Slashdot Mirror
Do We Really Have a Shortage of STEM Workers?
New pweidema writes "Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School who has been writing a book on the subject of the current state of employment in science and technology fields, recently spoke at an Education Writers Association Conference about the 'STEM Worker Shortage: Does It Exist and Is Education to Blame?' The National Science Board's biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators , consistently finds that the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields. What explains these apparently contradictory trends? And as the shortage debate rages, what do we know about the pipeline of STEM-talented students from kindergarten to college, and what happens to them in the job market? An article LA Times summarizes his findings of his findings on the STEM hype: '...some of it comes from the country’s longtime cycle of waxing and waning interest in science; attention seems to focus on science every 10 to 15 years before slacking off. The only forces pushing the idea of STEM doom, he said, are those that have something to gain from it. Mostly those are STEM employers ... that want to pack the labor force with people to suppress wages ... Joining the chorus are universities that want more funding for science programs...'"
No. We do not have a shortage. The US has been shedding STEM jobs, not gaining unfilled ones. For almost 3 decades at this point.
There is a vested interest in driving down wages for those few jobs that remain however.
We have a shortage of employers willing to pay market rates.
There's no conspiracy to push down wages - these are real complaints. The same problem exists in many fields - there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a hiring manager, when I complain about finding qualified people, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning. I've hired highschool dropouts (and am one myself) and PhD grads.
We need people that are in STEM because they WANT to be in STEM. Trying to get more people educated in a field by saying "we need more people with STEM degrees!" is like saying I need more people who know how to run. I don't want someone who knows how to run, I want someone who loves running.
.
Yeah, there are some unqualified people out there, but I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of job seekers in STEM can't be "re-trained" in similar sub fields of STEM. For example, why can't someone who has solid SQL knowledge be trained as a DBA or a Java programmer?
Colleges teach high-level theories and models and UMLs and chess board Java CS projects - useless to 99.9% of tech employers. So many compsci students I see come into class half-asleep, barely pay attention in class, and don't seem to think much about it once they leave the classroom. They think they're going to make a ton of money as .NET developers by using drag-and-drop software like Visual Studio. I am looking to hire 3 student programmers right now, and even amongst our best candidates, they can't write a simple 4-line script to output a file to screen. They are very, very smart students, but they don't have any skills!
Employers need workers with practical experience, and in general WANT workers who have lots of experience with specific software. Colleges don't teach software suites, they teach theories.
Programming and information technology should be taught as vocations... high-paying, of course.
I've you've ever hired for a stem job, you will know: there are plenty of people with the right degree out there. Finding one with a degree who understands even half of what they learned is another.
It's just something the industry tells Congress when they beg for more indentured servant licenses.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
... is the word 'qualified'. I've never interviewed so many stupid smart people ever in my life the last 10 years. People who just got out of college and expect to pull down 6 figure salaries for work they've never done before and have no proof of how good they could be. And people that think they are much better than they really are, but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. My prior job hired a self-described 'Java programmer' that wrote some of the most horrid code I've ever seen, it didn't even come close to working. Yet he sold himself as a Java expert to the company owner (who had no IT skills), and somehow convinced him to hire him. The only thing it appeared he knew how to do was talk a good talk and use SSIS. Shortly after I left, he managed to completely obliterate a very important production database. That they had to contract with me to recover.
I now work with some really good developers because the company is choosy about who they hire. But time and time again, they lament about a shortage out there of really good developers. They get plenty of resumes, just no one worth hiring.
And attitudes ... such a bunch of spoiled babies. It's not just skills either, it's a good work ethic. Sorry .. we do have a dress code where we work. If someone can't manage to wear clean clothes that include long pants and a collared shirt every day because it's a little too restraining, they can't work here. We pay enough, I know they can afford it If someone can't manage to understand that we have standards and security requirements and they can't just write whatever they want and shove it into production, they can't work here.
So I guess if someone wants mediocrity or less, there is plenty to choose from.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
My company is looking for experienced developers in the Denver area without much luck. They may be out there but they seem to be behind a wall of recruiters or otherwise unavailable due to not wanting to jump from their current jobs. I think the unemployment rate for .net developers here is something like 2%.
Yes, we need more. A common Slashdot response is that the employers aren't paying enough to attract the talent. Well, if the talent isn't worth the money in terms of bang for buck for the company, then I guess that's that, employer doesn't get a new employee and the employee doesn't get the job. Its unfortunate for both sides at that point, the economics just don't add up.
