Slashdot Mirror
Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US
Nerval's Lobster writes Millennial tech workers are entering the U.S. workforce at a comparable disadvantage to other tech workers throughout the industrialized world, according to study earlier this year from Educational Testing Services (PDF). How do U.S. millennials compare to their international peers, at least according to ETS? Those in the 90th percentile (i.e., the top-scoring) actually scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 studied countries; low-scoring U.S. millennials ranked last (along with Italy and England/Northern Ireland). While some experts have blamed the nation's education system for the ultimate lack of STEM jobs, other studies have suggested that the problem isn't in the classroom; a 2014 report from the U.S. Census Bureau suggested that many of the people who earned STEM degrees didn't actually go into careers requiring them. In any case, the U.S. is clearly wrestling with an issue; how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market?
Makes me glad I'm one of the last born Gen X'ers.
introduce them all....this ain't about work. it's about wages.
Testing is worthless and ETS is even more worthless. ETS just wants to make a buck.
College is too Expensive, doesn't guarantee a job in the US. In WA State, they used to be heavily subsidized. Now they aren't. Not enough STEM, Businesses lobby the Govt for more H1B visas and out-source more. Vicious circle since the mid 90s.
I made this: http://www.bpftpserver.com
They are for H1Bs, silly.
I think at this point everyone agrees that the STEM job market in the US is screwed up. Right now we're all pointing fingers at eachother blaming millennials, gen X, baby boomers, immigrants, business owners, politicians, civil servants, the whole government, high schools, colleges, testing services, misogynists, political correctness, investors, people who don't invest, Obama, Bush...
Anyone have any ideas on what to do about it? How about we work on that now.
Oh, I thought it was menials. Same thing.
Kids spend 4-5 years working their asses off learning something like computer science then they get to their first job and they're added to a team maintaining VB6, Powerbuilder, or Java 1.6 because the dipshits with BBAs need moar features not technical mumbo jumbo.
US businesses are all about short term profits - it's getting worse now that private equity firms (aka Bankers) are buying and running the largest proportion of tech companies. Some of the biggest players in the software industry today are private equity firms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Equity_Partners They're founded and run by former Goldman Sach's bankers and they're rolling like the Borg.
EEs coming out of places like MIT with degrees in MATLAB. Physicists coming out of Stanford with degrees in Mathematica. Circuits? What's that? FPGAs? What's that stand for again? Been happening long enough in some places I've seen that senior management thinks it have software without coding, eletronics without soldering, and mechanisms without machining. Sad. But all rooted in laziness and an inability to handle criticism or recognize polite discouragement for what it is. No mystery.
They have really really high self esteem.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
From the last link, with Javascript disabled:
You said it, DICE jobs page Javascript widget.
If the STEM wages in other countries are almost double relative to the local standard of living, then typically those people would put more effort into it. Capitalism incentives 101.
The threat of being outsourced here also tends to make one treat hands-on technical work as a mere stepping-stone job, hoping to move into management, which pays more relative to heads-down tech work. If it's a temp job, obviously one will tend to put less effort into fine-tuning their skills.
Table-ized A.I.
The answer is always in simple economics and nobody wants to face the music. If the pay is sufficient, people will be motivated to acquire the skills necessary to land tech jobs. Since people are not doing that, it's a market signal that wages need to be higher. The tech industry knows this, but they don't want to raise the pay of line-level works so they lobby for the right to import impoverished workers from other countries to fill the gap.
What if you broke out United States statistics by race? I wonder what you'd find.
... when we're having increasing problems finding jobs for what we currently have. ACS reports chemist employment has been dropping for decades, all sorts of people 35-40+ have issues finding work, lots of talk about a jobless recovery. The last thing we need are more disposable workers tossed into the marketplace without any concern for long-term employability.
If this trend continues, we're going to be awash in smart financial or medical people. Y'know, stuff that's harder to outsource so easily. We'll also have blue-collar workers as it's hard to work on a car or an A/C unit remotely but nobody thinks that's work that's worth doing anymore.
What is the fundamental driver of the free market economy? MONEY!
Quit depressing wages and destroying job security with offshoring and H1B visas.
Employers have created an unattractive workplace and they wonder why they can't attract quality talent.
how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market?
The answer to this is simple: Pay more to qualified STEM people.
But of course, we all know that the real questions is actually:
how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market while keeping the price just as low?
That, would require artificially flooding the market with oversupply, but luring qualified people with false promises through continuous propaganda of "STEM shortages".
Oliver.
all test data (most data) from indian and china is bullshit, so toss that noise now. how do we compare?
Pay us well (and give us raises as we gain experience so we don't have to job-hop to be paid market rates).
