As someone else said below, treating STEM as one category is absurb and lumps together way too many different majors and careers (that have drastically varying levels of attractiveness and compensation growth).
Majors like biology and chemistry have fairly terrible prospects with just a BS degree, but CS and the engineering majors are still quite good. Physics and math are more iffy, but if you know what you're doing and pick up some employable skills on the side, then those majors will at least get you into interviews for good jobs.
There's also the question of what "not enough jobs" means. There are definitely struggling CS majors, but I think that a statement about there not being enough jobs needs to be looked at in a relative way - that is, one needs to consider what the alternative options are and whether those alternatives have better prospects. Many careers have been on the decline, and it's difficult to really identify career paths that are significantly better than computer science / software engineering (at least, at the undergraduate level). Even if we compared careers that required graduate school, the only paths that one could plausibly argue are significantly better than tech are medicine, law, and business (in my opinion). Those three careers all come with their own serious tradeoffs and downsides.
If anyone has information on what career paths are significantly better than CS / engineering, I'd be interested to hear your opinion. Right now, I'm unfortunately not seeing significantly better alternatives.
I think the hype is really, really dangerous. I work as an external examiner for CS students at an academy and bachelor level. 10 years ago, maybe 20 students would finish from a single school, in 2019 that number is in the several hundreds some places thousands. If I look at my average grading over the years, there is a clear trend too. People are either really good or really bad, where 10 years ago it was far more spread out, and a lot more people were “average”. It’s anecdotal but I think it’s because hype has pushed too many people into CS.
There will always be a need for excellent CS students, preferable with candidate or masters, just like there will always be a need for excellent biologists or great escimologists. I don’t think there will always be a need for below average CS students, especially not at the rate of which we’re producing them right now, again thanks to the hype.
One of the reasons I say this is because of automation. If you look at operations, the cloud has really killed a lot of jobs in enterprise IT departments, because it’s so much easier to operate your stuff in AWS or Azure than when you had to have your own infrastructure. Sure there are still operations people around, but notice how they are the best operations guys not the averages, because the people who were average 10 years ago are unemployed today.
It’ll be the same for development. We already see bits of it, at least if you’ve been around for a while. 19 years ago we build our first web based enterprise tool to handle employee vacation, sick leave and tax-refund on corporate related driving. It was a massive JSP undertaking that took 20 guys and 6 months. In 2017 it was replaced by a modern web tool build in .NET framework web-app and Angular, it took an intern three weeks to do it.
If you look at what areas are becoming useful, it’s not really CS. Sure you’ll be able to use some CS students for ML, but you’d rather have a mathematician or a statistician who can code. Sure you can use some CS students for robotics, but you’d rather have an electrical engineer.
I’m Danish, our jobmarket is different, but we too hype STEM and especially CS, but the truth is, that what we’re really going to need is electricians, pumblers and other craftsme because every young person wants to learn to code.
One thing that had happened, especially in SE Asia, is the wage has been driven down outside of FAANG. Many non-tech people view development as plumbing, which it kind of is, but at least plumbers are certified which guarantees a minimum level of competency. Buyers don't view development work in terms of value delivered but only in terms of price. This destroys the middle market for good but not industry leading devs.
This is not limited to SE Asia. Outsourcing, rather over-simplified and limited definitions of cost, buyer's market for companies (and no, the bigger players don't care for real talent at large) drive this in other environments too.
I am from Germany and in this market for 20 years as a freelancer/contractor/consultant. Personally - having a major in mathematics and relevant project experience - I have no significant problems. But 'dev-only' people certainly face the mass market effects.
Also from germany. CS degree = 75% mathematics + 5% coding + 20% other theory. Fresh out of university i hardly could write code at all and had zero experience with databases.
What I see happening that even though productivity has increased by e.g. an order of magnitude, projects still remain big since there's a latent demand for more features.
There might be latent sales department demand for more features. I don't think there's latent market demand for more features, at least not to the extent consumers would choose to pay for new features.
How many Facebook users were willing to pay to have to download a separate Messenger app, or for Oculus integration? How many Apple users would pay extra for the Touch Bar if it were a standalone feature?
My guess is, not many. Probably not enough to justify adding the feature.
>2019 that number is in the several hundreds some places thousands.
wow - how are the uni's getting the space / resources to do that? I have some knowledge of the investment required in labs and lecture theatres, and I know of several CS programs in the UK capped by the constraints that these impose. Basically if you can't get the class into a "standard" lecture theatre at your institution you are capped. Attrition is ~5 and 15% (sometimes higher - but the teaching quality stuff kicks in) per year so by the time you get to a graduation class it's rare that >100 graduate - more like 60.
Good question - I think that hands on hardware should be at least one bit of a proper CS degree, for things like massive parallelism and FPGA's perhaps you could use cloud resources - does this cost in?
I’m not sure that you’d rather have a mathematician or statistician who can code for all cases with ML. At least at universities I’ve gone to, even the main research in these areas is going on in CS/ECE departments or some in the stats department. Implementing non-novel ML stuff seems like most of the difficulty would be in data movement etc. since you can use the big frameworks for most easy things. Even testing new stuff at small scales might involve lot of eg fiddling in MATLAB and testing on examples rather than only proving theorems
Of course the “CS students” I work on these topics with are more math heavy CS graduates (some sort of have a complex about not being in the math department) rather than someone who is extremely good at coding and only took the calculus sequence necessary to graduate with his CS degree.
Careers that have higher status and entry requirements have the advantage that they don't cannabalize their middle-age job prospects like CS does.
CS is great for many years, until you discover it's a year too late, with only a limited number of things to show for it, along with largely useless random domain knowledge; and your peers who didn't major in CS are gaining more leverage relative to you, due to compounding nature of advancement in those other professions compared to constant skill (re) acquisition in tech
I largely agree with what you say for generic CS skills. A way to accumulate leverage might be focusing on hard and deep skills like distributed computing and machine learning for complex real-world problems. Although details change significantly over time, the fundamentals evolve much more slowly and take years to truly understand and be able to apply them effectively.
Alternatively, moving into technical management with deep domain knowledge might be suitable for some.
Machine learning effectively didn't exist a decade ago. A decade from now, it's likely to be where building HTML pages was in the nineties, or database-backed web applications in the 00's.
I understand it's a deeper skill set, but depth has little to do with supply-and-demand. Physics, biology, and similar have a lot of depth, and the fundamentals evolve much more slowly and take years to truly understand and be able to apply them effectively as well, but employment prospects are grim.
