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Education IT

Amazonians Visit High Schools To Inspect the Amazon Future Engineer Troops (washingtonian.com) 92

Posted by EditorDavid from the boxes-with-smiles dept.
theodp writes: Amazon Future Engineer students across the country are graduating from high school," reports the Amazon Day One blog, "and to celebrate, Amazonians visited select classrooms to meet some of the students and to check out their impressive computer science progress and end of year projects [TV coverage of an 'Amazon graduation'].

Amazon Future Engineer "is a four-part, childhood-to-career program aimed at inspiring and educating 10 million students from underrepresented and underserved communities each year to try computer science and coding. Amazon strives to achieve this by inspiring millions of children through coding camps and Code.org's Hour of Code program, funding computer science courses in high schools across the country, providing 100 students with four-year college scholarships in computer science, and offering Amazon internships to scholarship recipients."

The importance of CS education to Amazon is highlighted in a new Washingtonian story, The Real Story of How Virginia Won Amazon's HQ2, which reports, "Northern Virginia's ultimate proposal was centered around an effort to provide Amazon -- or any other tech firm that wanted to come -- with all the educated workers it needed, now and in the future. [Virginia Economic Development Partnership CEO Stephen] Moret's team proposed increasing tech education from kindergarten through 12th grade, expanding university offerings to produce up to 17,500 new bachelor's degrees in computer science and related fields, and building a tech campus that could produce the same number of master's degrees."

And in a recent Brookings Institution fireside chat, Moret noted, "we analyzed substantially all of the LinkedIn profiles of HQ1 — the Seattle workforce... And if you look at the tech occupations — that was the space they were the most concerned about — literally half of all the people at Amazon Seattle headquarters that are working in some kind of tech occupation, half of them have at least one degree in computer science. So, that was a really big data point for us; and that really shaped a lot of how we built our package.
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Amazonians Visit High Schools To Inspect the Amazon Future Engineer Troops More

Amazonians Visit High Schools To Inspect the Amazon Future Engineer Troops

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  • 80 hour weeks are common there with the 100 as needed

  • Love to outsource coding to the lowest bidding shop in the turd world!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Spoiler alert: Amazon and other tech companies aren't pushing tech education out of altruism. It's simple economics. Currently the demand for people with a CS degree is high and the supply is low. By increasing supply the tech companies are hoping to lower their cost.

      • Thanks for the tip, theodp. Get over it already.

      • There is a very good reason that the amount of people with a CS degree is low. CS ain't BA. Cramming bullshit ain't gonna cut it. It's one of those fields where you actually have to understand what you're doing.

        There is a reason the dropout rates are pretty high with CS. At least with reputable universities.

  • Ohhhhh... the bald guy Amazon, right.

  • There's no such thing as "underserved" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I reject the notion that society somehow owes these people.

  • Yeah, Bezos' has heard of it but is having none of it. Good luck to these kittens when they have to confront real problems that only require coding as an ancillary skill where the main problems are in physics, chemistry, biology, psychiatry, etc.

  • I wish more people understood that computer science classes are to writing code the same as physics classes are to building bridges.

    People that build bridges are engineers, and they almost always went to university to study mechanical engineering, civil engineering, industrial engineering, or environmental engineering. People certainly can build a bridge from a physics degree, I'm quite certain people have. Those that want to be good at it will be best served by studying engineering. These people that build bridges certainly took physics classes in university, but they also studied engineering.

    We should expect people that want to write good code to study engineering. This will often be electrical engineering, computer engineering, or software engineering. These people will take computer science classes, but they also take engineering classes.

    I learned this from a recruiter for some large company while a senior at university looking for a job for after I graduated. I don't remember exactly which company they were from but I remembered this because I found it to be profound and bluntly honest. The recruiter said that while they will certainly interview people with a computer science degree they prefer those with an engineering degree. First is because an engineering degree is more rigorous, there's more math required to graduate. The other thing is because they write good code. The recruiter didn't care what languages you learned in college, they can teach that on the job. They just want to know if the person has been taught what good code design looks like, and not everyone with a computer science degree had that where most everyone with an engineering degree had.