Treat us well (no more 70 hour weeks, no more rollout-on-weekends-with-no-comp-time, no more demand to fix bugs on our own time, no more keeping us in meetings all week then wondering why work didn't get done on time, etc).
Give us job security (no more you-are-useless-if-you-are-over-40).
Do that, or even some of that, and the workforce will swell with tech workers.
They used to teach them C/C++. Pointers and memory management would filter the serious people from the "I wanna make games" crowd.
Games are one of the last bastions of C/C++ and raw memory management, so what are you going on about? =)
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I hate to point this, but reducing the supply of cheap labor might improve the lot of all Americans. If some left-wing or libertarian groups actually suggested/supported this, a number of right-wingers would get on board and you might be able to get some legislation passed. Yeah, Big Business Republicans (and Tech-Whoring and Illegal-Enabling Democrats) will oppose it, but a Left/Right populist alliance could actually improve the country.
If only the two groups could stop calling each other "racist capitalists" or "self-loathing liberals".
If I'm smart enough to go into STEM I'm also smart enough to know any career so overwhelmed with outsourcing onshoring and visa abuse is a dead end. This isn't rocket science. Rocket Science doesn't pay enough to make ends meet...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the companies that are hiring electrical engineers either aren't doing it in America or they're importing their labor. EE is a dead end in America because of this. There's also practically no entry level jobs because there's no factories to cut your teeth in. It's kinda hard to compete when other countries can dump their toxic sludge into drinking water. It's not laziness, it's survival instinct. That skill is all but worthless in a country with zero protection for it's native industry and workers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Dumping on people does not make them better. Study after study has shown how fragile children's psychs are and how important positive reinforcement is. But hey, it's a lot more fun to be a dick and crush everyone you see. And if you think of human beings as a resource to be used and without any intrinsic value whatsoever you're way works too. You just have to be willing to grind your populace into dirt for the sake of profit and to buy one more Car Elevator and one more Private Jet. Yeah, I know I'm trolling, but damn if I'm not sick of this culture of disposable human beings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I graduated at the top of my class about 2+ decades ago and worked the big name fortune 500 companies as an MSEE. When H1-B's were in vogue seems everybody I knew either transitioned into a management through company politics or switched jobs. The rest were guys from Malaysia, India, then China, and so on and they didn't know more.. they just got paid much less and worked 6-7 days a week. Management every year would prune out the American engineers and eventually they would tell you "you weren't performing" or some bogus excuse to drop you legally. It was well coordinated with HR. Eventually being the last white guy in a team of 15 overseas engineers you know you're next. I found the only real jobs were government/mil if you want some stability and then branched out to freelancing contract work (which really pays well, if you can line up stuff consistently). -- Commercial is dead in my opinion. Now the software/social media companies did the same game to the CS kids.
They tell us there aren't enough qualified people. of course not, after they abused the H-1B system, people stopped pursuing those careers, and now twenty plus years later the few that are qualified would be stupid to pursue a fortune 500, when there is better pay elsewhere contracting.
I am a largely self-taught millennial, and I have been experiencing the hardest time getting a technology job right now. Almost every job I apply to, when I do get a response, I get a form letter: "Blah blah blah, we're impressed by your skills and experience, but we're going to concentrate on other candidates who match our needs more closely right now. kthxbye." A few of the companies make me jump through hoops, the coding challenges, before sending me the same form letter. This is in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, where you can supposedly just walk across Market Street and get a new job.
All these Learn to Code, Hour of Code, Computer Science for Everyone are doing is giving false hope. You learn to code, but you got no qualifications. You have to pay one of Dice's commercial partners out of your own pocket to get the qualifications. That's what every employer is holding out for: Qualifications that they're not paying for.
I suspect that I will have to start my own company, just to create my own qualifications. This job market sucks.
Have a nice time.
I'm too busy supporting the baby boomers to give a shit about the millennials.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Another problem is that very few companies want to invest in their workers. They want somebody who already has the skills that they need, and will be performing the same role for the extent of their employment there. No wonder there is so much job hopping among the people who are qualified. Never mind that even qualified people take weeks or months to get up to speed in a project of any complexity. Everybody's asking for, "Hit the ground running."
My problem is that my last 15 years of education, work, and hobbies, they just sweep it away as "Not qualified." Heinlein's Specialization is for insects? Doesn't exist as far as recruiters are concerned. You've been a network admin but haven't used OSPF? Fail. You've been a Clojure programmer but haven't used it for a commercial client? Fail. You've run a helpdesk for dozens of clients but haven't supported thousands of clients? Fail. Well, you recruiters fail, as far as I'm concerned.
Have a nice time.
