
The STEM Crisis is a Myth - RougeFemme
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
======
patio11
"Wages for technologists have not increased" is often evidenced by claims
about averages. By the same token, one could argue persuasively that devs do
not age, because a year goes by and they get a few months younger.

The explanation is that the number of devs (and many related trades) is
increasing rapidly, largely driven by hires of young neophytes rather than
retraining of e.g. 50 year old lawyers. The neophytes are younger and have
lower wages than the mean dev. This brings the average down faster than raises
and aging bring the average up.

You can verify this if you look at data for particular career cohorts, either
people or experience levels. In the 4 years I've been on HN the quotes I hear
for "generic CS undergrad from Stanford" are up more than 25% (80k to 110k or
so, starting salary offer). Companies that I work with complain bitterly that
their competitors are bidding irresponsibly. The going wages _for interns_ are
substantially in excess of what I expected to earn in mid career when I
graduate not even 10 years ago.

Also, anecdotally, of the couple hundred people whose professional statuses
I'm routinely exposed to I don't think I've ever heard "Boo, got to take a pay
cut" except for making the BigCo to startup or self-employment transition.

~~~
Tichy
It sounds to me as if you are saying average wages are not increasing because
of the influx of young developers. Isn't that exactly the point the article
makes, that the non-increasing wages indicate that there is no shortage of
tech workers?

It also seems unlikely that the decreasing averages don't affect the wages of
older tech workers. They compete with the young, cheap tech workers after all
- why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if
they could replace them with cheap young tech workers?

~~~
jasonkester
_why should companies continue to pay high salaries to old tech workers if
they could replace them with cheap young tech workers?_

Because young workers are not a substitute for old workers.

You could argue that _four_ fresh graduates are a substitute for a single good
senior dev, but in many cases even that is not true. Thus, old guys continue
to find good jobs for good money.

This worry is as old as software. The cheap hordes will replace you. It used
to be cheap hordes from overseas, and now it's cheap hordes fresh out of
school. They're on there way. But somehow they never seem to arrive.

~~~
rmc
_They 're on there way. But somehow they never seem to arrive._

I wonder if that's because the demand keeps increasing. Software is eating the
world. Sure, supply is increasing from overseas, and young people, but demand
is growing more.

------
radicalbyte
My experience is that it's very hard to find good developers, or university
graduates who want to become developers.

The CS grads that I've interviewed fall into three groups:

1) They were good at Math, spent 4 years avoiding anything involving
computers, and whose career goal is to find a cushy middle-management job.

2) Arrogant CV-fillers who think that their HTML/JS 'skillz' make them them
God's gift to the world. Who then end up working for Big Consultancy Firm
working on Sharepoint (because the money is good).

3) The rare gem, who love computers, love coding, and get usually get snapped
up instantly by Google/Microsoft.

As someone who doesn't have a degree, I find the level of CS graduates from
(top!) universities disheartening. I've seen people who couldn't implement a
simple sorting algorithm in pseudo-code (or even explain how they'd do it!).

Things I can do with my eyes closed; you know, because I have actually read my
algorithms book cover-to-cover.

The cause is clear: developers can earn very good money at the moment. It's a
good career move. So it's attracting the lazy chancers who just see the $$$$$.

What ever happened to pursing a career doing something because you, you know,
love doing it?

~~~
Wilya
There are things from a formal CS background I wish more people mastered.
Things like understanding how JOINs work, basics of memory management and
understanding that two nested for loops is likely to be worse than a single
one, even in the cloud. But knowing how to implement a specific sort isn't one
of these. It's simply never come up outside of an exam.

~~~
14113
I'm shocked that a proper CS course _wouldn 't_ teach them. We covered Joins
(and the relational maths behind them) in first year, and "nested for loops
being bad" would be a necessary by-product of learning _anything_ about
complexity.

~~~
Wilya
Oh, I don't mean to say these aren't taught (though being taught something and
mastering it isn't quite the same).

