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Virginia To Produce 25K-35K Additional CS Grads As Part of Amazon HQ2 Deal (loudounnow.com)
theodp writes: Developers! Developers! Developers! To make good on the proposal that snagged it a share of the Amazon HQ2 prize, the State of Virginia is also apparently on the hook for doubling the annual number of graduates with computer science or closely related degrees, with a goal to add 25,000 to 35,000 graduates (Amazon's HQ2 RFP demanded info on "education programs related to computer science"). To do that, the state will establish a performance-based investment fund for higher education institutions to expand their bachelor's degree programs, and spend up to $375 million on George Mason University's Arlington campus and a new Virginia Tech campus in Alexandria. The state will also spend $50 million on STEM + CS education in public schools and expanding internships for higher education students.
Amazon is certainly focused on boosting the ranks of software engineer types. Earlier this month, Amazon launched Amazon Future Engineer, a program that aims to teach more than 10 million students a year how to code, part of a $50 million Amazon commitment to computer science education that was announced last year at a kickoff event for the Ivanka Trump-led White House K-12 CS Initiative. And on Wednesday, Amazon-bankrolled Code.org -- Amazon is a $10+ million Diamond Supporter of the nonprofit; CS/EE grad Jeff Bezos is a $1+ million Gold Supporter -- announced it has teamed with Amazon Future Engineer to build and launchHour of Code: Dance Party, a signature tutorial for this December's big Hour of Code (powered by AWS in 2017), which has become something of a corporate infomercial (Microsoft recently boasted "learners around the world have completed nearly 100 million Minecraft Hour of Code sessions"). Students participating in the Dance Party tutorial, Code.org explained, can choose from 30 hits like Katy Perry's "Firework" and code interactive dance moves and special effects as they learn basic CS concepts. "The artists whose music is used in this tutorial are not sponsoring or endorsing Amazon as part of licensing use of their music to Code.org," stresses a footnote in Code.org's post. So, don't try to make any connections between Katy Perry's Twitter endorsement of the Code.org/Amazon tutorial later that day and those same-day follow-up Amazon and Katy Perry tweets touting their new exclusive Amazon Music streaming deal, kids!
Amazon is certainly focused on boosting the ranks of software engineer types. Earlier this month, Amazon launched Amazon Future Engineer, a program that aims to teach more than 10 million students a year how to code, part of a $50 million Amazon commitment to computer science education that was announced last year at a kickoff event for the Ivanka Trump-led White House K-12 CS Initiative. And on Wednesday, Amazon-bankrolled Code.org -- Amazon is a $10+ million Diamond Supporter of the nonprofit; CS/EE grad Jeff Bezos is a $1+ million Gold Supporter -- announced it has teamed with Amazon Future Engineer to build and launchHour of Code: Dance Party, a signature tutorial for this December's big Hour of Code (powered by AWS in 2017), which has become something of a corporate infomercial (Microsoft recently boasted "learners around the world have completed nearly 100 million Minecraft Hour of Code sessions"). Students participating in the Dance Party tutorial, Code.org explained, can choose from 30 hits like Katy Perry's "Firework" and code interactive dance moves and special effects as they learn basic CS concepts. "The artists whose music is used in this tutorial are not sponsoring or endorsing Amazon as part of licensing use of their music to Code.org," stresses a footnote in Code.org's post. So, don't try to make any connections between Katy Perry's Twitter endorsement of the Code.org/Amazon tutorial later that day and those same-day follow-up Amazon and Katy Perry tweets touting their new exclusive Amazon Music streaming deal, kids!
Pretend you'll add jobs, but really you want to import workers from Asia while reaping corporate welfare?
The placement of HQ deux and trois near Wall Street and Pennsylvania Ave is no coincidence.
Well, technically it's a different program, but here's how it works:
Already trained programmer comes over from India, goes to "school" and at the same time works for a company who's sponsoring them. Ordinarily the programmer couldn't keep up with a full time school and work load, but they've already been trained in their country. Meanwhile the programs are closed to Americans, and even if they weren't again, nobody can keep up with 40+/week at a job + 300/400 level class workloads unless they already know the material.
The company gets cheap labor, the school gets a quick influx of cash from a student who doesn't need any time from his professors. Everybody wins except the American worker who's out a job (or at least has lost 30% of his/her wages due to reduced demand, yep, supply & demand works both ways folks) and the American student who is competing for a limited spot in 300+ level courses with somebody who already took the course.
