
Tech Education Con - DeusExMachina
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/stem-coding-bootcamp-education-scam-philanthropy
======
jondubois
The thing about tech projects is that you can always hire more engineers.
There is no limit as to how many engineers a company can employ for any given
project.

As soon as the CTO loses touch with some part of the code base, that's when
the middle managers start introducing unnecessary complexity into projects.
Technical middle managers will always create more complexity to give
themselves more work and more responsibilities. They will do it subconsciously
and compulsively.

There aren't many engineers today who care about code quality or even know
what that means. I'm disappointed by what this industry is turning into. There
is no pride in efficiency anymore.

Most managers within tech companies today don't have a clue what good software
development looks like; they think that if they use TypeScript as a
programming language, Agile as a methodology and Jira as a project management
tool, that the product will turn out great for sure; but it's not the case.

Tech monopolies can allow even the worst tech managers and engineers to thrive
professionally. No one ever gets reprimanded for unnecessarily increasing the
project complexity even though it will cost the company millions a few years
from now (in a large part due to the need to hire more engineers to manage the
complexity).

WhatsApp could handle 200 million users with only 50 employees; it's proof
that you don't need many employees to deliver quality. Keeping complexity
under control is a better strategy than just hiring more people.

~~~
skookumchuck
> Most managers within tech companies today don't have a clue

In my role as tech manager, I've been called incompetent, stupid, short-
sighted, biased, insane, greedy, vindictive, just about every epithet in the
book.

This is normal. If you're ever promoted into management, you'll be, too.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
If you think that's bad you should try going into politics :)

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pweissbrod
I dont understand arguments like this. It reads too closely to the anti-
immigration narrative I hear all to much in USA lately. If you're hard
working, critical thinker, creative then you deserve the opportunity to join
us and lowering barriers to all these folks is not something we should
perceive with skepticism. Discouraging opportunity so you can have more market
share is just plain selfish and bad for society, not to mention the fact that
if youre highly qualified you shouldnt be concerned with a growing field of
tech workers.

~~~
ksdale
Exactly. When I became a lawyer I was astounded by people speaking in lofty
language about how serving people is the highest good and then turning around
and saying that we have to protect the legal field from “low skilled” entrants
because those people will harm clients with the inevitable malpractice that
will occur.

As a lawyer, I know for a fact that a lot of legal work is not complicated
enough to require a law degree, but it does because otherwise lawyers would
make substantially less money.

There’s a giant gap in the legal market where there are poor people who need
simple services and they aren’t getting them because there are no lawyers who
can afford to work that cheap and pay off their loans, or the lawyers are
doing the work pro bono, which is generous, but why don’t we just let people
who aren’t lawyers do more of this clerical work?

------
fanzhang
Is the economics of this article right? The main problem I have is that the
total supply of engineers is _huge_ and Google is benefiting all companies
that demand engineers, not just themselves, which is a massive dilution.

A Google search shows Google has about 40K software engineers, while the USA
has about 18M software engineers. This means Google hires about 0.2% (i.e.
0.002) of the software labor force.

This means that Google only captures 0.2% of the benefit from increasing the
labor pool. 99.8% of the dollar benefit goes to other people -- some of who
are competitors even!

Further, Oracle hires a lot more software engineers, but Oracle is notorious
for its profit motive and bad image while Google tries (in name at least) to
be altruistic. Is Oracle spending as much as Google on STEM? How about IBM,
SAP, etc? If the math works out for Google, it should doubly work out for
companies employing more software engineers.

