
Where the STEM Jobs Are (and Where They Aren’t) - stablemap
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-jobs-industry-careers.html
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thisisit
Another in the long line of clickbaits. While it starts out by making a case
for lack of non-CS jobs, it slowly devolves into an ad for "Insight Data
Science Fellows Program".

Then to avoid being marked as native advertising, it adds info about data
sciences division at University of California, Berkeley. The article then ends
abruptly without having a satisfying conclusion.

Is it just me or we can't seem to get lot of infomration from the media
without some kind of covert advertisement in between?

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seibelj
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

Almost all news is paid for outside of current events and politics (although
those sections are biased by the editorial room). Pay enough money and you’ll
get into the NYT, it just takes the right PR agency to pitch the story
correctly.

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GCA10
Much better data on what people actually do with their majors has been
gathered by the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project. This initiative,
published earlier in 2017, looks at career paths for about three million
people, major by major. A link is here:

[http://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/median_earnings_for_la...](http://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/median_earnings_for_largest_occupations)

What Brookings/Hamilton observes ... and the NYT overlooks ... is that lots of
people with STEM majors find work in relevant fields that happen to be
classified in irrelevant ways. For example, math majors tend to show up as
financial analysts, actuaries, high school math teachers, etc.

There's a lot of quant work on Wall Street these days, all of which is
classified as financial sector work, even though it's STEM-intensive and miles
away from gabbing about mutual funds with retirees.

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pitaa
Is this implying that 2/3 of those who graduate with an engineering degree
don't get a job in engineering? Because that sounds absurd. Sure, people can
and do get jobs in industries not exactly related to their degree, but over
half? No way.

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dogma1138
2/3ds not getting an actual engineering position or a job in their immediate
field sounds about right.

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ukulele
As an engineer, this data doesn't jibe at all with my experience. Is it some
catch with the data treatment, or am I just missing something that others
experience?

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dogma1138
Likely not having an engineer in the title and not having an engineering
discipline as a requirement.

Your experience also might be skewed if you are a “software engineer” which in
many places today is abused as a title both in education and in the job
market, same goes for computer science degrees.

In too many places SE and CS share nearly an identical program which
traditionally wasn’t the case and with a very lackluster focus on the
engineering part as too many people equate programming with software
engineering.

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stevenwoo
OK, this is not a geographical thing that I gleaned from the title but more a
simple summing of the graduates in the four STEM areas and the number of job
openings in those areas.

It appears that in spite of the much touted shortage given as the reason the
H1-B program must be expanded that the number of graduates for every field far
exceeds the number of job openings except for computer science - where it is
roughly the same. Where are these underemployed STEM graduates going - the
article points to STEM graduates who gave up on academic careers/paths to go
into computer programming/data analysis.

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peterburkimsher
I was also expecting a discussion about the geographical "where" jobs are
found.

Political problems mean that I can't go to California for work, so now I'm
working for a tech company in Taiwan.

My boss asked me to do data science courses that seem similar to those
advertised in the article, but despite learning the concepts, I haven't had
any new interesting projects because of it. I'm personally more interested in
hardware design and backend programming, which isn't as "trendy" as machine
learning. Even if I could get a job more easily doing statistics and making
pretty graphs for board meetings, I don't think I'd enjoy it as much as
soldering together a little gadget.

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ianai
I feel like the math sciences could be pasted into the comp sci field. They're
good to separate, but there's definite filling of CS jobs with math
backgrounds.

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A30JB0LFI1MCQS
Sure, people can and do get jobs in industries not exactly related to their
degree, but over half? No way.

