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kneejerk reaction: like what? I haven't thought a lot about this, but I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'. What other industries/disciplines are you

by gnoway 14y ago

kneejerk reaction: like what? I haven't thought a lot about this, but I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'. What other industries/disciplines are you thinking of?

VLM 14y ago
"I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'." There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. Very few things unite everyone in power both in .biz and .gov quite as well as the destruction of STEM as a middle class or better lifestyle. My advice is be very careful when going up against a united powerful opposition like that. Like I wrote, I may not know the right answer, but its not very hard to figure out STEM is, or is soon going to be, the wrong answer.
- angersock 14y ago
  That's quite a claim there--would you mind elaborating on your reasoning? Perhaps it's just due to my current existence in a very productive city, but STEM (and vocational training) seem to be both very much in demand and rewarded.
  - VLM 14y ago
    To elaborate I would advise reading the article and the HN posts.
  - VLM 14y ago
    Alright enough enough I apologize for the somewhat curt answer above stop downvoting me. I'll be more verbose and more polite. Estimate a ratio of "we need more STEM" vs "we need less STEM" in .biz, .gov, mainstream media, etc. Does anyone other than internal "tech" sites ever discuss how the pool is too big and getting too large and maybe we need licensing and unionization and apprenticeships or some way to shrink it? Lets say maybe 100 to 1 ratio? Are there any paid PR groups or lobbying groups at all on the side of the STEM worker? Any? Not even one? How bout on the other side? Oh, dozens you say working to increase the supply and drop the cost (aka our salary). A continuous stream of one unified voice from .gov, .biz, and .edu that we need more STEM grads, more STEM immigrants, more STEM is what "we" need or else. Yet... talk to people who aren't paid PR shills and its all poor working conditions, more grads than jobs, ageism, underemployment/overeducation. Sure you'll get a few quisling types who think that supporting those trying to destroy them will somehow personally save them, although historically that never seems to work out. And there's maybe 3 or 4 cities with a high cost of living and a shortage of techies... at least right now... at least supposedly. A tiny subfield with real demand as opposed to PR demand like petroleum engineering has explosive salary growth rates... supposedly we're told the demand is even higher for code slingers, well, OK, show me the increasing salaries and the unemployment rate approaching zero. Oh that's not happening nationwide without lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well someones lying then, or at least not telling the whole truth. Do you think the guy who stands to make a higher profit could be lying to you? Nah, Management and PR are transparent and clean as glass... How about the .gov guy purchased by the .biz guy, has a politician ever lied to you? Hmm. How bout that .edu guy who's salary more or less depends on convincing kids to enter his field, does he have any conflict of interest, or at best well intentioned delusion? Yet a VERY few lone voices in the wilderness, with no economic interest (or not much anyway) suggest maybe the emperor really does have no clothes, but they must be making it up because their reward for it is ... nothing at all? A better life for their kids? +5 of HN karma? Seems a pretty small reward at best for a lot of work. So that's my interpretation of the players on the field. There's the completely unorganized STEM workers, and absolutely everyone else united against them with a common cause, identical PR campaign, for fairly rational similar economic reasons. I wonder which side will win? Now compare our response to other fields involving labor forces and import/export and immigration and .gov policies. We seem to be failing ourselves in the PR war compared to ... well compared to pretty much every other field of human endeavor other than maybe the pot growers, congressmen, and sex workers. And there's a substantial overlap there at that. Actually they probably do a better job of self promotion than we do.
    - whiddershins 14y ago
      I am torn between -the desire to agree with your point in principle: yes, there is probably a conspiracy of some sort to push these wages down and ignore the reality that these careers can have a huge downside, your wages will at best stagnate, and the number of college grads increase each year -the desire to respond to your point in practice: it seems generally hard to hire computer programmers, they seem to make quite a bit, even if they aren't super-exceptional, and the wages and unemployment statistics for these sorts of jobs seems better than most other career paths
