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Amazon To Fund Computer Science Classes at 1,000 US High Schools (geekwire.com)
Amazon said its Future Engineer program will fund computer science classes at more than 1,000 high schools in all 50 states by this fall. From a report: This is a rapid expansion for the program that launched in November. Down the road, Amazon aims to reach more than 10 million kids with the coding activities and lessons each year and provide more than 100,000 students in more than 2,000 high schools access to introductory or advanced computer science courses. As part of the program, Amazon also plans to award 100 students with four-year, $10,000 scholarships and paid internships at the company to gain work experience. Future Engineer is part of a larger $50 million investment from Amazon in computer science and STEM education.
Amazon, funding computer science education so they can increase supply and drive down the cost of labor.
The article says they use Edhesive (Side note, maybe spell checkers should be hooked into DNS registries to avoid autocorrecting domain names).
The breakdown in study looks decent, but I can't seem to tell how the classes will actually be run.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Its nice to see tech companies who complain about not finding enough talent in the US to instead help train domestic workers. Maybe the US Government could incentivize this practice, or extend it to older displaced workers.
It's a merit-based scholarship.
IF THEY PAID TAXES.
It's seriously fucked up when a company can operate and pay zero dollars in taxes.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Welcome to AWS 101, your Amazon Technology Indoctrination Program. In this class, you will learn how to be a consumer of various Amazon hosted services - valuable skills that will lead you to be able to take jobs where you will specify the purchase of same.
If you are an Amazon Prime member.
Stoopid RICH PEOPLE! Get out off hear! Loosars!
-- AOC
It's a merit-based scholarship.
Some folks are just more deserving than others.
Capitalism is fascinating in its ability to patch holes in infrastructure which the US public sector attempts to provide. Public education not providing enough technical education? Private sector will come in and do that for you... for a price. In this case, that price is surely that Amazon will have influence over the curriculum, presumably access to their grades, and therefore a proprietary funnel of high quality talent already trained in job skills relevant to Amazon. $10,000 scholarships * 100 = $1 million is a tiny price for Amazon to pay in order to hire the top 100 students out of the 10 million they're reaching. And I'm a capitalist, not against this at all. If anything, the government should butt out even more so that there can be a real competitive marketplace where you don't need to be as large as Amazon to participate in the education sector.
I'm curious to read all the basher-posts.
Facebook is teaching female convicts to do the same.
I wonder who will be paid less: female ex-cons or high school students?
to be programmers.
Seriously, don't. Go into medicine unless you're a math wiz (in which case you're not really a programmer, you're a mathematician who happens to program).
The current administration just raised the H1-B cap by 20,000/yr. They passed it off as a good thing because those folks will have to have PHDs, but given the way diploma mills work that's not a high bar.
Like journalism in the 90s programming is a dying field. Steer clear. There's a reason why "Learn to Code" became an insult/slur.
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That's like letting Jeffrey Dahmer teach HVAC classes.
So, get the schools to do minimal training and then use the labor at intern rates? Sounds like a business plan to get cheap skilled labor. Working for Amazon at any level sounds awful.
Most importantly, how many of them are targeted to be creim kids?
Going to these courses would constitute a great opportunity for our renowned collaborator who lives in San Jose and supposedly works for the FBI in Palo Alto which I doubt, I suspect he is on a welfare check from from Special Education of the Santa Clara County Office of Education with a important bonus to take into account his rare disabilities.
Hopefully they gave zero consideration to any of those things so the courses won't discriminate.
Amazon by offering free training to high school kids, is paying a form of tax - they are just choosing what the money gets spent on.
Wish normal citizens could do the same.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The folks who actually exhibit merit without special advantage for any alleged privileged or unprivileged group.
Maybe taxation is a bad way to organize society.
Nobody in the US halls of influence cared about this issue, not for a generation or longer. If they needed workers, they went to India. Places I have worked (30 years running) are increasingly Indian and Chinese, verging on 95%. I don't see that changing ever.
So why this interest in pushing CS into public education?
