Chicago School Official: US IT Jobs Offshored Because 'We Weren't Making Our Own' Coders 268
theodp writes: In a slick new video, segments of which were apparently filmed looking out from Google's Chicago headquarters giving it a nice high-tech vibe, Chicago Public Schools' CS4ALL staffers not-too-surprisingly argue that creating technology is "a power that everyone needs to have."
In the video, the Director of Computer Science and IT Education for the nation's third largest school district offers a take on why U.S. IT jobs were offshored that jibes nicely with the city's new computer science high school graduation requirement. From the transcript: "People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."
In the video, the Director of Computer Science and IT Education for the nation's third largest school district offers a take on why U.S. IT jobs were offshored that jibes nicely with the city's new computer science high school graduation requirement. From the transcript: "People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."
Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Funny)
Indians, it would appear.
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because they do doesn't mean that should be the standard, but in the great race to the bottom, that's all that matters: CHEAP!!!!!!
That's the real reason why they can't find anyone. They don't want to pay for someone in the US to do it. They want to pay as little as possible for as much profitable work as possible damn be the consequences. That means going with the cheapest labor and that currently means hire in India, where people are willing / able to work for much less than an American. That's the problem with globalization. You as a consumer have to compete with the entire world for a job, (not good if you live in an area with a high cost of living), and you get to pay local market adjusted rates for products and services. It's extracting maximum wealth from you while giving back as little as possible. Great system, for those that get to exploit it that is.
Also, note that I said "profitable work" not "well made product". If you as a coder are not fine with shipping broken code that's filled with security vulnerabilities because the deadline is here, then they *definitely* don't want you around. The delays in development would cost them money. They also don't want you really writing your own code. That takes more time and money to develop. They want you to cut and paste pre-made code using some bloated library / API because that gets the product to the market sooner, and keeps your hours, and therefore how much they pay you, down. They don't care if it's dog slow and cumbersome to manage. As long as it sells in the market, they make money. Forget about QA, that department was unceremoniously shot in the head years ago.
Money makes the world go round, only because society gives too much power and influence to those who covet it.
Now of course, there are *some* groups that do still need to care about security vulnerabilities, well written, efficient, (and documented!), code. This can be for a number of reasons, but in most cases, these groups will not be accepting people fresh out of college with no work experience. Which is another issue entirely of not wanting to train people, but that's another topic for another day.
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, note that I said "profitable work" not "well made product". If you as a coder are not fine with shipping broken code that's filled with security vulnerabilities because the deadline is here, then they *definitely* don't want you around. The delays in development would cost them money. They also don't want you really writing your own code. That takes more time and money to develop. They want you to cut and paste pre-made code using some bloated library / API because that gets the product to the market sooner, and keeps your hours, and therefore how much they pay you, down. They don't care if it's dog slow and cumbersome to manage. As long as it sells in the market, they make money. Forget about QA, that department was unceremoniously shot in the head years ago.
I'm over 40, and I've yet to have a coding task that wasn't compromised in some large way, but it usually boils down to short term versus long term. Your paid for short term results. Furthermore, even if you are lucky enough to get paid to produce a bit better than average stuff, they are probably not paying for the redundancy of multiple people knowing the code base. You get shuffled from project to project and just got to hope that if you are chosen to pick up the pieces that the last person tried to make it possible.
I thought this year might be different. There was a mountain of technical debt to fix, and they seemed serious about fixing it, except, well, they weren't really serious about fixing it. I was in the red headed step child group, not the main group, though as near as I can tell I produced better results than the larger group did. Of course it is also possible that the larger group was hiding all work from us, but either way, not serious.
Technical debt is accumulated because no one bothered to man the shovels and deal with it over time, and just because the powers that be now want to fix it, it is not remotely that easy for certain highly specialized coding tasks. The biggest thing I wish for would be they would either get over it and let some of the older programmers like me start designing stuff, or higher a decent freaking systems engineer to shell in a plan from the start.
