Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

I wonder how long it would take for Google to spend an extra $1 Billion by bringing janitorial, food service, and other non-technical jobs in-house instead of contracting it out to the lowest bidder.<p>To put it in perspective, $1 Billion is 10,000 times $100,000. Or 1000 $100,000&#x2F;year jobs for ten years before discounting for the time value of money. Instead, big chunks of the money will get siphoned off to administrators and technical instructors and computer manufacturers and lots of other areas that already have plenty of money.<p>A billion dollars is less than half the annual budget of University of Nebraska for serving ~50,000 students [1]. Back of envelope turns $1 Billion into ~22,000 student years which is in the same people-helped ballpark as the 10,000 worker years, with the difference being that those 10,000 worker years come with actual jobs at $100,000 a year. And the 10,000 worker years are offset by the current cost of contracting out the work and the value that work returns to Google&#x27;s bottom line.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_of_Nebraska_system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_of_Nebraska_system</a>

It&#x27;s never been easier to get training in all sorts of things, for free. For example, I&#x27;m currently taking MIT&#x27;s 6.002 electronics course because I never learned circuit analysis properly. It&#x27;s on youtube, it&#x27;s free, I watch it anytime.<p>There&#x27;s the Khan Academy, too.

How does flooding the market with developers that will never be able to pass their interviews help them? I guess it will increase the amount of people in the 1% by expanding the size of that pool?<p>Just seems like Google out of all companies has a need for the best, not just blue collar code slingers. Many people with 4 years CS degrees from good schools do not get hired.

Google spends what, upwards of $10B a year on software engineer salary and benefits? So, seems like a good deal. If they can spend $1B and decrease salary’s and benefits by at least 10% over a few years, they get return on investment.

I wish Google could spend just a fraction of that money employing technical writers to better document their technologies. So much of the documentation is outdated or flat out broken. Even stock sample projects right on the Android Studio sometimes fail to work.<p>Oh, and remember the mess Gradle was in 2015&#x2F;2016? How much money could it possibly cost to better document some of the major tools?

I don&#x27;t understand why they don&#x27;t open more remote offices instead. Around 90% of their employees are currently within the US, wouldn&#x27;t it be a lot easier to find tech talent if they had a major position in other areas of the world as well?

Universities need to start focusing on skills instead of general education. Imagine the amount of skills you could learn if you didn&#x27;t have to take 60 hours of nonsense credits and focus on skills you require.<p>Programming &#x2F; Networking &#x2F; 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 the next 2 years focus around solid design principles and actually developing projects (real or fake).

You know, I&#x27;m actually really impressed with Google for speaking with their money on this. There&#x27;s a lot of &quot;why don&#x27;t these hicks just get a real job&quot;, but no one really seems interested in furthering that sentiment.<p>There&#x27;s popular opposition to Trump&#x27;s promise to give people jobs by resurrecting industries that a lot of people (probably Google as well) would rather see stay dead. But there&#x27;s no denying people need jobs, and formal education ain&#x27;t cheap.<p>Now we&#x27;ve got a tech giant backing that up with cold hard cash. It would be great to see other companies getting on board and putting some dough in the ring or at least offering some kind of internship&#x2F;work experience programs for people coming out of an education funded by these grants.

Stated differently: &quot;In light of recent criticism on its ability to import foreign, cheap labor, Google commits to improving their public image for American labor&quot;

Yeah, more bootcamp trained JS-&quot;artisans&quot; and Ruby-&quot;artists&quot; for all of us! If they wanted to do good, invest in the school system, use your power to monitor Betsy DeVos and call her out for the bullshit to come from her. If Google could raise interest in STEM in High Schools already that would be way more organic.

To the critics in this thread- maybe it&#x27;s time to consider unionizing tech workers after all?

Google is often criticized for not hiring developers who &quot;still need more work&quot;, and instead hires experienced people. Hiring less capable people and training them internally would make some sense to me.

Makes sense given the antitrust movement is getting stronger.

I&#x27;d be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don&#x27;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&#x27;ve been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy administration to little effect.

I am glad to see Google doing something like this.<p>All of humanity growing together towards a brighter future for everyone is truly our highest calling.

But nobody wants to address the mounting student loan problem!!<p>Degrees don&#x27;t come for free, technical graduates don&#x27;t come for free, students have to go to college for that and in US you need a LOT of money for that.<p>This is the chicken and egg problem where nobody wants to address the real problem an everyone is going around giving superficial solutions.

What they mean by high tech specifically ? Android dev, web dev, etc qualifies as high tech job?

