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Science and Engineering Workforce Has Stalled In the US
dcblogs writes "The science and engineering workforce in the U.S. has flatlined, according to the Population Reference Bureau. As a percentage of the total labor force, S&E workers accounted for 4.9% of the workforce in 2010, a slight decline from the three previous years when these workers accounted for 5% of the workforce. That percentage has been essentially flat for the past decade. In 2000, it stood at 5.3%. The reasons for this trend aren't clear, but one factor may be retirements. S&E workers who are 55 and older accounted for 13% of this workforce in 2005; they accounted for 18% in 2010. 'This might imply that there aren't enough young people entering the S&E labor force,' said one research analyst."
Arrr, a shit storms a brewin!
The more that business sends that kind of work offshore, the less interested people will be in having the rug pulled out from under them in the Holy and Unquestionable name of Global Competitiveness.
You want to get people interested in science & engineering? Kill all the guest worker programs, prioritize citizens over internationals for university slots, and start working with business to guarantee long-term work to attract people back.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So, after a lifetime of watching older members of the science and engineering community get outsourced, downsized, run ragged, and generally mistreated by their employers, young people don't want to sign up for the same thing?
Good for them. Maybe the kids today are smarter than we thought.
--saint
Why would young people enter science and engineering when they can go into management and finance? Then they can take the credit and pay that would have been taken from them if they had gone into STEM.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What they should say is that there aren't enough people willing to work very hard for a an ever shrinking piece of the pie. What do they expect researchers to do when they keep cutting basic science funding? The numbers are terrible right now. Something like 10% of those with new Phd's that apply for a grant actually get it. Who in their right mind would get a Phd for a 10% chance of getting funding? They apparently expect Phd's to be happy to work indefinitely as a post-doc for 30K a year. This trend is very similar for recent engineering graduates.
Could it be that there's more money and less stress in going into a different career than science/engineering? Who would have thought?
Maybe if donations to universities went to beefing up outdated science & engineering departments instead of athletes, it might "trickle up" to the real world. But that's just crazy.
The data might not mean there is an outright shortage of S&E workers; it could indicate a combination of factors related to such things as the recession and offshoring.
This suprises anyone?
The other thing that happened since 2000 was 9/11 and all our immigration hysteria. I'd wager that fewer foreign tech students stick around after graduation. I know at my company work visas and green cards are harder to come by than they were in the 90s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As a young engineer myself, the good part of the story is that there will be more promotion possibilities because the older workers are retiring. The bad part is that the reason for the decline is the loss of job security and pay that barely pays the school loans and isn't matching inflation most times makes S&E a somewhat risky career path.
It's funny reading all the responses saying "It's obvious"... and then each response gives a different cause.
If I knew then what I know now, I would probably not have gone into electrical engineering out of fear of offshoring. Thus far it hasn't completed killed engineering in the USA, but it has certainly made a big dent. But I don't know that the majority of young engineers know to even fear that...
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
Because iPod are designed by hippies instead of engineers, am I right?
I would love to see how you can load music and podcast onto an iPod without a computer or the internet.
[sarcasm]Meanwhile, quants working on Wall Street to separate investors from their 401(k) funds have grown by 20%.[/sarcasm]
Seriously, look at the number of engineering grads going to work on Wall Street vs. actual engineering companies. You might be surprised.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
I blame education for this.
One one hand you tell students they will be sucessful if they get a college degree (any college degree).
On the other hand you have colleges marketing easy-and-fun degree programs with very low market demand for those degrees.
The net result is a crop of students with a pile of debt and a Masters degree in Basket-Weaving which isn't necessary in the real world.
Isn't this inherently what happens with higher technology? As technology increases, you can get more done with fewer man-hours of labor (e.g., concentrating IT in cloud-like service centers and so forth). It's not like we're socialists who use this to give everyone a dividend in more pay, or less hours per week. Instead, we hire fewer people, and the business world considers that to be a good thing.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I typically get the feeling the young are stuck between a rock and a hard place for STEM careers. On the one hand we are told over and over that these are important jobs. But then when you go to apply for them, you are told you are too young and need more experience and can't hire you. "Well, can you train me?" "No, you just have to get experience, or go back to school." So you go back to school, and they tell you "Well we don't do job training, our focus is how to *think* and learn the principles needed. Go get a job if you want experience." And so you end up in a bizarre catch-22 where everyone expects you to know everything at a young age, but no one is willing to provide the training you need to get there. It's as if they think scientists grow on trees and you just wait for them to ripen and apply for a job, with their analytical skills and knowledge fully formed. Maybe that was possible in some sense during the baby boom, when it was also more patriotic to go into a STEM field to fight the commies, but today you have to work for it and provide incentives. There are less people for each job, not more.
Either these are important jobs employers need to support more (with leniency on the expectations of youth, pair them up with an older mentor, on-job training, etc), or they aren't. Suck it up and pay for it instead of whining. But I am tired of the limbo these fields leave many younger people floating in.
That is the most bizarre set of stats i've ever read....
I cant understand why they would think the PERCENTAGE of the workforce for s&e would be on the increase? That just baffles me.
Its like, checkout people, the number you have is dependent on the number of retail places around, which is dependant on the population, and hence its probably always going to be relatively fixed (as a percentage). At the moment, that might be on the decrease cause of automated human-less checkouts, but the driving force behind checkout people is the size of your population.
I cant think of anything in the last decade that would propel more ppl (as a percentage) to enter either science or engineering. Any factor that might cause it is probably going to be offset by something else, ultimately if everyone started getting into science and engineering, who's gunna be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, etc etc.
How that even begins to relate to "less innovation" baffles me even more because 5% of the population is a considerable number of people and innovation itself tends to be sporadic and driven by individuals (and then implemented by large armies of kill robots). Ultimately even 5% is an ever increasing number of people (given population growth).
I keep looking at the clock wondering if its april 1st, cause I really cant understand how they think "Ideally, the S&E workforce -- it numbers more than 7.6 million workers -- would be expanding as a percentage of the labor force. That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers." is a remotely valid assumption. Again, given population growth, "That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers" that is actually happening if your holding at 5%.