The key is to always be thinking long term, even if you have to do some things for short term results to meet deadlines.
Agile is not a replacement for spending the time to come up with a decent plan, though it can help you adapt the plan to face things you had not expected, but even then, sometimes you have to take a step back and make sure your road map to peace is not a nature trail to hell.
There is no coding task beyond a certain level of complexity that cannot be made exponentially harder by bad leadership. Experienced coders can deal with crap requirements, but it is not cheap, and in reality just means your paying your coders to help you develop the true requirements and probably everything else. Good luck trying to farm that off to India.
Paying for someone to give a damn and do their best to produce something that can be maintained is expensive, but then so is starting over, and your usually developing code to get a job done, therefore the true cost is much higher.
For instance if it costs say $50/hr for people to use your code, but a more careful design could have allowed the user to get done in half the time, well, it doesn't take a huge amount of users to justify paying doing the job right, and keeping the job done right.
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As someone mentioned above the real and only reason US IT jobs are off shored is cost. And it is not only a lower hourly rate but the hiring company can also jettison the cost of employee benefits which is a considerable amount of money. And while business tax rules usually allow a business to deduct some of their labor costs they can deduct almost all the costs of contracting services. These are the reasons a business school graduate with absolutely no understanding of technology choses the off shore appr
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If you're over 40, then you might want to slightly rephrase the " I was in the red headed step child group, not the main group". That was us as well; anything normal someone got, anything abnormal someone else got. *WE* always seen to get the "No one else knows what the hell this even is, handle it" projects.
After a couple of times of that, a young friend of mine came up with the name "We're the land of misfit toys." It stuck -- because we all had a great time figuring out what was going on and what nee
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
People also forget, that decades ago companies used to take on cadets and train them. Now, cheap arse fuckers, that don't pay taxes, demand the government and workers pay for the training, which the companies exploit and then demand to pay less and less for the work, else they will bring in the cheapest foreign labour they can find. Now how many people do they want trained locally at government and worker expense, way more than is necessary ie supply and demand, glut of tech workers and wages collapses. Basically yes, they are psychopathic cunts, not better way of putting, they of course demand to be paid more and more for being the best psychopathic cunts for as long as it lasts and then wander off laughing with golden parachutes when the companies collapse, all backed by mainstream media, this backing is paid for in advertisements costs.
Re:Insanity (Score:4, Interesting)
Decades ago, when a company invested in their employees, they were pretty sure they would stay with them, not out of loyalty, but out of necessity. There were only a small number of companies to poach them, and starting your own company or joining a small startup wasn't generally a highly mobile path (only taken by people that wanted to get out of the rat-race).
Now, for better or worse, there are a large number of multi-national companies that are out there that are more than willing to poach employees after they are trained and it is easier than ever to start your own company become a millionaire. For many companies, the return on training investment is low enough that it makes poaching and out-sourcing a better strategy. The explanation is probably just that simple.
I would argue that it is probably a bit better for some in this environment and probably worse for most people. Success accumulates now more for the aggressive than the loyal and I don't see the game changing anytime soon. It's basically how silicon valley started [wikipedia.org].
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
People only leave a job voluntarily for a few reasons:
- Low pay. Solution: increase wages, invest in your human resources, offer additional benefits like extra time off, company car etc.
- Bad working environment. Solution: fire bad bosses, get rid of the cubicle farm and give skilled workers offices, free coffee, assigned parking spaces etc.
- Uninteresting work. Solution: create interesting work, e.g. with R&D or something like Google's 80/20 rule.
- Poor performance. Solution: check if you promoted them too fast, offer a demotion with no loss of salary or additional training/mentoring.
- Children. Solution: offer flexible working, don't punish new parents.
- Bean counters. Solution: make worker happiness, retention and training into metrics that they are measured by.
