It was a myth much longer ago than 2013 yet the article is no less valid today. In fact with the rise of bootcamps and so on it has gotten even worse in software particularly. There should be laws against bootcamps ripping off hopefuls with false promises.
What’s wrong with bootcamps? I know a few success stories, and I firmly believe that if somebody wants to learn programming, it is doable almost for everyone. It is hard, like learning a foreign language, but as nearly everybody can learn e.g. Spanish, so nearly everybody can learn how to program.
"Another reason for the current problems with bootcamp job placement is that employer expectations, and their attitudes towards bootcamp grads, have changed since the early days. A lot of employers who did hire from bootcamps found that although many of these bootcamp grads did well at interview, they had trouble being immediately productive once in post. The underlying issue was that these new hires lacked the fundamental programming knowledge and other skills (such as problem-solving and technical communication) that they needed to work effectively without lots of additional support or guidance."
"“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman."
I find that many 4-year CS grads have a problem with problem-solving and technical communication. Bootcamp grads average worse, but it's not something that I'd use to exclude all of them.
I've worked at two companies that have hired both experienced developers and people fresh out of a bootcamp.
Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales).
If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).
Well, it is somewhat unrealistic to hope to secure a software engineer position in FAANG immediately after a bootcamp. A well-paid position of a (junior to mid) software engineer in a smaller company is quite achievable, though. After 2-3 years of real-world experience there one could try their hand at FAANG interviews.
What false promises? Many of them graduate and are getting real jobs. One of the fastest growing new boot camps even lets people attend for free and makes back their money as a percentage of future salaries earned. Nothing could be further from ripping students off with false promises of jobs.
You must have seen the ads... “average salary in data science/cyber security/whatever is $$$” with the clear implication that taking their $$$ 8-week course will let you sail into one of these jobs.
Slightly off topic, but I feel like when people talk of STEM as a lucrative field of study, they tend to imply CS. Non-CS STEM field hardly have a shortage of qualified and talented people. In fact, there's probably a oversupply compared to job prospects in non-CS STEM fields. I see so many talented Math/Physics majors end up switching to CS and do mundane software engineering work.
Median income in 2017 was $52k for men and $42k for women [1]
Median income for an RN in 2017 was $70k [2]
So, in the US it's fair to say that nurse is a moderately well paid job. Of course compared to west coast tech salaries that doesn't look so amazing, but compared to what many life sciences PhDs are earning while fighting for a tenure track job it doesn't look so bad
I know in America, in Colorado and Florida, nurses are in demand and paid pretty well. From the people I know, ~$60k+ with a 2 year degree. They're also generally happy with their jobs. They might bounce from one hospital to another for a year or two until they find the company and bosses they like. Then they hunker down. But each one I know had recruiters help place them.
I really think you’re just living in a bubble. I know many recently graduated non-CS engineers who stepped straight into high salaries in their fields. Civil, mechanical, structural, aerospace, petroleum, acoustic, chemical, material, biomed, marine, geological... There are literally hundreds of different specialised engineering disciplines, and so many of them are high-demand and high-paid. Don’t get all your information about the world from SF job listings.
Do you mean computer science or programming? Most programmers are not doing computer science, and I wonder how many are actually doing engineering.
Programming is a paradox because it's an easy job, but with entry barriers that we don't fully understand. It seems to be prohibitively hard for most people, but easy for a few, and for those few, it doesn't seem to matter too much what their educational background is. I know people with music degrees who became programmers.
I was a math/physics major. Don't know about the talented part. ;-) Today, if you were to monitor what I spend time doing at work, it's mostly programming, followed by some electronics and optics design, and lab work. Lucrative, easy, what's not to like? Also, it was possible to get into programming without anybody's permission, because the tools are free.
It's also kind of a one way street. I've noticed that once people break away from quantitative engineering work, it's hard to go back, and they can't just start doing it on their own because the tools in those fields (e.g., mechanical and electrical CAD) are proprietary and expensive. This is like an imaginary thermodynamics experiment where you have two livestock pens separated by a one-way gate, and eventually all of the animals end up on one side if they are just walking at random.
People with a solid STEM background may not get a job in their field, but they learn skills that are generally useful outside of their specialty. I was working with a recent MIT graduate who had a Masters in Engine Design. While his job had little to do with that, it did make use of his significant statistics training and paid a significant salary.
By comparison my coworker with a Philosophy degree had gained what he described as zero useful skills. He was also making good money, but he described his degree as little more useful than a check box on the application.
CS is still a little fungible. I have worked with many programmers without a CS degree. They often took some programming classes as part of a STEM degree and spent significant time coding in collage.
These people often go back for a masters in CS, but that’s not required to work in the field.
Anyone with a real CS degree should be able to learn a new toolkit in six months. The "STEM" crisis is from companies not wanting to pay for that six months.
That's not what I meant by fungible. You don't see CS degree'd people moving into electronics, fluid mechanics or mechanical design.
The math and mathematical techniques for electronics, fluid mechanics, statics, and kinematics is all the same. For example, a mass/spring/damper system is the same as an inductor/capacitor/resister network.
Good point. Although I have a undergrad CS degree, it's old enough that I got a general engineering education, from thermodynamics to drafting. (A later MSCS at Stanford was 100% CS. And, pre machine learning, did not involve a single floating point multiply. Lots of number theory, no differential equations or statistics.)
> Math/Physics majors end up switching to CS and do mundane software engineering work
My degree is in mechanical engineering, and I have had a nice career doing mundane compilers. A big motivator to switching to software is I could start a business with nearly zero investment.