    - angersock 14y ago
      To your point about demand: there already exists (in some fields at least) certs you need to legally do certain types of work. To the best of my knowledge, only a certified PE can sign off on a bridge design, structural analysis, etc. To your point about unemployment and the glut of STEM grads: There's two things going on here: whether or not we want STEM grads, and whether or not we want to employ them. I posit that yes, we want STEM grads. Unless you want to go into academia and focus on the humanities (and in turn deal with the circlejerking that goes on there, or at least appears to go on there; there is a credible case to be made that this is true) STEM is a baseline training you must have to not end up in the service industry. You learn to create things--real, tangible things that progress the race--or you're ultimately fucked. We can't with a straight face recommend that our kids become English majors or medieval studies majors in this economy--I'd encourage my kid to take those courses on the side (you always need breadth!) but not to forsake an employable skill set. There will always be time for reading, for books, for learning and arguing and doing all those things that make the humanities wonderful and rewarding; picking up an education in hard sciences or engineering is hard, and should be attempted because it doesn't lend itself to being a hobby. So, no, I think the push for "we need a larger pool of nominally-capable STEM grads" is totally reasonable. The other question, though, is do we employ them? The difference between a competent engineer and an awesome one (substitute coder, developer, or whatever) is huge. It makes sense that an innovating company is going to want the best of the best, and that thus we expect the employment percentages to reflect that. As for the blub programmers, there are many companies that are past innovation and thus can use ass-in-chair devs to maintain their COBOLS and SQL queries. The existence of the large STEM pool helps the long-tail of companies that need those okay devs. I think it's a really complicated subject, and there is a lot to explore. I'm more concerned, honestly, with the seeming derpiness of our brethren in regards to politicizing their self-interest: shit like the DMCA, state taxes on net commerce, etc. all seem to fly because the tech industry (rivaling if not exceeding energy, healthcare, and finance in importance to the US economy) doesn't protect its interests. For fuck's sake, it's like we're still the stereotypical 20th century nerd picked on in school and letting ourselves get bullied by the status quo. I'm more worried about us growing a collective spine than getting screwed by a .biz/.gov/.edu conspiracy.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  >"I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'." There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. This is the part I would like to hear more about. It is not addressed in the article or other comments.
polymatter 14y ago
if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pay at the high end, still applicable if you change job later, generally respected culturally.
- mseebach 14y ago
  What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?
  - VLM 14y ago
    Strange as it sounds, fraud prosecution. If a software dev lies or the product is buggy nothing really happens to anyone, but at least in theory a fraudulent or incompetent accountant could go to jail, and that's not happening in Outsourceland, so fundamentally at least some of it has to be done locally. Most of the lowest level of data entry and paper shuffling has long since been disposed of via automation, so already mostly only decision makers remain. Its not a bad idea.
    - gnoway 14y ago
      Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs. Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
      - VLM 14y ago
        I would disagree with the first paragraph in that a large number of .gov, .biz, and .edu personnel have a unified voice encouraging kids out of all other fields and into STEM. So the pool of grads is smaller in accounting therefore its a better job market for them to enter. My two kids are not going to tip the demographics such that accounting is now flooded. I do agree with the second paragraph in that accounting is more employable. If there's a web 2.0 crash or something, a tax accountant at a dotcom can more or less transfer into tax accountant job at an oil company. On the other hand a NAS storage engineer is pretty screwed via pigeonholing if he wants to get hired as a petroleum engineer. Much larger job pool in accounting.

