Do We Really Have a Shortage of STEM Workers? 491
New pweidema writes "Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School who has been writing a book on the subject of the current state of employment in science and technology fields, recently spoke at an Education Writers Association Conference about the 'STEM Worker Shortage: Does It Exist and Is Education to Blame?' The National Science Board's biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators , consistently finds that the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields. What explains these apparently contradictory trends? And as the shortage debate rages, what do we know about the pipeline of STEM-talented students from kindergarten to college, and what happens to them in the job market? An article LA Times summarizes his findings of his findings on the STEM hype: '...some of it comes from the country’s longtime cycle of waxing and waning interest in science; attention seems to focus on science every 10 to 15 years before slacking off. The only forces pushing the idea of STEM doom, he said, are those that have something to gain from it. Mostly those are STEM employers ... that want to pack the labor force with people to suppress wages ... Joining the chorus are universities that want more funding for science programs...'"
I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a vested interest in driving down wages for those few jobs that remain however.
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up!
This is exactly what is going on. There isn't a shortage of STEM workers at all. There is a shortage of STEM workers willing to work for minimum wage. What companies want is H1-B factories. Cheap foreign labor. I don't know who will buy their products when nobody has a high enough paying job to afford them though.
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:4, Insightful)
What companies want is H1-B factories. Cheap foreign labor.
Yes, that is what they want, but what they don't realize is that they actually get if they got what they ask for.
If I import cheap labor that is exactly what I get, cheap labor.
Expensive labor exists overseas too. It is expensive because they know what they are doing and are worth the extra cost. What you get when you import cheap labor is the ones who aren't competitive in their native market.
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With 100+ immigrant class of Visas H1-B is a drop in the bucket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't say anything about this explicitly, so I'll add it.
The people who study balance sheets, and decide whether tr not to risk their money on your company (either in the form of equity or loans), have apparently all decided that cheap labor is a universal good, and profits that come at the expense of squeezing them out of your labor employees, rather than from increased sales, are also markers of good management.
The effects of hiring the cheap labor (and the overall lesser skill levels that come with it) are not felt for several quarters, and since everything is all about this quarter, hiring twice the labor for two thirds the cost looks good on the current balance sheet. Plus they get to inflate their work force numbers. Since the goal of every manager is to grow head count and budget, and since nobody can objectively judge how efficiently you ran your department, more head count is better. Especially when you can't grow your budget, and especially when you can shrink you budget at the same time.
The a couple of years later, when your company starts to implode, you get your golden parachute, and the company becomes somebody else's short term problem.
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
$16,000 a year is minimum wage here, you can't even afford to live on the
east or west coast at that wage.
If they drive all wages to that level we will become a giant warsaw ghetto
like just prior to WW2, or maybe that is the idea after all...
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$16,000 a year is minimum wage here, you can't even afford to live on the east or west coast at that wage.
Just a point of clarification. There is nowhere in the United States where one can afford to live on minimum wage.
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly what is going on.
Except that it is not. There are currently about two million practicing engineers in the USA, and that number is growing by about 70,000 per year. So we are not "shedding" STEM jobs. The unemployment rate for computer professionals and engineers is about 3% [bls.gov] compared to an overall rate of over 7%.
I apologize for interrupting this whine-fest with actual facts.
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you provide specific data, why not cite it? Here are the numbers pulled from the total January 2014 unemployment rate column of your link:
- Overall unemployment is 7.0% exactly, which you got right
- The closest category I could find to science professions has a 3.1% unemployment rate
- Computer and mathematical professionals have a 2.3% unemployment rate
- Engineers have a 3.8% unemployment rate; the 3% you cited was for a much broader class of professions
All of those rates are lower than they were last year, suggesting that demand is picking up.
The NSPE indicates that the number of licensed engineers is around 450,000 [nspe.org] as of 2010, and that only about 20% of graduates in relevant majors actually go on to become licensed engineers. Their rough estimates are that there are currently about 2.2 million people in the workforce who graduated with a relevant degree, but by no means would all 2.2 million of those people be considered practicing engineers. In fact, the link indicates that 80% of them never got licensed and have likely moved on to another field.
You also only cited numbers for the E in STEM, then made generalizations about STEM as a whole, which is a bit hand-wavey of you. The article I linked did the reverse of that (as have I, inasmuch as I referenced information from the article), since they talked about T and E when they lumped computer science in with engineering for the 2.2 million number, but then used that number to make specific claims about the number of licensed engineers, despite the fact that P.E. licensure isn't relevant to the vast majority of computer science graduates.