This is a theory that seems like it can be true (and make you seem smart at
cocktail parties), but the math doesn't seem to add up.

~~~
mlinsey
You're exactly right. Investment into STEM education would be a very slow,
inefficient way for FANG et al to reduce worker pay compared to collusion
(which they were busted for in 2014) or more aggressively focusing on hiring
overseas instead of the US.

It's true there are plenty of other self-interested reasons for these
companies to fund CS education: PR, getting new devs trained on their
toolchain (my college CS classes were in the Gates Building, and friendly
Microsoft evangelists brought pizza and free copies of visual studio to my
freshman intro CS class), and growing the tech industry overall when they
control and monetize the underlying platforms.

But then, there is also the much more mundane explanation that these
charitable contributions are a drop in the bucket compared to these companies'
overall budgets, that they are run by human beings who see themselves as doing
good and who are predisposed to think CS is a great path to a good future.

------
Ancalagon
The irony around this article is that the hardest part about getting a tech
job is the interview processes these companies create themselves. Do companies
want to pay less for their talent? I'm sure the answer is yes. But
realistically the barrier to entry for these kinds of positions is not a
"skills-gap" in terms of the technology most engineers are likely to use in a
day's work.

Anecdotally, I haven't met any coding bootcamp graduates that have managed to
get software jobs at FAANGs. I'm sure this is because my experience is
anecdotal, and that there actually is a steady supply of bootcamp grads that
are getting jobs at these companies. But my point is that even with an
accelerated program designed to retrain adults to have the skills they need
for these positions, the supply will probably not increase to a point where
salaries are significantly effected. This especially true when you consider
the number of previously non-technical companies that are hiring software
engineers at incredible rates to meet expected software development demand in
the coming decade.

~~~
rchaud
> I haven't met any coding bootcamp graduates that have managed to get
> software jobs at FAANGs

That's because the FAANGs already have stacks of resumes from Stanford,
Caltech, MIT etc. Part of the diversity issue (academic and demographic) comes
from the fact that they rarely recruit outside their comfort zone of 5-10
schools.

~~~
Ancalagon
I don't have recruitment data so its quite possible those companies recruit
far more heavily from those schools, but even from my own anecdotal experience
at a top 30 (yes 3-0) state school in CS I was still getting recruited and
interviewed by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And that was as a Physics major
with only a CS minor in my Junior year. I doubt getting interviews with those
companies is the issue, they are ALWAYS looking for more talent wherever they
can get it.

------
inostia
Of course if you take some kids with liberal arts degrees (or no degrees) and
train them to have programming skills they will be cheaper than people with
senior level skills and CS degrees. But isn't that to the benefit of those
workers who now have jobs? They might make less, say $60,000/yr, while the old
guard gets angry because they now aren't competitive and their wages go down.
What's interesting though - as an aside - is that these bootcamp grads _still_
demand to make as much as people with CS degrees and years of experience.

But what's the answer, protectionism and railing against STEM education? Yes
software developers will be bitter about lower wages, but in the long term
that means more people with skills and jobs, more people of color, more people
from poor backgrounds who come from families who never made more than $20,000
in their life.

Let's not be so selfish, there are plenty of ways to outshine a General
Assembly bootcamp grad with no degree... You just aren't going to do be able
to do it by building websites for $200,000/yr anymore.

~~~
jschwartzi
I think the problem is that for a lot of us technology was a way to provide
ourselves and our families with a middle class living without doing something
exceedingly dangerous like underwater welding or deep sea fishing. The
companies that employ technology people are trying to eliminate this line of
work and render it as cheap as an entry level checker at Wal-Mart. When that
happens, how can anyone earn a living doing anything? It's not like these
companies are going to take pity on their workforce and provide raises.
Instead management will be trained to treat people as interchangeable and
replaceable.

------
_hardwaregeek
I've started frequenting the subreddits /r/csmajors and /r/cscareerquestions
and it's truly disheartening to see the number of people who are obsessed with
doing just enough to get a high paying job. I've seen people claim that the
point of going to Stanford is to get a good job or that one shouldn't bother
with courses past data structures because they won't help with a job. The
cynical part of me hopes that a tech crash will eliminate some of the more
careerist people.

~~~
rchaud
Stanford's undergraduate tuition is likely in the $200k+ range over 4 years;
many other US schools have similar tuition fees. Why shouldn't CS students
obsess about a 6-figure job?

Also, FA_NG (left out Apple) doesn't sell anything other than surveillance and
ads, and the mainstream use case of AR is superimposing dog ears on a selfie,
what motivation is there for CS students to push the boundaries of their
learning?

~~~
_hardwaregeek
It's totally fine to think or even obsess about a high paying job. It's not
okay for that to be the only reason you're in the industry.