Yet another article with the same premise: “there is no shortage of scientists and engineers, there are enough of them!”
Take a moment to read through the article. First it tries to show that STEM graduates are such a small proportion of the total labor force, only 3-4%, the implication being that such a small proportion shouldn’t deserve the attention the get. OK, fine you’re arguing that it’s hype.
Next, cherry pick data to show that not all STEM graduates from this tiny sector can all find jobs. Yes, this is not a factory, you can’t just train someone and expect them to be productive in STEM. It’s not the same as pushing buttons or lifting things, it requires much more from the person which is why you can’t mass manufacture STEM graduates. Just because not all STEM graduates can find jobs means that it’s a hype? Okay.
Next, sprinkle some grievances about STEM being used to justify increasing the number of H1Bs, and now you’ve got the racists, the “H1B workers are why I don’t have a great job” crowd. Nice.
Oh, don’t forget the quotations of authority figures sounding alarm about the lack of engineers. The same alarm, that helped US education systems include more technical training to keep up with schools everywhere else who were in the same race. This is not some secret, all countries know the importance of high skilled labor force.
The wealth and prosperity we see in most nations today is precisely due to the work of millions of STEM graduates, creating innovations and technologies that constantly drive down costs of manufacturing and transportation, increased labor productivity, gave us fucking smartphones and internet everywhere devices and are currently bringing down the costs of renewables so rapidly that even Texas is going all in on wind energy.
I’m very upset that this appears in ieee though. I imagined that to be a respectable academic institution and not one that would allow such a poorly researched and hyperbolic article to be published.
There is no such thing as a "STEM job". There are computer science jobs and marine biology jobs, both under the rubric of STEM, but the skill sets are not fungible and the employment prospects are wildly different. We can simultaneously produce more STEM graduates than jobs and have a shortage of workers for STEM jobs.
The most popular STEM degree by a large margin is psychology, many more than all engineering disciplines combined. That psychology majors can't find work implies little about the demand for engineers.
Psychology sits in a really weird (and interesting!) place between the social sciences and "hard" sciences. I thus find either classification reasonable, as unhelpful as that may be.
140,000 new jobs over the next 10 years, 1,700,000 current employment. Assuming the replacement cycle for an engineer is 20 years, that's about 100,000 jobs per year.
The ASEE ”Engineering by the Numbers" shows 124,000 engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in 2017.
Sure, you can slice it down to appear to be a deficit, but it'll look rediculous. "I need an opto-acoustic engineer with a pituitary gland the size of an avocado."
The local schools here now call it STEAM, include in "Arts" and now say:
>"It will include subjects like history, social studies, and language arts, all of which are vital facets of a STEAM curriculum."
and now STEM has no meaning anymore (if it ever did).
These are all fine subjects, but they miss the point of the push for STEM that was based on the theory that Americans are falling behind in Math, Science, and Engineering and we need these to be competitive.
Not underrate. There are only so many hours to spend learning. Current school systems put Math on the same footing with History, PE, foreign language...etc.
Looking at salaries there is an over abundance of history and social studies graduates. It’s simply a supply vs demand imbalance, and one that has real consequences.
Many STEM fields are also over saturated, and some arts fields can make a good career path. But, nuances are not really the point of this discussion.
That the labor of historians and social scientists is undervalued compared to the benefit they bring to humanity. There is no incentive for a large tech corp to have historians as C-level officers, even though it's a no brainier logically.
This happens because shareholder value is the only thing corporations are optimized for.
I have literally been saying just this for years when someone says "STEAM". At that point, it is just school again.
I agree that History, Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy...etc are important and can't imagine a world without them, but the whole point behind STEM was to put a focus on Math and Science because those help us keep our economic edge and solve the world's upcoming problems on the technical side.
Providing some after school programs to cover programming, computers (real computing principles and not just how to use Microsoft products and type), robotics, and additional math is good and gives our children a leg up. 1-hour of Math a day might not be enough.
It turns out that those solutions STEM folks have to technical problems have created a whole host of social problems. The pendulum needs to swing the other way.
STEM folks write the guidelines of how it should have been done, then the bureaucrats say "You know what this needs? The critical thinking skills that only liberal arts can provide!"
Two points: it seems a little grotesque to be focusing on creating people trained in STEM solely for the purpose of keeping an "economic edge", as if they were troops that we need to keep us safe, and university students are some kind of army we need to train, and secondly more and more ethical and cultural issues due to what STEM students go on to create have come to light recently, and training in critical thinking, philosophy and even art may help with that - though in a way that also seems wrong-headed: to encourage people to pick humanities subjects to help the people who picked STEM subjects not be unethical. It's Kafkaesque.
The idea that US high schools provide a liberal arts education when colleges increasing find themselves unwilling or unable to is a fantasy. The STEM focus was born out of the inadequate secondary education. Those same inadequacies exist in liberal arts education.
Is there any evidence that training people in critical thinking at school actually improves their critical thinking? Also, the same question about ethics.
Critical thinking, at least in my country, isn't taught widely at school. But my proposal wouldn't be to introduce a mandatory 'critical thinking' class, it would be to reform the education system to be built on critical thinking in every facet, whether it be in STEM, philosophy or otherwise. I too doubt the effectiveness of a class that explicitly teaches critical thinking, just as I doubt the effectiveness of ethics seminars at big companies.