If blockchain had turned out to be the Next Big Thing, the important fundamentals would have been in cryptography. And so on. Someone young, without family, mortgage, etc. obligations, will be able to get into the current hot field much more quickly than a 40-year-old or 50-year-old with three kids in school and possibly starting medical problems.
It doesn't help that there is massive age discrimination.
If you want to be employed older, the trick seems to be to move into a cross-disciplinary role, such as management (people+tech). A lot of other cross-disciplinary roles will do, though (medicine+tech, bio+tech, chemistry+tech, EE+tech, etc.). Pure tech doesn't seem to cut it after thirty for career growth, after forty for job stability, or after fifty for having a job at all.
Machine learning has been applicable to businesses since the late 90's and early 00's (e.g. recommendation engines, basic speech recognition for people with special needs) and existed as a research field decades earlier.
The star researchers who command top compensation in the field today often have over a decade of experience.
I agree that a much larger pool of graduates might dampen average compensation in the future somewhat. A key distinguishing feature of these more complex skills (relative to HTML, etc) is that much fewer percentage of people are capable of mastering them, and it takes longer commitment as well.
Relative to pure physics and biology, the applications are much broader and thus better prospects for the experts.
Do senior petroleum engineers face the career issues you suggest?
I’m 40, all my significant career growth was after 30 with most of it after 35, I’m more employable now than I was 3 years ago and am paid well. I was really worried about a Logan’s Run-esque slaughter at 40 and I’m not seeing it, with the usual caveats on luck and anecdotes. I do believe there is intense ageism in our industry but I think it may be endemic to certain areas or companies. Don’t fear the reaper my friends, you can be 40 with a family and still work in high profile tech, probably.
> Careers that have higher status and entry requirements have the advantage that they don't cannabalize their middle-age job prospects like CS does.
Do you have any studies or evidence to back that assertion up? If the number of people working in a field doubles every five years there will then at 20 years with perfect retention only 7.5% of the population of workers will have 20 years experience and half will have less than five.
High status doesn’t really help that much if the economics and funding environment are awful. Professional actors are not looked down on by many and even fewer look down on biology or chemistry professors but trying to get into those careers is a poor choice unless your parents can support you if it doesn’t work out. Vicious competition for a small number of coveted spots leaves to many people spending years of their lives only to drop out of a tournament they lost, with precious little to show for it.
If you're smart about what you learn and what jobs you take, you can build a skill set that will keep you in demand forever. If you just spend 20 years building boring crud apps using the hot stack du jour, of course you're going to have problems.
Always try to make your next project more ambitious than your last. Look for opportunities to incorporate challenging features into boring products, and ask your employer to let you work on progressively harder things.
It's from 2013, but Peter Turchin talks about law degrees in the U.S., where job prospects had become bimodal. Note that this would not show up in unemployment stats necessarily, but the salary prospects of the lower mode clearly did not justify the time and expense of the law degree: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/bimodal-lawyers-how-ext...
As a law student, I definitely saw this bimodal outlook. I went to a second-tier law school, but in the New York City area. At the time, twenty years ago, the "average" starting salary for my school was posted at $65k. But what you later found out is that the top students were getting offered $140k (Top NY firms), while everyone else was getting $30k (working for judges and small NJ firms). So no one was actually getting an offer for the average salary. Some of the top NYC firms would interview at my school, but would only interview the top 2% of students. Also, the reason the "spike" at the high end is so sharp and pronounced for law is that top tier law firms mostly all offer the same salary. If one of the group raises the starting salary, all the other top tier firms instantly match that new salary.
Working as staff at a major university, I get to interact with a lot of students in biology and often hear back from them once they graduate. At least for biology, the job prospects are not great. With luck, you may make a living wage and have a full time job with job security by the time you reach middle age, but there are so many students that graduate and end up working at Whole Foods, or waitressing at the Cheesecake Factory, or being a personal fitness instructor at a private club. Those are all jobs recent MS degree graduates from my institution are currently working while they wait for something better to come along. Sometimes something better doesn't come along.
Of course, the situation isn't always that bad -- students graduate and can do quite well for themselves, but there is no guarantee of a good job if you graduate with a BS or MS in biology, and that is a little different from graduating with a degree in math or CS. At least, that's what it looks like from my vantage point.
At least at my university (major well-known one), many if not most biology majors were intending to go on to medical school, rather than try to get a job after graduation.
Bio was just a pragmatic and convenient choice as the course requirements for the bio major itself pretty much also fulfills all pre-med course requirements (bio, organic chemistry, etc...)
Instead of grouping people together with stem we could have a categorization that species people who can reasonably get a job as software engineers and then all other stem. Because isn't that really it? Bio seems much harder to do dev work, but it's common for mech engr, ee, some physics and math.
In the UK CS is one of the least effective ways to be employed.
The catch is that other grads will do terrible work like waiting on tables, while CS grads usually won't. So "employed" is a relative term. Stats for "gainfully directly employed in work that relies on their major" are harder to come by.
Even so. Anyone who thinks they can do a CS degree here and walk into a well-paid job is deluding themselves.
I am surprised to hear that. I have no personal experience with it, but anecdotally, the son of a friend who recently graduated in CS from Newcastle said he and all his classmates had multiple offers upon graduating. Although, he did say the work was not what he had hoped for. He was hoping for a position in game development or distributed systems and ended up at a company doing POS terminals software.
Wow, whole foods jobs require an M.S. degree that's rough! I have heard you need 2 postdocs in biology before you are qualified for industrial research ...
Unfortunately, "just try harder" isn't always the solution to this problem. Sometimes it's better to fail, catch your breath, and then select a different path.
You can be a "STEM graduate" but if you insist on trying to get a job doing basic scientific research, you're probably not going to find interesting well paid work. If you do an engineering degree and get a job building mining equipment, you're going to do fine. The job market doesn't care about your aspirations, it cares about how useful your skills are in solving a company's problems.
If you want a job doing basic scientific research the entry level qualification is a doctorate. That’s certainly true in universities and it’s equally true in biology and chemistry though that’s probably not enough. You almost certainly need a post doc or two. Physicists have enough outside options that if they want to get out the post doc is unnecessary but getting a doctorate is a terrible financial decision. That’s what happens when the government does a careful study of how to reduce the prices of highly skilled scientific labour and then follows the recommendations.
> Government and Universities Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
* "X, 23, from Sydney's inner west graduated with a bachelor of creative arts in film and television production from a private college in 2016. She wants to be a film director and actor."
* "Y, 23, studied journalism at the University of Wollongong and was warned it would be tough to get a job."
* "Z graduated with a degree in social research and policy from the University of NSW in last year said it took her a year to find a project management job."