Solve these simple problems and you can safely train staff with little worry that they will jump ship.
Re:Insanity (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://webcenters.netscape.com... [compuserve.com]
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Loyalty is a two-way street.
It used to be that companies turned to layoffs as a last-ditch effort to save the company from bankruptcy. That was abandoned in the 1980s. Instead, layoffs are now relatively common as a way to goose the stock price for a quarter or two.
Employees reacted to that breach of loyalty in the entirely predictable way: They stopped being loyal to the companies that were no longer loyal to them.
So no, it's not the employees or other companies that cause poaching to be a problem. Is t
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Sure, people may have more choices today that they didn't have decades ago. But companies are willing to do less to keep people around than they did decades ago.
I've heard/commented before around the 'net - is it any coincidence that with the death of the pension, that any type of employee loyalty died along with it?
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Sure, people may have more choices today that they didn't have decades ago. But companies are willing to do less to keep people around than they did decades ago.
I've heard/commented before around the 'net - is it any coincidence that with the death of the pension, that any type of employee loyalty died along with it?
At least one theory about this is floating around, and they blame institutional shareholders for the death of the pension...
https://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2... [wsj.com]
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This should wash out. If companies invested in training, they could simply hire someone that was trained somewhere else.
And then the differentiator would be institutional knowledge.
Its crap all the way down thats for sure. I haven't had decent training in a decade. But I'm the type that goes an gets my own anyway.
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The point of training isn't to keep a higher skilled worker in a lower skill position. It is so you get first crack at paying them enough to stay.
Although you might get the first crack, in today's environment, the grass always looks a bit greener over there and you have to counter that.
For example, starting in the late 1990's, people who hopped jobs got significant pay boosts both in the US and in India, but this wasn't true in Europe. Why? My guess is that in the US and India, the grass over at another company looked significantly greener. In Europe (which had fewer startups and larger institutions that hired high tech folks), there was not much
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You answered the question yourself as to why people don't stay.
If I stay at company X and only to get a 3% year over year increase, and you can get 10% by jumping ship.... most people will jump ship....
Companies complain about loyalty but then do nothing to foster it.
Companies complain about a bunch of things, and so does my 4yo. Doesn't mean I should listen to either of them.
I'm just pointing out the past is the past, I don't think there's any going back to the "good-old-days" as if those days of paternalistic companies where there weren't many career options except to stick it out and get your pension was really as great as what people think they remember it was (most of the "complainers" are too young to remember it anyhow)...
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Not only do they fail to train up replacements, they fire or let go of their area experts. Then they expect to hire a replacement for this expert or contract out work that they were previously responsible for. Most of my contracts over the past few years seem to start out with, here is your work, the last person who worked on this quit/was let go 5+ years ago. This is one of the reasons why I've not fought to get out of contracting and back to full time employment with a software company.
Re: Insanity (Score:2)
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The problem with your rant about race to the bottom line and race to market is that the article is about a public school district.
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Re:Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, anytime an organization says, "Not enough employees", they leave off, "at the low wages and in the circumstances we're dictating". Want more employees? Up the pay and train them. Stop making them work in really shitty conditions. The US has plenty of people not working or in dead end jobs wanting more. Invest in them instead of investing in India.
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head. Every single offshore project I was part of? Because it was wildly cheaper. I can hire, today, right now, 4 coders from india for 20k. Out of them I will get total crap. Yet I just lean on the outsourced agency a bit and they rotate people in and out. About 1 out of 20 people 'get programing'. Out of those 1 in 10 like it. I can rotate about 1-2 a month for 'poor performance'. Within a couple of years I have a decent crew for 20-30k. In the states I can get 2-4 coders for 500k. The cost is wildly out of line. I know it. That is what I compete with.
Companies do not want to train because there is 0 incentive for them to do so. The MBA schools have taught them that. We are a 'resource' to be exploited.
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We are a 'resource' to be exploited.