Which do you want to teach in school?
I took both computer programming and web development in college very recently (finished web development this year).
The thing I took away from it most was how I'll never go back, it is the education institute not the students.
I honestly was expecting their online area to be shored up, structured, and well controlled. I found they had outsourced their website to some company from india, and not a single teacher had ever created a website before. There was not one teacher who had created a website to help hold information, provide structure for assignments or collaboration, or even was all that knowledgeable about things like mongoDB and nodeJs (two giant technological leaps in the field of web development).
On top of that was the insult. This whole stem thing appears to be an ideal that everyone needs to be super good at math, or at writing. I make websites, and while I do deal with logic it isn't actually math(I feel programmers have the same disconnect between logic and math), while I do write things onto the page, it's not really articles just basic data label titles to various areas. I paid these people thousands and thousands of dollars, they forced math and writing down my throat wasting precious time (making a website actually takes a very long time if your also setting up the server) along with several other silly classes that had little or nothing to do with why I paid them thousands of dollars.
Overall was the feeling as well that they were not helping me build myself up, they were attempting to build a cardboard cutout that would appear to employers to be a viable employee the way fish bite at shiny things. They really didn't care if I wanted to be a contract worker and only cared about how I could be a servant, which left them constantly referencing older technologies that aren't really used by anyone except high level people (asp.net should not be used to make a website, its trash, but it's corporate trash with a pedigree like bill cosby is a rapist but he's also a known name celebrity).
It feels like they are just refusing to attempt to adapt or grow with whats happening around them, they aren't even laying the foundations for the future. Overall blaming students (we're clones of each generation before us, don't pretend we're made of different flesh we are not) seems like a cop out for wide spread institutional failure. I blame that failure entirely at the colleges feet, it is their task to present functional material in a digestible manner and they failed on both accounts.
As the world grows and more examples of really great learning comes out, it's easy to see that good education is generally fairly straight forward and to the point, it has clarity and depth and only gives you as much data as necessary. When I think of how I learned jquery and how awesome and straight forward the documentation is with examples vs trying to learn MySql database, it's two totally different pools of thought about how to present data, and one is definitely better than the other (jquery) for documentation and clarity leading to operation.
At the end of the day I am still building various important parts of my web server and web site to be able to do anything useful (like process transactions) which were never covered by my course at all. They spoke about SSL but at no point setup a simple webserver and walked through the process, nor did they reference our own personal web servers and work with us to get SSL on each, same thing with email in/out, same thing with server side environment, same thing with shipping, same thing with taxes etc etc.
Now I'm broke, with my 2 diplomas, and nobody gives a damn about the pieces of paper, only about how good my site is and what I can bring to the table on a project. Which is perfectly reasonable, but the school totally ignoring these aspects has created several diploma holding generations of complete incompetents.
I have two friends, one American and the other Indian, and both have masters level math degrees, and both got siphoned off into programming as careers. The problem is that when these people were earning their degrees, jobs that required hard math were not as plentiful, partly because the computing power to crunch numbers was out of reach of all but the largest companies. Now with advances in information processing and big data capability now available economically to mid-size organizations, there will be more and more people needed to interpret the numbers. This is not to say that it will change for all STEM fields (sorry, non-research psychologists), but professions that require hard math and statistics are growth fields according to the BLS.
How to get more qualified people into stem? Pay higher wages than wall street traders. A lot of our best STEM graduates are being taken by wall street for everything from risk management algorithms to hft trading programming.
It's not that hard to figure out.
4 jobs at 40 hours equals 5 jobs at 32 hours.
And each worker now has an extra 8 hours to learn stuff,
If they desire. Create more positions if you want people
To invest time. They will not do it for diminishing
Opportunity.
Green Card is the only honest resident alien immigrant status. All others (student visas, J1, H1B, etc.) exist to force techies to accept 2nd class citizen status. If you compete with people for whom getting fired equals getting deported, you will think twice about asking for a partnership in your tech company the way any lawyer or doctor would ask if they contribute to their practice. You may be just as smart or well-educated, but you can be replaced by an indentured servant. Before serfdom was abolished, they used to advertise serfs with special skills (music talents, poetic writing talents, etc.) Being better skilled won't get you ahead if you have no power to bargain for your wages. And unlike low-skilled workers, you can't retrain after half a life-time of learning. You are in. As long as there is any legal immigrant status other than a Green Card, any US citizen would be insane to pursue a STEM career. To make a decent wage, you need to be in top 10%. And if you that smart, any career other career will do.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Perhaps it's just your communication style, but I read way too much "gimme, gimme" in your post. "Pay us well" How about making fair market value for your expertise, abilities, and productivity? "Treat us well?" How about being treated like everyone else in said company? "Give us job security"? How about making sure that you are valuable enough that a company want's to hire/keep you? I am well over 40 and have no idea what people are talking about claiming they can't get a job. I have a constant stream of offers, and I'm not even looking to change jobs. Are you over 40 and still refuse to work on anything but the VAX? Can you not act as a Lead anything? Are you still claiming Q-Basic can solve all problems? Humor aside if you have trouble finding work over age 40 I'd take a long hard look at your resume and skill set, because the issue is probably not your age.
