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The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage
walterbyrd (182728) writes in with this story that calls into question the conventional wisdom that there is a shortage of science and engineering workforce in the U.S. "Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber? The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce."
Why link to an article about some studies that "prove" common knowledge is false, instead of linking directly to the studies themselves?
Is it journalistic courtesy?
yup there is a shortage.
.. no shortage ..
Wanna install windows 8 on 100 machines ?
Nope
There is a lot more to this article than the mythical labor shortage. There is a discussion of the complexity of the issue. That includes things like labor market cycles, shortages in some specializations with surpluses in many, the cost of misinformation to graduates, and a fair bit more.
To the summary skimmers, this article is probably worth your time.
An analysis of salaries and salary trends for STEM employees will tell you exactly whether there is a shortage or not.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
We are full on socialists, have been for many many years and the socialists in charge seek only to confiscate more and more of the wealth of the citizens.
You have no clue what it means to live in a socialist society. So stop putting completely inapprobriate labels everywhere just to appear alarmist. The U.S. is capitalist. Pure and simple. With a very small amount of socialist icing on top. I've grown up in a socialist state. To call the U.S. socialist is akin to calling snow black.
There isn't a shortage of STEM graduates.
There's a shortage of _cheap_ STEM graduates for businesses too cheap to pay properly.
The authors agree:
"Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations."
Companies have no desire what so ever to train up employees. Which is of course part of the shortage right there. Companies bitch that they can't find people with the exact skill set they need, but are unwilling to hire and train. Also the management set has their heads very far up their asses and have convinced themselves that engineers and other highly skilled workers are overpaid.
Consider that to be an engineer requires 4 years of 'work' during high school (unpaid). 5 years of college (also unpaid and requiring taking on debt). 2-3 years work experience. That's probably an investment of 15000-25000 hours. An investment worth 3/4 to a 1.25 million dollars. Certainly a 5-10% return on investment is very reasonable right? Well that's 50-100k per year.
Unreasonable to the political and management class, why? Cause reasons.
What gets me is these guys think, oh lets just outsource this to India and China. Forgetting that then India and China get the factories, trained work force, supply chains, technical know how, etc. And while the managers still control trademarks, patents and distribution, that won't last either.
We had plenty of qualified workers back in, say, 1997 when the internet first boomed.
The economy was strong as ever.
Can't we just pretend it is 1997 again?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good; they will be star programmers and eventually software architects. Another 40% are competent - they would be able to carry out plans created by others, but should never carry any larger responsibility. Good, solid programmers. The remaining 50% manage to graduate, but frankly should never work directly in the field. Maybe they can be testers or write documentation, but never let them write a line of code in a real project.
Unfortunately, it's not always obvious what kind of person you are hiring. Add to this mix the people who are self-taught, who are coming from some other field, and may have wildly inappropriate ideas. Just as an example, I am currently working with a company whose star programmer (and he really is very good) comes from process control - and has zero clue about testing or quality control. He writes code and assumes that it works, and his company is so glad to have him (at a grunt-level salary) that they refuse to insult him by testing his code - so they deliver his work untested straight to clients - you can imagine how well this works.
tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
60-80, stopped right there...Most people, excluding the rich and the poor, are not paying 60-80%, in fact I would be willing to bet no one is paying anywhere near that much, unless you are fairly well off. The max is 43% for federal those making over 200k a year, which I would argue puts you in the rich catagory. Add in about 8% for state taxes and you get up to 51% as about the highest tax rate.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You just don't know how it is when a farmer is blackmailed to join a farmer's collective by having a truck outside his house all night with a running engine, shining the beams into the bedroom. When his son is put in jail for trumped up traffic violation charges, and the charges will only be dropped if his father joins the collective. You don't know how it is when a private owned print shop just doesn't get any paper, because the order for new paper was put back and back and postponed again by the state owned papermill. You don't know how it is when you can't rent out your house anymore, but you are required to report all available appartements to the municipal appartement administration which then will send you whoever people they allocated the appartments to.
Stop your clueless musings about how socialist the U.S. would be. It just isn't true.
Apparently, you don't believe in education either, or you wouldn't spell "global" as "globul" or "religion" as "religon". Tax rates in the U.S. are well below those of other countries. That alone doesn't make the U.S. not-capitalist, but it does put it in perspective. Yes, the company tax rates need to be adjusted, that usually happens about every 20-30 years, so hold on to your britches.
