# Are companies lying about STEM jobs? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 20, 2014, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858 "2014-05-20T20:16:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2014, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/81 "2014-05-28T13:54:49Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > First of all, talent appears to be distributed something closer to a power law than linear or a bell curve. In my very rough estimation, for every 10x you increase in selectivity, you get a doubling of productivity/talent. ie: the top 10% of programmers will be twice as productive as average, the top 1% will be 4x as productive, the top 0.1% will be 8x and the top 0.01% will be 16x as productive as average. I would agree with this (or some variation of this ratio). There are some people who simply don’t get it. It’s the sort of field where you can have one guy who builds an entire web app in his dorm room overnight, a whole bunch of competent to very competent programmers, and a bunch of people who care barely understand the concept of a FOR / NEXT loop unless you give them very detailed and specific requirements. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2014, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/82 "2014-05-28T16:30:34Z")
> [@Dangerosa](#): > > And that is where the jobs are. Science jobs - not really so much. Lots of people with a B.S. in Biology having a career as a barista. It isn’t that much different than an English Lit degree. Math - you teach. I know there is lots of math research going on - but not so much that the jobs fall from the sky. But Technology and Engineering - you see the jobs. > > Its the practical applications for those fields where the jobs are - Science becomes engineering in the real world for most people - and math becomes financial modeling - just as English Lit becomes marketing or technical writing. > > And all that goes back to we teach students to think in terms of subject - not career. They like Science. They are good at English. Few even know they can take their math skills and do financial modeling until late in college. And by then, we’ve taught many of them to be academic snobs - you didn’t learn to deconstruct Jane Austen so you could read Jane Austen - you learned to deconstruct Jane Austen because someone is going to describe a business problem to you and you’ll need to deconstruct the business problem - and it will be a boring business problem like “why do we get so many returns on large appliances?” Well, from where I’m sitting this is how I often see it. I’m a process development chemist. I like being a process development chemist. I could, if I had to, make a move fairly easily into discovery chemistry. If a company is willing to do some training, I can learn polymers or formulation or the nitty-gritty of analytical work. I may not want to take a job in any of those fields, but I could do it if I had to and was given the chance. I probably can’t easily make a move into computational. I definitely can’t get one of those IT or engineering jobs with a lot of additional study. The best I might be able to do relatively quickly would be a chemical engineering degree. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to take two degrees in chemistry and five plus years in process development and find a job in a different field without taking a position off the bench while already employed as a chemist first. Much less getting even an interview through the disaster of a hiring process often used by companies these days. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2014, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/83 "2014-05-28T20:45:02Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > First of all, talent appears to be distributed something closer to a power law than linear or a bell curve. In my very rough estimation, for every 10x you increase in selectivity, you get a doubling of productivity/talent. ie: the top 10% of programmers will be twice as productive as average, the top 1% will be 4x as productive, the top 0.1% will be 8x and the top 0.01% will be 16x as productive as average. Barry Boehm, in a paper from the '70s I think, showed that the best programmers were 10x more productive than the worst or average programmers. His advice was to spend more to hire the best. I don’t think he broke it down by bands like you have. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2014, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/84 "2014-05-28T23:35:27Z")
> [@magellan01](#): > > Glad to hear it. You’d never get that impression working in Silicon Valley, or California generally. But I’d love to see the breakdown based on actual jobs. My fuss is that they’re counting the custodial staff at Google in those numbers. I did a decidedly unscientific poll using our internal directory (no comment on where I work, but it’s a well-known Silicon Valley company with several thousand people). I counted the number of people with the top 5 Hispanic surnames (Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez, and Lopez) vs. top 5 US surnames (Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, and Brown), specifically including only STEM positions. I get 17 vs. 53. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2014, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/85 "2014-05-28T23:41:17Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Barry Boehm, in a paper from the '70s I think, showed that the best programmers were 10x more productive than the worst or average programmers. His advice was to spend more to hire the best. I don’t think he broke it down by bands like you have. I think it really depends on the problem. For churning out reams of business logic, I’d posit that there’s not a tremendous difference between average and top programmers. But scale the problem difficulty up, and the ratio approaches infinity. Certain problems _can’t_ be solved by someone below a certain skill threshold. I certainly have had challenges where I simply had to hit the books and review the basics before I could make forward progress. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2014, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/86 "2014-05-29T04:10:23Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > I think it really depends on the problem. For churning out reams of business logic, I’d posit that there’s not a tremendous difference between average and top programmers. But scale the problem difficulty up, and the ratio approaches infinity. Certain problems _can’t_ be solved by someone below a certain skill threshold. I certainly have had challenges where I simply had to hit the books and review the basics before I could make forward progress. In terms of programming concepts or the application area? I think Boehm’s work was on business programming - I don’t recall which level. But I think a good programmer could still be ten times better in this field also. She can just type the code, having done something similar before, where the less competent guy would be slowly working it out. I saw this kind of delta when grading CS200 type programs. Some kids got it, some didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2014, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/87 "2014-05-29T05:09:18Z")
> [@magellan01](#): > > Glad to hear it. You’d never get that impression working in Silicon Valley, or California generally. But I’d love to see the breakdown based on actual jobs. My fuss is that they’re counting the custodial staff at Google in those numbers. Google just recently revealed that [3% of it’s workforce is hispanic](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/getting-to-work-on-diversity-at-google.html) and 2% is black, lending weight to the assertion that essentially no non-asian minorities are being hired in tech. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2014, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/88 "2014-05-29T05:23:33Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > In terms of programming concepts or the application area? Both, I suppose. There’s a limit to how big a program a given person can fit in their head. Once exceeded, productivity goes way down (again, I’ve observed this in myself). A better programmer can fit more in her head at once than an average one, so given a program that lies between these two thresholds, the better programmer will be vastly more efficient. For a smaller program, the difference isn’t so drastic. I suppose I should add that “fitting a program in your head” isn’t just a matter of memory, but also storage efficiency–for very large programs, you can’t know every line, but you can know where to look for a piece of code. And yeah, concepts too. This one is more of a judgement call, though–if you tell me to implement a game pathfinding algorithm, I’ll have a hard time and will spend time reading the literature before getting started. For someone with experience, it might be a trivial task. Does that make her a better coder, or just someone with more experience? > [@Voyager](#): > > I think Boehm’s work was on business programming - I don’t recall which level. But I think a good programmer could still be ten times better in this field also. She can just type the code, having done something similar before, where the less competent guy would be slowly working it out. Personally, I’ve found that the areas where my own productivity had gone up most are in areas where I can build _elegance_ into the system. Find an abstraction that models the problem at hand well, architect the code around that, and you end up with easy to read code with minimal duplication. Someone else might accomplish the same thing with buckets of spaghetti code. However, I find that certain types of code (like web coding) aren’t amenable to that. Maybe they have lots of annoying logical cases that don’t quite have enough commonality to merge. Maybe it requires complicated text formatting that again has enough differences between the cases that they can’t be easily unified. Mainly, when code is subject to volatile external constraints, it becomes difficult to write elegant code, and spaghetti code is the norm. > [@Voyager](#): > > I saw this kind of delta when grading CS200 type programs. Some kids got it, some didn’t. There’s definitely a dichotomy at that level as well–I certainly recall seeing the difference as an undergrad. I was by no means a fantastic coder at the time, but I could at least produce a small, single-task program that was reasonably elegant and bug-free. Lots of others could, too. But a certain set could never do it. I hope they aren’t doing anything too important. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2014, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/89 "2014-05-29T05:23:40Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > I did a decidedly unscientific poll using our internal directory (no comment on where I work, but it’s a well-known Silicon Valley company with several thousand people). > > I counted the number of people with the top 5 Hispanic surnames (Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez, and Lopez) vs. top 5 US surnames (Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, and Brown), specifically including only STEM positions. I get 17 vs. 53. “Top 5 Hispanics” may get more Fernandez than Hernandez, it probably won’t make a difference in this case but you may want to check both, as well as Gonzalez, Perez and Sanchez. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2014, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/90 "2014-05-29T09:42:46Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > “Top 5 Hispanics” may get more Fernandez than Hernandez, it probably won’t make a difference in this case but you may want to check both, as well as Gonzalez, Perez and Sanchez. Mainly I just wanted to see if we’re in the ballpark of a decent distribution, and it seems that we are. It’s always hard to judge this kind of thing without bias, so I wanted something approaching hard data. One strange thing I’ve noticed is that our company seems to partition into national cliques. There’s the “Russian mob”, and the Polish, and the Chinese, and so on. For some reason, it seems the Hispanics were clustered in technical marketing. Is this due to hiring biases (not necessarily malicious–more like people hiring others from their school)? Just random clustering? I don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![JEngelman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e79b87/32.png) [@JEngelman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JEngelman)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/91 "2014-05-31T13:01:53Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > Employers can be both selective and there be a shortage if you understand a few things about the tech industry. > > First of all, talent appears to be distributed something closer to a power law than linear or a bell curve. In my very rough estimation, for every 10x you increase in selectivity, you get a doubling of productivity/talent. ie: the top 10% of programmers will be twice as productive as average, the top 1% will be 4x as productive, the top 0.1% will be 8x and the top 0.01% will be 16x as productive as average. > > Second, productivity is **not** additive, instead, it’s highly non-linear. Adding someone who is below average to a team can often decrease overall productivity and velocity is maximized in small teams that work well together. > > Thus, taking both of these factors together can help explain why, even during a shortage, it might be rational to be ultra-picky vs lowering your standards. > > That’s not to say there are numerous dysfunctions around tech hiring that probably contribute far more in the real world towards this situation such as box ticking HR, non-programmers trying to hire programmers, poorly designed interviews, rampant sexism and ageism, voodoo magic rituals around hiring, the talent industry being broken and a thousand other idiotic things. Employers complaining that there is a shortage of high tech workers are like women complaining that there is a shortage of rich, handsome men, and men complaining that there is a shortage of young, beautiful women. It is in the interest of high tech employers to flood the country with employees with H1B visas. It is the interest of American citizen high tech employees to keep those H1B visa people out. Many people who favor more restrictions on immigration are motivated by irrational bigotry and ethnocentrism. Nevertheless, it is a legitimate economic issue. The more people there are looking for a job, the harder it is go get a job, the less one is paid who gets a job, and the easier it is to lose that job. The high rate of immigration is a major reason for the growing income gap. ---
**Author:** ![JohnGalt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johngalt/32/184_2.png) [@JohnGalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnGalt)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/92 "2014-05-31T14:59:23Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I saw this kind of delta when grading CS200 type programs. Some kids got it, some didn’t. I see this as well, and as someone who immediately “got it” it’s hard to remember that not all students get it. Slowing down the lectures, simplifying the examples, doing more in class helps, but I’ve had the talk with several students that they should be looking at other careers (such as network admin). I’d hate to send them to a job that would just be frustrating for them. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/93 "2014-05-31T17:59:40Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > Google just recently revealed that [3% of it’s workforce is hispanic](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/getting-to-work-on-diversity-at-google.html) and 2% is black, lending weight to the assertion that essentially no non-asian minorities are being hired in tech. Google’s hiring is heavily weighted towards people with advanced degrees. Its rare to find someone at Google that doesn’t have at least a Masters degree. When you are looking for minority, particularly African American and Hispanic candidates, but your minimum hiring requirements include an advanced degree, you have a very small pool of candidates. And just having the last name of Lopez and a master’s degree doesn’t mean you are a good fit for Google, whose hiring process is pretty focused on getting people who are good fits. Lots of White, Asian, and Indian people with Master’s degrees don’t make it through the interview process. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/94 "2014-05-31T19:04:00Z")
> [@Dangerosa](#): > > Google’s hiring is heavily weighted towards people with advanced degrees. Its rare to find someone at Google that doesn’t have at least a Masters degree. When you are looking for minority, particularly African American and Hispanic candidates, but your minimum hiring requirements include an advanced degree, you have a very small pool of candidates. And just having the last name of Lopez and a master’s degree doesn’t mean you are a good fit for Google, whose hiring process is pretty focused on getting people who are good fits. Lots of White, Asian, and Indian people with Master’s degrees don’t make it through the interview process. On top of that, they tend to prefer people from ivies. Unfortunately, the number of ivy league graduates with advanced degrees doesn’t include a large number of non-asian non-white minorities. That’s even before you factor in personality fit and relevant skills (Google doesn’t particularly need computer graphics specialists, for instance). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/95 "2014-06-01T05:01:36Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > Both, I suppose. There’s a limit to how big a program a given person can fit in their head. Once exceeded, productivity goes way down (again, I’ve observed this in myself). A better programmer can fit more in her head at once than an average one, so given a program that lies between these two thresholds, the better programmer will be vastly more efficient. For a smaller program, the difference isn’t so drastic. > > I suppose I should add that “fitting a program in your head” isn’t just a matter of memory, but also storage efficiency–for very large programs, you can’t know every line, but you can know where to look for a piece of code. That’s an interesting concept. However the program one fits in ones head is not just code. The experienced programmer has a library of techniques which can be swapped in. While the new programmer can see a problem as requiring 100 lines, the experienced programmer sees it as 10 or 12 lines. I have some common code which I can type as fast as cut and paste. Grandmaster chessplayers do the same thing, > [@](#): > > Personally, I’ve found that the areas where my own productivity had gone up most are in areas where I can build _elegance_ into the system. Find an abstraction that models the problem at hand well, architect the code around that, and you end up with easy to read code with minimal duplication. Someone else might accomplish the same thing with buckets of spaghetti code. Elegance or the right hack. Things should only be as elegant as they have to be, no more. I do lots of special purpose tools. 80% of the time they never get used again - I can improve it for the 20% of the time it does. > [@](#): > > However, I find that certain types of code (like web coding) aren’t amenable to that. Maybe they have lots of annoying logical cases that don’t quite have enough commonality to merge. Maybe it requires complicated text formatting that again has enough differences between the cases that they can’t be easily unified. Mainly, when code is subject to volatile external constraints, it becomes difficult to write elegant code, and spaghetti code is the norm. The secret of a good architecture is understanding volatility and planning for it. The system I build had no specs worth mentioning - the user community had never done this before, and had no real idea of what they wanted. Knowing this upfront I was able to build a general framework and make it extensible. Three years later it is still nice and solid and does not need a rewrite, despite handling stuff I would have said would never, ever have come up. Computer architecture (which I did my Ph.D in) teaches you how to architect software systems also, in being a good way of looking at stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/96 "2014-06-01T05:03:11Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > On top of that, they tend to prefer people from ivies. Unfortunately, the number of ivy league graduates with advanced degrees doesn’t include a large number of non-asian non-white minorities. That’s even before you factor in personality fit and relevant skills (Google doesn’t particularly need computer graphics specialists, for instance). I don’t know Google’s college list, but I do know ours, and unless you define “Ivy” very broadly we’d much rather hire someone from say Stanford than Dartmouth. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2014, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/97 "2014-06-03T08:09:46Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > That’s an interesting concept. However the program one fits in ones head is not just code. The experienced programmer has a library of techniques which can be swapped in. While the new programmer can see a problem as requiring 100 lines, the experienced programmer sees it as 10 or 12 lines. I have some common code which I can type as fast as cut and paste. Grandmaster chessplayers do the same thing, Agreed. That’s along the lines of what I meant by “efficiency,” though I was thinking more in terms of working within an existing codebase alongside other team members, where the code may be suboptimal. You still need to grok the system, even if the code is not how you would have written it. Still, what you say still applies–there’s value in the kind of mental compression you describe. > [@Voyager](#): > > Elegance or the right hack. Things should only be as elegant as they have to be, no more. I do lots of special purpose tools. 80% of the time they never get used again - I can improve it for the 20% of the time it does. Oh yes. A while back, we had need for an assembler ASAP. I said I could write one in a day; my co-worker said no way, with $40 on the line. He was thinking of something written in Yacc or some other nonsense. I knew that it was a constrained problem and that a parser generator would be massive overkill; just writing the grammar and getting it “hooked in” to a program would probably take a day. I wrote a special-purpose program and test suite that covered 100k test cases within the day. It’s proven reliable and extensible. Right tool for the right job. > [@Voyager](#): > > The secret of a good architecture is understanding volatility and planning for it. The system I build had no specs worth mentioning - the user community had never done this before, and had no real idea of what they wanted. Knowing this upfront I was able to build a general framework and make it extensible. All true, but you have to be careful to avoid the inner-platform effect. You don’t want to make your system so flexible and extensible that it is as complicated as the system it resides within. It takes a light touch (and I could use some refinement myself: I think this is just something cultivated over time). ---
