Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2005 14:41:20 -0700
From: Norm Matloff <matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu>
To: Norm Matloff <matloff@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: why Johnnie can't...wait, hold on a minute

To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter

Enclosed are two articles on the recent results of the annual ACM Programming
Contest, an international collegiate event.  Their theme is that "Johnnie
can't program (anymore)," i.e. that American programmers are now not as good
as those of some other nations.  Of course, the industry lobbyists will use
this to excuse their importation of H-1Bs and exportation of work to
programmers abroad.

Since I am a strident opponent of the overhiring of H-1Bs and offshoring, I am
open to the charge that my dismissal of the theme of the two enclosed articles
is biased and defensive.  For that reason, I must point out that I have
dismissed programming contest results even when they were being used to
support views that I share on H-1B/offshoring.  Last August, the Lou Dobbs
Show ran a show on the Top Coder programming context.  The Indians didn't do
very well in that contest, and Dobbs tried to claim that that implied that
Indians must be poor programmers.  I objected strongly to that implication
(see my posting at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/DobbsTopCoder.txt).
Here are excerpts of my comments at the time:

   First, I've never put much stock in contests.  Some of you may recall
   that I am very critical of the Westinghouse (now Intel) high school
   science contest, which in my opinion became quite a sham over the
   years.
   
   And though what little I know about TopCoder indicates that the
   contest itself is pretty rigorous, a major problem is that the
   contestants are self-selecting.  The claim that the contestants in
   TopCoder are the only super-programmers in the world is laughably
   absurd.  And once it gets a bit of a reputation, it becomes something
   like the Olympics, manipulatable.  For example, I wouldn't be
   surprised if the governments of some countries are paying excellent
   programmers to participate, even though they may not have done so
   without the incentive.
   
   I guarantee you that if the Indian government decides to get its best
   programmers active in the contest, you'll see many more Indians do
   well in it.  

Having said that, I find the opening line in the first article enclosed below,
written by a Ed Frauenheim, a journalist I've generally admired, to be highly
irritating and irresponsible, just plain yellow journalism:

   In what could be an ominous sign for the U.S. tech industry, American
   universities slipped lower in an international programming contest.

The implication is that there is "something wrong" with the American
schools/students, or in short, "Johnnie can't program."

Statistically, there is no reason why the U.S. should dominate, or even be a
major player in, this contest like it used to.  There are bright computer
science students all over the world, and participation in the contest is way,
WAY up--it has more than QUADRUPLED in the last 10 years.  Over 3,800 teams
from around the world competed this year, compared to only 900 teams 10 years
ago.  It's not that the U.S. has "slipped," as claimed in the article, but
simply that the number of competitors has quadrupled.

There is then the additional factor that many of these countries, or
individual universities in those countries, are anxious to get the
publicity from doing well.  They thus may give their teams a subsidy,
say allowing them to take a reduced course load so as to engage in
regular practice.  But even without that, again statistically there is
no reason why the U.S. should be as prominent is this contest as it used
to be.

Granted, the point being made by the reporter is that the contest results show
that programming can be done all over the world, not just in the U.S., with
adverse implications for the jobs of American programmers.  But come on, no
one ever questioned that.  I can't recall ever seeing anyone who is critical
of offshoring (tech people, i.e. excluding Dobbs) say that we shouldn't send
software work offshore because people in other countries are incapable of
programming.  Instead, what we critics have been saying is that (a) offshore
development is bad for U.S. firms because communication problems etc. result
in serious project delays and other problems, and (b) a general offshoring of
professional work will undermine U.S. society, greatly reducing the size of
the middle class.

Even if the size of the competition had not quadrupled, it still would be
wrong for the reporter here to claim that the results of the contest indicate
that American schools/students are "slipping."  If one used the contest
results as a guide, Peking University and Tsinghua University, both considered
far stronger schools in China than Shanghai Jiaotong University, the winner
here (as well as in 2002), must be "slipping" too, since they didn't do as
well as SJTU.  Obviously, the contest is not a good measure of quality of the
university.

(I don't mean that the contest itself is meaningless, though.  It's a
good exercise, and I support ACM for having it.  Actually, many years
ago I served as a coach for a UCD team, which did pretty well.)

I had originally suspected that both of the articles below had arisen because
industry lobbyists had contacted them.  The articles quoted the same
people saying the same things, which seemed to be to much to ascribe to
coincidence.  But it turned out that the first article had come about because
the reporter had seen something about the contest results on the programmer
news site Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), and the second article had come about
because the reporter's editor had read the first article!

