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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."
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."
More like the pants-on-fire dept.
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?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"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.
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.
The quality of school computer science education is dropping because the powers-that-be are trying to dumb down and demonetize programmers everywhere. This way they can't challenge AI when it gains the ability to "predict crime". Indian programmers get things done like Russian and Vietnamese soldiers; you have to throw a million of them at every small problem. Indians are being given leadership positions in U.S. tech companies for no obvious reason. The bankers are in control.
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!
Corporations had a choice between making their own, or going to India: We know which one they chose. Now, everyone else is going to India, so they will too.
For the last 5 decades, there's been a surplus of labour allowing corporations to be fussy, then abusive, and then underpay employees. Some school proclaiming their "graduates are proficient in the language" that corporations choose, isn't going to fix either problem.
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'. It was a disastrous shit show that never ended. Whenever I would try to bring the matter up as both a programming graduate and as a web developer they waved me off with dismissive remarks.
The system could have been developed by their own students easily and cheaply with a websocket, mongo database, and nodejs webserver. However then blame for bugs or issues would fall directly upon their shoulder and not on some far flung ethereal entity meaning people could directly challenge the problems and force them to be resolved.
I'm grasping for a reason why. To my mind there never was a good one. We could have built that system easily and cheaply, but they would not allow us to. By us I mean the students they handed diplomas to and said 'you are now considered professionally trained to perform these services'.
I know full well their training was sub standard and they were liars and charletons, that doesn't mean we did not posses these skills in spite of their limp half hearted efforts. It was obvious their interest was our wallets and not our minds. We could have done that task and been enriched for it, both materially and in our skill set and experience.
Lesson of warning to those of you either entering into an education or seeking one. If they will not hire their own product to do the work, be wary of their competence as they do not in their hearts believe think they have any to pass on else they would put their own product to work for themselves and everyone else with trust.
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And it's hilarious, because Chicago Public Schools has a million problems. I should know, I live there.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Companies are trying to save a buck so they sent their programming work to India. In many cases, the work performed was shoddy.
Do you have children in the system?
If so, how do you deal with it?
My GF works in Gwinnett County Public Schools, in a school with a high percentage of low/no income families. Some of the parents care deeply about their children's education, some bitch about it, and most don't give a shit.
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...
I've never found a liberal who could state a position without resorting to insults.
The inevitable result is that people simply stop, keep quiet, and get on with their lives. Then, in the privacy of the voting booth, they vote for the candidate promising reform, and against the candidate with insults and no real position.
Isn't that a better and simpler explanation than "nazis and supremacists"?
Is there some way to arrest people who make false statements when justifying unpopular actions? The dude is so obviously full of shit that you can smell him down the hall...but he'll just keep spouting bullshit forever.
Is there some way to penalize him so he won't do it again?
The reason is GREED... We often get low quality programmer from offshore but as long as this looks cheaper on paper they dont care. They want to pay $20 an hour or less doesnt matter if the american programmer is far superior . Why go to school for 5 years , be in debt and the be replaced after a few years?
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
If the $24k car can be expected to last more than 8 times as long as the $3k car then a rational actor will buy the $24k car ... unless they know that someone else will be held responsible for transportation costs before that time is up.
I've seen this for 30 years.
It was not lack of coders. It was ruthless and relentless offshoring and outsourcing because they were less expensive and more willing to work 80 hour weeks without pay.
Stop the H1B program for any job making under $150,000 a year and coders would be there.
Offshoring is usually bad enough that companies that they can't stick with it for too long.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We are making them, businesses just don't like citizens. Kill every guest worker program, then see to it that citizens take their place.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Project based learning requires itches (aka opportunities) to scratch that you are willing to pay for. Further students need to feel ownership over the problems you challenge them to solve to bring that type of problem based learning to the real world for real career gains.
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Alright, sure.