I'll take a guess. As India and China become technological powerhouses in their own right (having expatriated their engineers to US companies for 40 years of paid top-shelf training) they are seen now as less a pool of low-wage workers to exploit, and more as economic competitors. Wow imagine that. 40 years spent relentlessly hollowing out the US middle-class labor pool, outsourcing for the quarterly bottom line, and now they are worried.
Cry me a river. I hope the Indians and Chinese take them to the cleaners, and I'm confident that is exactly what will happen.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
The h1bs are neither parasites, or chimps. They are human. With regular showering with soap, smellyness can be mitigated.
It's not the the private sector is good at patching holes; rather, it's that the government is bad at doing literally anything (in terms of output per input).
Schooling was initially private; government commandeered that industry, because it was a way to buy votes with other people's money. As with any organization that gets its funding through coercion at the point of a gun, government does a bad job with the resources it steals—even if some school district somewhere does really well, it's a Pyrrhic victory when the numbers are examined.
According to Amazon they are specificly going after places with "underprivileged kids and underserved communities"
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/dont_learn_to_code.html
A rebuttal to the Mark Zuckerberg saying "Learn to Code".
The folks who actually exhibit merit without special advantage for any alleged privileged or unprivileged group.
Of course. They are more deserving.
Because this time the kids had to use aws instead of actual physical computers.
Y'all know why.
They are certainly a more likely investment. Of course, in a way we might be worse off rewarding those with merit. Those who don't do as well tend to breed more. Those who do well try not have children they can't afford.
Beware of huge tech companies bearing gifts.
Table-ized A.I.
If you choose to pay for something, then you are betting you'll profit from that decision.
There are some governmental projects that people bet will be profitable to them, and so people would gladly pay for those projects willingly. Such a payment cannot be considered taxation, because then buying something like a T-shirt from a store would be a transaction that is indistinguishable in nature, and nobody considers doing that to be an example of paying a tax.
There are also many governmental projects that people would never fund voluntarily; the government has to steal resources from people under threat of violent reprisal for noncompliance, in order to fund those projects. This, then, must be the kind of transaction that is taxation.
So, taxation is theft.
Taxation is what you pay to the warlord, because he'll break your knees if you don't (or just throw you into a cage, like an animal, as a deterrent to other non-compliant slaves).
How much better would it be to know what something you want costs, and then to pay for that something directly and explicitly?
It's not a mistake that taxation is a convoluted process of forms, loopholes, and mysterious calculations. That obscurity is well designed to keep you from questioning the whole idea.
They are certainly a more likely investment. Of course, in a way we might be worse off rewarding those with merit. Those who don't do as well tend to breed more. Those who do well try not have children they can't afford.
Your elitist meritocracy sounds like a shitty place to live. But then, that's likely why you choose to live there.
Indeed, I'm sure it does to someone who lacks ingenuity, drive, capacity, and ability. Make no mistake, I'm not one of those who equates wealth to merit.
Then, our renowned resident IT janitor will definitely be eligible.
When you make a bad investment with your money, then your power to make future choices for society's resources is diminished; in contrast, if you make a good investment, then your power to make choices for society's resources is strengthened.
Yet, a democratic, governmental vote doesn't provide this characteristic. Not only is the fool given as weighty a voice as the scholar, but past decisions have very little affect on a voter's ability to make future decisions for society.
Worse still, Alice's vote is often used to decide how Bob should invest his resources. That creates major conflicts of interest; Alice and her girlfriends can band together and vote that Bob should pay them more welfare benefits, etc. Or, Bob and his cronies could vote to make Alice pay for their stupid corporate schemes.
There is only one real way to give power to the people, humanely, rationally, and in a way that cultivates expertise: Capitalism; free markets; voluntary exchange. You must vote only with your wallet, and if you've got nothing in your wallet, then that is a signal that you should introspect about your decisions in life, and maybe start making some different ones.
Creimer is too busy making YouTube videos and taking on The Verge for copy striking the tech community.
Programing methodologies today are like teaching mathematics with Roman Numerals. Very Limited.
gates did the software. bezos is doing the education. good job guys.
Basically, you and your ilk have been saying that for at least 100 years, during which time government in America has provided education funded by taxpayers.
THE EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN RUN.
You are WRONG.
I mean, you can't just run around the streets of Rome in your toga, exclaiming "VIIXXIIC??? There's a better way!"