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Because $4billion+ in tax breaks wasn't enough, let's make sure there's excess developers to keep salaries nice and low! Because at Amazon, it's all about the lowest prices... for everything but executives!
25K-35K Additional CS Grads still with loans easy to hit and NO RISK to the state.
Flood the market with excess labor so that wages drop. Saves amazon money.
all that rigamarole it's because they've already hit the cap on every other visa program they can get workers from. It's an end run around the normal limits.
What I wish was folks would elect politicians who would do something about it. Trump promised, but he still hasn't even reverse Obama's executive order letting H1-B spouses work. He could do that with a stroke of a pen, and it's not like he's unaware, he talked about it during the campaign. Here we are 2 years in and not a damn thing's changed. He said some mean things and there was talk of less immigrants coming, but that didn't show up in the numbers or my wages.
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Oh, no. They are going to take theodp's jerb. This guy is so fixated on CS education.. Ridiculous.
Yeah, because no one else hires CS graduates. Only Amazon. Sometimes I wonder if I live on another planet than the typical Slashdotter.
How about Amazon just pay their employees more?
This is just another brazen example of a company who is privatizing profit and socializing risk. In a normal free economy (low supply + high demand = higher cost), if there's a scarcity of qualified employers, then the employee either needs to raise salaries, or train under-qualified employees. But Amazon prefers to put that cost on the state of Virginia. Virginia will artificially inflate their CS grads, with the cost of both modifying their educational resources and reducing labor pools that may be better suited or in greater demand elsewhere. All the while, Amazon saves on the cost of training, keeping more profit, rather than invest in their company and their employees.
And the moment Virginia reneges on their agreement, or fails to deliver on continued demands that will undoubtedly continue to flow from Amazon corporate in the subsequent years, becomes the moment where Amazon closes up shop and moves elsewhere. There is no loyalty or community to this agreement, only corporate demand and political capitulation.
"To do that, the state will establish a performance-based investment fund for higher education institutions to expand their bachelor's degree programs, and spend up to $375 million on George Mason University's Arlington campus and a new Virginia Tech campus in Alexandria. The state will also spend $50 million on STEM + CS education in public schools and expanding internships for higher education students. "
But maybe they should teach reading first.
Tulsa Remote will offer a $10,000 grant, free working space, discounted rent and more to talented people who will move to and work remotely from Tulsa for a year.
https://www.kansas.com/news/business/article221592120.html
Tulsa World. Nov. 13, 2018.
free
— What?! That's right, the Kaiser foundation is going to pay people $10,000 to live in Tulsa for a year
The George Kaiser Family Foundation has come up with another bright idea — a bold and creative plan that is sure to catch a lot of attention.
The foundation — the guys behind Gathering Place, Guthrie Green and dozens of other innovative ideas that invest in Tulsa's current and potential futures — and the city are rolling out Tulsa Remote, which will offer a $10,000 grant, free working space, discounted rent and more to talented people who will move to and work remotely from Tulsa for a year.
That's right, Mr. Programmer, Ms. Entrepreneur, we'll give you $10,000, and all the rest of that stuff just to telecommute for 12 months. No Austin traffic. No New York City crime. No Boston winter.
The underlying gamble is this: After 12 months, the young talent will grow to love Tulsa and the remote workers will want to stay here. In itself that's not such a big payout — one more white collar worker in Tulsa — but its potential is fascinating. The program will create a pool of young, tech-savvy innovators and thought leaders who will think of Tulsa as home for at least a year, maybe more. Could we win the race to finding the next Bill Gates? Maybe we'll create a cohort of smaller success stories — new Tulsans with new ideas instead.
There's not a penny of public money involved. The funds for this effort are provided exclusively by GKFF, which is as it should be. It's a gamble to see if we can win the hearts and minds of future leaders.
Obviously, the folks at the Kaiser foundation love Tulsa, and they're willing to stake their own money on the chance that other people — strangers to the city now — will love it, too, if they just have a little incentive.
That is the American way.
I've found it hard to hire high quality CS people. Even at premium rates I only got a handful of applicants and most of them didn't have any experience (some had a degree but then went on and did basically data entry).
The problem the US has is that anyone can pass an engineering education, the standards have been lowered due to all sorts of social improvement/engineering and equality of outcome programs. If you HAVE to graduate x% across all sorts of arbitrary dimensions, the standards are lower for everyone.