Plus, you really don't need to go to Stanford, MIT, etc. to get a high paying
job. If I wanted to maximize my wealth ASAP, I'd go to my state school, major
in CS and math/econ, graduate in 3 years debt free and then go into
finance/tech. I'd like to hope that the people going to Stanford are doing it
for more than just a 6 figure salary.

~~~
rchaud
There are lots of assumptions in your "this is how I'd get rich" plan.

\- A CS major at a state school in North Dakota doesn't go as far as one from
say, the Cali state system.

\- A CS and Math/Econ double major in 3 years? How many people do that and
have a GPA that isn't toilet-adjacent?

\- 'then go into finance/tech': If by 'finance' you mean IB/PE/HF, those firms
don't recruit at state schools unless it's in a major metropolitan area or has
a history of hiring alums. If you think you'll get into IB by just submitting
an online application like the rest of the world, then good luck.

Same for FAANG and the other companies that offer big salaries to fresh grads.
They aren't exactly flocking to the SUNYs to pick up CS grads.

~~~
_hardwaregeek
> A CS major at a state school in North Dakota doesn't go as far as one from
> say, the Cali state system.

Fair, but honestly I don't think FAANG companies put a lot of weight on school
past the top 10 ranked. I don't think your average hiring manager is going
care about the difference between Bing and NDSU.

> A CS and Math/Econ double major in 3 years? How many people do that and have
> a GPA that isn't toilet-adjacent?

Don't sleep. Study a lot. Keep in mind we're talking state school here.
Double/triple majors are a lot easier at Bing than at Harvard. If you come in
with AP credit it's definitely doable.

> 'then go into finance/tech': If by 'finance' you mean IB/PE/HF, those firms
> don't recruit at state schools unless it's in a major metropolitan area or
> has a history of hiring alums. If you think you'll get into IB by just
> submitting an online application like the rest of the world, then good luck.

Okay, sure, finance might take a bit more finesse (although outside the big
firms I bet it's a lot easier). But tech is generally more focused on general
hiring pipelines.

> Same for FAANG and the other companies that offer big salaries to fresh
> grads. They aren't exactly flocking to the SUNYs to pick up CS grads.

I actually know quite a few people at SUNYs that have FAANG internships.
Especially Stony Brook. Not unbelievable that they'd get a decent offer out of
school.

------
tonymet
Which is better: benefiting the world with a selfish agenda, or hurting the
world with an altruistic one?

Who cares about their interests? If it helps people get educated and improve
their lot?

~~~
psoots
Who does it hurt? Everyone. I think it hurts everyone when we allow bigger
companies (or a powerful few) to steer the education system. That should be
left up to a democratic process. Why should Facebook, Google, etc. be the ones
to decide that education is only about getting a job (and specifically about
getting a job at Facebook, Google, etc.)?

~~~
mactrey
I'm not sure I understand how that hurt actually takes place. These companies
are essentially acting as charities, donating a portion of their profits to
reduce the cost of a tech education. Some people who might not have been able
to pursue education in tech are now able to. Do those people not benefit? Do
the companies not benefit? Then how is society harmed? Would society really be
better off if these companies remitted that money to shareholders as
dividends, as is their right?