I think of Dilbert comics. Managers are incredibly stupid. They want 23 year old super graduates with 2 masters and 10 years experience in the job, also 3 years experience with technologies that usually exist for like 6 months, whom they can pay below minimum wage. Since they don't get that we keep hearing the usual bullshit of shortages. With realistic requirements and decent pay you can fill any position.
are the budgets. if x company wants to hire qualified developers, they could - at a premium. instead, they bargain shop in an effort to save 20-30k a year per developer, and as a result bring on board sub-par developers that wreck their product and leave them in worse condition had they just spent the money to begin with.
the cycle is somewhat humorous to me, and I laugh at every job posting I see looking for `rockstars` at 55-65k a year when other companies in the area are offering up 65-85k for the same job. (caveat, I don't work in the valley or in NY - so wages aren't on par with those markets)
It's interesting that in the Netherlands, tech companies have been telling the government that there is a shortage of about 30.000 IT workers. However, if you're actually looking for a job and trawl the internet for vacancies, you'll quickly conclude that there are about 500 vacancies tops.
There are plenty of qualified, motivated and intelligent IT professionals. If companies have such a big shortage of IT workers, they should just publish the vacancies, hire the best who apply and shut the fuck up.
They (employers) want people with a STEM degree and paid experience to go along with it, but they only want to pay those people wages commensurate with someone who's fresh out of college.
I work in a small town with a very small number of high tech employers. The place across town posted a job with extremely specific job requirements that happened to align perfectly with my resume... I applied for the job and immediately received a back channel request to withdraw my application because the job opening was posted for a temporary foreign worker they had who had to be given a permanent position or go home... Apparently they were required to post the job and could only hire her if there were no qualified applicants who were US citizens... It's a small town, I didn't want to burn bridges, and already had a good job so I withdrew but I wonder how often this happens where the applicant for the fake job does not get a heads up and has his time wasted interviewing for a fake job opening...
I have noted a significant shortage in management who understand the work they oversee.
But be that as it may, even with good management at the mid level, accountants & asshole finance guys run the show and will do anything to their staff to save money on next quarter's balance sheet.
American business has bought into the hype game 100%....until we take a flamethrower to all that bullshit we will see problems like this....this is a **symptom** of a problem
Thank you Dave Raggett
The summary frames this as a false conundrum.
...consistently finds that the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields. What explains these apparently contradictory trends?
There is no contradiction between those two statements. Perhaps reading comprehension is what we are lacking. Let's remove the politics by replacing STEM graduates with oranges and see what happens:
1. The US produces more oranges than the citizens can eat.
2. Citizens are struggling to find quality oranges.
Conclusion: We produce lots of poor quality oranges.
Now, this is not to say that we don't really need more good quality oranges. But if you forcibly increase production, you will probably have a greater percentage of poor quality product than you had before.
Caveat: I am judging from the summary here so perhaps there is some statistic that says these graduates are indeed quality.
What they teach in a Computer Science degree are some of the more common or interesting algorithms, algorithm analysis and design, some operating system theory, say how to write a mouse driver as did my friend at UC Santa Cruz.
So you get out on the workforce looking for your first job, and you see that the craigslist "sof / qa / dba" section wants someone who knows PHP, Javascript and MySQL.
So you buy some books and learn those, maybe you get the job, but eventually you go looking for another job. They want C# .Net, Microsoft Internet Information Server and SQL Server.
I now have a vast number of technical books, and a hard time getting a job because I've never written an Android App.
How about on-the-job training? There were at least at one time some companies that did it. That's how I learned Java, Python, Smalltalk, Postscript and UNIX Sysadmin. But on the job training is very uncommon these days, because employers want "someone who can hit the ground running".
If you paid your new hire to spend his or her first week reading an O'Reilly book, then the next month paired up with a more experienced coder, you'd find that there is no shortage of workers, rather there is a surplus.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
STEM covers a wide range of fields; while there is a shortage of computer scientists and engineers (mostly due to the fact that many non-CS engineers go into software), there is an oversupply of biologists and other sciences. http://csl.stanford.edu/~pal/e...
Good employees are almost always available if an employer is really willing to pay. Whether it is an IT professional or a feild worker picking oranges it distills down to the same issue. If farmers paid enough there would be American laborers who would instantly leap to picking oranges. And if technology oriented companies are really willing to pay then the best workers will stand in line to get hired. Two issues exist. The first is a class warfare type of situation where the bosses feel that they are superior and employees are just convenient dirt to be misued at will. Only a shallow pretence of caring about employees is made. The second issue is that many businesses have no reason to exist and actually simply can not pay good wages for quality workers. In my area restaurants are a huge example. We have far too many restaurants that stand almost elbow to elbow, Most go broke or survive on a thread. They get by on the hope that one day they will become popular and capture the market. Employees is such businesses only do well by accident and in fact the owners may become enraged to find that a worler does well while they dread their businesses survival odds. Politics enters in when borders are allowed to be easy to cross or work permits for foreigners are common. And the tax payer is the chump who pays for it all. Picture an American who can not survive on wages picking fruit being replaced by an illegal immigrant. The American ends up on unemployment, or disability or welfare. the farmer hires the illegal worker for one third the pay and the tax payer pays for the American worker who is idled.
