12 ms·

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013)

57 points by lelf 7y ago

pm90 7y ago
[2013]
charmides 7y ago
Note that this piece is from 2013. I think that should be indicated parenthetically in the title.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  Title should also use all caps for STEM.
- pm90 7y ago
  A very practical consequence being that many links within the article are dead, which makes it hard to dig into any references.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  It only got worse since.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  It was a myth much longer ago than 2013 yet the article is no less valid today. In fact with the rise of bootcamps and so on it has gotten even worse in software particularly. There should be laws against bootcamps ripping off hopefuls with false promises.
  - pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
    So you want to ban religion?
  - atemerev 7y ago
    What’s wrong with bootcamps? I know a few success stories, and I firmly believe that if somebody wants to learn programming, it is doable almost for everyone. It is hard, like learning a foreign language, but as nearly everybody can learn e.g. Spanish, so nearly everybody can learn how to program.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      "Another reason for the current problems with bootcamp job placement is that employer expectations, and their attitudes towards bootcamp grads, have changed since the early days. A lot of employers who did hire from bootcamps found that although many of these bootcamp grads did well at interview, they had trouble being immediately productive once in post. The underlying issue was that these new hires lacked the fundamental programming knowledge and other skills (such as problem-solving and technical communication) that they needed to work effectively without lots of additional support or guidance." https://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamps-fail-to-live-up-to-their-job-placement-expectations-7b90e929fe64 https://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamp... (By someone selling a bootcamp, of course.) "“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep-away-from-coding-schools https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-jo...
      - greglindahl 7y ago
        I find that many 4-year CS grads have a problem with problem-solving and technical communication. Bootcamp grads average worse, but it's not something that I'd use to exclude all of them.
      - zdragnar 7y ago
        I've worked at two companies that have hired both experienced developers and people fresh out of a bootcamp. Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales). If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).
  - cactus2093 7y ago
    What false promises? Many of them graduate and are getting real jobs. One of the fastest growing new boot camps even lets people attend for free and makes back their money as a percentage of future salaries earned. Nothing could be further from ripping students off with false promises of jobs.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      You must have seen the ads... “average salary in data science/cyber security/whatever is $$$” with the clear implication that taking their $$$ 8-week course will let you sail into one of these jobs.
vikinghckr 7y ago
Slightly off topic, but I feel like when people talk of STEM as a lucrative field of study, they tend to imply CS. Non-CS STEM field hardly have a shortage of qualified and talented people. In fact, there's probably a oversupply compared to job prospects in non-CS STEM fields. I see so many talented Math/Physics majors end up switching to CS and do mundane software engineering work.
- avip 7y ago
  It's much worse in life-sciences where PhDs are washing pipettes or feeding mice.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - whyenot 7y ago
    ...and yet those in the life sciences who took a more practical path, for example, nurses, are both well paid and in high demand.
    - pergadad 7y ago
      Well paid nurses? Which country would that be?
      - pacaro 7y ago
        Median income in 2017 was $52k for men and $42k for women [1] Median income for an RN in 2017 was $70k [2] So, in the US it's fair to say that nurse is a moderately well paid job. Of course compared to west coast tech salaries that doesn't look so amazing, but compared to what many life sciences PhDs are earning while fighting for a tenure track job it doesn't look so bad [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-263.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26... [2] https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/ https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/
pm90 7y ago
Yet another article with the same premise: “there is no shortage of scientists and engineers, there are enough of them!” Take a moment to read through the article. First it tries to show that STEM graduates are such a small proportion of the total labor force, only 3-4%, the implication being that such a small proportion shouldn’t deserve the attention the get. OK, fine you’re arguing that it’s hype. Next, cherry pick data to show that not all STEM graduates from this tiny sector can all find jobs. Yes, this is not a factory, you can’t just train someone and expect them to be productive in STEM. It’s not the same as pushing buttons or lifting things, it requires much more from the person which is why you can’t mass manufacture STEM graduates. Just because not all STEM graduates can find jobs means that it’s a hype? Okay. Next, sprinkle some grievances about STEM being used to justify increasing the number of H1Bs, and now you’ve got the racists, the “H1B workers are why I don’t have a great job” crowd. Nice. Oh, don’t forget the quotations of authority figures sounding alarm about the lack of engineers. The same alarm, that helped US education systems include more technical training to keep up with schools everywhere else who were in the same race. This is not some secret, all countries know the importance of high skilled labor force. The wealth and prosperity we see in most nations today is precisely due to the work of millions of STEM graduates, creating innovations and technologies that constantly drive down costs of manufacturing and transportation, increased labor productivity, gave us fucking smartphones and internet everywhere devices and are currently bringing down the costs of renewables so rapidly that even Texas is going all in on wind energy. I’m very upset that this appears in ieee though. I imagined that to be a respectable academic institution and not one that would allow such a poorly researched and hyperbolic article to be published.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