It seems to me that the complaint begins and ends with the assumption that if
something is good for a big corporation then it must be bad for society at
large, and vice versa.

~~~
AstralStorm
It's not just funding, it's when they steer education programs by threat of
removing funding, or by providing free stuff or services; sometimes even more
directly.

Education time is finite. If you focus on some specific you may miss out on
general or a different specific. (Reminds me of a database course focused on
Microsoft tooling... half the technologies now dead.)

------
otras
> _It’s not too hard for a physics student who already writes R code to learn
> web development from a MOOC in order to get an entry position at a startup._

As someone who did this, it was very hard to do and took a great deal of both
hard work and luck. I’m surprised that it’s dismissed in a single sentence.

------
WheelsAtLarge
At the start of my career, I worked for a company that did web sites. The
philosophy was to sell cheap and get cheap labor to do the work. A "digital
sweatshop" is a good description. It worked because html is easy to learn and
repetition made you fast.

Just knowing html is no longer an option but I can see where knowing the
basics in programming is enough to create an assembly line type of programming
workforce.

Prior to the industrial revolution, Craftsmen were the norm. With the advent
of automation products are created that best the best craftsmen of old and do
it at speeds that no craftsmen can match.

There will always be room for the best but we are heading towards a future
where low skills will dominate. AI is the big subject now but as most AI
expert know AI is very specialized. Generally, it can't match what a five-
year-old can do but it's excellent at doing one thing very well. Combine
current AI and low skill programmers and you have the workforce of the future.
It will be cheap and fast. But we can't get to this future until the workforce
is trained.

Going forward, the tech giants will be looking for competent techies not
necessarily the best of the best but they have to have a competent group to
choose from.

Infotech workers get paid very well now because demand is high relative to
supply. Increase supply and pay is bound to fall. The tech companies know this
and are doing all they can to increase supply.

If you think companies are doing the world a favor. Don't! Companies are doing
their best to survive one more day and create a future where they thrive.

------
leepowers
A few counterpoints:

1) Google and Facebook represent only a very small and very elite slice of the
developer market. This bizarre focus on what happens at the top 0.5% of the
market has a distorting effect. The rest of the market is ignored in this
analysis.

2) No mention of dollars spent on training vs. dollar return in labor savings.
If Google spends $1 billion on education over 20 years which provides a labor
savings of $500 million then they are losing out. The article speculates that
there will be a net profit on labor savings but provides no data or evidence
to back it up.

3) Developer salaries may actually be inflated. In which case it's only
natural that many people would try to get into the market, either by
participating in MOOCs, getting a computer science degree, being self-taught,
etc. The article assumes it's exploitative to help people break into this
market, because the MOOC companies operate at a profit and it might reduce
developer salaries overall. But people are going to find their way into the
market on way or another. Even if we got rid of all the MOOCs and all the tech
education initiatives talented people are going to flock to these industries.

4) Article ignores positive effects. Lower developer costs mean smaller
companies or less-than-rich individuals can hire talented developers to build
a new service or start a new company. Developers might be paid 10%-20% less,
but we would also end up with more developers total. The net benefit to the
labor market as a whole would be positive.

------
lordnacho
This is written in such a pessimistic tone. I mean sure, tech giants want to
have lots of labour available, we get that. But is it wrong? At least some
people who wouldn't have had the change to code will get a sniff at it now.

Also, I wonder whether it will matter much to supply. How many CS grads are
actually being churned out? I heard it hasn't changed all that much. And
people leave the profession too, either they don't like it or they can't hack
it.

I somewhat liken it to sports. It's not that easy to like programming if you
didn't like it as a kid. Sure, you can learn to kick a ball around when you're
an adult, but you're not likely to have time, and the best opportunities to
learn and progress will have passed. (OTOH your body won't start failing you
as a coder in your 30s.) That's not to say you can't, I'm sure a bunch of late
bloomers will appear if I left it at that, just that you tend to know that
coding is the kind of thing you like when you're quite young.

So the undiscovered pool of talent is probably quite small. We can give more
kids who don't have access to a computer some gear and some intro,
particularly in poor countries. But there's cultural and legal issues with
tapping that pool. With advanced societies, probably a lot of kids who are
going to like coding will already have been exposed.

------
open-source-ux
I think the more likely reason Apple, Google, and Microsoft push their
products in schools is to hook students on their products so that they
continue to use them into adulthood.

I find it pretty astonishing that ChromeOS (installed on Chromebooks) for
example is so widespread in US schools. This is a 'cloud-based' operating
system that _that tracks everything you do_. To properly use ChromeOS requires
you sign-in with a GMail account. Now your personal details are tied to all
your activity in the OS (a guest account gives you limited functionality
only).

Even if that activity data is detached from your account and "anonymised" (a
pretty meaningless phrase), this is still means Google captures and saves (and
presumably aggregates) the data of millions of US students that they can
interrogate and dissect in ways that even they probably don't yet know.

Why does the tech community accept this?

The kids forced to use ChromeOS don't even have a choice in the matter. It's
the adults who decided for them. Online tracking is so normalised now, large
parts of the tech community rush to Google's defence. (Does a giant multi-
billion dollar corporation need your defence?) It's a pretty depressing state
of affairs and shows how little the tech community actually cares for privacy.

~~~
wmf
It's not like schools choose Chromebooks because of the spying. They choose
Chromebooks because they're cheap and the software is reliable. iOS is equally
reliable but much more expensive. Desktop Linux isn't even in the running.

~~~
zozbot123
> It's not like schools choose Chromebooks because of the spying.

You really think they don't? They might go for a slightly different angle,
like the ease of centrally managing your deployment or whatever, but the gist
of it is that they want a device that can be made to act against the best
interests and expectations of the end-user.

------
askvictor
Considering how tiny Google's workforce is compared to its value, this doesn't
add up. That's even before you consider the longer term effects of automation.

------
president
Those of us grounded in reality saw this coming a mile away. Apart from tech
salaries dropping long term, working with people that don't truly enjoy
software engineering is truly maddening. Like I always said, the golden age of
the 2000s tech era died long ago.

------
michael--
If degrees are no longer requirements to get tech jobs and tech companies
start paying significantly lower salaries, what can one do to become
competitive in this market?

What value do Masters and PhDs (in CS) have in the current market?