Truly bizarre, its like someone misunderstood the different between what a percentage is and an absolute figure.
It has nothing to do with the number of people entering these fields. It's the number of jobs that companies are removing from these fields. They cut staff and tell those remaining that they have to work another 20hrs/wk to cover the workload.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
While the workforce stays flat, the demand continues to increase - with science and technology solutions providing more and more of the services and goods we require. So the actual effect of a flat workforce is enhanced by the increasing demand for such skills for even the most rudimentary jobs.
My town is home to the base facilities for eight of the Mauna Kea Observatories, and we're looking at the Thirty Meter Telescope in the near future as well. Needless to say, there are pretty much always job openings for engineers, technicians, and PhDs. The catch? We're on an island, and some people get tired of that.
So Science Education/Public Outreach (SE/PO) is a part of life here. Pushing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) as good ways to make a better-than-average living is a part of life here. The scientists take over the local mall one day every spring. In late January, we take over the University for a "science day" in honor of Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka, for kids in grades 3-8, and NASA sends an astronaut each year. And around late February or early March, there's Journey Through The Universe.
I'm actually about to head to a nearby school to spend an hour talking about science careers to a classroom of 7th-graders, so I'm getting a real kick out of this article showing up right now. The other 9 classes I'm visiting over next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are a bit younger - grades 1-3. The idea, though, is that from Kindergarten on, kids here are meeting real live people who work in science at observatories or other "famous science places" every year and are being encouraged to stay in school, take classes about STEM, look at college majors in STEM, and become qualified for those good jobs, so that we can hire people who are from here and would love to stay here.
Last year, I was told about one of the first success stories - a guy who was in 7th grade when they started visiting classes, and as a result of what he heard over the years, had picked a STEM major at the local university, and was now going to accompany a scientist to classes as a "community ambassador" sort of person.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
We are educating kids to be users of technology, but not developers or inventors. Every time I've taken a computer or a disk drive or other electronics apart for a demonstration to the Scouts or just kids, they are always amazed. They are never taught beyond a mouse click. A lot of kids coming out of college are no better these days. Another problem is that in our zeal to bring girls into higher education, we are losing boys - those who would be most interested in engineering ( see Carpe Diem website archives for all the graphs and tables on subject preferences, Prof J does a great job of laying that argument out from high school on ).
This is an excuse to open the doors to more immigration to bring in cheap technical labour.
There is no technical shortage. Just a shortage of highly-skilled qualified people willing to work for minimal wages.
I saw recently an article in one of the local newspapers that indicated that 4,000 engineering graduates were being produced per year in Canada, 10,000 engineers per year were being brought in via immigration and only 1,000 new engineering jobs created per year, thus 13,000 engineers per year are unhappy and either unemployed or employed/under-employed in jobs outside of the field.
Add in government grants that pay 50% of the salary for non-citizen visible minority engineers, why would anybody hire a Canadian educated engineer except for when they come straight out of school?
The constant mantra of the sky is falling because we have no engineers is an old story and is used to bring in more engineers via immigration and thus deflate the average income for engineers. The problem is that governments keep on falling for this ruse.
The basic issue is a disrespect for the skills of engineers and desire to turn them into a disposable cog in a company to maximize short-term profits.
I know dozens of highly qualified engineers with 20+ years of experience that are underemployed, or unemployed or working in other fields because they cannot even get an interview nevermind a job.
The media & governments fall for this ruse over and over.
My two-cents
The kids today are experiencing an uphill battle. I remember 20 years ago having a discussion with the guys I worked for about the total lack of young workers in our workplace. I was doing communications install and maintenance for a large electrical utility company. The problem for the young workers, as we saw it, was the requirement for a very diverse experience background. Microwave radio, UHF, VHF radio, fiber optic, RTUs, computers, phone switches, DACs, mux, and much more. The employer wants to hire work ready people and are afraid that if they expend money to train a young worker the young worker will bail as soon as he finds a better offer. It's a trap. No experience, no job. No job, no experience.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Really? You think guys?
Then why is it that despite me having tons of technical work experience, a CS degree, and an extensive background in Graphic Design, I can't even land a simple UI designer job that pays enough to repay my student loans and pay rent at the same time? In a big-10 college town with a pretty big tech industry?
Perhaps it's because instead of R&D and progress, we're focused on blowing up brown people and stealing their oil? Perhaps the same reasons why NASA is woefully underfunded, and yet the DOD has a few billion to throw at missile research?
FUCK this country. It used to be great, now it's just a slowly-fermenting pile of excrement.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Malpractice insurance goes for upwards 100,000 per year. The New Yorker reported it (2006) at 265,000 per year.
I think it's a little more complex than that. The immigration hysteria has mostly been about illegal immigrants, i.e. people from south of the border with no skills at all besides picking fruit and who don't speak English, not people from Asia with college degrees and tech skills who speak good English.
Instead, more important factors are that a lot of industry is going to Asia (China and India specifically, plus other countries like Thailand) where these foreign students come from. Where industry goes, so do the engineers, and since these kids come from there anyway, it makes perfect sense they'd want to go back there.
Put yourself in their shoes: suppose we're in an alternate universe and the USA (presuming that's where you're from) was a 3rd-world country all along, but you were smart and you went to China (a giant world power and leader in technology) to get an education as an engineer. When you're done, perhaps you even work there for a few years to get experience. But China's moving all their manufacturing to the USA because the labor there is so cheap, and the US economy is rising dramatically as a result, while China's is stagnating badly. So do you want to stay in China, where you don't speak the language that well, you're an outsider, and you're living in an alien culture, making very good money but the cost of living is high? Or would you rather move back home, get a job paying half as much, but because of the low cost-of-living this much money lets you live like a king, with a servant or two, and you're in your own culture around your own countrymen you grew up with? I think the answer is obvious. The only reason these people were coming here was because of jobs and money. As the job opportunities got much better back home, they just went back there.
The article says the reasons aren't certain, but my experience doing technical interviews for my employer seems to point to a possible cause -- perceived lack of stable career prospects.