Why yes, yes you are. We all are. If you cannot prove your value, then you should ask yourself why you are trying to do what you are doing. I find if very difficult to have sympathy for the profession that is trying to automate the rest of the working world into the unemployment line. 'Nuff said.
Re:Insanity (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a very American way of looking at it.
To the extent that humans are a resource, they are more like a fruit tree than a disposable cog in a machine. The company has to nurture them, help them grow and the extract value from them in a way that doesn't harm them. Sometimes the rot sets in and the tree can't be saved, but usually it just needs a little bit of support.
As for automating away jobs, I tend to think of it more as automating away the drudgery and freeing people up for more interesting stuff. People used to copy out books by hand, until the printing press was invented. Now the descendants of those book copiers making a living playing video games on Twitch. Change is inevitable, no-one wants my skills writing software for 80s home computers any more, what matters is that there is a way forward for everyone.
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you must move to them as opposed to where you want to live
For what other professions do companies hire remote workers? The opportunities for working remotely as a coder are not that great, but every other profession I can think of is even worse.
you must work long hours,
Not all tech jobs require long hours, and plenty of other jobs do have long hours.
commute an hour to work and an hour back
What? So there are special fast lanes for non-coders?
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is there are ways companies could approach an actual shortage. More pay or more perks.
Companies aren't doing either. Which indicates there is no shortage.
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More pay or more perks.
Companies aren't doing either.
A BS in CS has a higher starting salary than any other 4 year degree. What industry offers better perks than tech?
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What industry offers better perks than tech?
Again, the point is sailing over your head.
The measure is not "tech vs everything else". That's just an attempt to say "shut up and enjoy what you have".
The claim is that there is a massive shortage of coders. If that was true, basic economics would dictate that salaries and perks would be increasing rapidly as companies competed for scarce coders.
That isn't happening. Salaries are flat and perks are either flat or being taken away.
That indicates there is no shortage. Instead, people are lying for polit
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You forgot one other thing.... If there were such a shortage, you'd see companies investing more in training - i.e. like people with backgrounds in related fields that had an interest in coding.
People tend to forget, CS is a relatively new degree at many universities. My parents went to 2 different universities (one large, one small, two different states, etc.) in the late '60's and early '70's. Programming courses were just starting to be offered, usually in the Math department, but other departments
Re:Insanity ^H^H^H insideous (Score:2)
Your subject really would have worked better if you had worded differently. Insane would be just crazy, abnormal, random behavior which could manifest harm to oneself or others. This actually does kind of make sense, but I am not sure it totally covers all of their intent.
I propose a modification to the term as insidious. This actually provides the full intent of their actions. Any other term would mean that they did not intentionally want the outcome any different than what they obtained.
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Complete Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
"People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."
There were plenty of programers. There has never been a "shortage". That is complete bullshit. The H-1B monkeys were brought into this country for one reason and one reason alone. Because they come from a background of extreme poverty and will gladly work for significantly lower wages. And in the process, hundreds of thousands of American workers lost their jobs so that they could be replaced by third world monkeys.
Re:Complete Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I completely agree with you that H1B is all about importing cheap labor. But it's utterly offensive to call these people 'Monkeys'. If you're angry, be angry at government and big business leaders who are effectively waging economic war on american citizens.
Re:Complete Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
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We're all monkeys. :P
Think as a world, not as a country. (Score:2)
In the global market, there is no reason to prefer higher paid Americans.
We are addressing the low-income persons in the world before the lower income persons in the US.
Now, new companies are being set up to train developers in PH, and ID, and TH in order to develop the questioning skills needed, in order to make the skill set comparable to new grads in the US.
But, because the cost of living is so much cheaper, companies can pay slightly more than the going rate for a coder-farm, but get coders who are equi
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Re:Complete Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
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My old boss (we were mechanical engineering consultants) used to say: "To make a good impression on the client, you need to drive a nice car, but never nicer than the client's."
