7 ms·

What STEM shortage? Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jobs last year

57 points by forgotAgain 13y ago

mdpopescu 13y ago
I believe that Greenspun's article at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/12/why-do-people-who-chose-not-to-study-science-and-math-opine-on-the-virtues-of-studying-science-and-math/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/12/why-do-people-... is very apropos.
planetjones 13y ago
> Claims of shortages of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) workers "have no support in fact and no connection to reality, " Have to say that's the evidence I find in much of the developed West. I watched a program in the UK last night where they were flouting the Government encouraged idea that over 100K new STEM graduates were needed a year - many of my friends leaving University with STEM degrees or thinking of enrolling on such degrees haven't bothered because job creation at that scale doesn't exist. With outsourcing and offshoring by the bucketload it's refreshing for this Ron Hira guy to point out the reality for many. Added link to summary of TV program if anyone is interested: http://www.itv.com/news/2014-01-16/tonight-is-britain-back-in-business/ http://www.itv.com/news/2014-01-16/tonight-is-britain-back-i...
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  I think that many of the powers that be in the UK are very wary of a manufacturing economy. I suspect they equate it with an organised labour movement and that was part of the ideology behind the push for a post-industrial economy in the 1980's. I always found the idea of a post-industrial economy rather perplexing as it relies on the idea that we can design and manage the manufacturing of the rest of the world, but the skills required to do that are dependent on having manufacturing experience, which will die out in a generation without an industrial base in which to get the required skills.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    "very wary of a manufacturing economy" Like the US, the UK still manufactures loads of stuff - it's just there aren't many people employed doing it and it's a much smaller percentage of the economy than it used to be. e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...
- bchjam 13y ago
  I think the govt is pushing STEM more out of a desire for its perceived competitive advantage than anything to do with today's job market
  - planetjones 13y ago
    I think they have to push something and STEM is what the frontbench in Government perceive as cool - no doubt their management consultants concur! Plus they're struggling to sell financial services as a viable career at the moment - though that's another example of where jobs are flowing East. The program I watched was also interesting as it followed HSBC who had brought call centre jobs back from India to the UK - what it failed to mention is that the higher paying STEM based jobs are moving (rapidly) in the opposite direction!
    - mason55 13y ago
      > Plus they're struggling to sell financial services as a viable career at the moment - though that's another example of where jobs are flowing East. FinServ is a great target for offshoring, even better than software IMO. The tasks are more rote/routine and well defined which makes it much easier to send it to a cheap team in India. The big concern is the competitive advantage of the information but if you just work as a clearinghouse then it's not as big of a deal since the information is not proprietary. A friend of mine works at a financial research offshoring company and they were just acquired by Moody's.
githulhu 13y ago
And yet, if you read HN, most developers make over $100k and can find a new job that pays more overnight if their current employer does anything that offends them. What's the reality?
- cobookman 13y ago
  The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or binary node tree, a good 25-50% would fail. And this is at a Top 10 program.
  - smileysteve 13y ago
    There was a post this week about a Ruby on Rails contractor who helped with a talent search. He didn't recommend people that didn't know what Ruby Gems were or what Active Record was... They got hired anyway.
    - agildehaus 13y ago
      I don't know Ruby, but I know what these things are from osmosis (running into them whilst searching for other things). If you don't know what Ruby Gems or Active Record are, you've likely not touched any web technology in depth.
    - matwood 13y ago
      Amazing. Another reason to still ask 'senior' developers a fizzbuzz type question. Above is also the reason good (not great or rockstars) developers are in high demand and almost never on the open market. Once you work with people and vet yourself with other good developers, new jobs are usually just a phone call away.
      - logfromblammo 13y ago
