The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

"I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'."

There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. Very few things unite everyone in power both in .biz and .gov quite as well as the destruction of STEM as a middle class or better lifestyle. My advice is be very careful when going up against a united powerful opposition like that.

Like I wrote, I may not know the right answer, but its not very hard to figure out STEM is, or is soon going to be, the wrong answer.

Given that there's not an actual college major titled "Google SWE II", I'm not sure what sort of standards you're expecting out of people.

(What I understand to be) Google's favorite tools - C++, Java, algo/data structure theory - don't exactly describe a holistic CS/SE/MIS curriculum. I'm sure a specifically designed trade school curriculum could train intelligent people up to ace valley hiring tests in two years or less.

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect anyone to work more than 40 hours a week.

If you are a GOOD developer, the opportunities for you are endless. And the bar for being a "good" developer is NOT very high relative to the range of abilities found among all software developers. Even horribly incompetent developers do not seem to have much trouble finding work (they do have trouble finding work at this company... usually).

I think the reason why roughly one third of "computer and information science" graduates aren't working in their field is because they themselves chose not to work in this field. The work isn't for everyone. I know quite a few people who majored in CS, were able to grind through it to get their degree, but can't stand the thought of doing this for a career. Their motivations for going into the field out of high school vary, and many are misguided, but how can you really hold a 17 year old to making a 40 year life decision?

We need more good developers. If we were allowed to hire more international developers, I can tell you we would not hire one crap developer "because they are cheap." A crap developer does not just do less quality work than a good developer, they do NEGATIVE work that costs the company more than the salary difference between them and a good developer.

From a self concerned strategic standpoint, the U.S. should use the opportunity of immigration reform to steal good developers from other countries. We are a country of immigrants, and immigration will always be important to us. Let's use it to capture the best and brightest from the rest of the world. That is how we stay on top.

This study was done by a 'non-partisan' group that's heavily backed by unions. Doesn't seem too non-partisan to me when you consider how significantly anti-immigration unions have been over the last century.

The data may be valid, but the interpretation is always the most important... and a union-backed group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank hardly seems unbiased.

There are no new developments, just more news outlets using (subjectively) bad interpretations of existing ideas/data.

Look at a site like http://www.memeorandum.com -- for any one news story, a dozen news outlets report on it (discussion section of links).

That's what's going on here: a new outlet decides to report on the same information that someone already scooped and we already discussed, and then we start the dog and pony show up here again and repeat all of our discussions with the same information we had 3 days ago, and 5 days ago, etc, when the other articles came out.

We had some brilliant people make some brilliant comments last time around, will we achieve that quality on the repeat post? Is it worthwhile to redo the effort?