13 ms·

Is there a STEM worker shortage?

26 points by gandalfgeek 13y ago

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
There are several different localized shortages, but also a general glut. If you're trying to hire well-trained software engineers with high-level CS knowledge in the Bay Area, good fucking luck, and make sure to pay plenty because you're getting nothing otherwise. If you're trying to hire medical device engineers in North Carolina (pulling this out of my ass, but you get the point), there is a glut of unemployed medicine and biology grads to choose from, many with top-flight skills and work experience. Why do we keep employing these overly large categories that conceal more than they reveal?
MrBuddyCasino 13y ago
tl;dr: there is no shortage, its just that most candidates are crap
- angdis 13y ago
  And the real reason that the "candidates are crap" is that too many employers no longer spend the time and resources to train their workers properly. Instead employees are expected to get hired with insanely specific skills and "hit the ground running" working for some clueless line and project managers who don't give a damn about what happens outside of their small-minded metrics.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    If you're not studying stuff related to what you want to do when you get out of college, on your spare time during studies, you're already losing. It's not enough to come out as a grad. You need to set your sights on a very specific job, and start learning for it. All throughout my undergrad I studied mobile to death and did a ton of work in it. Had no problem landing a 150k+ job right out of undergrad, because I was incredibly skilled. Not too many companies care about your GPA + the courses you did, the ones that do, will put you into a mediocre role loosely related to your profession since you have no specialty.
  - hackula1 13y ago
    One more reason to work as a consultant/freelancer or for a small business (startups included). In these settings you have a lot of control over the tech stack and can optimize your skills for the changing market. You can also devote whatever reasonable amount of time you need to learning new things as you go. In most of these environments, polyglots are rewarded and encouraged, which means much less career risk, since you can hit the ground running on a wider array of projects.
  - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
    As a hiring manager, it happens very, very rarely that I encounter someone worth training. When we're talking "crap" candidates, we're talking a complete lack of both talent and passion. It would be a waste of time and effort to try to train these people. Education is part of the problem. I don't expect higher education to result in immediately applicable job skills, but I do expect it to weed out the fundamentally incompetent.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    My first job out of high school (*with only O levels) was at a r&d organization in the math modeling section. My first day was a hours instruction on the pdp11/03 then I was told to goto the company library get the book they had on FORTRAN and learn it.
  - bcheung 13y ago
    You make it sound like competency is a bad thing. What a sad state when people don't value it and think it is someone else's responsibility to provide it for them. "clueless line and project managers..." is an ad hominem and doesn't support your argument.
gopher1 13y ago
This guy linked to the IEEE Spectrum article, but I don't think he read it, because they address the issue about defining STEM workers, and despite his anecdotal evidence, they came to the conclusion that, yes, the STEM shortage is a myth.
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  No, they don't address the issue in that article, they carefully circumvent it. Like all shortage-denial articles, they focus on education rather than actual practical competence. There is no shortage of STEM graduates. There is a shortage of people actually capable of doing the jobs which, amongst other things, require a STEM background. And for most software development jobs, the latter isn't even the most important qualification. The STEM shortage is a myth created by people who want to deny that there is a shortage of qualified knowledge workers by equating "qualified" to having a STEM degree. Nobody actually in the business ever complained about a STEM shortage. We complain about a shortage of competent people.
  - hackula1 13y ago
    > We complain about a shortage of competent people. As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".
    - noonespecial 13y ago
      >We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. The trouble is, in software, single individuals in that top 20% are capable of doing things in a short time that individuals from the bottom 80% couldn't do in 1000 man years. Software is funny like that, some people can think different kinds of thoughts. So in a way, for certain values of incompetent, this is actually true.
anovikov 13y ago
Easy explanation is that there are a ton of people holding a STEM-related diploma but absolutely inept in this profession not even trying to compete. I know that from every class of software engineers in Russia, couple guys make a successful career, couple more become mediocre coders, couple more try for a while give up, rest not even bother...
- SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  Exactly. I've interviewed recent UC Berkeley EECS [1] graduates and found they couldn't write a line of code, and Berkeley is a top 10 engineering and top 10 computer science school (or at least was a the time; haven't checked rankings recently). [1] Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; their B.S. degree in computer science. I think they have a B.A. as well.
  - angdis 13y ago
    Come on... do you _REALLY_ mean they can't write a line of code? I find that hard to believe.
    - bhousel 13y ago
      I believe it. Sadly, cheating has become endemic in STEM degree programs.
    - anovikov 13y ago
      I know Ph.D. in computer science who can't write a line of code.
      - epoxyhockey 13y ago
        I know a Ph.D. in economics who can't balance his own checkbook. None of these anecdotes mean anything. Humans have strengths & weaknesses, experience & inexperience, interests & disinterests. Match the person with the job or train them if they aren't a 100% match.
rearry 13y ago
vivek haldar....
dnautics 13y ago
>The flaw is in the assumption that every STEM degree holder is a qualified candidate for a STEM job. There is also a flaw in the assumption that every STEM jobholder is qualified for a STEM job.
- hackula1 13y ago
  IDK, I could see this the other way around too. If you are currently doing the job, then you must be qualified for it, or are soon to be fired. There are probably some small percentage of people who just slide under the radar, but I would think if you were entirely incompetent and unable to do your job you would not last long.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    sometimes it's not trivial to fire people, because lawyers could get involved.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      For gross incompetence it's not really that hard in either the USA or the UK of course this just means your HR dept has some performance issues it needs to address :-)
      - dnautics 13y ago
        depends on the state in the US. And let's say the HR dept has performance issues. How do you fire someone in HR? They're the ones that know all the rules and all the laws that could get you in trouble. Where I work slid by, managed to can the HR head, but they were only able to do it because 1) she was super-overpaid and there was a budget crunch - which can be a legal problem for nonprofits (overhead) 2) there was a pretty serious SNAFU involving federal funds that happened under her watch, so she could have been in legal trouble herself. Also, gross incompetence is not necessarily the problem... Death by a thousand cuts.
        13y ago
robotcookies 13y ago
This is a view I've held for a while... that the shortage isn't with people holding square pieces of paper with fancy latin on it proclaiming competence. Rather the shortage is a talent shortage and degrees are a very poor indicator of talent. There was another article on HN a while ago and it stated that only about half of STEM workers have a STEM degree. Meanwhile, 75% of STEM degree holders didn't have a STEM job. Maybe the problem lies with the process of getting a degree?
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  I agree the university process is part of the problem, but you need to be conscious of where the numbers come from. As the full Spectrum article mentions, different groups have different definitions of "STEM worker" and "STEM degree" that can vary the numbers significantly, so you may be comparing apples to oranges and not realize it.
trekky1700 13y ago
It's a concerning trend. Lot's of people go into the fields looking for high salaries and job opportunities, and then have no interest and thus talent in the field. There's so many totally inept people with even graduate degrees in computer science. At the same time, look into some of the top University's CS exams and they're writing code on paper. They're not training effective and talented programmers, they're training effective exam writers.
- dnautics 13y ago
  This problem exists in the "hard sciences" too. There happens to be an intern in our lab, who is very motivated to do science, and actually fairly competent, but there are just some really critical things that are missing she just can't do basic mental arithmetic - it takes her minutes to figure out what volume to add to do a 1:20 dilution. Then she writes it down so that she doesn't have to do that calculation again in the future. She's always asking to make sure her procedure is correct, and has never creatively come up with an experiment on her own. This is compounded by self-doubt, there are procedures that need to be done extremely quickly, because there's an air-sensitive compound, and I've told her she needs to be snappy, and if she needs to, practice it 20 or 50 or 100 times to get the whole thing done under a minute or two, still no, and I think it's affecting the results, which of course, increases her self-doubt, so she tries to be more careful, which makes things slower, etc etc (she's not my intern so I can't be too aggressive in giving her criticism). This student has a master's degree and was applying to PhD programs at Harvard. I think Harvard rejected her, and the best grad school she got into had "people worse than her" (which I don't doubt, like I said, she's competent overall), so she's applying again this fall. I can't take her aside and tell her, "you are not PhD material". I leave it to the reader to figure out why. She would be fine in industry as a lab tech. I presume something similar happens at a lower level where people who are techs, shouldn't even be at that level. Contrast this with a high school intern in the other lab, who successfully built a giant 6 meter bioreactor that is actually being used to process waste at an industrial facility, and totally took down a professor that asked a dumb question during her "presentation on what she did".... I am terrified that she will leave STEM - she didn't get into as good a college as she should have.