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Its not racist, its a reference to a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. This is how the sausage is made.
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WTF?
This is not a misunderstanding about the meaning of the words, it's an instance of virtue signalling. Usually when someone throws in "offensive", you can tell it's a cunt taking the high road.
Re: Complete Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. The shortage was of employers who understood the technical difficulty of coding, and were willing to pay accordingly. I am now in law, which pays better, but coding at any reasonable level of quality (so, better than offshore minimal skill code monkey ships provide) is more intellectually demanding than law.
Re: Complete Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Complete Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing happened to nursing. Originally, the salaries were high enough to qualify as middle-class wage earners. But the government claimed there was going to be a nursing shortage. Dozens new nursing colleges opened everywhere. Then suddenly, there was an oversupply of nurses; salaries fell through the floor, the hospitals soaked up the savings. Now they are dependent on foreign labor. Family butchers used to be a middle class profession, then the supermarkets open meat factories out of state, hired cheap labor and undercut those family businesses.
Re: Complete Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there are two big differences here:
If you look at retention rates and graduation rates as a percentage of incoming freshmen, three times as many CS majors drop out or change majors within the first year, and only about half as many CS majors actually graduate with a CS degree. This is not because CS is hard. After all, nursing is hard and requires intellect. CS requires... something entirely different and much more rare.
Programmers have to be highly creative, but also highly logical. Lots of people are highly creative, but have a hard time wrapping their heads around the logical aspects of programming. Those folks might be decent managers or product designers, but will probably never be good software engineers. Others are highly logical, but are not very creative. That second group might pass as "code monkeys", but also will never be good software engineers.
And programmers also have to simultaneously be able to think abstractly and concretely. They have to be able to see something abstract and turn it into a concrete representation. And to make the big bucks, they also have to be able to go the other way—to see what the final concrete representation is supposed to look like and work their way back to an abstract underlying architecture that can support it, and then turn that into concrete representations for each part.
Programmers also need a larger than average working set memory, a stronger language center, and stronger ability to pay attention—often to the point of hyperfocus (getting "in the zone"). Although to some degree those skills can be improved with practice, they all have a genetic component as well.
Another area with essentially the same properties is music. (This may be why musicians are so over-represented in tech.) Unsurprisingly, in a 2008 study [discovermagazine.com], researchers concluded that musical ability is about 50% genetic. Some people really are naturally predisposed to being good at it, and that predisposition results in getting good at it much more quickly and ending up being better at it than people without that predisposition, regardless of how much effort the latter group puts in.
Any CS teacher will tell you that the same is true for computer programming. There is a sizable subset of people who, no matter how much they might want to learn how to program, will try and try and will never wrap their heads around it, or at best, will do so at a pace that makes it a very poor career choice for them.
It would be great if we exposed more people to computer programming at a young age so that a greater percentage of the people who are innately predisposed to being good programmers will choose careers in that field. I'm not convinced that this will drive the cost of labor down, though. After all, a glut of good programmers will also result in a glut of new ideas that turn into new companies that hire more programmers.
The same thing happened in music beginning in the 14th century. We called it the Renaissance. There wasn't a cheapening of creativity; if anything, the reverse was true. Creativity bred demand for creativity. Similarly, that's what will likely happen if we convince people that there is a shortage of computer programmers. In fact, that's what has been happening for the last couple of decades, just in case folks didn't notice.
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CS != Programming. There is an entire job market for 'hands on coders'. CS majors insisted the only path to being a 'programmer' was through college and that's not at all true.
When we pushed everyone to college we neglected the VocTech trades and that is the shortage they are talking about. When you build a house you reach a point where more engineers isn't going to get it built faster or better. On the Mechanical Engineering side of my job our technicians are invaluable. Most didn't go to college. Most ju
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And that is why stories like this are going to continue. If you insist that writing some Python is something that requires a BS you're going to get outsourced and replaced.
