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It's a tight labor market now, not just engineer positions. as far as engineer or IT jobs are concerned, I have been wondering for years: is the root cause tha

It's a tight labor market now, not just engineer positions. as far as engineer or IT jobs are concerned, I have been wondering for years: is the root cause that we can't produce enough STEM graduates? starting from k-12. I have no strong evidence, but my current company could not even find candidates(we're doing chip design), in the past it would have to work with H1B workers but covid19 made that a slow and impossible task. some could argue H1B is just cheaper, per my understanding it's not always the case, it is more likely that we just don't have enough STEM graduates to fill the pipeline over the last 3 decades.

MattGaiser 5y ago
STEM doesn't retain people, particularly women (only one woman I know that I graduated with is still a tech worker) and plenty of others got tired of taking orders from project managers and decided to become them or go found something. A lot of people think that as software engineers they get to develop the product. In practice, I have mostly been an ticket processing Oompa Loompa. You can get some input, but that requires arguing with people you would often rather not argue with. That drives a lot of people away.
- 88913527 5y ago
  It depends on the engineer. Some are interested in steering the direction of the product, but a majority are not. Coming in, picking up Jira tickets, and clocking out is enough for many software engineers. I don't blame them, and in fact it's probably a good thing; too many cooks in the kitchen becomes problematic.
mattkrause 5y ago
Is there a big research university near you? If so, I'd bet it's a large and relatively untapped pool of candidates, especially outside of the CS/EE departments. A lot of fields now make pretty heavy use of programming, ML and other tech. It's true that some folks are definitely in the "I tweak the script that gives the numbers" camp, but there are proper coders as well. Plus, you're pulling from a pool that's smart, good at teaching themselves, and probably making $25-$60k.

MattGaiser 5y ago

STEM doesn't retain people, particularly women (only one woman I know that I graduated with is still a tech worker) and plenty of others got tired of taking orders from project managers and decided to become them or go found something. A lot of people think that as software engineers they get to develop the product. In practice, I have mostly been an ticket processing Oompa Loompa. You can get some input, but that requires arguing with people you would often rather not argue with. That drives a lot of people away.

88913527 5y ago
It depends on the engineer. Some are interested in steering the direction of the product, but a majority are not. Coming in, picking up Jira tickets, and clocking out is enough for many software engineers. I don't blame them, and in fact it's probably a good thing; too many cooks in the kitchen becomes problematic.

mattkrause 5y ago

Is there a big research university near you? If so, I'd bet it's a large and relatively untapped pool of candidates, especially outside of the CS/EE departments. A lot of fields now make pretty heavy use of programming, ML and other tech. It's true that some folks are definitely in the "I tweak the script that gives the numbers" camp, but there are proper coders as well. Plus, you're pulling from a pool that's smart, good at teaching themselves, and probably making $25-$60k.