Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is there a STEM worker shortage?

blog.vivekhaldar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 80 posts

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#21

Post by dnautics »

trekky1700 wrote: post #13

It's a concerning trend. Lot's of people go into the fields looking for high salaries and job opportunities, and then have no interest and thus talent in the field. There's so many totally inept people with even graduate degrees in computer science. At the same time, look into some of the top University's CS exams and they're writing code on paper. They're not training effective and talented programmers, they're trai…

This problem exists in the "hard sciences" too. There happens to be an intern in our lab, who is very motivated to do science, and actually fairly competent, but there are just some really critical things that are missing she just can't do basic mental arithmetic - it takes her minutes to figure out what volume to add to do a 1:20 dilution. Then she writes it down so that she doesn't have to do that calculation again in the future. She's always asking to make sure her procedure is correct, and has never creatively come up with an experiment on her own. This is compounded by self-doubt, there are procedures that need to be done extremely quickly, because there's an air-sensitive compound, and I've told her she needs to be snappy, and if she needs to, practice it 20 or 50 or 100 times to get the whole thing done under a minute or two, still no, and I think it's affecting the results, which of course, increases her self-doubt, so she tries to be more careful, which makes things slower, etc etc (she's not my intern so I can't be too aggressive in giving her criticism). This student has a master's degree and was applying to PhD programs at Harvard. I think Harvard rejected her, and the best grad school she got into had "people worse than her" (which I don't doubt, like I said, she's competent overall), so she's applying again this fall.

I can't take her aside and tell her, "you are not PhD material". I leave it to the reader to figure out why. She would be fine in industry as a lab tech. I presume something similar happens at a lower level where people who are techs, shouldn't even be at that level.

Contrast this with a high school intern in the other lab, who successfully built a giant 6 meter bioreactor that is actually being used to process waste at an industrial facility, and totally took down a professor that asked a dumb question during her "presentation on what she did".... I am terrified that she will leave STEM - she didn't get into as good a college as she should have.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#22

Post by bowlofpetunias »

angdis wrote: post #7
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #2

tl;dr: there is no shortage, its just that most candidates are crap

And the real reason that the "candidates are crap" is that too many employers no longer spend the time and resources to train their workers properly. Instead employees are expected to get hired with insanely specific skills and "hit the ground running" working for some clueless line and project managers who don't give a damn about what happens outside of their small-minded metrics.

As a hiring manager, it happens very, very rarely that I encounter someone worth training.

When we're talking "crap" candidates, we're talking a complete lack of both talent and passion. It would be a waste of time and effort to try to train these people.

Education is part of the problem. I don't expect higher education to result in immediately applicable job skills, but I do expect it to weed out the fundamentally incompetent.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#24

Post by hackula1 »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #9
gopher1 wrote: post #3

This guy linked to the IEEE Spectrum article, but I don't think he read it, because they address the issue about defining STEM workers, and despite his anecdotal evidence, they came to the conclusion that, yes, the STEM shortage is a myth.

No, they don't address the issue in that article, they carefully circumvent it. Like all shortage-denial articles, they focus on education rather than actual practical competence. There is no shortage of STEM graduates. There is a shortage of people actually capable of doing the jobs which, amongst other things , require a STEM background. And for most software development jobs, the latter isn't even the most importa…

> We complain about a shortage of competent people.

As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#25

Post by dnautics »

hackula1 wrote: post #17
dnautics wrote: post #11

>The flaw is in the assumption that every STEM degree holder is a qualified candidate for a STEM job. There is also a flaw in the assumption that every STEM jobholder is qualified for a STEM job.

IDK, I could see this the other way around too. If you are currently doing the job, then you must be qualified for it, or are soon to be fired. There are probably some small percentage of people who just slide under the radar, but I would think if you were entirely incompetent and unable to do your job you would not last long.

sometimes it's not trivial to fire people, because lawyers could get involved.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#27

Post by trekky1700 »

dnautics wrote: post #21
trekky1700 wrote: post #13

It's a concerning trend. Lot's of people go into the fields looking for high salaries and job opportunities, and then have no interest and thus talent in the field. There's so many totally inept people with even graduate degrees in computer science. At the same time, look into some of the top University's CS exams and they're writing code on paper. They're not training effective and talented programmers, they're trai…

This problem exists in the "hard sciences" too. There happens to be an intern in our lab, who is very motivated to do science, and actually fairly competent, but there are just some really critical things that are missing she just can't do basic mental arithmetic - it takes her minutes to figure out what volume to add to do a 1:20 dilution. Then she writes it down so that she doesn't have to do that calculation again…

Wow, I didn't realize it was quite so bad everywhere. This really shows how desperately reform in the education sector is needed. Especially the last part, a student brimming with talent turned away and potentially changing fields because of it. That's scary.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#28

Post by vonmoltke »

trekky1700 wrote: post #13

It's a concerning trend. Lot's of people go into the fields looking for high salaries and job opportunities, and then have no interest and thus talent in the field. There's so many totally inept people with even graduate degrees in computer science. At the same time, look into some of the top University's CS exams and they're writing code on paper. They're not training effective and talented programmers, they're trai…

Well, they are in alignment with the industry then, where the big players seem intent on hiring effective exam writers based on their technical screening process. How do you pass your undergrad courses? Memorize data structures, algorithms, and definitions, and write code on paper. How do you pass a Google interview? Memorize data structures, algorithms, and definitions, and write code on a whiteboard.

I cringe every time someone asks a question about interviews on /r/cscareerquestions and the inevitable reference to Cracking the Code Interview or something similar comes up. I cannot fathom that you can, and should be expected to, study or cram for an interview. It makes the interview the equivalent of an undergrad test, with the same value as a signalling device. I'm not sure which feeds which, and I'm sure there is two-way feedback in this system, but I don't think fixing undergrad education alone will fix the core of the problem, nor will encouraging more students to pursue engineering degrees as programs like MathMovesU attempt to do.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#29

Post by seiji »

Local anecdote: my last N interviews have gone from HR contact to phone interview to phone interview to take home project to (being flown out for) in person interview to ... rejection.

I'm getting worried I'm actually incompetent now.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#30

Post by dnautics »

trekky1700 wrote: post #27
dnautics wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem exists in the "hard sciences" too. There happens to be an intern in our lab, who is very motivated to do science, and actually fairly competent, but there are just some really critical things that are missing she just can't do basic mental arithmetic - it takes her minutes to figure out what volume to add to do a 1:20 dilution. Then she writes it down so that she doesn't have to do that calculation again…

Wow, I didn't realize it was quite so bad everywhere. This really shows how desperately reform in the education sector is needed. Especially the last part, a student brimming with talent turned away and potentially changing fields because of it. That's scary.

maybe I'm being pessimistic, she got into an good school that I respect, she just - deserves more.

EDIT: I guess I could be more specific.

In the state of california, there is the Cal State system and the UC system, the UC system is considered to be the "top tier" system, and the CS system is widely considered to be "slightly less than". She got into a CS engineering program, that I happen to think creates a substantial number of engineers that are superior to some of the UCs, but that may or may not be the appraisal of people who hire her down the line, especially as we move towards a more credentialed system, or if the system gets flooded with less competent engineers and candidate selection trends toward the superficial.

Post reply on HN