        Again, it depends on where you live and who you know. Every job I have ever landed, I've had to go through the full HR rigamarole, from finding the posting through multiple rounds of interviews. I've never quite been able to make a friend--or even acquaintance--that has subsequently been able to backchannel me into a job. I've had several interviewers say directly that I appear to be one of the most technically qualified candidates they have, but after I walk out the door, I never hear another word from them again, not even to say they picked someone else. The hiring system is broken. And the damage is at least in a load-bearing member, if not the foundation itself. There is no financial pressure for anyone capable of fixing it to actually do so. And so we suffer as entities with far more political experience glide smoothly among the sharks, depressing our wages today, and tomorrow, they quietly dismantle the dreams of young people passionate about our field. It sickens me to the point that I feel like there are no good employers left in the U.S., in any field. I have no reason whatsoever to buy a house, befriend my neighbors, and invest in my local community, because at any moment my gracious employer (or their new owners) could decide to fire everyone and move out. That would leave me again in the position where I have to also move, just to find a job not quite as good as the one I just had. And now that I am in one of the few locales recognized as a "tech center" in the U.S., I find that most of the jobs here are military-industrial complex tax-leeching jobs, where industry best practices are routinely ignored, because the primary goal of the contractor is to produce billable hours instead of permanent solutions, and the overseer-boss got his job via military good-ol'boy networking rather than having one inkling of competence. What's the solution? I don't know. But making me retype my entire resume into your stupid web forms to better facilitate its automatic rejection for lack of required hidden keywords is completely antipodal to it.
nickthemagicman 13y ago
It seems to me there's a big shortage of people in the less 'fun' tech jobs like desktop support or QA or Java corporate development. There's no shortage in the more creative jobs creating new apps, cutting edge web dev, network engineering, game dev, etc. The kind of stuff that inspires most kids to go into comp sci. It seems, the big 4 get more resumes than they can shake a stick at. I could be wrong. Just my thoughts.
- roc 13y ago
  > "It seems to me there's a big shortage of people in the less 'fun' tech jobs like desktop support or QA or Java corporate development." And yet the wages being offered for these jobs haven't gone up. It's pretty hard to have a labor shortage if the remaining workers aren't seeing wage increases as demand exceeds supply.
  - shawabawa3 13y ago
    > And yet the wages being offered for these jobs haven't gone up. It's pretty hard to have a labor shortage if the remaining workers aren't seeing wage increases as demand exceeds supply. Isn't it possible the jobs just aren't worth that much? There could be hundreds of unfilled positions, but not filling the positions is only costing say ~$50k in revenue. It's not worth paying someone $51k for that position
    - dangerlibrary 13y ago
      You have described an equilibrium condition in which, by definition, there are not hundreds of unfilled positions.
    - nickthemagicman 13y ago
      That seems like a pretty good point. Especially considering I.T. is considered a cost center to most businesses.
  - AmVess 13y ago
    The starting pay at a (formerly) local company was $14.25/hr in 2000. They pay $10.25 for the same job 14 years later. The nearby Costco pays better, has realistic working hours, and offers actual benefits. I can't remember when it was that I saw such a job that paid a living wage.
drpgq 13y ago
Glad I took computer engineering in an ECE department. Although I'm not really that surprised at these results as let's face it, the centre of electronics hasn't been the US for some time.
- lucasnemeth 13y ago
  Good point. The centre of electronics is switching to asian countries since the beginning of the 21st century and ignoring the global economy leads to a short-sighted analysis.
michaelochurch 13y ago
This "shortage" talk is the problem with engineers. They take peoples' opinions and petty desires (such as business requirements and deadlines that are arbitrary) and assume them to be objective truth. I worked at a startup that was cargo-culting Scrum (badly) and people started talking about "Iterations" as if they existed objectively and had real, phallic, meaning. They don't. Engineers insist on truth and struggle with the fact that most people who succeed in human affairs are extremely dishonest. "Shortage" just means, "we can't hire talent at as low a wage as we'd like to pay". It is not an objective condition. It might qualify as a true shortage if companies were reducing the pay of executives and non-techs to make space for engineers, but that is happening almost nowhere.
- lsc 13y ago
  >as if they existed objectively and had real, phallic, meaning. Did you mean to do that? either way, it's pretty funny.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Did you mean to do that? Do what? I'm not sure what you're asking. Yes, I know what the word "phallic" means.