I mean, you're not wrong. That's the whole point behind a specialized workforce. The whole point to modern society is individuals focus on something and do it, really, really well. We then suffer doing other stuff competently. Other than the occasional hobby gardener, how many tech engineers know how to maintain a vegetable garden? I've asked this to a few people before. They just imagine it's as simple as throwing seeds in the ground, making sure there's water and waiting. Growing food on a decent scale, like feeding just yourself, takes a lot more. Knowing how and when to fertilize soil. How much sunlight. How much water. Seasonal timing for maximum yield. Recognizing disease and ailments. And it goes on. But we're a society where not everyone has to farm. That's both good and bad. Same goes with building homes, bridges, maintaining a water supply, electricity, preserving food, curing disease, etc.
But the drawback to that system, it's easier to wipe out a small population and start to handicap that society. Thus, you do have a "type of army" of structural engineers that build and help maintain bridges. If they're gone, there are problems.
I do have one... discussion point(?) I'd like to bring up. I constantly see and hear that liberal arts and what not is supposed to teach critical thinking. How does it do so more than engineering? Engineering especially forces you not to just think of the immediate solution, but long term both in terms of wear/tear, environment factors, attack vectors and future proofing against obsolescence. Yet, I'm told, rather often by other people that a liberal arts major can do this better than an engineer. Look, I'm a sub-par engineer and programmer. I say this often and will never hide it. But I've yet to meet someone with a liberal arts or literary degree that can do analysis and solution strategies on complex, real world problems anywhere close to me. Sure, I get hung up on theoretical problems. Really badly too. But when it comes to the real world, I've never met a non-engineer who can step forward on a, again, real world problem.
The whole ideology of capitalist society is that you're supposed to be able to pursue whatever goal you'd like, that you accept the consequences of that decision, and that there is no common good by which individuals should be directed, at least by force. Now I don't think that's the case, obviously, but that's the ideological line. Thus the creation of an "army" of structural engineers would involve some level of coercion to direct the wants and needs and mold ordinary members of society into the engineers of that society. The precondition for this is only being a member of society with sufficient funds (or ability to loan) to enter the education system. But the precondition being 'molded' this way is different from the army system in most Western countries in which there is no conscription. You never chose to be molded that way, you were simply born with access to the education system. By joining the army you chose to be molded that way. I concede that 'molding' happens all the time from every imaginable source, but it seems to me to run directly counter to at least the spirit of freedom to pursue one's own ends under such influence. The invisible hand is superseded by a government's education secretary.
With regards to your point, the answer probably lies along the different types of reason. To put it crudely, if we were to ask whether a bomb made by a mad scientist is 'good', an engineer will first be directed to look at it in terms of destructive capacity, wear/tear, whether it can be used in the rain, and whether the production line is future-proof against enemies. The philosophy student, hopefully, will be directed to ask whether it was ethical for the mad scientist to create the bomb. The difference here turns on the meaning of the criterion (goodness), which is viewed from two different perspectives.
Plenty of "liberal arts" degree holders really do engage in analysis of complex, real world problems. For instance, the debate around, say, pornography (a very contentious topic which can and does inform legislation), distributive justice, or taxation (in the more abstract sense) is usually held by philosophers and sociologists. These are extremely important and complex problems that are informed by empirical data, not unlike in engineering. It seems as though you expect the philosopher to come forward with a ready-made solution, and indeed many do, but the field operates differently, it operates through dialogue, not only learning from past work. Next, it is worth considering whether working on the real world problems "close to you" is more important than more abstract ones. Philosophy and sociology work at a slower pace than the already slow engineering. It takes years or decades for new engineering works to make their way to pervade society (not merely to influence a few companies in tight competition with another) and it likewise takes a long time for attitudes to change.
While I can't speak for other commenters, I wonder if we aren't speaking past each other a bit.
I don't think anyone should be coerced into a field of study and I'm not sure if the "army" quote from the other poster should be taken literally. I read it as you should make sure society has enough in that basket to maximize welfare for all, but I could be interpreting them poorly.
When I hear arguments for STEM, what I and many others generally mean is that the pie-chart for things studied in school (Math, Language, Literature, History, Geography, PE, Sociology, Science, Art, Religion, Music...etc) should be tweaked a bit to where the Math, Science, and Technology subsections are bigger. If that means reducing the rest of the courses by some small percentage in order to do so, then so be it. Note that I'm not talking about eliminating anything entirely.
Regardless of chosen profession, I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be better off by being more scientifically and mathematically literate. At this point you might ask if the same couldn't be said for other subjects like music and I would disagree. Although all learning and knowledge should generally be considered a blessing, scientific reasoning is a force multiplier. Think of all the ignorance regarding vaccines, climate science...etc.
Yes, that's why I put it in quotes. There should be an appropriate sized pool of specialty-whatever to be effective in a society. But also plus some. Just so you don't have an accidental brain drain. But output is important too. Even though there's lots of hate for commercialized farmer. It now takes less farmers to make X amount of food for a larger amount of non-farmers. But, we can also argue quality and environmental impact of said practices due to such wide scale farming practices.
I think this might have been the early definition of STEM or I'm just an idiot. But I thought it was Sci, Tech, Engineering and Medical. Math just seems redundant to me in that. Because those 4 career fields are for the most part, all well paying and technical. So... yea, I guess... But also, I'm not for the end of art class or anything like that. I actually think music and art need to have a better focus of doing rather than just the history to students. Good for the soul, if you will. Something I've been working on myself recently.
Well, you know the saying that anything technologically advanced enough to someone just seems like it's magic? To me, that's exactly why people need to at least dip their feet into all STEM.
And I think you said it best. Things like philosophy, the humanities and so forth, are a force multiplier. However, no matter how large the number is multiplied against 0, you still get 0. I think STEM is your base score and the rest are force multipliers. My opinion.
