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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
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.
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.
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.
the only inadequacy locals have it to work for peanuts while the bosses pour out caviar. remember, this isnt a third world hole like china or india. the republicans havent won yet.
copy finland
whatever they do, we do the same
#1 thing we should copy from finland's universities:
https://www.jyu.fi/en/academic...
Doctoral sword
The sword used at the Degree Ceremony is independent Finland's official civilian sword. The sword comes with a scabbard and a black or golden holder. The University's golden symbol will also be on the sword. Other traditional swords can also be used if available.
The sword is traditionally carried on the left side. Men carry the sword in its holder. A loop for the holder can be sewn into pants and the sword will stay firmly in place because there is a catch on the scabbard. Female doctors should also have a sword. In most cases the sword cannot be directly attached to dresses, because the material is not strong enough. A belt with a loop can be used, or the sword can be attached to a skirt at the waist by taking out some of the seam, or the fastening can be hidden under the top of a two-piece outfit. There is also the option of carrying the sword in hand.
The person's name, the date of their dissertation and the date of the Degree Ceremony is etched on the sword. One does not need to attend a Degree Ceremony to purchase a sword.
To buy the doctoral sword the Promovendi can join the collective order. Additional information on the collective order will be sent later for all registered Doctors.
i mean, that's just awesome. if we gave our graduates swords, i think they would try harder, right?
all joking aside, we really should just copy finland
fuck japan, it's a closed society and a stifling culture that doesn't have anything to translate to our own
but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale
sounds like a deal. we get a good system AND we avoid paying full retail.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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/
There are quite a few people who enter CS programs that are game players that want to be game programmers, but quickly drop out or switch majors once they find out how difficult it really is.
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/
Not at all. Programming is just a tiny portion of game creation, especially over the last two decades with affordable engines. A better analogy: It is like saying you want to own a bakery but are put off by organic chemistry.
I'm actually a professional videogame programmer, so I'm aware of the various disciplines involved. My point was this: if you're taking a C++ class, you're typically choosing the programming route (a CS degree), not one of the many other disciplines (designers, modellers, animators, texture artists, concept artists, writers, audio engineers, production, etc).
The implication of that post seemed to be that "I wanna make games" = "not serious", and therefore less likely to learn a "serious" language like C++. I just thought it was an odd thing to say when C++ happens to be the language of choice in the videogame industry.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You have a good point, but H1Bs are slave labor because it gives the employer power to kick an employee not just out of the company but out of the country. It's tough for locals to compete in that market.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
We really have not seen much innovation in the past 10 years. If you think about it, what is really new and improved from this time in 2005?
You have a really narrow view of STEM.
1. DNA sequencing is several orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, as are ways of making use of the data for diagnostics and theragnostics. Moore's law might be better applied to bioinformatics than to transistors these days.
2. Cancer therapeutics that use the immune system to selectively attack cancer cells instead of stuff that is just somewhat more toxic to cancer cells than the rest of your body.
3. Just announced this week: Some of the first promising candidate drugs for Alzheimers ... How much more fuckin awesome can innovation get?
4. Viable electric cars and self driving cars on their way.
5. I can use my cell phone to get a ride from a stranger in a hybrid car cheaper and faster than I can get a cab.
unfortunately, republican state houses across the country are cutting down on funding state universities
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
etc., etc.
so tuition will increase and quality will decrease, and those who are bright but come from limited backgrounds will wind up working in retail or fast food instead of becoming good STEM candidates
of course, this makes sense, as poor and stupid is the republican base
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Stop hiring Indians and Chinese.
Ridiculous. Actually, part of the problem is that due to wealth transfers (Welfare and tax credits), government handouts to unions (especially federal union jobs), etc, have made it so that engineering take home pay gets held down through taxes, and some other jobs get paid more than they should. It's not that I want lower wages for some people, but, when the disparity in earnings gets artificially reduced, a lot of people may not be willing to take the much harder STEM career path for only marginally higher earnings. In countries like India where engineers make ten times the average wage, EVERYONE lines up to be in STEM.