xfour 13y ago
We discuss this every other day on here, do other professions, I'm just curious.
daurnimator 13y ago
This sounds to me like the issue is more university programs: people completing a STEM degree SHOULD come out of it able to take on a STEM job. From the hiring side, I agree with the dearth of quality candidates, and on the job training is often the current solution. From my own university experience: the wrong things were being taught, and depth was pretty much out of the question. I can only imagine its worse elsewhere. Only due to my personal side projects did I end up getting the knowledge needed for a job.
- epoxyhockey 13y ago
  This sounds to me like the issue is more university programs: people completing a STEM degree SHOULD come out of it able to take on a STEM job. To be fair, college is not trade school, nor is it supposed to be trade school. on the job training is often the current solution 10-15 years ago, this was standard operating procedure for college grads, as were decent training budgets to keep all employees up to date on skills. Only more recently have employers demanded a turn-key candidate while training budgets have been cut back or zero'd out. It's pretty worrisome for the future. Many individuals in this thread complaining about lack of qualified candidates may find themselves unqualified to a future employer if they don't value training.
kbenson 13y ago
Is it possible that industry automation reduces the workers needed for some positions, freeing them to look for other positions, thus increasing the pool of candidates? That would go some way towards explaining why projected STEM job candidate numbers are always below reality. Automation affects many jobs. Just because a job isn't replaced entirely by a robot or program, doesn't mean it hasn't been rendered significantly easier or less time consuming, reducing the personnel required. CAD is probably one of the oldest examples of this. What's to say that similar changes aren't taking place in many industries now?
stuaxo 13y ago
No.
rearry 13y ago
techinsurgent.com
rearry 13y ago
robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/america-rip/
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Get out.
  - dctoedt 13y ago
    > Get out. Meaning? (I can think of several possibilities.)
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Meaning, I clicked into that blog post of his, and he's a racist, fascist nut. He should leave, right now.
seiji 13y ago
Local anecdote: my last N interviews have gone from HR contact to phone interview to phone interview to take home project to (being flown out for) in person interview to ... rejection. I'm getting worried I'm actually incompetent now.
ekidd 13y ago
I've sat in front of enormous piles of resumes, desperately hoping that one candidate in 10 might be able to code fizzbuzz or reverse a linked list. Yes, the candidate pool is awful on average, but this is a survivor effect—the good candidates tend to get hired, and a handful of unqualified candidates keep spamming their resumes. But as an economist once told me, the market clears. If you're realistic about the market price, you can absolutely hire qualified people. That's practically the definition of "market price." Price signals work; when programmer salaries get ridiculous, plenty of competent people take an interest in programming. You can save money by offering other benefits, hiring outside Silicon Valley, being better at evaluating candidates than your competitors, not discriminating based on age/gender, or by figuring out how to work with talented remote experts. But you have to make an interesting offer if you want talented people.
robbles 13y ago
One issue I keep seeing in these kind of studies is the use of the "STEM" acronym itself. I'm sorry, but with the current job market, this kind of grouping makes NO sense. The jobs and opportunities are mostly in the middle two letters - technology and engineering. Science and mathematics are still tied to academia enough that only the real go-getters with the ability to self-educate and work out how to transfer their skills to other fields will easily find careers. Despite the flaws in most of the institutions offering engineering degrees, an education in engineering/technology is still the most straightforward path to a career, with the most applicable job skills being taught.
- drewying 13y ago
  I have a good friend who is a mathematician, masters degree. She works for an insurance company doing statistics as an actuary. This is just based her anecdotes, but from her stories it sounds like the world of professional mathematicians/staticians is suffering from a talent shortage that completely dwarfs what we experience in the technology sector. A good mathematician is rare gold in the finance/insurance worlds right now.
  - robbles 13y ago
    That's a great example - Your friend sounds exactly like the people I mentioned who "work out how to transfer their skills to other fields". I think that these kind of people are outliers who underestimate the difficulty involved in doing this for others, probably because they're very talented people. What most people want to get out of their degree is a straightforward path to a job, not a stepping stone that they can use creatively to build their own career. I suspect that the issue with that particular talent shortage might be similar to the software engineering one - it hinges on the definition of "good mathematician". If I graduated with good grades from a top university with a degree in mathematics, will I automatically have a good chance of being hired by a financial institution? Or do I need to somehow acquire domain-specific knowledge first and have the right personal network?