I don't like immigration because it massively inflates the supply of labour, which in turn drives down wages and living standards for people like me who have to work for a living. The costs, both tangible and intangible, of this immigration, aren't paid for by the people who benefit from the reduction in wages and collective bargaining power of labour. Restricting immigration and enforcing immigration law will slow the rate at which my country is becoming more diverse, maybe even reversing that "progress" and make it more white - and I don't care.
Please tell me where I'm wrong.
Your subject really would have worked better if you had worded differently. Insane would be just crazy, abnormal, random behavior which could manifest harm to oneself or others. This actually does kind of make sense, but I am not sure it totally covers all of their intent.
I propose a modification to the term as insidious. This actually provides the full intent of their actions. Any other term would mean that they did not intentionally want the outcome any different than what they obtained.
It is easy to see that with morons like this running schools where the education deficiency. Even this idiot knows it is the cheap, exploitable labor that drives visas. They do not care that visa workers are incompetent as they have their bonus and are long gone before the stockholders feel the pain.
Why do you think IT jobs are out sourced to India? Education? No cost. Cheap labor abounds in India. It has nothing to do with labor shortages in the U.S.
Economic data clearly shows you do not have a labor shortage. But if you are trying to depress wages, then flooding the market with programmers is the way to do it.
You're a fucking school. Make some fucking coders.
Fuck the pension fund. I'm supremely indifferent to the Chicago politics that caused hyper-inflated pensions to be assigned to a bunch of greedy bastards and then kicked down the road.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This conveniently forgets the rounds of layoffs that numerous companies have done. Working Americans were dumped in favor of cheaper offshore programmers.
If the problem is strictly a lack of programmers, this would never have happened. Not once, let alone repeatedly.
The best part is when the company offers severance contingent upon training the replacements. They recognize the value of institutional knowledge while totally dismissing the value of their employees.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
We don't need any lectures from Chicago public school system on educating coders when the city passed an ordinance to raise minimum wage to $13 by 2019.
The city cries about lack of qualified labor while mandating a minimum wage that drives away jobs. Offshoring doesn't happen due to lack of qualified labor it happens because cheaper labor is readily available elsewhere. Chicago has a wage competition problem not a labor pool problem.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
a database... what could ever be more complex? pity the endlessly undone digitarian hired goons..
If it's complex, you're doing it wrong. However it seems like the whole IT industry has been doing it wrong for a long time.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
They offshored jobs because they could pay them a hell of a lot less.
Example: I think it was PG&E in California that offshored their IT, and forcing their current employees to train their cheaper replacements.
Tech companies have been firing senior coders and engineering staff for the last 10+ years and hiring cheap H1B labor or outsourcing overseas. It has nothing to do with a nonexistent labor shortage.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The "we weren't making our own" argument is complete bullcrap. There are many many incidents of ageism and just cost cutting involved in the off-shoring trend. From a 40 year old dominos delivery driver delivery pizzas to his younger former co-workers ... to many examples of staff laid off and only getting their separation package because they stayed on long enough to train their off shore replacements. I used to have no more than a 2 week break between contracts. From the mid 1990's to the side 2010s the off shore market rose dominated and started to decline. And part of the reason for the decline was the ever strong influx of H1-B workers paid considerably less than the workers they displaced.
... I imaging we are laughed at for our industrial security. Much like the article were a foreign descent person was found after hours in a medical sciences company conference room, uninvited, and had downloaded files from the company servers using two laptops and a tablet. Only discovered because an officer of the company working late discovered him on the way out of the building. This helps lessen the unique talents of US workers by displacing their value (the value of their work product) overseas as well. Hiring these potential spies who accept lessor rates of pay just to position themselves in the US, as well as just hiring overseas candidates at lower rates than their US counterparts hurts the economy longterm. But US companies are all about short term gain, all too often, and fail to see the longterm implications.
... Your competitors may end up paying less for their outsourced project benefiting from code written on your dime. You need strict controls in place. And an organization you can hold accountable if your companies "crown jewels" end up in other companies hands.