Socialized medicine? Errr....how come the insurance companies are still in business and the new ACA requires everyone to get insurance somehow. Ma and Pa Kettle do get Medicare, but that is because the sainted insurance companies want to cherry pick the healthy people and insure them. Death panels you say? What do you think actuarial boards of insurance companies are?
Global warming is a fact, stop trying to turn it into a political issue. Don't believe me? Look up Miami and the plans they have for sea level rise and how expensive it will be for them. And even if you do not believe in global warming (although frankly I think it is like not believing in gravitation), observe the data on the acidification of the oceans. That's directly due to CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere. It's killing coral in....Florida and throughout the Caribbean. Localized? Hardly, it is also killing coral in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. They expect it to be gone within about 50 years if something isn't done. Yes, I know, what's a good Libertarian care about coral. Well, the crux is the ocean is the bottom of the food chain. Maybe you've heard of it, you're at the top...for now.
And if the U.S. isn't a capitalist economy, how did the real estate market manage to tank the U.S. economy and give the world's a cold? The basic problem is that a pure capitalist economy spawns bubbles and monopolies. In order or to level that out, laws and regulations were needed. Don't believe me, look at the U.S. before the Great Depression. The economy was a wild west of an economy and lurched from crisis to crisis. Of course, if you lost your money in one, your days of lurching were over. The Great Recession happened because the Bush Administration did not believe in regulation. The head of the SEC was a puppet of Wall Street. That allowed Wall Street to run amok. Realtors, the local zoning officials, the builders, and the sainted American people worked with almost no rules and...splat...there went the economy.
That's not socialism. 80% state ownership, heck if you have that then you might as well have 100% ownership, wich as we all know is full on communism.
Nope, socialism means the state owns the means of production, communism means the state has vanished and the people own the means of production. Socialism is a transitory phase towards communism.
What Americans call "socialism" is actually the welfare state built by "social democrats" which may employ similar methods as socialism does but which has a completely different goal - it's goal is to maintain a capitalist economy and soften it a bit to make it more bearable. It is a concept that you Americans constructed to immunize Western and Northern Europe against actual socialism.
And no, you don't still have a clue. You come across like the american jews in the 1930ies and 1940ies, who told their European brethren who could barely flee: "we also had hard times." Yes, there are regulations in the U.S. and there are taxes. That doesn't make the U.S. in any way socialist. The municipal appartement administration has no comparable counterpart in the U.S.. The owner of a house under the municipal administration can't enter any contracts anymore. Not even necessary repairs. He can apply for repairs at the office, but the administration will determine the time, allocate the money, will hire the craftsmen (or send their own), and oversee the execution.
Do the Colleges and Universities bear some of the responsibility for the quality of graduates they're churning out, or are these chickens coming home to roost from a well meant but misguided push to give every child a chance to get an advanced degree?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This one.
Ohh yes you do. It might be against the rules on paper, but when you can threaten the worker with deportation back to their third world hellhole of a home country, they tend to not complain about you breaking the rules.
You use an H1B when you're too cheap to pay market rates domestically and you just want to tick off a laundry list of skills without any assessment of whether they're actually good at their job or not. Have you seen any code H1Bs turn out? It might run (technically) but it's shit.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
This is a business as usual so far as I can see from what companies claim.
There's no shortage.
There's a shortage of highly competent, high producing, years of experience individuals willing to work for peanuts.
Everyone else needs training, which companies are no longer willing to pay for. In some magical fashion, employees are just supposed to be hired and become immediately productive.
Spare us your juvenile politics. You obviously have NO idea what true socialism is. You americans make me sick , sitting between 2 oceans without a clue what its like in the rest of the world, whinging about trivia.
"Yea, this is exactly what our founders fought and died for so many years ago"
Your founders were a bunch of religious extremists. Be thankful your country isn't run by them any longer or you'd be a christian version of Iran.
This is political wisecrackery with no legitimate basis to back it up. Congress has been informed for over seven years that this is an untruth. (Here's an article in Businessweekfrom all the way back in 2007 citing a study done by the Urban Institute debunking this myth.
This information has been reported to Congress on both the floor and in committee hearings. (Sorry, at one point, I had an old printout of one report supporting this statement. I can't seem to locate it, either in paper form nor on Google.) Congressional leaders willingly refuse to accept this truth, simply because there is more to gain politically by not accepting it. (Huge amounts of money are circulated by lobbyists in support of political agendas influenced by this...opening up more H1B visas, for example.)