My background: I work for a medium to large IT company doing systems integration -- code for "troubleshooter, lab rat, make-stuff-work-in-the-face-of-no-documentation person." For a person with the right temperament and skills, it's a very fun job. However, whenever we go out looking for new team members, we get back lots of less-than-qualified people. I'm not talking about qualities like "experts in 4 different operating platforms, genius-level coding skills, etc." -- I'm talking more along the lines of "communicates well, writes clear documentation, and has logical thinking skills." Everything else is trainable in my mind, but if you don't have the engineer/tinkerer/figure-it-out-without-help mindset, you can't do this job well. And oh yes, the pay is decent, and the job is stable if you're good at it and contributing excellent work.
The only problem is that we're in the NYC area, and so is the finance industry. Anecdotal evidence from my colleagues in finance states that any new college grad who is remotely good at science, math and engineering is going into finance or business. Unfortunately for us, that's probably a rational choice given the current employment climate. When you turn 21 or so and are faced with constant talk of outsourcing/offshoring, companies living with a skeleton crew because they don't want to hire and add to costs on one side, and see in finance/business an easy and very lucrative job market, what would you pick? Go back a couple of years before that...and compare the STEM students working in the lab/studying all the time with the business/psychology/communications majors partying 24/7 and coming out ahead of the game in terms of compensation and ease of work. Then, you really start to see what's wrong.
One other problem is the outsourcing/offshoring of routine IT work. Some of the jobs that us IT veterans got our start in are way less accessible than before. I started in tech support/help desk, and it was the best training for dealing with angry users and calmly troubleshooting a problem without changing 100 things. Now, those help desk jobs are overseas or at one of three or four huge IT service providers. So, strike two -- uncertain future employment/compensation prospects, lack of entry-level positions to learn the business...what else is stacked against us?
Personally, I still see a need for *good, competent* engineering talent. Even though most companies and products now are just marketing, flash and repackaging of old technology, someone has to come up with the next neat thing. (Or in my case, someone has to make the 45 neat new things that all got mashed into our software/systems work together.) The problem is that business hs to either start signaling that they really do want and pay for talent, or we won't have replacements for all the people who are slated to retire soon.
Keep on insulting smart people with nasty names like dork and nerd... and this will drop to 0% in no time...
Raise the benefit & liability requirements to the same level as FTE. Once all parties except the worker share liability and benefit costs for temporary work, multiplied over the number of middlemen as well as being inversely proportional to the length of the work (with the option to reward lower skill level entry)** one can then kill that abuse.
** - i.e. it would reward people who go on directly hired, lifetime employment with one or a few employers over being a one-night-stand contractor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...of the fall of Rome. You better watch out though because the dying body of this beast is still going to kick and flail for another 20-50 years. You don't want to be in the way.
Silence is a state of mime.
First it was manufacturing, next IT, next Software Development, now science and engineering. The government wonders why the economy is in the shitter. It's called globalization. Outsourcing sucks. Corporations are cutting the domestic workforce, and they wonder why their products are not selling. We gotta take industry back and reward US companies that design, and build their products here. Screw this globalization shit.
Nobody wants to go into these jobs because they require you to be able to think. And of course since the GOAL of Public Education for the last 20 years has been to prevent the student from thinking of course we are running low on young thinkers.
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One issue is the large "winnowing out" of STEM majors in college:
Among students who majored in liberal arts, business or other fields, 73% of white students and about 63% of black and Latino students finished their degrees in five years.
Forty-one percent of American students who start off majoring in science, math, engineering or technology fields graduate from those programs within six years.
The question is whether this "winnowing" is due to lack of preparation of the students before college, or simply a non-educational strategy of signaling that the students who "survive" are of high quality, in which case the institution should consider not calling itself a "higher learning" institution but a "better signaling" institution.
Students in general are choosing non-STEM majors. Top US graduating majors are 1) Business 2) Social sciences and history 3) Health professions and related clinical sciences 4) Education 5) Psychology 6) Visual and performing arts.
I feel pretty bad for anyone who took out loans for majors #2 or #6 and think they can pay them back...#5 will have a rough time as well. Education doesn't pay well on day 1, but if you can stick it out for 10 years and sneak a graduate degree you can do OK, depending on your union contract.
One other issue is that while more women than men are now attending college (57% women/43% men), women are even more likely to choose non-STEM majors. In Business, the female/male ratio is nearly 50/50, but in the #2 top major group of Social Sciences, it is 64/36 in favor of women. In #3 Health, it is 76/24. In #4 Education, it is 77/23.
In CS the female/male ratio is 30/70, in Engineering it is 17/83.
Physical sciences are closer to even (47/53) while Math is slightly more female (58/48).
Its all part of the attitude in the U.S. towards S&E, leading to a transition from a design-and-manufacturing powerhouse to a fully dumbed-down service-oriented economy. Would you like fries with that?
"Oh golly, Yes!" They must be thinking. "Let me work for an engineering degree so I can compete with someone making $8/hr. in the Philippines and be laid off by the time I'm 50 because I'm "too expensive" and my skills are "obsolete" according to a bean counter and an upper management ignoramus who knows nothing about my industry or what I do."
Sure! Why, I bet the kids are just lining up for that "opportunity." That bed has been made by American corporations. Unfortunately, we must all lie in it.
The USA and its wealth are being harvested by an international elite who don't give a rat's ass about the USA or any other nation state. Nobody with power/money has any interest in having a strong, stable middle class in the USA. The best skill set for a young person with a passion for engineering is the ability to speak Chinese or Hindi and the skill set to acquire permanent working status in China or India, where at least the cost of living is more in line with salaries.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
We've really created a hostile environment for anyone wanting to study science as a kid.
Can't give your kid a chemistry set, those don't exist. Can't buy chemicals, you might be making a bomb.
For several years (after 9/11) you couldn't buy a model rocket engine, 'cause of course you could use it for terrorism somehow.
Until recently you couldn't build a UAV. Well, you could build it, but flying it was illegal.
Students are arrested if they bring electronics projects to school (Can't find the link, remember reading about this).
Having canning jars and a bag of fertilizer in your car can get you arrested for having bomb-making materials.