This is the real reason why women are graduating in computer science in much smaller numbers than when I was in school, when the number was 30%. Programming, like engineering and science, has turned out to be just not a good long-term career prospect for most people.
Whenever demand softens, which it does every few years, women and minorities take the brunt. Once you have been out for even three years it is very hard to break in again.
Part of the problem is that when employers don't feel like paying a living wage, they easily persuade government to import foreign help, in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The companies pretend that this doesn't depress salaries, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Furthermore, they have arranged not to be obliged to pay overtime, and then they demand overtime work on a routine basis. I have never seen such an employer pay engineers overtime, under any circumstance. Sometimes there are "bonuses" that are a tiny fraction of what overtime would cost them.
The only plausible solution to this problem will be for engineers and programmers to unionize, and start cultivating representation in legislatures. We are handicapped by myths about self-reliant cowboy engineers who don't need to join together.
I don't recognize the world that OP is describing. CS is still a good career option and pays well in relation to the level of skill and education it requires.
Having said that, it isn't a utopia and it isn't for everyone. One of the many reasons why I hate the current "Everyone learn to Code" trend is because if you don't love it, programming is as exciting as reading a EULA or TOS or any legal contract. That's certainly how some of my friends see programming, and I can totally see why.
I don't know who pays overtime, I don't get paid overtime, but I also don't do overtime (at a FAANG). Why do overtime if they don't pay for it?
Overall it's pretty good, and I'd be fine even if I was paid half of what I'm paid, after a 2001-style crash. I can think of very few other jobs that have such nice prospects.
What country? In my experience overtime is never mandatory. I think if you work for a startup with young (unattached) engineering staff there may be social pressure to spend inordinate amount time at the office - is that what you mean?
In the US, on call/overtime without pay can be mandatory for salaried employees. IT as i recall is called out specifically if you help maintain critical systems. Normally the company just has to be clear on expectations before hand. Fortunately I have had reasonable employers that don't abuse it but i do have to do on call and don't believe i have any option to avoid.
I had a salary in my last company and did on call which came with a paid component if we were called to do work off hours. We were working on that in my current company, but they just basically let me set my own hours to deal with that. Work a lot for a few days, go home early on other days. Have some downtime? Expect you might need to work extra some other time. My company doesn't abuse this, although there have been a few really critical months of crunch time in the past few years. It's basically all evened out for me.
I worked in Israel in various big companies and I could see situations for myself or others where overtime was never explicitly specified, but a monthly salaried software engineer had been given an amount of work that cannot be completed without "voluntary" overtime. I'm asking for country because I can see it being a cultural difference between different countries.
My current gig actually. As a contractor/consultant, I charge for hours worked. You want more than the contracted 40 hrs per week not only do you pay but you pay at a higher rate.
I've worked in startups for fifteen years and not once have I been in a situation with compulsory overtime. Maybe I'm just lucky? Maybe Boston area startups respect work/life balance more than most?
Anyone developing for a web service or data warehouse is likely to be oncall; if the employer has an SEE organization maybe someone else does it for you ....
I'm nearing the end of my second year of CS. I was up programming until midnight last night (Saturday night). I woke at 6am this morning excited that I get to keep working on this task. I don't know of a single peer excited to work on assignments but I guess this bodes well for me.
Yes and no. Cs is huge. People have preferences for what they’d rather be working on. But it seems it’s a lower div class, whose projects tend to be more general. There’s a possible cases: your peers find the project boring because it is trivially easy but just busy work to them; they find it hard; they are interested in something else in cs.
This assignment, in particular, has a reputation for being difficult, even nightmare inducing. I think it's a combination of I like challenges and I like development, while my peers might not like challenges as much or they might find it stressful.
Are you kidding? We have people flooding into CS jobs from ALL other fields, and ALL other countries, because, "If I don't make it in XyZ I can always get a job programming!", at Google I sat next to a math PhD, an EE, and a Music Major! What do you think happens when every one uses your major as their backup plan?
Have a non-CS PhD and “made it” in my field, but joined FANG to make 2X as much money. I mean, why not?
You should have an upper hand though with a CS degree. I had to learn everything on my own, and there are still areas that I don’t know and you should.
It was certainly my backup plan. I never took a CS course, but figured that I could be a programmer if physics and math didn't work out. In fact I went through college with no employment-related objectives.
But to be fair, CS also treats programming as a backup plan. That's why there are coding interviews. How many CS majors actually get "CS jobs," i.e., pursuing the advancement of computer science? Probably the same number of physics majors who get physics research jobs. The rest become programmers.
Software engineering is not a "CS job". Computer science is a research field that has very little to do with the workaday business of creating good reliable software.
Developers would do well to realize that they're skilled labor, not academics or superstar artists, and start behaving accordingly.
Not strictly related to programming, but in general, most engineers don't use the stuff that they learned in college. If it's maybe 20% of the work, it will go to 20% of the workers, rather than each worker doing it 20% of the time. As a result, engineers quickly differentiate and stratify in the workplace.
You may be one of the 20% in your particular area of interest. If you're doing the kind of work that most engineers tend to avoid, you will never be unemployed. ;-)
I got a degree in EE, but spent a year in CS (don't ask). Some years back I totted up what have used since graduation that I actually learned in class. I didn't get a CS degree because it is too easy -- you just read the book. So I didn't learn any CS there, I had already read the book.
The only thing I have used since graduation, for work, that I actually studied for a class was big-O notation and reasoning.
But! Every week, in every engineering class, they assigned problem sets. Every week I read them through and knew, with certainty, there was no way I could do them. Then, every week I turned them in, completed correctly.
So that was what I really learned in school: that I have no real sense of what I can learn to do, and do. Since then, I have just done things, without worrying about whether I was really capable.
To add my anecdotes to the pile, my experience is that those going into software jobs as a backup plan make significantly less and do significantly different work. They generally just don't have the skill base nor experience to command the same level of salary.
Learning to program most definitely doesn't take 10 years of self-study. Someone of reasonable intelligence and enough disciple can learn enough in about a year to become reasonable useful for the average company. Does that person still have a lot to learn. Sure, but that can be learned at the job.
Where I live in Austin, Texas, USA, programming is one of the better job markets, and has been for decades with the exceptions of 2001 and 2008. Even in those years, it was better than most other fields.
recent STEM hype aside, it has historically been very challenging to find work as a "straight" biologist, especially with only a BS, and if you can it's probably going to be scut-level underpaid lab or field work.