All in all, the numbers from all of these sources--flawed as they are--seem to suggest that demand for STEM field practitioners is far outstripping the available supply (as indicated by extremely low unemployment rates and extremely low rates of new supply becoming available). As such, while we may not be shedding jobs, we do appear to have a shortage. I make no claims about whether we're shedding jobs or not, since no one in this thread has provided sufficient facts to make their case, though if we are shedding jobs, we must also be shedding new supply at an even faster rate, given that unemployment rates have gone down for all STEM fields over the course of the last year.
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All of those rates are lower than they were last year, suggesting that demand is picking up.
It may be suggested, but a closer look tells a different story. Those numbers are based on unemployment rolls. Congress ended the EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) on December 31, so that took about 5 million people off the list. Many other long-term unemployed people either gave up looking or exhausted regular benefits (which is all that's left). So the real story is not that there are more jobs, but less people looking.
Re:Future issues (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like the company I'm contracting with currently. I hadn't worked at a defense contractor for 20 years, when I was an intern in college, so I was a little shocked when I came to work here and found that everyone seemed to be near retirement age. It's OK though, in 10 years they won't need to replace these people because this company (despite being a F500) isn't going to be around I'm fairly sure. There doesn't seem to be much work going on, there's a lab downstairs I use that's full of test stands that look like they haven't been used in 30 years, and there doesn't seem to be much of a future. The company is profitable only because they can bill the DoD ridiculous sums of money for systems for white elephant airplanes.
Re:Future issues (Score:5, Insightful)
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Aside from the whole H1-B fiasco, immigrants become citizens. Those jobs, eventually, are thus filled by citizens.
I'm happy to compete with anyone who lives near me, regardless of citizenship status - we all have the same costs of living to deal with. Far, far better competing with immigrants that the same person, doing the same job in his home country, where $30k is a great professional salary.
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
It's interesting that in the Netherlands, tech companies have been telling the government that there is a shortage of about 30.000 IT workers. However, if you're actually looking for a job and trawl the internet for vacancies, you'll quickly conclude that there are about 500 vacancies tops.
There are plenty of qualified, motivated and intelligent IT professionals. If companies have such a big shortage of IT workers, they should just publish the vacancies, hire the best who apply and shut the fuck up.
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It's interesting that in the Netherlands, tech companies have been telling the government that there is a shortage of about 30.000 IT workers. However, if you're actually looking for a job and trawl the internet for vacancies, you'll quickly conclude that there are about 500 vacancies tops.
That's because cheap foreign laborers are lazy and only possess 1/60 the productivity of a Dutch person.[/sarcasm]
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Like most things, telling the truth would not let them lower the prevailing wages.
So they do what they do best and lie and lie some more.
As seen in the film "The Corporation" it often acts like a sociopath/psychopath,
and one of those traits is lying alot, much like politicians, lawyers, and bank$ters.
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Until they can get the average pay as low as the plutocrats want it lying will be
ONE of the tools they use to get the pay lowered for all jobs.
Allowing millions of illegal immigrants in is another way, and the 100+ different types
of immigrant Visa is another, the H1-B gets a lot of coverage, but the L1 has NO LIMIT...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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No. We do not have a shortage. The US has been shedding STEM jobs, not gaining unfilled ones. For almost 3 decades at this point.
We do not have a shortage and really never have had a shortage. But this is never going to be "settled" because it's all about cheap labor and always has been.
But the media frausters always claim otherwise (Score:3)
Just take a look at pp. 139-140 of The Billionaire's Apprentice,
Re:I thought this had been settled long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
[posting AC because I'm talking about my current employer]
Or, what they want are experienced people willing to work for entry-level salaries. I've been trying to fill a position for six months now, but no qualified person will work for what I'm permitted to offer them. So we've just been doing without, and the longer that goes on, the more likely the PHBs are to withdraw the position altogether.
This is a natural outgrowth of the old HR saying about attracting "the best and the brightest" but only paying "market" salaries, i.e., 80th percentile talent for 50th percentile pay.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a shortage of employers willing to pay market rates.
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And no shortage of H1B visas and outsourcing that keep wages artificially low.
Why is that "artificial"? If anything, the "natural" level of wages would be in a free market with no constraints on the movement of labor, which would be even lower.
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Because when someone invests their time, energy, and money in the institutions that make the political and cultural environment in their geographic locale a more efficient place to build a business than competing areas, they do it with the implicit understanding that they will be for the primary benefit of others who are also making sacrifices to those same institutions. Everything from a reliable power grid to sound courts of law are not at all natural, and without these artificially built institutions we
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Advocating for the race to the bottom eh ?
Well its on its way and enjoy the upheaval that is coming with it.
What we are feeling now is just the ripples on the water.
