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

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."

Comments

Insanity

[fluffernutter]

How can we expect to make our own coders if companies aren't creating a real draw for people to learn coding? Corporations are sending a message that you must move to them as opposed to where you want to live, you must work long hours, commute an hour to work and an hour back, and be dumped at 40. What kind of insane person would consider that as a good life choice when coming out of high school?

Re:Insanity

[apoc.famine]

Yeah, anytime an organization says, "Not enough employees", they leave off, "at the low wages and in the circumstances we're dictating". Want more employees? Up the pay and train them. Stop making them work in really shitty conditions. The US has plenty of people not working or in dead end jobs wanting more. Invest in them instead of investing in India.

Re:Insanity

[ShanghaiBill]

you must move to them as opposed to where you want to live

For what other professions do companies hire remote workers? The opportunities for working remotely as a coder are not that great, but every other profession I can think of is even worse.

you must work long hours,

Not all tech jobs require long hours, and plenty of other jobs do have long hours.

commute an hour to work and an hour back

What? So there are special fast lanes for non-coders?

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

You hit the nail on the head. Every single offshore project I was part of? Because it was wildly cheaper. I can hire, today, right now, 4 coders from india for 20k. Out of them I will get total crap. Yet I just lean on the outsourced agency a bit and they rotate people in and out. About 1 out of 20 people 'get programing'. Out of those 1 in 10 like it. I can rotate about 1-2 a month for 'poor performance'. Within a couple of years I have a decent crew for 20-30k. In the states I can get 2-4 coders for 500k. The cost is wildly out of line. I know it. That is what I compete with.

Companies do not want to train because there is 0 incentive for them to do so. The MBA schools have taught them that. We are a 'resource' to be exploited.

Re:Insanity

[jeff4747]

The point is there are ways companies could approach an actual shortage. More pay or more perks.

Companies aren't doing either. Which indicates there is no shortage.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Indians, it would appear.

Just because they do doesn't mean that should be the standard, but in the great race to the bottom, that's all that matters: CHEAP!!!!!!

That's the real reason why they can't find anyone. They don't want to pay for someone in the US to do it. They want to pay as little as possible for as much profitable work as possible damn be the consequences. That means going with the cheapest labor and that currently means hire in India, where people are willing / able to work for much less than an American. That's the problem with globalization. You as a consumer have to compete with the entire world for a job, (not good if you live in an area with a high cost of living), and you get to pay local market adjusted rates for products and services. It's extracting maximum wealth from you while giving back as little as possible. Great system, for those that get to exploit it that is.

Also, note that I said "profitable work" not "well made product". If you as a coder are not fine with shipping broken code that's filled with security vulnerabilities because the deadline is here, then they *definitely* don't want you around. The delays in development would cost them money. They also don't want you really writing your own code. That takes more time and money to develop. They want you to cut and paste pre-made code using some bloated library / API because that gets the product to the market sooner, and keeps your hours, and therefore how much they pay you, down. They don't care if it's dog slow and cumbersome to manage. As long as it sells in the market, they make money. Forget about QA, that department was unceremoniously shot in the head years ago.

Money makes the world go round, only because society gives too much power and influence to those who covet it.

Now of course, there are *some* groups that do still need to care about security vulnerabilities, well written, efficient, (and documented!), code. This can be for a number of reasons, but in most cases, these groups will not be accepting people fresh out of college with no work experience. Which is another issue entirely of not wanting to train people, but that's another topic for another day.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, note that I said "profitable work" not "well made product". If you as a coder are not fine with shipping broken code that's filled with security vulnerabilities because the deadline is here, then they *definitely* don't want you around. The delays in development would cost them money. They also don't want you really writing your own code. That takes more time and money to develop. They want you to cut and paste pre-made code using some bloated library / API because that gets the product to the market sooner, and keeps your hours, and therefore how much they pay you, down. They don't care if it's dog slow and cumbersome to manage. As long as it sells in the market, they make money. Forget about QA, that department was unceremoniously shot in the head years ago.

I'm over 40, and I've yet to have a coding task that wasn't compromised in some large way, but it usually boils down to short term versus long term. Your paid for short term results. Furthermore, even if you are lucky enough to get paid to produce a bit better than average stuff, they are probably not paying for the redundancy of multiple people knowing the code base. You get shuffled from project to project and just got to hope that if you are chosen to pick up the pieces that the last person tried to make it possible.

I thought this year might be different. There was a mountain of technical debt to fix, and they seemed serious about fixing it, except, well, they weren't really serious about fixing it. I was in the red headed step child group, not the main group, though as near as I can tell I produced better results than the larger group did. Of course it is also possible that the larger group was hiding all work from us, but either way, not serious.