moron4hire 13y ago
So what you're saying is that it's all the university's fault setting standards too low and graduating too many students.
Balgair 13y ago
A couple of friends of mine decided to 'walk a mile in their shoes' and became hiring managers. Craigslist is a wonderful thing, especially since it is very cheap to post a job listing. My buddies put out a very generic job posting for the types of jobs they were looking for. It was a way to gauge the heat of the job market, to see the competition, and mostly to see what it was like. Their hypothesis was at least 100 resumes. And being good scientists, they posted in a lot of big metro areas. 14 total resumes came in, 7 from India. In 10 major US metro areas, and this posting lasting a cumulative 3 months among the areas they got 14 resumes in. 5 Cover letters. 3 of the guys were ok, and hirable. It was a shock. They thought they were in a really hot market and the competition was fierce. That must be the reason they get no calls back. Nope, not at all. At least in the Craigslist sphere, there were no job hunters to speak of. Personally, I don't know what to make of the data either. Lots of jobs were posted, but no-one was there and answering. The only thing that came to mind was that MOST of the craigslist postings were fradulent, just like my friend's. The job market is stranger every-day.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  The only thing that came to mind was that MOST of the craigslist postings were fradulent, just like my friend's. This is the basic assumption, yes. It's why most of us don't job-hunt on Craigslist.
  - Balgair 13y ago
    Ok, so where do we all job hunt, and how can we do this again? The info there is of great value for applicants.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      LinkedIn? Hacker News hiring threads?
      - Balgair 13y ago
        Eh, not really a programmer, more of an engineer. LinkedIn is not my field.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tekalon 13y ago
The shortage is in jobs that are willing to take graduates/applicants that know that basics, or even has experience, and then TRAIN them on what they want. Those that can pass STEM are usually smart enough to be trainable. Companies are expecting schools to teach current skills (not just theory) or students to be 100% self motivated in learning those skills on their own.
- bcheung 13y ago
  Yes, they are expecting that. Imagine that.
ifben 13y ago
"... how many grads do not have a decent grasp of elementary algorithms and data structures, and are not comfortable with code." This is more a fault of computer science education than the student. I was taking 16 credits of upper division CS courses at [not renowned but not bad university]. Half-way through the term I had yet to do any programming. I realize that CS is about more than programming (my four classes broadly were proofs, computer hardware, methods of software engineering, and stats for scientists/engineers). But the only way to become good at programming is to do it consistently. One or two big projects towards the end of the term leaves you brushing up on old skills instead of building new ones. I'll be attending Hack Reactor this fall because I want to become a good programmer, not vaguely familiar with everything CS has to offer.
- rizzom5000 13y ago
  CS isn't about programming at all. While CS can help make a programmer a better engineer, it's not intended to teach programming skills; which is much more a vocational skill than a science. I think the primary reason so many development shops ask for CS grads, is not because they should have learned programming at university - it's because they've already been selected for intelligence by getting into a more selective hard science university program. If programming skills were more important than intelligence, these jobs could be filled with folks who have a 6-month certificate from ITT -- but hiring shops have evidently found out that they get a better product from CS departments. I kind of feel that CS departments should really emphasize these points to prospective applicants so they can go to HackReactor instead of wasting their time in CS programs - but unfortunately they have little incentive to do so.
bcheung 13y ago
I'm the lead developer at a tech startup in Silicon Valley and I interview about 2-3x a week. There is definitely a shortage of competent workers here. We will typically extend an offer to about 1 out of every 5 candidates because they just can't code or don't have the experience in the technologies we use. I've learned that resumes are very puffed up and that having a college degree really doesn't make much difference in terms of a candidate's competency. I disagree with the article about salaries being stagnate. In startups, especially for web developers, competition amongst companies is fierce and has driven up salaries. Many studies use college degrees vs open positions as their data but I think this is a flawed model because what I have found is that college degrees and education / competency is only a loose correlation at best.
- hackula1 13y ago
  1 in 5 sounds pretty good to me. You could hire someone new every ~1.5 weeks.