100+ different types of immigrant Visa ought to do the trick eh ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no conspiracy to push down wages - these are real complaints. The same problem exists in many fields - there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a hiring manager, when I complain about finding qualified people, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning. I've hired highschool dropouts (and am one myself) and PhD grads.
We need people that are in STEM because they WANT to be in STEM. Trying to get more people educated in a field by saying "we need more people with STEM degrees!" is like saying I need more people who know how to run. I don't want someone who knows how to run, I want someone who loves running.
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Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Insightful)
Raising how much you pay is a great way to get people who want to work for you.
Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Insightful)
and not treating them like 'resources' to be laid off the very moment the financials look less rosy, THAT will also keep engineers working for you and loyal.
I just recently went thru a major layoff and it was cold and cruel. they fired most of the american workers (silicon valley area) and every single asian and indian worker was left untouched. also, all the ones let go were of 'older age'.
stop treating us like disposables and maybe you'll find it easier to retain people. instead, its a revolving door where you bring people in, refuse to train them and then walk them out the moment things get hard, business-wise.
oh, and right after we fired 1/3 of our staff, they hired another person. yes, indian. I rest my case.
Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have kids, but if I did, I would tell them to go into blue collar work. engineering is a done-deal in the US if you are born and raised here. we are 'not economically viable' to hire anymore. we are able (and willing) to say NO when asked to do absurd amounts of overtime, whereas overseas imports are fine with this. the standard of living for engineers is pretty bad (if you measure it by how unstable our jobs really are and how many hours we are asked to work, for free).
no, I would not recommend any american enter the engineering or 'thinking skills' kinds of jobs. the US is not willing to pay for your investment (time, education costs) and you would be better off with a job that cannot be outsourced (building wiring, plumbing, wallboard, etc; those cannot be done 'remotely', and so they are actually safer than tech jobs).
what a switch that is, huh? in the 50's we were taught that we should go to school, learn our technology and we will have a secure life as long as we are good workers. this is now a LIE. you can go to school all you want, but that does not mean US companies want to hire you anymore.
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Another possibility is that you need to hire people and train them yourself so that they have the qualifications you need.
Did you read his post? Like every company I've ever worked for, he's looking for people who are "smart and willing to learn".
In software development, for entry level positions, you already have to give up the notion that a new hire will have any useful technical skills. You look for people who demonstrate that they can code at all and who seem interested in the work and eager to learn.
And it is hard to find people (which may or may not indicate a shortage): a software-related degree is only marginally pre
Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problem we have is that HR keeps adding stupid bullshit to out want-ads. We submit something with "Must be familiar with principles of scientific computer and numerical analysis in Matlab. May include some C/C++, java, fortran, and/or ada." And they translate it to 5 years experience in each of those fields. No. We don;t need you to be able to write programs in those language on day 1, but might need you to tweak a function or filter or maybe move stuff from fortran (legacy) to matlab. It's not weird fortran. It's loops and math. The kind of shit anyone who is familiar with any procedural language can figure out. But HR has their own bullshit going on (mostly justification for their existence) and so, actively perverts our job postings. Hell, we wanted to hire a writer/editor to help fix our reports and they bumped the requirement to include a BS in EE simply because our division is binned as an engineering one. WTF? I've talked to people from other businesses around here and it seems to be universal.
THE POINT IS:
We do not have a shortage of good people in the country. What we have is an excess of stupidity in the system to link people who want $X with people who can provide $X.
Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. You can easily hire top people, you just have to be willing to pay them enough. Whatever you're offering, keep doubling it and see if you're still not getting great candidates walking in the door. This is what Netflix do: They routinely offer salaries at significantly above market rate, and they have far less trouble hiring software engineers than the other Silicon Valley firms who complain about a lack of talent.
Now, you may say, "but we can't afford to offer salaries that high!" and maybe that's true, but it means that the candidates you want are out of your price range, not that they're not out there. For companies that can't pay, the solution is obvious: Encourage as many people as possible to enter STEM fields, thus increasing the pool of candidates, which in turn increases the smaller pool of elite candidates. Greater supply and equal demand causes a drop in price, and companies an now hire better talent for mediocre wages.
This equation is the only reason by tech companies have been attaching themselves to these ludicrous campaigns to teach everybody to code. Not because they really believe their some social benefit to every school kid being able to make their own smartphone app, but because they want to increase their profits by lowering their wage bill. This is hardly wild speculation, given we know for a fact that tech CEOs spent most of the 2000s illegally conspiring to lower wages via mutal non-recruitment agreements: http://pando.com/2014/01/23/th... [pando.com]
Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no conspiracy to push down wages - these are real complaints. The same problem exists in many fields - there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a hiring manager, when I complain about finding qualified people, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning.
(Emphasis mine.)