    - lsc 13y ago
      I could read the comment both ways, really, but the sentence parsed awkwardly enough to make me wonder. It does sound like it could have come from an Agile consultant. "Are your iterations flaccid?" But nobody actually talks that way... right?
ausjke 13y ago
I was a H1B before, and I can tell you that I was not paid less, if not more. Most of my H1B peers are well paid as far as I know, you can tell that by how fast they purchase the house and cars and start a STEM-professional new life in USA. The low-paid H1B steals good-quality-STEM-engineer-job theory does not hold water for me. The STEM shortage is so true, while I agree outsourcing saves money, H1B are most often not, more likely, it's because the company can not hire the right STEM candidates and they have to go through the painful H1B hiring process, while paying for their very expensive immigration attorney bills to keep them. More high-quality STEMs, less outsourcing, are the real solutions for a booming local job market. When we have more good STEMs locally, the H1B will become a non-issue.
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  This is matter of statistics, not personal anecdote. All reporting on the matter I've seen indicate H1-Bs in IT earn sub native wages, and employers easily get around the rules to hire cheap foreigners. Anyway, as a matter of national policy it's remarkably short sighted to import large numbers of skilled workers to a large nation like America. Can't people see that addressing any "shortage" this way perpetuates it? People have got the memo loud and clear: If you are a technical worker you are a fungible commodity of little status. Your prestige and earnings will be attacked with immigration policy, visas, and outsourcing. Why go in for this as a career if you have options? The most able will go elsewhere.
  - ausjke 13y ago
    The ugly truth is that, without H1B policy, the big corps will more likely do more outsourcing,which is worse. I agree some big foreign IT agencies are hiring cheaper H1B, those are normally pure-software jobs, the EE/H1B looks different to me, in that, H1Bs are not cheap, if at all. I am EE. I checked again and again, the college graduates here fail to do basic math is beyond imagination. I hope STEM can help to better that, in fact I'm leading a local math club as a volunteer to do just that.
    - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
mcbaby 13y ago
I don't think STEM reflects market demand as much as it does our new understanding of 21st century skills. While the gov't loves the "college = success" equation, I think it is somewhat valid for STEM students, as it introduces a much more practical skill set and mind set to students.
debacle 13y ago
My father in law is an EE. He was forced out of his job a few years ago (in his mid fifties). From what it sounds like, many of his similarly aged coworkers face the same treatment - if you don't hit a certain level of management by the time you're middle aged, promotion paths become closed to you and eventually you become marginalized, because there are so many new graduates coming in willing to work for close to half of what the experienced EEs command for salary. He wasn't able to find another EE position, except at a small company as a part-time tester. He's retired now, mostly because he gave up trying to find fulfilling work.
- robrenaud 13y ago
  Is it the case that an EE with 30+ years of experience isn't much, much better at the job than a fresh grad?
  - xradionut 13y ago
    Good, experienced EEs are worth 10 or more recent grads. Especially those that know RF and/or embedded programming. But then again I'm in a area that has a large number of EE's.
  - nyan_sandwich 13y ago
    I've heard that in most professions, experience is most relevant in the first two years, then stops being valuable after that, with intelligence and conscientiousness being more important.
  - debacle 13y ago
    Not when you have MBAs making decisions, apparently.
- jjindev 13y ago
  So, I was at the park watching soccer. My friend introduces me to a "world famous neurosurgeon." We all talk and he says that he'd interested in giving her son (now in CS) an internship, and then something about not trusting a programmer over 40. Now, the kicker is that the neurosurgeon is in his 60s. I think he missed the implication that if programmers must stop by 40, but neurosurgeons can keep going and keep up into their 60s ... neurosurgery is easier than programming? (I don't doubt that in all fields there are people who slack off, but also in all fields there are smart people who keep on learning. It is very sad that 50's engineers are exculded on the assumption that they are slackers.)
scottjohnson 13y ago
It seems to me that the true motive behind talk of a supposed STEM "shortage" is to flood the market with new STEM workers in order to drive down labor costs (i.e. wages). The problem is not that STEM workers can't be found, it's that they can't be found for the wages business owners want to pay. And what they want to pay for skilled labor will always be: "less".
