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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?
... 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.
Give us job security (no more you-are-useless-if-you-are-over-40).
Especially when you consider that study after study has shown that older programmers consistently outperform younger programmers. This has been shown to be true up to about age 70.
Hi, I'm not the original poster etc.
Your right about the overhead of starting a business, it can be crushing.
That's not to say though that there aren't ways around that, I run darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca (shameless plug I know) but I built that server, I setup all the software on it, got it onto the internet and wrote all the code for it server and client side.
It's only real overhead is the 30 dollars for domain name (yearly), and the 4$ per month for a static IP address along with the 450$ for the computer itself.
However that's not counting time, I've been a busy beaver building tearing down and rebuilding for almost 3 years now and it's still got core components that aren't totally correct (yes I went to college, no they didn't help me get anything useful done, no I'm not surprised, I took the course to get my parents off my back while I created the system I knew had to be created because there are no jobs with or without a diploma).
We tried this in the Netherlands in the 80s, and it didn't work. Only a handful of jobs were created; instead productivity was increased by 20% (let people work less but keep their workload the same, and don't pay overtime...over time, employers and employees figured out how to do the same job in less time) The effects of a shorter work week probably vary a lot between industries. In services, you may see hardly any increase, also because a lot of the work is knowledge work and communications, and adding extra people to the team to make up for lost hours will certainly decrease productivity. In manufacturing however, it may be easy to slot in extra workers working shorter hours, while increasing productivity is not something easily done.
And GP is right: hiring 5 guys at 80% instead of 4 full time guys may well increase overall cost, because of the effects of tax and wage regulations.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...