Sure, there is something to be said for abusive employers. I have worked IT for over 3 decades, before that I managed restaurants to put myself through College, served in the US Army, and worked full time during my junior and senior year in High School so that I could have a car and niceties (that last one is not legal any longer, but..). I have seen abusive employers, and I work elsewhere. Hell, I moved over 3,500 miles to have better prospects 5 years ago. The company I worked at was shit, and all but a couple people I knew left. After a few years of being forced to hire shitty temps and losing contracts the board finally got wise and canned the management (we were smart and told other people not to work there!). I wasn't there, and doubt I'd ever go back. Point here is that nobody can force you to stay in crappy situations, but you have to be willing to make changes.
A big part of the culture coming out of College, especially the younger grads, have this idea that they should be making 6 figures because they got a degree. They don't have experience, and most have no respect for experience. Professors tell all students they are gifted, and some of these people actually believe them and wear it on their collar. Generally the younger graduates lack communication skills and professionalism, which in my opinion relates largely to the lack of experience. A thirty something that changed careers and has a new shiny degree is not the same thing as the 20 something.. I'll take a 30 something any day.
Anyway, enough rambling and back on point. Yes, there are crappy places to work. If you have to work at one for some duration use that time to build your resume. Everyone I know has run into "one of those" sometime in their career. Consider them a long rung on a ladder, and move out when you can. If you are shit to a shitty business, it's going to be hard to build the resume to move on. If you are professional in the worst circumstances people will recognize that, and know that you can be professional in better circumstances. As I started with, perhaps you don't have a sense of entitlement and just communicated your point poorly. Consider that last point if you really are forty-something and can't find good work.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Classical Education System? Oh, never mind.. you are trolling.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Sarcasm is not "dumping" on someone. I'll go further and point out that correcting someone is not "dumping" on them, punishing people for violating the rules is not "dumping" on them, offering advice is not "dumping" on them. Study after study has shown that children require enforced rules and guidelines for proper development, as well as positive reinforcement.
Yeah, I agree with you that we should not be a culture of disposable humans. At the same time if you never see any humor in anything life has to be terribly miserable.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's not that hard to figure out.
4 jobs at 40 hours equals 5 jobs at 32 hours.
And as an employer, my per-employee loading costs go up by 20%.
Tell you what: Go to a single payer health care system, roll unemployment, disability, and retirement into a Basic Guaranteed Income program, and define away poverty because with a BGI, it doesn't exist, and I'll happily split up jobs into as many pieces as you want, down to 20 hours/week/worker, because it won't cost me extra to hire more people, as long as the same number of hours get worked.
Until then, thank your government unfunded mandates and offshoring for current unemployment levels (26%+, according to World Bank numbers, since DOL unemployment statistics only count people receiving unemployment insurance, and vastly underestimate the number of unemployed).
If you want to fix the offshoring problem, I can help with that, too, but you really need to abandon the TPP, modify NAFTA to eliminate the trans-shipment loophole, and eliminate MFN status for China (for starters; there's other things that will need to happen on top of that, but it's the minimum foundational bedrock necessary to move forward).
Unemployed with a STEM degree....
I earned a BS in physics from a state school. No one will hire me. I am "over qualified" and thus rejected for many non STEM jobs I have applied for. For anything requiring a BS in STEM, I am routinely beat out by others form better schools. I require employment, but have begun to feel so worthless that I no longer apply frequently (after 200+ rejections it gets emotionally upsetting). I took a lot of computer science, but minored in music. I speak three languages, but not Spanish. I have tried to learn better interviewing skills, but still feel like it's a perverse game where lying and false confidence is rewarded above all else.
When starting out I had the audacity to desire pursuing a PhD. When I realized this was not realistic (coming from a state school with a B average) I decided to find a job in "industry" only to learn the harsh realities. Experience, experience, experience. Teaching high school, interning at the planetarium and running the astronomy club does not impress HR. No one wants someone without experience to put their foot in the door.