Firstly -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or snarky here -- do you want qualified people that are "open to and reasonably good at learning," or people "that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning"? Because these aren't necessarily the same thing. You're looking for someone who interviews well, probably because you don't have that many other good methods of readily determining his qualifications. But that can be a problem, because a good interviewee isn't necessarily a good on the job learner. A worst-case scenario is hiring a guy that sounds good but is just a great salesman while overlooking a guy who would do a great job but doesn't present himself as well as the other guy.
Now one can certainly respond that candidates for jobs should be able to present themselves well. Being able to "sell" oneself obviously works. But that's solving a different problem. It's solving the "I didn't get hired" problem from the candidate's POV, not the "I can't find a good candidate" problem that HR has.
Also, you say you're not trying to push down wages. But of course you are. Not maliciously. You just don't want to spend more than you have to, do you? I don't go to the grocery store looking to needlessly spend more than I have to on fruit. But on the other hand, you're not usually gonna get top quality produce at bargain prices. You pay your money and make your choice.
Applicant to job ratios suggest otherwise (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a postdoc, which puts me about as far down the narrow end of the qualifications wedge as you can get. I'm still competing with about 10 other postdocs (and never you mind all the underqualified noise) for every position I go for, corporate or academic. That is not a ratio that speaks of a shortage of employable candidates.
Believe me, anyone who reaches this stage really, really wants to be in STEM. The jobs just aren't there, unless you want to go into quantitative analysis at a bank. They just never stop hiring.
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When I spent time at a university it was a common complaint that a lot of really really intelligent advanced degree holders couldn't find positions in academia or the corporate side of things. Maybe it was just my field but I observed that there are a lot more jobs for Computer Engineers with B.S. and M.S. degrees than there are for Computer Engineers with Eng.D or Ph.Ds. It actually seemed easier to get a
Re:Education does not qualified make... (Score:5, Insightful)
" I don't want someone who knows how to run, I want someone who loves running."
code for "I want people to work a bunch of hours for free and then toss them as soon as they have a person priority."
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that a huge red flag that says you have absolutely no interest in learning.
Wrong. It means they have absolutely no interest in pedagogy. And probably little interest in the 'material' that a clueless fuck whose degree is in Education has to 'present' to them. Learning is a lifelong pursuit, whereas the people who are most successful in formal 'education' environments are the skilled rats who learn what lever to press. After they graduate, they want to watch football for the rest of their lives.
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If you didn't go to school AND you are still qualified, you are NECESSARILY good at learning on your own and clearly motivated to do so.
If you graduated, you MAY be good at learning or you might have gone through the motions to please Mom and Dad. You might only learn when spoon-fed.
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We live in an age of lies, and we are the Empire of Lies.
That is also why Ron Paul said "Truth is treason in the Empire of Lies".
Define "qualified" (Score:2)
Re:Define "qualified" (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies want someone who has already been trained to do the job they are hiring for. They want someone who can hit the ground running.
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But I feel that is true in any field.
I would also contend that you're looking in all the wrong places. Posting on Monster or Dice will get you all kinds of people.
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I hired in "computer graphics" for many years. The post-interview test (50% weed out based on interview) was "transform this program that draws an empty box to draw a sine wave." 90% failure rate. I hired some of the failures and used them for other things with great success. I "helped" some of the near misses and gave them a trial run at a job that needed graphics programming skills - that was always a mistake.
Re:Define "qualified" (Score:5, Insightful)
This (no mod points today). I'm a dynamite C programmer, some small experience in JS & C#, and I know how to design an rdb schema and write a stored procedure, but I don't have "4 years experience with jdb and Netbeans". Whatevs: give me three weeks with actual stuff to do, and you probably couldn't tell the difference, but it's darned hard to get hired.
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Because nobody wants to do on the job training any more.
and
Companies want someone who has already been trained to do the job they are hiring for. They want someone who can hit the ground running.
But then, companies can't complain that there are "no qualified candidates." Saying that you don't offer any training, are a victim of poor planning and that there are no unqualified candidates are two contradictory statements.
Re:Training needs to be improved (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course training needs to be improved, or at least there is some room for improvement.
My issue is that corps talk a big game - there there is a shortage of qualified candidates. What there is a shortage of is good training, planning, career paths and adequate salary. If there was really a shortage, we'd see changes in these areas.
replace college with apprenticeships / trades scho (Score:3)
replace college with apprenticeships / trades school settings for tech / IT jobs.
an 1-2-3 year technical schools with some kind of apprenticeships mixed in will work real good.
And they need to be real apprenticeships like other trades. not coffee / office boy internships where you are not really learning to do the job.
Programming as a vocation! (Score:5, Interesting)
Visual Studio is not just drag and drop (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps you should try using it some time, unless you think Microsoft have written an application that can automatically generate all the business logic for every single organisation that will ever exist.