I think not only do we need to be thinking about getting people &quot;prepared&quot; with new skills, but also about smooth lateral movement across industries.<p>In a lot of cases these are probably viewed as the same thing but, for example, I would ask: When was the last time a Senior Java Developer was a candidate for a Senior FrontEnd Web Developer position?<p>I think the future is going to be a lot less about being hired for &quot;jobs&quot; with &quot;companies&quot;. Instead it&#x27;s going to be substantially more about &quot;projects&quot; being done by &quot;groups &#x2F; organizations&quot;. The groups &#x2F; organizations being assembled &#x2F; disassembled with high frequency.

Start with basic observations. Tool acquisition is not tool mastery. Tool mastery does not mean jobs for or at Google. Janitors are not getting IPO payouts for lives of leisure. Cold war coastal higher education, city living and corporate trading prowess have drained many interior communities of their best brains throughout decades of deindustrialization and deskilling.<p>Some better nerds here can hardly imagine perfectly smart people who cannot yet touch type or turn a spreadsheet into a group calendar. Our miraculous simple decision support tools are still opaque to majorities of Americans. Only Americans far outside Google will create value to create jobs. That takes planning for any possible sweat equity or financial investment. We have generations of people to train with tools. The boy genius prizes for ever new tooling are not really separate concerns. Cultivating and harvest new boy geniuses from the field is expensive. They don&#x27;t exactly grow on trees.<p>Google like Apple or Microsoft had to discover and rediscover their own relevance. They cultivate their markets now with intensive growth. This is a good move.

Everyone hates a cynic so bring on the downvotes:<p>I&#x27;m going to warn everyone of what&#x27;s coming.<p>Software engineer jobs will be blue collar, $40-$60k a year jobs, by 2030.<p>The HUGE push from government, and private business, to fill the PERCEIVED lack of engineers, will come to fruition around that time.<p>Make no mistake about it - there is NOT a lack of skilled engineers right now. There is a disinterest among business to pay higher, and higher salaries.<p>If you are a SWE right now, save your money, and invest your time into improving YOURSELF. Have a backup plan, because I promise you, the good times are coming to an end sooner than you think.

How many of these grants are going outside of already tech heavy areas? How many of them are going to coal country, or to the Rust Belt?<p>It&#x27;s great that they&#x27;re doing this, but unless they&#x27;re going to be doing it in the places that are hurting, not much is going to change.

Better link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;topics&#x2F;causes-community&#x2F;opportunity-for-everyone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;topics&#x2F;causes-community&#x2F;opportunity-for-...</a>

Stated differently, &quot;Google commits $1B to flood the market with newbie tech workers, and to grow future client businesses&quot;.<p>The cynic in me can clearly see their interest in the effects of this grant, but thinking on it more that interest might serve us better in the long run. I just hope the community gains from that money before it makes it&#x27;s way back to Google.

always remember: the industry&#x27;s involvement in CS education has less to do with philanthropy and goodwill than it does with lowering the cost of labor over the long term

As 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.<p>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.<p>The reason that business schools exist on university campuses in the first place is because they were supposed to train business leaders to aspire to the same ideals as a university: knowledge, development of character, the search for truth to create a better word, etc.<p>If people knew how much harder they work today for fractions of a chance at a reward that is now 3x expensive, gestures like this would be seen for what they are, a band-aid in place of a tourniquet.<p>BTW if you’re upper-middle class, know life is now pretty good, but your economic base is being slowly eroded as well and there will be a time when your economic fall will come.<p>*- - - -<p>EDIT: Keep in mind, this is the same company whose head of HR (Laszlo Bock) literally says he does not believe training helps at all develop people. This sounds like I am taking him out of context but I kid you not. I wish I was at home so I could find the physical page numbers, but he says it in his book “Work Rules!” from a couple of years ago. It’s at the beginning of the chapter where he talks about the New York Yankees.

So this means there are new open positions for foreigners&#x2F;H1B at Google?

Prediction – people will still bitch and whine, as always.

Someone cares to try to put this story in political perspective?

How about a billion to high tech trains

This is absolutely lovely news.

Actually spending $10 million. Talking about $1 billion over 5 years.

Before you go patting Google on the back, consider this. They stole money from engineers by colluding with the other big players to keep engineering salaries artificially low and now want to use some of that money to train more workers to create more supply which lowers salaries even further.

mkdir plan<p>git add $1B<p>git commit -am &quot;train US workers for high tech jobs&quot;<p>git push<p>(please PR for a better git joke)

Great, it&#x27;s about time that these companies stepped up to bring more people into their workforce. It&#x27;s ridiculous to complain to legislatures about skills shortages without stepping up to bring your own resources to bear on the issue.<p>Still, as nice as giving money to other organizations is, it would even better to see them actually training people from a diverse variety of backgrounds. They&#x27;re not exactly taking any responsibility here.

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.

Great! They won&#x27;t need to offshore any more work! Or rely on exploiting H1B&#x27;s!