How does one gain "experience" when there are few entry level jobs? This is one of the major problems with the STEM lie. STEM people are needed says the government, says the newspapers, says society. But in reality there are few entry level positions to start out and they are filled by fierce competition. A mediocre business person is employable. A mediocre manager is wonderful. A mediocre mechanic is the norm. Average tradesmen do just fine. But if you want a STEM job, you must be exceptional. What do we do with mediocre physicists, computer scientists and engineers? //end rant
As a Scotsman, it is my duty to say "England" is not interchangeable with "UK". Even in the published piece from Educational Testing Services the term *actually* used is "England / Northern Ireland". While Nothern Ireland is a part of the UK, calling it out alongside England only adds to the slight. The possibly non-existent / mythical Scotland and Wales are many times larger than Northern Ireland but clearly down't merit a mention. Scotland hardly has any tech workers anyway, just little things like Grand Theft Auto are made here, no biggie. I'm calling the United States "California" from now on. "Hi, I'm Andy from New York" "Oh, a Californian, how exotic. Welcome to Scotland!"
College might not guarantee a job, but how much harder is it for those applying for jobs where a college degree is a prerequisite?
Congratulations!
You have just made the "A college degree is not a guarantee of competence, it is a union card substitute". argument. If you don't value your degree more than that, it says a lot about how much effort you put into actually learning from your courses, and it begs the question of why I should value your degree more than that, as well.
Wrong. It also says:
"The comparative data on skills attainment and parental education highlight another salient point:
The scores of U.S. millennials do not compare favorably with those of their international peers who
have parents with similar levels of educational attainment. In fact, across all three levels of parental
educational attainment, there is no country where millennials score lower than those in the United
States.48 Additionally, while a relatively large percentage of our millennials (and the parents of millennials)
have pursued post-secondary education when compared to other countries, on average,
the scores for this more advantaged group are still disappointingly low. "
The white upper middle class males who moved back in with their parents after college and who prefer video games to traditional sports, those are the ones who really make this country work!
I have it on pretty good authority... you *will* need algebra later in life, and you *won't* need football later in life.
Dumping on people does not make them better. Study after study has shown how fragile children's psychs are and how important positive reinforcement is.
Call me back when someone non-Chinese from the millennial generation builds a rocket and lands people on the moon.
And no, Elon Musk does not count as a millennial; apart from being the wrong age, he got his primary education in South Africa, not the U.S. Public school system.
Until then, all of the people who have been positively reinforced for attendance without excellence can stuff it.
I understand why medical is hard to outsource, but I would think finance would be incredibly easy. I'm pretty sure Excel and calculators are plentiful in other countries.
I had a friend who tried this. He outsources his financial and retirement planning to someone else in another country. He wouldn't have done that, but the person he outsource to was a very religious person, and also royalty. Unfortunately, he still lost all his money, despite having invested it with a Nigerian Prince.
I hope you have better luck outsourcing your finance work to another country.
God Bless.
Maybe it's the US culture where a career as a maker is discouraged
Maybe it's the religion interfering with real education and being indoctrinated to accept unsupported claims (like one that a god exists) leaves you less capable of doing evidence based work.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
The last time I visited my alma mater, they had game consoles set up in the student center. They had installed a new bowling alley. They had pool tables, and a stunning world-class gymnasium. They were also just breaking ground on another new "social and entertainment complex" costing $25M to build.
Colleges are trying to attract students with entertainment, not academics. While labs and academic facilities languish, the college is spending millions on impulse satisfaction and distraction. While I understand that there is a need to provide facilities to "unwind," the pendulum has swung way too far in that direction.
Then, there is the willful ignorance of underage drinking on campus by the administration and campus police department.
The only real money I made was running my own company, selling and licensing my own designs. I had to learn the practical skills the old way - I'm 40 now, been a amateur radio operator since I was 14; took things apart to learn how they worked, etc.
Read the writing on the wall, saw the commoditization of the space, migrated to government. Thankfully I'll be able to retire soon and saved; I'm not sure I'd recommend EE has a viable career anymore; engineering as a whole is no longer a proper profession. Even traditional domains like civil have been dominated by MBA-run monsters like Stantec.
On the upside, if you're good with computers now, you can learn everything without the debt - and market your products without the middlemen.
Those in the 90th percentile (i.e., the top-scoring) actually scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 studied countries
In most countries the filter of students who get into STEM programs in the first place is much stricter and earlier than in the US. So it wouldn't surprise me that the US score is diluted. It's a US tradition to give everyone the opportunity to succeed or fail.
Seriously... have you worked with US millennials lately? I'm in a senior position where I work and regularly get to interact with new hires that have some form of computer science or MIS degree and are unable to comprehend simple sql or even how to use excel. Sure they got great grades and can kinda sorta regurgitate the facts they had to memorize (and mostly forget) for their classes but God forbid you ask them to do any sort of independent thinking. On top of it almost without exception they always think they are the smartest people in the room.