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Why aren't you hiring students and allowing them to gain some practical experience before they graduate? This was a pretty common practice when I was going to school. Did this somehow go out of style due to shifting corporate culture?
Are students no longer doing internships? Are corporations no longer offering them?
Re:Programming as a vocation! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't teach your employees how to work in your company. I don't work in your industry or with your tools.
Universities are not outsourced training programs for private companies. They are places of education. If you want trained employees, train them yourself you cheapskate. The most we can do is make them more trainable.
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Alot of the MBAs think there best investment are in accounting and marketing folks.
Even while I worked at Cisco Systems the marketing ppl were paid more then some of
out better engineers, which made no sense to me.
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When I worked at Seagate, the Sales and Marketing guys got a "package" for making some quarterly goal, which included a South African safari for the whole team, and a commemorative wristwatch (about $2000 value). No engineer EVER got any kind of perk like that. Three quarters later, our group was being sold-off to another company. Which was bought by another company two years later. We engineers were treated very much like cattle. I'm sure the sales guys are all retired now because they got way more in s
Quality, not quantity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quality, not quantity (Score:5, Interesting)
After a while, I simply started to ignore degrees. Especially because I need people with a very specific skill set that is hardly, if at all, taught at schools.
My solution today is to post short "problems" with our job description. Your degree doesn't matter too much, your previous experience matters a little, your answer to my problem is what really matters, though. Of course there are always the wise guys that solve it with Google, but usually the phone interview already takes care of that (because that's where you get your next problem tossed at you).
With this strategy I now have assembled a small but very good team of people, most of whom don't have any kind of university degree at all. But they're good at what they're doing.
That's what matters to me. Not what sheet of paper decorates their walls.
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The difference in the two numbers ... (Score:4, Informative)
... is the word 'qualified'. I've never interviewed so many stupid smart people ever in my life the last 10 years. People who just got out of college and expect to pull down 6 figure salaries for work they've never done before and have no proof of how good they could be. And people that think they are much better than they really are, but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. My prior job hired a self-described 'Java programmer' that wrote some of the most horrid code I've ever seen, it didn't even come close to working. Yet he sold himself as a Java expert to the company owner (who had no IT skills), and somehow convinced him to hire him. The only thing it appeared he knew how to do was talk a good talk and use SSIS. Shortly after I left, he managed to completely obliterate a very important production database. That they had to contract with me to recover.
I now work with some really good developers because the company is choosy about who they hire. But time and time again, they lament about a shortage out there of really good developers. They get plenty of resumes, just no one worth hiring.
And attitudes ... such a bunch of spoiled babies. It's not just skills either, it's a good work ethic. Sorry .. we do have a dress code where we work. If someone can't manage to wear clean clothes that include long pants and a collared shirt every day because it's a little too restraining, they can't work here. We pay enough, I know they can afford it If someone can't manage to understand that we have standards and security requirements and they can't just write whatever they want and shove it into production, they can't work here.
So I guess if someone wants mediocrity or less, there is plenty to choose from.
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My employer simply has a six-month training wage (with a 50% raise to "normal" after the training period). Either you get what we do in those six months, or you really never will, but he has absolutely no problem with on-the-job training.
Re:The difference in the two numbers ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been on both sides, interviewer and interviewee in the past few years there are problems on both sides. And, it also depends on what you mean by qualified.
For example, NFL teams complain that there is a lack of qualified people who can throw a football even though every college team in the country has 3 or 4 on the roster. However, there is only one Peyton, Brady, or Brees. There is a reason they get paid an insane amount of money and it's because once you've narrowed the field to the best 32 guys in the country, there is still a big difference in quality.
However, the difference between superstar programmer and basically competent programmer is probably on the range of 5 to 10K at most on average. What companies mean when they say "qualified" is frequently superstar. They want 10+ years of experience in 10 different technologies and would prefer that you be under 30 and fairly cheap. They don't want to pay the equivalent of Brady or Brees salary (relatively not literally). They want people who do it because they "love" it or have passion for it.
Where I work, for programmers and engineers (P.E. types), not only do you need to be better than minimally competent in your technical field you also need to be able to manage people and do business development. How many people do you know who are average to above in a technical area, management, and marketing? And yes, we complain we can't find "qualified" people. I keep pointing out that every company would like to have the people we want and there just isn't that many to go around. In the end, coaching or management is taking a group of guys and leading them to perform such that the team is greater than the sum of the parts. It's easier if you have all stars at every position, but that is almost never going to happen.
Re:The difference in the two numbers ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You get what you pay for. Seriously. The beef I have with some requirements is that they want the engineering equivalent of star lawyers and Donald-Trump-level managers, but pay in the lower 5 digits. That's not going to meet up.