Repeat after me: No private ownership or private control of production means. As long as most of the production means ownership and control is private, you simply don't have Socialism. You can call me Euroweenie or Hans or whatever, but you still are wrong. Swearwords don't change that.
Choose a new swearword for the situation you don't like in the U.S. or be prepared to further be called for misunderstanding and misusing the word Socialism.
Sure, well-designed stuff is easy to code - if you are a solid programmer.
It's amazing how many people carry the qualifications of a programmer, but can't actually code their way out of a paper bag. Abstraction, interfaces, any sort of advanced design pattern, and their eyes glaze over. By the time you break it down enough for them (write a method that takes a, b, and c - do d, e, f and return g), you'd have been faster writing the code yourself.
Of course, you also get crappy design, but that's a whole 'nother problem, usually coming from a solid programmer who just isn't able to think "big" enough. I disagree with the earlier poster who says you can have good software architects who are lousy programmers - at least, I've never seen an example of that.
Social security is 6.2%, and 1.45% for medicare, making it combined 7.65%, and that is for the middle class, it is lower for the rich due to caps, however since I was speaking off effective rates that is already included..... The average property tax in the US is around 1% (AVERAGE) of home cost, which means unless you have an expensive home and a low income the actual % of your income used will be low. Gas tax is in the state taxes bracket, it is variable, and relatively small part of your taxes. All in all I dont see anything that you stated that counters, it is like you are breaking down specific taxes and trying to add them on top of tax rates that already include them to make it look like more.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Pot meet kettle, do you not think that calling people socialists is not name calling and unfounded assumptions?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You mean "Thanks Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan!"
What gets me is these guys think, oh lets just outsource this to India and China. Forgetting that then India and China get the factories, trained work force, supply chains, technical know how, etc. And while the managers still control trademarks, patents and distribution, that won't last either.
So what's the problem? India and China get the factories and know-how, and for now the American companies control patents and trademarks and distribution. The executives at the American companies make lots of money. In a decade or two, the American companies aren't needed any more and dry up, and Indian and Chinese companies dominate, but the American executives don't care because they've all retired with generous golden parachutes, and are sitting on a tropical beach being waited on by beautiful women. Why would they care about the state of the US at that point?
When the returns on capital are used to buy representation, extend time limited legal protections and defend monopoly positions you no longer live in a capitalist society, it could even be argued you no long live in a democracy. So pure and simple, the U.S is ......
Fascist? Corporatist? An oligarchy? A plutocracy? Ok, I'm out of guesses...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
A few misconceptions in the above: (speaking for California, here, where I'm licensed)
1) a degree is not required; 6 years experience with reference letters from other Engineers is. Some fraction of college can serve as, I think, 2 years of the 6, if it's the right courses, etc.
1a) passing a pair of day long tests is required: Fundamentals of Engineering (formerly EIT), typically before you start working; and the actual PE exam, which is field specific (e.g. Civils take an exam on concrete and steel; Electricals look at EM fields, control loops, and logic design, etc.), and which you take after doing your 6 years.
2) It's not a professional association/order (although such do exist: IEEE, CSPE, etc.): it's a license issued by the state (Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, in California; similar in other states), just like Bar Licenses, MD licenses, etc. The BPELS can take your license away if you seriously screw up. There's a delightful newsletter that comes out with all sorts of examples of struck-off Engineers which make you ask "What were they thinking that this would be ok to do".
3) PE "wet stamp" is really only required for a limited set of things: building plans is the best example. The vast majority of engineers in California toil under what is called the "industrial exemption": you're not personally liable for stuff, the company is. Product design, for example, is usually under the exemption.
4) There are laws about the use of the title Engineer in certain contexts. I can put up a sign advertising myself as an Engineer (because I have a license). Someone without a license cannot, and must call them self a "consultant" or some such. There's subtlety too, in some states (e.g. California) about "title" and "practice". The former is using the title Engineer (e.g. in advertising) and the latter is about doing engineering (e.g. designing buildings). Some kinds of engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) are actual practice areas: as an Electrical branch PE, I can't do Civil engineering work. Some kinds are just titles: Petroleum Engineer or Traffic Engineer, and are essentially flavors of one of the "big 3".
