11 ms·

The STEM Crisis is a Myth

139 points by RougeFemme 13y ago

linkregister 13y ago
"That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce." The huge disparity of pay between different STEM disciplines should clearly show where the demand is. Biologists compete over shrinking government grants, while petroleum engineering students receive job offers of $90K starting. Treating STEM as a homogenous bloc will hurt the less in-demand fields while failing to treat the shortfall in others.
- ffn 13y ago
  One of his points was that it is extremely hard to predict where the next boom in the greater STEM field will be. Several years ago, internet boomed, then bust, then boomed again. Meanwhile, petro rose while aerospace fell... It's precisely the point that, because STEM skills cannot cross fields (you try getting a rocket scientist to build you a photo-sharing app) that leads to moments of massive oversupply, then terrible shortage, and then massive oversupply again.
  - tomjen3 13y ago
    Programmers can cross fields, as can most enginners.
  - WalterBright 13y ago
    Cannot cross fields? My major was Me/Ae, took no CS courses, worked for Boeing designing airplane gearboxes and hydraulic systems, and yet I had no trouble transitioning to a CS career. When I took mechanics/fluids/electronics/materials classes, I discovered that the math was all the same, except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      This speaks to how quickly what we're taught in school goes out of date. You were able to transition to CS, compete with same-age CS graduates, because much of what they were taught in school had become obsolete, while what you learned on the job became more and more valuable and relevant. > ... except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'. And that only because of the coincidence that 'i' refers to current in electrical equations. It also addresses the issue that, with respect to getting useful results from a computer, one's mathematical knowledge and ability is now more important than one's knowledge of a computer's inner workings.
      - bayesianhorse 13y ago
        The subject matter becomes obsolete, but the mental processes and skills stay relevant. Too much of education is aimed and evaluated for data storage rather than brain training.
        lutusp 13y ago
        Very true. Americans are taught what to think, not how to think.
        bayesianhorse 13y ago
        In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. In Germany I'm not hearing a lot of "mind training matters" noise out of education either.
        lutusp 13y ago
        > In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. Yes, or Japan, where being different or standing out in any way is seen as the height of rudeness. Sumimasen, arigatōgozaimashita I guess we have to face the fact that the ability to think for oneself, and think critically, is rather unpopular, with rare exception.
        13y ago
tsotha 13y ago
Duh? There has never been a STEM shortage, at least in the US. Ever. There has only been duplicitous propaganda on the part of companies that want to raise the H1-B limit in order to push down wages.
patio11 13y ago
"Wages for technologists have not increased" is often evidenced by claims about averages. By the same token, one could argue persuasively that devs do not age, because a year goes by and they get a few months younger. The explanation is that the number of devs (and many related trades) is increasing rapidly, largely driven by hires of young neophytes rather than retraining of e.g. 50 year old lawyers. The neophytes are younger and have lower wages than the mean dev. This brings the average down faster than raises and aging bring the average up. You can verify this if you look at data for particular career cohorts, either people or experience levels. In the 4 years I've been on HN the quotes I hear for "generic CS undergrad from Stanford" are up more than 25% (80k to 110k or so, starting salary offer). Companies that I work with complain bitterly that their competitors are bidding irresponsibly. The going wages for interns are substantially in excess of what I expected to earn in mid career when I graduate not even 10 years ago. Also, anecdotally, of the couple hundred people whose professional statuses I'm routinely exposed to I don't think I've ever heard "Boo, got to take a pay cut" except for making the BigCo to startup or self-employment transition.
- diminish 13y ago
  On the other hand, as you age, your salary increases and as you compare with 10 years ago, you omit inflation. Averaging same-age, same-years-of-experience, inflation-adjusted developer salaries across years would make better sense.
- Tichy 13y ago
  It sounds to me as if you are saying average wages are not increasing because of the influx of young developers. Isn't that exactly the point the article makes, that the non-increasing wages indicate that there is no shortage of tech workers? It also seems unlikely that the decreasing averages don't affect the wages of older tech workers. They compete with the young, cheap tech workers after all - why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if they could replace them with cheap young tech workers?
  - jasonkester 13y ago
    why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if they could replace them with cheap young tech workers? Because young workers are not a substitute for old workers. You could argue that four fresh graduates are a substitute for a single good senior dev, but in many cases even that is not true. Thus, old guys continue to find good jobs for good money. This worry is as old as software. The cheap hordes will replace you. It used to be cheap hordes from overseas, and now it's cheap hordes fresh out of school. They're on there way. But somehow they never seem to arrive.
tokenadult 13y ago
No one even talks about a crisis of too few English majors. That seems to be beyond dispute. So maybe there is a bit more of a kernel of truth to the idea that some (perhaps not all) STEM occupations have a limited supply of capable workers.
- dnautics 13y ago
  limited supply of capable workers, yes. 100% agree. But if you have an oversupply of workers in general, out of which it's difficult to tell which ones are capable, then what?
  - tokenadult 13y ago
    A fair question. Use research-based hiring procedures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 to sift through the many persons with degrees (or even without degrees) to find the smaller number of persons who can actually do the job. Key idea: use a work-sample test to hire for any job.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      you can't really do that for biology or chemistry.
- jazzyk 13y ago