Of course there are unreasonable expectations on both sides of the fence, where some college drop out wants 6 figures and a car on company expense because he knows how to spell TCP/IP without too many errors, but in my experience the unreasonable expectations are rather on the company's side than on the employee's.
The main problem I've encountered is that companies want university level programmers and pay them like unskilled labor. And that's simply not going to work out. My budget per programmer was (in the beginning) somewhere around 40k a year. Do you think you can get highly skilled programmers with a very specific subset of skills (in this case security, which by itself is already hard to find and right now is near impossible to find) for that? I don't.
We're now closer to double that and we still have troubles finding good people. Oh, we could get all sorts of code monkeys who will of course write code that works (with security holes to shove planets through, of course), who have no idea of QA or even the simplest kind of security protocol and who think procedures only exist as part of their code. No problem, for a fraction of even the 40k. But I simply don't need them!
I need good people, and it took a while to get the upper ones to finally understand that money does the talking here. Yes, of course I want people who also "love" their work. Seriously, you don't get old in this kind of biz if you don't like what you do. But these people are highly skilled and highly sought after. And, bluntly, if you pay me 40k and someone else pays 75k to do the same thing, I really wish to hear your reason why I should take your job for 40k.
Re:The difference in the two numbers ... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry .. we do have a dress code where we work. If someone can't manage to wear clean clothes that include long pants and a collared shirt every day because it's a little too restraining, they can't work here.
Fuck you and your dress code. I've dealt with shit bags like you for 20 years. I don't meet with customers. There is no reason why I cant wear shorts to work. You're a pretentious douche bag. Listen here, people don't like being fucking zombies, walking single file into their cubicle farm to be barked at by a fuckwad like you about fucking TPS reports. Assholes like you walk around the office looking like fucking peacocks stinking up the office with your god-awful cologne and hitting on every chick in the office until she quits and files a sexual harassment suit.
I've done just fine for decades in my shorts and t-shirts when its 105 degrees outside. You want to wear a suit and tie in that kind of weather, be my fucking guest. Just don't sit next to me with your BO stink mixed with cheap cologne. I sincerely hope an employee slaps this piss out of you for being such an anal fucking douche bag. You would deserve it.
Hard to find good developers in Denver (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, we need more. A common Slashdot response is that the employers aren't paying enough to attract the talent. Well, if the talent isn't worth the money in terms of bang for buck for the company, then I guess that's that, employer doesn't get a new employee and the employee doesn't get the job. Its unfortunate for both sides at that point, the economics just don't add up.
Re:Hard to find good developers in Denver (Score:5, Insightful)
if you can't find the talent you're looking for at the price you want, then the problem is with you and your price - not the talent. if you're not getting enough "bang for your buck" then you have either grossly overestimated the "bang" you're going to find or you've grossly underestimated the "buck" that you're going to need to spend.
i can't go car shopping and complain that no one will sell me a car for ten bucks, then say "oh well i guess i don't get a car and you don't get to sell me a car!"
if the talent "isn't worth the money" then i guess you don't really need it.
Re: (Score:3)
If I got shopping for a car because having a car will save me $10,000 a year, and only find cars on sale for $20,000, then I'm not going to buy a car.
Re:Hard to find good developers in Denver (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that you said yourself that the employees are nearly universally employed already (for a salary they apparently accepted), I would say that from the side of the employee this is not an unfortunate situation at all.
Re:Hard to find good developers in Denver (Score:4, Informative)
An employee has to win the company more than he costs it. Else, the company is better off without him. That's a given. But otoh, the employee has to gain more than his expenses or taking the job would be a loss for him either.
To take a job, I must first of all be able to afford it. I have to move there, I have to get an apartment there and I have to take into account my running costs. And all that has to be compensated by the wage I will receive or me moving there is simply not viable.
If you cannot pay more, and workers can't survive on the wage you can offer, then you will not find a new worker. But saying that there is a shortage is simply not true in that case. Even if there were hundred times more workers looking for a job, if that job doesn't pay enough to sustain me, I cannot take it, and neither can anyone else.
You, in turn, cannot pay more, I understand that. The worker has to get you more than he costs. But understand that the problem is not that there are too few people around, the problem is rather that the circumstances don't allow supply and demand to meet.
Re:Hard to find good developers in Denver (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough call. I work a bit north of Denver so I'm not in the south near the Tech Center. When looking for a job at the Tech Center 6 years ago (IBM sucks let me just say), where most of the technical jobs are, the offers were for around 75k. When I asked for a little wiggle room since I was making about 92k at the time plus a job at the Tech Center would mean having to drive through Denver to get to the job (or move of course), but the companies were pretty firm. I found a new job in my area for 95k am now making over 6 figures (haven't checked my W2 yet but around that). I'm pretty happy where I am even though I think I had 3 raises in the past 6 years, not even cost of living increases really.