by gnoway 14y ago

kneejerk reaction: like what? I haven't thought a lot about this, but I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'. What other industries/disciplines are you thinking of?

VLM 14y ago

"I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'." There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. Very few things unite everyone in power both in .biz and .gov quite as well as the destruction of STEM as a middle class or better lifestyle. My advice is be very careful when going up against a united powerful opposition like that. Like I wrote, I may not know the right answer, but its not very hard to figure out STEM is, or is soon going to be, the wrong answer.

angersock 14y ago
That's quite a claim there--would you mind elaborating on your reasoning? Perhaps it's just due to my current existence in a very productive city, but STEM (and vocational training) seem to be both very much in demand and rewarded.
- VLM 14y ago
  To elaborate I would advise reading the article and the HN posts.
- VLM 14y ago
  Alright enough enough I apologize for the somewhat curt answer above stop downvoting me. I'll be more verbose and more polite. Estimate a ratio of "we need more STEM" vs "we need less STEM" in .biz, .gov, mainstream media, etc. Does anyone other than internal "tech" sites ever discuss how the pool is too big and getting too large and maybe we need licensing and unionization and apprenticeships or some way to shrink it? Lets say maybe 100 to 1 ratio? Are there any paid PR groups or lobbying groups at all on the side of the STEM worker? Any? Not even one? How bout on the other side? Oh, dozens you say working to increase the supply and drop the cost (aka our salary). A continuous stream of one unified voice from .gov, .biz, and .edu that we need more STEM grads, more STEM immigrants, more STEM is what "we" need or else. Yet... talk to people who aren't paid PR shills and its all poor working conditions, more grads than jobs, ageism, underemployment/overeducation. Sure you'll get a few quisling types who think that supporting those trying to destroy them will somehow personally save them, although historically that never seems to work out. And there's maybe 3 or 4 cities with a high cost of living and a shortage of techies... at least right now... at least supposedly. A tiny subfield with real demand as opposed to PR demand like petroleum engineering has explosive salary growth rates... supposedly we're told the demand is even higher for code slingers, well, OK, show me the increasing salaries and the unemployment rate approaching zero. Oh that's not happening nationwide without lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well someones lying then, or at least not telling the whole truth. Do you think the guy who stands to make a higher profit could be lying to you? Nah, Management and PR are transparent and clean as glass... How about the .gov guy purchased by the .biz guy, has a politician ever lied to you? Hmm. How bout that .edu guy who's salary more or less depends on convincing kids to enter his field, does he have any conflict of interest, or at best well intentioned delusion? Yet a VERY few lone voices in the wilderness, with no economic interest (or not much anyway) suggest maybe the emperor really does have no clothes, but they must be making it up because their reward for it is ... nothing at all? A better life for their kids? +5 of HN karma? Seems a pretty small reward at best for a lot of work. So that's my interpretation of the players on the field. There's the completely unorganized STEM workers, and absolutely everyone else united against them with a common cause, identical PR campaign, for fairly rational similar economic reasons. I wonder which side will win? Now compare our response to other fields involving labor forces and import/export and immigration and .gov policies. We seem to be failing ourselves in the PR war compared to ... well compared to pretty much every other field of human endeavor other than maybe the pot growers, congressmen, and sex workers. And there's a substantial overlap there at that. Actually they probably do a better job of self promotion than we do.
  - whiddershins 14y ago
    I am torn between -the desire to agree with your point in principle: yes, there is probably a conspiracy of some sort to push these wages down and ignore the reality that these careers can have a huge downside, your wages will at best stagnate, and the number of college grads increase each year -the desire to respond to your point in practice: it seems generally hard to hire computer programmers, they seem to make quite a bit, even if they aren't super-exceptional, and the wages and unemployment statistics for these sorts of jobs seems better than most other career paths
  - angersock 14y ago
    To your point about demand: there already exists (in some fields at least) certs you need to legally do certain types of work. To the best of my knowledge, only a certified PE can sign off on a bridge design, structural analysis, etc. To your point about unemployment and the glut of STEM grads: There's two things going on here: whether or not we want STEM grads, and whether or not we want to employ them. I posit that yes, we want STEM grads. Unless you want to go into academia and focus on the humanities (and in turn deal with the circlejerking that goes on there, or at least appears to go on there; there is a credible case to be made that this is true) STEM is a baseline training you must have to not end up in the service industry. You learn to create things--real, tangible things that progress the race--or you're ultimately fucked. We can't with a straight face recommend that our kids become English majors or medieval studies majors in this economy--I'd encourage my kid to take those courses on the side (you always need breadth!) but not to forsake an employable skill set. There will always be time for reading, for books, for learning and arguing and doing all those things that make the humanities wonderful and rewarding; picking up an education in hard sciences or engineering is hard, and should be attempted because it doesn't lend itself to being a hobby. So, no, I think the push for "we need a larger pool of nominally-capable STEM grads" is totally reasonable. The other question, though, is do we employ them? The difference between a competent engineer and an awesome one (substitute coder, developer, or whatever) is huge. It makes sense that an innovating company is going to want the best of the best, and that thus we expect the employment percentages to reflect that. As for the blub programmers, there are many companies that are past innovation and thus can use ass-in-chair devs to maintain their COBOLS and SQL queries. The existence of the large STEM pool helps the long-tail of companies that need those okay devs. I think it's a really complicated subject, and there is a lot to explore. I'm more concerned, honestly, with the seeming derpiness of our brethren in regards to politicizing their self-interest: shit like the DMCA, state taxes on net commerce, etc. all seem to fly because the tech industry (rivaling if not exceeding energy, healthcare, and finance in importance to the US economy) doesn't protect its interests. For fuck's sake, it's like we're still the stereotypical 20th century nerd picked on in school and letting ourselves get bullied by the status quo. I'm more worried about us growing a collective spine than getting screwed by a .biz/.gov/.edu conspiracy.
jeremyjh 14y ago
>"I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'." There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. This is the part I would like to hear more about. It is not addressed in the article or other comments.

polymatter 14y ago

if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pay at the high end, still applicable if you change job later, generally respected culturally.

mseebach 14y ago
What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?
- VLM 14y ago
  Strange as it sounds, fraud prosecution. If a software dev lies or the product is buggy nothing really happens to anyone, but at least in theory a fraudulent or incompetent accountant could go to jail, and that's not happening in Outsourceland, so fundamentally at least some of it has to be done locally. Most of the lowest level of data entry and paper shuffling has long since been disposed of via automation, so already mostly only decision makers remain. Its not a bad idea.
  - gnoway 14y ago
    Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs. Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
    - VLM 14y ago
      I would disagree with the first paragraph in that a large number of .gov, .biz, and .edu personnel have a unified voice encouraging kids out of all other fields and into STEM. So the pool of grads is smaller in accounting therefore its a better job market for them to enter. My two kids are not going to tip the demographics such that accounting is now flooded. I do agree with the second paragraph in that accounting is more employable. If there's a web 2.0 crash or something, a tax accountant at a dotcom can more or less transfer into tax accountant job at an oil company. On the other hand a NAS storage engineer is pretty screwed via pigeonholing if he wants to get hired as a petroleum engineer. Much larger job pool in accounting.