Billionaire Donors Lavish Millions On Code.org Crowdfunding Project 84
theodp (442580) writes "Whether it's winning yacht races, assembling the best computer science faculty, or even dominating high school basketball, billionaires like to win. Which may help explain why three tech billionaires — Code.org backers (and FWD.us founders) Mark Zuckerberg, VC John Doerr, and Sean Parker — stepped up to the plate and helped out Code.org's once-anemic Hour of Code Indiegogo crowdfunding project with $500k donations. When matched by Code.org's largest donors (Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and others), the three donations alone raised $3,000,000, enough to reach the organization's goal of becoming the most funded crowdfunding campaign ever on Indiegogo. On its campaign page, Code.org remarked that "to sustain our organization for the long haul, we need to engage parents and community members," which raises questions about how reliant the K-12 learn-to-code movement might be on the kindness of its wealthy corporate and individual donors. Code.org started shedding some light on its top donors a few months back, but contributor names are blank in the 2013 IRS 990 filing posted by the organization on its website, although GuideStar suggests the biggest contributors in 2013 were Microsoft ($3,149,411) and Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi ($1,873,909 in Facebook stock). Coincidentally, in a Reddit AMA at Code.org's launch, CEO and Founder Hadi Partovi noted that his next-door-neighbor is Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith, whose FWD.us bio notes is responsible for Microsoft's philanthropic work. Just months before Code.org and FWD.us emerged on the lobbying scene, Smith announced Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, which called for "an increase in developing the American STEM pipeline in exchange for these new [H-1B] visas and green cards," a wish that President Obama is expected to grant shortly via executive action."
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This is simple. Tech firms benefit when people are more competent with tech.
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code.org and fwd.us is simply a scam to lobby for more H1-B visas, so that they can pay programmers minimum wage.
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That's cheap compared to paying programmers enough to make the job desirable.
Where the heck do you work? Find a better job! (Or realize the all first jobs suck.)
Look at some of the donors: Facebook, Google, and MS all pay quite well. There's very few careers that pay better without going into business for yourself. I'm quite OK with heart surgeons making more than me, really.
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. Also, programmers don't all work at big software houses in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the discrepancy between the requirements and the pay is much more pronounced at smaller companies and in other parts of the country.
And coal miner pay really sucks in areas with no coal mines. Deep sea fishing jobs pay really well, but you're not going to find one in Kansas. Want a career as a physicist? Which 5 years are you spending at the LHC? If you want to be paid, you must first find someone to value the service you're offering.
Have you looked at what most layers actually make (those that can ever find work), and at what age they actually pull ahead of developers in lifetime earnings less schooling costs? Ditto doctors that d
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You're comparing the relatively few top paying programmer jobs to run-of-the-mill banking and management jobs. Compare Silicon Valley developer positions to Wall Street banking, for example, and see how programmers fare then. Or, as I mentioned earlier, compare the many programmers all over the country to the many managers everywhere. It is nice that you're content with your pay, but if programming were the excellent career choice that you paint it as, it would attract a far more diverse crowd, and career-m
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I work with an extremely diverse crowd, and always have - or did you mean a "diverse" set of white Americans? Relative to the cost of living in NYC, I think West Coast mid-career programming jobs pay OK compared to run-of-the-mill investment banker jobs (especially considering the EA-style workweeks those guys have), or for that matter corporate lawyer jobs.
Where I work, the number of senior tech-track jobs and senior engineering managers is roughly the same - many companies are lagging in that regard, but
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It's a network effect - you hire where you can find lots of skilled workers, and the worker move to where companies are hiring. Silly Valley is the largest hub, but on the West Coast there a fair pool of jobs in LA associated with Hollywood, and a large and fast-growing pool in Seattle where MS and Amazon are headquartered, and many other large companies have offices to mine that talent pool.
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I'm quite OK with heart surgeons making more than me, really.