Taking apart a smoke detector (and using it to demonstrate alpha radiation) is a "grievous offense" (actual NRC term) and can get you raided and have *all* your lab equipment taken away.
Your hackerspace will be shut down instead of "given 30 days for compliance" as would be the case for a company.
Really... what's left? Mathematics? I'm surprised that we have *any* young people interested in science ATM. We make it nigh impossible and come down hard on them when they do.
A high school graduate can earn $45,000 working as an assistant manager at a local gas station or restaurant. They could spend 4+ years working hard to get a degree in engineering or science, owe $100,000+ afterward, and earn a starting pay of maybe $55,000. Long term, top pay for a manager anywhere is higher. Why bother with engineering or science? Average pay for science and engineering jobs has been largely stagnant for the last 20 years. While many science and engineering jobs have moved outside the US, workers from other countries have moved to the US, all driving down salaries. Now add that long term research is pretty much gone in the US and even research labs compete for what they can turn out in the next six months.
I was recently in a room with 10 Chinese students, 3 Americans, and 1 Japanese Professor.
He asked the Chinese students if they were going to stay in America or go back to China. After they all said they were going to go back to China he goes on to talk about how 15 years ago everyone would have stayed in America but times are changing. He spoke along the lines of exactly what is in this post.
The EE department at my school is about 95% foreign and ~60% are from China.
I see this is as one of the biggest problems our country faces going forward. Our best schools are teaching people who go work in other countries...
Guest workers are used for knowledge transfer, where said workers go back to their home nation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Even if someone decides to enter S&E career fields, there are very few real jobs offered by real employers -- it is much easier to use "this gun is for hire" contractors that you can REALLY abuse and dump with few consequences.
Contractors are used with great success appropriately. My father contracted out to a number of contractors the company could never justify having full-time, to do specialist work, which is the whole point. For example - a guy who knew CCDs inside and out. Another specialized in PCB layout, generating boards my father (an EE for decades, no stranger to PCB layout) described as "art."
All these guys were well compensated for their work and in some cases had more work than they could handle. So, if you're a programmer - find something that you think has a market which interests you and you're highly qualified in, hone your skills, and market yourself. You will never be able to be a contractor as a Java programmer - you're a total commodity.
If you want to talk about inappropriate use of contractors...well, the IRS has been cracking down on companies that use contractor status to avoid payroll taxes and benefits. My state has been, too.
Please help metamoderate.
The US has a very disturbed economic situation. One side of capitalism is that it can be a disease in which all good things are cannibalised in the name of profits. Combine that with a recession where money is hard to take in to begin with and you are setting up a tragedy. Then we have the guest worker problem. Underneath that resides another issue that will really upset a lot of people. Foreign engineers and science graduates have managed to survive in a climate that is hostile to humanity in general and excessively demanding in education. I am far from convinced that the best American scholars can function at the same level as many scholars from Asia, India, china or the smaller nations on the Pacific rim. Also we have some serious scholars that have emerged from the iron curtain nations in Europe as well. And despite the fact that one can stand with one foot in the US and one foot in Canada I have seen output from Canadians that looked superior to anything I have seen in American students. Then we have another cultural obstacle as well. The most educated are rarely on the boards or upper management positions in American companies. We seem to have a cultural distaste for the well educated and want corporate leaders more like the common folk. That somewhat explains why a brilliant young engineer in a firm from Burma might be seen as some sort of odd egg head that we can make money on but not as a real human being. It can get pretty ugly at times.
I think it's a little more complex than that. The immigration hysteria has mostly been about illegal immigrants, i.e. people from south of the border with no skills at all besides picking fruit and who don't speak English, not people from Asia with college degrees and tech skills who speak good English.
Wrong!
I was one of the last few people who managed to come from GERMANY to Sillicon Valley on a H1B visa back in the 90es.
I would say that i speak the language here pretty fluently, and have several graduate degrees. I admit, i DO pick fruit in my backyard, but only recreationally.
Still, my Greencard process took a total of 7 years (filed right before 9/11, YAY!)
Since then, I have worked with several high tech, talented people, and - my colleagues from Germany largely don't want to move to the US of A anymore, and are even annoyed by many of the things they undergo to come here for business trips.
I have also worked with a team from Brazil, and wanted to hire their top engineer (MS/CS, fluent english, on track to senior management).
I tried to convince him to move to the Valley, and work for a billion dollar company.
Even with the resources of a huge company, it was impossible to get a timely visa for him, and after "pending" in the queue for 10 months, his wife pulled the plug and decided she doesnt want to come and live here anyways, since she (who is a MD in Brazil) couldnt practice here, and she also didnt want to subject her children to american school system.
YAY, way to go. each one of my friends who has been strung along and finally gave up would have held down a top paying job here in the high tech industry, and payed taxes and created jobs.
YES, foreigners CREATE jobs in the USA, they don't take them away.
Dont believe me - well, look at some russian immigrant who founded a small company called Google.
Or this Vinod guy, who is the #1 VC, Khosla Ventures who co-founded SUN (together with Bill Joy a German, and
So, yes - i DO believe that the US immigration policy has thrown out the baby WITH the bath water.
Overall, there USED to come more highly talented people INTO the US.
Those were the ones who actually FOLLOWED the laws, which were now tightened up unreasonably.
The others, who come here illegally - well, do you REALLY think the immigration laws affect them? seriously?
There's a reason they are called ILLEGAL.
It's now almost impossible to transfer good workers from abroad into the US. The criteria have changed so much that our company has basically stopped doing that except for higher level managers. It used to cost about $70k-$100k to get an Engineer into the US on a work visa but the cost and time involved has ballooned so much that it's no longer considered cost efficient by my employer. I saw a memo to that extent a few years ago.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
That, combined with the college/student loan bubble. S&E students tend to be, well, intelligent. The combination of outsourcing concerns, college costs vastly exceeding inflation (which any intelligent middle/high schooler witnessed during those years), college costs more or less exceeding what one could realistically pull in with employment, and the fact that there's no way out of student loans that didn't produce return on investment would scare away plenty of people with the natural talent needed for S&E. These people may seek out other fields that can be entered through different means, finding other means to make it.
