They just want cheap labor! There is nothing altruistic about Google and their commitment to their fellow man. They merely want children (teach a kid scratch so they can be enslaved for a lifetime!) and people in lower income countries to take up where the people here need more inorder to live here. And if Google were to be honest they need people who want to live in the bay area and are willing to enslave themselves to do it! And now that the flow of new blood was cut off now Google again needs fresh souls...so they are coming for anyone who can type, and wants to move the CA and live in their Hooverville.
Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
101–110 of 370 posts
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#102I don't understand why they don't open more remote offices instead. Around 90% of their employees are currently within the US, wouldn't it be a lot easier to find tech talent if they had a major position in other areas of the world as well?
Where are you getting that 90% statistic from? I'm pretty sure at least 30-40% of their employees are based internationally, and even within the US they have offices in pretty much every major city. So most Google employees are already working "remotely".
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#103Universities need to start focusing on skills instead of general education. Imagine the amount of skills you could learn if you didn't have to take 60 hours of nonsense credits and focus on skills you require. Programming / Networking / Hardware need a new type of University that is similar to Trade colleges but focus primarily on the skills and nothing more. The first 1-2 years could focus on the foundations while t…
Name a giant in this industry, that person benefitted from a liberal arts education.
I'm sure all the gender studies classes has helped the vast majority of tech students become better developers
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#104Everyone hates a cynic so bring on the downvotes: I'm going to warn everyone of what's coming. Software engineer jobs will be blue collar, $40-$60k a year jobs, by 2030. The HUGE push from government, and private business, to fill the PERCEIVED lack of engineers, will come to fruition around that time. Make no mistake about it - there is NOT a lack of skilled engineers right now. There is a disinterest among business…
"PERCEIVED lack"? Doesn't the fact that salaries are sky rocketing essentially disprove your point? Why are the salaries getting pushed higher and higher? Because demand for SWEs is outstripping supply.
This to me looks like the same kind of privileged outlook that other professional guilds like the AMA desire. Do you want cheaper healthcare, or doctor compensation to keep going up? Hey, letting nurse practitioners take on some of the load is "flooding the market with n00bs"
This just seems like protectionism by another name.
Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate?
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#105I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy admin…
I'm thankful I found a company like that after graduating. Seemingly the only such specimen in America today. It's a giant international consultancy company that seemingly has a questionable reputation online but it was all I could get that paid anything remotely respectable and they even do paid training. It's seems to be one of a rapidly dwindling handful of paths for new grads who are graduating and finding out the online hype like "it's easy to get a job in CS if you do [some combination of good side projects, internships, good gpa, etc]" is an outright falsehood at this point in time - it's very hard unless an opportunity approaches you like what eventually happened to me amd it turned out all that applying and trying was a waste of time.
In my case I had no choice but to do a draining unpaid internship in college, their return offer was only $15/hr, nowhere I applied to for months (likely hundreds of applications) would take me even though I did all those things in the list and continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit, except one offer for 30k. 15/hr and 30k are abysmal insults to the amount of time money and effort put into programming since middle school, getting a BS CS degree, volunteering on big online projects since high school, etc. I'm not in the middle of nowhere either, this was NY/NJ.
These experiences signal to me that the tech field is hightly oversaturated for new grads and it's a matter of time before people realize the bubble popped. Someone in my position should not be getting offered what amount to poverty wages taking into account student loans, the high price of car insurance for a driver of my age range, etc. Programs like what google is doing are just going to make this problem even worse as companies feel further emboldened to require increasingly more experience out of junior programmers and offer them salaries further approaching minimum wage.
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, I see people fail learning programming over and over again. Even after three years completing a computer engineering degree, they struggle with how a for loop works, (No this is not a joke in Europe). Learning to program takes a lot of dedication and focus. Which a lot of people have no interest in, it is just too much work and too difficult. Every student that takes a engineering degree here, have to hav…
I just can't share that optimism. I taught myself to code using youtube videos and books. There are 14 year olds on YouTube coding iOS video games in a matter of weeks. Combine that with the fact that big companies (like Google) release SDKs that make application development trivial, and you've got a recipe for the skill cap lowering along with wages.
Making it easier to do some things we do with code today doesn’t mean there won’t be new hard problems to solve tomorrow.
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#107I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy admin…
I suggested exactly that 2 months ago [1]; the idea was not popular here.
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#108Everyone hates a cynic so bring on the downvotes: I'm going to warn everyone of what's coming. Software engineer jobs will be blue collar, $40-$60k a year jobs, by 2030. The HUGE push from government, and private business, to fill the PERCEIVED lack of engineers, will come to fruition around that time. Make no mistake about it - there is NOT a lack of skilled engineers right now. There is a disinterest among business…
I don't think you're wrong; I could see certain kinds of engineering jobs becoming more blue collar. But at the risk of sounding pretentious, there's a bit of an intelligence restriction on certain kinds of engineering work. There will probably always be more of a demand than supply for people who are really good and useful.
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a long time the anti-H1B segment has been critical of Big Tech for trying to undercut American tech workers instead in investing in citizens. So now they're investing in the wrong citizens?
I swear, many of the HN crowd seems like they'd be happiest if they were the only developer on the planet.
Well obviously, think of how well I'd be paid! /s
Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs
#110As much as something like this is appreciated, the history of job retraining programs are filled with over promises, under-commitments, and disaster, stretching back to the 1970’s. There is no need to train more CS people. There is a need for recovering the “grand bargain” between employers and employees that began in the 1940’s and was slowly unwound beginning in the mid 1970’s. The reason that business schools exis…
That "grand bargain" is over, and never returning. The economy is global, cutthroat and changes on a dime. Every man/woman is in a mercenary situation today, whether they're aware of this fact or not.
If this was the case, then why wouldn't Google just tap this global labor reserve instead of training people? Why is the federal reserve expecting inflation to rise as unemployment continues to be low?