  Unlike English majors, software job requirements change practically quarterly. Companies (mostly start-ups) always appear to look for min 2-year experience in some latest, hottest, tech/framework, which has barely even been available that long. If someone out there happens to have that skill, s/he will ask for a decent (but not outrageous) salary/rate for a (temporarily) rare skill. Companies looking are not willing to pay that(the CEO needs to get his $2M bonus, after all). So there is your "limited supply". Maybe, just maybe a couple of passionate employees could be quickly trained? What a radical idea....
swamp40 13y ago
And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. So, assume a $30K salary differential, times 115K jobs = $3.45 Billion dollars in savings. Well, that will pay for some lobbyists...
sker 13y ago
I'm not in the US, but from what I've seen here and in other boards, the whole STEM Crisis is actually a HR Crisis. No wonder you can't hire anyone if you want rocket scientists to build your world-changing photo sharing app.
- tl 13y ago
  It's also true in the US. We've gone through several transitions from mainframes all the way to smartphones, bringing technology to more people each time, and my anecdotal experience is this the average HR worker understanding of computing has actually decreased (in that I face forms of ignorance now that I had not in the past).
- derefr 13y ago
  It almost feels like VCs are putting together teams of people overqualified+tempting enough for MicroFaceGoogHoo! to want to pay millions to acquihire them, and then telling them to do various money-burning attention-grabbing "peacocking" things until it happens. Sometimes the illusion wavers for a moment, when the product part fails to happen (e.g. Color) but everything else still does.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    That's... a surprisingly good hypothesis.
- jmspring 13y ago
  It is an HR crisis on two points - 1) There is a business preference to find the best candidate for the lowest rate (practical sense) which leads towards hiring the youngest/cheapest resource available who meets the criteria. 2) Existing companies refuse to invest in building up / educating employees. In the old days you hired based on merit and potential, but you also provided training to make sure employees adapted with technology. These days, there is no training and employees are expected to adapt on their own (there are certainly arguments for keeping on top of things, but if you have a full time job and other obligations, external interests might not be technical/career related) Unfortunately, because of (1) and no requirement for companies to commit to (2), there is a push to allow for more non-domestic workers through programs like H1-B and related visas. Personally, I think most engineers should hone their skills and continue to learn and evolve. That said, some situations don't allow that and when coupled with a refusal of companies refusing to hire/train based off potential, we end up in the mythical "STEM crisis". I'm not talking the founder visa issue here, I am talking the normal boots on the ground. For which, no longer training and wanting the cheapest option have created a toxic environment for a certain segment of the tech community.
nazgulnarsil 13y ago
Grade inflation (related to political pressure about the STEM shortage narrative) is such that a larger proportion of STEM graduates than ever before are mostly useless.
jbellis 13y ago
The only people who claim there are plenty of talented developers to hire are people who have never tried to hire one in the last three-plus years. I hire developers anywhere in the world to work on cutting edge infrastructure software and it's still tough. But not as tough as restricting us to the Bay would be.
- pkj 13y ago
  "plenty of talented developers.." ^^^^^^^^ From my experience in bay area & india, I never saw shortage of resumes for open positions. Large enough even if you assume people applying to multiple companies. The shortage though was for talented folks meeting the expectations of mgr/co-workers.
  - RWeaver 13y ago
    So train them. Give them a general aptitude test, tell them you're taking a chance and hope they'll stay for at least three years and give them mentors and a couple of months to come up to speed or they'll be let go
    - pkj 13y ago
      What you describe is very close to how hundreds of thousands of grads are hired into Indian software service industry. Aptitude test followed by training and plenty of time to come to speed and be evaluated. It has worked out fine for them. Layoffs are very rare. Startups are a different story as time to market is crucial and you have almost no slack.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        Maybe this is a problem with startup culture, perhaps technologists have it backwards. In other industries , new startups seem to usually come from people with experience who have been round the block who have some idea of what is required to ramp up a company in the sector. In technology it seems that if you haven't founded a company in your 20s then you have "missed the boat".
pkj 13y ago
"The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade."... That's wildly optimistic. The reality is unemployment rate for indian engineering graduates now ranges from an optimistic 50% upto 80%.. [1] http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degree-in-hand-a-generation-of-engineers-looks-for-alternat.html http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degr... [2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news/40049243_1_engineers-iit-bombay-batch-size http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news...
lutusp 13y ago
Unsurprisingly, different groups define "shortage" differently. Employers call the shortage real because they can't hire employees cheaply. Employees call the shortage a myth because they can't find a position with a desirable salary.
joeblau 13y ago
Wow, My Friend just launched a stem job board on Monday. If there is a transition from "Alarm" to "Boom", this seems like a great business opportunity.
MarcScott 13y ago
Although difficult to analyse, we must also consider the quality of STEM degrees from different institutions. There's a world of difference between a first class degree in Physics obtained from Cambridge compared to say Stafforshire. Some Universities in the UK have unemployment rates for graduates over 25%. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10159647/One-in-five-graduates-from-worst-universities-left-jobless.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10159647/...
jquery 13y ago
Anecdotally, my brother, with a Mech Eng degree, has been unemployed ever since he graduated a year and a half ago, despite looking constantly. He's married with a kid and lives with his wife's parents in a spare bedroom. The STEM shortage is nothing more than employers looking for cheaper workers (either salary-wise, or without any obligation to train them the necessary skills).