I could teach a high school dropout to do 50% of my job. Even if all it started out as was filling functions with a standard documentation format and moved from there.
Every single other profession has 'lower level' employees that do a large portion of the grunt work. You think healthcare is expensive in the US now? Imagine how much it wou
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I've got news for you. It takes 12 years just to get a HS diploma. Only then can you get into nursing school and spend more time being educated in order to become professionally qualified to put in an I.V.
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If you want to be pedantic. Then yeah. It was fairly obvious that I was talking about post HS education.
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And that is why stories like this are going to continue. If you insist that writing some Python is something that requires a BS you're going to get outsourced and replaced.
I could teach a high school dropout to do 50% of my job. Even if all it started out as was filling functions with a standard documentation format and moved from there.
Every single other profession has 'lower level' employees that do a large portion of the grunt work. You think healthcare is expensive in the US now? Imagine how much it would cost if you insisted it took 12 years of education to put in an IV.
Doctor:Physician's Assistant:Nurse:Orderly :: Engineer:Technologist:Technician:"Wrench Monkey :: CS Major: Programmer: Code Monkey.
You are why we have so many security issues today. Over time either the market won't care (in which case you are right) or the market will decide it doesn't want insecure crapware that regularly causes PR problems and damages the corporate brand. Somehow you might be right, but you are betting much more on this than you realize and if it breaks against you, I won't shed a tear but it will be bloody and ugly.
And whose fault would that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you implying that there are not enough CS places for US students because the available places have been taken by foreign students?
That doesn't make sense. If there was demand, wouldn't they just run more CS classes rather than turning away students? Or did I misunderstand?
Bullshit! (Score:4, Insightful)
Chicago School Official: US IT Jobs Offshored Because 'We Weren't Making Our Own' Coders
Offshoring is about cost savings, not about availability of workers.
There are numerous examples of entire departments being dumped and replaced with cheap offshore labor.
Put in words that a Chicago School Official might understand: Liar, liar, pants on fire!
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My own college did this (Score:5, Interesting)
Algonquin College in Ottawa Ontario. They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'. It was a disastrous shit show that never ended. Whenever I would try to bring the matter up as both a programming graduate and as a web developer they waved me off with dismissive remarks.
The system could have been developed by their own students easily and cheaply with a websocket, mongo database, and nodejs webserver. However then blame for bugs or issues would fall directly upon their shoulder and not on some far flung ethereal entity meaning people could directly challenge the problems and force them to be resolved.
I'm grasping for a reason why. To my mind there never was a good one. We could have built that system easily and cheaply, but they would not allow us to. By us I mean the students they handed diplomas to and said 'you are now considered professionally trained to perform these services'.
I know full well their training was sub standard and they were liars and charletons, that doesn't mean we did not posses these skills in spite of their limp half hearted efforts. It was obvious their interest was our wallets and not our minds. We could have done that task and been enriched for it, both materially and in our skill set and experience.
Lesson of warning to those of you either entering into an education or seeking one. If they will not hire their own product to do the work, be wary of their competence as they do not in their hearts believe think they have any to pass on else they would put their own product to work for themselves and everyone else with trust.
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Department heads and directors get paid bonuses based on the cost savings they make. Some times they were charging interns £1000/month to get work experience.
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Algonquin College in Ottawa Ontario. They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'. It was a disastrous shit show that never ended.
I've used Blackboard. You're being unfair to actual s**t shows.
Re:My own college did this (Score:4, Insightful)
Algonquin College in Ottawa Ontario. They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'.
By east indian are you talking about the product Blackboard, from the Washington (USA) based company Blackboard Inc. which was sold to a USA based and own equity group? Is that native american indians you speak of?
I'm grasping for a reason why.
Why do people deploy Oracle or SAP? Blackboard is a product used by education institutions around the entire world including 75% of USA based colleges. There's sense in standardisation and not trying to re-invent a wheel.