Perhaps you should try using it some time, unless you think Microsoft have written an application that can automatically generate all the business logic for every single organisation that will ever exist.
I've been asked this same question in interviews twice:
write a C function to reverse a C-string in place.
I expect most slashbots can supply a correct answer, but a good friend of mine who has many years of experience as a visual basic coder, and who does know some basic C, is unable to answer the question.
When I supplied my answer, the company owner said "I see you have an eye for efficiency". I found that puzzling. Perhaps that's why I got the job.
I've interviewed with google a few times. I won't tell you any of their interview questions, that would be rude, but I will tell you that their HR recruiters - all in-house, not third-party headhunters - all screen new candidates by asking the very same, very basic three computer science questions. Anyone who has done one single algorithms class, and worked a year at a good coding job should be able to answer all three questions, but I expect that many prospective candidates cannot.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
We need to more carefully scope how we define "STEM".
Some studies lump social sciences under STEM, where others do not.
I would not be surprised if companies were having a difficult time finding enough qualified engineers and programmers - but I would have a difficult time believing companies were having a difficult time finding qualified Sociology, Psychology, or Biology majors. The Biological Sciences and Psychology buildings at my school were teeming with students, while the CompSci and Engineering buildings were generally much less populated.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
"the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields"
Perhaps the graduates are unable to do the work.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The reason is simply that it pays better to move into BA. Seriously, take a look at your earning opportunities with a STEM degree, then compare to what a BA can make. And finally compare the workload.
Even I had to move away from my beloved engineering and into management because it was just effin' impossible to get ahead otherwise. I now make a lot more money with a lot less work on my shoulders. If I had a BA degree instead of a STEM one, maybe I would've gotten here 10 years ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I tend to believe that the problem is that using "STEM" as a definition is far too broad to have meaningful discussion. Many of the out of work STEM people are victims of changing technology or simply dumb luck in choosing a field that went dry when new tech appeared, studying the wrong tools or languages or techniques and not adapting to a market shift. The schools are partially to blame for sometimes teaching out of date material, also to blame would be the inevitable market overshoot of a "boom" field attracting more workers than it can absorb resulting in a glut of talent in that field for some period of time.
I'm on the other side of the coin. I've found most of my college education to be less informative than what I do on my own time. I'm exceptionally fast at learning, always give as much of myself as I can, and naturally fall into a leadership role. I'm looking outside my company right now because there's been less than a 1% raise over 2 years, I'm paid below market, we're constantly short-staffed, there's no training provided for new software, and there's no room to grow. My company is a Fortune 100 company and the level of pay difference between management and the ones who do useful work is dramatic. An actual example is that two directors were talking and one was complaining to the other that he couldn't decide between a Maserati and a Porsche...meanwhile most of the people are underpaid. I want to do more, I crave to be in a company that will use me to my full potential, instead I'm stuck doing mind numbing and boring work, with no chance of escape. Some of this is my fault for not getting certifications to prove what I know, but it's really hard to save up extra money when you're living so close to the edge financially, and completely demoralizing when you're responsible for keeping millions in revenue flowing.
I think there's a problem with the "training" that's available for people with existing experience in IT fields that makes it difficult to gain knowledge and expertise allowing you to move to a different specialty.
One one end of the spectrum you have "college" which people usually go to once. Heavy on theory, light on practice, expensive, time-consuming and not realistic for most people with broad, in-field experience. Close to this are technical schools of various kinds, which mostly seem to focus on ground-up education as some kind of a college substitute, and not really as applicable to people looking to gain expertise in an IT subfield.
Then there's the various corporate "training" usually run by vendors or teaching vendor-produced curriculum. Because their audience is usually employed, this kind of training is brief and shallow, almost a tour of user interfaces with little in-depth application taught.
Between these two seems to be a gap that might teach more in-depth skills and knowledge that would help educate people already in the IT field who want to gain expertise not just in a single vendor product but in its real-world application while still providing some of the theoretical background so you don't just crank out MCSE-style "experts".
I have nearly two decades of experience in infrastructure -- operating systems, virtualization (well, maybe only a decade here), servers, networking, yet if I wanted to become a DBA, developer, my only real option is to pound it out on my own and hope I'd figured out enough to not fail day 1 on the job.