Part of the reason I think STEM is horseshit is that it is so broadly defined as to be without meaning. You just can't reasonably talk about something as one labor market if it includes zookeepers, pharmaceutical chemists, medical doctors, facebook engineers, economists, and advertiser...er, data scientists.
> Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. ... Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. ... The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. ... No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher
As i recall at the time, even IEEE's response was "there is no shortage and certainly no skills gap; employers just won't pay you what you're worth and people won't work for peanuts."
>"there is no shortage and certainly no skills gap; employers just won't pay you what you're worth and people won't work for peanuts."
That cannot be IEEE's response. It makes no sense. The market decides the rate, not the employers nor employees. If no employer wants to pay what you think you're worth, you're not worth that. Having said that, the market rate does give you some indication as to what the wider supply and demand looks like.
You are missing the argument. It is the same one that RAND https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF194.html gave when commissioned by congress to determine whether their was a “STEM shortage.” If there was a STEM shortage, wages would rise. Since rising wages aren’t observed, the situation is that the employers complaining of a shortage don’t want to pay the market rate. Instead they want extra-market forces (political programs to push workers into STEM training) to lower the market rate for them.
The crazy wages that tech companies pay aren't a data point? One of my co-op student got offered a position in the States with starting salary north of $120k - straight out of university and not even by one of the big 5 or even a Fortune 500 company. The guy was good and he'd have done well in the market, but not that good.
>Since rising wages aren’t observed, the situation is that the employers complaining of a shortage don’t want to pay the market rate.
Again, I'm having a hard time parsing this. Employers would always like to hire more people for less money. Employees would like to work less and make more money. You're correct in that technically there are never any shortages of anything ever, because you could always pay more money as supply dwindles. Even Venezuela, if you're willing to pay exorbitant prices with hard currency, I'm sure you could get anything you want. That's not what is meant by a 'shortage' though.
>Instead they want extra-market forces (political programs to push workers into STEM training)
That is such a weird way to phrase it. Every industry always tries to market itself to kids and students as a great career option. I'm not worried about the fact that companies in IT want more kids to go into IT.
I'm getting a 'rent seeking' vibe in this thread. It seems like people here want to kick out the ladder after they climbed it into their career choice so as to reduce the supply of future professionals so that they can be the beneficiary of that reduced supply.
One data point - a co-op student of yours - is not reflective of STEM as a whole. As this Sydney Morning Herald article points out, STEM includes fields like biology, which don't have crazy wages.
As an analogy, consider someone fresh out of high school who plays for a professional sports team and is paid $5 million per year. That 'crazy wage' for a 19 year old does not mean that all professional athletes are well paid.
What do you think "shortage" means? Because my understanding agrees with bloomer's. There is no shortage of Volvo V60s simply because new ones aren't available for $10,000. But the calls for STEM training sound very much like that sort of complaint.
While it's true that (nearly) "Every industry always tries to market itself", those are market forces.
"Extra-market forces" would be like the government including two years of plumbing training for all high school graduates. That's a non-market way to drive the cost for normal plumbing jobs down. (Note that this means other topics would be covered less.)
Similarly, the government might greatly increase the number of $10,000 scholarships for CS majors. This would almost certainly result in relatively more people with CS training, compared with other fields. The prediction is that this results in a higher supply of programmers relative to demand, and thus a lower salary.
A market solution is to have companies including training as part of hiring new employees. Companies don't like this because it places the expense on them. It also increases risk in two ways. First, someone may decide after 9 months that this isn't the career for them. They still get paid for those 9 months. Second, after the training is over, the employee may decide to take that training and go elsewhere for better wages. Calls for increased STEM funding can reasonably seen as a way to push the risks onto the student, and onto the government ("socialized", rather than "free market").
There is no need to reference rent seeking for this interpretation, which I believe is also the standard interpretation.
>As this Sydney Morning Herald article points out, STEM includes fields like biology, which don't have crazy wages.
Correct. The comment was clearly directed at the programming profession.
>That 'crazy wage' for a 19 year old does not mean that all professional athletes are well paid.
That's true but unlike professional athletics, programmers are paid well on average.
>"Extra-market forces" would be like the government including two years of plumbing training for all high school graduates. That's a non-market way to drive the cost for normal plumbing jobs down.
I really don't understand this argument. Government isn't trying to get people into STEM in order to drive down STEM wages. That is not how government works. That is not how politics works. This is not a good metaphor to understand the motivation. Governments will always have programs and policies to move people into specific industries or move people out of specific industries. That usually stems from good-intentions, values of the population (Armenia loves Chess, and therefore teaches Chess to kids in primary school), and maybe for some economic, ideological or political reasons.
>Similarly, the government might greatly increase the number of $10,000 scholarships for CS majors. This would almost certainly result in relatively more people with CS training, compared with other fields.
And that would be preferable to what the US (and Canadian) government is doing - mainly underwriting huge loans (or subsiding tuition) for majors that have low probability in resulting in a good paying job.
Trust me, if government wasn't involved in post-secondary education, you would see an even larger move to CS because no bank would ever underwrite a student loan for a 4-year history degree.
>The prediction is that this results in a higher supply of programmers relative to demand, and thus a lower salary.
OK. This is basic econ. Having said that, the math isn't so straight forward. Sometimes increasing the pool of engineers can also increase the market for engineers because more companies relocate to the area, or more companies get started by those engineers.
>Companies don't like this because it places the expense on them.
All employees need some training because no business is identical. But OK, I understand the point you're making though I think it is nonsensical.
For example, you're not seriously expecting a business to provide a 4-year degree program to train their engineers? That would be like building a house by grabbing a guy off the street and training them on how to build a house. If a company needs programmers to work on their software they will advertise for professionals with those skill-sets. This is why they pay good money for those professionals.
You wrote "The comment was clearly directed at the programming profession."
No, it is not clear. The SMH article was on STEM. The thread concerns STEM. The IEEE position you doubted is (almost certianly) about STEM (see https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-... ). You presented a data point about programming, which is part of STEM. Nowhere did you say that the data point was only meant to be restricted to programming.
Even then, you defined it as those tech companies which pay high wages. There are plenty of tech companies which do not pay high wages. (Especially if your definition of "tech" includes things like "biotech", though I know that's not what you mean.)
Here's another IEEE piece, this one a podcast interview (with transcript) from "Techwise Conversations" titled "Why Bad Jobs-or No Jobs-Happen to Good Workers" from 2012, at https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-b... . It concerns Peter Cappelli's book 'Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It.'
You ask "You're not seriously expecting a business to provide a 4-year degree program to train their engineers?" That's of course silly. A 4-year liberal arts degree in computer science is different than job training. Few companies will require me to learn a foreign language, or take a fine arts course, as part of becoming a software developer. Or, as you point out, take a history course. Which is all fine. Colleges aren't trade schools. (And I think we need more trade schools.)