Engineer here with an anecdotal story. My sibling has a doctorate in liberal arts (teaches at a university and publishes papers) and reads quite a bit and has said similar things on how this aids in critical thinking. They're great in some discussions, but all technology is essentially magic and math is complete gobblegook to this individual. This isn't to say they aren't smart and don't add value to society, but the things this person and many of their colleagues lack (basic numerical literacy) is important and a big part of what separates us from far more primitive cultures over centuries. I understand specialization and how it is vital, but a vast window of the universe is closed off to them.
Basic numerical literacy is important for everyone, but it is no exaggeration to say that moral, political and philosophical (and that includes the philosophy of science) development also separates us from far more primitive creatures over centuries. To me it makes equally as much sense to say that all that development is closed off to engineers (and I say this as someone finishing up an engineering degree myself).
First of all, congrats on finishing up your degree!
As a counterpoint to the above, I believe most highschool students can read the publications of many professors in the liberal arts and understand what they're saying (Ex: literary criticism) although it helps to have some background knowledge of the period in question. How many highschool students or even liberal arts professors can read and comprehend practically anything that someone in the engineering department published? My point is that it takes a lot more effort to get a working knowledge of something like physics. Although not everyone can and should be able to read a quantum mechanics textbook, I think the average adult should know about things like entropy. If you don't agree with STEM, at least change the course requirements so that the technically inclined can get more math and science courses under their belt. Your country may already do that, but it isn't super common in the US (public or private schools). My parents forced me to go to Catholic school growing up (public schools were terrible in my area) and this resulted in mandatory 1-hour of daily religion class for 13 years that I could have used for something else I would've preferred (math, science, engineering, programming, philosophy). Regardless of one's views, I question the sheer breadth of the US system over depth.
I do disagree. Many other creatures play politics and morality. Wolves and chimps have power and political struggles all the time. Along with taking care of those injured. But an individual that has a history of taking more than their share and not helping the group doesn't get as much help when injured. They do have their own morality. Whether we agree with it or not, is not really our place. The same type of discussion that brought up when discussing how one country should conduct business as that's an infringement of sovereignty. Even paleolithic hominids (a recent fascination of mine) show culture and morality because of bones with massive fractures that healed over time. Said hominid then lived for many more years. A sign they were taken care of. The more philosophy you learn, the more you realize that we're really not that different. We're just smart enough to see how different we are, but too stupid to realize how similar we are.
So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers? You make it seem that an engineer is pure cold and calculating. That's just a terrible stereotype that, I thought died off quite a while ago. Then again, that stupid ass show The Big Bang Theory kind of brought that idea back.
Engineering teachings teach you to constantly learn. Essential, an engineer is never done learning until they die. This spills over to other topics just fine. The difference is, there's already a skillset of finding accurate and reliable sources, creating your own lesson plans (in a way) and diving into said subject.
>Wolves and chimps have power and political struggles all the time. Along with taking care of those injured. But an individual that has a history of taking more than their share and not helping the group doesn't get as much help when injured.
This is not politics. I feel as though this discussion is stupid, since I think it's reasonable to say that the degree to which animals have "politics" is lesser than those animals which have tool use. You cannot forget that technology is always coupled to a certain stage of historical development, it does not happen in a vacuum. There is no such thing as production in general.
>Said hominid then lived for many more years. A sign they were taken care of.
A lot of animals take care of each other, it doesn't mean much in the way of how humans do it.
>So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers?
It is closed off in the same way that engineering is closed off to liberal arts majors, as the parent commenter claimed. That is to say, you must learn it, and learn how to argue about it. Of course I don't claim that you need to be a liberal arts major to be moral or even have cogent ideas about morality, but you still need to learn how to argue your point if you're talking about it, and you can only do that by learning about what's been argued before.
Oh agreed. Specialization isn't perfect. But a lot of engineers, I think, like being "well rounded(?)". Mostly when it comes to making things. But, if you take the youtube channel Tech Ingredients. That dude is like the spirit animal to engineers. The guy can build anything from freezers, AC, jet engines, speakers and even make his own whisky. And again, I'm a sub-par engineer both mechanical and CS, but the problem solving skills and maths I know, there's very little in the real world that I get lost to. To build things out of my skill set, I still have a learning curve, but to me nothing is impossible. And so far, nothing really has been for me. If one human has built it in the past, I know I can eventually do it. But like you said, a liberal arts type, they just really gloss over.
I'd also argue, take a decent engineer in any field. Structural, mechanical, CS, electrical, whatever. Now tell them to teach themselves... oh, I don't know, philosophy? Maybe law. Well, I'd argue law is a more "scientific" version of philosophy because it does have "more hard rules". Me using those quotes are important to understanding what I mean. But, I think an engineer is well suited, after half a decade or a full decade of working, to teach themselves anything. Because that's part of the job. Learn, learn and learn because you're not done learning. Oh, and you need to try learning things that no one else has discovered too. Then learn more. I guess, I just have never seen an LA later learn engineering. But I see engineers learn LA.
> it seems a little grotesque to be focusing on creating people trained in STEM solely for the purpose of keeping an "economic edge", as if they were troops that we need to keep us safe
But the reality of the situation is that economic "troops" are required to maintain our current standard of living. It seems to me even more grotesque to ignore the immediate needs of society because it feels wrong from some ivory tower philosophical perspective.