If 500 seniors graduate in CS from a typical state university system in a year, but only 100 can actually function as an intern or junior developer upon graduation then you have 400 people who should probably have never made it past year two of their program. In my alma mater's case, we were weighted heavily toward testing because the alternative was that only about 30% of our CS students would graduate. Our valedictorian, an excellent test taker, couldn't even teach herself Python when she had a whole week or two to learn it and write up a presentation on it. Yet with a 2.5 GPA I managed to do Smalltalk. Go figure...
A similar thing is happening with managers. A lot of the PMPs I've worked with are no better or in fact worse than the non-PMP managers I've dealt with.
Without the right amount of culture (a computer and incentive to try and create stuff with it) while still in infancy you most likely won't have a person that:
A: Wants to program for a living.
B: Is good at it.
The same is true for many other areas, electrical engineers that dismantle radios as kids for example.
So it is not enough to try to get high school kids into STEM bachelors, you need to have the right culture while growing up to make a good professional. That is one (of many) reasons why woman are underrepresented in STEM fields, they are not encouraged at a young age to do this type of activity.
There is not a national STEM problem but there are places with very local and very acute problems with finding enough people for the work available. For multiple reasons and factors most of those STEM style jobs left for elsewhere but the need for scientists and engineers didn't from places like Idaho and Tennessee.
I fully expect you can't walk through a crowed mall in Seattle or San Fransisco without bumping into someone who is STEM educated. I also fully expect that there are people who would do anything for another lab scientist or engineer on staff in a company located in Omaha, Nebraska.
The economist says there's never a shortage, just a shortage at a given price. E.g., Robert R. Prechter, Jr: "In a free market, shortages are impossible; there is only a price. Rubies and Picassos are scarce, but there's never a shortage of them. You can buy all you want any day of the week. Just pay the price." You can have all you want if you're willing to pay more.
I am not a crackpot.
If you pay peanuts, expect to get monkeys.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No. There's no "shortage." There's a shortage of STEM workers who will work for slave wages like all the MBA's and foreign CEOs would like.
Engineers. We're so.... uppity.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You should have reported it. They are committing fraud.
A large part of the problem stems (heh :) from the fact that the disciplines are not interchangeable. Policy makers typically do not have backgrounds in _any_ of the fields, so they see little distinction between a computer science student, software engineer, math, physics, etc. While we can all agree that those disciplines are technical in nature, the fact is you do not learn the same set of skills. When employers say then need more STEM grads, they aren't looking for a generic chemistry or biology student. They want a C++ coder, or they want someone that can build an antenna, or someone that can operate a mass spec. The learning outcomes from different STEM degrees are vastly different. Notwithstanding issues related to wages, H1-B etc, the acronym itself is a big part of the problem.
I'm a postdoc, which puts me about as far down the narrow end of the qualifications wedge as you can get. I'm still competing with about 10 other postdocs (and never you mind all the underqualified noise) for every position I go for, corporate or academic. That is not a ratio that speaks of a shortage of employable candidates.
Believe me, anyone who reaches this stage really, really wants to be in STEM. The jobs just aren't there, unless you want to go into quantitative analysis at a bank. They just never stop hiring.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There is a coming bubble of retirements coming that is really going to strap the field as well. In my company (A Fortune 1000), the average age of our engineers is mid-50s. Some of our suppliers and partners are in the same boat. It's a company everyone loves to work for, yet we have trouble filling the open spots we have let alone replacing people with 30+ years experience with a qualified person
I'd be more inclined to think the MBA managers are idiots then the ppl who
passed with an engineering degree.
There may be some STEM degree folks who paid ppl to take their tests, etc etc,
and some may be functionally non performing, but I am sure that is in
the minority based off the ppl I have met.
Some STEM degrees are more like a 5 year degree now, and your insulting their
accomplishment shows that you likely have an inferiority complex and feel better
by insulting others.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
MOD parent up, they want to save the big money for stockholders dividends,
and for fat salaries for the meeting jockeys who push paper around a conference table.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
IMHO, there is FAR too much emphasis being placed on so-called "critical thinking" in education which leads to too many people thinking they are qualified to be critical of other peoples' (read: STEM peoples') real work. The vast majority of "critical thinkers" have never created anything practical in their lives. That aside, there is always a shortage of STEM workers with currently needed knowledge. I saw this back in college and grad engineering. The professors were teaching stuff that was useful for their generation and not for what was coming. This is where the real problem lies. Trouble is, the people who are qualified to teach upcoming marketable skills are too busy working in the real world to teach.
What does STEM stand for? My first cache his is "Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope", which doesn't fit. I guess the first two are Science and Technology. But it would help if people didn't introduce unexplained acronyms. (Maybe it is a common US one - but this is, I hope, an international forum).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
replace college with apprenticeships / trades school settings for tech / IT jobs.
an 1-2-3 year technical schools with some kind of apprenticeships mixed in will work real good.