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  If employers were looking for cheaper workers, your brother would have taken the cheapest job available wouldn't he? After all, working as a Mech Eng even at minimum wage should for him be preferable to flipping burgers at minimum wage or being unemployed, especially with a family...
  - jbjohns 13y ago
    It depends. Countries with actual safety nets often provide enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be employed" job while looking for their next real job.
    - Proleps 13y ago
      In the Netherlands we have enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be employed" job. But the longer you are unemployed, the harder it will be to find a new job. A hole in your resume doesn't look god
      - jbjohns 13y ago
        Of course. There is always the driver to actually work. In places that lack a safety net you have to take some "flipping burgers" job which you still can't really report on your resume so you end up with no time plus that ugly hole in your resume.
    - bayesianhorse 13y ago
      It has been shown that humans prefer pay for work over the same pay for no work (within reason). Many othere species too. Except Cats. Also there is lots of room between an "adequate" engineering salary and minimum or no wage... Figuring out how to get underachieving academics into paying or even wellpaying jobs should be a higher priority in politics.
Kiro 13y ago
The problem is that many STEM majors are not the kind of STEM workers there is a demand for. In my country a big share of people who have a CS degree barely know how to write real code. I think it's because 1. the education is too theoretical 2. free education system (no barrier means a lot of people who study without having any real interest in programming).
- jbjohns 13y ago
  2 seems unlikely. If education is free, why not learn what ever you want? If educate is insanely expensive then unless your family is rich, you have to try and make sure what ever you study can recoup those costs.
  - Kiro 13y ago
    Because people don't know what they want to do so they just jump on any education. I've been there. It's so easy to start university that literally everyone does it and what you actually read is secondary. In fact, many people choose bogus courses like "hat science" just to get study allowance and access to the other benefits. So it's not surprising people pick CS thinking "it's good money so why not".
davidw 13y ago
STEM seems to me to be very much not zero-sum, so I think the more the merrier.
- dnautics 13y ago
  it can be worse than zero-sum. If you dilute the workforce with idiots, you could wind up with a situation where projects requiring insight get completely derailed and moreover actually competent people get passed over time after time and quit the endeavor in frustration. This is what is happening in the sciences.
  - davidw 13y ago
    > If you dilute the workforce with idiots This seems to be the sort of problem that markets are pretty good at dealing with. I wouldn't worry about it.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      Market heavily distorted by governments wanting to fund science as a source of national pride. As you well know, number of PhDs correlates to national greatness.
radicalbyte 13y ago
My experience is that it's very hard to find good developers, or university graduates who want to become developers. The CS grads that I've interviewed fall into three groups: 1) They were good at Math, spent 4 years avoiding anything involving computers, and whose career goal is to find a cushy middle-management job. 2) Arrogant CV-fillers who think that their HTML/JS 'skillz' make them them God's gift to the world. Who then end up working for Big Consultancy Firm working on Sharepoint (because the money is good). 3) The rare gem, who love computers, love coding, and get usually get snapped up instantly by Google/Microsoft. As someone who doesn't have a degree, I find the level of CS graduates from (top!) universities disheartening. I've seen people who couldn't implement a simple sorting algorithm in pseudo-code (or even explain how they'd do it!). Things I can do with my eyes closed; you know, because I have actually read my algorithms book cover-to-cover. The cause is clear: developers can earn very good money at the moment. It's a good career move. So it's attracting the lazy chancers who just see the $$$$$. What ever happened to pursing a career doing something because you, you know, love doing it?
- TheAceOfHearts 13y ago
  I love coding, but if you make me implement a quicksort in the interview I'll probably be too nervous and fuck it up. Have you tried having more interactive interviews, or handing out projects? I just like doing cool things, honestly. And I know a few people that are just like me.
  - radicalbyte 13y ago
    We tailor the interview to the applicant: so someone coming from (GOOD!) Uni should be able to verbally explain a sorting algorithm. We don't ask them to code - it will take too long and a discussion is much more valuable (and almost impossible to pass by memorizing a couple of algorithms). Heck, I passed a harder version of the test (including the theory, I'm a senior/lead/old-fart so I was expected to implement everything on top of the discussions) and I left formal education at 17 :) They don't have to implement a working version, just give a good outline and be able to answer questions about it :) For experienced people we go further, and do ask for some coding. You've got 5 years experience in SQL? Then solve this simple problem which requires using JOINs and aggregates. You're a javascript expert? Great, then demonstrate that you know the syntax and know what a closure is. Java expert with a focus on patterns? Then you should be able to implement one of: Singleton/Factory/Command. We get more people who have 10 years of experience with C# are are self proclaimed experts, but who don't know the difference between the heap and the stack then we do CS students applying for the wrong job.. but that's for a different thread :)
cbhl 13y ago