I think "grotesque" is a little extreme here. Economic edge is certainly an advantage that comes out of constantly producing new technologies which aid humanity. I can understand your concern though as many technologies come with environmental impacts...etc. Another way to view this in a more positive light is that we're also in the midst of a green revolution (wind, solar, energy storage... etc). The more people we have tackling these hard technical problems (transportation, renewable energy generation, fusion, finding an end to cancer, optimizing food production) the better. Of course, this can't come at the expense of our humanity, but providing additional focus on pivotal subjects like mathematics is vital to the human race.
I believe there is a small number of people who do the hard work on innovative projects and move humanity forward. The rest of us is ideally helping out with the easier parts and maybe impeding said work. More of those key people would mean more economic growth around whatever they are doing.
Can you get more of them?
Yes if many smart people currently avoid STEM because it is low status, hard, and not really paid well compared to things really smart people can achieve.
No if people who have the ability to do the hard work are inevitably drawn into it anyway.
I am in STEM and I honestly think there's a shortage of smart STEM workers, because not every person trained or experienced in STEM is someone I would hire.
Ask around, you'll find quite a few people like me.
So we end up with employers who don't want to pay top dollar in case they get a lemon, and competent developers who are either happy where they are or unwilling to work for lemon rates.
And have you interviewed candidates for development positions recently? It is depressing, and I say that as someone who catches flak about being too generous and letting too many "poor-quality" candidates through screens.
There is not a shortage of "STEM" workers- but there are a number of more specific industries that have a shortage of workers, and these industries fall under "STEM".
Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food.
Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay.
I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though.
In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.
Yes, there's always a "shortage" of workers willing to work for less than market rate, just like there's always a "shortage" of free beer. That's market equilibrium.
It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.
There's plenty of jobs, but also plenty of applicants. Ask any one of these companies how many resumes they get, or how long it takes them to fill a position.
No shortage of people only a shortage of people willing to work for less than market rate. Tesla for example can’t hire and keep talented people because it’s well known that wages are modestly low for a job that expects 60+hrs a week in a high col area
The constant talk about sexism, racism, ageism, etc in our industry almost completely disproves "STEM shortage" argument.
If such people exist, it won't be long before someone realizes they can hire these people cheaply because they are less in demand. Undercutting your labor costs gives a massive competitive advantage bringing products to market. There are thousands of startups every year started by a very wide variety of people from widely different backgrounds.
Ageism is a particularly good canary in the coalmine. If someone has decades of relevant experience and you can't find anyone, why wouldn't you hire them and if they've worked for your company for years and know all the subsystems well, why would you ever think of firing them and hiring someone else?
This frivolous misuse of human capital shows that overall, there must certainly be a surplus of talent rather than a deficit.
A great counterpoint to prove this is/was the web boom. Web talent used to be priced at $50-60K because such people were everywhere. Once Javascript became fast and highly-interactive websites and web apps became hugely in demand, a localized deficit started.
The reason for the localized deficit is obvious, but worth reiterating. The development tools and language were considered frustrating to learn and use by other programmers. There was a "not a real dev" stigma. IE and other cross-platform issues were hard to deal with. Powered by the new, fast JS engines, a glut of new APIs surfaced which led to another glut of CSS features -- all taking almost super-human effort to keep up with. Complicating this, most frontend developers up to that point didn't have strong programming skills, so you had either experienced programmers or knowledgeable frontend developers with a very small overlap.
The result has been to hire everyone. In 2010-2015 especially, if you had 50 people apply, probably only one person qualified (and if you found two, it was worth considering hiring them both). With real choices being that limited, companies simply cannot afford to waste time to market trying to find a candidate that "is the right fit" or whatever the BS "ism" label is in that area. Even people with no programming experience outside of a couple months of "boot camp" have a chance at getting hired.
As time has gone by, that drought has become at least mostly slaked. Companies can be a little pickier about whom they hire and wages have mostly stabilized at a bit over average programmer rates (which seems to account for the extra troubles of frontend development over most other types of programming).
I'm betting that once the current tech bubble bursts and wages plummet, we'll still keep hearing about the shortage of programmers who will work for $40K per year.
The current STEM efforts do seem to be filling a need, but I do feel that this is going to lag and overshoot the market. Education needs to have good fundamentals and not only crank out grads for software as a trade.
Same thing happened when the telephone got popular and the demand for switchboard operators exploded. "At this rate, everyone's going to have to be a switchboard operator." Then they added dialers to phones. We just need better spreadsheets.
Companies notice that they're getting less applicants with higher salary expectations.
When those companies are surveyed by the government, they cry wolf: "There's a shortage of workers!" they exclaim, when really it's just a "shortage" in the number of applicants with the same salary expectations as before - a trend that has to be nipped in the bud.
The goal then is to have policy bring labor supply back in favor of the companies, by dumping money into education and liberalizing immigration. Essentially, it's another bit of corporate welfare that can be marketed as philantropy.
The joke's on them though, because unlike most other professions, software developers have the ability to create more work than there would have been, had they never been hired in the first place.
I am starting to disagree with what I an also starting to call “The Religion of STEM”. I say this as a card-carrying believer. And yet, I am starting to leave yet one more religion behind in favor of what I think is truly lacking with our approach to education:
Entrepreneurship, business, personal finances and multiple servings of critical reasoning. And more...
Kids, after thirteen years of schooling, are handed to society with virtually no marketable skills whatsoever. Zero. The only two paths they have are:
-College
-Stacking boxes at Office Depot (or making coffee, etc)
Knowing how to code, I hate to say, is the last thing most people need in life. It is, without a doubt, a useless skill for the vast majority of HS graduates. What we should be teaching, we do not.