And they need to be real apprenticeships like other trades. not coffee / office boy internships where you are not really learning to do the job.
A friend of mine was at one time a dot-com millionaire, but he managed to blow it all on hats.
Throughout the dot-com crash, his company website had two or three open positions. The job requisitions were updated regularly - that is, they weren't always the same job. Sometimes he needed engineering, sometimes QA, sometimes sales.
So I dropped him a dime and said "Aren't you busted?" and he replied "Yeah but as long as our creditors think we're still in business, they hope to get repaid. If we weren't hiring they might send the sheriff around to seize our office furniture."
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Notice that word "qualified"?
Merely possessing a STEM degree does not automatically mean one is prepared to step into a STEM job.
In an effort to win federal and state money, colleges and universities (as well as public schools) are racing to implement ANYTHING that looks like STEM programs, lowering the criteria to participate, and building false hopes in these students that despite their remedial math and science classes, they were going to be "Engineers" when they graduate...
Ken
Where I went to school in the 90's (Purdue), Computational Science was a math degree and we didn't touch a computer for the first two years unless you specifically took a programming course.
Programming IS a vocation that is an application of several disciplines. If a tech employer has no use for UML, then they are not a very sophisticated business. Hell, I work at a little rinky dink manufacturing company and we use UML and other modeling systems to lay out our business processes to better understand the business and for ISO 9001 quality management.
If you want code monkeys to crank out unmaintainable spaghetti to show your VC fund, then by all means go find some.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
This is just my casual observation, but STEM workers tend to be highly intelligent individuals who understand complex or abstract concepts. They are also highly adaptable, so instead of working in their chosen field, they get tapped to fill other fields where they are still successful. The problem lies in management filling positions with competent warm bodies, rather then putting individuals in positions that maximize potential.
I was talking to someone from Boulder last night, and they (scientific data archive) had three of their programmers poached (got contacted out of the blue, they hadn't been looking to jump ship before that), and haven't had much luck finding replacements.
She said the programmer unemployment rate was 0.5% in their area. So, if you're an unemployed programmer, who's in a position to pick up and move, you might want to look at job postings in that area. (although I'd advise doing research into cost of living there .... it's not ungodly expensive, but it's not the cheapest place, either)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
My favorite was when I was labeled as part of a 'Supply Chain' by a fairly large defense contractor.
Whenever you hear that there's a "shortage" of workers in any field, from trash collection to STEM, it usually means there's a shortage of workers willing to work for the wages we're willing to pay. That's very different from a shortage of qualified people, being more of a shortage of employers who understand how supply and demand work.
It is impossible to speak in generalities about STEM. The fields that fall under STEM are so diverse and even within one of the letters there is such a stratification of positions and educations that any comparisons are difficult to make.
Is there a shortage in Computer Engineering Eng.Ds? Or is there a shortage in Computer Engineering B.S. degree holders? Your average B.S. isn't going to jump right into an advanced research position and write a new distributed computing algorithm. Your average Eng.D. isn't going to be happy working under an architect writing Java for a corporate back end system. What about your Information Systems graduate? Can he write C++ for embedded systems? Would your average embedded engineer be happy configuring ISS and Active Directory? Even though those things are drastically different they all get lumped together under "coder" or "programmer".
Take Mechanical Engineers. You have your B.S. Mechanical Engineers slaving away over Solid Works creating widgets. Your have your Eng.D. mechanical engineers developing new engine systems. Which do we need more of?
I think the reality is that when companies complain they need more STEM graduates they are saying they either want extremely talented B.S. graduates to make the business run (example: embedded engineer writing industrial control software, you dont need a PhD but your average B.S. couldn't do it) or they want extremely talented Eng.Ds to develop the next processor architecture that takes over the market. But they don't want middle of the road B.S. graduates that don't understand OO even though they only language they can write is Java, and they don't want Eng.Ds who have experience in far out research but aren't capable of doing practical work that makes a company money.
I attend user groups to hear new technologies (really the free pizza). The recruiters buy us pizza, beer, snacks. They seem to have 10-20 jobs for anyone looking. Most positions are "trendy" web-services or mobile. My company does vertical scientific outsourcing for the Fortune-20. Not much HR activity there.
We have biology, physics, EE, philosphy, music degrees from MIT. None of us majored in CS (6-3). Most of the current languages and techniques were invented after we graduated, so we picked them up along the way.
As a recent entry (read: inexperienced tech guy looking for an entry level job) into the IT-field, I also find it very hard to find a job in my area. I do believe that companies intentionally cry "we need H-1B's" to suppress wages and that makes getting a job that much harder for an initiate like me.
Yes, we do have a shortage of STEM candidates in the country....
