Will Amazon Poach CS Profs Needed To Produce CS Grads Promised For Amazon HQ2? (bizjournals.com) 49
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
To make good on the proposal that snagged it a share of the Amazon HQ2 prize last year, the State of Virginia pledged to produce an additional 25K-35K grads annually with computer science or closely related degrees. And while university leaders in the Greater Washington DC area appear to be on the same page with Amazon when it comes to filling the region's ever-growing demand for tech talent, the Washington Business Journal reports there's an understanding that as universities in the region grow their faculty to meet the demands of Amazon, the schools will likely also have to compete with Amazon for those same educators.
At a panel discussion on the future of Amazon HQ2 and education, interim president of George Mason University Anne Holton noted that the local schools are all going to be competing for faculty talent ("It's going to be elbows out"). Turning to Ardine Williams, VP of workforce development at Amazon, Holton added, "We are jostling with you for the new people too."
So, if the people who are qualified to educate the next generation of STEM students for Amazon can also get paid more to work for Amazon, is professor poaching history likely to repeat itself?
At a panel discussion on the future of Amazon HQ2 and education, interim president of George Mason University Anne Holton noted that the local schools are all going to be competing for faculty talent ("It's going to be elbows out"). Turning to Ardine Williams, VP of workforce development at Amazon, Holton added, "We are jostling with you for the new people too."
So, if the people who are qualified to educate the next generation of STEM students for Amazon can also get paid more to work for Amazon, is professor poaching history likely to repeat itself?
DUH!!! Any cook will tell you (Score:5, Funny)
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In Colorado they're baked.
Those who canâ(TM)t... (Score:2)
If they were any good at what they do, they wouldnâ(TM)t be teaching
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Programming is something that you learn by doing, not by sitting in a classroom.
Just pay the world's best CS professors to record their lectures, and let the students watch them on YouTube.
Then give the students problems to solve and have some TAs available to answer questions. Or randomly assign the students to teams, so they learn from each other.
This model scales easily. No poaching needed.
Re: Those who canâ(TM)t... (Score:2)
Go hire 5 year olds then.
And what about the students? (Score:2, Insightful)
You cannot create STEM "talent". There is a limited pool of people with the talent (i.e. the potential) to be any good in this area and that is it. If you educated others, they never will have good skills or good motivation.
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What's with "the State of Virginia pledged to produce an additional 25K-35K grads annually with computer science or closely related degrees" anyway?
Does Amazon hire 25K-35K people with computer science or closely related degrees every year? And why would they need to be from Virginia?
Re:And what about the students? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's with "the State of Virginia pledged to produce an additional 25K-35K grads annually with computer science or closely related degrees" anyway?
It's setting up a case for Amazon to demand more H1-Bs. If the State of Virginia does NOT produce the additional 25K-35K CS grads, Amazon will claim that they are owed more H1-Bs to make up for the difference.
In my experience IT folks who study CS because they have a passion for it perform exceptionally.
Those who study CS because they think that it will be easy to get a job, or that it will pay a lot . . . perform substantially less that exceptional.
I wouldn't even want to touch a CS student who studied it to "make a quota" for the State of Virginia.
Guaranteed mediocrity.
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It's only other people's money after all
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Because flooding the market with graduates with a specific degree lowers the cost to acquire those graduates. 3000 people for 3000 jobs or 30k people for 3000 jobs. That's a huge problem. What it means is that colleges will have to lie to their students to get them to drop 100k on a degree that is worthless. In 4 or 5 years it will be obvious that it's a trash degree. Within 10 years we will be lucky to have half the workers we need with CS degrees. It will drive the experienced programmers out of work so i
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Sounds like a good plan. We need more people who yeah it like a day job, not motivated nutcases who treat it as a religious calling. We've all meet those, the type who build a massive edifice because they're "motivated" rather than a simple, boring, maintainable solution.
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Oh, you think there are good engineers for which this is "just a job"? There are not.
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Oh, you think there are good engineers for which this is "just a job"? There are not.
Even the worst of vaguely passable engineers need to learn to read. There are many motivated coders for who it is a calling who are worse than those for who it is just a job because their combination of passion, motivation and arrogance causes far more damage than mere ambivalence.
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Oh, I do not disagree. A no-formal-education coder is in almost all cases an unmitigated catastrophe. You need that passion _and_ a good formal education on top. But an Engineer in the software field that has no passion and/or no aptitude for his/her job is not that much better in the end. Part of that is because the software field is still moving fast. But part is that mediocre engineering results are not always better than nothing and in the IT field they are quite often worse than nothing.
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Oh, I do not disagree. A no-formal-education coder is in almost all cases an unmitigated catastrophe.
Not talking about those. I know a few and the need I happen to know are good.
You need that passion _and_ a good formal education on top.