What I mean is that those are the parts of a CS background that have actually
been useful in my everyday coding life, and that I would expect from
candidates I interview. To be opposed to knowledge/implementation of different
types of sorts, which is also a part of a CS background, but has low practical
use in my everyday coding.

~~~
cbhl
> _the parts of a CS background that have actually been useful in my everyday
> coding life_

Someone fresh out of school would have _no idea_ how to discern that from
anything else in the wide, wide world of CS unless they have experience
working in the industry (from, say, a summer internship or co-op terms).

Hell, mastery of basic DVCS operations (say, git pull, git commit, git merge,
although equivalent experience with hg, perforce, or TFS would be reasonable)
isn't a guarantee, even if students spent four months in a lab "using" such a
tool.

The people who "do best" in university get told by their professors to become
graduate students. Most are not optimized to teach the skills you seek -- if
you picked a random fresh graduate and they happened to have those skills,
it's probable that either they taught themselves or they learned them at
another employer.

------
sker
I'm not in the US, but from what I've seen here and in other boards, the whole
STEM Crisis is actually a HR Crisis.

No wonder you can't hire anyone if you want rocket scientists to build your
world-changing photo sharing app.

~~~
inerte
Or ads, as Jeff Hammerbacher said better: "The best minds of my generation are
thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

~~~
nextweek2
Another way to look at it is that the best minds are thinking about how to
optimise capitalism.

They are doing that and in effect we are all getting a better more efficient
society. Plus the best minds aren't working on world peace because people vote
for people with the best hair to do that job.

~~~
6d0debc071
That only really makes sense if you think that ads are providing information
that's relevant to people's best interests and is going to be fed into fairly
rational decision making, rather than exploiting cognitive biases as an attack
vector.

------
linkregister
"That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a
widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of
labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were
scarce."

The huge disparity of pay between different STEM disciplines should clearly
show where the demand is. Biologists compete over shrinking government grants,
while petroleum engineering students receive job offers of $90K starting.
Treating STEM as a homogenous bloc will hurt the less in-demand fields while
failing to treat the shortfall in others.

~~~
ffn
One of his points was that it is extremely hard to predict where the next boom
in the greater STEM field will be. Several years ago, internet boomed, then
bust, then boomed again. Meanwhile, petro rose while aerospace fell... It's
precisely the point that, because STEM skills cannot cross fields (you try
getting a rocket scientist to build you a photo-sharing app) that leads to
moments of massive oversupply, then terrible shortage, and then massive
oversupply again.

~~~
WalterBright
Cannot cross fields? My major was Me/Ae, took no CS courses, worked for Boeing
designing airplane gearboxes and hydraulic systems, and yet I had no trouble
transitioning to a CS career.

When I took mechanics/fluids/electronics/materials classes, I discovered that
the math was all the same, except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of
'i'.

~~~
lutusp
This speaks to how quickly what we're taught in school goes out of date. You
were able to transition to CS, compete with same-age CS graduates, because
much of what they were taught in school had become obsolete, while what you
learned on the job became more and more valuable and relevant.

> ... except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'.

And that only because of the coincidence that 'i' refers to current in
electrical equations.

It also addresses the issue that, with respect to getting useful results from
a computer, one's mathematical knowledge and ability is now more important
than one's knowledge of a computer's inner workings.

~~~
bayesianhorse
The subject matter becomes obsolete, but the mental processes and skills stay
relevant.

Too much of education is aimed and evaluated for data storage rather than
brain training.

~~~
lutusp
Very true. Americans are taught what to think, not how to think.