Instead, I'll quote that podcast:
> Well, the employers, if you look at what the hiring managers are saying and what they’re looking for, they’re not, for the most part, hiring people out of college anyway or out of high school. What they want is three to five years’ experience. So the shortages that they report, the difficulty hiring, are for people who have quite specific skills, and those skills are work-experience based.
So no, most employers are NOT looking for the equivalent of someone of a 4-year degree in the first place, so they aren't going to pay for someone's college degree.
In fact, that podcast concurs with my point, which you think is incredible:
> the shortfall is in giving people experience, taking people out of school who are bright and capable, and giving them the basics and getting them up to speed in these work-based skills. And the problem is, employers a generation ago used to do this routinely; now, virtually none of them are willing to do it.
Cappelli makes the argument (which I hadn't heard before):
> the craziest thing about high tech is the Silicon Valley model, which sort of became dominant in the U.S., replaced the model where IT people used to be groomed and trained from within. And the Silicon Valley model of hiring just in time for what you need came about largely because they were able to poach talent away from these bigger companies that had spent a lot of time training and developing people.
What I (and hprotagonist) wrote here is nothing exotic or abnormal in the discussions about the "myth" of the need for more STEM training. Nor does it ignore basic economics like you think it does.
Since you are so incredulous that the IEEE (or at least articles in the IEEE) can have a position which can be summarized as "there is no shortage and certainly no skills gap; employers just won't pay you what you're worth and people won't work for peanuts." , and yet it's so easy for me to find IEEE articles making that point, suggests that you need to take a closer look at what the IEEE has written on the topic before making such a blanket response, or characterizing our viewpoints as fundamentally flawed from an economics perspective.
>No, it is not clear. The SMH article was on STEM. The thread concerns STEM.
Uh huh. I would think it would be clear after my response, and yet you won't simply accept it and respond to that.
Just to be extra clear so I don't have suffer through another multi-paragraph response where you gaslight me about what I meant to say: I agree that there is no shortage of science majors. We are probably graduating too many biologists, chemists and physicists for the market or academia to take in. There are certain engineering fields that are probably saturated as well.
I can't say the same about CS. For one thing CS is a very flexible profession. Because it gives you such a good mental model of computing, you can transfer CS knowledge into multitude of domains. Regarding the demand side, the fact that bootcamps exist and that graduates of those bootcamps can actually earn a living suggests to me there is more demand for programmers than you make thing. There is no such thing as an engineering bootcamp, or a physics bootcamp, or a physician bootcamp. The fact the big tech companies (but even startups and mid-to-large companies) keep throwing around huge salaries and bonuses is another data point. The fact people here think that a six figure starting salary after a 4 year degree is perfectly normal is another data point. The fact that politicians and non-professionals have taken up a mantra of 'learn to code' is another data point.
HN title: "Not enough jobs for science graduates challenges STEM hype"
hprotagonist: "it has historically been very challenging to find work as a "straight" biologist ... I think STEM is horseshit is that it is so broadly defined as to be without meaning"
me: "The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage"
hprotagonist: "even IEEE's response was "there is no shortage and certainly no skills gap"
You: "That cannot be IEEE's response"
(I later provide a couple of links to IEEE-hosted articles which concur with what we are saying. Furthermore, you now agree that there is 'no shortage of science majors', which is the S of STEM.)
bloomer: "It is the same one that RAND ... gave when commissioned by congress to determine whether their was a “STEM shortage.”"
you: "The crazy wages that tech companies pay aren't a data point?"
me: "One data point ... is not reflective of STEM as a whole"
If it's so obvious that the thread switched away from STEM onto CS, then why did both bloomer and I get confused? Instead of me 'gaslighting' you, I think a better description is that you 'sidetracked' the conversation, while I tried to steer it back to the main thread.
Jesus. I qualified my statements over the last two responses. Can you move on already?
I would also appreciate if you didn't continue to distort my position by attributing quotes or phrasing to me that I didn't argue, and I don't believe.
>I think a better description is that you 'sidetracked' the conversation, while I tried to steer it back to the main thread.
Fine. But we have no actual disagreement about there not being a lack of supply of scientists and even engineers. I conceded that point, though 'concede' is too strong of a statement because I never argued otherwise. I live in a university town and half the people in my social circle are some form of PostDoc or PhD student/grad in the sciences. I can see how hard it is for a Math PhD to get a tenure-track position.
>(I later provide a couple of links to IEEE-hosted articles which concur with what we are saying. Furthermore, you now agree that there is 'no shortage of science majors', which is the S of STEM.)
It wasn't that I disbelieved IEEE, but rather it was an expression of surprise that a IEEE would issue a nonsense statement like that. But I said that already, and you won't leave it alone. How many more times do I have to explain what I meant without your gas-lighting?
>If it's so obvious that the thread switched away from STEM onto CS, then why did both bloomer and I get confused?
And after the tedious clarification - what's your excuse now?
>FWIW, and not that it makes any difference, but:
I understand the word 'bootcamp' is used, but those 'bootcamps' are not there to train professional physicists or engineers. They are summer camps for students to get excited about the respective professions. But you know that, so why would you purposely be engaging in this equivocation? Why even bring it up as a point when you know it's red-herring.
I ask seriously. I made a point that there are no weeks-long courses to get you to be a professional scientist, and you went ahead and googled it, found programs for students which are nothing like programming bootcamps but you still decided to post that.
>There are bootcamps for physicians, but they are for practicing physicians to get training in a specific topic.
So nothing like bootcamps I referenced. Just like the other 'bootcamps' you used as a counter-example.
>The crazy wages that tech companies pay aren't a data point? One of my co-op student got offered a position in the States with starting salary north of $120k
Why is $120K a "crazy wage"? Perhaps labor in general, and particularly highly specialized labor, is underpaid across the board. It's not uncommon for traders or investment bankers to earn 7 or even 8 figures yet I don't hear anyone claiming there's a shortage of speculators and financiers. We just seem to have this built in cognitive bias that doctors, lawyers, and bankers are "supposed to" be highly paid but that it's somehow a "problem to be solved" for engineers and scientists to be paid similarly.
>Why is $120K a "crazy wage"? ... it's somehow a "problem to be solved" for engineers and scientists to be paid similarly.
Bless your heart. I don't begrudge anyone a salary they earned or advocate for lower salaries. $120k/year is a very good starting salary for a kid straight out of a 4 year university degree. It is also twice the household median income so let's recognize the fact that programmers are paid very well for the work they do.