They need to learn all of the above as well as walk out of school with one or more marketable skills.
Love STEM. I even mentor a local HS robotics team. We need to do more. Education is broken.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadhttps://medium.com/launch-school/why-do-programming-bootcamp... (By someone selling a bootcamp, of course.)
"“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-jo...
Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales).
If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).
Median income for an RN in 2017 was $70k [2]
So, in the US it's fair to say that nurse is a moderately well paid job. Of course compared to west coast tech salaries that doesn't look so amazing, but compared to what many life sciences PhDs are earning while fighting for a tenure track job it doesn't look so bad
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26... [2] https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/
Engineering is highly in demand. I imagine math too.
I know lots of people go pre-med and leave college in a saturated field
Programming is a paradox because it's an easy job, but with entry barriers that we don't fully understand. It seems to be prohibitively hard for most people, but easy for a few, and for those few, it doesn't seem to matter too much what their educational background is. I know people with music degrees who became programmers.
I was a math/physics major. Don't know about the talented part. ;-) Today, if you were to monitor what I spend time doing at work, it's mostly programming, followed by some electronics and optics design, and lab work. Lucrative, easy, what's not to like? Also, it was possible to get into programming without anybody's permission, because the tools are free.
It's also kind of a one way street. I've noticed that once people break away from quantitative engineering work, it's hard to go back, and they can't just start doing it on their own because the tools in those fields (e.g., mechanical and electrical CAD) are proprietary and expensive. This is like an imaginary thermodynamics experiment where you have two livestock pens separated by a one-way gate, and eventually all of the animals end up on one side if they are just walking at random.
By comparison my coworker with a Philosophy degree had gained what he described as zero useful skills. He was also making good money, but he described his degree as little more useful than a check box on the application.
These people often go back for a masters in CS, but that’s not required to work in the field.
The math and mathematical techniques for electronics, fluid mechanics, statics, and kinematics is all the same. For example, a mass/spring/damper system is the same as an inductor/capacitor/resister network.
My degree is in mechanical engineering, and I have had a nice career doing mundane compilers. A big motivator to switching to software is I could start a business with nearly zero investment.
Take a moment to read through the article. First it tries to show that STEM graduates are such a small proportion of the total labor force, only 3-4%, the implication being that such a small proportion shouldn’t deserve the attention the get. OK, fine you’re arguing that it’s hype.
Next, cherry pick data to show that not all STEM graduates from this tiny sector can all find jobs. Yes, this is not a factory, you can’t just train someone and expect them to be productive in STEM. It’s not the same as pushing buttons or lifting things, it requires much more from the person which is why you can’t mass manufacture STEM graduates. Just because not all STEM graduates can find jobs means that it’s a hype? Okay.
Next, sprinkle some grievances about STEM being used to justify increasing the number of H1Bs, and now you’ve got the racists, the “H1B workers are why I don’t have a great job” crowd. Nice.
Oh, don’t forget the quotations of authority figures sounding alarm about the lack of engineers. The same alarm, that helped US education systems include more technical training to keep up with schools everywhere else who were in the same race. This is not some secret, all countries know the importance of high skilled labor force.
The wealth and prosperity we see in most nations today is precisely due to the work of millions of STEM graduates, creating innovations and technologies that constantly drive down costs of manufacturing and transportation, increased labor productivity, gave us fucking smartphones and internet everywhere devices and are currently bringing down the costs of renewables so rapidly that even Texas is going all in on wind energy.
I’m very upset that this appears in ieee though. I imagined that to be a respectable academic institution and not one that would allow such a poorly researched and hyperbolic article to be published.
The most popular STEM degree by a large margin is psychology, many more than all engineering disciplines combined. That psychology majors can't find work implies little about the demand for engineers.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/07-08/sd
140,000 new jobs over the next 10 years, 1,700,000 current employment. Assuming the replacement cycle for an engineer is 20 years, that's about 100,000 jobs per year.
The ASEE ”Engineering by the Numbers" shows 124,000 engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in 2017.
Sure, you can slice it down to appear to be a deficit, but it'll look rediculous. "I need an opto-acoustic engineer with a pituitary gland the size of an avocado."
>"It will include subjects like history, social studies, and language arts, all of which are vital facets of a STEAM curriculum."
and now STEM has no meaning anymore (if it ever did).
These are all fine subjects, but they miss the point of the push for STEM that was based on the theory that Americans are falling behind in Math, Science, and Engineering and we need these to be competitive.
Why do you believe that?
Looking at salaries there is an over abundance of history and social studies graduates. It’s simply a supply vs demand imbalance, and one that has real consequences.
Many STEM fields are also over saturated, and some arts fields can make a good career path. But, nuances are not really the point of this discussion.
This happens because shareholder value is the only thing corporations are optimized for.
I agree that History, Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy...etc are important and can't imagine a world without them, but the whole point behind STEM was to put a focus on Math and Science because those help us keep our economic edge and solve the world's upcoming problems on the technical side.
Providing some after school programs to cover programming, computers (real computing principles and not just how to use Microsoft products and type), robotics, and additional math is good and gives our children a leg up. 1-hour of Math a day might not be enough.
What would your ideal curriculum be?
Bureaucrats make education policy.
STEM folks write the guidelines of how it should have been done, then the bureaucrats say "You know what this needs? The critical thinking skills that only liberal arts can provide!"
Then everything is just as fucked as before.
But the drawback to that system, it's easier to wipe out a small population and start to handicap that society. Thus, you do have a "type of army" of structural engineers that build and help maintain bridges. If they're gone, there are problems.