Like SAP the adoption is often difficult. Like SAP once it's running you wonder how you did without it.
We could have done that task and been enriched for it, both materially and in our skill set and experience.
You think you can. Mind you if you are actually able or producing a comparable product then there are many wheelbarrows of money waiting in your future so you have no reason not to drop what you're doing right now and start down this line. More likely though you didn't understand the scope, requirements, or the benefit of having a complete and fully integrated learning management system as opposed to... what did you call it: "keeping track of tests and students". Yes someone didn't read the functional requirement specification.
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They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'.
East Indian? [blackboard.com] I have a buddy who works for them.
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists. We're abandoning the working class. Same Bloody thing happened in Germany in 1944 and we ignored it then too because nobody wanted their taxes to go up. How's that quote go? Something about business getting out of hand and us being lucky to live through it...
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This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists.
They're the ones voting in line with the party who wants to reduce government to zero, providing no government jobs. They don't want to pay taxes on their inevitable massive lottery win. They're own bloody fault.
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Well stated, that demographic has been voting against their own interests for at least 40 years because all you have to do is tell them "gays, brown people, and atheists did it!"
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To be fair, it was already a bit late. They'd invaded Poland (or was it bombed Pearl Harbour?) four years earlier.
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To be fair, it was already a bit late. They'd invaded Poland (or was it bombed Pearl Harbour?) four years earlier.
Do you seriously not know whether nazi Germany invaded Poland or bombed Pearl Harbor?
The Germans invaded Poland in 1939 (technically five years before 1944, but we'll let it slide), kicking off WW2 in the process.
Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese in 1941, in response to the US strangling supplies of fuel and other raw materials to Japan (in an effort to stop Japanese imperialistic ambitions).
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I think it was a tongue-in-cheek comment directed squarely at the OP not knowing that WW2 was nearing its end by '44.
WTF, liberals? (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, what's the point of Government jobs if they're not going to employ Americans? This is what my tax dollars go to? Sending money overseas? And yes, it's my tax dollars too. State School systems get federal money.
This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists. We're abandoning the working class. Same Bloody thing happened in Germany in 1944 and we ignored it then too because nobody wanted their taxes to go up. How's that quote go? Something about business getting out of hand and us being lucky to live through it...
I've never found a liberal who could state a position without resorting to insults.
The inevitable result is that people simply stop, keep quiet, and get on with their lives. Then, in the privacy of the voting booth, they vote for the candidate promising reform, and against the candidate with insults and no real position.
Isn't that a better and simpler explanation than "nazis and supremacists"?
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It's not an insult, it's the literal truth. You have a resurgence of neo-Nazis and others in the far right at the moment, in America and in Europe. Did you not hear about Charlottesville? Have you looked at the statements made my Trump's closest advisers?
It's incredible that people are still in denial about this. They marked down the street with swastikas, murdered someone and then your president refused to condemn them.
Why do you think this is an insult to you? Unless you are on the far right yourself then
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The left don't want to send millions of people to gas chambers.
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and against the candidate with insults and no real position.
um, really?
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> This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists. We're abandoning the working class.
No, much simpler. It's happening because you label everybody that would like to preserve local values, culture and curb uncontrolled immigration as a nazi or white supremacist. .. people that believe white people are worth more because they're white, is the same, if not lower.
The number of actual white supremacists and nazis, actual as in
Not True (Score:2)
Can we arrest this guy for lying? (Score:3)
Is there some way to arrest people who make false statements when justifying unpopular actions? The dude is so obviously full of shit that you can smell him down the hall...but he'll just keep spouting bullshit forever.
Is there some way to penalize him so he won't do it again?
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Maybe you should create an agency to test these claims. Have them generate a suitable candidate, a US citizen, and apply for the job. Interview if asked to, ask for a reasonable wage, and if they end up hiring an H1B instead start a criminal prosecution. If they hire your undercover candidate, they can either take the job or you can give them a few bucks for their wasted time and effort.