However, what they are not telling you is, that the shortage is due to the fact nobody who has that sort of background wants to work for $24K a year with food stamp supplemental income, like WalMart employees.
It is so hard to find those sorts of people.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Corporations want A-grade choice for C-grade wages, and a gazillion arbitrary combos of skills in one individual that's nearly statistically impossible without any training time. If they can scout the whole planet, their chance of finding that odd combo coincidence is higher, and they can pay them less.
Corporations don't care what impact their demands have on society: they just want it when they want it how they want it and don't want to pay for it and will lobby like hell to get what they want.
Table-ized A.I.
The real answer is more complicated. Overall, there is an oversupply of STEM workers. That was a major reason why I left research chemistry for a career in medicine. The issue for companies is that they often want to add expertise in a very specific area, and often can't find the appropriate workers. It is somewhat akin to needing a mechanic with experience with a particular portion of the Tesla Model S drivetrain, and when no suitable applicant is found, blaming the problem on an overall lack of automotive mechanics.
MOD parent up, they want to save the big money for stockholders dividends,
and for fat salaries for the meeting jockeys who push paper around a conference table.
Shareholder here. Not likely. Few stocks these days pay fat dividends.
Most of the money gets spent on executive-suite bonuses and in buying other companies so that more people can be laid off as they consolidate.
Complexity because of the decisions done at the 'margins' of the current economy, paranoid employee attitudes, and employer caution after two major dumps in same decade.
Simplicity because most STEM candidates are just not capable. My example - I do test automation (code and hardware design), regulatory (product safety/EMC/enviromental/social), infrastructure (building management), quality management for the TJ factory (ISO9k and 14k programs), product reliablity and QC, engineering process automation, technical customer support, some product design, and some IS support (mostly just automation and config scripts for the IS tech, and telling people to reboot their windoze boxen), and some other stuff.
The engr dept is very small (2EE, 1SE, 1ME, and me), and over-commited, and the company is very small (61). The boss says to find someone to take some of my duties, and after 14 months of interviewing people from recent grads to 30 years of experience, the only people we found (in San Diego County) qualifed to do at least two of these tasks were asking north of 6 digits. Perhaps they are actually worth that, dunno, but we just cannot pay that. We were offering the statistical median (75k) and good bennies.
Had several candidates that were were one to two years out of UCSD and UCI - none could bias a transistor. One could not even identilfy names of terminals for a bi-polar or FET. WTF?!? So gave up on the 'STEM' educated person and started looking at techs. We found two very qualified technician candidates, one of which accepted the offer. A 26 year old former marine, recently completed an A.S. at local JC, does C without making spaghetti and loves Python, and understands electrical/circuit theory better than most of the STEM degreed candidates that were interviewed, and can hand-solder 0402 components (young eyes). The kid has a great attitude, and no sense of arrogance or entitlement. After 6 months, gave him a decent raise, and are planning on mentoring him up the engineering path.
Myself and the other principle engineer will probably retire in 20 to 30 months - company owner said that would be a time to sell unless the next gen of talent is in place. The other two (small) tech companies in this building are also in a quandry on how to fill engineering billets. My gut feeling is that small companies are the agents bearing most of the weight of poor STEM talent pool, and that as small companies throw in the towel, the American market for STEM grads will crash.
At least those languages have all been around for a long time. My favorite is those job ads demanding 5+ years experience in something that has only existed for 2. Don't they know that those workers are going to come in hung over from all those time traveler parties?!?!
"a clueless fuck whose degree is in Education"
Yeah, I remember those back in high school. I didn't meet any in college. Where did you go (if you went) so the rest of us can avoid it?
Lots of STEM graduates out there, but not as many who can think and work independently after decent training.
Hahaha, that is awesome, but some decent coders from Asia will eventually end
up here as they gear up over time. As the race for the bottom continues and
100+ different types of immigrant Visa are used all jobs in the US will decline for
citizens.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Because the low wage immigrants were not able to do the same job for less pay. Right?
Name three new, non-game commercial retail software titles for the PC released as 1.0 applications in the last five years that were not remakes, re-releases, upgrades or clones of existing software.
I'll save you the trouble. There were zero. Why? Because the immigrants were not able to do the same job at all. The pay didn't even matter.
1) Fake crisis
2) Cry to paid off politicians
3) Bring in more Visa workers via 100+ immigrant Visas types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4) Record Profits !!!
Long live the Kleptocratic states of the Plutocracy.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
there is no shortage but a glut in the U.S. of pretty much every type of skilled labor that traditionally would have earned a good living. It is very sad.
I've been interviewing people for higher end stuff, and keep getting applicants that don't know jack.
Are lost at the Ax=b
Haven't heard of Valgrind
All this from interviewees that are conditioned to believe that all these requirements are just HR flak to be ignored.