There is no such thing as a "STEM job". There are computer science jobs and marine biology jobs, both under the rubric of STEM, but the skill sets are not fungible and the employment prospects are wildly different. We can simultaneously produce more STEM graduates than jobs and have a shortage of workers for STEM jobs. The most popular STEM degree by a large margin is psychology, many more than all engineering disciplines combined. That psychology majors can't find work implies little about the demand for engineers.
- charmides 7y ago
  I don't think psychology is typically considered STEM.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    According to the article, it is by the NSF and not by the commerce department.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Psychology sits in a really weird (and interesting!) place between the social sciences and "hard" sciences. I thus find either classification reasonable, as unhelpful as that may be.
  - Eldandan 7y ago
    It is institution-dependent, and a bit odd. I believe the American Psychological Association have advocated for this. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/07-08/sd https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/07-08/sd
- mcguire 7y ago
  https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/article/engineers.htm?view_full https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/article/engineers.htm... 140,000 new jobs over the next 10 years, 1,700,000 current employment. Assuming the replacement cycle for an engineer is 20 years, that's about 100,000 jobs per year. The ASEE ”Engineering by the Numbers" shows 124,000 engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in 2017. Sure, you can slice it down to appear to be a deficit, but it'll look rediculous. "I need an opto-acoustic engineer with a pituitary gland the size of an avocado."
fortran77 7y ago
The local schools here now call it STEAM, include in "Arts" and now say: >"It will include subjects like history, social studies, and language arts, all of which are vital facets of a STEAM curriculum." and now STEM has no meaning anymore (if it ever did). These are all fine subjects, but they miss the point of the push for STEM that was based on the theory that Americans are falling behind in Math, Science, and Engineering and we need these to be competitive.
- sosborn 7y ago
  Something I've observed working in education: All educational acronyms eventually become SCHOOL.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics -> Science, CHemistry, and Object-Oriented Languages ?
- avip 7y ago
  It has no meaning but it's more inclusive.
  - fortran77 7y ago
    That's exactly why they do it!
- whatshisface 7y ago
  STEAM does actually have a meaning: it excludes low-tech vocational training, home economics, and physical education.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    It seems that the only meaning of STEAM is to force arts to piggyback STEM.
- 7y ago
petra 7y ago
I'm curious: fundamentally, can the economy find a place for many more talented STEM people ? And if not, what's missing - useful ideas ? capital ? management ? Something else ?
- UweSchmidt 7y ago
  I believe there is a small number of people who do the hard work on innovative projects and move humanity forward. The rest of us is ideally helping out with the easier parts and maybe impeding said work. More of those key people would mean more economic growth around whatever they are doing. Can you get more of them? Yes if many smart people currently avoid STEM because it is low status, hard, and not really paid well compared to things really smart people can achieve. No if people who have the ability to do the hard work are inevitably drawn into it anyway.
- jstewartmobile 7y ago
  I think even the premium-credentialed grads are mostly working on last-man bullshit of marginal utility. Look at the kinds of brain-trusts Nest employed before they went down the toilet.
- ModsCtrlideas 7y ago
  Yes? Until every job is automated?
petermcneeley 7y ago
Covered by Eric Weinstein https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/how-and-why-government-universities-and-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-of-scientists-and-high-tech-workers https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/how-a...
cybersnowflake 7y ago
The only people who honestly think there are a shortage of stem workers are those who aren't in stem.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  I am in STEM and I honestly think there's a shortage of smart STEM workers, because not every person trained or experienced in STEM is someone I would hire. Ask around, you'll find quite a few people like me.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    That's like saying there's a shortage of good STEM jobs because I wouldn't take any STEM job out there.
    - leggomylibro 7y ago
      They're not mutually exclusive; I'm starting to think that the market for coders is basically a market for lemons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons So we end up with employers who don't want to pay top dollar in case they get a lemon, and competent developers who are either happy where they are or unwilling to work for lemon rates. And have you interviewed candidates for development positions recently? It is depressing, and I say that as someone who catches flak about being too generous and letting too many "poor-quality" candidates through screens.
- sdinsn 7y ago
  There is not a shortage of "STEM" workers- but there are a number of more specific industries that have a shortage of workers, and these industries fall under "STEM".
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  No, it’s an actual conspiracy by big companies to drive down wages. “We advertised this job for well below the going rate and didn’t get any applications, better outsource it!”