26 points by gandalfgeek 13y ago

There are several different localized shortages, but also a general glut. If you're trying to hire well-trained software engineers with high-level CS knowledge in the Bay Area, good fucking luck, and make sure to pay plenty because you're getting nothing otherwise. If you're trying to hire medical device engineers in North Carolina (pulling this out of my ass, but you get the point), there is a glut of unemployed medicine and biology grads to choose from, many with top-flight skills and work experience. Why do we keep employing these overly large categories that conceal more than they reveal?

MrBuddyCasino 13y ago

tl;dr: there is no shortage, its just that most candidates are crap

angdis 13y ago
And the real reason that the "candidates are crap" is that too many employers no longer spend the time and resources to train their workers properly. Instead employees are expected to get hired with insanely specific skills and "hit the ground running" working for some clueless line and project managers who don't give a damn about what happens outside of their small-minded metrics.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  If you're not studying stuff related to what you want to do when you get out of college, on your spare time during studies, you're already losing. It's not enough to come out as a grad. You need to set your sights on a very specific job, and start learning for it. All throughout my undergrad I studied mobile to death and did a ton of work in it. Had no problem landing a 150k+ job right out of undergrad, because I was incredibly skilled. Not too many companies care about your GPA + the courses you did, the ones that do, will put you into a mediocre role loosely related to your profession since you have no specialty.
- hackula1 13y ago
  One more reason to work as a consultant/freelancer or for a small business (startups included). In these settings you have a lot of control over the tech stack and can optimize your skills for the changing market. You can also devote whatever reasonable amount of time you need to learning new things as you go. In most of these environments, polyglots are rewarded and encouraged, which means much less career risk, since you can hit the ground running on a wider array of projects.
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  As a hiring manager, it happens very, very rarely that I encounter someone worth training. When we're talking "crap" candidates, we're talking a complete lack of both talent and passion. It would be a waste of time and effort to try to train these people. Education is part of the problem. I don't expect higher education to result in immediately applicable job skills, but I do expect it to weed out the fundamentally incompetent.
- walshemj 13y ago
  My first job out of high school (*with only O levels) was at a r&d organization in the math modeling section. My first day was a hours instruction on the pdp11/03 then I was told to goto the company library get the book they had on FORTRAN and learn it.
- bcheung 13y ago
  You make it sound like competency is a bad thing. What a sad state when people don't value it and think it is someone else's responsibility to provide it for them. "clueless line and project managers..." is an ad hominem and doesn't support your argument.

gopher1 13y ago

This guy linked to the IEEE Spectrum article, but I don't think he read it, because they address the issue about defining STEM workers, and despite his anecdotal evidence, they came to the conclusion that, yes, the STEM shortage is a myth.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago
No, they don't address the issue in that article, they carefully circumvent it. Like all shortage-denial articles, they focus on education rather than actual practical competence. There is no shortage of STEM graduates. There is a shortage of people actually capable of doing the jobs which, amongst other things, require a STEM background. And for most software development jobs, the latter isn't even the most important qualification. The STEM shortage is a myth created by people who want to deny that there is a shortage of qualified knowledge workers by equating "qualified" to having a STEM degree. Nobody actually in the business ever complained about a STEM shortage. We complain about a shortage of competent people.
- hackula1 13y ago
  > We complain about a shortage of competent people. As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".
  - noonespecial 13y ago
    >We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. The trouble is, in software, single individuals in that top 20% are capable of doing things in a short time that individuals from the bottom 80% couldn't do in 1000 man years. Software is funny like that, some people can think different kinds of thoughts. So in a way, for certain values of incompetent, this is actually true.

anovikov 13y ago

Easy explanation is that there are a ton of people holding a STEM-related diploma but absolutely inept in this profession not even trying to compete. I know that from every class of software engineers in Russia, couple guys make a successful career, couple more become mediocre coders, couple more try for a while give up, rest not even bother...