Here, you can have government or factory jobs making 45,000 a year, and starting engineering jobs being 55,000, and while there is probably more upward potential with engineering, it takes way more work and leaves a lot less time for goofing off in college. If the government makework job paid a more realistic 25000-30000 and the engineering job started at 75000-80000, you'd see everyone with any ability flooding into the STEM courses, and you'd be more likely to reach a supply/demand equilabrium when it comes to STEM talent.
Note: STEM jobs also take a very considerable amount of constant lifelong learning to keep up with technology changes. Constant studying, test taking and certifications are often the norm, whereas other fields you learn how to do a job and then you never crack a book again for 20 years. Tech is a tough treadmill to be on, and if you want people to go that way you have to make it worth their while by not monkeying with wages and wealth redistribution.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
No, he's right. The "I wanna make games" crowd is usually not very serious. The "I make games" crowd is where the serious skill is at. But only a tiny, tiny subset of the "I wanna make games" crowd is actually serious enough to make it to the "I make games" crowd.
Side story: I was a senior year computer science / computer engineering double degree student at my University. My senior year, I happened to move onto the floor in the dorm for the computer science learning community (something I had never lived in myself). Learning communities were a place where freshman sharing a major could live together and learn/study together. Anyway, all these CS freshman, about 30 of them, all were in CS because they "liked video games and wanted to make games". They would run around dressed like medieval people with spears playing Dungeons and Dragons, playing video games, etc. None of them understood that programming is challenging, requires a lot of theory and math, etc. I kid you not, I don't recall even one of them making it to their sophomore year as computer science majors. They all switched, and it was pathetic.
So that's what he's referring to when he talks about the "I wanna make games" crowd. They are a dime a dozen and not serious at all. The "I make games" crowd, on the other hand, is extremely skilled and respectable technically.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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.
Why train employees when you hire the exact pre-trained skill set you need? Companies aren't hiring programmers or developers or designers, they're hiring 5+ years javascript, node.js, SASS, ruby on rails, .net, and/or whatever other buzzwords they think they need. Even the most outlandish and demanding job description will get a list of candidates, from which the company can select a proper "culture fit."
Networking matters more than paper qualifications now more than ever before - we're heading for a post-labor world and nobody bothered to inform the workforce.
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.
Incompetence and only be fully developed and utilized to its maximum potential if it is paired with arrogance, as otherwise people could utilize undesirable insights into their own skills (or rather lack thereof) as motivator to increase their competence level. One of the tried-and-true ways of establishing arrogance is fostering high self-esteem that is not founded in accomplishments, but in the believe that everybody can and should regard themselves as highly valuable, regardless of whether they have actually accomplished something.
Makes me wonder whether this drive to give young people high self-esteem is actually a coordinated attempt to sabotage education and self-improvement.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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).
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.
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.
Actually, it's more of a signaling argument where a college degree indicates a willingness to put in effort and learn and thus will probably apply those characteristics in the job. It's not a perfect signal as there are plenty of educated derelicts and smart, talent people without a degree but as a first cut it is easy and thus used.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Finnish education system has been fucked for past 10 years already.
Teaching has become female-only profession and only people who are accepted to study to be teachers here are straight-a geeks(the bad kind) who lack the proper authority in front of the class.
There is/were large number of good class teachers in the post-war generations, but those people are now/soon retiring.
The trade union of teachers, AKAVA is well known joke in the union field and isn't strong enough to actually do anything that matters to improve things.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Finland is in the process of revamping their education system. They are tired of being #1 in the world, and everyone comparing themselves to them, so they have decided to fuck it up.
Finland is #1 at being average. We have full literacy at the expense of holding down anyone smarter than the average. The universities are bureaucratical sausage factories designed to produce set amounts of average masters and doctors. We simply don't have/tolerate the kind of variety and diversity that you see around the world.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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.
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.
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.