rland 7y ago
It seems to me that there is a shortage of qualified employees and yet also a shortage of jobs in every single well-paid, well regarded sector. It's almost as if we want people to train themselves to work doing hard stuff and also don't want to pay them to do it. In other news, water is wet.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Define "shortage". Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food. Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay. I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though. In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    Yes, there's always a "shortage" of workers willing to work for less than market rate, just like there's always a "shortage" of free beer. That's market equilibrium. It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.
- ModsCtrlideas 7y ago
  Engineering and programming? There is a shortage of people. Plenty of jobs.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > Plenty of jobs. There's plenty of jobs, but also plenty of applicants. Ask any one of these companies how many resumes they get, or how long it takes them to fill a position.
hajile 7y ago
The constant talk about sexism, racism, ageism, etc in our industry almost completely disproves "STEM shortage" argument. If such people exist, it won't be long before someone realizes they can hire these people cheaply because they are less in demand. Undercutting your labor costs gives a massive competitive advantage bringing products to market. There are thousands of startups every year started by a very wide variety of people from widely different backgrounds. Ageism is a particularly good canary in the coalmine. If someone has decades of relevant experience and you can't find anyone, why wouldn't you hire them and if they've worked for your company for years and know all the subsystems well, why would you ever think of firing them and hiring someone else? This frivolous misuse of human capital shows that overall, there must certainly be a surplus of talent rather than a deficit. A great counterpoint to prove this is/was the web boom. Web talent used to be priced at $50-60K because such people were everywhere. Once Javascript became fast and highly-interactive websites and web apps became hugely in demand, a localized deficit started. The reason for the localized deficit is obvious, but worth reiterating. The development tools and language were considered frustrating to learn and use by other programmers. There was a "not a real dev" stigma. IE and other cross-platform issues were hard to deal with. Powered by the new, fast JS engines, a glut of new APIs surfaced which led to another glut of CSS features -- all taking almost super-human effort to keep up with. Complicating this, most frontend developers up to that point didn't have strong programming skills, so you had either experienced programmers or knowledgeable frontend developers with a very small overlap. The result has been to hire everyone. In 2010-2015 especially, if you had 50 people apply, probably only one person qualified (and if you found two, it was worth considering hiring them both). With real choices being that limited, companies simply cannot afford to waste time to market trying to find a candidate that "is the right fit" or whatever the BS "ism" label is in that area. Even people with no programming experience outside of a couple months of "boot camp" have a chance at getting hired. As time has gone by, that drought has become at least mostly slaked. Companies can be a little pickier about whom they hire and wages have mostly stabilized at a bit over average programmer rates (which seems to account for the extra troubles of frontend development over most other types of programming). I'm betting that once the current tech bubble bursts and wages plummet, we'll still keep hearing about the shortage of programmers who will work for $40K per year.
karmakaze 7y ago
The current STEM efforts do seem to be filling a need, but I do feel that this is going to lag and overshoot the market. Education needs to have good fundamentals and not only crank out grads for software as a trade. Same thing happened when the telephone got popular and the demand for switchboard operators exploded. "At this rate, everyone's going to have to be a switchboard operator." Then they added dialers to phones. We just need better spreadsheets.
gridlockd 7y ago
Here's how these inflated numbers come about: Companies notice that they're getting less applicants with higher salary expectations. When those companies are surveyed by the government, they cry wolf: "There's a shortage of workers!" they exclaim, when really it's just a "shortage" in the number of applicants with the same salary expectations as before - a trend that has to be nipped in the bud. The goal then is to have policy bring labor supply back in favor of the companies, by dumping money into education and liberalizing immigration. Essentially, it's another bit of corporate welfare that can be marketed as philantropy. The joke's on them though, because unlike most other professions, software developers have the ability to create more work than there would have been, had they never been hired in the first place.
robomartin 7y ago
I am starting to disagree with what I an also starting to call “The Religion of STEM”. I say this as a card-carrying believer. And yet, I am starting to leave yet one more religion behind in favor of what I think is truly lacking with our approach to education: Entrepreneurship, business, personal finances and multiple servings of critical reasoning. And more... Kids, after thirteen years of schooling, are handed to society with virtually no marketable skills whatsoever. Zero. The only two paths they have are: -College -Stacking boxes at Office Depot (or making coffee, etc) Knowing how to code, I hate to say, is the last thing most people need in life. It is, without a doubt, a useless skill for the vast majority of HS graduates. What we should be teaching, we do not. They need to learn all of the above as well as walk out of school with one or more marketable skills. Love STEM. I even mentor a local HS robotics team. We need to do more. Education is broken.

