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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.
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
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.
If you are an Amazon Prime member.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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
According to Amazon they are specificly going after places with "underprivileged kids and underserved communities"
The reason to learn to code isn't to become a programmer professionally it's because coding and understanding how code works is valuable for most any profession. Being able to code is like being able to use office these days. In fact, advanced excel users already code.
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.
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.
Programing methodologies today are like teaching mathematics with Roman Numerals. Very Limited.
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
Right, we should pay a professional everytime we need a simple bot for a game or excel macro. Perhaps we all need professionals to keep our checkbooks or perform any math.
Or everyone can have some basic coding skill, a math and logic skill on par with basic Algebra and be able to perform coding tasks on par with changing a light bulb or doing basic day-to-day home maintenance. And if you can't handle that level of coding, your merit is burger flipper at best and that is the only job you should get.
No method of funding institutions and projects which promote general welfare of a society is perfect, but you only point out some negatives of taxation without mentioning the negatives of free market funding.
Wealthy individuals already have significant means to influence society without the use of government. A vote is one of the few avenues those with lesser wealth have available to them. Each vote may be equal, but that doesn't make everyone's voice equal. Campaign contributions, lobbying, and the use of political connections are all avenues for the wealthy to impose societal control above and beyond their vote; and they are arguably more influential than voting.
If your beliefs on how voting works in the US were accurate, we wouldn't see widening income inequality in America. The have nots would already be voting for huge government payouts which give the bulk of economic gains to the poor, working, and middle class. Considering this is the exact opposite of what has been happening for decades, it appears your political theory has little in common with reality.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
Not so much, apparently...
Ezekiel 23:20
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".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
* 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.
You're thinking of John Wayne Gacy, the crawl space guy.
That's like letting Dahmer teach a class on home meat cutting.
Punchline: I was going to open a Dahmer nose pizzaria.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No, it is impossible for 'everyone' to a have 'some basic coding skill'. We can't get below 75% innumerate college grads, despite best efforts.
But your basic point remains: Anybody doing any kind of technical job needs some basic coding skill.
The world still needs ditch diggers. Sucks to be them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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
It's just not possible for education to be neutral.
Depending on your political view. Look at either CA or TX textbook standards. You will be outraged in either case. Those are the two big ones, most other states just follow one of those two. They're about equally bad.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The problem is that both sets of textbooks play to and teach as fact, the common opinions in the regions.
It would work better if the states switched standards. So the average kids could 'spot the bullshit', not get their opinions reinforced by group thinking, conformity demanding teachers.
Sure, some kids will realize they are just being indoctrinated. But those kids would have been fine in anycase. What about the gullible ones?
IMHO every family should have an 'uncle full of shit'. To get the kids bullshit detectors going at a young age. Also it's great fun for him, gets to put the kids up to endless trouble. e.g. Teach the kids 'help help, I'm being repressed. Come and see the violence inherent in the system.' at age 4.
Just like all early childhood education, they need to be fed obvious bullshit. So they can learn to spot the not so obvious bullshit when older.
But that still won't get them to examine the things they want to believe.
As it is, only the minority opinion holders gain any 'critical thinking' skills. The rest think 'critical thinking' is how they got to their groupthink, as that's what their teachers told them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Maybe taxation is a bad way to organize society.
The only kind of large stable society that exists without taxation is one with conscription. At some point, the society as a whole needs to get something done. So either they take money, which can then be paid to someone to do the work willingly, or they take unwilling people to do the work by conscripting them.
I know which one I prefer.
Right, we should pay a professional everytime we need a simple bot for a game or excel macro.
A game bot is a hobby need: if you're interested enough to want to do it, good luck to you. But it's like saying everyone should be able to make fishing flies so they can go fishing.
Excel macros are a work need: either they are a required skill for your job and you learn them, or they're written by someone else at your work who knows what they're doing.
None of this means that most people will ever need a knowledge of actual programming.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Anybody doing any kind of technical job needs some basic coding skill.
This is only true in the tautological sense that if your job needs programming knowledge, then you need programming knowledge to do that job.
And if (say) AI replaces lawyers, you're still going to have a few high level lawyers with the AI doing the grunt work, but those high level lawyers aren't going to be spending their time coding.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
All you have to do to argue, is postulate strong AI doing the coding...in other words, assume the answer you want. 'AI' does not exist today, except in the marketing sense.
Knowledge workers need to navigate, today and for the foreseeable future, that means basic coding skills. If only so they understand how their queries work (or don't).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'