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  It's one of the few areas of our modern economy that reads like it's straight out of Marx. It's straight up capital vs. labor.
  - davidw 13y ago
    And like Marx, it's bad economics. And actually it's not really as simple capital vs labor, but also includes a component of US based labor vs "take rrrr jooooobs" foreign labor.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
      Are you implying that workers shouldn't have national interests? You appear to be snorting at the idea as if it doesn't make obvious sense. Are you some sort of open borders weirdo? I mean, it was obvious to César Chávez that immigration hurt workers and he wanted it stopped.
      - davidw 13y ago
        > Are you some sort of open borders weirdo Being from the US, with an Italian wife and a daughter born in Austria, and working with people from all over Europe and the US, yes, I suppose I am some kind of "open borders weirdo" in that I tend to see the value in other people as something inherent and not depending on where they happen to be born or what their passport says. Granted, I don't think Lichtenstein should probably open its borders 100% to India tomorrow, but in general I don't believe there is a fixed amount of labor to go around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy Immigrants have brought a lot of great things to the US and elsewhere. For that matter, the economy is a lot better now than 100 years ago when there were far fewer people.
patio11 13y ago
Partly this is due to edge effects in measurement (how conversational are you with the BLS SOC?), exacerbated by "software eating the world." Similar people doing similar things for society are suddenly software people, not hardware people, despite the fact that the software they're writing targets a physical device rather than an anonymous Turing machine in the cloooooooooooud. Consider the employment profiles of "companies selling electronic locks" in 2002 versus 2012. These days it probably ships with a microcontroller. That means, congrats, software people now outnumber hardware people, at least as the BLS measure things. (If you really want to get wonkish, read up on what the tiebreakers are if your work implicates multiple SOC classifications. If you spend more time with a mouse in your hand than a soldering iron you're probably going to get bounced out of engineering occupations entirely, a result which is -- to put it mildly -- not a 1 to 1 mapping with our intuitive understanding of the claim "US employment of engineers just decreased by 1.")
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  The article says there were only 19,000 net new software jobs and unemployment in that category remains high.
  - patio11 13y ago
    I have revised how I phrased this post: I am confused as to the methodology by which IEEE extracted that conclusion from BLS data. On noticing my confusion, I attempted to verify every number in the article. I have just spent an hour with OES data from 2012 and 2011, since I believe the IEEE was looking at the 2012 data released in 2013 rather than the 2013 data which be released later this year. I remain confused as to how to generate any number that the IEEE has quoted in this article. I have considered the possibility that the IEEE has accessed to unpublished data from the BLS for 2013. However, if I interpret the numbers they are quoting as from 2013 with the delta from the year previous, I am unable to reproduce the BLS' numbers from 2012. I am confused by the magnitude of the discrepancy. For example, the IEEE claims that "The number of employed software developers, the largest IT occupation segment, increased by only 1.75%, to 1.1 million, a gain of 19,000." I have difficulty reconciling this with the BLS numbers from 2012, which report that employment in that segment is 1,397,780. The one-year gain in that segment is, according to the BLS, over 100,000 jobs, again assuming that we're looking at 2011 to 2012. I have taken the liberty of repeating the analysis while intentionally making several easy processing mistakes in interpreting the 2012 data, for example looking at the numbers for only the private sector. I have not yet found any combination of data sources or mistakes which produces the numbers the IEEE is claiming.
tseabrooks 13y ago
I feel like I repeat this anec-Data every time one of these posts comes up. This is all fine and good, but I've never worked at a SW company (8 years now) nor had a friend work in a SW company that wasn't constantly hiring. The companies I've worked for pay above market and simply can't find people they're willing to hire.
throwwit 13y ago
Seems to be a philosophical shift in the working world & academia overall today. Just need to look to last year, where the guy behind the Higgs Boson said the publish or perish atmosphere today would've never lead to a theory. Then there's also the Phd who fell through the cracks to work at a subway before solving the twin primes conjecture. Somethings gotta get fixed.

