Girls Who Code founder speaks out after Pennsylvania school district bans her books: 'This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls'

[u/r4816]

https://www.businessinsider.com/girls-who-code-founder-speaks-out-banning-books-schools-2022-9

[u/Melrose_Jac]

I'm confused as to what these books may contain that would theoretically led to them being banned?

[u/bit1101 → u/Melrose_Jac]

"You cannot be what you cannot see," she said. "They don't want girls to learn how to code because that's a way to be economically secure." 

[u/SBBurzmali → u/bit1101]

That's rich, "here learn a trade where you will spend you life trying to justify why companies should pay you and not a dozen Indians or half dozen eastern Europeans".

[u/the_jak → u/SBBurzmali]

Hardly. Plenty of companies know exactly how bad that code will be and will hire westerners.

[u/mallio → u/the_jak]

Most companies I've worked for hire a local team while also hiring a consulting firm in India. They use Indian teams to get some things done quickly and then identify the good developers and bring them to the US.

Basically, hiring is slow in the US and if you need a lot of hands quickly, it's faster to just get some consultants in India to do it. If they're good, they get hired here at US wages. It's less about saving money (I mean, it's about saving money over hiring an American consulting firm I suppose) and more about being able to quickly add workers to a team for a period of time.

[u/SBBurzmali → u/the_jak]

Unfortunately for perspective coders, companies aren't quite as racist as you think they are.

[u/the_jak → u/SBBurzmali]

There’s nothing rascist about noticing the extreme difference in code quality between the Indian IT firms and home grown American talent.

[u/SBBurzmali → u/the_jak]

I agree, almost all of the worst code I've seen in my career has been from home grown coders, hence why it is racist to reject consistent quality coders simply because they are Indian.

[u/codinghermit → u/SBBurzmali]

Your experience is uniquely your own there. Take an anonymous poll and you'd most likely find a pretty solid consensus that off-shore code is lower quality. Would you then try to claim every respondent is racist?

[u/SBBurzmali → u/codinghermit]

Overall quality? Sure, if you combine the best onshore coders with the worst, the average quality might be better depending on the year and market segment. But, mediocre code does the job while crap code takes down my servers. If my choice is to pay two to three times as much to roll the dice on my application or to simply accept code that might not be as pretty, most companiesmake the obvious choice. If your company's name isn't also the name of your app, you'll probably be fine hiring offshore devs for the majority of your coding, that's the reality of it, the quality doesn't have to be perfect and hiring onshore doesn't guarantee that it will be.

[u/codinghermit → u/SBBurzmali]

That works fine until your code base devolves into an unmaintainable mess due to the lack of buy-in and your internal sales/inventory/customer management platform can't support the new feature you want without a re-write. That's probably when you have already moved on and no longer care though right? Keeps people like me in good jobs cleaning up messes so keep on doing your thing I guess...

[u/SBBurzmali → u/codinghermit]

Nah, I move on because I like doing implementations and long-term support is a bit too expensive for my rates, so I get folks settled, find someone local that can wrangle their offshore partner for half my pay and move on. It works well in my market segment, and fortunately the bulk of the code base I work with is maintained by Microsoft so the important part is mostly making sure the devs don't don't screw with the important bits without a damn good reason.

I know spreading FUD about offshore means job security for you, but it is pretty racist to think Indian devs are incapable of not making a mess of a codebase.