And just so you know, I don't mind driving. I commuted from Stafford VA to Columbia MD for a year to work at Johns Hopkins APL and lived in the DC metro area for over 30 years :)
[John]
the real shortage (Score:3, Insightful)
the cycle is somewhat humorous to me, and I laugh at every job posting I see looking for `rockstars` at 55-65k a year when other companies in the area are offering up 65-85k for the same job. (caveat, I don't work in the valley or in NY - so wages aren't on par with those markets)
I get it (Score:2)
They (employers) want people with a STEM degree and paid experience to go along with it, but they only want to pay those people wages commensurate with someone who's fresh out of college.
Fake job bro (Score:5, Informative)
And you withdrew? (Score:5, Informative)
You should have reported it. They are committing fraud.
shortage of good managers (Score:3)
I have noted a significant shortage in management who understand the work they oversee.
But be that as it may, even with good management at the mid level, accountants & asshole finance guys run the show and will do anything to their staff to save money on next quarter's balance sheet.
American business has bought into the hype game 100%....until we take a flamethrower to all that bullshit we will see problems like this....this is a **symptom** of a problem
What contradiction? (Score:2)
The summary frames this as a false conundrum.
...consistently finds that the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields. What explains these apparently contradictory trends?
There is no contradiction between those two statements. Perhaps reading comprehension is what we are lacking. Let's remove the politics by replacing STEM graduates with oranges and see what happens:
1. The US produces more oranges than the citizens can eat.
2. Citizens are struggling to find quality oranges.
Conclusion: We produce lots of poor quality oranges.
Now, this is not to say that we don't really need more good quality oranges. But if you forcibly increas
The Problem is Hitting the Ground Running (Score:5, Insightful)
What they teach in a Computer Science degree are some of the more common or interesting algorithms, algorithm analysis and design, some operating system theory, say how to write a mouse driver as did my friend at UC Santa Cruz.
So you get out on the workforce looking for your first job, and you see that the craigslist "sof / qa / dba" section wants someone who knows PHP, Javascript and MySQL.
So you buy some books and learn those, maybe you get the job, but eventually you go looking for another job. They want C# .Net, Microsoft Internet Information Server and SQL Server.
I now have a vast number of technical books, and a hard time getting a job because I've never written an Android App.
How about on-the-job training? There were at least at one time some companies that did it. That's how I learned Java, Python, Smalltalk, Postscript and UNIX Sysadmin. But on the job training is very uncommon these days, because employers want "someone who can hit the ground running".
If you paid your new hire to spend his or her first week reading an O'Reilly book, then the next month paired up with a more experienced coder, you'd find that there is no shortage of workers, rather there is a surplus.
Not all STEM fields are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Class Wars (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Class Wars (Score:4, Insightful)
You've given your home over to the nearest Indian tribe it was stolen from, and made reparations for over 100 years of American imperialism throughout Latin America: crashing economies, supporting fascist massacres, and overthrowing democratically-elected governments?
No? Then STFU about "illegal immigration" and buy a history book, troglodyte humungoulus.
Welfare was ended 20 years ago. By a Democrat, replaced with "workfare", where there are lifetime caps on benefits and you have to be looking for work to collect. You've had two full decades to come up with a new talking point, but your resources are obviously limited.
Try answering this simple interview question (Score:2)
I've been asked this same question in interviews twice:
write a C function to reverse a C-string in place.
I expect most slashbots can supply a correct answer, but a good friend of mine who has many years of experience as a visual basic coder, and who does know some basic C, is unable to answer the question.
When I supplied my answer, the company owner said "I see you have an eye for efficiency". I found that puzzling. Perhaps that's why I got the job.
I've interviewed with google a few times. I won't tell y
Re: (Score:3)
Very true indeed.
But what I noticed is that degrees mean jack when it comes to basic things like this. I've had people with degrees in CS and whatnot who were great in theory. But when it came to coating that theory in code, most suddenly drew a blank.
Likewise, when I was working at a company that deals with malware analysis, we were looking for programmers with at least a bit of an ASM background. What we got were mostly people with a lot of experience in, say, VB and JS. Eventually I designed a simple que
Theory (Score:2)
"the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields"
Perhaps the graduates are unable to do the work.
Follow the money (Score:2)
The reason is simply that it pays better to move into BA. Seriously, take a look at your earning opportunities with a STEM degree, then compare to what a BA can make. And finally compare the workload.