So am I, but I am not quite OK with a lot of managers and bankers making more than me. Also, programmers don't all work at big software houses in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the discrepancy between the requirements and the pay is much more pronounced at smaller companies and in other parts of the country. Does programming pay enough to live comfortably? Sure. Does it pay enough compared to the "go to" money making jobs? No, it doesn't. Not for the majority of programmers.
It's good old capitalist supply and demand. Contrary to the majority opinion here on slashdot, being able to use or program a computer does not make you the equivalent of a movie star.
Capitalism's great when you're the one near the top of the money tree, not so good when you're falling down through the branches as companies realise that moving your job oversees works just as well for programmers as call centre operators.
The harsh truth is that you're a fungible asset, like 99% of people in the world of
"Crowdfunding" via billionaires (Score:5, Funny)
Nice thing about billionaires is it really only takes one to make a crowd.
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Criticizing philanthropy falls outside the circa 2014 Overton window, plebian.
Bow in appreciation to those who pick your pockets and then generously give you the lint back as a charitable gift.
All opposition to neoliberal hegemony will be crushed by His Holliness John Galt.
This! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a great portion of my favorite book on Political thought regarding wages and the Artisan. Socrates points out that once a person in society receives ample money for a project they no longer have incentive to do future work. Socrates continues stating that this is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the person with the wealth is now free to meddle in the affairs of everybody else in society. That meddling is almost never in societies interests, but that person or the person's close friends and associates, so that they gain further control of society and have more stuff than everyone else.
That book in case you are interested is Plato's "The Republic".
The whole "everyone should code" argument is foolish. Society needs plumbers, welders, architects, accountants, doctors, physicists, line workers, and every other job there is. As society has demand for jobs the wages should go up, which draws people into the needed jobs. Since coders are in demand and receive good wages for their work, it seems at least some of this push is to artificially reduce the wages by flooding the market. And lets face it, there are not a whole lot of decent paying middle class jobs left in the US any longer.
Automation changes future job market (Score:1)
You and everyone else who thinks being a plumber is a lucrative job now and tomorrow needs to understand that automation is going to change the employment landscape dramatically in the coming years. The undereducated people who have been automated out of their warehouse work, call center jobs, etc. will dogpile on those jobs that pay well and don't require a diploma. Then those jobs w
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Apply what you wrote in first paragraph to the second. Billionaries want to reduce costs not help the masses.
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I do think their support of STEM is in the interest of growing the domestic workforce towards the needs of industry.
If by "needs of the industry", you mean "get to pay programmers less", then sure, that's what they want.
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I never stated plumbing was a lucrative job, I don't even think I hinted at it. Automation has it's place, but many things are not better [qz.com] given our current ability to automate.
These wealthy tech billionaires see the writing on the wall and are trying to help equip the masses to be more relevant in tomorrow's job market.
These wealthy billionaires did not become wealthy billionaires by altruism, sorry. I appreciate your opinion, but I don't believe for one second that they have societies best interest in mind with this push. I consider that they read the reference I provided and took the message of Sophistry and Machiavelli instead of altruism. I
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Am I wrong to think that plumbing, as a profession, will outlive every job in the tech sector?
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The simple proof of this is the number of people doing tedious jobs on minimum wage, when according to your theory they could all be out there earning much more as plumbers now.
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There is a great portion of my favorite book on Political thought regarding wages and the Artisan. Socrates points out that once a person in society receives ample money for a project they no longer have incentive to do future work. Socrates continues stating that this is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the person with the wealth is now free to meddle in the affairs of everybody else in society. That meddling is almost never in societies interests, but that person or the person's close friends and associates, so that they gain further control of society and have more stuff than everyone else.
That book in case you are interested is Plato's "The Republic".