We already have an extreme excess, it is why wages are suppressed. Lets get people OUT of STEM jobs, the forklift drivers here make more money than I do in my STEM position
Government can do things to encourage students to go into STEM programs, but it can't increase the relative market value of STEM jobs. Not without an exceptionally good reason to directly hire most grads for STEM jobs with salaries far above current market rates.
One of the first questions we ask in an interview for a technical position is "what kind of phone do you use". If the answer is iAnything, you're not the right person for the job. Most often, it's the people who would be considered millennials that think Apple has the answer to all their technology needs. Don't get me wrong, I've got plenty of friends that are iPhone users--but none in IT careers. A iPhone toting millennial's idea of "making things happen" is finding the right consultant to do the job. Anybody else is more likely to make things happen by actually obtaining the skills and doing the work. They're project managers and not IT professionals.
Are you telling me America's Best and Brightest do not want to enter a workforce where you can be insourced/outsourced/right to worked/contract only?? WTH, I'd think that average smart americans would love to get a chance at being outsourced for to another country while he has to sell his house at a loss or hope to get a contract somewhere with 85% travel required.
Perhaps the smartest decided a business degree was simpler, paid more, and had less fail written all over it. I'm certainly not encouraging my kids to get a "I'm a manager degree. " Yea they could probably make more short term in IT for a few years, but having lived through several booms and busts, I'm looking back at the promises and lies. It would have been much easier and cost effective to just take the first management position and work into retirement at the hospital or bank or retail corp or manufacturer or any of the other places I worked at in the past in IT.
... Such a waste... it's like a computer that has too many processes and spends all its CPU time doing context switching rather than actually processing meaningful work... ...If people were allowed to work on a small number at a time, knock them out, and then move to the next thing, I think they'd actually get more total projects done in a year than the "work on them all at once" method that seems way to common.
This! and context switching is the same analogy I use, i'm not sure it's even an analogy, you quite literally have to context switch in your head. I hate multitasking, It feels like this stupid buzzword that pretentious people like because it makes them look capable...
When it comes down to the task at hand it will be performed better in almost all respects if you give it your full attention. I'm a single tasker all the way and ultimately we all are, multitasking just means jumping in and out of tasks in quick succession and the reality is that even with the time lost for those context switches your brain is not a CPU and it will not full save the context and not fully restore it, instead your head stays filled with multiple projects and and your capacity to be thoughtful and careful with your code greatly decreases.
Also, about long term unemployment...
http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
This table shows that U.S. long term unemployment as of 2012 was 29.3%
My understanding is that it was down somewhat, but that was based on preliminary numbers. Not renewing the Unemployment Insurance Extension in the last federal budget moved some people from short term to long term unemployed as they fell of the unemployment insurance rolls. My numbers were pre this event, so it's possible the number has gone back above 30% at this point in time,
Generally, politicians will avoid renewing Unemployment Insurance extensions prior to midterm elections, since it deflates the DOL statistics, and makes it look like the unemployment situation is getting better, when it really means that those who were counted in the prior accounting are now long term and no longer receiving Unemployment Insurance benefits.
In particular, this was intended to make the Democrats look better relative to the unemployment situation going into the midterms; the Republicans won anyway, so expect the benefits to be extended the next time, and potentially going into the presidential election (it really depends on whether it's more important to make the (now Republican Controlled) congress look bad, or it's more important to make a Democratic presidency look good.
If it's renewed going into the 2016 presidential election, it will mean that the Democrats expect to lose the White House to the Republicans, and the Republicans are intentionally eating a potential loss of congressional seats to attain the White House.
It's basically a balancing act by both parties, and I'd vastly prefer we just use the World Bank numbers, and be done with it, rather than playing political games with people's lives, but there you go...
If you can afford a STEM degree, then you can't afford to waste it on a STEM job.
The value of a STEM degree is a potential job and salary, but with the economics driving the salary down the only benefit would be a low paying job.
STEM degrees have become the new Liberal Arts degree.. in that everyone wants them for "sentimental" and "national pride" reasons.. so naturally they flow over seas where nationalism still overrides common sense.
Its more lucrative to "Manage" the process, or process the profits "Finanicals", or blow "Derivative" bubbles.
The dummies, loosers.. are the ones who doggedly stick to the STEM job pursuit.. and its makes wonderful Political fodder
Aside from the long standing problem of professors teaching what was the hot thing when they were working in the private sector and now passe or obsolete, there is not much more fragmentation and specialization in STEM careers. 20 years ago, if you knew C, C++, and Unix, you had one foot in the door of most places. Now, employers need to fill positions that often use obscure development tools and environments. They're less likely to hire a generalist and less likely to be willing to train a generalist. That said, it's now vastly easier to search for a job than it was 30 years ago. You may have to go far afield to get one.
