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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.
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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.
Because nobody wants to do on the job training any more. And chances are if a company is hiring a DBA, it's because they are short a DBA. If there is anyone else on the database team, they're going to be struggling to do the work of two people and won't have time to train anyone else.
Companies want someone who has already been trained to do the job they are hiring for. They want someone who can hit the ground running.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
... 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.
This (no mod points today). I'm a dynamite C programmer, some small experience in JS & C#, and I know how to design an rdb schema and write a stored procedure, but I don't have "4 years experience with jdb and Netbeans". Whatevs: give me three weeks with actual stuff to do, and you probably couldn't tell the difference, but it's darned hard to get hired.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Of course training needs to be improved, or at least there is some room for improvement.
My issue is that corps talk a big game - there there is a shortage of qualified candidates. What there is a shortage of is good training, planning, career paths and adequate salary. If there was really a shortage, we'd see changes in these areas.
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?
Sounds like the company I'm contracting with currently. I hadn't worked at a defense contractor for 20 years, when I was an intern in college, so I was a little shocked when I came to work here and found that everyone seemed to be near retirement age. It's OK though, in 10 years they won't need to replace these people because this company (despite being a F500) isn't going to be around I'm fairly sure. There doesn't seem to be much work going on, there's a lab downstairs I use that's full of test stands that look like they haven't been used in 30 years, and there doesn't seem to be much of a future. The company is profitable only because they can bill the DoD ridiculous sums of money for systems for white elephant airplanes.
That's what happens when your company doesn't have a pipeline to train new employees, and only focuses on maximizing return on the ones they have. A healthy organization would have people with 20 years of experience to replace those with 30 when they retire, and people with 10 years of experience to replace the ones with 20, etc. Reduces your efficiency in the short term because you have to support some who aren't as experienced but preserves institutional memory much better.
"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.