I apologize for so quickly suspecting that the articles were "plants."
I do have to fault both reporters, though, for only interviewing lobbyists
(and in the second reporter's case, for mainly interviewing the same people as
were quoted in the first article).

Speaking of lobbyists, here's something that the first reporter, Ed
Frauenheim, should have seen was fishy:

   The relatively poor showing of American students is a red flag about how 
   well the United States in general is doing in technology, compared with 
   its global rivals, said Jim Foley, chairman of the Computing Research 
   Association, a group made up of academic departments, research centers 
   and professional societies.
   
   "This confirms concerns expressed by the Computing Research Association 
   about the U.S.'s status in the worldwide race for technological 
   leadership," said Foley, who is also a professor in the College of 
   Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

First of all, Foley is indeed a lobbyist and the CRA is certainly a
lobbying organization.  As I've pointed out many times (including twice
this week, e.g. in http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ActionAct2.txt),
U.S. universities strive to research funding "empires."  They lobby to
increase the funding itself (mentioned in the article below), to
increase the number of foreign students who serve as cheap labor (also
mentioned below, as well as in my link earlier in this paragraph), to
expand the H-1B program (for reasons I've explained before), etc.  CRA
has been extremely active in pushing for all of these.  As they state on
their Web page, "CRA's mission is to strengthen research and advanced
education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and
minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the
importance of computing and computing research in our society."

Now, concerning Foley's remark, let's compare it to what he told the same
reporter, Frauenheim, just last September (see the article and my critique of
it at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CSAcadEstablishment.txt):

   CNET   News.com  recently  spoke  with  Foley  about  computer  science
   education,  the  flow of programming work offshore and how the computer
   science profession in America can weather the trend toward offshoring.
   ...
   Q:  Let  me  then  ask  about the offshoring issue, because a lot of
   people would  look  at it and say, "It doesn't make sense to get into
   computer science and then to become a programmer."
   
   Right.  It  does  not make sense to become a programmer. But there is a
   lot more to computer science and computing than programming, and that's
   part  of our challenge. There is this stereotypical image that computer
   science  education leads to heads-down programming jobs, and it's those
   heads-down,  isolated-from-the-problem  jobs  that  are  going  to some
   extent  offshore.  I  think  the  trend  of  pure programming jobs will
   continue  to  go  offshore,  because  in  many  ways, our computers and
   communications technologies enable that to happen.

So, last September Foley was saying programming is not a big deal, but
now suddenly he is saying that programming is nothing less than a
measure of a nation's mettle.  These lobbyists are never careful to be
consistent, nor is the press very careful in calling them on their
inconsistencies.

And of course when Foley said in September that "programming jobs will
continue to go offshore, because in many ways, our computers and
communications technologies enable that to happen," he was referring to
the fact that labor is much cheaper abroad (also mentioned by the
reporter in the article below).  He did NOT say the reason was that the
quality of programmers is better abroad, like he is implying now.  

Foley's hypocritical behavior really makes me ashamed to be an academic.

I've enclosed a second article below, from today's San Francisco
Chronicle.  There, Intel's Tracy Koon, their top lobbyist, once again
brings up the issue of science and math scores, as usual very
misleading.  As I (and others) have explained before, the fact that
American kids look only mediocre in international comparisons of math
and science scores, relative to kids in Asia, is that the U.S.  must
deal with a large and neglected underclass.  The test scores in states
like Utah, Iowa and Nebraska, which don't (yet) have a large underclass
population are similar to those of the top Asian countries.  (See David
Berliner, "Averages That Hide The True Extremes," Washington Post, Jan. 28, 
2001, http://courses.ed.asu.edu/berliner/readings/timssroped.html.) And by 
the way, the biggest offshoring countries, India and China, refuse to
participate in those international test comparisons.

Norm

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5659116.html?tag=nl.e539

U.S. slips lower in coding contest
By Ed Frauenheim, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: April 7, 2005, 2:04 PM PT

In what could be an ominous sign for the U.S. tech industry, American 
universities slipped lower in an international programming contest.

The University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of 
the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate 
Programming Contest, which concluded Thursday. That's the lowest ranking 
for the top-performing U.S. school in the 29-year history of the 
competition.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University of China took top honors this year, 
followed by Moscow State University and the St. Petersburg Institute of 
Fine Mechanics and Optics. Those results continued a gradual ascendance 
of Asian and East European schools during the past decade or so. A U.S. 
school hasn't won the world championship since 1997, when students at 
Harvey Mudd College achieved the honor.

"The U.S. used to dominate these kinds of programming Olympics," said 
David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery 
and a computer science professor at the University of California, 
Berkeley. "Now we're sort of falling behind."