I work in analog IC design (yes, the world really is analog) and I just don't see American engineers under a certain age. It is not about hiring practices. All the millennial aged engineers I know got their graduate degrees in the US after getting undergraduate degrees at home.
Engineering and Science used to be respected in America, but now it seems to be a bad thing. People would rather go into law or marketing than be a science nerd. All this talk about needing more STEM workers feels hollow when we still talk about going to the moon as our latest great achievement and a large segment of the population thinks that scientists are elitists with a nefarious agenda. It should come as no surprise that we are giving our technical competence away.
Somehow, the actual answer, commonly referred to as, "money" never seems to come up.
If STEM salaries are low COMPARED TO THE LOCAL COST OF LIVING, then there will be few interested in STEM careers. A smart person can become an engineer (relatively low pay) or a doctor (relatively high pay) or a Wall Street trader (relatively high pay). Hell, even Dentists and Optometrists can sometimes beat a starting engineer's salary.
Maybe, just maybe, capitalism is working and people are choosing to put their efforts where the money is. Maybe, just maybe, people are choosing NOT to compete with workers in India making $10 an hour when they could be choosing a career that generates $100 an hour.
Maybe, just maybe, the fucking morons who keep writing these hand-wringing articles should learn to see the the obvious thing in front of their noses.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If you PAY THEM, they will come.
If you screw them by passing them over in favor of $5/hr H1B Visa holders, well, you get what you pay for.
There is trouble in river city from ETS? What else would they say?
"Oh wow, everything is hunky dory. You'd better use our standardized tests to make sure everything stays that way?"
Education at all levels needs review, but I view anything coming out of ETS, or Pearson, with a lot of sceptisim.
What employers want is:
Sycophancy. It's much more fun to botch a project with unqualified offshore people who say "we'll work harder next time" instead of with qualified people who say "define the damn business requirements and stick to them if you want us to be done on time." It's hard to tell a qualified techie from a guy off the street with acronyms on his/her CV.
Low salaries. Companies are willing to spend 60 days training and 3 months of work to fail a project offshore that can be done onshore in 3 weeks. It's so much easier to sell cheap people who aren't qualified than reasonable priced people who are. No one knows the difference, especially once the project ends up getting done in 3 weeks once it gets brought back onshore.
A low geekiness factor. It's way more fun to fail a project with guys who are fun and happy than to succeed with a bunch of grouchy nerds.
Promotions without raises. Even at higher levels I'm hearing more and more people who get a title and responsibilities while being paid peanuts relative to people promoted 5 or 10 years ago.
Stock buybacks to inflate options instead of growing the company. Who needs to get better at what you do when you can pillage what someone else built?
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
The problem is not that US STEM students are falling behind. The problem is in who gets tested. In many, many countries, only those students who show an aptitude for a STEM field get educated for that field, while many others end up getting trade skills. So, the top 10% of the US scores tend to single out the cream of the crop, in general, while the top 10% of others is the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop.
It would be similar to only using people in the comparison in the US who scored 32 or above on the ACT when comparing with other countries. But in the US, anybody who can pay (or borrow) can go to college, so the testing is using different types of populations which skews the statistics.
To be meaningful, statistics need to have the same base for comparison. You would think they would teach that in a STEM curriculum.
In my experience, millenials take a lot of things for granted in computing and are not interested in understanding the guts of the systems they are working on. IN GENERAL, they tend to avoid anything below the application layer. Memory management, databases, operating systems, hardware, etc are not well understood. And when issues pop up in those layers, they are considered as something to quickly throw money/resources at (vs understanding the problem) until things are working again (but likely still not scalable). Then the underlying issue is disregarded until it pops up again in 6 months.
That is just my experience with the majority of younger software engineers I have worked with over the last 5 years. And it's not to say they can't learn, many of them listened to us old guys over a beer (I'm 34 haha), study up and adjust their approach. It's just kinda sad that they didn't have any interest in that stuff until they were forced to learn about it on the job. To me, hardware is the most interesting part of computing.