57 points by lelf 7y ago

pm90 7y ago

[2013]

charmides 7y ago

Note that this piece is from 2013. I think that should be indicated parenthetically in the title.

robbrown451 7y ago
Title should also use all caps for STEM.
pm90 7y ago
A very practical consequence being that many links within the article are dead, which makes it hard to dig into any references.
HarryHirsch 7y ago
It only got worse since.
goatinaboat 7y ago
It was a myth much longer ago than 2013 yet the article is no less valid today. In fact with the rise of bootcamps and so on it has gotten even worse in software particularly. There should be laws against bootcamps ripping off hopefuls with false promises.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  So you want to ban religion?
- atemerev 7y ago
  What’s wrong with bootcamps? I know a few success stories, and I firmly believe that if somebody wants to learn programming, it is doable almost for everyone. It is hard, like learning a foreign language, but as nearly everybody can learn e.g. Spanish, so nearly everybody can learn how to program.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    "Another reason for the current problems with bootcamp job placement is that employer expectations, and their attitudes towards bootcamp grads, have changed since the early days. A lot of employers who did hire from bootcamps found that although many of these bootcamp grads did well at interview, they had trouble being immediately productive once in post. The underlying issue was that these new hires lacked the fundamental programming knowledge and other skills (such as problem-solving and technical communication) that they needed to work effectively without lots of additional support or guidance." https://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamps-fail-to-live-up-to-their-job-placement-expectations-7b90e929fe64 https://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamp... (By someone selling a bootcamp, of course.) "“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep-away-from-coding-schools https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-jo...
    - greglindahl 7y ago
      I find that many 4-year CS grads have a problem with problem-solving and technical communication. Bootcamp grads average worse, but it's not something that I'd use to exclude all of them.
    - zdragnar 7y ago
      I've worked at two companies that have hired both experienced developers and people fresh out of a bootcamp. Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales). If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).
- cactus2093 7y ago
  What false promises? Many of them graduate and are getting real jobs. One of the fastest growing new boot camps even lets people attend for free and makes back their money as a percentage of future salaries earned. Nothing could be further from ripping students off with false promises of jobs.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    You must have seen the ads... “average salary in data science/cyber security/whatever is $$$” with the clear implication that taking their $$$ 8-week course will let you sail into one of these jobs.