The relatively poor showing of American students is a red flag about how 
well the United States in general is doing in technology, compared with 
its global rivals, said Jim Foley, chairman of the Computing Research 
Association, a group made up of academic departments, research centers 
and professional societies.

"This confirms concerns expressed by the Computing Research Association 
about the U.S.'s status in the worldwide race for technological 
leadership," said Foley, who is also a professor in the College of 
Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A number of developments in recent years suggest the world's tech 
leadership could shift from Silicon Valley and other U.S. locales to 
Asian nations such as China, Korea and India. One sign is the way 
American technology companies are conducting some of their research and 
development activities in Asia.

The U.S. educational system is another area of concern. Technology 
leaders, including Intel's Craig Barrett, have pointed to education woes 
as a major problem for the U.S. tech industry. Student interest in 
computer science departments in the United States has waned in the wake 
of the dot-com collapse and amid reports that companies are shipping 
some of their technology work to low-wage countries like India.

Also alarming to some is a dip in applications from international 
students to U.S. graduate schools.

Many observers have said that U.S. elementary and secondary schools 
should improve their ability to boost interest in technology, with 
proposed reforms ranging from higher pay for teachers to education tax 
credits that let parents pay for private-school tuition.

Other proposed steps to foster U.S. tech leadership include higher pay 
for positions in the field and more federal funding for computing research.

While those in the United States may be fretting over their tech future, 
some in China are celebrating. A photo on the Web site of the 
programming contest seems to show students from Shanghai Jiao Tong 
University tossing someone into the air in the wake of the school's 
victory.

San Francisco Chronicle 

American universities fall way behind in programming
Weakest result for U.S. in 29-year history of international technology
competition

Birgitta Forsberg, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, April 9, 2005

American  universities  --  once the dominant force in the information
technology  world  --  fell  far  down  the  ranks in a widely watched
international computer programming contest held this week.

The  University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of
the  Association  for  Computing  Machinery  International  Collegiate
Programming  Contest.  That's the weakest result for the United States
in the 29-year history of the competition.

This  year,  the  contest  was  held  in  Shanghai, where a home team,
Shanghai  Jiao  Tong University, won. Two Russian institutions, Moscow
State  University  and  St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and
Optics,  came in second and third. Canada saved North America's honor,
as Ontario's University of Waterloo took the No. 4 spot.

In one problem, contestants were asked to calculate the minimum number
of  cellular  base stations needed for a mobile phone to be moved from
one  city to another with no loss of reception. Competitors were given
a map with cities, roads and base stations.

Another  problem challenged contestants to determine how much sunlight
a Shanghai apartment management company could promise tenants on April
6, 2005. The students were provided information when the sun rises and
sets  on  that  date,  as  well  as  a  drawing  of  the buildings and
apartments.

Asian and Eastern European schools have been scoring increasingly well
in  the  world championship. A U.S. school hasn't won since 1997, when
students at Harvey Mudd College proved best.

"After  World  War II, the U.S. was ahead, as all other countries were
recovering  from  the  war," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David
Patterson,  the  association's  president. "We had a head start and we
were a leader by default. But now they have caught up with us."

Patterson  noted that, in many high-scoring countries, governments are
in  the  vanguard  of  technology research. In the 1970s and 1980s, he
said,  the  Defense  Department's  research  arm,  DARPA,  invested in
academic  research  and  supported  work in industrial centers such as
Xerox  PARC  and  Bell  Labs.  That  public/private cooperation helped
develop the personal computer and the Internet.

"When  there  is  more  and  more  competition  in the world, the U.S.
government is spending less on research than before," he said.

While  the  United States slips, China's technology skills are rising,
South Korea is the leader in broadband data transmission, and India is
becoming  the  world's programming hub. Europe, which also did well in
the  contest, is ahead of the United States in online mobile telephone
service.

"The educational system has done a demonstrably poor job of (teaching)
technical,  scientific  and  computing,"  said  Georgia  Institute  of
Technology   Professor  Jim  Foley,  chairman  of  Computing  Research
Association,  a group made up of academic departments, industrial labs
and professional societies.

Chip-making giant Intel says it is also worried.

"Our students in K-12 don't do well in international tests in math and
science. We have too few students entering degree programs in math and
science, " said Tracy Koon, director of corporate affairs.

"If you assume science and math drive innovation and innovation is the
soul of technology and technology drives a large part of the global of
economy -- and any particular nation's ability to be competitive -- we
have a problem."
  _________________________________________________________________

E-mail Birgitta Forsberg at bforsberg@sfchronicle.com.

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