That is neither necessary nor sufficient. I know people with both of those who's "passion" means they make a bigger disaster in a hurry.
Part of that is because the software field is still moving fast.
A lot of the speed is haring round in circles because passionate people ke
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You have no contact to actual reality. In addition, you have absolutely no idea what kind of work I did put in.
But I guess _you_ do not have any real talent or never got to explore it, and hence you have no clue what kind of a difference that makes.
Clearly you've never heard me "sing" (Score:2)
> Talent is a meaningless concept that doesn't exist in real life. You either put in the work and learn or you don't.
Clearly you've never heard me try to sing. Or even clap my hands to the beat. Most two-year-old children are better than me at anything musical. Not because they've put in the work. I've spent more time working on music than any two year old, trying to learn how to dance. It turns out, I'm just not wired that way. People ARE different.
Some people have "hefty" genes, they are naturally
On the other hand (Score:2)
Having said that, there is also something else to keep in mind. In the late 1960s there was a 14 year old black girl in Tennessee who ran away from an abusive home. Being 14, negro, and pregnant wasn't a recipe for success in the 1960s.
The girl put in the work to develop her gift for public speaking and Oprah is doing pretty well today. She put in serious work.
We all have different circumstances and different gifts. Putting in the work to develop our unique potential will lead to success.
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Indeed. And on the other side, trying very hard to become something you are not or becoming good at something you have no talent for, will fail, no matter how hard you try. The best you can ever hope to be in such an area is mediocre and that is just not good enough.
Any good education not only teaches you stuff, but also enables and encourages you to find what you are good at and what you enjoy doing. Usually (although not universally) the two overlap. I have, time and again, seen smart people really, reall
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Well and good.
Code is a skill not an art
Re: And what about the students? (Score:1)
Re: And what about the students? (Score:4, Insightful)
For some people, CS comes naturally and easily. For most, it does not. There's no amount of teaching which will make those people magically "get it" any faster or better.
I have been teaching CS for over 10 years and that is not true. Some people are natural at it, maybe 3% of students I come across are in that category. But they still need to be instructed correctly to make the most of their natural understanding. Some students are just incapable of learning CS. That's a learning disability, and it is very rare. Probably under 1% of the students I meet (the fraction could be higher in the general population, but they never get to me).
Students that are not natural but can still learn are virtually everybody else. Here good instructors can make a massive difference. There is mostly two aspects that make student learn, the will to learn and having challenges at the right level. The will to learn is something an instructor can cultivate; education expert call that engaging students with the material. It takes effort to expose students to a range of problems that they may care about as opposed to problems that are technically interesting. But one can do that, pick the right example to present in class. Have problems for the student to work on that the student actually care about will help with that.
The second problem is having challenges at the right level. Here the main problem is that you have in classes students with high variable levels. Some students are very well prepared and some are really not. It makes running a class that will improve the knowledge and skills of everyone quite hard. The root cause of that problem is that in middle and high school, funding levels are very inconsistent. The public education system has been money-starved for decades. You get high school classes where the instructors convey their fear of the material to the students. That's not good. I have had struggling students, the D level kind of students that can't seem to get anything correctly. Work with them one on one for 2 hours a week for a month or 2, and they shoot up to B level students. That tells me they were capable, they got never got the attention they needed.
The worst part of the funding level problem is that it affects the population in differently depending on socio economic status. So you have a bunch of really smart kids that are never revealed as star computer scientist because their chances got cut in middle school or high schools. Personally, that is why I am a big supporter of diversity programs. The stars can come from anywhere, but the systems we have mostly look for them in good socio economic status.
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Personally, that is why I am a big supporter of diversity programs. The stars can come from anywhere, but the systems we have mostly look for them in good socio economic status.
The problem with programs intended to address socioeconomic disadvantage, to this point, has been they are targeted mostly at the wrong end. Rather than applying affirmative action quotas, we should be putting adequate money and effort in early in life - grade school, kindergarten, even earlier - so they aren't starting college two steps behind everyone else and are truly able to complete on a level playing field after they've graduated.
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The problem with programs intended to address socioeconomic disadvantage, to this point, has been they are targeted mostly at the wrong end. Rather than applying affirmative action quotas, we should be putting adequate money and effort in early in life - grade school, kindergarten, even earlier - so they aren't starting college two steps behind everyone else and are truly able to complete on a level playing field after they've graduated.
Well, to be fair, they have been targeted at all levels. School lunch programs have been shown to be effective at raising the education level where they are deployed. But really raising the base funding level is what is necessary. Poor school districts end up not being able to afford basic supplies or good teachers for all subjects.
At college level, making sure the people you (the system) believe can go through the program successfully can get in and get the support they need is important too. It can help c
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It's not a funding problem, or at least not "mostly" a funding problem.