~~~
bayesianhorse
In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. In
Germany I'm not hearing a lot of "mind training matters" noise out of
education either.

~~~
lutusp
> In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind.

Yes, or Japan, where being different or standing out in any way is seen as the
height of rudeness. _Sumimasen, arigatōgozaimashita_

I guess we have to face the fact that the ability to think for oneself, and
think critically, is rather unpopular, with rare exception.

------
cbhl
One of the things that seems suspect to me about this article is the
conflation between "STEM" and "Computer Science / Software Engineering /
Computer Engineering".

No where in the article is "STEM" defined precisely, but the author clearly
notes that is NSF number includes health-care workers, psychologists and
social scientists. Even if we replaced "STEM" with "Engineering" in the entire
article, it's still a fallacy to say "there are 0.3 million engineering jobs,
and 11.7 million engineering graduates -- there can't possibly a shortage of
engineers." I wouldn't automatically assume that someone with an undergraduate
degree in Chemical Engineering or Civil Engineering is qualified to work at
<insert software company here>[0], in the same way that I would be completely
unqualified to be hired run an oil field or draft up a plan for my city's mass
transit system. Sometimes people _do_ have extra skills atop their degree that
lands them in a job outside of their field, but that's not true for everyone.

If anything, I think the whole "STEM shortage" sounds like a plea to US post-
secondary institutions to make their CS/EE/CE/SE graduating classes bigger --
perhaps at the expense of other STEM programs.

Edit: [0] I'm assuming a software company small enough that it's not doing
city planning on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were Civil
Engineers working at the likes of Microsoft and Google, trying to figure out
the master plan for their main campuses, but that's not my point.

~~~
jbjohns
No, I think the issue is that software developers have reached a limit of how
low a salary they are willing to work for, and not enough of them have a limit
that is low enough for what companies are willing to pay so rather than cave
in, the companies are playing politics with the hope of flooding the markets
to drive prices down nationally.

~~~
cbhl
If that is indeed the rationale, I don't think having more bodies in the SF
Bay Area is going to help. (More people means housing prices will go up, and
thus, the rational price accepted by half-decent developers should go up. It's
easy to spend 70% of a entry-level Google salary on housing in the city right
now.)

I wonder if buying up a bunch of houses in Detroit, and offering one as a
starting bonus (along with gigabit Internet and a nearby Wal-Mart) would be
enough to entice people to work for less.

------
jquery
Anecdotally, my brother, with a Mech Eng degree, has been unemployed ever
since he graduated a year and a half ago, despite looking constantly. He's
married with a kid and lives with his wife's parents in a spare bedroom.

The STEM shortage is nothing more than employers looking for cheaper workers
(either salary-wise, or without any obligation to train them the necessary
skills).

~~~
bayesianhorse
If employers were looking for cheaper workers, your brother would have taken
the cheapest job available wouldn't he?

After all, working as a Mech Eng even at minimum wage should for him be
preferable to flipping burgers at minimum wage or being unemployed, especially
with a family...

~~~
jbjohns
It depends. Countries with actual safety nets often provide enough
unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be
employed" job while looking for their next real job.

~~~
Proleps
In the Netherlands we have enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to
take some ridiculous "just be employed" job. But the longer you are
unemployed, the harder it will be to find a new job. A hole in your resume
doesn't look god

~~~
jbjohns
Of course. There is always the driver to actually work. In places that lack a
safety net you have to take some "flipping burgers" job which you _still_
can't really report on your resume so you end up with no time _plus_ that ugly
hole in your resume.

------
jbellis
The only people who claim there are plenty of talented developers to hire are
people who have never tried to hire one in the last three-plus years.

I hire developers anywhere in the world to work on cutting edge infrastructure
software and it's still tough. But not as tough as restricting us to the Bay
would be.

~~~
don_draper
Sigh... Could you please add the salary that you are looking for? I'm going to
guess it's too low.

~~~
Tichy
To be fair from his point of view he would still be correct - there are not
enough developers available to push the price below his threshold.