Same comment I just posted to the Dice article. As someone with a degree in Electrical Engineering I find this article somewhat lacking in the needed information to draw any form of conclusion. Millennials are being accused of being behind others in problem solving skills, but no mention as to what specific area they are behind in. Problem solving is a fairly broad area. Usually it’s used as a placeholder for something else. My experience with both foreign and domestic tech workers has been they are on fairly equal footing. The difference is in how much it costs to train them up to your needs. All colleges teach your basic skillset (Higher mathmatics, circuitry, DSPs, Dynamics, Statics, Physics, etc) when it comes to a STEM degree. When these people leave school and hit the workforce the fact they require training in a particular methodology (Six Sigma, Agile, etc) is now being viewed as a lack of skills. These skills used to be taught to new hires during the first few months of employment in entry level positions. Now companies are expecting new hires to already have this knowledge that is unique to their company alone creating a perfect catch 22 scenario. Foreign tech workers have these skills because said companies train them in much the same way they used to train domestic workers. It just costs them less. Why do you think these same companies push so hard for more H1B visas?
Coffee: The lifeblood of intelligence in civilization.
Pretty obvious that when the government adopts policies detrimental to US citizens (that drive down the salaries), fewer qualified people will enter those fields. Duh.
Millennials have parents' basements, the older generations do not [FINGER].
Education won't help those over forty-five. I propose the following:
Social Security OAB Reform:
1. Remove the wage cap for the FICA and Medicare payroll taxes.
2. Have a college degree? You don't collect. The point of a college degree is to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
3. Own a business? You don't collect. The point of a owning a business is to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
4. Have investements? You don't collect. The point of having investments is to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
5. Received a substantial inheritance? You don't collect. The point of receiving a substantial inheritance is to have sufficient money for individual retirement.
6. Born or naturalized after 1970? You don't collect. The point of becoming of age in a Post Cold War economy is presumed to be the opportunity required to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
7. Raise the expatriation tax to recover what would have been taxed had said individual not engaged in the supreme act of selfishness.
This puts the burden where it belongs. Those not having such opportunities will receive an income for a dignified future and should not have to run themselves into the ground.
This will also phase out SS OAB. Once the last pre-1970 birth has died, the program can be closed, the debt paid and the budget balanced.
8. No longer sell US financial instruments to foreign entities. Only when fiscal sovereignty is restored can political sovereignty be once more realized. The rights you enjoy within the jurisdiction depends on whether or not foreign laws and/or policies invade our shores. Uncontrolled immigration is one of the unpublicized terms upon which foreign entities lend to the US govt.
It can be done. Remember Fleming v. Nestor.
This message is brought to you by Karl Martell. EDUCATE YOURSELF.
It's high time that millennials live like the third worlders that their college professors hold in high regard. Show me a millennial that does not have a nose ring, eat vegetarian, stink, and bown to images of multilimbed cyanotic humanoids with those curly mustaches.
[sound of power turbine shutdown]
Start shooting H1B visaholders. Make it such that no one will dare come. Put those 5.56 rounds to use.
I am disillusioned by the ETS testing monopoly. Not sure the validity of their research these days.
For starters they like to tell people they are located in Princeton - guess that is just a mailing address because Trenton doesn't sound academically prestigious enough. Once you discover the address nonsense it makes you start questioning everything else.
Way too many Americans who don't understand the value of education. Many schools, especially k12 can't keep up because can't get politicans to approve funding increases because unpopular to raise taxes. No resources so can't keep curriculum up to date or hire the most qualified candidates. Wife is a teacher and I see what she makes and the hours she puts in, worth more than what she makes. Meanwhile, many other countries are investing heavily in education and are turning out better prepared students. I work in IT and when going to school, many of my classmates in graduate courses were foreign. Why? They had the scores to be accepted into the program and/or willing to do the work required.
We have a lot of Asian friends, many with at least one PhDs and they see the value of education. They are a minority but go above and beyond what the school (k12) requires of their children. Paying out of pocket for challenge classes to make sure kids are ahead and getting involved with PTA to attempt to make a difference.
As for college being expensive, Asian parents don't think so. Willing to pay for the extra classes so kids are at top of class and can get into the best schools. If you think college is expensive, look at the cost of a top tier school. Focus of course is in STEM careers as this is where the demand is. Even if many times, also means a lot more work. Especially for those not adequately prepared in k12.
So yes, college is expensive but the question is why and what to do about it. Asians have their answer, pay the cost. For others, join the local PTA if you have children, and/or join the school board. That is a good first step. Otherwise, be vocal about the value of education for society and make the case that everyone must be willng to pay the costs to fund it. Even if this means paying a little higher taxes to support the k12 schools and subsidize college for those who many not otherwise be able to afford it. Above all, don't think of education as a drain but as an investment.
As for no guarantees that college will get you a job. Hey, no guarantee of a job without college and very likely that without a college education, will not find a good job. I spent 10 years after high school before I went to college, and for me, college paid for itself several times over over my career.
E.g., Google "exam cheating india". And efforts to rig outcomes are not limited to India...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"