57 points by forgotAgain 13y ago

I believe that Greenspun's article at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/12/why-do-people-who-chose-not-to-study-science-and-math-opine-on-the-virtues-of-studying-science-and-math/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/12/why-do-people-... is very apropos.

planetjones 13y ago

> Claims of shortages of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) workers "have no support in fact and no connection to reality, " Have to say that's the evidence I find in much of the developed West. I watched a program in the UK last night where they were flouting the Government encouraged idea that over 100K new STEM graduates were needed a year - many of my friends leaving University with STEM degrees or thinking of enrolling on such degrees haven't bothered because job creation at that scale doesn't exist. With outsourcing and offshoring by the bucketload it's refreshing for this Ron Hira guy to point out the reality for many. Added link to summary of TV program if anyone is interested: http://www.itv.com/news/2014-01-16/tonight-is-britain-back-in-business/ http://www.itv.com/news/2014-01-16/tonight-is-britain-back-i...

moocowduckquack 13y ago
I think that many of the powers that be in the UK are very wary of a manufacturing economy. I suspect they equate it with an organised labour movement and that was part of the ideology behind the push for a post-industrial economy in the 1980's. I always found the idea of a post-industrial economy rather perplexing as it relies on the idea that we can design and manage the manufacturing of the rest of the world, but the skills required to do that are dependent on having manufacturing experience, which will die out in a generation without an industrial base in which to get the required skills.
- arethuza 13y ago
  "very wary of a manufacturing economy" Like the US, the UK still manufactures loads of stuff - it's just there aren't many people employed doing it and it's a much smaller percentage of the economy than it used to be. e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...
bchjam 13y ago
I think the govt is pushing STEM more out of a desire for its perceived competitive advantage than anything to do with today's job market
- planetjones 13y ago
  I think they have to push something and STEM is what the frontbench in Government perceive as cool - no doubt their management consultants concur! Plus they're struggling to sell financial services as a viable career at the moment - though that's another example of where jobs are flowing East. The program I watched was also interesting as it followed HSBC who had brought call centre jobs back from India to the UK - what it failed to mention is that the higher paying STEM based jobs are moving (rapidly) in the opposite direction!
  - mason55 13y ago
    > Plus they're struggling to sell financial services as a viable career at the moment - though that's another example of where jobs are flowing East. FinServ is a great target for offshoring, even better than software IMO. The tasks are more rote/routine and well defined which makes it much easier to send it to a cheap team in India. The big concern is the competitive advantage of the information but if you just work as a clearinghouse then it's not as big of a deal since the information is not proprietary. A friend of mine works at a financial research offshoring company and they were just acquired by Moody's.

githulhu 13y ago

And yet, if you read HN, most developers make over $100k and can find a new job that pays more overnight if their current employer does anything that offends them. What's the reality?

cobookman 13y ago
The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or binary node tree, a good 25-50% would fail. And this is at a Top 10 program.
- smileysteve 13y ago
  There was a post this week about a Ruby on Rails contractor who helped with a talent search. He didn't recommend people that didn't know what Ruby Gems were or what Active Record was... They got hired anyway.
  - agildehaus 13y ago
    I don't know Ruby, but I know what these things are from osmosis (running into them whilst searching for other things). If you don't know what Ruby Gems or Active Record are, you've likely not touched any web technology in depth.
  - matwood 13y ago
    Amazing. Another reason to still ask 'senior' developers a fizzbuzz type question. Above is also the reason good (not great or rockstars) developers are in high demand and almost never on the open market. Once you work with people and vet yourself with other good developers, new jobs are usually just a phone call away.
    - logfromblammo 13y ago
      Again, it depends on where you live and who you know. Every job I have ever landed, I've had to go through the full HR rigamarole, from finding the posting through multiple rounds of interviews. I've never quite been able to make a friend--or even acquaintance--that has subsequently been able to backchannel me into a job. I've had several interviewers say directly that I appear to be one of the most technically qualified candidates they have, but after I walk out the door, I never hear another word from them again, not even to say they picked someone else. The hiring system is broken. And the damage is at least in a load-bearing member, if not the foundation itself. There is no financial pressure for anyone capable of fixing it to actually do so. And so we suffer as entities with far more political experience glide smoothly among the sharks, depressing our wages today, and tomorrow, they quietly dismantle the dreams of young people passionate about our field. It sickens me to the point that I feel like there are no good employers left in the U.S., in any field. I have no reason whatsoever to buy a house, befriend my neighbors, and invest in my local community, because at any moment my gracious employer (or their new owners) could decide to fire everyone and move out. That would leave me again in the position where I have to also move, just to find a job not quite as good as the one I just had. And now that I am in one of the few locales recognized as a "tech center" in the U.S., I find that most of the jobs here are military-industrial complex tax-leeching jobs, where industry best practices are routinely ignored, because the primary goal of the contractor is to produce billable hours instead of permanent solutions, and the overseer-boss got his job via military good-ol'boy networking rather than having one inkling of competence. What's the solution? I don't know. But making me retype my entire resume into your stupid web forms to better facilitate its automatic rejection for lack of required hidden keywords is completely antipodal to it.