Come on, man. Tell us of your travels in Arabia and India. What is that better way?
The funding determines the finding, right?
Does it?
Look for yourself, the classes are through the (I think poorly named) Edhesive.
Doesn't seem very AWS focused to me at all. In fact you do not even reach "Unit 11: Internet" until the very end of the second term.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...Your state doesn't give Amazon 500 million in tax credits and incentives.
Why dont you stard paying your taxes first then you could go overboard with nice initialive, but start by doing what you are supposed to do.
It's hilarious that a government thinks it's giving you something when it simply promises not to steal [as much] from you as it initially intended.
What's that? Other citizens are being forced to pay Amazon's fair share?
No. Government is stealing from those other citizens, too.
The problem is taxation, not Amazon's productive organization of resources.
No, of course not. You simply believe that some folks have more merit than others. And that naturally those folks should receive more opportunities and benefits than the rest.
Except the FBI field office is on the other side of 101 in Palo Alto. That's a long walk for a fortune cookie. The Zoom Caffe is just across the street.
All the good ones immigrate to the US, leaving the dregs for outsourcing. Very few ever return, the quality of life and freedoms are still very superior. Until those change, this cycle will continue, we take their best and brightest.
They will send their money back to their home country. They will engage in industrial espionage on behalf of their home country. Sometimes, they will take a high level position in a company of their homeland. They will create ethnic enclaves within their host country. See anjem choudary.
In FY 2019, all government spending in the United States is estimated to comprise about 36% of GDP.
That is to say, the vast majority of decisions for America's collective/societal resources are made by private individuals.
If you look at North Korea or the old Soviet Union, or even modern China, you'll find that the only thing that keeps people afloat is the "black" market—i.e., capitalism, where people interact voluntarily, exchanging goods and services as per their individual needs/wants.
Capitalism is EVERYWHERE; it's what allows a society to function DESPITE every attempt of the authoritarians to fsck things up.
Merit divorced from context is meaningless. Within a given specific context, some people do indeed have more merit. When comparing job applicants, some will be more qualified than others, and will merit more consideration. Merit presupposes the question of "to whom and for what?" You can't drop context and expect to have any meaningful conversation on the topic.
Umm... I would expect Amazon to sponsor the schools with students with the wealthiest families. That way, when they go home and show their parents in upper management how awesome those shiny new AWS services are.
Sure Chris, are you saying that you sometimes go to Zoom Caffe instead when you are too hungry to wait for Panda Express to open?
So, 10 lattes and some appetizers at Zoom Caffe then, you head up to Panda Express?
Because the OP point is that you don't have a job and that your FBI job is only fabulation.
He says that instead you are on a welfare check from Special Education of the Santa Clara County Office of Education with a important bonus to take into account your rare disabilities.
Nancy Guerero won't confirm due to confidentiality issues.
Trick question: H-1Bs since there will be less as Amazon attempts to saturate the market with talent and drive down wages.
If you can drive down labor costs from $100k+ to $60k across a pool of 7,000 engineers, you just saved $280 million *per year* in labor expenses. In total for these programs, Amazon is dumping $50 million. If it works, it seems like a solid brain dead business investment to increase their talent look and or drive down wages.
I'm more curious if there really is a talent shortage (or more businesses being cheap) and if there is a real shortage, if it's a problem you can throw money at to fix.
You can throw money at me all day but I won't become a brilliant physicist or a talented surgeon. Do certain computing skills require a similar level of acumen (much of computer science is mathematical in nature though not all tech work requires such talents) or can many tech skills (say software engineering) be simply pumped into young brians?
What's also interesting is if you develop this talent pool of talented tech workers and they ultimately form a competitor that brings your very business down. That would be poetic irony.
No Qualified Teachers. We have tried to hire them.
Not so much, apparently...
Ezekiel 23:20
There's nothing better than public school to kill a student's interest. The best part about computer science for me, was no one around telling me that I was doing was too difficult or that I wasn't capable. My computer doesn't roll its eyes at my ideas or questions. The only limitations I was up against were myself. My growth was directly influenced by my curiosity. My "lesson plan" was wherever my interest took me. Help was available when needed by a community rather than a bureaucracy.