One of the things that seems suspect to me about this article is the conflation between "STEM" and "Computer Science / Software Engineering / Computer Engineering". No where in the article is "STEM" defined precisely, but the author clearly notes that is NSF number includes health-care workers, psychologists and social scientists. Even if we replaced "STEM" with "Engineering" in the entire article, it's still a fallacy to say "there are 0.3 million engineering jobs, and 11.7 million engineering graduates -- there can't possibly a shortage of engineers." I wouldn't automatically assume that someone with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering or Civil Engineering is qualified to work at <insert software company here>[0], in the same way that I would be completely unqualified to be hired run an oil field or draft up a plan for my city's mass transit system. Sometimes people do have extra skills atop their degree that lands them in a job outside of their field, but that's not true for everyone. If anything, I think the whole "STEM shortage" sounds like a plea to US post-secondary institutions to make their CS/EE/CE/SE graduating classes bigger -- perhaps at the expense of other STEM programs. Edit: [0] I'm assuming a software company small enough that it's not doing city planning on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were Civil Engineers working at the likes of Microsoft and Google, trying to figure out the master plan for their main campuses, but that's not my point.
- jbjohns 13y ago
  No, I think the issue is that software developers have reached a limit of how low a salary they are willing to work for, and not enough of them have a limit that is low enough for what companies are willing to pay so rather than cave in, the companies are playing politics with the hope of flooding the markets to drive prices down nationally.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    If that is indeed the rationale, I don't think having more bodies in the SF Bay Area is going to help. (More people means housing prices will go up, and thus, the rational price accepted by half-decent developers should go up. It's easy to spend 70% of a entry-level Google salary on housing in the city right now.) I wonder if buying up a bunch of houses in Detroit, and offering one as a starting bonus (along with gigabit Internet and a nearby Wal-Mart) would be enough to entice people to work for less.
rogerchucker 13y ago
A little off-topic perhaps but it is sort of crazy to see IEEE being so adamantly xenophobic since the start of the H1-B debate given that there are so many foreign-born authors in articles from IEEE transactions. I have seen their editorials on this issue in the past and as an Indian, it kinda depresses me.
skylan_q 13y ago
I don't understand what a "shortage" entails.
dhimes 13y ago
"They" have been crying about a lack of STEM (it used to just be scientists and engineers) for at least 30 years. I don't listen to it any more. When I walked out with my doctorate, jobs were very scarce in the science/engineering fields (although software jobs were increasing). From what I can gather, the soothsayers simply do a linear extrapolation of current jobs and candidates, and show a shortage. They do no real forecasting by trying to reason about future needs. So, I don't pay attention any more.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I'm generally happy to see STEM funding in education[1] really, I am happy to see any funding in education. But, the "STEM shortfall" (if there is any) isn't because of a lack of funding for specific education program, but because of a lack of demand in those fields. If companies are having trouble finding proper candidates for jobs (they tell me that they are), they either need to look at their selection process (which IMO is pretty terrible) or offer more money; probably a little bit of both. It requires a little more discipline and sacrifice to earn a STEM degree vs many of the other degree tracks, many of these students change plans to a simpler track that gets them more money for their effort. [1] Disclosure: I am a STEM educator, and I am a little bit worried that this effort might even flood the market for STEM grads lowering wages.
graeme 13y ago
My personal anecdote supporting the idea of an STEM crisis: I'm not a developer. Last year, I was learning programming. I also had a track record of starting and successfully executing projects. Small personal ones, but they made money. I tutored a student for the LSAT, and he thought I was smart. When he heard I was learning programming, he introduced me to his sister's boyfriend, who was a manager at a local hardware/software firm. The guy met with me, was interested in turning me into a developer and offered me a decent salary to do so. He said he couldn't hire enough competent developers. I ended up pursuing another opportunity (large commute at this job + I wanted to build my own stuff), but this impressed on me the high value currently given to STEM expertise. I didn't have any! Just an interest was enough. Edit: I has learned the basics of programming, having gone though most of K & R, and a couple of Udacity courses. But I has no programming skills that were worth paying for at that particular moment. Nothing tht could immediately make anyone money.
Tycho 13y ago
Maybe the homogeneity of STEM labour is what the myth is.
bane 13y ago
Part of the problem is that we also put people through an extraordinarily difficult educational process (CS or similar) for what's largely become a skilled vocational problem. 90% of developers working on 90% of their work will never have to implement an algorithm of any kind that matters. They won't have to understand higher maths, computational theory, language theory, etc. They have to glue this piece from here with this piece from there and write some documentation that they did so. On the flip side, spending four years learning about computability theory instead of the latest frameworks in foo language likewise doesn't prepare a CS major for employability. Their first employer will have to spend lots of time and money training them in the vocational skills they'll need. Universities' attempts at recognizing this and educating students for this reality give us majors like Software Engineering and Information Systems which don't exactly match what the market needs either. What's needed is to take a relatively smart, but ignorant person off of the street, and in 4 years spit out a mid-level developer, with specialties in web development, server development, etc. Their coursework should be nothing but learning languages, APIs, development environments and frameworks and how to coherently document their work. For those specializing in web development, their senior project should be to build, from scratch, an entire e-commerce site, with product catalogs, promo codes, wishlists, shopping carts etc, including setting up all the servers, and gluing them together. The entire thing should be meticulously documented and launchable tomorrow. Similar senior projects should go to those specializing in game development (like the senior projects out of digipen), desktop software development (make a basic office suite), server software development (write a database and web server from scratch with full APIs), etc. In very specific markets this has already happened. Video Game development, for example has spawned vocation focused education like digipen. CS is both over and underkill for most jobs. And the result is that we interview for CS skills, for a job that doesn't really need them.

