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posted by martyb on Sunday September 24 2017, @11:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the Programming-Jobs dept.

Commentary from The Guardian

The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.

This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn't actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won't make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that's precisely the point.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:34PM (8 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:34PM (#572292) Journal
    What's remarkable is that not a single bit of supporting evidence is provided. The bald assertion is made and then the author goes on to other things. We eventually reach the key claim of the article:

    This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn’t actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won’t make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that’s precisely the point.

    At its root, the campaign for code education isn’t about giving the next generation a shot at earning the salary of a Facebook engineer. It’s about ensuring those salaries no longer exist, by creating a source of cheap labor for the tech industry.

    And then the author segues into a story about some non profit that helps coal miners find jobs. OK, no evidence there. Then there's an alleged oversupply of computer science majors by 50% which still doesn't show what the author wants it to show. The author then argues that it's to the advantage of employers to have cheaper employees. Ok, true as far as it goes.

    Guest workers and wage-fixing are useful tools for restraining labor costs. But nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers. And where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools? It’s no coincidence, then, that the campaign for code education is being orchestrated by the tech industry itself. Its primary instrument is Code.org, a nonprofit funded by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others. In 2016, the organization spent nearly $20m on training teachers, developing curricula, and lobbying policymakers.

    That it would be to the benefit of these employers to have cheaper employees. Therefore that must be the reason. That's the extent of the evidence. What a remarkably shoddy article.

    But let's not stop there. Even if we suppose the premise of the story is true, that certain high tech companies are deliberately educating/training new workers in order to increase the supply of programmers and keep the cost of their labor down, what exactly is supposed to be the problem? What's special about programming that we should protect high wages in this area and prevent additional people from enjoying the benefits of such jobs? Just because this is of benefit to employers, doesn't mean it is the only benefit possible. It's of benefit to the new worker who can have a good paying job. It's of benefit to end customers who can have the products of these programmers for a cheaper price.

    What is missed here is that if these employers are working selfishly as claimed by the story, we then have a story of selfish business entities making self-interested decisions that happen to benefit all of society rather than just themselves. That is after all the key power of capitalism - that it provides avenues by which greed-based decisions can help rather than hinder society.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @02:54PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @02:54PM (#572322)

    The onus of offering a better hypothesis is on you. In particular it has become clear that the 'STEM crisis' is a myth. [ieee.org] However it's certainly true that certain companies and government agencies have been pushing that myth that incredibly hard. So what is their motivation? This article offers a logical hypothesis that matches all the data and action we have. Nonetheless disagreement is perfectly reasonable. However, again the onus falls on you to offer a more viable explanation.

    And this will certainly not benefit society. An overabundance of developers will collapse labor prices which benefits nobody except companies. They will, in turn, take the reduced labor costs and send that new "profit" straight onto shareholders and corporate executives which will result in greater wealth inequality and further accelerate our socioeconomic decline. Myopia is a chronic illness in corporate America today.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by pvanhoof on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:09PM

      by pvanhoof (4638) on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:09PM (#572326) Homepage

      > The onus of offering a better hypothesis is on you

      No. That's simply not how it works. How it works is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Another must not assume any claims to be true, and the onus of offerint a better hypothesis is not on whoever should assume something to be true. The guy making extraordinary claims must provide extraordinary evidence. And that's it.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:55AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 25 2017, @06:55AM (#572570) Journal
      As noted by the other replier, pvanhoof, no the onus is not on me.

      This article offers a logical hypothesis that matches all the data and action we have.

      The "data and action" is ridiculously paltry. As I noted, not a single bit of evidence was provided aside from the observation that cheaper labor prices would theoretically benefit those who employ programmers. That's it.

      Now let me provide a few pieces of contrary evidence. The first one is why should we have the expectation that this will work? As kurenai.tsubasa noted [soylentnews.org], one doesn't use marketing in isolation to get more entrants. They just pay more. The paying more is already happening and thus, we see an increase in programmers. Second, employers already have easy ways to hire cheap, foreign programmers and the supply of those is growing quite fast. And to anticipate a rebuttal here, why are the programmers gulled by marketing in the US going to be better programmers than their Indian counterparts?

      Moving on, we have the investment horizon. Businesses are notorious for not thinking very far ahead in today's climate. So why are they going to put money into marketing programming jobs now just so they can have cheaper labor costs in twenty years? Not seeing it because it's past the next quarter.

      Since you asked, here's my theory on the matter. This is just standard corporate status signaling via charity themes aligned with the business's markets. It may help dull criticism of H1-B games in US and similar attempts across the developed world to import developing world programmers or outsource to developing world destinations (a reasonable concern giving widespread immigration and outsourcing concerns among the developed world public).

    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday September 25 2017, @07:50PM

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Monday September 25 2017, @07:50PM (#572768)

      And this will certainly not benefit society. An overabundance of developers will collapse labor prices which benefits nobody except companies.

      Having more programmers out there can't help but drive up the quality of code that each of us uses every day. There will be more potential contributors to open source projects, so there will be more open source code, some of which will be good.

      If that smacks of bullshit, how about the general trend of driving down cost, and thus price, for everything we use every day. More programmers will mean that more problems can be solved in software, so there is less need for an expensive hardware solution. Or, the feature set for a product can be expanded at the same price point.

      Maybe, worst case, is all we (as a society) get out of a glut of programmers is a skinnable version of Flappy Bird. Don't overlook the small wins.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:16PM (#572330)

    But let's not stop there. Even if we suppose the premise of the story is true, that certain high tech companies are deliberately educating/training new workers in order to increase the supply of programmers and keep the cost of their labor down, what exactly is supposed to be the problem?