There's also rules about whether one can practice engineering in another state, and that is, of course, state by state dependent, and whether one has to get licensed there (with or without a test, etc.; but almost always involving paying a fee).
"The U.S. is capitalist."
Perhaps your time in whatever state you are from has clouded your view some?
What us capitalist? Wikipedia tells us "Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industry and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market economy."
We do have private property ownership here in the states, but then you are allowed to own private property in Europe, in Russia, even in China, are you not?
We are taxed here at all levels, income, sales, property, capital gains, death. Local, state and federal. These taxes pay for all manner of social programs from food stamps to SSI (it's a tax), Obamacare (medicare/medicaid), unemployment, I could go on. And this is a progressive tax, that is those who earn more are taxed more, excluding of course those elites who find themselves very powerful and connected to the state decision makers and this get themselves out of these things. These people exist but they are not large in number, basically unless you are very poor, or very rich you are paying anywhere from 60 to 80% of what you earn to government in one form or another.
And for all that we live in a society of regulations from cradle to grave. You cannot buy a light bulb without the permission of the state. You cannot buy a toilet without the permission of the state. You cannot wash your car without the permission of the state. Your food must pass the inspection of some nameless faceless beauracrat. Likewise your medicine. Your clothes. Your home. Your car. Your barber cannot cut your hair without a state license.
This isn't capitalism, not by any stretch of the imagination.
And by the way, I am not trying to attack you in any way, I have no doubt whereever you are from it is also highly socialised. I am just trying to make the point that so many "progressives" and liberals (a terrible word but it's what people here use) constantly accuse us of being "evil capitalists". We haven't seen the free market here for generations, and every year taxes go up, government get's bigger and individual liberties go away.
I don't know about you but I rather liked the whole "freedom" thing we used to have.
You seem to be confusing an economic system with a governmental system. Your definition of Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industry and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market economy. I don't see how any taxes or regulations negate that. Even with all that stuff, the US still has an economic system in which trade, industry and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market economy.
Or do you mean that the trade and means of production aren't really in control of their owners because those owners must comply with regulations and pay taxes? Many (not all) of those regulation were enacted to solve problems. I actually like that my food is inspected by some faceless bureaucrat; likewise my medicine. In such a complex society we need rules and regulations to maintain a standard of quality, safety and responsibility. You may counter that we do not achieve that, and I might agree. But not everyone is an honest or virtuous actor. There is an old saying that if men were angels, we wouldn't need government. I agree with that. I would love to eliminate government. But men are manifestly not angels, and they act in short-sighted and selfish ways. Capitalism without regulation is the Devil's playground, as has been demonstrated time and again. I don't see how those regulations make it not-capitalism.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
A more efficiently stated, "thanks H1B Perverters"
"Creep" by Radio Head #mcconnelling
And the truth comes out. Why is it that every time someone gets up in arms about Socialism, or regulation or taxation it turns out to be about the government taking your money and giving it to those people? You know why the state has to do that, Cletus? Because Capitalism can't seem to provide enough for everyone.
Capitalism is an economic system concerned with bringing goods and services to market at a profit for the capitalist. That's it. It has nothing to say about making sure everyone gets fed. It has nothing to say about whether people in a society have a roof over their heads, or safe roads to drive on, or a fire department, or help when they are sick, or courts to redress their grievances, or are discriminated against. It's an economic system, not a governmental system.
You may not like how the government is run, but the minorities and the poor are not the problem. Sure, the government takes some of your (and my) money to support some of those people. But that's only because Capitalism doesn't do it. Society is more than economics and commerce.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
It has to do with far, far more than just visas and immigration policies, it has to do with all the policies backed by these administrations (and the Congresses during their terms) and their cumulative effect on the American economy: NAFTA and other trade policies, wars, defense spending, spending on research (or lack thereof), corporate welfare, and on and on.
> If I had a dollar for every professor whom I have met who shows up on campus at 9 a.m., teaches one lecture, takes an hour for lunch and leaves campus at 3 p.m. thinking that he has put in a full day of work and who actually believes that the smartest and most capable people work at universities, ...
I have a STEM PhD. I do not know a *single* professor who did that. All of them worked longer than 9 - 5. I have not even heard of a faculty member who puts in less than 40 hrs per week, not the tenured ones and certainly not the ones on the tenure track.