vikinghckr 7y ago

Slightly off topic, but I feel like when people talk of STEM as a lucrative field of study, they tend to imply CS. Non-CS STEM field hardly have a shortage of qualified and talented people. In fact, there's probably a oversupply compared to job prospects in non-CS STEM fields. I see so many talented Math/Physics majors end up switching to CS and do mundane software engineering work.

avip 7y ago
It's much worse in life-sciences where PhDs are washing pipettes or feeding mice.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- whyenot 7y ago
  ...and yet those in the life sciences who took a more practical path, for example, nurses, are both well paid and in high demand.
  - pergadad 7y ago
    Well paid nurses? Which country would that be?
    - pacaro 7y ago
      Median income in 2017 was $52k for men and $42k for women [1] Median income for an RN in 2017 was $70k [2] So, in the US it's fair to say that nurse is a moderately well paid job. Of course compared to west coast tech salaries that doesn't look so amazing, but compared to what many life sciences PhDs are earning while fighting for a tenure track job it doesn't look so bad [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-263.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26... [2] https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/ https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/

pm90 7y ago

Yet another article with the same premise: “there is no shortage of scientists and engineers, there are enough of them!” Take a moment to read through the article. First it tries to show that STEM graduates are such a small proportion of the total labor force, only 3-4%, the implication being that such a small proportion shouldn’t deserve the attention the get. OK, fine you’re arguing that it’s hype. Next, cherry pick data to show that not all STEM graduates from this tiny sector can all find jobs. Yes, this is not a factory, you can’t just train someone and expect them to be productive in STEM. It’s not the same as pushing buttons or lifting things, it requires much more from the person which is why you can’t mass manufacture STEM graduates. Just because not all STEM graduates can find jobs means that it’s a hype? Okay. Next, sprinkle some grievances about STEM being used to justify increasing the number of H1Bs, and now you’ve got the racists, the “H1B workers are why I don’t have a great job” crowd. Nice. Oh, don’t forget the quotations of authority figures sounding alarm about the lack of engineers. The same alarm, that helped US education systems include more technical training to keep up with schools everywhere else who were in the same race. This is not some secret, all countries know the importance of high skilled labor force. The wealth and prosperity we see in most nations today is precisely due to the work of millions of STEM graduates, creating innovations and technologies that constantly drive down costs of manufacturing and transportation, increased labor productivity, gave us fucking smartphones and internet everywhere devices and are currently bringing down the costs of renewables so rapidly that even Texas is going all in on wind energy. I’m very upset that this appears in ieee though. I imagined that to be a respectable academic institution and not one that would allow such a poorly researched and hyperbolic article to be published.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

There is no such thing as a "STEM job". There are computer science jobs and marine biology jobs, both under the rubric of STEM, but the skill sets are not fungible and the employment prospects are wildly different. We can simultaneously produce more STEM graduates than jobs and have a shortage of workers for STEM jobs. The most popular STEM degree by a large margin is psychology, many more than all engineering disciplines combined. That psychology majors can't find work implies little about the demand for engineers.

charmides 7y ago
I don't think psychology is typically considered STEM.
- mcguire 7y ago
  According to the article, it is by the NSF and not by the commerce department.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Psychology sits in a really weird (and interesting!) place between the social sciences and "hard" sciences. I thus find either classification reasonable, as unhelpful as that may be.
- Eldandan 7y ago
  It is institution-dependent, and a bit odd. I believe the American Psychological Association have advocated for this. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/07-08/sd https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/07-08/sd
mcguire 7y ago
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/article/engineers.htm?view_full https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/article/engineers.htm... 140,000 new jobs over the next 10 years, 1,700,000 current employment. Assuming the replacement cycle for an engineer is 20 years, that's about 100,000 jobs per year. The ASEE ”Engineering by the Numbers" shows 124,000 engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in 2017. Sure, you can slice it down to appear to be a deficit, but it'll look rediculous. "I need an opto-acoustic engineer with a pituitary gland the size of an avocado."