~~~
rmc
Tough. That's the real world. Complaining that "there aren't enough good cars
available to buy" when all I want to spend is €500 will not get much sympathy.

~~~
Tichy
If you say "not enough x" the question is always "for what?". That usually
isn't even answered in those articles. Not enough developers to defeat cancer
and world hunger? Or what?

------
swamp40
_And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like
Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B
visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year
to as many as 180 000._

So, assume a $30K salary differential, times 115K jobs = $3.45 Billion dollars
in savings.

Well, that will pay for some lobbyists...

------
tsotha
Duh? There has never been a STEM shortage, at least in the US. Ever. There has
only been duplicitous propaganda on the part of companies that want to raise
the H1-B limit in order to push down wages.

------
pkj
"The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in
part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the
end of the decade."...

That's wildly optimistic. The reality is unemployment rate for indian
engineering graduates now ranges from an optimistic 50% upto 80%..

[1]
[http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degr...](http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degree-
in-hand-a-generation-of-engineers-looks-for-alternat.html)

[2]
[http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news...](http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news/40049243_1_engineers-
iit-bombay-batch-size)

------
lutusp
Unsurprisingly, different groups define "shortage" differently. Employers call
the shortage real because they can't hire employees cheaply. Employees call
the shortage a myth because they can't find a position with a desirable
salary.

------
MarcScott
Although difficult to analyse, we must also consider the quality of STEM
degrees from different institutions. There's a world of difference between a
first class degree in Physics obtained from Cambridge compared to say
Stafforshire. Some Universities in the UK have unemployment rates for
graduates over 25%.
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10159647/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10159647/One-
in-five-graduates-from-worst-universities-left-jobless.html)

------
Kiro
The problem is that many STEM majors are not the kind of STEM workers there is
a demand for. In my country a big share of people who have a CS degree barely
know how to write real code. I think it's because 1. the education is too
theoretical 2. free education system (no barrier means a lot of people who
study without having any real interest in programming).

~~~
jbjohns
2 seems unlikely. If education is free, why not learn what ever you want? If
educate is insanely expensive then unless your family is rich, you have to try
and make sure what ever you study can recoup those costs.

~~~
Kiro
Because people don't know what they want to do so they just jump on any
education. I've been there. It's so easy to start university that literally
everyone does it and what you actually read is secondary.

In fact, many people choose bogus courses like "hat science" just to get study
allowance and access to the other benefits. So it's not surprising people pick
CS thinking "it's good money so why not".

------
bane
Part of the problem is that we also put people through an extraordinarily
difficult educational process (CS or similar) for what's largely become a
skilled vocational problem. 90% of developers working on 90% of their work
will never have to implement an algorithm of any kind that matters. They won't
have to understand higher maths, computational theory, language theory, etc.
They have to glue this piece from here with this piece from there and write
some documentation that they did so.

On the flip side, spending four years learning about computability theory
instead of the latest frameworks in foo language likewise doesn't prepare a CS
major for employability. Their first employer will have to spend lots of time
and money training them in the vocational skills they'll need.

Universities' attempts at recognizing this and educating students for this
reality give us majors like Software Engineering and Information Systems which
don't exactly match what the market needs either.

What's needed is to take a relatively smart, but ignorant person off of the
street, and in 4 years spit out a mid-level developer, with specialties in web
development, server development, etc. Their coursework should be nothing but
learning languages, APIs, development environments and frameworks and how to
coherently document their work.

For those specializing in web development, their senior project should be to
build, from scratch, an entire e-commerce site, with product catalogs, promo
codes, wishlists, shopping carts etc, including setting up all the servers,
and gluing them together. The entire thing should be meticulously documented
and launchable _tomorrow_.

Similar senior projects should go to those specializing in game development
(like the senior projects out of digipen), desktop software development (make
a basic office suite), server software development (write a database and web
server from scratch with full APIs), etc.

In very specific markets this has already happened. Video Game development,
for example has spawned vocation focused education like digipen.

CS is both over _and_ underkill for most jobs. And the result is that we
interview for CS skills, for a job that doesn't really need them.

------
graeme
My personal anecdote supporting the idea of an STEM crisis:

I'm not a developer. Last year, I was learning programming. I also had a track
record of starting and successfully executing projects. Small personal ones,
but they made money.

I tutored a student for the LSAT, and he thought I was smart. When he heard I
was learning programming, he introduced me to his sister's boyfriend, who was
a manager at a local hardware/software firm.

The guy met with me, was interested in turning me into a developer and offered
me a decent salary to do so.

He said he couldn't hire enough competent developers.

I ended up pursuing another opportunity (large commute at this job + I wanted
to build my own stuff), but this impressed on me the high value currently
given to STEM expertise. I didn't have any! Just an interest was enough.

Edit: I has learned the basics of programming, having gone though most of K &
R, and a couple of Udacity courses. But I has no programming skills that were
worth paying for at that particular moment. Nothing tht could immediately make
anyone money.

------
tokenadult
No one even talks about a crisis of too few English majors. That seems to be
beyond dispute. So maybe there is a bit more of a kernel of truth to the idea
that some (perhaps not all) STEM occupations have a limited supply of capable
workers.