139 points by RougeFemme 13y ago

"That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce." The huge disparity of pay between different STEM disciplines should clearly show where the demand is. Biologists compete over shrinking government grants, while petroleum engineering students receive job offers of $90K starting. Treating STEM as a homogenous bloc will hurt the less in-demand fields while failing to treat the shortfall in others.

ffn 13y ago
One of his points was that it is extremely hard to predict where the next boom in the greater STEM field will be. Several years ago, internet boomed, then bust, then boomed again. Meanwhile, petro rose while aerospace fell... It's precisely the point that, because STEM skills cannot cross fields (you try getting a rocket scientist to build you a photo-sharing app) that leads to moments of massive oversupply, then terrible shortage, and then massive oversupply again.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  Programmers can cross fields, as can most enginners.
- WalterBright 13y ago
  Cannot cross fields? My major was Me/Ae, took no CS courses, worked for Boeing designing airplane gearboxes and hydraulic systems, and yet I had no trouble transitioning to a CS career. When I took mechanics/fluids/electronics/materials classes, I discovered that the math was all the same, except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    This speaks to how quickly what we're taught in school goes out of date. You were able to transition to CS, compete with same-age CS graduates, because much of what they were taught in school had become obsolete, while what you learned on the job became more and more valuable and relevant. > ... except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'. And that only because of the coincidence that 'i' refers to current in electrical equations. It also addresses the issue that, with respect to getting useful results from a computer, one's mathematical knowledge and ability is now more important than one's knowledge of a computer's inner workings.
    - bayesianhorse 13y ago
      The subject matter becomes obsolete, but the mental processes and skills stay relevant. Too much of education is aimed and evaluated for data storage rather than brain training.
      - lutusp 13y ago
        Very true. Americans are taught what to think, not how to think.
        bayesianhorse 13y ago
        In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. In Germany I'm not hearing a lot of "mind training matters" noise out of education either.
        lutusp 13y ago
        > In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. Yes, or Japan, where being different or standing out in any way is seen as the height of rudeness. Sumimasen, arigatōgozaimashita I guess we have to face the fact that the ability to think for oneself, and think critically, is rather unpopular, with rare exception.
        13y ago

tsotha 13y ago

Duh? There has never been a STEM shortage, at least in the US. Ever. There has only been duplicitous propaganda on the part of companies that want to raise the H1-B limit in order to push down wages.

patio11 13y ago

"Wages for technologists have not increased" is often evidenced by claims about averages. By the same token, one could argue persuasively that devs do not age, because a year goes by and they get a few months younger. The explanation is that the number of devs (and many related trades) is increasing rapidly, largely driven by hires of young neophytes rather than retraining of e.g. 50 year old lawyers. The neophytes are younger and have lower wages than the mean dev. This brings the average down faster than raises and aging bring the average up. You can verify this if you look at data for particular career cohorts, either people or experience levels. In the 4 years I've been on HN the quotes I hear for "generic CS undergrad from Stanford" are up more than 25% (80k to 110k or so, starting salary offer). Companies that I work with complain bitterly that their competitors are bidding irresponsibly. The going wages for interns are substantially in excess of what I expected to earn in mid career when I graduate not even 10 years ago. Also, anecdotally, of the couple hundred people whose professional statuses I'm routinely exposed to I don't think I've ever heard "Boo, got to take a pay cut" except for making the BigCo to startup or self-employment transition.

diminish 13y ago
On the other hand, as you age, your salary increases and as you compare with 10 years ago, you omit inflation. Averaging same-age, same-years-of-experience, inflation-adjusted developer salaries across years would make better sense.
Tichy 13y ago
It sounds to me as if you are saying average wages are not increasing because of the influx of young developers. Isn't that exactly the point the article makes, that the non-increasing wages indicate that there is no shortage of tech workers? It also seems unlikely that the decreasing averages don't affect the wages of older tech workers. They compete with the young, cheap tech workers after all - why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if they could replace them with cheap young tech workers?
- jasonkester 13y ago
  why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if they could replace them with cheap young tech workers? Because young workers are not a substitute for old workers. You could argue that four fresh graduates are a substitute for a single good senior dev, but in many cases even that is not true. Thus, old guys continue to find good jobs for good money. This worry is as old as software. The cheap hordes will replace you. It used to be cheap hordes from overseas, and now it's cheap hordes fresh out of school. They're on there way. But somehow they never seem to arrive.

tokenadult 13y ago

No one even talks about a crisis of too few English majors. That seems to be beyond dispute. So maybe there is a bit more of a kernel of truth to the idea that some (perhaps not all) STEM occupations have a limited supply of capable workers.

dnautics 13y ago
limited supply of capable workers, yes. 100% agree. But if you have an oversupply of workers in general, out of which it's difficult to tell which ones are capable, then what?
- tokenadult 13y ago
  A fair question. Use research-based hiring procedures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 to sift through the many persons with degrees (or even without degrees) to find the smaller number of persons who can actually do the job. Key idea: use a work-sample test to hire for any job.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    you can't really do that for biology or chemistry.
jazzyk 13y ago
Unlike English majors, software job requirements change practically quarterly. Companies (mostly start-ups) always appear to look for min 2-year experience in some latest, hottest, tech/framework, which has barely even been available that long. If someone out there happens to have that skill, s/he will ask for a decent (but not outrageous) salary/rate for a (temporarily) rare skill. Companies looking are not willing to pay that(the CEO needs to get his $2M bonus, after all). So there is your "limited supply". Maybe, just maybe a couple of passionate employees could be quickly trained? What a radical idea....