nickthemagicman 13y ago

It seems to me there's a big shortage of people in the less 'fun' tech jobs like desktop support or QA or Java corporate development. There's no shortage in the more creative jobs creating new apps, cutting edge web dev, network engineering, game dev, etc. The kind of stuff that inspires most kids to go into comp sci. It seems, the big 4 get more resumes than they can shake a stick at. I could be wrong. Just my thoughts.

roc 13y ago
> "It seems to me there's a big shortage of people in the less 'fun' tech jobs like desktop support or QA or Java corporate development." And yet the wages being offered for these jobs haven't gone up. It's pretty hard to have a labor shortage if the remaining workers aren't seeing wage increases as demand exceeds supply.
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  > And yet the wages being offered for these jobs haven't gone up. It's pretty hard to have a labor shortage if the remaining workers aren't seeing wage increases as demand exceeds supply. Isn't it possible the jobs just aren't worth that much? There could be hundreds of unfilled positions, but not filling the positions is only costing say ~$50k in revenue. It's not worth paying someone $51k for that position
  - dangerlibrary 13y ago
    You have described an equilibrium condition in which, by definition, there are not hundreds of unfilled positions.
  - nickthemagicman 13y ago
    That seems like a pretty good point. Especially considering I.T. is considered a cost center to most businesses.
- AmVess 13y ago
  The starting pay at a (formerly) local company was $14.25/hr in 2000. They pay $10.25 for the same job 14 years later. The nearby Costco pays better, has realistic working hours, and offers actual benefits. I can't remember when it was that I saw such a job that paid a living wage.

drpgq 13y ago

Glad I took computer engineering in an ECE department. Although I'm not really that surprised at these results as let's face it, the centre of electronics hasn't been the US for some time.

lucasnemeth 13y ago
Good point. The centre of electronics is switching to asian countries since the beginning of the 21st century and ignoring the global economy leads to a short-sighted analysis.

michaelochurch 13y ago

This "shortage" talk is the problem with engineers. They take peoples' opinions and petty desires (such as business requirements and deadlines that are arbitrary) and assume them to be objective truth. I worked at a startup that was cargo-culting Scrum (badly) and people started talking about "Iterations" as if they existed objectively and had real, phallic, meaning. They don't. Engineers insist on truth and struggle with the fact that most people who succeed in human affairs are extremely dishonest. "Shortage" just means, "we can't hire talent at as low a wage as we'd like to pay". It is not an objective condition. It might qualify as a true shortage if companies were reducing the pay of executives and non-techs to make space for engineers, but that is happening almost nowhere.

lsc 13y ago
>as if they existed objectively and had real, phallic, meaning. Did you mean to do that? either way, it's pretty funny.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Did you mean to do that? Do what? I'm not sure what you're asking. Yes, I know what the word "phallic" means.
  - lsc 13y ago
    I could read the comment both ways, really, but the sentence parsed awkwardly enough to make me wonder. It does sound like it could have come from an Agile consultant. "Are your iterations flaccid?" But nobody actually talks that way... right?