I do have one... discussion point(?) I'd like to bring up. I constantly see and hear that liberal arts and what not is supposed to teach critical thinking. How does it do so more than engineering? Engineering especially forces you not to just think of the immediate solution, but long term both in terms of wear/tear, environment factors, attack vectors and future proofing against obsolescence. Yet, I'm told, rather often by other people that a liberal arts major can do this better than an engineer. Look, I'm a sub-par engineer and programmer. I say this often and will never hide it. But I've yet to meet someone with a liberal arts or literary degree that can do analysis and solution strategies on complex, real world problems anywhere close to me. Sure, I get hung up on theoretical problems. Really badly too. But when it comes to the real world, I've never met a non-engineer who can step forward on a, again, real world problem.
With regards to your point, the answer probably lies along the different types of reason. To put it crudely, if we were to ask whether a bomb made by a mad scientist is 'good', an engineer will first be directed to look at it in terms of destructive capacity, wear/tear, whether it can be used in the rain, and whether the production line is future-proof against enemies. The philosophy student, hopefully, will be directed to ask whether it was ethical for the mad scientist to create the bomb. The difference here turns on the meaning of the criterion (goodness), which is viewed from two different perspectives.
Plenty of "liberal arts" degree holders really do engage in analysis of complex, real world problems. For instance, the debate around, say, pornography (a very contentious topic which can and does inform legislation), distributive justice, or taxation (in the more abstract sense) is usually held by philosophers and sociologists. These are extremely important and complex problems that are informed by empirical data, not unlike in engineering. It seems as though you expect the philosopher to come forward with a ready-made solution, and indeed many do, but the field operates differently, it operates through dialogue, not only learning from past work. Next, it is worth considering whether working on the real world problems "close to you" is more important than more abstract ones. Philosophy and sociology work at a slower pace than the already slow engineering. It takes years or decades for new engineering works to make their way to pervade society (not merely to influence a few companies in tight competition with another) and it likewise takes a long time for attitudes to change.
I don't think anyone should be coerced into a field of study and I'm not sure if the "army" quote from the other poster should be taken literally. I read it as you should make sure society has enough in that basket to maximize welfare for all, but I could be interpreting them poorly.
When I hear arguments for STEM, what I and many others generally mean is that the pie-chart for things studied in school (Math, Language, Literature, History, Geography, PE, Sociology, Science, Art, Religion, Music...etc) should be tweaked a bit to where the Math, Science, and Technology subsections are bigger. If that means reducing the rest of the courses by some small percentage in order to do so, then so be it. Note that I'm not talking about eliminating anything entirely.
Regardless of chosen profession, I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be better off by being more scientifically and mathematically literate. At this point you might ask if the same couldn't be said for other subjects like music and I would disagree. Although all learning and knowledge should generally be considered a blessing, scientific reasoning is a force multiplier. Think of all the ignorance regarding vaccines, climate science...etc.
I think this might have been the early definition of STEM or I'm just an idiot. But I thought it was Sci, Tech, Engineering and Medical. Math just seems redundant to me in that. Because those 4 career fields are for the most part, all well paying and technical. So... yea, I guess... But also, I'm not for the end of art class or anything like that. I actually think music and art need to have a better focus of doing rather than just the history to students. Good for the soul, if you will. Something I've been working on myself recently.
Well, you know the saying that anything technologically advanced enough to someone just seems like it's magic? To me, that's exactly why people need to at least dip their feet into all STEM.
And I think you said it best. Things like philosophy, the humanities and so forth, are a force multiplier. However, no matter how large the number is multiplied against 0, you still get 0. I think STEM is your base score and the rest are force multipliers. My opinion.
As a counterpoint to the above, I believe most highschool students can read the publications of many professors in the liberal arts and understand what they're saying (Ex: literary criticism) although it helps to have some background knowledge of the period in question. How many highschool students or even liberal arts professors can read and comprehend practically anything that someone in the engineering department published? My point is that it takes a lot more effort to get a working knowledge of something like physics. Although not everyone can and should be able to read a quantum mechanics textbook, I think the average adult should know about things like entropy. If you don't agree with STEM, at least change the course requirements so that the technically inclined can get more math and science courses under their belt. Your country may already do that, but it isn't super common in the US (public or private schools). My parents forced me to go to Catholic school growing up (public schools were terrible in my area) and this resulted in mandatory 1-hour of daily religion class for 13 years that I could have used for something else I would've preferred (math, science, engineering, programming, philosophy). Regardless of one's views, I question the sheer breadth of the US system over depth.
So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers? You make it seem that an engineer is pure cold and calculating. That's just a terrible stereotype that, I thought died off quite a while ago. Then again, that stupid ass show The Big Bang Theory kind of brought that idea back.
Engineering teachings teach you to constantly learn. Essential, an engineer is never done learning until they die. This spills over to other topics just fine. The difference is, there's already a skillset of finding accurate and reliable sources, creating your own lesson plans (in a way) and diving into said subject.
This is not politics. I feel as though this discussion is stupid, since I think it's reasonable to say that the degree to which animals have "politics" is lesser than those animals which have tool use. You cannot forget that technology is always coupled to a certain stage of historical development, it does not happen in a vacuum. There is no such thing as production in general.
>Said hominid then lived for many more years. A sign they were taken care of.
A lot of animals take care of each other, it doesn't mean much in the way of how humans do it.
>So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers?
