(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Follow-up needed: Is Detroit at Work a complete failure? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-27 Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (D) shakes hands with a well-wisher at the 2017 Cinco de Mayo parade. A month ago, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (D) announced $100 million in “adult scholarships” to help the city’s residents overcome the obstacles that keep them out of work. The news outlets love these announcements of millions of dollars for such good causes. Here’s one from CBS News Detroit, and another from Fox 2 Detroit. But then there’s no follow-up. Are those $100 million doing anything? Do you know? I don’t. Neither CBS News Detroit nor Fox 2 Detroit nor any of the others are asking. In 2016, the Ralph C. Wilson Foundation gave $2 million to train Detroiters for software developer jobs. Crain’s Detroit Business was just one of several to have articles about that, and now those articles are all behind the paywall, for subscribers only. After all these years, there has never been any follow-up on the Wilson Foundation grant. Did anyone go through the program? Maybe one white guy… The $100 million that Duggan was talking about comes from the America Rescue Plan signed into law by President Joe Biden. The president and Congress have done their part. Now it’s up to state and local governments to use these federal funds to accomplish the plan’s goal. And I worry that in Detroit it has been a complete failure. Detroit at Work is the agency in Detroit charged with administering these “adult scholarships.” They have a confusing and hard to read guide detailing all the programs that are available. If you visit one of the Detroit at Work offices, they’ll give you dozens of loose sheets of paper outlining various programs that are available. But they don’t give you any help understanding any of those. I noticed a program for Detroiters to get Oracle certifications (Oracle is the company that bought Java from Sun Microsystems). But the Java programmers working in Detroit, whatever their race, none of them have Oracle certifications, and none of the job postings list Oracle certifications as a required or preferred qualification. The big hang-up is professional experience. If no one has paid you to be a programmer, you must not be any good. But if you’ve worked for even just four months getting paid a software developer salary, recruiters will sniff you like dogs around a fire hydrant. Somehow white men always overcome that chicken and egg paradox of needing experience to get experience. And a few blacks and maybe two Latinas for whom their hard work has somehow managed to line up with their luck. Detroit has a crisis of wasted black and Latino talent for software development. Men and women who understand Java backwards and forwards, lacking only a little knowledge about certain practical details that they could easily be taught in a week or two of onboarding. I have met several of these men and women. For example, this one black guy, call him “Reshawn.” Last I heard, he’s still an elevator operator at a sports arena, and he says he’s good at that job, and I believe him. But I do know for a fact that he’s very good at Java. So it makes me angry when I hear white men who’ve founded startups complain about how difficult it is to find good developers. But if Reshawn showed up before them, they’d dismiss him without giving him the slightest opportunity to show what he can do. Don’t tell me that every one of the white male mediocrities who graduates from Grand Circus hits the ground running, because they can’t, no one can. There’s too much stuff being built up on top of other stuff that is just slightly different enough to be hard to learn. Some of those white men are entitled with no idea of how much they’ve gotten for free just for being white men. Anyone who dares complain about the racism in this industry is inevitably told about the very few examples of blacks and one Latina who have made it through, as if that somehow proves that racism no longer exists. I’ve talked to that one Latina on the phone, let’s call her “Luz-Maria.” You see, Luz-Maria was rejected by Grand Circus at first. Then she worked a soul-crushing job at a certain Fortune 500 company and all of a sudden she was good enough for Grand Circus. Now she’s living up to her potential as a professional software developer. How do blacks and Latinos go about getting those soul-crushing jobs in the first place? But more importantly, why should they even have to? Mediocre white men are not forced to go through that first. And yeah, there are white men who suffer. This one white guy, call him “Connor,” he’s very good at JavaScript, React and all that front-end stuff. But he’s only four feet tall. That’s the only explanation I have for the rejections he got at first, when taller and less skilled white men got jobs while he was passed over. Connor suffered for almost six months. Reshawn, who is much taller than Connor, has been suffering for six years and he’s still suffering with no path to live up to his potential as a software developer. I worry about Reshawn. I’m not worried about men like Connor. They just need to wait six months from graduation. I wish there was a company that would give applicants like Reshawn a fair and honest shot for software developer jobs. Instead of having applicants do some insultingly easy exercise like FizzBuzz by themselves, the interview process would start with a pair assessment in test-driven development (TDD) with something non-trivial of actual practical importance, like some kind of data structure. Because that way, the interviewer is invested in the applicant making something that compiles and runs, and the applicant gets to show that he or she can figure things out in the spot through TDD. And this company would be proactively equal opportunity. Other than that, this company would be no different than the software consulting companies that already exist in Detroit. How do I put that into an appealing business plan? Would a venture capitalist be the least bit swayed by such a proposal? There is money laying around that can be used for my idea, and for other ideas. If not from the American Rescue Plan, maybe from Detroit’s budget surplus, or from the Detroit pension money earmarked for venture capital. The news outlets need to follow up and ask if the money Duggan announced is doing what he said it would do, or if it’s just sitting in a bank account earning interest. I have talked to Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago Romero (District 6) about this, and she listens to me like she’s thinking about something else. “Did I forget to charge my phone? I think I have a charger in my car. Or maybe I should ask Laura for her charger...” People like Reshawn urgently need help, and Detroit at Work is failing them. Maybe he’ll get help when it’s too late, if at all. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155270/-Follow-up-needed-Is-Detroit-at-Work-a-complete-failure Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/