It really fills me with disgust to see influential people present this issue as a skills shortage, while hiring workers at reduced wages and burdening them with the threat of deportation.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/02/26/bill-gates...
Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Drew Houston, Tony Hsieh and Gabe Newell and Mark Zuckerberg aren't throwing their name and money at learn to code charities out of the goodness of their heart. They're very directly trying to lower the primary cost that their investments face - wages.
Wow that's a unique level of cynicism even for this generally cynical forum. I'm speechless. So you see all these efforts to raise interest in computer science in younger generation of Americans and all you can think of is how all these new, enthusiastic programmers are going to compete with you?
...then you were looking at something else. That was a group of billionaires advertising their naked greed and self interest.
When normal school-kids take an interest in computer science it doesn't appear in Forbes magazine.
>the profession will probably benefit if you found yourself something else to do.
Now that's pathetic.
They see the salaries, see that all of the other good middle class jobs have dried up and think "well, it's either learn javascript or be stuck in Starbucks forever". The fact that so many persist at it even while hating it makes me sad.
These kids should have a multitude of options to a good middle class job, not just one.
That's thanks to decades of vicious economic policy directed by billionaires like the ones smiling at you in that promotional video.
If widget specialists flood the market, their wages go down [1], but so do widget prices. The factory owner doesn't necessarily benefit, just like grocery stores don't benefit from higher tomato prices. (In fact, they may lose in greater shoplifting costs that can't be passed on to customers.)
On top of that, there's the public goods problem, of how other employers, who aren't expanding the supply of programmers, can hire them just the same.
So I don't see the monetary incentive to fund these things like you claim.
[1] Of course, just like your claim about programmers, this ignores systemic/ecosystem effects: maybe the lower price of widget labor will lead to investment in capital that depends on widget labor, which leads more investors to look for better uses of widget labor, which bids it back up. This isn't an unreasonable dynamic to expect in software, as more app ideas might get pursued than otherwise as more programmers come on the market.
Only if we make the patently unrealistic assumption that the widget manufacturers have negligible market power (a perfectly competitive market). That assumption would also lead us to believe that they have negligible profits. They don't.
Those billionaires have a lot of market power between them and make a lot of profits.
If we used your assumptions, the tech wage fixing cartel of 2013 would also have been impossible. It happened.
So your theory [1] would require that this "make everyone a better programmer" is more like wage-fixing (in terms of economic incidence) than the tomatoes, even though
a) the wage fixing affected demand, and this education program affects supply, of programming labor; and
b) the big companies are a much bigger fraction of the SV labor market than of the workers that would learn through this program.
It's also not clear to what extent the wage fixing agreement was mitigated by driving programmers to non-conspirators.
Getting the full picture would require a careful assesent to the sensitivity of these markets to all those parameters, not simply assuming that any increase in the supply of programmers purely benefits employers of them and doesn't affect the relative scarcity of their final output.
And FWIW, I don't get your insistence that one theory requires "perfect competition"; it might require some level of competition, but why perfect? The tomato result would hold true even in very lumpy markets. (Or were you just exaggerating?)
[1] I know, not "your" theory, but it's much simpler than "the theory you offered in your previous post", and I add this footnote only to fend off a possible indignant reply about "hey, that's not just my theory".