swamp40 13y ago

And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. So, assume a $30K salary differential, times 115K jobs = $3.45 Billion dollars in savings. Well, that will pay for some lobbyists...

sker 13y ago

I'm not in the US, but from what I've seen here and in other boards, the whole STEM Crisis is actually a HR Crisis. No wonder you can't hire anyone if you want rocket scientists to build your world-changing photo sharing app.

tl 13y ago
It's also true in the US. We've gone through several transitions from mainframes all the way to smartphones, bringing technology to more people each time, and my anecdotal experience is this the average HR worker understanding of computing has actually decreased (in that I face forms of ignorance now that I had not in the past).
derefr 13y ago
It almost feels like VCs are putting together teams of people overqualified+tempting enough for MicroFaceGoogHoo! to want to pay millions to acquihire them, and then telling them to do various money-burning attention-grabbing "peacocking" things until it happens. Sometimes the illusion wavers for a moment, when the product part fails to happen (e.g. Color) but everything else still does.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  That's... a surprisingly good hypothesis.
jmspring 13y ago
It is an HR crisis on two points - 1) There is a business preference to find the best candidate for the lowest rate (practical sense) which leads towards hiring the youngest/cheapest resource available who meets the criteria. 2) Existing companies refuse to invest in building up / educating employees. In the old days you hired based on merit and potential, but you also provided training to make sure employees adapted with technology. These days, there is no training and employees are expected to adapt on their own (there are certainly arguments for keeping on top of things, but if you have a full time job and other obligations, external interests might not be technical/career related) Unfortunately, because of (1) and no requirement for companies to commit to (2), there is a push to allow for more non-domestic workers through programs like H1-B and related visas. Personally, I think most engineers should hone their skills and continue to learn and evolve. That said, some situations don't allow that and when coupled with a refusal of companies refusing to hire/train based off potential, we end up in the mythical "STEM crisis". I'm not talking the founder visa issue here, I am talking the normal boots on the ground. For which, no longer training and wanting the cheapest option have created a toxic environment for a certain segment of the tech community.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

Grade inflation (related to political pressure about the STEM shortage narrative) is such that a larger proportion of STEM graduates than ever before are mostly useless.

jbellis 13y ago

The only people who claim there are plenty of talented developers to hire are people who have never tried to hire one in the last three-plus years. I hire developers anywhere in the world to work on cutting edge infrastructure software and it's still tough. But not as tough as restricting us to the Bay would be.

pkj 13y ago
"plenty of talented developers.." ^^^^^^^^ From my experience in bay area & india, I never saw shortage of resumes for open positions. Large enough even if you assume people applying to multiple companies. The shortage though was for talented folks meeting the expectations of mgr/co-workers.
- RWeaver 13y ago
  So train them. Give them a general aptitude test, tell them you're taking a chance and hope they'll stay for at least three years and give them mentors and a couple of months to come up to speed or they'll be let go
  - pkj 13y ago
    What you describe is very close to how hundreds of thousands of grads are hired into Indian software service industry. Aptitude test followed by training and plenty of time to come to speed and be evaluated. It has worked out fine for them. Layoffs are very rare. Startups are a different story as time to market is crucial and you have almost no slack.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      Maybe this is a problem with startup culture, perhaps technologists have it backwards. In other industries , new startups seem to usually come from people with experience who have been round the block who have some idea of what is required to ramp up a company in the sector. In technology it seems that if you haven't founded a company in your 20s then you have "missed the boat".

pkj 13y ago

"The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade."... That's wildly optimistic. The reality is unemployment rate for indian engineering graduates now ranges from an optimistic 50% upto 80%.. [1] http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degree-in-hand-a-generation-of-engineers-looks-for-alternat.html http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degr... [2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news/40049243_1_engineers-iit-bombay-batch-size http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news...

lutusp 13y ago

Unsurprisingly, different groups define "shortage" differently. Employers call the shortage real because they can't hire employees cheaply. Employees call the shortage a myth because they can't find a position with a desirable salary.

joeblau 13y ago

Wow, My Friend just launched a stem job board on Monday. If there is a transition from "Alarm" to "Boom", this seems like a great business opportunity.