fortran77 7y ago

The local schools here now call it STEAM, include in "Arts" and now say: >"It will include subjects like history, social studies, and language arts, all of which are vital facets of a STEAM curriculum." and now STEM has no meaning anymore (if it ever did). These are all fine subjects, but they miss the point of the push for STEM that was based on the theory that Americans are falling behind in Math, Science, and Engineering and we need these to be competitive.

sosborn 7y ago
Something I've observed working in education: All educational acronyms eventually become SCHOOL.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics -> Science, CHemistry, and Object-Oriented Languages ?
avip 7y ago
It has no meaning but it's more inclusive.
- fortran77 7y ago
  That's exactly why they do it!
whatshisface 7y ago
STEAM does actually have a meaning: it excludes low-tech vocational training, home economics, and physical education.
- rumanator 7y ago
  It seems that the only meaning of STEAM is to force arts to piggyback STEM.
7y ago

petra 7y ago

I'm curious: fundamentally, can the economy find a place for many more talented STEM people ? And if not, what's missing - useful ideas ? capital ? management ? Something else ?

UweSchmidt 7y ago
I believe there is a small number of people who do the hard work on innovative projects and move humanity forward. The rest of us is ideally helping out with the easier parts and maybe impeding said work. More of those key people would mean more economic growth around whatever they are doing. Can you get more of them? Yes if many smart people currently avoid STEM because it is low status, hard, and not really paid well compared to things really smart people can achieve. No if people who have the ability to do the hard work are inevitably drawn into it anyway.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
I think even the premium-credentialed grads are mostly working on last-man bullshit of marginal utility. Look at the kinds of brain-trusts Nest employed before they went down the toilet.
ModsCtrlideas 7y ago
Yes? Until every job is automated?

petermcneeley 7y ago

Covered by Eric Weinstein https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/how-and-why-government-universities-and-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-of-scientists-and-high-tech-workers https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/how-a...

cybersnowflake 7y ago

The only people who honestly think there are a shortage of stem workers are those who aren't in stem.

greglindahl 7y ago
I am in STEM and I honestly think there's a shortage of smart STEM workers, because not every person trained or experienced in STEM is someone I would hire. Ask around, you'll find quite a few people like me.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  That's like saying there's a shortage of good STEM jobs because I wouldn't take any STEM job out there.
  - leggomylibro 7y ago
    They're not mutually exclusive; I'm starting to think that the market for coders is basically a market for lemons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons So we end up with employers who don't want to pay top dollar in case they get a lemon, and competent developers who are either happy where they are or unwilling to work for lemon rates. And have you interviewed candidates for development positions recently? It is depressing, and I say that as someone who catches flak about being too generous and letting too many "poor-quality" candidates through screens.
sdinsn 7y ago
There is not a shortage of "STEM" workers- but there are a number of more specific industries that have a shortage of workers, and these industries fall under "STEM".
goatinaboat 7y ago
No, it’s an actual conspiracy by big companies to drive down wages. “We advertised this job for well below the going rate and didn’t get any applications, better outsource it!”

rland 7y ago

It seems to me that there is a shortage of qualified employees and yet also a shortage of jobs in every single well-paid, well regarded sector. It's almost as if we want people to train themselves to work doing hard stuff and also don't want to pay them to do it. In other news, water is wet.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Define "shortage". Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food. Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay. I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though. In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Yes, there's always a "shortage" of workers willing to work for less than market rate, just like there's always a "shortage" of free beer. That's market equilibrium. It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.
ModsCtrlideas 7y ago
Engineering and programming? There is a shortage of people. Plenty of jobs.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > Plenty of jobs. There's plenty of jobs, but also plenty of applicants. Ask any one of these companies how many resumes they get, or how long it takes them to fill a position.