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
Exactly. I've interviewed recent UC Berkeley EECS [1] graduates and found they couldn't write a line of code, and Berkeley is a top 10 engineering and top 10 computer science school (or at least was a the time; haven't checked rankings recently). [1] Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; their B.S. degree in computer science. I think they have a B.A. as well.
- angdis 13y ago
  Come on... do you _REALLY_ mean they can't write a line of code? I find that hard to believe.
  - bhousel 13y ago
    I believe it. Sadly, cheating has become endemic in STEM degree programs.
  - anovikov 13y ago
    I know Ph.D. in computer science who can't write a line of code.
    - epoxyhockey 13y ago
      I know a Ph.D. in economics who can't balance his own checkbook. None of these anecdotes mean anything. Humans have strengths & weaknesses, experience & inexperience, interests & disinterests. Match the person with the job or train them if they aren't a 100% match.

rearry 13y ago

vivek haldar....

dnautics 13y ago

>The flaw is in the assumption that every STEM degree holder is a qualified candidate for a STEM job. There is also a flaw in the assumption that every STEM jobholder is qualified for a STEM job.

hackula1 13y ago
IDK, I could see this the other way around too. If you are currently doing the job, then you must be qualified for it, or are soon to be fired. There are probably some small percentage of people who just slide under the radar, but I would think if you were entirely incompetent and unable to do your job you would not last long.
- dnautics 13y ago
  sometimes it's not trivial to fire people, because lawyers could get involved.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    For gross incompetence it's not really that hard in either the USA or the UK of course this just means your HR dept has some performance issues it needs to address :-)
    - dnautics 13y ago
      depends on the state in the US. And let's say the HR dept has performance issues. How do you fire someone in HR? They're the ones that know all the rules and all the laws that could get you in trouble. Where I work slid by, managed to can the HR head, but they were only able to do it because 1) she was super-overpaid and there was a budget crunch - which can be a legal problem for nonprofits (overhead) 2) there was a pretty serious SNAFU involving federal funds that happened under her watch, so she could have been in legal trouble herself. Also, gross incompetence is not necessarily the problem... Death by a thousand cuts.
      - 13y ago

robotcookies 13y ago

This is a view I've held for a while... that the shortage isn't with people holding square pieces of paper with fancy latin on it proclaiming competence. Rather the shortage is a talent shortage and degrees are a very poor indicator of talent. There was another article on HN a while ago and it stated that only about half of STEM workers have a STEM degree. Meanwhile, 75% of STEM degree holders didn't have a STEM job. Maybe the problem lies with the process of getting a degree?

vonmoltke 13y ago
I agree the university process is part of the problem, but you need to be conscious of where the numbers come from. As the full Spectrum article mentions, different groups have different definitions of "STEM worker" and "STEM degree" that can vary the numbers significantly, so you may be comparing apples to oranges and not realize it.

trekky1700 13y ago

It's a concerning trend. Lot's of people go into the fields looking for high salaries and job opportunities, and then have no interest and thus talent in the field. There's so many totally inept people with even graduate degrees in computer science. At the same time, look into some of the top University's CS exams and they're writing code on paper. They're not training effective and talented programmers, they're training effective exam writers.

dnautics 13y ago
This problem exists in the "hard sciences" too. There happens to be an intern in our lab, who is very motivated to do science, and actually fairly competent, but there are just some really critical things that are missing she just can't do basic mental arithmetic - it takes her minutes to figure out what volume to add to do a 1:20 dilution. Then she writes it down so that she doesn't have to do that calculation again in the future. She's always asking to make sure her procedure is correct, and has never creatively come up with an experiment on her own. This is compounded by self-doubt, there are procedures that need to be done extremely quickly, because there's an air-sensitive compound, and I've told her she needs to be snappy, and if she needs to, practice it 20 or 50 or 100 times to get the whole thing done under a minute or two, still no, and I think it's affecting the results, which of course, increases her self-doubt, so she tries to be more careful, which makes things slower, etc etc (she's not my intern so I can't be too aggressive in giving her criticism). This student has a master's degree and was applying to PhD programs at Harvard. I think Harvard rejected her, and the best grad school she got into had "people worse than her" (which I don't doubt, like I said, she's competent overall), so she's applying again this fall. I can't take her aside and tell her, "you are not PhD material". I leave it to the reader to figure out why. She would be fine in industry as a lab tech. I presume something similar happens at a lower level where people who are techs, shouldn't even be at that level. Contrast this with a high school intern in the other lab, who successfully built a giant 6 meter bioreactor that is actually being used to process waste at an industrial facility, and totally took down a professor that asked a dumb question during her "presentation on what she did".... I am terrified that she will leave STEM - she didn't get into as good a college as she should have.