I have people graduating with a CS/EE degree that know a little C don't know Python, can't even program an Arduino.
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Heard it was available for 20 people. If so, that's not a lot of incentive to apply. My guess is that you've got more than 20 applications already.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
But we'd have to fully fund our schools and have training programs to use them. With India you don't just get somebody who's trained, you get somebody trained on their own dime. They have to do compete in the screwed up economy over there. This is all part of the race to the bottom that Marx warned us about, but all anyone can remember about Marx is that Stalin and Mao borrowed his books for rhetoric...
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Even with a lot of incentives for being a CS grad, I have personally seen that a lot of people just do not like being in a pure CS major. I honestly have no idea how they could possible double the number of grads...
Maybe sixth super high bonuses for every successful CS grad? Maybe.
Or maybe you redefine the requirements for what a CS major needs to take... I suppose that might do it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My guess is that you've got more than 20 applications already.
Only from folks whose experience with the place is limited to flying over it.
Can't wait. Or can I?
I know many of you have valid complaints about this system but this is how these problems are solved when you get government involve. This is not an anti-government rant either. There are some things you need government to solve and there are things that you don't need government to solve. This problem is not a problem you need government to solve.
For everyone saying Free-Market is dead, this is its replacement. The gerrymandering of resources and products from behind the scenes using slight of hand and and a couple of rhetorical platitudes. The Free-Market is not just something this generation of Americans hate, but also something that has been long killed off by the previous generation that "espoused" it.
No business or government likes or wants a free-market because they have little to no control in them. They have to compete with the choices that consumers are making and in order to gain that control, they will create a problem that does not exist, but matches closely enough with one to make it appear valid. The same strategy of convincing citizens that governments need to build massive armies to protect them only to use them as a police force is the same strategy here. Make a NON problem up so that control or a gimmick can be introduced to remove liberty or suppress consumers/citizens in some way that is not immediately apparent.
There is no enterprise as industrious as Government when it comes to solving problems that never existed. America has most definitely either become or is headlong into being an Oligarchy. I cannot think of a single area of life from Taxes to Food where a business has not sweet talked (bribed) government into creating a regulation that serves them instead of protecting the citizen and this "deal" is just one more example of the thousands of examples that are out there.
And it's a shall issue concealed carry state
If they carry on with the program, a great addition might be a handgun of your choice foreach person that takes them up on the offer, and three security cameras.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All this nonsense, and the tax breaks/subsidies, while the headquarters were always going to go in close to his residences :)
Bezos is a brilliant guy no question, but this shows how effective a negotiator he is, and how ineffective, outside of military force, politicians are.
The bottom line is that relatively few people have right combination of aptitude, temperament and specific ambitions to excel in these fields (ambitions like sitting on you ass all day staring at a computer).
CS has exploded since the first dot-com boom, with the majority of people chasing a âoegood careerâ, not the logical conclusion of their own abilities.
Efforts to increase diversity in the field have been a good thing, because talent is too scarce to let illogical, arbitrary factors like race, gender and nationality distort the market.
But has it? I've seen over the last 20 years loads of money and diversity efforts applied to CS. To an industry that already was way ahead of the game when it came to utilizing folks who weren't from the mainstream US (either folks who were from other places, other demographic groups, etc). The result I've seen is more poorly trained programmers who cause more harm than good but are cheap which the companies love.
We've forgotten every single lesson of Fred Brooks in favor of factory style methods of programming that often cause more harm than good. The shitty engineering at the last company for which I worked was costing them around $1b a year of lost revenue due to the poor latency of their site (which was the only way they made revenue). They did employee 400 engineers but for a task that should have taken at most 50 and since they paid poorly they only got mediocre engineers who didn't understand what they were doing.
If they had instead paid 2x the industry average they could have easily hired those 50 skilled engineers they needed, saved money, and increased revenue. And this is the current mode of operations in SV.
What happens when someone in a suit figures out how flawed all this is and these company get rid of all these cut rate engineers (or a competitor figures it out and they go out of biz)? What are we going to do with several million poorly trained CS grads who can't program well and we no longer need (or they are turfed out at 40 per corporate policy)? They've all been told as long as they learn programming they will be fine and feel like their (probably liberal) teachers lied to them and swing to the right much like blue collar workers have been doing for decades. Its like we are trying to breed political instability.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Because current numbers already contain all the semi-competent and you cannot "produce" smart people...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
My guess is that you've got more than 20 applications already.