The whole "everyone should code" argument is foolish. Society needs plumbers, welders, architects, accountants, doctors, physicists, line workers, and every other job there is. As society has demand for jobs the wages should go up, which draws people into the needed jobs. Since coders are in demand and receive good wages for their work, it seems at least some of this push is to artificially reduce the wages by flooding the market. And lets face it, there are not a whole lot of decent paying middle class jobs left in the US any longer.
Human societies are now billions of people. Even millions of dollars are just a drop in the sea. There is absolutely no way anyone can know what that drop is good or bad for society. Is the projected funded by a billionaire for his interests more detrimental than a project sanctioned by a government official using taxpayer money?
By the same logic of not everyone should code, then everyone shouldn't need to read and write, do math, learn science? Every scientist now learns to code; engineers code, physicis
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Please explain me... (Score:1)
...why all this obsession to get every kid out there and their dogs to "code"?
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to drive down the salary of coders so that they can take more of the profit.
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...why all this obsession to get every kid out there and their dogs to "code"?
The Singularity is coming. If we can't beat them with quality, we might just try overwhelming them with numbers.
At least the Iranians think this is a valid strategy.
Racist and Sexist Organization (Score:5, Insightful)
Why support a racist and misandric bunch of SJWs? This ends up perpetuating stereotypes, while creating resentment all around.
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To be fair, they removed all the "lets get girls to code and leave boys out in the cold" stuff pretty quickly. Perhaps they thought this might discourage contributions from about 50% of the population.
Ballmer should have picked up a clipboard (Score:2)
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Well that's good, but what the hell does it have to do with this subject? People who throw Malcolm Gladwell articles are like monkeys and their Malcolm Gladwell articles.
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While I enjoy much of Malcolm Gladwell's writing, I was able to answer the question presented in the subtitle without giving it much thought.
A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?
Because it requires a lot more endurance to pull off a full court press. You've got to get your entire team dedicated to jogging like a track team on their own time. Then they still have to learn to shoot, rebound, etc.
You can also out-strategize the press, [youtube.com] as John Belein demonstrated a couple years back when Michigan absolutely crushed VCU in the NCAA tournament. The
"lavish"? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like 0.1% of their worth. It would be like me "lavishing" 60$ on them.
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That's like 0.1% of their worth. It would be like me "lavishing" 60$ on them.
And did you give $60? Thought not.
People needing assistance are helped no less if the donor is well off.
"Compassion is not about sacrifice" - Tenzin Gyatso, 14th (and likely final) Dalai Lama.
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Giving money to help others makes the world a better place, and is praiseworthy. Complaining about others doing so isn't helping.
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If most of the resources of an economy are devoted to producing frivolous luxury items for rich people
That hasn't been an issue since before the industrial revolution. That was rather the point of the revolution. The 1% may have twice as much stuff as the rest of us -- twice as many houses and cars and furniture -- OK, fine that 1% of all stuff "wasted", so what? If you've been to Walmart ever, you know it's not the rich eating twice their share of food. If you're rich and spend your money on expensive frivolities, you eventually stop being rich.
It's not really any man's place to demand that another giv
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They have all the wealth and power - I don't think they're the ones with the problem.
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It's not really any man's place to demand that another give away what's he has earned. As far as suggest, sure
That's simply not true, or why isn't taxation voluntary?
Okay, your point is? (Score:2)
Giving money to help others makes the world a better place, and is praiseworthy. Complaining about others doing so isn't helping.
Let us take a few billionaires in the US and see what "giving" could result in. Bill Gates with an estimated personal wealth of 67 Billion dollars could give away 66 Billion and still have a billion left (enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life and make his children very wealthy when he dies). That would purchase 660,000 houses for the homeless population in the US valued at 100,000 each. This is more than the amount of homeless people estimated in the US (by approximately 50,000) so would he
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Bill's Plan is to give away most of his money before he dies. I believe it's much less than 1 Billion he will give to his heirs. The Gates Foundation has done significant and meaningful charity work that's had a real effect: certainly malaria deaths have fallen, by somewhere around 100k a year. That's a Hell of a thing.