"Sit down, shut up, read this, do this, don't improvise, don't ask questions, stick to the lesson plan, don't do that" ... nah. The whole environment will kill student interest right from the very start. We'll lose a ton of future engineers once public schools puts their incompetent hands on it.
Everything about your reply is the exact antithesis of the AC's point.
He doesn't want democratic voting, and he doesn't think the authoritarianism inherent in a monarchy is a good idea.
So, what in the world made you think your reply makes any sense? Or, is your irrational reply just a manifestation of cognitive dissonance?
Let me guess - none of them are in NYC.
when blue collar guys were getting their jobs shipped overseas / to Mexico in the late 90s early 2000s they were told to "Learn to Code". Guys in their 40s were sent to tech schools for new jobs.
Thing is it's hard to learn a new trade when you're young. It's harder when you're old. And a lot of these folks weren't suited to the jobs in the first place. I worked with a bunch of these guys in my career and none of them lasted.
These guys are pretty fucking bitter at this point. During the 2016 campaign that was basically Hillary Clinton's message to them. It's a big part of why Trump won, he promised them their old jobs back.
Anyway, fast forward to 2019 and there's been huge Journalist layoffs at newspapers and TV stations. Mergers and Acquisitions + the general move to digital means a lot fewer jobs. Those bitter, angry blue collar guys came out of the wood work and starting throwing "Learn to Code" at the Journalists and other white collar guys who were now out of work and who ignored them when they were hurting.
It's basically shorthand for "How do you like it when it happens to you, fucker". And no, I don't blame the blue collar guys for being mad. That said, I _do_ blame them for not showing up to the Democratic primary and putting Bernie Sanders or another real populist with real solutions in office. Their best bet is stuff like infrastructure spending and the green new deal. It's not that we don't need blue collar work, it's that the rich don't want to pay for it and after 2008 they took all the money for themselves.
Like Bernie's 2020 slogan says, it's not me, it's Us. Blue Collar and White Collar need to get it through their heads that they're all working class and band together.
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it's just the local talent isn't a part of it.
Globalism means I don't need to hire local talent at local rates. I can offshore most of the work, sell the products they make and what I can't offshore I can bring in cheap workers on visas.
Just as many jobs in programming either way, but way, way less pay and you'll never get hired to do it if you're "local".
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* You imply optimizing for short-term gains ultimately hurts long-term gains; well, if the market's goal is to optimize total gains, then clearly it will take into account this problem, and therefore look to the long-term as well. Put another way: There's a market for long-term valuation. Put another way: Why do you think you're the smartest person on the planet, the only one who has figured out that long-term planning is valuable? Also, corporations have a government-mandated fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder value, and thus government law is what leads corporations to optimize for short-term gains, because otherwise they may have to squander resources defending in court their long-term decisions. Law by legislation is always the problem; law by contracts is always the solution.
* If capital is accumulated through strictly voluntary interaction (e.g., law by contracts), then what are you complaining about? What else can you hope for? Surely a monopoly that arises through providing a voluntary service is better than a monopoly that arises through the threat of violence; it would never be a rational solution to use a violently imposed monopoly to protect society from a voluntarily grown monopoly.
* If a self-made rich man makes his money through voluntary interaction, then he's proved himself good at making decisions for society's resources; why should you then question his very last decision, to bequeath that wealth to his heirs? It is irrational to think that a life-time of voluntary interaction should be capped with one involuntary interaction, namely the re-distribution of his wealth against his will to people who never proved to anyone that they were deserving of receiving it. Indeed, the heirs he chooses to receive his wealth share his DNA, as well as his life history, including perhaps educational instruction that would help them to be similarly good stewards of that wealth (e.g., they watched him work); if his heirs turn out to be playboys, then who cares? At worst, they'll squander that wealth on frivolity, which just means their inherited decision-making power will naturally be distributed to other hands; at best, they'll hire competent professionals to manage the money, in which case the heirs are a conduit for organizing society's resources productively.
So these guys will get paid less? I hope not, seems like they need the money.
Wrong.