My guess, it that the 20 "winners" are politically well connected and were planning on moving to Tulsa anyway.
And will have been selected, before the "program" was even announced.
20 folks are a gimmick . . . 2000 would be a program.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Matches my observations.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ah, so they will reward those that lower their standards. Because smart people is not something you can "produce". There is a very limited supply of them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Tulsa's too high crime for my tastes
That's the least of its problems; the bad part is north Tulsa which throws me off the average immensely.
I totally agree with you, that the only way to really increase numbers are to include a lot of people who are just not good at CS... so why would Amazon even want such people?
It lends a lot of veracity to what others were posting, that it's just a ploy for Amazon to get more H1-B workers.
More programmers for Alexa I guess!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nationwide, ~2.5 million per year, and that figure is from a while ago, quite a few more people are legally carrying concealed, while ~27% of the population isn't allowed to. Broken down by state, you'd need to see if that was one of the states the CDC included in their Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) 1996, 1997, and 1998 surveys which recently came to light, or see if one of the others breaks it down by state.
"Me?" No.
Sounds like a Great Leap Forward for software
His travel ban was upheld. And he's repeatedly shown a willingness to do thing that'll get him sued. Face it, he forgot about us. I'd be less angry if it wasn't such a central plank of his campaign. But hell, he forgot about the Carrier Air folks too. Their jobs are on the way to Mexico. And they get to keep the multi-million dollar subsidy Trump gave them to boot.
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Pitty, I figured congress was supposed to make laws. Not the courts
The courts exist in part to figure out whether the Congress exceeded the powers that the Constitution grants to the Congress.
or the President
The Congress has chosen to make some laws in broad strokes and create administrative agencies to hammer out the details on behalf of the Congress.
Maybe I missed something during my civics classes.
If your civics class skipped "judicial review" and "Code of Federal Regulations", you can look them up on any major web search engine.
If Amazon isn't planning on hiring at least some of these new CS grads, why did they make it part of the deal in the first place? The only reason I can think of is getting access to a large pool of unskilled labor in the form of college students looking for part time jobs to supplement their income while they're in school and I don't find that idea particularly plausible.
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My thought exactly. There are only so many college students with the right mind set to become a good programmer, developer or system administrator in any area, and I doubt that there are that many in and around Virginia who aren't already studying CS. Unless they can start pulling good candidates in from farther away, the only way they crank out that many CS degrees without lowering their standards and giving themselves a bad reputation as a diploma mill.
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of a pen, so yes, it can be ended with the stroke of a pen.
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I don't even know what would make you say that, but let me be a little more blunt: I'm saying the American Right wing no longer invests in schooling in America because they can get cheap, already trained workers overseas and bring them here. This is why college is so expensive now: we cut federal and state funding starting in the mid 90s and continued up until the mid 2000s only stopping when it was all but gone.
If companies didn't have cheap labor from overseas they wouldn't have allowed that to happen. They'd want the taxpayer to subsidize their training programs. When the cold war was going on and they were too scared to take their factories overseas and India wasn't cranking out It workers they had to coddle us. That's over. Now they're back to shitting on us. Meanwhile we're busy kicking down blaming Blacks, Mexicans, SJWs, Jews or whatever group's popular on reddit for the blame game while they're laughing at us all the way to the bank...
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But, I am fairly sure they have zero intention of hiring any of these (imaginary) CS graduates.
Before that, many efforts in the Congress failed. And now the Federal courts, Ninth District and New York ones, have ordered it can't be undone.
Does any of this sound like the functioning of a "democracy", aside of course from it not passing in the Congress? Do you think there's any way this will end well?
don't know Python
College and University CS courses focus on teaching programming fundamentals and theory, not teaching students random languages.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I have no problem finding the right skill sets in people to be able to do learning on the job. I'm also looking for people with at least some experience, I've found that hiring directly out of school comes with its own problems, most often that kids get a degree for the money until reality sets in, I've seen many people drop out of the field entirely 1-2 years into a real job, schools do a poor job preparing kids for jobs, I'd rather get a high school dropout with a few failed startups. I've also interviewed people that were expecting their CS degree would get them a managerial job (preferably at Google or a Unicorn startup) right out the gate.
I rather find people that like doing their job, if you joined a robotics club or a hackers group, those kids generally have the right aptitude but across hundreds of students in a University providing EE and CS, that club is maybe 50 members large.
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