Technical debt is accumulated because no one bothered to man the shovels and deal with it over time, and just because the powers that be now want to fix it, it is not remotely that easy for certain highly specialized coding tasks. The biggest thing I wish for would be they would either get over it and let some of the older programmers like me start designing stuff, or higher a decent freaking systems engineer to shell in a plan from the start.

The key is to always be thinking long term, even if you have to do some things for short term results to meet deadlines.

Agile is not a replacement for spending the time to come up with a decent plan, though it can help you adapt the plan to face things you had not expected, but even then, sometimes you have to take a step back and make sure your road map to peace is not a nature trail to hell.

There is no coding task beyond a certain level of complexity that cannot be made exponentially harder by bad leadership. Experienced coders can deal with crap requirements, but it is not cheap, and in reality just means your paying your coders to help you develop the true requirements and probably everything else. Good luck trying to farm that off to India.

Paying for someone to give a damn and do their best to produce something that can be maintained is expensive, but then so is starting over, and your usually developing code to get a job done, therefore the true cost is much higher.

For instance if it costs say $50/hr for people to use your code, but a more careful design could have allowed the user to get done in half the time, well, it doesn't take a huge amount of users to justify paying doing the job right, and keeping the job done right.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone mentioned above the real and only reason US IT jobs are off shored is cost. And it is not only a lower hourly rate but the hiring company can also jettison the cost of employee benefits which is a considerable amount of money. And while business tax rules usually allow a business to deduct some of their labor costs they can deduct almost all the costs of contracting services. These are the reasons a business school graduate with absolutely no understanding of technology choses the off shore approach and end up confused when their IT division is always over budget with little to show for it.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, for better or worse, there are a large number of multi-national companies that are out there that are more than willing to poach employees after they are trained and it is easier than ever to start your own company become a millionaire. For many companies, the return on training investment is low enough that it makes poaching and out-sourcing a better strategy. The explanation is probably just that simple.

That's why I only hire the lowest paid and least skilled workers I can find, then point them to a wiki to self train at home off the clock and tell them it is their own fault if they can't learn new skills. That way no one tries to poach them from me. Nothing ever really works or gets finished, but at least I don't have to give raises to people who, god forbid, get better at their jobs.

The point of training isn't to keep a higher skilled worker in a lower skill position. It is so you get first crack at paying them enough to stay.

Re:Insanity

[AmiMoJo]

People only leave a job voluntarily for a few reasons:

- Low pay. Solution: increase wages, invest in your human resources, offer additional benefits like extra time off, company car etc.

- Bad working environment. Solution: fire bad bosses, get rid of the cubicle farm and give skilled workers offices, free coffee, assigned parking spaces etc.

- Uninteresting work. Solution: create interesting work, e.g. with R&D or something like Google's 80/20 rule.

- Poor performance. Solution: check if you promoted them too fast, offer a demotion with no loss of salary or additional training/mentoring.

- Children. Solution: offer flexible working, don't punish new parents.

- Bean counters. Solution: make worker happiness, retention and training into metrics that they are measured by.

Solve these simple problems and you can safely train staff with little worry that they will jump ship.

And whose fault would that be?

[sunking2]

I would estimate that a good percentage, upwards of 50%, of a CS program is foreign nationals. The schools are greedy, they prefer foreign tuition prices, no financial aid.

Bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Offshoring is about cost savings, not about availability of workers.

There are numerous examples of entire departments being dumped and replaced with cheap offshore labor.

Put in words that a Chicago School Official might understand: Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Re:Complete Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, I completely agree with you that H1B is all about importing cheap labor. But it's utterly offensive to call these people 'Monkeys'. If you're angry, be angry at government and big business leaders who are effectively waging economic war on american citizens.

WTF

[rsilvergun]

Seriously, what's the point of Government jobs if they're not going to employ Americans? This is what my tax dollars go to? Sending money overseas? And yes, it's my tax dollars too. State School systems get federal money.

This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists. We're abandoning the working class. Same Bloody thing happened in Germany in 1944 and we ignored it then too because nobody wanted their taxes to go up. How's that quote go? Something about business getting out of hand and us being lucky to live through it...

Re: Complete Bullshit

[andrew.j.borell]

Exactly. By "We weren't making our own coders" I think they mean we didn't over-saturate the market enough to drive down the value of the job for prospective U.S. employees. Only a couple weeks ago I read an article on tech companies nagging over paying US developers US wages, now this nonsense? A long time ago I argued that off-shored services should be taxed like an imported good and to my astonishment someone argued back that companies already pay taxes for those employees in their respective countries. I find it insulting corporations think we are actually dense enough to buy into this garbage or that anyone gives a snip about the pittance of taxes corporations pay in foreign countries to drive up profits at the expense of US jobs.