My comment was also a response to the notion that somehow wages haven't risen in response to a shortage.
Only some programmers get paid that and it usually depends heavily on the location you live.
Here's a generic software developer payscale for Boston which comes in lower. Boston isn't exactly a low cost city. While I'm sure there are plenty of devs making more, this is a good example of what I've seen.
I think part of the issue is that tech salaries are insane in SF and NYC, everywhere else and every other field salaries are not increasing. I was looking at engineering postdocs and the typical salary is 50k. For bio postdocs it's 35k. You can make more than that as a farmhand.
I think a lot of people in commonwealth countries have no understanding of how productive and valuable a young male worker is. I got this from an itinerant professor who was educated in the UK and practiced in the United States.
In commonwealth countries they bleed young males dry and tax most of their salary away to pay for social programs like medical care for the elderly single mother care for the single mothers, free or mostly free education for the masses, and early retirement for everyone! These high tax rates further depress the salaries of the young engineers! who wants to give 75 cents of every dollar to the government??
In the United States we don't do that BS and the salary 100% pays for retirement, healthcare, education, etc that part is not something skimmed by the governement! This is why our young workers supposedly make the big bucks: because they are more responsible and are held accountable by the economy.
I think you don't know how "productive and valuable" a young female worker also is.
"medical care for the elderly" - which includes many once-young males.
"single mother care for the single mothers" - and paid paternity leave for the fathers, and single father care for the single fathers. (At least in the more feminist of countries.)
"free or mostly free education for the masses" - of which about half will become young adult males
"early retirement for everyone" - including those once-young males
"who wants to give 75 cents of every dollar to the government - what Commonwealth country are you talking about? I don't think any of them even have that high a rate for the upper tax bracket.
"we don't do that BS and the salary 100% pays for retirement ..." - We certainly do! Let me introduce you to payroll taxes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax#United_States . Sure, it's not directly part of your paycheck, but it lowers your effective salary, and it pays for Social Security ("retirement"), Medicare ("healthcare"), and unemployment.
"they are more responsible and are held accountable by the economy" - ROFL! https://www.fool.com/retirement/2016/12/17/baby-boomers-aver... - "roughly half of all baby boomers have set aside only $100,000 or less" and 37% have less than %50K. GenX isn't doing all that well either.
>> Instead they want extra-market forces (political programs to push workers into STEM training)
> That is such a weird way to phrase it. Every industry always tries to market itself to kids and students as a great career option. I'm not worried about the fact that companies in IT want more kids to go into IT.
Well if you wanted to work in science without insane competition and crap wasted that was possible in the US until industrial policy made supply of scientific labour high and wages cheap. Sometimes employers get what they want.
You do realize the glut of PhDs is a global problem, not something confined to United States policy.
The article you cited is too much of a conspiracy theory for me to take seriously (Eric Weinstein is fun to read and listen to but he's crazy, and I wouldn't put any stock in his social commentary). Nobody orchestrated a secret plan to lower wages for science majors.
You need some perspective you are completely screwed up! $120k at FAANG is like minimum wage in the Bay area; the poverty rate in San Jose is $95k for a family of four. We with $120k you can look forward to renting a 1-bedroom apartment all your life ... The bay area is like living in Tokyo...
This individual wasn't going to the Bay area or to work for 'FAANG'. I think you need to get some perspective. For one thing, in no universe is $100k 'poverty rate' anywhere. I can guarantee those that are making this salary are not poor. To even suggest it is delusional (and I will grant that this was probably a joke).
> One of my co-op student got offered a position in the States with starting salary north of $120k
Where? If it's NYC/SF/LA etc, then look at the price of homes in that city. Then look at the CoL. Then see if engineer compensation has kept up with CoL.
That would surprise me. There may be enough people working for the big tech employers and financial industry in high cost of living areas in the US to be a mode. But the rest pretty much spans the gamut from entry level sys admin jobs in manufacturing and retail up through well-paying but not FAANG level development, architects, etc. throughout the US. Bio dale would imply you have well-paying jobs and poor-paying jobs with not much in between and nothing in my experience suggests that’s the case.
There's a shortage of passenger pigeon meat - okay, complete lack of what used to be a common and cheap meat. Yet the government did not fix that price. Indeed, its belated attempts to fix the price through laws to protect the pigeon were not successful.
Similar observations can be made about many ecological situations, like the nuts and wood from the American Chestnut Tree. Some few survive, but not enough that the line "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" resonates with the general American Christmas experience.
More generally, you should expect to see oscillations any time there's a delay in the feedback in coupled systems. This comes naturally from the predator–prey equations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio... . There's no need to require government price fixing for that to happen.
What you're observing here is the "Tragedy of the Commons". Nobody owned the passenger pigeons, so people hunted them to extinction. This is not free market. For example, despite all the pigs, cows, and chickens being eaten, there is no shortage of them and no threat of them going extinct. That's because people own those resources, they are not in the Commons.
Oscillations are not shortages. For example, when there's a natural disaster, people load up their pickups with gas and water and rush in to sell it at high prices. I.e. the shortage promptly disappears. People get mad at the high prices and pass laws to prevent that (i.e. price fixing), with the predictable result of shortages while they wait for FEMA to get around to delivering supplies.
There's plenty of wood for all uses. If you drive the back country, you'll see quite a few tree farms.
> Puerto Rico
The shortages there are the ones government utilities are supposed to provide. A lot of people, however, made money providing various solar power systems. Anyone who can pay for it can get power.
It used to be part of the general American experience to eat chestnuts in fall/early winter. Hence the line "Chestnuts roasting over an open fire" which I quoted earlier.
The chestnut shortage caused that tradition to all but disappear.
The shortage wasn't caused by government setting the price. It wasn't caused by "Tragedy of the Commons".
You don't even think there is a shortage because we've adjusted. It appears to be that if people can survive without it, perhaps by using an alternative, then there cannot be a shortage of something.
Which is not what "shortage" means, at least for those who don't subscribe to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
(If that is what shortage means, there can never be a shortage of toilet paper because there are other ways to clean one's butt - or you can get used to having a dirty butt.)
Let's go back to the passenger pigeon. If we apply your logic then of course there's no shortage of passenger pigeon meat because really people are getting their food from other sources. Yes?
I'll note that you even acknowledge that the absence of passenger pigeon meat was not - contrary to your first assertion - based on government price fixing ("The only time there's a shortage in a free market is when the government fixes the price.") Instead, you say the problem is that it wasn't part of a free market at all.