ausjke 13y ago

I was a H1B before, and I can tell you that I was not paid less, if not more. Most of my H1B peers are well paid as far as I know, you can tell that by how fast they purchase the house and cars and start a STEM-professional new life in USA. The low-paid H1B steals good-quality-STEM-engineer-job theory does not hold water for me. The STEM shortage is so true, while I agree outsourcing saves money, H1B are most often not, more likely, it's because the company can not hire the right STEM candidates and they have to go through the painful H1B hiring process, while paying for their very expensive immigration attorney bills to keep them. More high-quality STEMs, less outsourcing, are the real solutions for a booming local job market. When we have more good STEMs locally, the H1B will become a non-issue.

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
This is matter of statistics, not personal anecdote. All reporting on the matter I've seen indicate H1-Bs in IT earn sub native wages, and employers easily get around the rules to hire cheap foreigners. Anyway, as a matter of national policy it's remarkably short sighted to import large numbers of skilled workers to a large nation like America. Can't people see that addressing any "shortage" this way perpetuates it? People have got the memo loud and clear: If you are a technical worker you are a fungible commodity of little status. Your prestige and earnings will be attacked with immigration policy, visas, and outsourcing. Why go in for this as a career if you have options? The most able will go elsewhere.
- ausjke 13y ago
  The ugly truth is that, without H1B policy, the big corps will more likely do more outsourcing,which is worse. I agree some big foreign IT agencies are hiring cheaper H1B, those are normally pure-software jobs, the EE/H1B looks different to me, in that, H1Bs are not cheap, if at all. I am EE. I checked again and again, the college graduates here fail to do basic math is beyond imagination. I hope STEM can help to better that, in fact I'm leading a local math club as a volunteer to do just that.
  - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago

mcbaby 13y ago

I don't think STEM reflects market demand as much as it does our new understanding of 21st century skills. While the gov't loves the "college = success" equation, I think it is somewhat valid for STEM students, as it introduces a much more practical skill set and mind set to students.

debacle 13y ago

My father in law is an EE. He was forced out of his job a few years ago (in his mid fifties). From what it sounds like, many of his similarly aged coworkers face the same treatment - if you don't hit a certain level of management by the time you're middle aged, promotion paths become closed to you and eventually you become marginalized, because there are so many new graduates coming in willing to work for close to half of what the experienced EEs command for salary. He wasn't able to find another EE position, except at a small company as a part-time tester. He's retired now, mostly because he gave up trying to find fulfilling work.

robrenaud 13y ago
Is it the case that an EE with 30+ years of experience isn't much, much better at the job than a fresh grad?
- xradionut 13y ago
  Good, experienced EEs are worth 10 or more recent grads. Especially those that know RF and/or embedded programming. But then again I'm in a area that has a large number of EE's.
- nyan_sandwich 13y ago
  I've heard that in most professions, experience is most relevant in the first two years, then stops being valuable after that, with intelligence and conscientiousness being more important.
- debacle 13y ago
  Not when you have MBAs making decisions, apparently.
jjindev 13y ago
So, I was at the park watching soccer. My friend introduces me to a "world famous neurosurgeon." We all talk and he says that he'd interested in giving her son (now in CS) an internship, and then something about not trusting a programmer over 40. Now, the kicker is that the neurosurgeon is in his 60s. I think he missed the implication that if programmers must stop by 40, but neurosurgeons can keep going and keep up into their 60s ... neurosurgery is easier than programming? (I don't doubt that in all fields there are people who slack off, but also in all fields there are smart people who keep on learning. It is very sad that 50's engineers are exculded on the assumption that they are slackers.)

scottjohnson 13y ago

It seems to me that the true motive behind talk of a supposed STEM "shortage" is to flood the market with new STEM workers in order to drive down labor costs (i.e. wages). The problem is not that STEM workers can't be found, it's that they can't be found for the wages business owners want to pay. And what they want to pay for skilled labor will always be: "less".