~~~
CamTin
I think Masters and PhDs are basically in a totally different market than
workers with bachelors', Associates', "boot camp" certificates, or no degrees
at all. They are being hired for "alpha hacker" positions implementing
compilers, databases, graphics engines, etc. while everyone else is building
apps, REST APIs, doing enterprise integrations, etc.

------
ykevinator
I'm not sure getting a computer science degree is as easy and making chrome
books cheap. It is, after all, hard. Americans don't like hard things. And I
don't think $120k salaries are "cheap labor." in fact, I think I'm ready to
dismiss this article as being a lazy opinion piece without research or data.

~~~
ykevinator
I just saw a piece that the number of cs enrollees doubled in the past x years
and that they can't find professors. That made me reconsider my thoughts on
this. Perhaps a doubling in supply will reduce wages but I still think there
is a shortage. I also think silicon valley is an irrational place to do a
start-up and the rest of the country still needs developers.

------
adamnemecek
I agree however this misses a couple of things. In the future there will be
exponentially more tech companies than now.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Or it could be less. I think a secondary wave of innovation won't come until
the bubble pops and there is a diaspora of out-of-work yet skilled engineers
forced into jobs they would have otherwise felt were beneath them, and are
then required to deal with the problems of the every-day worker.

------
crdrost
So when I was in college I did a writing requirement course called _The Hero
in Literature_ and in it I suggested something like that one Russian author's
book was a direct response to another Russian author's book that I had read
previously: I made a strong case about dates, thematic overlap, how you could
view this speech over here as a rebuttal of that speech over there. Feedback
for the first revision: whoa there, that is a very serious charge you are
making, and even if all of those things are true it might just be that Russian
authors happen to like similar subject matter, kind of like how
existentialists seem to orbit around the paradoxical freedom of a young man
facing the potential tragedy of a life sentence in prison. If you want to
prove it, they said, go do research and find letters from the one author
discussing the other author's work, analyze _those_. For high school, yeah,
being all "this guy was copying that guy with a twist!" is a very interesting
paper, but for college we expect you to realize that that's a very serious
claim and it needs to be backed up with some very serious research.

I feel very similarly here: yeah there is a case to be made that this is a
"long con" of trying to saturate a labor market with fresh talent, but if you
want to prove that, really, I need to see leaked internal letters and strategy
presentations that indicate that someone at Google or Microsoft is
_consciously_ trying to change the labor market. Because it could also just be
that Google has a lot of programmers who think programming is easy to learn
and incredibly powerful as a modern-world skill, and so they have a lot of
people pushing for educational initiatives. You can't tell the difference
between those by the outside act of supporting the educational initiatives but
only by looking at the internal communications.

For what it's worth, if that _is_ Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon's strategy, it
is likely to be very difficult and enterprisey in ways that they likely don't
want to be -- all at least pay lip service to some high-minded ideals of
innovation and revolution, no? But if you're looking for those "black swan"
successes, you face the problem that achievement is not normal but log-
normal[1]: it depends on the multiplication of independent factors, and not
their summation. Coding bootcamps and mass coding education only target one of
those factors, but without the rest you don't have a highly performant
individual. Like, if that's their goal, one would imagine them also having
"emotional intelligence bootcamps" and "how to take conscientious personal
ownership of the work you do bootcamps" and so forth to try to increase the
number of people who have several of these skills, not to fixate on just one
of them when those other ones will set a maximum capacity for the employee.

[1]: [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is-
log...](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is-log-normal/)

------
darawk
Oh look, a communist magazine rediscovered what's great about capitalism.
Companies, in the pursuit of private profit, make the world a better place by
subsidizing education. Congrats guys, you did it.

~~~
natalyarostova
If you help someone become an engineer out of self-interest though, it
actually doesn't help them, for complex reasons you need a PhD in literature
to understand.

~~~
darawk
If only these companies had set their intention better.

~~~
natalyarostova
What we really need is to bring in enlightened humanities ethics managers to
teach these greedy engineers what it means to love and cherish people.