The US has a huge unused reserve of technical workers that were laid off, and could never find a secure job footing again for two decades. And as a result of our policies we actually endanger national security as a small fraction of those State Department sponsored students who graduate and are hired (skilled people they are!) and a small portion of H1-B tech workers are spying on US technology and shipping it overseas. Consider that we only catch and expose those that aren't smart enough to not get caught.
We treat this problem as if we were boxers following the Marquis de Queensbury rules. No low blows, can't hit someone whose down, etc. These rest of the world is playing no holds barred mui thai
Sure, hire the best and brightest overseas talent. But you don't really want to hire newly minted overseas programmers because they cost 20% less, when the real cost is higher. And worse, when you outsource whole projects your source code isn't really yours anymore
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Last time I used the CPS website for contractors/consultants/construction it was a big messy pile of Oracle Primavera. A painfully user-unfriendly way of managing construction projects. I let my login expire and try to get the more junior co-workers to do the actual input on the website.
If that's part of what they're talking about, they need to, preferably, get rid of the Oracle crappy framework and then, possibly, fire all the offshored programmers that "customize" it.
You're wrong in thinking that politicians like Trump are on your side. (Before I get jumped on by partisans, note that I would say the same thing about most politicians, regardless of party.)
In the global market, there is no reason to prefer higher paid Americans.
We are addressing the low-income persons in the world before the lower income persons in the US.
Now, new companies are being set up to train developers in PH, and ID, and TH in order to develop the questioning skills needed, in order to make the skill set comparable to new grads in the US.
But, because the cost of living is so much cheaper, companies can pay slightly more than the going rate for a coder-farm, but get coders who are equivalent to an Westerner with a Bachelors and 2-3 years exp. The rate for the local is still stupidly good for the area, and thus makes for a win-win situation for the workers and the foreign company.
A former co-worker of mine took his USD 200k salary, lives in Thailand, (flys to california when needed), and locally in TH, helps to train the foreign workers in Thailand. Bringing up the value for the local (thai) economy. Decreasing cost for company, and increasing the value per person.
The real question is whether an introduction to coding makes the students more trainable for jobs they might get. Those jobs do not only include those where computer programming is 100% of the job. In Chicago, that includes whether students would be better prepared to be CNC machinists. I have my doubts about the Chicago Public Schools' ability to assess the skill platform to develop and the curriculum to develop a facility for further learning in the field.
Alas, the programming industry started off on the wrong foot because employees arrived self-trained. I refer to the industry after microcomputers changed it completely. When it was all IBM mainframes, programmer was something of a profession, guys in ties and coats, math degrees and training in the shop.
When the notion of just writing software alone, not as a free add-on to a million-dollar computer, came along for PCs, the programmers were all enthused self-taught hobbyists and industry, well, got spoiled early. The book "Hackers" (Steven Levy, 1984) writes of Sierra On-Line "training" game programmers, but just about the gaming tricks in 8-bit: they only hired already-fanatic young hackers.
So everybody tried to become a self-taught hacker; after Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and got rich, dropping out of U became almost a badge of honor, of your willingness to risk your career on your talent and hard work alone.
If IT could become a profession - like Medicine, Law, Engineering, Teaching, Accounting - with actual requirements and competence tests - it would change a lot of things. Women piled into Medicine and Law despite the sexism they encountered: Medicine and Law are our best-compensated, most-respected professions. Why should they put up with sexism to get a shit-job competing with foreign wages and tossed at the first grey hair?
And you'd find people lining up to get the degrees that would get them into this respected profession. RIght now, you see CS class enrollment bounce up and down with every bit of good and bad news out of Silicon Valley.
It makes sense, it's just not good news for people hoping for a good income from such work. The rich started the war with off-shoring, and now they are recruiting the poor to make them allies in crushing the middle class. I'm not even remotely a communist, but in this case, the shoe kinda fits, you know?