Those who simply equate college=more money and don't THINK, often go into unprofitable majors, don't work part of it off and leave their four year with five figures of debt, or worse. Incidentally, their burden on the demand is responsible for scaring away those who would otherwise get into profitable S&E fields.
At the risk of getting too political, we have deep inlaid problems that will take years if not decades for the masses to finally pick up on...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
I see it as being great that China offshores its education system.
Nullius in verba
Wages are low, work is hard, college for these degrees is hard, and job security in general is all but a punchline but especially painful when you are uber specialized. You are smarter to get a more mobile degree like business, as it is also easier and anecdotally it has a much higher wage ceiling than science and engineering.
Not that I'm jaded or anything...
Also think about education, India and China have been pumping money into engineering and science degrees for the past 20 years and general push people to go abroad to study and work. Its not a surprise that they have more volume but that doesn't always equate to better works just as in the US that hasn't been pushing as much money into higher degrees. We probably have the same percentage of really good workers compared to overall graduates of higher levels but when you have more graduates, you have more physical people that can do a better job. Dealing with physical people nominal data in forms of percentages doesn't work as well to compare number of people that can fill the 2+ million jobs that are needed in the Tech industry. Also take a look at the rankings for the OEDC countries on education standards and see where we are. I have not had a problem getting a job in US over the past 5 years and my salary has over doubled in the past three years with a computer science degree. You just have to be good at what you do.
Nothing says the US can use its top-of-the-world position to bring it back to a more manageable US/UK/Western EU/Australia alliance.
Why should globalization mean that the developed world guts itself, sending the bits that made the country developed to some hellhole?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Our best schools are teaching people who go work in other countries...
That's because most of the work is in other countries.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
When I was in Engineering school, 20 years ago, the freshman class was bigger then the rest of the school.
There were more freshman then sophomores, juniors, seniors, grad students, faculty and staff combined.
It typically cleared out in the first month. Lots of new CS and business majors.
I don't expect this has changed much.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not just because of the H1Bs. Read about recent IBM layoffs of US workers.
Face reality, tech companies are offshoring US jobs, and inshoring visa workers, and fast as they possibly can. There is no sign that US employers will ever let up.
Unemployment of US STEM workers is way up, and salaries are down.
For US workers, avoiding STEM careers should be a no brainer.
We would our kids study to develop techs, when US employers are throwing US tech developers under the bus?
Offshore workers are cheaper. Who wants to compete with third world wages?
That is such a shame. We should be doing everything we can to make it simple for the rest of the world's best and brightest to live here. If you have a certain resume and pass some simple financial tests, your work visa should be nearly automatic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
STEM is being offshored, and inshored, to death.
There is no way to stop it. All we can do is avoid STEM.
I have a friend, who was a former coworker at an experimental aircraft design firm, with advanced degrees in Aerospace Engineering (summa cum laude) and Mathematics. He unloads boxes from trucks at Target.
Anybody can see where this is heading. US employers do want to hire US STEM workers - period.
US workers would have to be flat-out stupid to want to compete with third world wages.
There are some good jobs left, that is true, but anybody can see the situation is going downhill fast for US STEM workers.
I am a PhD educated biotech/nanotech specialist and I currently would be happy is someone offered me a 50k salary. I actually did the PhD in one of the major US groups. Coming to the US and getting a PhD was a big mistake for me.
unemployed.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3213663920916963027 ..
Watch HDnet, Dan Rather report "No Thanks for Everything."
Also watch "Stolen Jobs"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3213663920916963027 ..
Who are either unemployed, or not working in engineering.
Maybe all US techies are stupid? That would explain why the US practically invented the entire IT industry. And what the US did not invent came from Europe.
India and China (where all new techies are coming from) have not been known for technology innovation for several centuries, at least.
Funny how all the "best and brightest" come from countries where people earn about $2 a day.
Very well writen post, thank you.
It's nice to know that somebody gets it.
Only people who come from third world countries - countries which are known for cheap labor, and not known for technology innovation - qualify as "best and brightest."
Sorry but don't need engineers or scientists. We need more insurance salesmen and bankers. America isn't a 'make stuff' country so we don't need people who make stuff.
. . . you're not advertising what the pay is. And just because you have "job openings" doesn't mean you have actual jobs (rather than idle wishlists of technology skills), nor does it mean you have jobs that pay a living wage. So save all the leg work trying to sell kids on jobs that aren't observably "successful"; just update your listings to be something better than the generic HR copy that it is now.
From what I heard from other contractors, they went into military contracting because there wasn't any competition for jobs with graduates from developing world countries.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Not only all that, but how do you predict what's going to be the next killer skill that'll be in hot demand?
If you think that's going to continue indefinitely, then you're a fool. China is famous for sending people abroad to learn about things, then having them come home and start teaching other Chinese so they can be self-sufficient. They do this with everything, especially manufacturing: if they want to spend a bunch of money on something like high-speed rail, they'll pay for the first units to be made by the foreign company, with the stipulation that they'll help set up a mfg plant in China and train people there to do subsequent work.
"...not put in a new medical school for over 30 years..."
What about this at Univ. of Central Florida? http://med.ucf.edu/about/
Don't forget the Hungarian guy who cofounded Intel, the world's premier chipmaker.
As for immigration laws affecting illegal workers, it depends on the worker. There's a giant difference between someone doing landscaping work for cash and living in the barrio somewhere, and someone working for a big company making $100k+. You don't need proper documentation to get paid cash for landscaping, but you do to get a job at anyplace that has a real HR department.
I'm not disagreeing that our immigration laws are bad, but I don't think that's the primary reason that foreign students are going back home. It's because they like home better, and there's lots of jobs there. Honestly, all things being equal, would you rather live in Germany around your own people, or in the US around a bunch of ugly Americans? If your answer is the latter, then you're an exception: most people like to stay in the culture they grew up in. They only move to other places because they feel forced to, by lack of jobs, political repression, religious persecution, etc.
The issue is not lack of qualified people, but lack of good jobs and opportunities for the qualified people. More people will get advanced degrees if that would guarantee a solid financial outcome with a balanced lifestyle. Today, in America, no training can guarantee both of these. If you are lucky, you can make some money, but chances are your life will be your job. Forget about been able to live without stress, or having a balanced family life.
