America's Growing Gap in Digital Job Skills
citylab.com
citylab.com
Google employs 74,000 people, so, there are a thousand times more students than Google employees, and obviously not all of those employees are working on AI; I assume most of them are sales & admin.
Facebook employs less than a third of that at 20,000.
A drop in the ocean compared to all the students that are being chronically underserved and undereducated.
The big issue is how we fund schools. It is based on the value of your home divided by the number of children that lives in said homes. Since the richer you are the less children you have they get more money. http://www.economist.com/node/21561112
Until we take the funding of school's to the state level we can talk till we are blue in the face and we will continue to have a "Divide." I don't understand why the AARP and other groups don't jump on the bandwagon and remove the burden of school tax off the backs of fixed income home owners. Fair funding is the foundation that will happen only if the US Court System steps in, because I can't see this happening any other way.
For Pennsylvania they have the biggest gap in the nation with the poorest Charter School Law in America. http://fairfundingpa.org/resources/infographics/
There's another way to put that: America's well-off suburbs have very good schools, but most of America does not. We need some numbers on the concentration of school-age children into good suburban districts versus "bad" inner-city and rural districts.
http://hechingerreport.org/struggling-cities-and-excelling-s...
The issue is defining suburbs. Usually it is Rural vs City (Which includes suburbs)
Already, the centers of the deep learning universe are in Toronto and London, neither of which is in the United States. France is starting to have a competitive advantage in climate science by promising American scientists the French won't strangle their funding forever, thus exerting a brain drain.
The United States can either feed its brains at the K-12, university, and research science levels, or those brains will go work for someone who promises to fund them and let them do their jobs.
Just a datapoint to support that statement. There was a drop of 3% and accelerating in first-time international students going to college in the United States. Similarly, the number of American students electing to study abroad increased by 4%. The US has long been a place that valued smart, aspiring people in the nation and from around the world, it looks like more students early in life are putting down different bets for their futures.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-international-stude...
My alma mater has had to shorten its semester by something like four or five weeks since I was there, due to state-level austerity. This kind of thing has become normal at public universities across the USA, so your "cheap" (ie: ~$14k/year) in-state tuition is now buying strictly less education. Research is centralizing to the most elite institutions, or going abroad. There was a government shutdown in 2013 that literally cut off the flow of already awarded NSF funding into academic coffers.
Meanwhile, Canada considers $10k/year for tuition to be expensive, and hasn't cut everything to the bone. Australia and New Zealand are similar. Parts of Continental Europe have dirt-cheap degree programs (on the order of $5k/year, even for foreigners), some of which are conducted in English, and others of which require you to speak the language.
If you do take a high-quality degree abroad, you can either subsequently apply for a work permit and enjoy better basic labor provisions than you'd usually get in the United States (cheap health-care and lengthy vacations as defaults), or come back to work at a high-paying American job if you can get one. It's a more diversified portfolio, you could say.
This has gotten to be a serious rot, like mushrooms growing out of a dead tree. The USA has gotten too used to importing its STEM professionals by brain-draining countries who seriously invest in education, and itself radically under-investigating in both STEM professionals and skilled tradespeople. You can't run a First World economy on nothing but low-level laborers, asset managers, and business owners.
I mean, sure, if someone has to do the real work but nobody does the real education, that probably means that us personally who got educated and trained in the "good old days" will have more bargaining power for salaries, but we'll also face a "hole" in the labor market of suitable juniors to train.
Because we led, doesn't mean we will lead. You get to be a leader by leading, not by resting on your laurels while someone else becomes a leader.
So, while I don't think I'll have an impact on corporateguy5's opinion, maybe some other reader will keep this in mind and somehow benefit from the awareness?
Has only 2 US universities, 3 from China and 2 from Singapore (which is crazy, as there are only 4 technical universities in the first place).
I will admit that the US has some damn fine universities, but far from all the top innovation happens in the US.
Nah, people drop money into CS education and the reasoning changes to "that's just businesses seeding cheap labor 20-30 years from now"
An example being software updates on phones. When I got my parents their first android phone, the app drawer worked on swiping left/right. Then came the change in orientation where the swipe went to up/down. My parents were confused and routinely called me to ask how to make the phone work.
Just today I had an app which showed different categories on clicking tabs on top changed to swipe up and down with a small button to choose categories at the bottom.
These kind of changes leaves people more confused. They like to stick to older versions and hence left behind on any thing new.
That sounds so funny.
It's striking how to us software developers what is an exciting new feature or nice cosmetic change is nothing more than a pain point for many people. Digital devices to many people are tools not toys. When we realize this, it's easy to understand how a change is not fun for them but merely work.
Someone on here, I don't remember who sorry, commented that Snapchat works by deliberately breaking UI conventions that people have grown accustomed to who have used computers for a while. That's the mechanism by which they exclude older people and "lock in" people who have little pre-existing computing experience. I strongly suspect this is exactly what the Android developers are trying to do as well.
All of which are insignificant compared to ageism. That's the telltale that there is no genuine skills shortage; employers are happy to overlook a large talent pool. The author of the piece even feels the need to mention both "race" and "ethnicity" to pad out the words!
Do you understand the difference between the words? I can't figure out any other context in which this comment makes sense.
"(The study notes some limitations to these O*NET data, which are reported as aggregates, and not available on the micro level. This means that digitalization scores are assigned nationally, without regard to location, which could introduce potential inaccuracies at the local level.)"
Did I miss something, does the data have metro labeling or something?
And finally, that last graph I'm not sure is showing much correlation. R^2 of ~.26?
If anyone else replies, I am in a small town and people are responding to me with "oh, you are a web designer! We could use your help!"
I am not a web designer. But I am a content creator and can serve as a content manager and I am willing to foster some development here. The town has high speed internet and an excellent library. But Facebook seems to be the big thing here. And there is lots of room for growth.
Literacy is paramount, NOT digital literacy, I mean the ability to read, write, and perform basic mathematics. Public schools in America are floundering when it comes to basic education. Students leave school without the most fundamental skills required to do anything other than menial labor, let alone author insipid React components.
That's a giant scary problem that is accelerating, and there will be a very ugly comeuppance in the USA for neglecting education.
I am speaking with literate, competent people. I recently spoke with a guy who is wealthy and a co-owner of a local successful business that has been around a long time. He is a local mover and shaker. He told me he does not own a computer at all.
Meanwhile, the website for his company has one of the best local websites I have tripped across, his business card lists his email address and he carries a very nice smartphone. I imagine he can get online with his smartphone, yet he apparently does not consider that to be a computer for purposes of viewing my websites.
He didn't want my email. He wanted me to text message him my phone number. He is a very intelligent man with a lot going on, but he straight up told me "I am [x age], I am not going to learn this stuff." I know people about that same age on Hacker News who program, etc.
Unemployment is high in this town. I would like to start hooking people up with earning opportunities that already exist on the internet. I am facing a lot of challenges in trying to connect to people. But I think there is a huge opportunity here for making some headway against some of the local problems via spreading the word that the internet is not just a place to watch YouTube videos and hang out on Facebook. There is a lot more going on in cyberspace than that and you can have a lot more going on in your life for the price of a (free) library card and a little digital literacy.
I find it frustrating that every question I have posted so far on Hacker News related to this desire of mine has been generally met with so little real support, for example the utter lack of reply here:
However, it happens to lie next to another concern with a much larger scope and severity: the failure of the American educational system in general. Compared to this, a few Luddites and facebook-only websurfers isn't such a big deal.