
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013) - lelf
https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
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jandrewrogers
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.

~~~
charmides
I don't think psychology is typically considered STEM.

~~~
mcguire
According to the article, it is by the NSF and not by the commerce department.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
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.

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vikinghckr
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.

~~~
avip
It's much worse in life-sciences where PhDs are washing pipettes or feeding
mice.

~~~
whyenot
...and yet those in the life sciences who took a more practical path, for
example, nurses, are both well paid and in high demand.

~~~
pergadad
Well paid nurses? Which country would that be?

~~~
pacaro
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

[1]
[https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26...](https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-263.html)
[2] [https://m.nurse.plus/how-much-nurses-make/](https://m.nurse.plus/how-
much-nurses-make/)

~~~
rdtwo
There is demand at low wages considering they have to work Long shifts and all
hours of the day often rotating between days and nights

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rland
It seems to me that there is a shortage of qualified employees and yet also a
shortage of jobs in every single well-paid, well regarded sector.

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.

~~~
ModsCtrlideas
Engineering and programming? There is a shortage of people.

Plenty of jobs.

~~~
rdtwo
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

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fortran77
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.

~~~
damnyou
STEAM just correctly recognizes that STEM people systematically underrate the
importance of history and social studies.

~~~
Retric
It’s not a question of importance, but abundance.

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.

~~~
damnyou
Yes, you have successfully identified a structural issue with modern
capitalism.

~~~
rumanator
Care to point out what you believe is the structural issue?

~~~
damnyou
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.

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cybersnowflake
The only people who honestly think there are a shortage of stem workers are
those who aren't in stem.

~~~
greglindahl
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.

~~~
bcrosby95
That's like saying there's a shortage of good STEM jobs because I wouldn't
take any STEM job out there.

~~~
leggomylibro
They're not mutually exclusive; I'm starting to think that the market for
coders is basically a market for lemons.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](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.

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robomartin
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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gridlockd
Here's how these inflated numbers come about:

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.

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karmakaze
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.

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petermcneeley
Covered by Eric Weinstein [https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-
papers/how-a...](https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/how-
and-why-government-universities-and-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-
of-scientists-and-high-tech-workers)

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hajile
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.

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petra
I'm curious: fundamentally, can the economy find a place for many more
talented STEM people ?

And if not, what's missing - useful ideas ? capital ? management ? Something
else ?

~~~
UweSchmidt
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.

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charmides
Note that this piece is from 2013. I think that should be indicated
parenthetically in the title.

~~~
goatinaboat
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.

~~~
cactus2093
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.

~~~
goatinaboat
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.

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pm90
[2013]

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pm90
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.

