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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
Actually no, several studies have shown that money isn't the primary driver. Instead, once the cash level hits a certain point (basically, comfortable living), how much people enjoy the job dominates salary increases.
all test data (most data) from indian and china is bullshit, so toss that noise now. how do we compare?
What if you broke out United States statistics by race? I wonder what you'd find.
The Fine ETS Study discusses that starting at page 37.
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
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/
yeah i reached that point. (75k they say, location dependent of course) then i made more money, and i liked that more. and then i made a lot more, and i liked that even more.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
"Treat us well". Not equally, Working everyone to death equally is like Communism - everyone equally poor.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
Finally, one last bit of advice. Before you go quacking out that Nobody owes anyone a job, remember that nobody owes a company any business either. If you're going to go by third-world market rates and lay off the greedy locals, don't be surprised if the unemployed locals can no longer afford your products and the third-world potential customers don't want to pay first-world prices.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are a complete moron.
... 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...
I'd flub your interview with my iPhone, but you'd never know that I had a drawer full of Android and Blackberry devices.
iOS? I would never hold it against them. Reliable phones with reasonable defaults, and you don't have to root them to back them up. OTOH, I would be skeptical of a tech who had a non-rooted Android phone. It shows a lack of care for privacy, security and reliability. For one, I know that they sent my contact info to Google and it's already mingling with the Google+ data to build a social network.
Then, an applicant who's rooted their Android and hacked it to death... while job hunting, seems to not understand what it is to tinker with a production systems. They're lucky if their phone hasn't crashed or isn't out of battery by the time they get a call.
Somebody who's customized Android to their liking, firewalled their apps, de-Googled and can reproducibly customize other Android phones to stable settings... that shows some thought and skill.
But any Android bigot I've met has been an underemployed tinkerer who's had their priorities mixed up. iPhones are good phones, lucrative platforms and good techs recognize that.
"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
Fair Market Value is whatever an employer can spend to get an equivalent amount of work done anywhere. Everyone needs to ensure they are valuable enough to be worth more than a third-world developer. Most of that extra worth will come from soft skills, not technical skills. Your salary will get capped real quick if you are mostly relying on your technical skills as your value to the company.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Computers aren't the only reason companies are more efficient today. One area (among many others) of improvement has been in knowledge management. 50 years ago companies were often far more reliant on the tacit knowledge of their employees. This could include your lead engineers' knowledge of your product, your senior salesmen's insight into your customers' needs, and so forth. Companies today spend far more effort in disseminating that information and codifying the knowledge so it is saved when an employee moves on or moves into another role. A well run company should be able to weather the loss of any employee with minimal disruption.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
When did s.petry say he is still working at a cushy job with a company still living in the past? For all you know he moves companies every 3-5 years as new opportunities present themselves. People who mismanage their careers usually find it impossible to even understand what a well-managed career looks like. I have worked at a failed start-up and a large company which was and still is losing market share because of mismanagement. Neither of these companies sunk my career; in fact both were used as springboards. I learned a lot, gathered contacts, and moved on.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
I am pretty sure I agree with the message for the most part, just not the style in which it was communicated. "Employers should provide employees with" reads a whole lot differently than "give me" or "give us". There are countless stories and articles being published with a slant for entitlement based on any number of factors. We can have a rational discussion without degrading the conversation to that level.
Two bits of advice for yourself. First, don't assume everyone else lacks experience. Second, learn not to use straw man arguments. I never claimed that people owe a company business, in fact read my post again and you will see clearly that I have no issue harming a business that behaves immorally and even provided a personal experience.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
Actually it's 4 employers in the last 5 years. More than I like personally, but with the high rate of Contract/Temp work in the bay area 6month contracts worked for a while. None of those would have ended up with me working there even if I was offered, but all of them were opportunities to improve my resume. I honed my interviewing and negotiating skills as well, so win-win for me.
If you see yourself as a commodity so will employers, assuming you can back your assertions and ego that is. A whole lot of people believe that knowledge of X is all you need to land a great job, and that is extremely far from being true. Long long ago my knowledge of MVS, or HP-UX, or AIX was enough but that changed about 15 years ago. Today you need exceptional base knowledge, an ability to find what you need, an ability to share knowledge, and an ability to simplify complex problems. Most of those require a good amount of communication/logic/rhetoric skills.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I graduated with a BA in physics once. I ended up being a ship's engineer. If you want to try that, don't start out as a seafood processor like I did. Go to a "maritime academy" that will graduate you as a QMED (I think it generally takes 6 months of school). If you don't mind spending half to 2/3 of your life at sea, there's always engineer jobs, and the Coast Guard requires people with the certification, so it's possible to find entry level spots.
"Finally, one last bit of advice. Before you go quacking out that Nobody owes anyone a job, remember that nobody owes a company any business either. If you're going to go by third-world market rates and lay off the greedy locals, don't be surprised if the unemployed locals can no longer afford your products and the third-world potential customers don't want to pay first-world prices."
Could not possibly agree with this statement more. Companies look at the short term too much anymore. If no one local has a job / career that pays well, then no one local can afford your product. The offshore solution you hired for pennies on the dollar certainly can't afford it so who exactly are you planning on selling your product to ?
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.
You should get a job at Verizon; you'd fit right in!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
This is hilarious. You just can't make up shit like this. Thanks!
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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"
For California:
"While it has changed over time and changes somewhat from year-to-year, about 52 to 55 percent of the State General Fund Budget is spent on K–12 and Higher Education."
http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgetin...
And you want to spend even more on education?!? All that money is mostly going into the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats -- it sure as hell is not making it to the schools. When I went to K-6, they *gave you pencils and paper*. 6-12 you were expected to provide your own pencils and paper.