    Universities are starting to understand that getting a computer science degree is not preparing students for a career in writing good code. Recruiters have been coming back to comment to the universities for a very long time on getting them to teach their students how to engineer software. The schools have appeared to push back on this, and not tell the students the distinction. Probably because it's easier to teach people how to code than to teach them how to be a software engineer.

    If someone tells you that there is no difference between computer science and computer engineering then don't fall for it. There's a reason why there is a distinction between the computer science program and the computer engineering program. If there was no difference then there would be no distinction.

    • I wish more people understood that computer science classes are to writing code the same as physics classes are to building bridges.

      When I went to college, it was very much a mix of very theoretical classes, mixed with very practical classes.

      Mine was an even more theoretical degree than most I think, in that it was considered a subset of the math department...

      But in addition to very abstract algorithm classes that dealt with the standard Big-O stuff and other algorithmic issue, we also had assembly language

      • I think the only probable difference is the department that runs the program

        Why would any university have two identical programs run by two different departments? That's just extra paperwork for them, isn't it?

        There is a difference to explain the distinction. With that said, I have seen universities with computer science programs run by engineering departments. There was no computer science program under a different department, just the one. I don't recall them having a computer engineering degree offered either.

        One university I attended had a "computer science" program run by

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      There's also the comedy that the Amazon recruitment team have analysed their staff and discovered that.. Amazon have a strange bias towards hiring people with CS degrees, instead of engaging the broader market of capable programmers.

      Maybe the issue isn't access to CS degrees.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      3 or 4 years isn't enough time to properly learn software engineering and computer science.

      Recruiters have unrealistic expectations. They need to be willing to train graduates if they want what they claim they want.

  • Why is theodp obsessed over CS education? Does he think kids are going to take his job?

  • ... I welcome our female warrior overlords.

  • As someone who's done IT and systems engineering for over 20 years, the big blocker I see to getting more people to "learn to code" is that students don't see the point. I'm in my 40s, so I saw my parents' generation lose factory jobs to offshoring and corporate office jobs to a combination of automation and outsourcing. This generation's parents are experiencing massive contraction in the tech sector due to offshoring and the move to the cloud -- and I'm sure most parents are probably telling their kids "d

    • I see where you are coming from. For someone interested in "computers", as opposed to "computer science", there's still a lot of options that cannot be easily outsourced.

      You mentioned help desk as one field that could be under threat for out sourcing. That's only true to an extent. People are finding out that getting a degree is often not the winning option. People can still find good work in IT by getting some certifications in the right fields. Employers might still want to see an an associates degre

    • "don't do what I did."

      Yup. If I were a college kid today, there's no way I would end up working in software. The industry today is a disgusting caricature of the industry I joined 20 years ago.

      Overtly evil business models; blithe disregard for security and code quality; race to the bottom offshoring; declining real wages; absence of viable career development paths; systematic social just-us nazi discrimination; rampant old boys club nepotism; and deskilled factory-style Agile(tm)!!!!1!! micromanagement. Thi

  • The future cart-pushers, the janitors, the mail-room workers and truck drivers are getting educated there as well.

  • So this is Amazonians as in hipster twats, not Amazonians as in Sting's friend who can store CDs in his lower lip?

  • Stop the bullshit. Virginia won because they were giving Amazon incentive payments. $40 million / year. https://www.bizjournals.com/wa... [bizjournals.com] Virginia needs to tap into their online sales tax in order to pay Amazon or else they would need to make massive budget cuts. The money used to pay Amazon would go towards: education, transportation and other infrastructure projects.

    But yeah Amazon cares about children.
  • Amazon needs to pre install an app that teaches coding on the Kindle Fire. Something like HyperCard.

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