Their was this recent article about STEM jobs saying we are telling young people we have this great shortage of them and to fill them we must import many immigrants while this man did some research saying their is NO shortage and in fact, STEM graduates are having trouble finding work and the pay rates are flat because of oversupply.
The idea is that US companies want cheap foreign labor.
Right. Things are very tight in certain categories, but not tight at all in others. STEM is too big to be considered as just one category.
Here is a list of companies sponsoring visas/ The biggest by far are Indian companies who bring people here to outsource close to the outsourcee. They are not really STEM jobs unless you consider basic programming jobs as STEM.
I do think the “STEM shortage” is oversold. One of my favorite factoids is the average film major makes more than the average biology major. And that is pretty true, as without a lot of higher education and biology degree pretty much qualifies you to wash test tubes. And getting a science PhD is a long, hard, poorly paid slog, which is one reason why American kids aren’t flocking to it in droves. And unlike a liberal arts degree, which teaches writing and critical thinking skills that are broadly applicable to most office jobs, a bio degree doesn’t really prepare you for much outside of that particular field. My own household actually has one biology major and one film major, and it’s been a pretty even match as to who is earning what, but the film major definitely has a lot more stability and fewer layoffs than the bio major-- and we are in a major biotech hub. I can’t imagine trying to make a living with just a biology degree in an area that doesn’t have a built-up biotech industry.
There are shortages of specific jobs. But it’s not as straightforward as it seems. One reason why solid quantitative thinkers are in such demand is that it’s a pretty rare thing to be good at. I’m not sure that I would encourage a person that is bad at math to become an enginner. Another factor is that a lot of these jobs require years and years in school making little money, with hopefully a large payoff at the end, and a lot of people would rather take the option that makes you moderate money pretty immediately. Finally, today’s shortage is tomorrow’s glut. It’s really hard to game these things.
Why wouldn’t you?
The answer is “depends”. Right now “data scientists” are in huge demand. Often PhD level mathematicians and statisticians who can create complex algorithms for analytics jobs.
Just because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are looking to pay top dollar for quant guys and engineers doesn’t mean any goon who can program a computer is eligible. Writing a high frequency trading system or search algorithms for Google is a lot different from being one of those Indian guys working a help desk call center.
Plus a lot of Americans who take STEM classes don’t have the desire or aptitude anyway. I’ve seen plenty of Americans who got into computer programming, only to transition into project/engagement management, sales or technical recruiting.
From my anecdotal observations, at least part of the problem is that companies no longer have a good internal developmental process, and just want a subject matter expert to jump in right now. If they need a Senior Engineer but they’ve never bothered to set up a decent career path for their technicians to become engineers, they may think they “need” H1Bs to fill the gap when they really could have managed without it.
Its all about H1-B visas. I’ve seen entire IT/Support departments with not one native born American. I remember a time when this would have been referred to as “discriminatory hiring”. Then there’s the Mark Zuckerberg bullshit about undocumented workers/immigration reform. Right. I wonder how many workers with Spanish surnames work for Facebook? Anybody?
The more things change … During the recession of the early 1990s we called this “The Myth” - that there were plenty of STEM jobs out there. Nope! There were 10-100 times more job seekers than open positions. A few non-economists at NSF circulated an unapproved report making this claim. They flunked Econ 101 as supply of labor does not equal demand for labor. Duh. There was a Congressional hearing. Yes, Congress once held useful hearings and passed laws! Here’s a cite from the mid 90s: Discouraged Job-Seekers Cite Crisis In Science Career Advice | The Scientist Magazine®
These days I, a former scientist, am a computer security consultant. I work with a number of younger folks who a refugees from biotech. Once again there are many more job seekers than jobs, people caught in endless cycles of scut-work postdocs, and grad schools cranking out PhDs with no regard to career opportunities. It’s a depressing history to watch repeat.
Heh… and don’t forget, that we’ve been hearing “WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH SCIENTISTS WE’RE FALLING BEHIND IN MATH SCORES OMG!!!1!11” since *&^% Sputnik and there seems to be a whole division at the Department of Education in charge of publishing a report to that effect during every administration.
Look at the title of the thread. This is about STEM jobs. I used to work in Silicon Valley, The STEM jobs are not held by Hispanics in any meaningful way. Hell, there might be more Eskimos.
I wonder if there’s a mismatch in specialization. If you really, really need people with backgrounds in physical modeling and simulation, you could have 10,000 jobs available but you’re not going to fill a lot of them. Even if there are 80,000 people with degrees in Physics or Computer Science, if your needs are really specific 78k of those may simply not have the necessary skillset (or you may wrongly assume you can’t train most of them when you really can).
I graduated in CS and I’m certainly not qualified for 98% of the jobs I see, because I focused in academic AI/Machine Learning research. I don’t want to say I couldn’t write a website to save my life, sink or swim and given a week to do some reading I could come up with something reasonable (if not perfect) no problem, but most of my peers practically specialized in web design. Despite us both having the same words on our degrees, we have wildly different niches built on the same foundation.
STEM fields are built on specializations and niches to a degree. I don’t think it’s quite as drastic as I made it sound, but I do wonder if there’s a certain degree of people talking past each other. Where all the people who graduated in specialization A are asking “where are the jobs?” and all the people who need specialization B are asking “where are the grads?” But there are extra problems out there. If 98% of the jobs ARE in specialization A, it makes sense to prepare students for it, even if it’s massively oversupplied. If all these “unfilled jobs” are not in specialization A, they’re probably not all in B, they’re probably divided up between B, C, D, E… and it’s not easy to prepare the exact proportion of students to ensure almost all of them have jobs, and almost all the jobs are filled.
One assumption these studies make is that anybody who graduates with a STEM degree is automatically qualified for a STEM job which, anyone working in hiring can tell you is very much not true. In Software Engineering, we have what’s called The Fizzbuzz test which is about the most simplest programming problem possible yet people report that up to half the college graduated computer scientists they interview struggle with it.
I’m starting to think that this may be the case as well. My company’s recently gone through a large expansion in the IT department, and it seems like half of a 300 person department is Indian now.
Before, when it was about 120 people, it was a pretty diverse mix of white, hispanic, black, asian and yes, Indians.
Then, with the expansion and an emphasis on cost-cutting, it’s become a sea of Indian guys with mustaches.
I find it extremely hard to believe that in Dallas, one of the technological hubs of the country, that if they need nearly 200 IT workers, that they’re forced to hire foreign IT workers due to a shortage of qualified locals. I think that they’re fundamentally cheap and want to hire H1-B workers from India, pay them beans, and not hire local people who require things like reasonable pay, benefits, etc…
I hate Fizzbuzz because every possible way you can write it looks wrong. I don’t mean in the sense of “incorrect”, I mean in the sense of every single way to write it, without fail, looks as if another way would be more elegant. :mad:
This. Part of the problem seems to be that the job descriptions are written by HR people that know barely enough to throw in a bunch of buzzwords and HR speak and make a description that sounds great but is not cohesive enough for anyone to actually be qualified for.
It’s nothing new either. I’ve been using a similar type of test based on Fibonacci numbers for nearly 40 years with the same results. The ‘college is not worth it anymore’ thread goes into a lot of this. Most of these jobs require people to start producing right away, the degree is just a ticket to an interview. It’s kind of like Sheldon Cooper learning to swim by studying it on the internet, not the same thing as having the actual experience.
