Code.org Celebrates 10th Anniversary With Fond Memories of Its Viral 2013 Video

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares his perspective on the 10th anniversary of Code.org:

Remember this?' asks tech-backed Code.org on Twitter as it celebrates its achievements.... 'It's the viral video that launched Code.org back in 2013!' Code.org also reminds its 1M Twitter followers that What Most Schools Don't Teach starred tech leaders Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, and Drew Houston.

But 10 years later, the promise of unlimited tech jobs and crazy-fun workplaces promoted in the video by these Poster Boys for K-12 Computer Science hasn't exactly aged well, and may serve as more of a cautionary tale about hubris for some rather than evoke fond memories.

'Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,' exclaimed Zuckerberg in the video. But ten years later, Facebook's policy is firing as many employees as it can — 11,000+ and counting. Houston, who sang the praises of working in cool tech workplaces in the video ('To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible'), went on to make remote work the standard practice at Dropbox, cut 11% of his employees, and reported a $575M loss on unneeded office space. Under pressure, Gates left Microsoft, Dorsey left Twitter, and Hsieh tragically left (Amazon-owned) Zappos, and the companies they co-founded recently unveiled plans for massive layoffs and halted ambitious office expansion plans as tech employees push back on return-to-the-office edicts.

Still, there's no denying the success of what the National Science Foundation called the 'amazing marketing prowess' of tech giant supported and directed Code.org when it comes to pushing coding into American classrooms. The nonprofit boasts of having 80M+ student accounts, reported it had spent $74.7M to train 113,000+ K-12 teachers to deliver its K-12 CS curriculum, and has set its sights on making CS a high school graduation requirement in every state by 2030.

Interestingly, concomitant with Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration was the release of a new academic paper — Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship — that provocatively questions whether K-12 CS, at least in its current incarnation, is a feature or a bug. From the paper: 'We are currently seeing an unprecedented push of computing into P-12 education systems across the US, with calls for compulsory computing education and changes to graduation requirements....
Although computing creep narratives are typically framed in lofty democratic terms, the 'access' narrative is ultimately a corporate play. Broadening participation in computing serves corporate interests by offering an expanded labor supply from which to choose the most productive workers. It is true that this might benefit an elite subset of BIPOC individuals, but the macroeconomics of the global labor market mean that access to computing is unlikely to ever benefit BIPOC communities at scale. There are several nonprofits invested in the growth of computing, many with mission statements that do explicitly cite equity (and sometimes racial equity, in particular). Some of the larger nonprofits, though, are mainly funded by (and thus ultimately serve) corporate interests (e.g., Code. org).

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