~~~
dnautics
limited supply of capable workers, yes. 100% agree. But if you have an
oversupply of workers in general, out of which it's difficult to tell which
ones are capable, then what?

~~~
tokenadult
A fair question. Use research-based hiring procedures

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923)

to sift through the many persons with degrees (or even without degrees) to
find the smaller number of persons who can actually do the job. Key idea: use
a work-sample test to hire for any job.

~~~
dnautics
you can't really do that for biology or chemistry.

------
davidw
STEM seems to me to be very much _not_ zero-sum, so I think the more the
merrier.

~~~
dnautics
it can be worse than zero-sum. If you dilute the workforce with idiots, you
could wind up with a situation where projects requiring insight get completely
derailed and moreover actually competent people get passed over time after
time and quit the endeavor in frustration. This is what is happening in the
sciences.

~~~
davidw
> If you dilute the workforce with idiots

This seems to be the sort of problem that markets are pretty good at dealing
with. I wouldn't worry about it.

~~~
dnautics
Market heavily distorted by governments wanting to fund science as a source of
national pride. As you well know, number of PhDs correlates to national
greatness.

------
dhimes
"They" have been crying about a lack of STEM (it used to just be scientists
and engineers) for at least 30 years.

I don't listen to it any more. When I walked out with my doctorate, jobs were
very scarce in the science/engineering fields (although software jobs were
increasing).

From what I can gather, the soothsayers simply do a linear extrapolation of
current jobs and candidates, and show a shortage. They do no real
_forecasting_ by trying to reason about future needs.

So, I don't pay attention any more.

------
fnordfnordfnord
I'm generally happy to see STEM funding in education[1] really, I am happy to
see any funding in education. But, the "STEM shortfall" (if there is any)
isn't because of a lack of funding for specific education program, but because
of a lack of demand in those fields. If companies are having trouble finding
proper candidates for jobs (they tell me that they are), they either need to
look at their selection process (which IMO is pretty terrible) or offer more
money; probably a little bit of both. It requires a little more discipline and
sacrifice to earn a STEM degree vs many of the other degree tracks, many of
these students change plans to a simpler track that gets them more money for
their effort.

[1] Disclosure: I am a STEM educator, and I am a little bit worried that this
effort might even flood the market for STEM grads lowering wages.

------
nazgulnarsil
Grade inflation (related to political pressure about the STEM shortage
narrative) is such that a larger proportion of STEM graduates than ever before
are mostly useless.

------
Tycho
Maybe the homogeneity of STEM labour is what the myth is.

------
skylan_q
I don't understand what a "shortage" entails.

------
joeblau
Wow, My Friend just launched a stem job board on Monday. If there is a
transition from "Alarm" to "Boom", this seems like a great business
opportunity.

