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Chicago School Official: US IT Jobs Offshored Because 'We Weren't Making Our Own' Coders

Posted by EditorDavid on from the assembly-lines-for-assembly-programmers dept.

theodp writes: In a slick new video, segments of which were apparently filmed looking out from Google's Chicago headquarters giving it a nice high-tech vibe, Chicago Public Schools' CS4ALL staffers not-too-surprisingly argue that creating technology is "a power that everyone needs to have."

In the video, the Director of Computer Science and IT Education for the nation's third largest school district offers a take on why U.S. IT jobs were offshored that jibes nicely with the city's new computer science high school graduation requirement. From the transcript: "People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."

4 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Complete Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    "People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."

    There were plenty of programers. There has never been a "shortage". That is complete bullshit. The H-1B monkeys were brought into this country for one reason and one reason alone. Because they come from a background of extreme poverty and will gladly work for significantly lower wages. And in the process, hundreds of thousands of American workers lost their jobs so that they could be replaced by third world monkeys.

    1. Re: Complete Bullshit by TekPolitik · · Score: 4, Informative

      Exactly. The shortage was of employers who understood the technical difficulty of coding, and were willing to pay accordingly. I am now in law, which pays better, but coding at any reasonable level of quality (so, better than offshore minimal skill code monkey ships provide) is more intellectually demanding than law.

    2. Re:Complete Bullshit by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 4, Informative

      Referring to producers of substandard work as "monkeys" is not offensive. For example, "code monkey." If you are offended, then you're the one with the problem.

    3. Re:Complete Bullshit by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 5, Informative

      Monkeys...code monkeys...was a common term before h1b going back at least to the 80's. It was used, at least in the company that I worked for, as someone who was brought in, usually at a high wage and temporarily, that could write software to a detailed spec, but who had little understanding of the why or how the system worked. The real, and higher up software engineers knew the big picture and spent little time coding (this was seen as more of a junior task), and spent most of their time creating detailed requirements because they knew how their part worked with hundreds, even thousands, of parts.