MarcScott 13y ago

Although difficult to analyse, we must also consider the quality of STEM degrees from different institutions. There's a world of difference between a first class degree in Physics obtained from Cambridge compared to say Stafforshire. Some Universities in the UK have unemployment rates for graduates over 25%. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10159647/One-in-five-graduates-from-worst-universities-left-jobless.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10159647/...

jquery 13y ago

Anecdotally, my brother, with a Mech Eng degree, has been unemployed ever since he graduated a year and a half ago, despite looking constantly. He's married with a kid and lives with his wife's parents in a spare bedroom. The STEM shortage is nothing more than employers looking for cheaper workers (either salary-wise, or without any obligation to train them the necessary skills).

bayesianhorse 13y ago
If employers were looking for cheaper workers, your brother would have taken the cheapest job available wouldn't he? After all, working as a Mech Eng even at minimum wage should for him be preferable to flipping burgers at minimum wage or being unemployed, especially with a family...
- jbjohns 13y ago
  It depends. Countries with actual safety nets often provide enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be employed" job while looking for their next real job.
  - Proleps 13y ago
    In the Netherlands we have enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be employed" job. But the longer you are unemployed, the harder it will be to find a new job. A hole in your resume doesn't look god
    - jbjohns 13y ago
      Of course. There is always the driver to actually work. In places that lack a safety net you have to take some "flipping burgers" job which you still can't really report on your resume so you end up with no time plus that ugly hole in your resume.
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    It has been shown that humans prefer pay for work over the same pay for no work (within reason). Many othere species too. Except Cats. Also there is lots of room between an "adequate" engineering salary and minimum or no wage... Figuring out how to get underachieving academics into paying or even wellpaying jobs should be a higher priority in politics.

Kiro 13y ago

The problem is that many STEM majors are not the kind of STEM workers there is a demand for. In my country a big share of people who have a CS degree barely know how to write real code. I think it's because 1. the education is too theoretical 2. free education system (no barrier means a lot of people who study without having any real interest in programming).

jbjohns 13y ago
2 seems unlikely. If education is free, why not learn what ever you want? If educate is insanely expensive then unless your family is rich, you have to try and make sure what ever you study can recoup those costs.
- Kiro 13y ago
  Because people don't know what they want to do so they just jump on any education. I've been there. It's so easy to start university that literally everyone does it and what you actually read is secondary. In fact, many people choose bogus courses like "hat science" just to get study allowance and access to the other benefits. So it's not surprising people pick CS thinking "it's good money so why not".

davidw 13y ago

STEM seems to me to be very much not zero-sum, so I think the more the merrier.

dnautics 13y ago
it can be worse than zero-sum. If you dilute the workforce with idiots, you could wind up with a situation where projects requiring insight get completely derailed and moreover actually competent people get passed over time after time and quit the endeavor in frustration. This is what is happening in the sciences.
- davidw 13y ago
  > If you dilute the workforce with idiots This seems to be the sort of problem that markets are pretty good at dealing with. I wouldn't worry about it.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    Market heavily distorted by governments wanting to fund science as a source of national pride. As you well know, number of PhDs correlates to national greatness.

radicalbyte 13y ago

My experience is that it's very hard to find good developers, or university graduates who want to become developers. The CS grads that I've interviewed fall into three groups: 1) They were good at Math, spent 4 years avoiding anything involving computers, and whose career goal is to find a cushy middle-management job. 2) Arrogant CV-fillers who think that their HTML/JS 'skillz' make them them God's gift to the world. Who then end up working for Big Consultancy Firm working on Sharepoint (because the money is good). 3) The rare gem, who love computers, love coding, and get usually get snapped up instantly by Google/Microsoft. As someone who doesn't have a degree, I find the level of CS graduates from (top!) universities disheartening. I've seen people who couldn't implement a simple sorting algorithm in pseudo-code (or even explain how they'd do it!). Things I can do with my eyes closed; you know, because I have actually read my algorithms book cover-to-cover. The cause is clear: developers can earn very good money at the moment. It's a good career move. So it's attracting the lazy chancers who just see the $$$$$. What ever happened to pursing a career doing something because you, you know, love doing it?

TheAceOfHearts 13y ago
I love coding, but if you make me implement a quicksort in the interview I'll probably be too nervous and fuck it up. Have you tried having more interactive interviews, or handing out projects? I just like doing cool things, honestly. And I know a few people that are just like me.
- radicalbyte 13y ago
  We tailor the interview to the applicant: so someone coming from (GOOD!) Uni should be able to verbally explain a sorting algorithm. We don't ask them to code - it will take too long and a discussion is much more valuable (and almost impossible to pass by memorizing a couple of algorithms). Heck, I passed a harder version of the test (including the theory, I'm a senior/lead/old-fart so I was expected to implement everything on top of the discussions) and I left formal education at 17 :) They don't have to implement a working version, just give a good outline and be able to answer questions about it :) For experienced people we go further, and do ask for some coding. You've got 5 years experience in SQL? Then solve this simple problem which requires using JOINs and aggregates. You're a javascript expert? Great, then demonstrate that you know the syntax and know what a closure is. Java expert with a focus on patterns? Then you should be able to implement one of: Singleton/Factory/Command. We get more people who have 10 years of experience with C# are are self proclaimed experts, but who don't know the difference between the heap and the stack then we do CS students applying for the wrong job.. but that's for a different thread :)

cbhl 13y ago

One of the things that seems suspect to me about this article is the conflation between "STEM" and "Computer Science / Software Engineering / Computer Engineering". No where in the article is "STEM" defined precisely, but the author clearly notes that is NSF number includes health-care workers, psychologists and social scientists. Even if we replaced "STEM" with "Engineering" in the entire article, it's still a fallacy to say "there are 0.3 million engineering jobs, and 11.7 million engineering graduates -- there can't possibly a shortage of engineers." I wouldn't automatically assume that someone with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering or Civil Engineering is qualified to work at <insert software company here>[0], in the same way that I would be completely unqualified to be hired run an oil field or draft up a plan for my city's mass transit system. Sometimes people do have extra skills atop their degree that lands them in a job outside of their field, but that's not true for everyone. If anything, I think the whole "STEM shortage" sounds like a plea to US post-secondary institutions to make their CS/EE/CE/SE graduating classes bigger -- perhaps at the expense of other STEM programs. Edit: [0] I'm assuming a software company small enough that it's not doing city planning on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were Civil Engineers working at the likes of Microsoft and Google, trying to figure out the master plan for their main campuses, but that's not my point.