So, what's the solution? Is is possible, within a free market system, to have saved the passenger pigeons? How does one "own" a migratory species which requires vast numbers in order to breed? And how does that ownership seem any different than price fixing by a monopoly owner, a.k.a., government prohibitions? And how does it factor in ecosystem changes caused by the presence/absence of that species?
No, because the market is artificially depressed by "visa programs". They pretend there are not enough skilled engineers, when really they are not offering enough to make the jobs attractive. Worse, people on these visas are captive labor, and cannot move along to better prospects.
It might be depressed but it's still an incredible job market. I just don't see it suppressed by immigration. In Seattle there are thousands of open jobs. My startup can't get people to even interview and we pay new bs cs grads 130k. fang pays more. We have 50 devs and want to hire 10. When I worked at Microsoft my division often had 3000 openings.
I've interviewed in a different city and been willing to relocate there. I don't have a lot of roots here besides family (who honestly probably love that I get out of the state) and this isn't a great location to begin with.
I can't be the only decent developer fitting those criteria - I'm sure some new grads or even mid-levels might be open to moving.
Or is your "shortage" actually a "shortage of people we deem suitable for this position and already live here" and not a general tech shortage?
I have seen wages go up pretty steadily since I moved here 25 years ago and started at Microsoft. I've worked at 6 companies now, through the 2000 .com crash and the 2008 crash. Both times some smaller companies didn't make it, partly because they didn't get new funding, but most jobs, salaries, etc kept up or didn't fall much. I know I've been fortunate but I'm nothing special, just a dev in seattle. I think you must be in a town without so much varied software jobs. I feel for you, and would be unhappy if I had the overtime demands you mention. That's just a very different world than I experience here.
What if we all don't want to live in Seattle or be told what do do by some PM with a physics degree from fill in the blank who never had to grind out code themselves?
The market colluded to drive wages down, screams at the top of their lungs about shortages to get wages down, it tried to scare people to talk about wages to drive wages down, it tells lies about unions to drive wages down. Market rate means absolutely nothing about real value.
When you say things like that, do you actually have a mechanism in mind that enables this 'collusion'? Because to me, it sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory on the level of moon-landing denial.
And what wages are down? Programmers make very good salaries. There are people who go through a few weeks of coding boot camps and land good paying programming jobs - what other area (outside of commission sales) could you land such a position with a comparable level of experience/education background?
>Market rate means absolutely nothing about real value.
It means something. It tells you how valued your particular skills are to another individual.
your assertion that a few weeks of coding bootcamp can land a good job is highly suspect. I can assert that I know of community college graduates who are teaching at MIT. My assertion holds as much water as yours!
Half of bootcamp attendees had less than 50 hours of experience. On average bootcamp alumni saw a $20k salary increase in their first job after completing the bootcamp.
I thought that part was added just to try to draw in the younger folks who are too little afraid of the scary science and maths parts to consider learning about tech stuff.
The difference between science and engineering (education-wise) is that an engineering degree is strictly defined with regards to subjects learned, with little choice of electives by the student: everybody is learning the same thing.
With science (and most other degrees) the student can pick and choose their topics.
Electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and chemical engineers have quite different courseloads. Even within electrical engineering, semiconductor physics, radio frequency electronics, electromotion, and power systems are all completely different from computer architecture and one another. That's without delving into specialties in each.
The person you're replying to never suggested that there weren't differences between the engineering degrees' course loads. I believe you may have missed their point completely.
Are you suggesting that engineering students have no choice about which areas to study, just because they have labels? Many study more than one, and take multiple degrees. I knew one who got seven bachelor's degrees in various engineering and science fields.
I'm saying that if you did a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) you've done EXACTLY the same course material as every other student in that course, even across different universities.
An employer getting an Engineering graduate knows exactly what they are getting.
> I'm saying that if you did a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) you've done EXACTLY the same course material as every other student in that course, even across different universities.
While engineering (including EE) programs tend to have less flexibility within schools, and probably also between them, than other fields, it is by know means zero difference in classes.
I was graduated with a BSEE. I can say with certainty that I did not take the same set of classes as anyone else, and most who graduated with me also did not. I don't know what kool-aid you have drunk from, but falsehoods about other fields of study are not welcome here.
this is also wrong, though. You will not have done exactly the same course load! Universities have specializations and areas of research focus that influence and dominate their course material and presentation. You will, however, have been exposed to all the material that ABET thinks is necessary to accredit that program as being an electrical engineering one.
assuming you went to an accredited school, of course.
In Australia, the courses are certified by the Institute of Engineers. Everybody does the same maths, physics, chemistry subjects. Only in the final year or two do the students get a choice of elective subjects.
Most Engineering students share a common first year (again, no electives) but the subsequent years differ depending on speciality (electrical, mechanical etc).
Contrasted to a science degree, where two people with a "Physics major" may have done very different work, both in subject matter and in difficulty.
My degrees are all in engineering, and we had plenty of coursework opportunities to specialize even in undergrad. We had a departmental bias towards one end of the spectrum for the discipline, but plenty of my cohort broke the mold and did their own thing fairly easily. We were also very heavily research-focused, so the other easy divide between engineering and science ('applications' vs 'basic research') isn't nearly as clean-cut as you might think.
This is just basic systems thinking (I am re-reading "the Goal" sorry ...)
We know overall we need more STEM based jobs because that drives innovation and invention and wealth.
So we educate people in STEM.
But when they arrive, we have failed to arrange incentives to grow new industries or expand use of STEM in current ones.
It's a bit like taking 100 newly graduated astronomers to the observatory, and when they say sorry our last telescope is broke, just telling the 100 go plough fields, we are pretty sure the sun just goes round the earth once a year. We'll be fine.
I think its been this way for a while? At least since the Great Recession imo. I have friends who have amazing credentials (talking like compsci and physics phds from places like caltech and cmu) and very few of them are employed in their field. Some of them didn’t even do anything and are basically NEETs who play video games all day.
It’s pretty clear the actual value and potential of these degrees aren’t being honestly advertised. The “STEM” hype as mentioned here certainly doesn’t help the situation. It is a lot of time and money and effort thrown away for a lot of people and it’s heartbreaking.
If they want jobs as a developer there are plenty. If they see NEETs that just play video games all day it's probably their own lifestyle choices that are at fault
Step 1 currently does pretty much nothing to help you transition to step 2. Sure, there are career networking events for juniors and seniors in college, but they are very superficial. It seems like colleges are producing unfinished products -- students who know a lot about theoretical concepts and not that much about applications. Maybe more colleges should try and obtain a better product-market fit by requiring vocational training for at least a semester.