xfour 13y ago

We discuss this every other day on here, do other professions, I'm just curious.

daurnimator 13y ago

This sounds to me like the issue is more university programs: people completing a STEM degree SHOULD come out of it able to take on a STEM job. From the hiring side, I agree with the dearth of quality candidates, and on the job training is often the current solution. From my own university experience: the wrong things were being taught, and depth was pretty much out of the question. I can only imagine its worse elsewhere. Only due to my personal side projects did I end up getting the knowledge needed for a job.

epoxyhockey 13y ago
This sounds to me like the issue is more university programs: people completing a STEM degree SHOULD come out of it able to take on a STEM job. To be fair, college is not trade school, nor is it supposed to be trade school. on the job training is often the current solution 10-15 years ago, this was standard operating procedure for college grads, as were decent training budgets to keep all employees up to date on skills. Only more recently have employers demanded a turn-key candidate while training budgets have been cut back or zero'd out. It's pretty worrisome for the future. Many individuals in this thread complaining about lack of qualified candidates may find themselves unqualified to a future employer if they don't value training.

kbenson 13y ago

Is it possible that industry automation reduces the workers needed for some positions, freeing them to look for other positions, thus increasing the pool of candidates? That would go some way towards explaining why projected STEM job candidate numbers are always below reality. Automation affects many jobs. Just because a job isn't replaced entirely by a robot or program, doesn't mean it hasn't been rendered significantly easier or less time consuming, reducing the personnel required. CAD is probably one of the oldest examples of this. What's to say that similar changes aren't taking place in many industries now?

stuaxo 13y ago

No.

rearry 13y ago

techinsurgent.com

rearry 13y ago

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/america-rip/

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Get out.
- dctoedt 13y ago
  > Get out. Meaning? (I can think of several possibilities.)
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Meaning, I clicked into that blog post of his, and he's a racist, fascist nut. He should leave, right now.

seiji 13y ago

Local anecdote: my last N interviews have gone from HR contact to phone interview to phone interview to take home project to (being flown out for) in person interview to ... rejection. I'm getting worried I'm actually incompetent now.

ekidd 13y ago

I've sat in front of enormous piles of resumes, desperately hoping that one candidate in 10 might be able to code fizzbuzz or reverse a linked list. Yes, the candidate pool is awful on average, but this is a survivor effect—the good candidates tend to get hired, and a handful of unqualified candidates keep spamming their resumes. But as an economist once told me, the market clears. If you're realistic about the market price, you can absolutely hire qualified people. That's practically the definition of "market price." Price signals work; when programmer salaries get ridiculous, plenty of competent people take an interest in programming. You can save money by offering other benefits, hiring outside Silicon Valley, being better at evaluating candidates than your competitors, not discriminating based on age/gender, or by figuring out how to work with talented remote experts. But you have to make an interesting offer if you want talented people.

robbles 13y ago

One issue I keep seeing in these kind of studies is the use of the "STEM" acronym itself. I'm sorry, but with the current job market, this kind of grouping makes NO sense. The jobs and opportunities are mostly in the middle two letters - technology and engineering. Science and mathematics are still tied to academia enough that only the real go-getters with the ability to self-educate and work out how to transfer their skills to other fields will easily find careers. Despite the flaws in most of the institutions offering engineering degrees, an education in engineering/technology is still the most straightforward path to a career, with the most applicable job skills being taught.

drewying 13y ago
I have a good friend who is a mathematician, masters degree. She works for an insurance company doing statistics as an actuary. This is just based her anecdotes, but from her stories it sounds like the world of professional mathematicians/staticians is suffering from a talent shortage that completely dwarfs what we experience in the technology sector. A good mathematician is rare gold in the finance/insurance worlds right now.
- robbles 13y ago
  That's a great example - Your friend sounds exactly like the people I mentioned who "work out how to transfer their skills to other fields". I think that these kind of people are outliers who underestimate the difficulty involved in doing this for others, probably because they're very talented people. What most people want to get out of their degree is a straightforward path to a job, not a stepping stone that they can use creatively to build their own career. I suspect that the issue with that particular talent shortage might be similar to the software engineering one - it hinges on the definition of "good mathematician". If I graduated with good grades from a top university with a degree in mathematics, will I automatically have a good chance of being hired by a financial institution? Or do I need to somehow acquire domain-specific knowledge first and have the right personal network?

moron4hire 13y ago

So what you're saying is that it's all the university's fault setting standards too low and graduating too many students.