It is closed off in the same way that engineering is closed off to liberal arts majors, as the parent commenter claimed. That is to say, you must learn it, and learn how to argue about it. Of course I don't claim that you need to be a liberal arts major to be moral or even have cogent ideas about morality, but you still need to learn how to argue your point if you're talking about it, and you can only do that by learning about what's been argued before.
I'd also argue, take a decent engineer in any field. Structural, mechanical, CS, electrical, whatever. Now tell them to teach themselves... oh, I don't know, philosophy? Maybe law. Well, I'd argue law is a more "scientific" version of philosophy because it does have "more hard rules". Me using those quotes are important to understanding what I mean. But, I think an engineer is well suited, after half a decade or a full decade of working, to teach themselves anything. Because that's part of the job. Learn, learn and learn because you're not done learning. Oh, and you need to try learning things that no one else has discovered too. Then learn more. I guess, I just have never seen an LA later learn engineering. But I see engineers learn LA.
But the reality of the situation is that economic "troops" are required to maintain our current standard of living. It seems to me even more grotesque to ignore the immediate needs of society because it feels wrong from some ivory tower philosophical perspective.
As a result, we now have "maker spaces" with people making collages and doing embroidery, but no metalworking tools.
[1] https://www.risd.edu/academics/public-engagement/
And if not, what's missing - useful ideas ? capital ? management ? Something else ?
Look at the kinds of brain-trusts Nest employed before they went down the toilet.
Until every job is automated?
Can you get more of them?
Yes if many smart people currently avoid STEM because it is low status, hard, and not really paid well compared to things really smart people can achieve.
No if people who have the ability to do the hard work are inevitably drawn into it anyway.
Ask around, you'll find quite a few people like me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
So we end up with employers who don't want to pay top dollar in case they get a lemon, and competent developers who are either happy where they are or unwilling to work for lemon rates.
And have you interviewed candidates for development positions recently? It is depressing, and I say that as someone who catches flak about being too generous and letting too many "poor-quality" candidates through screens.
“We advertised this job for well below the going rate and didn’t get any applications, better outsource it!”
It's almost as if we want people to train themselves to work doing hard stuff and also don't want to pay them to do it. In other news, water is wet.
Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food.
Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay.
I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though.
In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.
It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.
Plenty of jobs.
There's plenty of jobs, but also plenty of applicants. Ask any one of these companies how many resumes they get, or how long it takes them to fill a position.
If such people exist, it won't be long before someone realizes they can hire these people cheaply because they are less in demand. Undercutting your labor costs gives a massive competitive advantage bringing products to market. There are thousands of startups every year started by a very wide variety of people from widely different backgrounds.
Ageism is a particularly good canary in the coalmine. If someone has decades of relevant experience and you can't find anyone, why wouldn't you hire them and if they've worked for your company for years and know all the subsystems well, why would you ever think of firing them and hiring someone else?
This frivolous misuse of human capital shows that overall, there must certainly be a surplus of talent rather than a deficit.
A great counterpoint to prove this is/was the web boom. Web talent used to be priced at $50-60K because such people were everywhere. Once Javascript became fast and highly-interactive websites and web apps became hugely in demand, a localized deficit started.
The reason for the localized deficit is obvious, but worth reiterating. The development tools and language were considered frustrating to learn and use by other programmers. There was a "not a real dev" stigma. IE and other cross-platform issues were hard to deal with. Powered by the new, fast JS engines, a glut of new APIs surfaced which led to another glut of CSS features -- all taking almost super-human effort to keep up with. Complicating this, most frontend developers up to that point didn't have strong programming skills, so you had either experienced programmers or knowledgeable frontend developers with a very small overlap.
The result has been to hire everyone. In 2010-2015 especially, if you had 50 people apply, probably only one person qualified (and if you found two, it was worth considering hiring them both). With real choices being that limited, companies simply cannot afford to waste time to market trying to find a candidate that "is the right fit" or whatever the BS "ism" label is in that area. Even people with no programming experience outside of a couple months of "boot camp" have a chance at getting hired.
As time has gone by, that drought has become at least mostly slaked. Companies can be a little pickier about whom they hire and wages have mostly stabilized at a bit over average programmer rates (which seems to account for the extra troubles of frontend development over most other types of programming).
I'm betting that once the current tech bubble bursts and wages plummet, we'll still keep hearing about the shortage of programmers who will work for $40K per year.
Same thing happened when the telephone got popular and the demand for switchboard operators exploded. "At this rate, everyone's going to have to be a switchboard operator." Then they added dialers to phones. We just need better spreadsheets.
Companies notice that they're getting less applicants with higher salary expectations.
When those companies are surveyed by the government, they cry wolf: "There's a shortage of workers!" they exclaim, when really it's just a "shortage" in the number of applicants with the same salary expectations as before - a trend that has to be nipped in the bud.
The goal then is to have policy bring labor supply back in favor of the companies, by dumping money into education and liberalizing immigration. Essentially, it's another bit of corporate welfare that can be marketed as philantropy.
The joke's on them though, because unlike most other professions, software developers have the ability to create more work than there would have been, had they never been hired in the first place.
Entrepreneurship, business, personal finances and multiple servings of critical reasoning. And more...
Kids, after thirteen years of schooling, are handed to society with virtually no marketable skills whatsoever. Zero. The only two paths they have are:
-College
-Stacking boxes at Office Depot (or making coffee, etc)
Knowing how to code, I hate to say, is the last thing most people need in life. It is, without a doubt, a useless skill for the vast majority of HS graduates. What we should be teaching, we do not.
They need to learn all of the above as well as walk out of school with one or more marketable skills.
Love STEM. I even mentor a local HS robotics team. We need to do more. Education is broken.