    The problem is that they're lying about it, to everyone including the government, and pushing for programs to get more people to learn these skills to help drive wages down. Basically, they want to externalize their costs: it's not like these companies are volunteering to educate all these kids themselves, starting from grade school and going through college (or at least pay for all these costs themselves); they want the rest of society to take on that burden. Getting an education is a risk: someone has to pay for it, generally the taxpayer up through high school, and then a combination of the student (and family) and the taxpayer through college (state universities get certain subsidies), plus alumni donations. That cost is an investment in a career these days, but if it doesn't pan out, not only does the taxpayer lose, but the student (who generally shoulders most of the cost probably) gets stuck with a giant debt they can't repay any time soon and which can't be discharged in a bankruptcy. Why should employers get these free source of labor at almost no cost to themselves? The high salaries are compensation to the students for their investment and risk.

    What's special about programming that we should protect high wages in this area and prevent additional people from enjoying the benefits of such jobs?

    What's special about programming that we need to subsidize employers to help them reduce labor costs for this one profession? Why don't we do this for doctors or nurses? Or what about managers and CEOs?

    It's of benefit to end customers who can have the products of these programmers for a cheaper price.

    Programmer salaries are only a tiny portion of the cost of any product, since programming is part of NRE (non-recurring engineering). If you want to reduce costs, it'd be more effective to reduce management costs; that can be done with salary caps for executives. You could also reduce the costs of HR; those people don't do anything useful anyway, so why should they get paid more than minimum wage? There's lots of places in corporations where money is being wasted and people are being overpaid; why are you focused on programming?

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 24 2017, @10:40PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 24 2017, @10:40PM (#572470) Journal

      The problem is that they're lying about it

      In other words, that their motives are impure. Why do we care?

      Why should employers get these free source of labor at almost no cost to themselves?

      Labor isn't free. They still have to pay for it in wages and benefits.

      What's special about programming that we need to subsidize employers to help them reduce labor costs for this one profession? Why don't we do this for doctors or nurses? Or what about managers and CEOs?

      I'll note that this has been done for a long time with doctors and nurses. I've read of immigrant Indian medical professionals in the late 80s, IIRC. Education for managers and CEOs is in great oversupply. That's not the restriction on those careers.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:54PM (1 child)

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:54PM (#572345) Journal

    I agree with what you've written for the most part. If tech companies need more workers, it makes sense for them to work with educators to create those workers. In my neck of the woods, there's a very real shortage of CNC operators. So, local factories created an initiative to work with community colleges to create CNC training programs. I've been looking at the one here in town. It's a full-time seven week course. There are also some other subjects this consortium has encouraged the community college to make available. Another one that caught my eye is “mechatronics,” which involves assembly line robot service/repair and retooling.

    That's what it looks like when there's a real shortage. There are practical courses offered that do not pretend to take every jerk who can register for classes and turn her into the person with 20 years experience who can look at a CAD drawing, meditate on it for a few minutes, then fire up the CNC mill and produce a perfect prototype on the first try. Or hell, look at somebody's sketch, then work up the CAD drawing and take it from there. I don't really know the practical day-to-day of factory work (yet, maybe).

    Additionally, there's a diversity of equipment they'll be teaching. I think after graduating the CNC program, I'd be qualified to at least have some clue what the hell I'm doing on CNC mills from about 8 different manufacturers.

    I also take a look at the marketing for the course, and it's very minimal. I don't see a diverse cast of smiling faces. There's just the odd regular joe operating a CNC mill. There's nothing exciting or hyped about it. We have factories here, and they need CNC operators. Plain and simple.

    Also note the lack of Narratives with CNC operators. There is no Narrative in the media that we need more CNC operators. There is no Narrative in the media that only cisfemales need apply for these new CNC operator positions. Finally, there is no Narrative that, when the cisfemale CNC operators fail to precipitate out of the æther, that it must needs be the fault (blame to create divisiveness) of all assigned males regardless of body parts who have been operating CNC mills since they were kids and have a love of CNC mill operation. The Narrative would tell us that every assigned male CNC operator is collectively and severally accountable for some culture of pervasive sexual harassment, even though the only examples this Narrative could find are in the boardroom and not on the factory floor.

    With programming, we see something a bit different. We have 3 week bootcamps. It will take me 7 weeks at the local college before they can turn me loose on a CNC mill, and nobody's promising me that I'll be a rockstar CNC operator. However, I'm supposed to believe that all it takes is 3 weeks in a bootcamp or maybe just an hour of code before somebody who's never used a command prompt before will have the same level of skill it's taken me decades to achieve.

    Then there's the sexual harassment. Obviously, we have a programmer shortage because all those misogynerds who can't get laid are chasing these cisfemales who are chomping at the bit to learn the secret voodoo to open a command prompt out of the field! The whole thing is contrived horseshit.

    Finally, one way I can really tell there's a CNC operator shortage and not a programmer shortage is that if I decide to take that 7 week course, I will probably be making $5/$10/even $15 more per hour in a year or two (assuming I'm any good at CNC operation) than I make now!

    Why are programmer wages not going up? I only have a 101 level understanding of economics, but I'm fairly certain that if there's a shortage of some good or service and demand is increasing, the price of that good or service goes up!

    Disclaimer: Keeping with tradition, I did not read TFA. It could very well be a crap article.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @03:51AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 25 2017, @03:51AM (#572539) Journal
      This is a good point. It seems an awful ineffective way to make more workers and lower wages. My feeling is that if we have nefarious motives, the nefarious motives are probably status signalling with respect to their hiring practices. "We're not bad people for hiring hordes of immigrants because we're paying actual money to make native programmers." Goes with the narrative better FWIW.

      Disclaimer: Keeping with tradition, I did not read TFA. It could very well be a crap article.

      I did read the article, and yes, it could well be a crap article. ;-)