I dunno, on the other hand, I got a B.S. in Ecology and have about 5 years of experience doing field work, long term monitoring, and data analysis and report writing on said research. Ostensibly that should be plenty of experience to prove I know my field and can learn new methods and skills related to it. Despite that I can't seem to find anything that isn't more seasonal work below my worth now or wanting a Masters degree even though I have plenty of real-world experience.
I agree that there's some serious gap between steps 1 and 2, but I did alright in finding internships and experience and still can't find squat.I admit I knew going into my undergrad that a Masters would be needed to find a /good/ job, but I didn't think I'd need one to find any job at all. I'm sure there are a multitude of reasons to explain it, but this job market blows. I never want to hear someone tell me they can't find good employees or fill positions fast enough when I apply to five or six jobs at a time every week and don't even get a rejection email from half of them, let alone an interview.
The same thing happened with lawyers around 5-10 years ago. It's almost like having everyone jump into the same market at the same time causes the market to change...
This is the age-old academic scam by greedy professors who want more graduate students! manufacture a fake scientific staffing crisis to pump up the funding for stem research grants and teaching and faculty and screw a whole generation of young people with fake vaporware jobs! NSF promoted the same bullshit lies in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond!
I think the poster was just pointing to the parallels. It's salient to me as a professor.
FWIW, I think the issues are definitely related though. There's lots of STEM hype in academics as well as in commerce which creates a labor oversupply in both.
The problem is that there are genuine advancements in STEM that are interesting and rewarding, from the academic as well as commercial side, but they're sort of buried in a sea of bullshit, and being able to connect with the worthwhile stuff (financially or otherwise) can often be due to random or sketchy reasons. So people see the great stuff going on, and then either promote it (in the case of politicians and public figures) or pursue it (as someone seeking a career) not realizing that throwing more people at something will necessarily produce more of what we like.
So you end up with the Gallipoli that is modern academics.
As an ex-professor myself, do you understand how the world works? NSF is run by high ranking(in the pyramid scheme) professors. Your tenure depends on raising an army of researchers so you lie about job prospects, lie about research potential outcomes and importance, over-drsmatize the importance of your work, and some even lie in their publications! This is the path to success.
The career path at MIT is work 20 years at MIT then go to a US government funding agency (DARPA, NSF, ONR, etc.) to raise even more money for MIT. These places are staffed 100% by ex-professors (and a few token PhDs who succeeded in industry, to provide political legitimacy "cover".)
University Departments engage in that though, at least mine did. Ambassador programs trying to get kids into the field, pumped up graphs about great career prospects and coming shortages.
Got out of school and story on ground was very different. Wound up programming instead.
I guess their job is to get kids into the program. What happens after doesn't matter so much.
This is about Australia, which is not like our average developed country with no primary ressources.
When you have one sector in your economy producing most of the export, you have a lot of trouble to have a high level of good job in another sector to export. Your currency exchange rate and cost of life is being driven by your main exportation.
Countries rich in oil or other primary resources are like that.
As a developer in Australia, this is true... there are literally no jobs for people doing a science degree. Even doing a CS degree can be pretty shaky - most businesses/companies here are just looking to get a basic app out, and something like Machine Learning / AI is just not required as of yet. That's why I'm looking to move to the US for better opportunities...
As I approach my 30's, I'm seriously considering a roadmap to getting out. This, along with recent legislation makes me very concerned about my future prospects.
This article is confusing overall - it talks about STEM in the headline, then cites a general chart by Grattan Institute (a policy think tank) similar to another recent piece by Grattan's Andrew Norton (quoted in the SMH piece): https://grattan.edu.au/news/graduate-employment-is-up-but-fi... .
The article starts with a discussion about science graduates, but it’s primarily about the weak job market for college graduates in general.
Unfortunately, college degrees are not a sure fire way to get hired in today’s economy, but they are essentially needed, unless you plan on going into some trade.
Kind of. College degrees replaced high school degrees as a baseline for general knowledge. It used to be the case that a high school degree meant you had some general knowledge of math, history, geography etc., with an above average level of literacy and a reasonable level of intelligence. High school degrees do not mean any of those things anymore. Many kids who graduate with a high school degree are functionally illiterate (1 in 5 graduates).
Shouldn't STEM (and to a greater extent STEAM) refer to degrees that combine the component areas into a program and not a degree that is solely a single component?
Yes, I understand you do very little Chemistry or Physics in a Comp Sci program, but your fundamental building blocks are almost entirely pure Chem and Physics, even more so in engineering.
I mean, ultimately the response really should be:
1. The overall macro measures still support success rates of STEM trumping other areas of study,
2. All hype is not created equal; even within Comp Sci or Engineering there are winners and losers.
3. Use general trends and measures to guide your overall strategy, not set specific tactics
The title is a bit confusing as the article is about a glut in supply of science graduates and a dearth in job opportunities (in Australia at least), also the anecdote about the journalism student was not germane at all.
I tried finding info on job opportunities but came up short - could only find data on worldwide STEM graduates https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-co...
and STEM job info about the USA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-job...
TLDR - vast majority of STEM jobs in USA are computer related and India/China/USA far outstrip other countries in producing STEM graduates. Whoever advised those Australian students to get non computer related degrees did them a disservice, if they did not forewarn them of the job market.
The title at smh.com.au is "Not enough jobs for science graduates challenges STEM hype" and the word "glut" doesn't exist on the page.
OTOH, the URL slug is 'glut-in-demand-for-science-graduates-challenges-stem-hype-20190327-p517zj'.
This suggests that in the intervening 10 or so minutes since the story was submitted to HN, someone in Australia noticed and fixed the problem in the title.
Majors like biology and chemistry have fairly terrible prospects with just a BS degree, but CS and the engineering majors are still quite good. Physics and math are more iffy, but if you know what you're doing and pick up some employable skills on the side, then those majors will at least get you into interviews for good jobs.
There's also the question of what "not enough jobs" means. There are definitely struggling CS majors, but I think that a statement about there not being enough jobs needs to be looked at in a relative way - that is, one needs to consider what the alternative options are and whether those alternatives have better prospects. Many careers have been on the decline, and it's difficult to really identify career paths that are significantly better than computer science / software engineering (at least, at the undergraduate level). Even if we compared careers that required graduate school, the only paths that one could plausibly argue are significantly better than tech are medicine, law, and business (in my opinion). Those three careers all come with their own serious tradeoffs and downsides.
If anyone has information on what career paths are significantly better than CS / engineering, I'd be interested to hear your opinion. Right now, I'm unfortunately not seeing significantly better alternatives.