Those disadvantaged schools you mention often get MUCH more funding per student than schools in higher income neighborhoods that do better on standardized tests.
One great example of this is Baltimore. Had the 4th highest per student spending in the nation, and yet in terms of proficiency Baltimore students score near the bottom on every standardized test.
It's not the curriculum (Maryland as a whole is above average proficiency and other
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I think you are just too much satisfied with mediocre results. It is a common fallacy when teaching: You are so happy for people to learn and grow that you lose sight as to what level they actually reach in the end. Sure, you can train anybody with the required intelligence up to mediocrity in any of the sciences and engineering disciplines. But it makes absolutely no sense to do so. It is destructive in its effects.
Incidentally, I have around 30 years experience teaching CS (on and off).
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The professor makes a difference too - the ones I work with don't like using computers or email.
And yes - before anyone tells me - that computer science really isn't about using computers - I feel that using computers helps students communicate with you about classwork etc.
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You've brushed against the real problem. CS isn't about actually building a computer or practical software for a computer.
If we handled civil engineering the same way, we'd expect the aspiring structural engineer to graduate with a degree in theoretical physics and go right to work.
Someone who wishes to create software will certainly need an understanding of CS, much like a EE must understand physics but also analogous to the EE, there are many engineering concepts they must also understand (such as maintai
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Thanks for a ray of reality
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You cannot create STEM "talent". There is a limited pool of people with the talent (i.e. the potential) to be any good in this area and that is it. If you educated others, they never will have good skills or good motivation.
I disagree. You can create STEM talent, but you have to start at a very young age, perhaps as early as 6 years old. I'm old. I've either directly raised or participated in the raising of several engineers, all with vastly different personality types.
The problem isn't that there are few humans capable of succeeding in a STEM field, the problem is that there is a culture problem in the US that prevents children from acquiring the discipline or desire to succeed in a STEM field.
Then there's the corporate en
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But are these engineers you claim to have "created" any good? Or are the all destined (or already have) moved to management?
You _can_ create bad engineers that do not really treasure their skills, but these are pretty worthless and often have actually negative worth for society.
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>I disagree. You can create STEM talent, but you have to start at a very young age
It feels 'wrong' to me given my experience with computers and education over the past 42 years, but that doesn't mean I'm right. My wife's PhD research and post grad research pretty much confirmed STEM can be taught to anyone, for mathematics and plenty of other research has too.
She can walk into a 100% failing (state tests) math class in an impoverished reservation school and have them all passing by the end of the term. J
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True, there are only so many coal miners and journalists in the world.
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If you educated others, they never will have good skills or good motivation.
So where did the pool come from?
There it is, the MOST stupid thing in the internet today.
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Seriously? Do you have the first clue what you are talking about? It does not even remotely seem like it. All you can do is deranged sniping.
Apples and Oranges (Score:2)
People interested (and qualified) to teach STEM classes choose to teach, rather than work for an employer like amazon.
People qualified (and not interested) in teaching STEM classes may or may not be able to get a job at Amazon (STEM isn't just CS - how many Calculus or chemistry teachers does Amazon need?).
STEM is also primarily a middle and high school term, college professors would likely be attracted to, and qualified for, jobs at Amazon.
The teacher that is showing middle school kids how to code in Scrat
They already got this one. (Score:1)
I was a CS professor for fifteen years. Had tenure and everything. Iâ(TM)ve just completed my third week as a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon, working from HQ2.
But I wouldnâ(TM)t say I was âoepoachedâ: that implies impropriety and a lack of agency. I didnâ(TM)t just passively get shot in the head by a poacher/recruiter while grazing peacefully in the savanna. I interviewed, they made me an offer, and I decided it was the right next thing for me. That decision was complex, pers
Re: They already got this one. (Score:1)
[Reposting without mojibake.]
I was a CS professor for fifteen years. Had tenure and everything. I've just completed my third week as a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon, working from HQ2.
But I wouldn't say I was "poached": that implies impropriety and a lack of agency. I didn't just passively get shot in the head by a poacher/recruiter while grazing peacefully in the savanna. I interviewed, they made me an offer, and I decided it was the right next thing for me. That decision was complex, personal, and
Who is the chattel now? (Score:1)
The very question implies, the professors — and other employees — are objects. Property — chattels, rather than free citizens endowed with a right to pursue happiness.
What are EditorDavid's views on slavery and its milder forms like serfdom and central planning?
University have become corporations .... (Score:1)
Universities have started acting more like corporations than non-profits, prioritizing income ($$$) over ideals. It is hardly surprising, then, that professors will start acting like employees rather than academics, and look to maximize their own revenue.
If I'm going to work for a corporation, I should at least get paid accordingly. Poach on ... and give me a call if you have something interesting to offfer.