Complete bullshit. (Score:2)
Eat your own dog food (Score:3)
Project based learning requires itches (aka opportunities) to scratch that you are willing to pay for. Further students need to feel ownership over the problems you challenge them to solve to bring that type of problem based learning to the real world for real career gains.
Please note this is Chicago Public School System.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The same CPS that struggles to graduate kids from High School.
The one that struggles to turn out kids who can handle college.
The one that struggles to turn out college-ready kids who DO NOT need massive amounts of remedial courses.
The one who thinks that simply throwing more money at a failed system will, somehow, magically transform them into a success (and we wonder why the KIDS are so dumb...)
And no. The main reason why jobs like this are offshored isn't because we don't have enough programmers.
It's a cost-saving thing. Why pay a US coder a decent salary when they can just offshore, or if required to keep the job in the states, demand 30 years of experience in a 3 year old technology, and then pass the job to an H1B farm for pennies on the dollar?
Like every other political group in Illinois, talking out their ass is a required skill.
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Fuck the pension fund. I'm supremely indifferent to the Chicago politics that caused hyper-inflated pensions to be assigned to a bunch of greedy bastards and then kicked down the road.
It's called cheap labor! (Score:2)
Economic data clearly shows you do not have a labor shortage. But if you are trying to depress wages, then flooding the market with programmers is the way to do it.
Education is not found here (Score:2)
You're a fucking school. Make some fucking coders.
So, about those layoffs... (Score:2)
This conveniently forgets the rounds of layoffs that numerous companies have done. Working Americans were dumped in favor of cheaper offshore programmers.
If the problem is strictly a lack of programmers, this would never have happened. Not once, let alone repeatedly.
The best part is when the company offers severance contingent upon training the replacements. They recognize the value of institutional knowledge while totally dismissing the value of their employees.
Coming from the advocate of $13 minimum wage (Score:2)
The city cries about lack of qualified labor while mandating a minimum wage that drives away jobs. Offshoring doesn't happen due to lack of qualified labor it happens because cheaper labor is readily available elsewhere. Chicago has a wage competition problem not a labor pool problem.
Lie. (Score:2)
They offshored jobs because they could pay them a hell of a lot less.
Example: I think it was PG&E in California that offshored their IT, and forcing their current employees to train their cheaper replacements.
This is total bullshit (Score:2)
Tech companies have been firing senior coders and engineering staff for the last 10+ years and hiring cheap H1B labor or outsourcing overseas. It has nothing to do with a nonexistent labor shortage.
We weren't making our own? (Score:2)
Computer Science For All (Score:2)
The real question is whether an introduction to coding makes the students more trainable for jobs they might get. Those jobs do not only include those where computer programming is 100% of the job. In Chicago, that includes whether students would be better prepared to be CNC machinists. I have my doubts about the Chicago Public Schools' ability to assess the skill platform to develop and the curriculum to develop a facility for further learning in the field.
Industry started off wrong; needs professionalism (Score:2)
Alas, the programming industry started off on the wrong foot because employees arrived self-trained. I refer to the industry after microcomputers changed it completely. When it was all IBM mainframes, programmer was something of a profession, guys in ties and coats, math degrees and training in the shop.
When the notion of just writing software alone, not as a free add-on to a million-dollar computer, came along for PCs, the programmers were all enthused self-taught hobbyists and industry, well, got spoil
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And it's hilarious, because Chicago Public Schools has a million problems. I should know, I live there.
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If that's part of what they're talking about, they need to, preferably, get rid of the Oracle crappy framework and then, possibly, fire all the offshored programmers that "customize" it.
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a database... what could ever be more complex? pity the endlessly undone digitarian hired goons..
If it's complex, you're doing it wrong. However it seems like the whole IT industry has been doing it wrong for a long time.