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Comment by synicalx | Hacker News Reader

I guess other than wanting a continuing supply of in-country tech's to hire (as others have touched on), it sort of comes back to the old "give a man a fish" vs "teach him to fish" shenanigans.

They could hire a bunch of janitors, who are already employed anyway, and essentially just transfer that $1b directly into their pockets but at the end of the day they're still going to be janitors. By investing that some amount of money into education though, they're enabling them to go off and achieve something more meaningful that they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do.

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This implies that janitor is an inherently inferior job that deserves lower pay. It might be true, but in my opinion an average janitor is more beneficial to society than an average programmer.

More to the point though, what happens when a janitor learns to code and gets a coding job? You still need a janitor!

Direct vs indirect utility. Janitors are directly beneficial to a small number of people. The typical Google engineering is indirectly and marginally beneficial to millions.

Is that what we tell ourselves, "I'm making a difference"?

It might not be positive, but we are making a difference

True.

The janitor's salary goes up, and the incentive to automate increases. It's all win really assuming knowledge work is more enjoyable than being a janitor

> More to the point though, what happens when a janitor learns to code and gets a coding job? You still need a janitor!

That is a good point, but I think it comes down to the barrier to entry - it's easier to become a janitor than it is to become a programmer so one could probably assume there's always going to be a steady stream of people who are willing to do janitorial work.

> This implies that janitor is an inherently inferior job that deserves lower pay

It does unfortunately. Given some of the awful stuff janitors have to deal I believe they're deserving of higher pay, but unfortunately the job market doesn't agree with me on that.

If they brought that support staff in-house, wouldn't it be easier to teach them how to fish?

Possibly, but I wouldn't think it's likely that every janitor is going to want to be a programmer. Whereas if you invest money in a school that teaches programming, there's a good chance that most of the people attending that school will want to be a programmer.

But you make a good point though, with even a fraction of that budget + maybe a little time investment from their staff, they could create some great opportunities for their otherwise non-technical employees.

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