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!

Comments

So like the Foxconn deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In my neck of the woods these are mostly H1-Bs

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:In my neck of the woods these are mostly H1-Bs

[JaredOfEuropa]

In other words: "Please pay to train our workforce. And please make sure you train enough of them to drive the hourly wage down a bit, we're not running a damn charity here"

Re:In my neck of the woods these are mostly H1-Bs

[david.emery]

What we'll get from programs like this are "coders who know the latest buzz-technology", but not "designers who know how to think and learn." But that's exactly what Industry wants. They don't -invest in human capital-, they just look for disposable staff who happen to know this year's fad.

Re:In my neck of the woods these are mostly H1-Bs

[TechyImmigrant]

>But that's exactly what Industry wants.

Nope. When we hire, we are looking for people who can think and do.

Re:In my neck of the woods these are mostly H1-Bs

[Registered Coward v2]

>But that's exactly what Industry wants.

Nope. When we hire, we are looking for people who can think and do.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies want that but at cut rate prices. As the labor market tightens the cheapskates will lose talent; and whine thay can't get any or people don't turn up for interviews. If you hadn't treated them like crap when you had the upperhand they wouldn't turn around and do the same to you.

Salaries! Salaries! Salaries!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:To do what exactly ?

[Fly Swatter]

Flood the market with excess labor so that wages drop. Saves amazon money.

Oh, if anyone's wondering why they go through

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re: Oh, if anyone's wondering why they go through

[mangastudent]

His executive orders tend to be reversed by the courts in SF or Seattle right away.

Exactly. Even if he's undoing a pure (and illegal) Obama executive order like DACA, it gets put on hold until it makes it to the Supreme court, should they deign to hear the case.

But quoting the author:

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

As we're noted, he cannot in practice end it with "a stroke of a pen", so his administration is doing it through the normal rules making process. It should come into effect in 1-2 months based on my searching just now and memory.

Of course, the 9th Circuit might nullify it anyway, but it'll be in theory harder to sustain.

Re:Oh, if anyone's wondering why they go through

[mikael]

If they come from a country that permits polygamy, you end up with a whole developer team coming across and living in the same house.

Or a crazier idea...

[Pollux]

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.

Re:Just what we need

[guruevi]

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.

Re:There's no shortage of those in America

[TechyImmigrant]

>But we'd have to fully fund our schools and have training programs to use them.

You think only the US has schools?

This is how Government Solves problems folks

[SirAstral]

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.

All this nonsense

[Beeftopia]

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.

Re: Just what we need

[sfcat]

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.

I'm gonna call BS on that

[rsilvergun]

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.