**Author:** ![Defensive\_Indifference](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/defensive_indifference/32/6502_2.png) [@Defensive\_Indifference](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Defensive_Indifference)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2014, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/98 "2014-06-04T15:50:11Z")
> [@JEngelman](#): > > Employers complaining that there is a shortage of high tech workers are like women complaining that there is a shortage of rich, handsome men, and men complaining that there is a shortage of young, beautiful women. > > It is in the interest of high tech employers to flood the country with employees with H1B visas. Whenever some business guy goes on the news talking about how his industry has a shortage of workers, I always think of the handbills in _Grapes of Wrath_ > [@John Steinbeck](#): > > [Ma said], “Seems too nice, kinda. I seen the han’bills fellas pass out, an’ how much work they is, an’ high wages an’ all; an’ I seen in the paper how they want folks to come an’ pick grapes an’ oranges an’ peaches. That’d be nice work, Tom, pickin’ peaches.” > > \ > > “Oh, that ain’t so,” [Ma] said. “Your father got a han’bill on yella paper, tellin’ how they need folks towork. They wouldn’t go to that trouble if they wasn’t plenty work. Costs ‘em good money to get them han’bills out. What’d they want ta lie for, an’ costin’ 'em money to lie?” > > \ > > “‘Course you ain’t gonna fret me. I got a han’bill says they need men. Don’t make no sense if they don’t need men. Costs money for them bills. They wouldn’ put ‘em out if they didn’ need men.” > > \ > > Tom said, “Back home some fellas come through with han’bills—orange ones. Says they need lots a people out here to work the crops.” > > The young man laughed. “They say they’s three hunderd thousan’ us folks here, an’ I bet ever’ dam’ fam’ly seen them han’bills.” > > “Yeah, but if they don’ need folks, what’d they go to the trouble puttin’ them things out for?” > > “Use your head, why don’cha?” > > “Yeah, but I wanta know.” > > “Look,” the young man said. “S’pose you got a job a work, an’ there’s jus’ one fella wants the job. You got to pay 'im what he asts. But s’pose they’s a hunderd men.” He put down his tool. His eyes hardened and his voice sharpened. “S’pose they’s a hunderd men wants that job. S’pose them men got kids, an’ them kids is hungry. S’pose a lousy dime’ll buy a box a mush for them kids. S’pose a nickel’ll buy at leas’ somepin for them kids. An’ you got a hunderd men. Jus’ offer ‘em a nickel—why, they’ll kill each other fightin’ for that nickel. Know what they was payin’ las’ job I had? Fifteen cents an hour. Ten hours for a dollar an’ a half, an’ ya can’tstay on the place. Got to burn gasoline gettin’ there.” He was panting with anger, and his eyes blazed with hate. “That’s why them han’bills was out. You can print a hell of a lot of han’bills with what ya save payin’ fifteen cents an hour for fiel’ work.” Of course, now they don’t even have the expense of printing the handbills. They just issue some press releases and go to interviews with credulous reporters. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c57346/32.png) [@Little\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Pig)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2014, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/99 "2014-06-08T04:32:45Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Computer architecture (which I did my Ph.D in) teaches you how to architect software systems also, in being a good way of looking at stuff. Agreed. My father taught me that on my first job, right out of high school. ---
**Author:** ![rat\_avatar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rat_avatar/32/255_2.png) [@rat\_avatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rat_avatar)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858/100 "2014-06-12T06:23:58Z")
> [@JEngelman](#): > > The computer field has become very specialized, and very competitive. Employers are often open in stating that they are looking for “the perfect candidate” who will “hit the ground running.” > > Employers would not be that selective if there was a shortage of high tech workers. > > It is becoming more difficult to get a permanent job as a computer programmer, one with job security, a career path, and health and retirement benefits. Employers like to hire contract tech workers. These are hired for as briefly as three months. They are paid as little as $25 an hour, with no benefits. > > When a contract is over the tech worker has to send out hundreds of resumes. He or she may have to move hundreds of miles to get another contract position. If he of she cannot find another high tech job in six months his or her career as a computer programmer may be over. You live in the East. The market over there has always been more about industries that mostly have solved problems. The region also tends to attract companies which typically can’t be called innovators anymore. Many are fighting for a shrinking part of a once profitable market and thus the bad job prospects in the area. I can promise you that we aren’t being picky at my work place, but we just can’t hire devops engineers who have massive knowledge gaps. Those are the candidates you see. Lots and lots of people who get siloed and don’t keep expanding their knowledge. FYI, we have 25% of the job openings we have are FTE software engineering jobs, with good benefits and good pay. If you lived in the west you would be getting dozens of calls a week for good local jobs by simply posting your resume to linkedin, dice and monster. You may complain about moving to a tech hub but H1B visa holders are willing to move, we would rather hire you. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-companies-lying-about-stem-jobs/688858.md?page=6)