Why would I want to pay an American 40k fresh out of college with no experience + 40k in healthcare costs +20k taxes, OSHA, and other regulatory hidden costs, when I can hire a Chinese for $8,000 a year, no taxes, and no health care costs. I can abuse and force them to live on campus and make them work 70 hour a weeks and they will glady do so without complaining. Wahoo!
Plus they work where the manufactoring and R&D and everything else which is already in China.
I get a nice bonus and a 6,000 square foot home I do not need and a porshce to screw over other Americans. Sounds like a great deal!
Unless you are a CEO, or a burger flipper I do not understand why you would want to hire anyone in the 1st world. It doesn't make any business sense. ... sadly I am serious and not a troll here. But this is how coprorate America or corporate Europe or any 1st world company thinks and operates. If I need to hire engineers to design products it makes sense to place them near where it is manufactured. That is not in America anymore like it was 10 years ago where six sigma and JIT inventory systems rules. Today it is all done in India and China.
http://saveie6.com/
I don't know how much of a problem this is in higher academia, but according to more articles like this
And the fact that prestigious universities such as this only accept a handful of students in computer science in a year, it's not surprising. One of the more surprising things is that UW received 40 million dollars from Paul Allen a while ago, and they used it to build a giant 40 million dollar new computer science building. But the number of students they accepted per year didn't change. Why is this? If you have lots of students who want to go there, why not use extra funds you have to expand the number of applications you can accept?
I dunno, I'm sure the downward trend of education spending all over our country isn't helping universities to expand the number of students they can accept either.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Even if someone decides to enter S&E career fields, there are very few real jobs offered by real employers -- it is much easier to use "this gun is for hire" contractors that you can REALLY abuse and dump with few consequences.
Contractors are used with great success appropriately. My father contracted out to a number of contractors the company could never justify having full-time, to do specialist work, which is the whole point. For example - a guy who knew CCDs inside and out. Another specialized in PCB layout, generating boards my father (an EE for decades, no stranger to PCB layout) described as "art."
All these guys were well compensated for their work and in some cases had more work than they could handle. So, if you're a programmer - find something that you think has a market which interests you and you're highly qualified in, hone your skills, and market yourself. You will never be able to be a contractor as a Java programmer - you're a total commodity.
Say what? You don't know what you are talking about. I did Java for 11 years, almost 9 of which were as a paid contractor, with O/T. Excellent money making with no shortage of jobs (not even during 2008.)
The reality is that the majority of job opportunities in Java (and "enterprise" and web software development for that manner) are in the form of contract work, many of them with paid O/T. If you are really good at Java, you can make a 6-figure salary as a contractor. Granted that most of the Java work available out there is just monkey coding crap that can be easily outsourced, but that is also true for all fields, even EE.
When it comes to Java, there is a good number of well-paying gigs out there, most of that for contractors only. So, sorry, you are wrong. If you work in Java, chances are you are a contractor. And if you are good, there is no shortage of work with good salaries.
If you want to talk about inappropriate use of contractors...well, the IRS has been cracking down on companies that use contractor status to avoid payroll taxes and benefits. My state has been, too.
But that is usually with contracting agencies "subcontracting" to other contractors (in particular while abusing 1099 forms and other "inventive" forms of S-corps.) Midsize and large Java shops predominantly use contractors via reputable contracting agencies (and both tend to avoid the 1099 scheme just to avoid the IRS wrath.)
Right, and if you are 63 years old, as I am, you can have all the skill sets (and continuing education) in the world and no one wants to hire you.
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
Immigration hysteria is there because people who were making 70k a year are unemployed or making minimium wage, while they see immigrants line up at the local home depot (this is common in California) willing to do work they once did.
They are pissed off and it is easy to blame something or someone. Try being a farmhand today? Unless you are a foreigner they wont talk to you. Hormel used to pay Americans $30,000 a year in the meat processing platns now hire Mexicans to do it for $7hr and were busted a year to ago by coming up with loopholes to let illegally undocumented workers take those jobs. That community in Minnesota is angry.
Whenever unemployment is bad immigration becomes a hot button issue. It did so in the 1873 depression which is similiar to the one today. Whole Chinese villages outside of San Fransisco were raided by angry out of work white people feeling cheated outl.
When the economy improves (if it does) and people can make 4ok ayear with just a high school diploma it will change.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm a Canadian who happens to be living the the U.S.A. and my American friends are generally shocked when I explain the hoops I had to jump through and the restrictions put on me and my wife to get a green card. The entire process was done by a law firm, thank goodness, but I still had the feeling that the U.S.A. really didn't want me here. Took around three 1/2 years to get it, pretty quick by some standards.
- My wife wasn't allowed to work at all for the first three years, spousal visa (she was aiming for one of those coveted coffee serving jobs).
- I missed my fathers wedding because "If you leave the country, you aren't serious about your green card, and you don't want anything to happen to the application do you?"
- We had to cancel a vacation because the government *might* start processing our green card application and if we aren't in the country when they start, they'll throw the application away. Not that they need to contact us you understand, it just showed we weren't serious if we went on vacation outside the country.
- A co-worker is from Lebanon, he has to tell immigration why he is leaving the country *before* he leaves or they will not let him back in (even with his valid H1B visa).
So yeah, it wasn't exactly welcoming.
Just in case people are wondering:
- The position was open for eight months for an American to take it, they couldn't find anybody with the skills
- Why don't I move back to Canada? I like Americans, they are generally nice people. The immigration process isn't nice.
I don't know which H1-B visa sponsor got you to push this, but it's just because you're jealous of people like me going for their PhD in Electrical Engineering.
Stop hating we American-born who want to educate ourselves!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Foreign students go home because a student visa does not allow them to work here They have about 6 months after graduation to find a job, get a green card, and become a permanent resident. I have personally known a great many people graduating with advanced degrees in engineering and science who were sent home because they didn't have their whole life in order within 6 months of graduating. A lot of those did not really want to leave. We make it unnecesarily hard.