Re: Complete Bullshit

[mikael]

The same thing happened to nursing. Originally, the salaries were high enough to qualify as middle-class wage earners. But the government claimed there was going to be a nursing shortage. Dozens new nursing colleges opened everywhere. Then suddenly, there was an oversupply of nurses; salaries fell through the floor, the hospitals soaked up the savings. Now they are dependent on foreign labor. Family butchers used to be a middle class profession, then the supermarkets open meat factories out of state, hired cheap labor and undercut those family businesses.

Re: Complete Bullshit

[dgatwood]

The same thing happened to nursing. Originally, the salaries were high enough to qualify as middle-class wage earners. But the government claimed there was going to be a nursing shortage. Dozens new nursing colleges opened everywhere. Then suddenly, there was an oversupply of nurses; salaries fell through the floor, the hospitals soaked up the savings.

Of course, there are two big differences here:

• A larger percentage of the public are capable of being successful at nursing.
• Having more nurses doesn't inherently result in more nursing jobs.

If you look at retention rates and graduation rates as a percentage of incoming freshmen, three times as many CS majors drop out or change majors within the first year, and only about half as many CS majors actually graduate with a CS degree. This is not because CS is hard. After all, nursing is hard and requires intellect. CS requires... something entirely different and much more rare.

Programmers have to be highly creative, but also highly logical. Lots of people are highly creative, but have a hard time wrapping their heads around the logical aspects of programming. Those folks might be decent managers or product designers, but will probably never be good software engineers. Others are highly logical, but are not very creative. That second group might pass as "code monkeys", but also will never be good software engineers.

And programmers also have to simultaneously be able to think abstractly and concretely. They have to be able to see something abstract and turn it into a concrete representation. And to make the big bucks, they also have to be able to go the other way—to see what the final concrete representation is supposed to look like and work their way back to an abstract underlying architecture that can support it, and then turn that into concrete representations for each part.

Programmers also need a larger than average working set memory, a stronger language center, and stronger ability to pay attention—often to the point of hyperfocus (getting "in the zone"). Although to some degree those skills can be improved with practice, they all have a genetic component as well.

Another area with essentially the same properties is music. (This may be why musicians are so over-represented in tech.) Unsurprisingly, in a 2008 study, researchers concluded that musical ability is about 50% genetic. Some people really are naturally predisposed to being good at it, and that predisposition results in getting good at it much more quickly and ending up being better at it than people without that predisposition, regardless of how much effort the latter group puts in.

Any CS teacher will tell you that the same is true for computer programming. There is a sizable subset of people who, no matter how much they might want to learn how to program, will try and try and will never wrap their heads around it, or at best, will do so at a pace that makes it a very poor career choice for them.

It would be great if we exposed more people to computer programming at a young age so that a greater percentage of the people who are innately predisposed to being good programmers will choose careers in that field. I'm not convinced that this will drive the cost of labor down, though. After all, a glut of good programmers will also result in a glut of new ideas that turn into new companies that hire more programmers.

The same thing happened in music beginning in the 14th century. We called it the Renaissance. There wasn't a cheapening of creativity; if anything, the reverse was true. Creativity bred demand for creativity. Similarly, that's what will likely happen if we convince people that there is a shortage of computer programmers. In fact, that's what has been happening for the last couple of decades, just in case folks didn't notice.

Please note this is Chicago Public School System..

[Chas]

The same CPS that struggles to graduate kids from High School.
The one that struggles to turn out kids who can handle college.
The one that struggles to turn out college-ready kids who DO NOT need massive amounts of remedial courses.
The one who thinks that simply throwing more money at a failed system will, somehow, magically transform them into a success (and we wonder why the KIDS are so dumb...)

And no. The main reason why jobs like this are offshored isn't because we don't have enough programmers.
It's a cost-saving thing. Why pay a US coder a decent salary when they can just offshore, or if required to keep the job in the states, demand 30 years of experience in a 3 year old technology, and then pass the job to an H1B farm for pennies on the dollar?

Like every other political group in Illinois, talking out their ass is a required skill.

Re:My own college did this

[thegarbz]

Algonquin College in Ottawa Ontario. They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'.

By east indian are you talking about the product Blackboard, from the Washington (USA) based company Blackboard Inc. which was sold to a USA based and own equity group? Is that native american indians you speak of?

I'm grasping for a reason why.

Why do people deploy Oracle or SAP? Blackboard is a product used by education institutions around the entire world including 75% of USA based colleges. There's sense in standardisation and not trying to re-invent a wheel.

Like SAP the adoption is often difficult. Like SAP once it's running you wonder how you did without it.

We could have done that task and been enriched for it, both materially and in our skill set and experience.

You think you can. Mind you if you are actually able or producing a comparable product then there are many wheelbarrows of money waiting in your future so you have no reason not to drop what you're doing right now and start down this line. More likely though you didn't understand the scope, requirements, or the benefit of having a complete and fully integrated learning management system as opposed to... what did you call it: "keeping track of tests and students". Yes someone didn't read the functional requirement specification.