1) Amazon is in a PR battle to delay the US federal government crackdown on it handling a large percent of the total retail sales in the USA. It's 4% of all retail sales, not just online only. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/03/amazon-grabbed-4-percent-of-all-us-retail-sales-in-2017-new-study.html
2) Expect the federal government to step in as Amazon gets towards 10% of USA retail sales.
3) There's been claims that the USPS loses $1.50 on each Amazon package and about 40% of Amazon packages go throuh the USPS. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/04/is-the-post-office-making-or-losing-money-delivering-amazon-packages/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.391e321c6fa8
4) Combine #3 with how it's cheaper to ship a package from China to you than for you to ship via USPS to your next door neighbor: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-usps-epacket-gives-postal-subsidies-to-chinese-e-commerce-merchants-to-ship-to-the-usa-cheap/#26aee59340ca
5) Amazon is also having to deal with counterfeit products and how to prevent them from being sold through Amazon
All in all, it may just be the old shake and bake of 'we will consider regulating you' game to get Amazon more involved in Washington lobbying / campaign efforts..... Shades of Clinton/Gore in the1990s with Silicon Valley.
When Obama told coal miners to learn to code, no one cared. Because there are plenty of examples of coal miners learning to code. They aren't stupid people.
When Journalists were told to "learn to code" by a random person on the internet, suddenly it was a slur. Because we all know journalists are idiots.
The big companies are looking to commoditize programming because there is a lot of grunt work to be done that doesn't require a great deal of skill. And they'd rather pay cheap labor to do it and save their high paid labor for solving bigger problems.
Work Safe Porn
code.org fined teachers for teaching boys.
SHAME ON CODE.ORG, YOU HATEFUL SEXIST BASTARDS.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/04/10/1235219/google-teach-girls-coding-get-2500-teach-boys-get-0
How do you think tax-payers got their money in the first place? by working.
If you take their money, you are taking their labor; it's indistinguishable from conscription except for one small thing: Capitalism is used to find productive work for people, so that society will actually generate wealth for a government to plunder.
As noted here, you've got it backwards: Capitalism is what allows a large, stable society to function; the wealthier and freer a society, the more capable it is of stomaching the parasite that you call "government".
I deal with this shit all day long. Don't go into programming. Skip IT. If you aren't willing to work 80 hours but only report 40 your ass will be let go and yet another Wipro offshore resource will added. When they say they can't find qualified IT people in the USA they mean they can't find people in the USA that are willing to lie on their timesheets. I still to this day can see in the twin cities, some H1B show up at 5 am, leave at 10 PM do that 6 days a week, but magically only have 40 hours on their timecard. It's a scam and any reporter could easily show it with a camera crew and a weeks worth of time. Fuck it, stay away from IT.
I'm sorry, but this is gonna end up like the Udacity garbage - it was awesome until they let big companies in and all courses sported so much obvious advertising that you cannot stand even watching them anymore.
"Now kids, repeat after me. Proper hosting can oly be done on AWS. It's the way God intended the internet to work!"
udachny is a sock puppet of roman_mir. the latter uses the former to try to convince more people that the foundational principles of his cult are righteous and sane. they both often post at -1 (and have their postings limited here on slashdot) because they have poor karma scores here as a result of repeated abusive behavior and their consistent religious proselytizing that is seldom on topic with the discussion thread. don't let him convince you that his doctrine would actually benefit you, or even result in him being less offensive.
Your story is anecdotal.
Also, you pointed it out already: The public schooling system was not the deciding factor; rather, you were born to people who somehow saw the value of self-betterment (maybe you're genetically predisposed to this same view), and who encouraged you to better yourself.
You would have probably done well regardless of public education—maybe you would have done even better without it, because you wouldn't have been strapped into a 13-year process that was designed for people who are dumber than you are.
If you have difficulties with learning, I turn to the professional service superior papers. Probably many students need help and I am very happy sometimes to get professional help for little money. This allows me to save time and focus on other tasks.
Many people of high merit don't need the ridiculous financial compensation that represents their value. Many are passionate about their work and as long as they're financially secure and happy, they'll keep cranking out all of that value. The opposite to recognizing merit is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Why don't we just give out people professions by having them draw from a hat. fk merit. /sarc
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