Those HR people have stolen hours from me indirectly.
I had an interesting run-in with the former head of our school board - seems he didn't care for a comment I made regarding issues of outsourcing. Turns out, he represented himself for years (10) as a local recruiter and project manager. Nobody challenged him during his tenure - they took him at his word that he represented US workers (vs US corporations). Turns out, he acts as a project manager for offshoring jobs. His website stated this rather clearly. Yet, nobody knew.
Our school district, once a very good one and highly rated, has had few students accepted in Ivy League and top tier schools since he took office. They programs were changed. And, while STEM was still taught, the level at which they are taught was subpar. This made it far easier for him to fill positions that should have been local with offshore workers where more emphasis was placed on STEM. Thankfully, he is no longer at the helm. But, the damage has been done and it will take years for the 10,000 students he and the rest of the school board disadvantaged during his tenure.
And, don't get me started on the change in curriculum that demphasised the arts and extended the school day with useless electives due to a deficit that was proven to be a $133M surplus but hidden in the budget.
If a great many "STEM graduates" are not actually qualified to do real creative work in high tech, that would be a sufficient explanation.
who will work 60/hrs a week and not complain.
and all quoted by sales/marketing and other non-engineers. What has changed is this new term STEM. Scary thing is STEM jobs, like pilots and actors, will become a two-tier system. Those that make a good livable wage, and those barely scraping by.
mfwright@batnet.com
"Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields" - at the wages they are willing to pay and with the qualifications they require. This notion that we don't have enough STEM workers is ridiculous. The reason that Employers want more H1-B workers is that H1-B workers don't have the same employment protections that US Citizens have and will work for less money. Period.
As I see it, here are the problems:
1) Unrealistic expectations on the part of Employers - Have you seen some of these job postings? They want the applicant to know everything under the Sun and the starting salary is 50K. Good luck with that.
2) Resume screening programs/HR people - Often, good candidates are excluded from even applying for a job unless they meet each and every requirement. Sometimes the rejection is done via software and sometimes it's someone in HR that simply doesn't understand what the requirements mean and their relative importance to the position. The whole system encourages lying and gaming in order to get the interview.
3) The insistence that candidates have a 4 year degree - I'm not against higher education but I've been in the business long enough to know that lots of jobs in IT can be done by someone that does not have a 4 year degree, as long as they get the proper training and mentoring. Heck, even people with 4 year degrees need training and mentoring. This notion that people without 4 year degrees are incapable of learning IT skills is elitist and absurd.
Start addressing some of these issues and the STEM "shortage" will disappear.
Higher Ed, by the way, loves this idea of giving out more H1-B visas. Why? Because it will attract more foreign students to their schools if the Student can get a Green Card the day they graduate. And foreign students just happen to pay about double the tuition that an in-state, US Citizen would pay for exactly the same courses.
One thing I have learned working with big Universities over the years - they love money as much as the greedy private sector capitalists that they love to deride.
So Big Business and Big Education promote the idea of STEM shortage as a means to an end. The US STEM worker gets left out in the cold.
Practicing, quite frankly, sounds like a weasel word. An experienced Ph.d sees his $110k job get downsized or offshored. If the best job he can get is writing documentation for $30k - documentation that could be written by a high school grad with a bit of experience - is he still a "practicing" engineer?
Companies have scaled back on on-the-job training because the moment they invest heavily in an employee, said employee will jump ship to another firm. A lot of times too, it's not even for more money, it's for a more prestigious company, hotter product, etc. Why bother trying to train in house talent when they're going to jump ship? Better to just look for someone who is qualified to do the job from the get go.
Now that is sooo unusual and to be applauded, normally one has grown to expect everyone from Harvard, MIT, Yale and Princeton to be laying fraudsters. I salute this dude!
Endless books one picks up will state, like that fraudster Barry Lynn at (Pew and Peterson Foundation supported) New America Foundation, that "Jack Welch finally began to offshore jobs in the late 1990s, suggesting that Welch, while he was transforming GE into a hedge fund and private equity firm, hadn't begun the trend of offshoring engineering, programming, and scientific R&D (along with manufacturing) jobs in the early and mid 1980s.
Just take a look at pp. 139-140 of The Billionaire's Apprentice, a book by Anita Raghavan, to see how McKinsey researched and targeted every single American job which could be offshored, which they would then sell to and sell their clients on doing.
you are talking to a population here who has experienced first hand the opposite of what you are spewing. Now go back to your paid troll position, douchetard....
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
Computer science is not about computers...nor is it a science. A quote that I remember is often attributed to Dijkstra:
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. "
If I had known that years ago I might have a degree in EE rather than CS.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
yeah....it's just that easy...
in fact, I can't think of **one** tech company started by a small group of 'tech guys'....not one single example of that happening, ever.