As a side note, a great deal of those students get their education paid for by NSF or NIH grant money from professors that hire them. Or some other AMERICAN agency, such as the AHA, ACS, etc, etc. Your charitable contribuitons and tax dollars educate them, and then policy tells them they aren't welcome here and they should really go home. As the GP said, "YAY".
Since 90% aren't smart enough to be scientists or engineers and we also need smart people for a few other things, I don't see this as likely to change.
Last I heard, Foxconn workers were getting $0.35 an hour, working 14 hours days, and often considered suicide to preferable.
I see it systemic of the real problems. Until they get fixed things will not change appreciably. You can see the symptoms almost everywhere in the U.S. and it is a sharp contrast to even 20 years ago. Simply put people feel the U.S. is becoming less and less of a place where you work and reap the rewards of that work and they feel much less empowered to make a change. There are many reasons for this but the almost complete breakdown of the political system due to mass corruption to me is one of the largest factors. The prevalence of the new corporate monopoly/colluded oligopoly also contributes to this. Utiliies, internet, cell phones, insurance, oil there are too many example industries to mention. I think the numerous polls of low confidence in the government along with many other indicators. You can also just talk to people and get this sense. It has reached a point where it is actively demotivating a large portion of an entire generation. The only thing that is making this a slower transition is that the U.S. has exported the corporate colonialism model to many other countries making them less attractive. That said most people can already detect a shift away from the U.S. for lots of new development.
I suspect soon another country will rise as being "the place to get things done" and some of the most ambitious talent from the U.S. will migrate there to accomplish things. Then corruption will increase there and wash, rinse, repeat. In the end the people who really want to get things done and are clever enough will naturally migrate to the areas that grant more freedoms, less taxation (so they can realize their goals faster) and have better infrastructure (immovable tools). That seems just logical to me.
It's interesting to see that people and governments actually think implementing rules, laws or other such nonsense they can stop the natural reaction to these changes. There are so many examples where this hasn't worked (Soviet Union, North Korea, Czech Republic after WW2, etc, etc). Even when people stayed productivity suffered immensely because slaves produce at much lower levels than motivated workers. Seems the carrot is a better motivator than the stick.
This is how I see having lived and worked in a few different countries so far.
YES, foreigners CREATE jobs in the USA, they don't take them away.
Bullshit.
H1Bs are not legally allowed to create jobs in the USA. H1Bs are used to replace US workers with foreign workers. Watch "No Thanks for Everything."
If immigrants are creating so many jobs, then why is the suffering the worst long-term unemployment since the great depression?
H1B are not the "best and brightest" - far from it. According to the US GAO, 54% of H1Bs are entry level, only 7% work at the advanced level.
H1Bs are cheap labor used to replace American workers. H1Bs are also used to help with the offshoring of US jobs.
for our own people.
If foreign workers are a great expense, then we should stop allowing foreign workers.
I worked in the U.S. in the nineties and got the distinct impression that engineering wasn't considered a "white man's job". That is, an engineer isn't the ideal son-in-law. The Americans want to succeed with their social skills (lawyers, salesmen, bosses, doctors). The introverted engineers that deal with machinery rather than people are thought of as borderline perverted.
Americans know they need engineers to make money so they hire them. But they don't want to become engineers or marry them if they have a choice. At the height of the telecom bubble there was a brief period when engineers (the stock option millionaires) were achieving respectability, but when the bubble burst, the American society came back to its senses.
This attitude is in contrast with the rest of the world where "engineer" has a respectable ring to it, and they are considered part of the ruling elite.
Does anybody have any other kind of degree in physics?
Looking at the chart, the S&E work force has grown considerably since 1990. The article suggests that the workforce as a percentage of the population should be continuing to grow, but they don't offer any logic as to why. It makes sense to me that this number would be flat. Is there an ideal target for this workforce? Is it 100%?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
"we've allowed the politicians to poison the well with too many policies, taxes, regulations, and laws"
actually we just moved manufacturing to places where there are no policies, taxes, regulations or laws, so you can, for example, produce poisoned baby food and kill a bunch of kids, and nobody gets in trouble for it.
if people want the US to become like China, well my question is this - why dont you just move to china? its 'adam smith on steroids' according to hedge fund manager Mitt Romney.
the entire portion of the labor force that thinks there is some future or hope in nationalism, i.e. 'them foreigners' vs 'us americans', do not get it.
corporations are international. they will do whatever they do, internationally. if you want to improve working conditions or wages for labor, you have to become international as well. nationalism is the antithesis of what is required to build an international labor movement that can compete with international capital-government structures like the Red Army and Walmart.
For example. India had a huge labor protest the other day. Banks were shut down. Banks! And telephone companies were shut down. That means that somewhere in India, there are nerds who have organized. Instead of keeping them out of the US, maybe we should be phoning them up and asking them if we can work together on strategy and tactics.
Haha dude, u live here she lives there? Smh. Dude, u don't have a girlfriend.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
we don't care if the computers, the food, the books, the radios, the films, the cars, even the drywall in our houses came from another country.
corporations are almost unregulated the way their assets pour between one country and another. they almost ignore nationality anymore.
but oh my god, if its a human being crossing an imaginary line on a map, well, we need to put up a billion regulations and an artificial line across an impenetrable desert.
it makes no sense.
My Chinese wife (born and raised in Shanghai) now living in Houston, TX would say you're full of shit. She's the risky one in the relationship. I prefer job stability while she prefers oportunity. In her words, there are far more business and wealth oportunities in the US than in China. Over there, you get around through old world politicking. Ironically, her attitude makes her more "American" than me.
More and more, the Chinese want an improved lifestyle with cars, entertainment, food, and better homes to live in. They have all the basic human desires that we all do. They so desperately want to become more "American" from a personal freedom and opportunity aspect if only the rest of their society and government would let them. It's an up hill struggle for China as a whole, but they're trying.
Life is not for the lazy.
That's funny, I'm American, and I'd rather live in Canada (specifically BC), as the people there are much nicer than all the assholes down here. Sure, there's places in America where the people are generally nice, but these tend to also be places without any tech jobs (or many jobs at all, for that matter, i.e. small towns). When I go to Canada, I find I don't have to leave the big city to be around nice people. The main problem with Canada from my POV is the cost of living is outrageous in Vancouver; it's probably cheaper to live in the Bay Area.