Spare us your juvenile politics. You obviously have NO idea what true socialism is. You americans make me sick , sitting between 2 oceans without a clue what its like in the rest of the world, whinging about trivia.
"Yea, this is exactly what our founders fought and died for so many years ago"
Your founders were a bunch of religious extremists. Be thankful your country isn't run by them any longer or you'd be a christian version of Iran.
First of all, please don't lump us all in with this guy. Second, I'm going to need some backup for the idea that the founders of the US were religious extremists. They went out of their way to say that the state could not establish a religion. Is that what religious extremists do?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If the supply and demand model applies to the job market then you can identify shortages by looking at the highest paid jobs first. Some of these professions are likely not very large, but even grouping some of these together then it appears we have a doctor shortage and lawyer shortage (Yes I hate saying that) and a shortage of middle managers. Based on these averages there is not meaningful shortage of Engineers, Scientists or IT because if there were a shortage then the average compensation would be higher. 1. Doctors $184,820 2. Chief Executives $176,840 3. Petroleum Engineers $147,470 4. Architectural and Engineering Managers $133,240 5. Lawyers $130,880 6. Natural Sciences Managers $130,400 7. Marketing Managers $129,870 8. Computer and Information Systems Managers $129,130 9. Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers $128,760 10. Financial Managers $123,260 11. Sales Managers $119,980 "Shortage" shouldn't be defined by CEOs who are going to Congress looking for more H1B visa indentured servants.
Thank you, so many people want to blame just one when obviously, like you pointed out here, we have been going downhill for some time now due to our so called leaders. Unfortunately though people just want to point their finger at one person, and don’t want to admit that their favorite politician is in on it just like the rest of them.
As companies grow, it's more profitable to buy legislation then compete. The move to expand the H1-B visa program is a perfect example. The best employee is a slave. The closest we get to that in the USA is an H1-B serf. CEOs across the board will try and purchase legislation that reduces their labor costs by insuring a supply of imported serfs, since remote serfs often prove to be less useful.
That's the reality. Anything coming out of the mouth of a CEO or a media company(s) where that CEO sits on the board, is simply self-serving noise.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Not quite. Corporations are quite happy to lobby for increased government interference when it suits them. They want the government to stay out of their way but they are more than happy to lobby for measures that increase government meddling in a way that harms competition.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In 2003, you could get a masters degree quality indian programmer for a third of the price of an american bachelors degree.
Then it was a "bachelor's degree 'A' student" about 2006.
By 2010, the quality was lower but the price was cheaper.
In 2011, we started seeing a new scam around the "L" visa. These indians were physically here but legally still in india. They could work 6 months in each calendar year then had to return home.
Two years ago, inflation ran over 20% in india and over 30% in china (and over 50%-- up to 100% at non technical jobs) for these jobs and Infosys started changing it's business model.
The typical offshore programmer in 2013- always said yes, delivered exactly to the specs- even if the specs were clearly insane/wrong/incomplete, was still willing to work 60 hour weeks but less so than in the past.
And the turnover was insane. Entire teams of people would just be gone replaced by new people every six months. And you realized the outsourcing company was training people at our expense. And our american managers LOVED the concept that programmers are generic glorp to begin with so they bit really hard on the concept that process documentation would allow an offshore programmer to be instantly productive the second they walked in the door. You can imagine the actual results in reality. Regardless of the level of documentation (which wasn't as good as promised), it was a multi *million* line system. In reality, it took years to learn how things hooked together.
The sneaky thing is the always saying "yes". An american manager asks an american programmer to do something and they know what is desired and say "can't do it on this set of constraints" while the indian programmer says "I'll do my best". "I'll do my best" is code for "can't do it on this set of constraints". But the managers bit on it every single time. And then had us working 70+ hour weeks to try and make up the difference/fix it.
Glad I was able to retire having saving half what I made since 1990. Now when I program, it will be for fun like it used to be.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Convention wisdom knows that putting out the real shortage they are concerned with won't get them what they want...
that there is a shortage of cheap science and engineering workforce in the U.S
H1Bs help fix this problem.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
To encourage you to read the article, here are a few quotes:
Do read the IEEE Spectrum article.
Read The Billionaire's Apprentice, paying close attention to p. 139 where Gupta explains how at McKinsey they took the GDP of America (and Germany) and broke down all the jobs which could be offshored, then made their big bucks selling corporations on offshoring them (which didn't really take much selling, after all).