I give money to some of the same charities, because they're trying to solve the longer-term problem, to help people need less charity in the future. I'm just a drop in the bucket, but at
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Well, I'll say to you what I say to everyone who complains of overpopulation: you first. Everyone has the right to pursue their own path to happiness. There's plenty of food and land to go around - the rest is politics.
New Language (Score:2)
One of the first things code.org needs to do is settle on the first coding language to teach. Problem with coding languages is they do not follow the logic of other things young people are taught 'reading, 'w'riting and 'a'rithmatic' but only follows their own 'internal' logic and this makes it much more difficult to learn. The language needs to more tightly align with normal spoken and written language and maths use. Which of course makes other spoken languages coding language an interesting problem. Wan
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The language needs to more tightly align with normal spoken and written language and maths use.
No, no it really, really doesn't. Every terrible blight upon the landscape of programming languages have come from this same, horrible mistake. The difficult part of programming is organizing your thoughts, not learning the language.
Teach using a simple language that makes it clear what the computer is doing, preferably a language without a lot of confusing cruft in it, though it seems all the common high-level languages have crazy historical baggage these days. Plus the point of this is to make people
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Again another fool trying to justify qwerty to this day. So why are they not teaching the QWEs at school and still persist in teaching the ABCs, make up your fucking mind which is right and PS stop you anal comment dissection it is lame.
Fucking bait and switch (Score:4, Insightful)
Now it all makes sense. These are cheap flashy diversions intended as distraction from the real agenda. They can claim they are supporting the future of STEM education in the US, and training those post K-12 to become employable in software. See, they are patriotic businessmen who love the US!!!
Meanwhile the real plan is to flood the market with unlimited foreign trained employees and drive technical salaries into the dirt. They won't be satisfied until technical talent is in the same range as minimum wage.
Before anyone screams that I'm crazy, that is exactly what happened in the visual effects industry. A combination of moving jobs offshore [biv.com], lots of 1H-B visas, and a glut of under-trained people moved salaries for many into the under $25/hour range. No health insurance, and since everyone is a show hire, no job security. You don't like the unpaid 40% overtime? Go work at Starbucks.
By the way, that is not a theoretical circumstance. I know someone who used to do pretty well doing visual effects. Eventually he had to declare bankruptcy, and take jobs at both Starbucks and Target. When he finally got back into do effects he was making a third his previous salary. Since he is officially a "professional", he works at least 16 hours a week unpaid overtime. The job is six months, and at the first of the year he'll be pounding the pavement looking for something else. It's kind of like free lance indentured servitude.
If your think that your precious technical ass is immune to this, you deserve to end up sleeping in your car. The plan to screw you is in motion and all systems are go. The only question is what are you going to do about it.
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That's a pipedream at best.
If you are qualified to work as a developer, chances are you already have a college degree. That proves you are not lazy.
The police state (and also criminal ID theft) increases you chance of having a random criminal record. That does not prove you are not unemployable. (Good credit report should offset bad criminal records IMHO)
At that leaves the unemployed that are in that situation because of luck or tragic circumstances. That is why we need to adequately fund welfare and social
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I can say with certainty that you have never been through college with a rigorous engineering curriculum. (No, those liberal arts stuff do not count)
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Why, apart from the fact that they've been brought up to believe they are precious snowflakes, are programmers or people in the "visual effects industry" any different?
It is all about getting cheaper employees (Score:3)
It should not be surprising to see those names up there, for them it is all about getting access to cheaper employees by conjuring up the idea that there are not enough "experts" available. Bitkom has been doing the same scheme for over a decade now in Germany and it has become a running joke amongst IT professionals.
Valuation (Score:2)
Do Goole/Facebook hire code.org certificates? (Score:2)
They should crowdfund their taxes (Score:1)
Technology is not the solution; you can't scale attention.