Well, you don't want to know what kind of info I get about the US from Iranian news sources. It's even worse than what you get about China from US sources.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Raise the benefit & liability requirements to the same level as FTE.
Right, because fixing the symptoms with even more regulations and heavy handed tyrannical control over people's lives and business contracts is what we should be doing right now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have posted this until my fingers have bled. The STEM shortage is a myth. We even discussed this on /.
see:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/08/03/10/1454250/it-labor-shortage-is-just-a-myth
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Get real. Want more people to go into SE? LEt the market work and quit campaigning for an increase in H1Bs to address "desperate labor shortages!!!".
People enrolled in SE when the pay was high and the opportunities plenty. OF course high pay pisses management off because that's money that could have gone to their bonuses. So the corporations flooded the market with H1Bs to drive down wages and create abusive working conditions and whaddya know- people quit enrolling in SE.
If you want to see SE enrollment up, we need to see hard, structural safeguards in place against corporations jacking with immigration for the purpose of manipulating the labor market.
Oh and corporations don't love people over 40 either, even though they're easily the most experienced, versatile and productive IT workers available. Sorry, but most of "new" technology and languages are old wine in new bottles, or old ideas that were tried and retired because they were found to be fundamentally flawed- case in point the whole anti-relational, noSQL movement. But of course if you don't know history, because you're oh, 22 and you never studied history, you're doomed to repeat it.. at a great waste of time and money.
Why study for 5 and 8 years and go into triple digit debt just to have a 10 or 15 year career?
Slave labor is the only place management will ever be happy with. Other than that, "desperate labor shortage! Emergency Will Robinson ... Emergency!"
Chinese sources about China are worthless too
One could make an argument that modern China is something akin to a technocracy. I'm relatively certain that most of the high-ranking officials and politicians (if you want to call them that) have science or engineering background. This is one of the first articles that came up when I googled "China technocracy", I'm sure you can find something with less provocative headline, if you want to. Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds
Since Foxconn suicide rates are lower than U.S. workplace suicide rates, I can understand why they are leaving for China... 14 hours a day sounds like someone at EA slacking off...
How many of them pursue that path right away? In order to get an engineering degree in a timely manner, you would usually have to start out in your freshmen year with some fairly rigorous math and science courses, like Calc I and II as well as physics and the like. I would look at the kids who go into those courses right away as the ones serious about the degree, versus the ones that might have listed M.E. as their major but are really just undecided at that point.
"I hate Illinois nazis."
- The Blues Brothers.
It depends on what college you can get into.
A CS degree from a no-name college is worth much more than a B degree from a no-name college. The latter is still more mobile, but it doesn't open up any immediate doors...they're going to work their way up from the bottom. It takes about 10 years to match the entry level salary of CS when you're talking about smaller, unknown programs.
The real path to male liberation
My father contracted out to a number of contractors the company could never justify having full-time, to do specialist work, which is the whole point. For example - a guy who knew CCDs inside and out. Another specialized in PCB layout, generating boards my father (an EE for decades, no stranger to PCB layout) described as "art."
Your father and his company represent the problem of increased distrust in workers, as opposed to training them up. They (and all those that use contractors to get out of the proper FTE) deserve any legislation that makes contractors more expensive than making them a proper part of the company with full benefits.
All these guys were well compensated for their work and in some cases had more work than they could handle
Exception, not rule for very few people. The majority of people are not meant to be a contractor, where they do well when there is stability and security.
If you want to talk about inappropriate use of contractors
The inappropriate use of contractors is anywhere within any science/technology interest, especially the lower-level ones. Flexibility is code for disposability.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The glut of student visas and creation of the H-1B visas did what they were intended to do: drive down compensation in targeted fields, with the knowledge that this would prompt US students to shift to fields that had better pay and more reliable life-time employment.
I've helped several PhD candidates who were not all that bright (and professors likewise).
But the fact is that there are no requirements that H-1B recipients actually be very bright, and both GAO and the US DoLabor have admitted as much, stating that the vast majority are not.
But what if a visa applicant were, indeed, very bright? What if his IQ were in the top 0.5%, or his GRE or MCAT scores were? Under the current, lax regime, his application would be dumped into the pile with hundreds of thousands of dullards. It would not get conscientious consideration. It would take more time process, as would his green card application, than if the USA had a reasonable process of conscientiously selecting the best, conducting proper background investigations and only admitting those who pass muster.
Being bright or "best" is not about having a "degree".
While we are getting away from my original point, I do agree with you here. That said, statistically you are getting smarter, wealthier people when you screen by degree or qualifications.
Linus Pauling or Albert Einstein
Now we're completely off-point :) I don't know about Linus, but I don't think you should call Albert Einstein a "drop out". He indeed left his high school, but he did so with the full intention of continuing his higher education at another institution. He basically snuck away from a high school that emphasized rote learning and ended up applying to colleges when he got home. Other high-profile "drop-outs" often left school because what they considered a great business opportunity popped up (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc), not because the couldn't hack it. So yeah, if the owner of a fortune 500 company (or even just a credible startup) wants to move his operations to CA, I think we should let him - degree or no degree. He should be able to bring his undegreed staff as well, along with his whole extended family :)
than if the USA had a reasonable process of conscientiously selecting the best, conducting proper background investigations and only admitting those who pass muster.
Now we're back to my original point - I agree 100%. The US currently does not try to attract the best and brightest, and that is a rotten shame.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
why shouldn't globalization mean the third world is empowered to rise out of third world status?
Not if it comes at the cost of the First World.
You are making the false assumption that globalization means the developed world gutting itself. It doesn't.
Despite your claim to the contrary, the developed world is gutting itself to prop up a region that is amenable to slavery.
Whether or not globalization guts you is dependent on how [overused buzzword] you are on the [overused buzzword]
So freedom for workers is not a market-friendly value, evidenced by businesses
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
In that situation, I can understand why they wouldn't be doing so. However, I also would not impose 80 hour weeks on them. Anyone who does is completely incompetent.