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by jkp56 2434 days ago
We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful presentation about software, I guess).
1 comments

> pretend to promote CS in college

Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them).

I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.

I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower.

The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists.

The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect.

Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.

> The Steve Jobs market manipulation

It wasn't "Steve Jobs", it was most/all of the tech giants colluding.

If I understand the case correctly it was a plot hatched and masterminded by Jobs. No other individual holds as much charisma and economic power as he did in his prime.
What I meant is these corps really want to increase the workforce and then cut the salaries, but at the same time they want to profit from dumb users who are easy to rip off. But the corps can't get both.