hajile 7y ago

The constant talk about sexism, racism, ageism, etc in our industry almost completely disproves "STEM shortage" argument. If such people exist, it won't be long before someone realizes they can hire these people cheaply because they are less in demand. Undercutting your labor costs gives a massive competitive advantage bringing products to market. There are thousands of startups every year started by a very wide variety of people from widely different backgrounds. Ageism is a particularly good canary in the coalmine. If someone has decades of relevant experience and you can't find anyone, why wouldn't you hire them and if they've worked for your company for years and know all the subsystems well, why would you ever think of firing them and hiring someone else? This frivolous misuse of human capital shows that overall, there must certainly be a surplus of talent rather than a deficit. A great counterpoint to prove this is/was the web boom. Web talent used to be priced at $50-60K because such people were everywhere. Once Javascript became fast and highly-interactive websites and web apps became hugely in demand, a localized deficit started. The reason for the localized deficit is obvious, but worth reiterating. The development tools and language were considered frustrating to learn and use by other programmers. There was a "not a real dev" stigma. IE and other cross-platform issues were hard to deal with. Powered by the new, fast JS engines, a glut of new APIs surfaced which led to another glut of CSS features -- all taking almost super-human effort to keep up with. Complicating this, most frontend developers up to that point didn't have strong programming skills, so you had either experienced programmers or knowledgeable frontend developers with a very small overlap. The result has been to hire everyone. In 2010-2015 especially, if you had 50 people apply, probably only one person qualified (and if you found two, it was worth considering hiring them both). With real choices being that limited, companies simply cannot afford to waste time to market trying to find a candidate that "is the right fit" or whatever the BS "ism" label is in that area. Even people with no programming experience outside of a couple months of "boot camp" have a chance at getting hired. As time has gone by, that drought has become at least mostly slaked. Companies can be a little pickier about whom they hire and wages have mostly stabilized at a bit over average programmer rates (which seems to account for the extra troubles of frontend development over most other types of programming). I'm betting that once the current tech bubble bursts and wages plummet, we'll still keep hearing about the shortage of programmers who will work for $40K per year.

karmakaze 7y ago

The current STEM efforts do seem to be filling a need, but I do feel that this is going to lag and overshoot the market. Education needs to have good fundamentals and not only crank out grads for software as a trade. Same thing happened when the telephone got popular and the demand for switchboard operators exploded. "At this rate, everyone's going to have to be a switchboard operator." Then they added dialers to phones. We just need better spreadsheets.

gridlockd 7y ago

Here's how these inflated numbers come about: Companies notice that they're getting less applicants with higher salary expectations. When those companies are surveyed by the government, they cry wolf: "There's a shortage of workers!" they exclaim, when really it's just a "shortage" in the number of applicants with the same salary expectations as before - a trend that has to be nipped in the bud. The goal then is to have policy bring labor supply back in favor of the companies, by dumping money into education and liberalizing immigration. Essentially, it's another bit of corporate welfare that can be marketed as philantropy. The joke's on them though, because unlike most other professions, software developers have the ability to create more work than there would have been, had they never been hired in the first place.

robomartin 7y ago

I am starting to disagree with what I an also starting to call “The Religion of STEM”. I say this as a card-carrying believer. And yet, I am starting to leave yet one more religion behind in favor of what I think is truly lacking with our approach to education: Entrepreneurship, business, personal finances and multiple servings of critical reasoning. And more... Kids, after thirteen years of schooling, are handed to society with virtually no marketable skills whatsoever. Zero. The only two paths they have are: -College -Stacking boxes at Office Depot (or making coffee, etc) Knowing how to code, I hate to say, is the last thing most people need in life. It is, without a doubt, a useless skill for the vast majority of HS graduates. What we should be teaching, we do not. They need to learn all of the above as well as walk out of school with one or more marketable skills. Love STEM. I even mentor a local HS robotics team. We need to do more. Education is broken.