jbjohns 13y ago
No, I think the issue is that software developers have reached a limit of how low a salary they are willing to work for, and not enough of them have a limit that is low enough for what companies are willing to pay so rather than cave in, the companies are playing politics with the hope of flooding the markets to drive prices down nationally.
- cbhl 13y ago
  If that is indeed the rationale, I don't think having more bodies in the SF Bay Area is going to help. (More people means housing prices will go up, and thus, the rational price accepted by half-decent developers should go up. It's easy to spend 70% of a entry-level Google salary on housing in the city right now.) I wonder if buying up a bunch of houses in Detroit, and offering one as a starting bonus (along with gigabit Internet and a nearby Wal-Mart) would be enough to entice people to work for less.

rogerchucker 13y ago

A little off-topic perhaps but it is sort of crazy to see IEEE being so adamantly xenophobic since the start of the H1-B debate given that there are so many foreign-born authors in articles from IEEE transactions. I have seen their editorials on this issue in the past and as an Indian, it kinda depresses me.

skylan_q 13y ago

I don't understand what a "shortage" entails.

dhimes 13y ago

"They" have been crying about a lack of STEM (it used to just be scientists and engineers) for at least 30 years. I don't listen to it any more. When I walked out with my doctorate, jobs were very scarce in the science/engineering fields (although software jobs were increasing). From what I can gather, the soothsayers simply do a linear extrapolation of current jobs and candidates, and show a shortage. They do no real forecasting by trying to reason about future needs. So, I don't pay attention any more.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I'm generally happy to see STEM funding in education[1] really, I am happy to see any funding in education. But, the "STEM shortfall" (if there is any) isn't because of a lack of funding for specific education program, but because of a lack of demand in those fields. If companies are having trouble finding proper candidates for jobs (they tell me that they are), they either need to look at their selection process (which IMO is pretty terrible) or offer more money; probably a little bit of both. It requires a little more discipline and sacrifice to earn a STEM degree vs many of the other degree tracks, many of these students change plans to a simpler track that gets them more money for their effort. [1] Disclosure: I am a STEM educator, and I am a little bit worried that this effort might even flood the market for STEM grads lowering wages.

graeme 13y ago

My personal anecdote supporting the idea of an STEM crisis: I'm not a developer. Last year, I was learning programming. I also had a track record of starting and successfully executing projects. Small personal ones, but they made money. I tutored a student for the LSAT, and he thought I was smart. When he heard I was learning programming, he introduced me to his sister's boyfriend, who was a manager at a local hardware/software firm. The guy met with me, was interested in turning me into a developer and offered me a decent salary to do so. He said he couldn't hire enough competent developers. I ended up pursuing another opportunity (large commute at this job + I wanted to build my own stuff), but this impressed on me the high value currently given to STEM expertise. I didn't have any! Just an interest was enough. Edit: I has learned the basics of programming, having gone though most of K & R, and a couple of Udacity courses. But I has no programming skills that were worth paying for at that particular moment. Nothing tht could immediately make anyone money.

Tycho 13y ago

Maybe the homogeneity of STEM labour is what the myth is.

bane 13y ago

Part of the problem is that we also put people through an extraordinarily difficult educational process (CS or similar) for what's largely become a skilled vocational problem. 90% of developers working on 90% of their work will never have to implement an algorithm of any kind that matters. They won't have to understand higher maths, computational theory, language theory, etc. They have to glue this piece from here with this piece from there and write some documentation that they did so. On the flip side, spending four years learning about computability theory instead of the latest frameworks in foo language likewise doesn't prepare a CS major for employability. Their first employer will have to spend lots of time and money training them in the vocational skills they'll need. Universities' attempts at recognizing this and educating students for this reality give us majors like Software Engineering and Information Systems which don't exactly match what the market needs either. What's needed is to take a relatively smart, but ignorant person off of the street, and in 4 years spit out a mid-level developer, with specialties in web development, server development, etc. Their coursework should be nothing but learning languages, APIs, development environments and frameworks and how to coherently document their work. For those specializing in web development, their senior project should be to build, from scratch, an entire e-commerce site, with product catalogs, promo codes, wishlists, shopping carts etc, including setting up all the servers, and gluing them together. The entire thing should be meticulously documented and launchable tomorrow. Similar senior projects should go to those specializing in game development (like the senior projects out of digipen), desktop software development (make a basic office suite), server software development (write a database and web server from scratch with full APIs), etc. In very specific markets this has already happened. Video Game development, for example has spawned vocation focused education like digipen. CS is both over and underkill for most jobs. And the result is that we interview for CS skills, for a job that doesn't really need them.