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
It's one of the few areas of our modern economy that reads like it's straight out of Marx. It's straight up capital vs. labor.
- davidw 13y ago
  And like Marx, it's bad economics. And actually it's not really as simple capital vs labor, but also includes a component of US based labor vs "take rrrr jooooobs" foreign labor.
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
    Are you implying that workers shouldn't have national interests? You appear to be snorting at the idea as if it doesn't make obvious sense. Are you some sort of open borders weirdo? I mean, it was obvious to César Chávez that immigration hurt workers and he wanted it stopped.
    - davidw 13y ago
      > Are you some sort of open borders weirdo Being from the US, with an Italian wife and a daughter born in Austria, and working with people from all over Europe and the US, yes, I suppose I am some kind of "open borders weirdo" in that I tend to see the value in other people as something inherent and not depending on where they happen to be born or what their passport says. Granted, I don't think Lichtenstein should probably open its borders 100% to India tomorrow, but in general I don't believe there is a fixed amount of labor to go around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy Immigrants have brought a lot of great things to the US and elsewhere. For that matter, the economy is a lot better now than 100 years ago when there were far fewer people.

patio11 13y ago

Partly this is due to edge effects in measurement (how conversational are you with the BLS SOC?), exacerbated by "software eating the world." Similar people doing similar things for society are suddenly software people, not hardware people, despite the fact that the software they're writing targets a physical device rather than an anonymous Turing machine in the cloooooooooooud. Consider the employment profiles of "companies selling electronic locks" in 2002 versus 2012. These days it probably ships with a microcontroller. That means, congrats, software people now outnumber hardware people, at least as the BLS measure things. (If you really want to get wonkish, read up on what the tiebreakers are if your work implicates multiple SOC classifications. If you spend more time with a mouse in your hand than a soldering iron you're probably going to get bounced out of engineering occupations entirely, a result which is -- to put it mildly -- not a 1 to 1 mapping with our intuitive understanding of the claim "US employment of engineers just decreased by 1.")

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
The article says there were only 19,000 net new software jobs and unemployment in that category remains high.
- patio11 13y ago
  I have revised how I phrased this post: I am confused as to the methodology by which IEEE extracted that conclusion from BLS data. On noticing my confusion, I attempted to verify every number in the article. I have just spent an hour with OES data from 2012 and 2011, since I believe the IEEE was looking at the 2012 data released in 2013 rather than the 2013 data which be released later this year. I remain confused as to how to generate any number that the IEEE has quoted in this article. I have considered the possibility that the IEEE has accessed to unpublished data from the BLS for 2013. However, if I interpret the numbers they are quoting as from 2013 with the delta from the year previous, I am unable to reproduce the BLS' numbers from 2012. I am confused by the magnitude of the discrepancy. For example, the IEEE claims that "The number of employed software developers, the largest IT occupation segment, increased by only 1.75%, to 1.1 million, a gain of 19,000." I have difficulty reconciling this with the BLS numbers from 2012, which report that employment in that segment is 1,397,780. The one-year gain in that segment is, according to the BLS, over 100,000 jobs, again assuming that we're looking at 2011 to 2012. I have taken the liberty of repeating the analysis while intentionally making several easy processing mistakes in interpreting the 2012 data, for example looking at the numbers for only the private sector. I have not yet found any combination of data sources or mistakes which produces the numbers the IEEE is claiming.

tseabrooks 13y ago

I feel like I repeat this anec-Data every time one of these posts comes up. This is all fine and good, but I've never worked at a SW company (8 years now) nor had a friend work in a SW company that wasn't constantly hiring. The companies I've worked for pay above market and simply can't find people they're willing to hire.

throwwit 13y ago

Seems to be a philosophical shift in the working world & academia overall today. Just need to look to last year, where the guy behind the Higgs Boson said the publish or perish atmosphere today would've never lead to a theory. Then there's also the Phd who fell through the cracks to work at a subway before solving the twin primes conjecture. Somethings gotta get fixed.