Thank you Dave Raggett
There are elastic, and inelastic, demand curves. Normally, things purchased (like STEM labor) are never truly inelastic. The only inelastic example I can come up with would be a lifesaving medicine. If a medicine were 100% guaranteed to save your life, you would probably pay (almost any) economic cost. Even then, I don't think most people would pay ANY cost. This is also true over different time periods - gasoline may appear inelastic over the short term, but over the long term people make substitutions (public transit, electric vehicles, flex fuel...) to deal with rising costs.
Any 'shortage' or 'surplus' is ONLY AT A SPECIFIC PRICE POINT (and more specifically, also for a specific time period.) There are not ever really any such things are shortages or surpluses - just buyers and sellers that will not change their perspective on what something "should" cost. If there is a shortage, the price will go up until people stop wanting to buy. If there is a surplus, the price will go down until everything is bought or production is no longer profitable. No one ever talks about the surplus of worthless college degrees - the price employers pay for them simply goes down until it is equal to unskilled labor. The only reason these terms even exist in economics is because of externalities (governments restricting the input of some good, or the output of another.)
I took about a year of college economics. The fact that I constantly hear about shortages of things is crazy to me, jack the price (increase profit) and less buyers will be interested in purchasing. There will be no shortage. If there is a surplus, drop the price until there is no profit, then stop production. That takes care of the surplus.
Sorry Uberbah, I cannot let this one pass.
"New highers..." should be "New hires..."
I had to re-read that before I actually understood what you meant, thus this reply.
Pedantry and Grammar Nazi aside, you have a valid point. It used to be different regarding OJT and company attitude.
But those days are gone since the MBA explosion, and where all of this will end up is anybody's guess.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
It seems you are missing the point.
If the car 'saves you $10,000 a year', and you buy one for $20,000, then the car will pay for itself by the end of the second year. The third year, having that $20,000 car is making you money.
And also, both cars and employees last more than two years if properly maintained, cared for, and 'operated'.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Bamn, I just saw this earlier comment which stated the same thing, but with better citations.
As an employer of "STEM" individuals, I would disagree on the surplus. Now, the area is fairly specialized as an environmental testing lab, and I wonder if that is part of the issue. For our entry level positions, I expect to need to do considerable training, but if I need an individual with prior experience, it is highly rare for me to receive resumes from more than 1 - 2 individuals that actually have the experience necessary. As a $4M company with a staff of about 15 chemists (as in small to very small business) we are often looking nationally to fill experienced positions. If I had need for a larger labor pool as most of the discussion is really about, does that drive the need for a international labor pool?
/.) when STEM is discussed, it needs to be remembered that it extends well beyond the computer, and programming disciplines.
So, the question that strikes me, is it that the field has so many very narrow specialties, that the university fundamentally cannot put together the program? Does a company want to drive labor costs down? I do not believe that question needs to be answered. But my perspective, the larger impact is not having qualified staff than the salary.
Finally, and I suspect I am the minority here (at
STEM - we have a shortage of American citizens with recent STEM degrees and a shortage of young women with STEM degrees.
The problem is that industry doesn't like to train or retrain people anymore, as they did from 1776 to the 1970s.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
H1B coupled with http://www.economist.com/blogs... is dooms day for you.
Casteism
The culprit is our educational system, and its failure to provide one simple aspect of the learning environment; "Common Sense". I grew up when schools just taught the 3 "Rs'. By the mid-to-late 70s I noticed a change in the work force coming into the market place. What I noticed was that Common Sense was not common anymore. People did not reason things out. They could spout all sorts of technical information, but that was all it was. They were regurgitating data they had learned, but that learning experience did not provide the leap between the data and reality. That was the beginning of the tech process of replace, do not troubleshoot to repair. Once our technologists became swappers instead of troubleshooters, it was all downhill from there. Today, it has gotten so bad that schools no longer teach life. What they teach now is a political agenda. When was the last time you saw a politician that even knew which end of a screwdriver you were supposed to hold? Nope, common sense isn't common anymore. I personally think it has a lot to do with a total lack of self-responsibility, coupled with laziness. When I achieved my certifications; (CCNA, CCNP, CCVP, and CCSI) it took months of study to be prepared for a single exam, and most certs required more than a handful of exams to achieve any one of the above. Today, there are exam professionals that will provide all the answers for any given exam. Yes, you can regurgitate the answers to specific questions, but do you actually KNOW the technology from a hands-on standpoint? No. So, anyone willing to pay money for the exams can get the certifications. Do they actually have the knowledge required to act as a subject matter expert in the technology? The answer is usually no.