Balgair 13y ago

A couple of friends of mine decided to 'walk a mile in their shoes' and became hiring managers. Craigslist is a wonderful thing, especially since it is very cheap to post a job listing. My buddies put out a very generic job posting for the types of jobs they were looking for. It was a way to gauge the heat of the job market, to see the competition, and mostly to see what it was like. Their hypothesis was at least 100 resumes. And being good scientists, they posted in a lot of big metro areas. 14 total resumes came in, 7 from India. In 10 major US metro areas, and this posting lasting a cumulative 3 months among the areas they got 14 resumes in. 5 Cover letters. 3 of the guys were ok, and hirable. It was a shock. They thought they were in a really hot market and the competition was fierce. That must be the reason they get no calls back. Nope, not at all. At least in the Craigslist sphere, there were no job hunters to speak of. Personally, I don't know what to make of the data either. Lots of jobs were posted, but no-one was there and answering. The only thing that came to mind was that MOST of the craigslist postings were fradulent, just like my friend's. The job market is stranger every-day.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
The only thing that came to mind was that MOST of the craigslist postings were fradulent, just like my friend's. This is the basic assumption, yes. It's why most of us don't job-hunt on Craigslist.
- Balgair 13y ago
  Ok, so where do we all job hunt, and how can we do this again? The info there is of great value for applicants.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    LinkedIn? Hacker News hiring threads?
    - Balgair 13y ago
      Eh, not really a programmer, more of an engineer. LinkedIn is not my field.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tekalon 13y ago

The shortage is in jobs that are willing to take graduates/applicants that know that basics, or even has experience, and then TRAIN them on what they want. Those that can pass STEM are usually smart enough to be trainable. Companies are expecting schools to teach current skills (not just theory) or students to be 100% self motivated in learning those skills on their own.

bcheung 13y ago
Yes, they are expecting that. Imagine that.

ifben 13y ago

"... how many grads do not have a decent grasp of elementary algorithms and data structures, and are not comfortable with code." This is more a fault of computer science education than the student. I was taking 16 credits of upper division CS courses at [not renowned but not bad university]. Half-way through the term I had yet to do any programming. I realize that CS is about more than programming (my four classes broadly were proofs, computer hardware, methods of software engineering, and stats for scientists/engineers). But the only way to become good at programming is to do it consistently. One or two big projects towards the end of the term leaves you brushing up on old skills instead of building new ones. I'll be attending Hack Reactor this fall because I want to become a good programmer, not vaguely familiar with everything CS has to offer.

rizzom5000 13y ago
CS isn't about programming at all. While CS can help make a programmer a better engineer, it's not intended to teach programming skills; which is much more a vocational skill than a science. I think the primary reason so many development shops ask for CS grads, is not because they should have learned programming at university - it's because they've already been selected for intelligence by getting into a more selective hard science university program. If programming skills were more important than intelligence, these jobs could be filled with folks who have a 6-month certificate from ITT -- but hiring shops have evidently found out that they get a better product from CS departments. I kind of feel that CS departments should really emphasize these points to prospective applicants so they can go to HackReactor instead of wasting their time in CS programs - but unfortunately they have little incentive to do so.

bcheung 13y ago

I'm the lead developer at a tech startup in Silicon Valley and I interview about 2-3x a week. There is definitely a shortage of competent workers here. We will typically extend an offer to about 1 out of every 5 candidates because they just can't code or don't have the experience in the technologies we use. I've learned that resumes are very puffed up and that having a college degree really doesn't make much difference in terms of a candidate's competency. I disagree with the article about salaries being stagnate. In startups, especially for web developers, competition amongst companies is fierce and has driven up salaries. Many studies use college degrees vs open positions as their data but I think this is a flawed model because what I have found is that college degrees and education / competency is only a loose correlation at best.

hackula1 13y ago
1 in 5 sounds pretty good to me. You could hire someone new every ~1.5 weeks.