Even I had to move away from my beloved engineering and into management because it was just effin' impossible to get ahead otherwise. I now make a lot more money with a lot less work on my shoulders. If I had a BA degree instead of a STEM one, maybe I would've gotten here 10 years ago.
Specificity... (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:3)
A programmer is born on the crib not on college (Score:4, Interesting)
Without the right amount of culture (a computer and incentive to try and create stuff with it) while still in infancy you most likely won't have a person that:
A: Wants to program for a living.
B: Is good at it.
The same is true for many other areas, electrical engineers that dismantle radios as kids for example.
So it is not enough to try to get high school kids into STEM bachelors, you need to have the right culture while growing up to make a good professional. That is one (of many) reasons why woman are underrepresented in STEM fields, they are not encouraged at a young age to do this type of activity.
Regional Crisis (Score:4, Insightful)
There is not a national STEM problem but there are places with very local and very acute problems with finding enough people for the work available. For multiple reasons and factors most of those STEM style jobs left for elsewhere but the need for scientists and engineers didn't from places like Idaho and Tennessee.
I fully expect you can't walk through a crowed mall in Seattle or San Fransisco without bumping into someone who is STEM educated. I also fully expect that there are people who would do anything for another lab scientist or engineer on staff in a company located in Omaha, Nebraska.
What does the economist say? (Score:5, Informative)
The economist says there's never a shortage, just a shortage at a given price. E.g., Robert R. Prechter, Jr: "In a free market, shortages are impossible; there is only a price. Rubies and Picassos are scarce, but there's never a shortage of them. You can buy all you want any day of the week. Just pay the price." [mises.org] You can have all you want if you're willing to pay more.
S != T != E != M (Score:5, Insightful)
Difference between "college degree" and education (Score:3)
Notice that word "qualified"?
Merely possessing a STEM degree does not automatically mean one is prepared to step into a STEM job.
In an effort to win federal and state money, colleges and universities (as well as public schools) are racing to implement ANYTHING that looks like STEM programs, lowering the criteria to participate, and building false hopes in these students that despite their remedial math and science classes, they were going to be "Engineers" when they graduate...
What they are not telling you... (Score:3)
Yes, we do have a shortage of STEM candidates in the country....
However, what they are not telling you is, that the shortage is due to the fact nobody who has that sort of background wants to work for $24K a year with food stamp supplemental income, like WalMart employees.
It is so hard to find those sorts of people.
Slight amendment... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields" - at the wages they are willing to pay and with the qualifications they require. This notion that we don't have enough STEM workers is ridiculous. The reason that Employers want more H1-B workers is that H1-B workers don't have the same employment protections that US Citizens have and will work for less money. Period.
As I see it, here are the problems:
1) Unrealistic expectations on the part of Employers - Have you seen some of these job postings? They want the applicant to know everything under the Sun and the starting salary is 50K. Good luck with that.
2) Resume screening programs/HR people - Often, good candidates are excluded from even applying for a job unless they meet each and every requirement. Sometimes the rejection is done via software and sometimes it's someone in HR that simply doesn't understand what the requirements mean and their relative importance to the position. The whole system encourages lying and gaming in order to get the interview.
3) The insistence that candidates have a 4 year degree - I'm not against higher education but I've been in the business long enough to know that lots of jobs in IT can be done by someone that does not have a 4 year degree, as long as they get the proper training and mentoring. Heck, even people with 4 year degrees need training and mentoring. This notion that people without 4 year degrees are incapable of learning IT skills is elitist and absurd.
Start addressing some of these issues and the STEM "shortage" will disappear.
Higher Ed, by the way, loves this idea of giving out more H1-B visas. Why? Because it will attract more foreign students to their schools if the Student can get a Green Card the day they graduate. And foreign students just happen to pay about double the tuition that an in-state, US Citizen would pay for exactly the same courses.
One thing I have learned working with big Universities over the years - they love money as much as the greedy private sector capitalists that they love to deride.
So Big Business and Big Education promote the idea of STEM shortage as a means to an end. The US STEM worker gets left out in the cold.
Re: (Score:3)
If you pay peanuts, expect to get monkeys.
Re: (Score:3)
H1-B is just the tip of the iceberg, there are 100+ immigrant Visas for flooding
the US labor market. Many are used under false pretense to get ppl here,
then they switch to a different type later, or just have a kid once they are here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
I'd be more inclined to think the MBA managers are idiots then the ppl who
passed with an engineering degree.
There may be some STEM degree folks who paid ppl to take their tests, etc etc,
and some may be functionally non performing, but I am sure that is in
the minority based off the ppl I have met.
Some STEM degrees are more like a 5 year degree now, and your insulting their
accomplishment shows that you likely have an inferiority complex and feel better
by insulting others.