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Is there a STEM worker shortage?

blog.vivekhaldar.com

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Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#31

Post by walshemj »

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.

My first job out of high school (*with only O levels) was at a r&d organization in the math modeling section.

My first day was a hours instruction on the pdp11/03 then I was told to goto the company library get the book they had on FORTRAN and learn it.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#32

Post by noonespecial »

hackula1 wrote: post #24
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent.

The trouble is, in software, single individuals in that top 20% are capable of doing things in a short time that individuals from the bottom 80% couldn't do in 1000 man years. Software is funny like that, some people can think different kinds of thoughts.

So in a way, for certain values of incompetent, this is actually true.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#33

Post by ekidd »

I've sat in front of enormous piles of resumes, desperately hoping that one candidate in 10 might be able to code fizzbuzz or reverse a linked list. Yes, the candidate pool is awful on average, but this is a survivor effect—the good candidates tend to get hired, and a handful of unqualified candidates keep spamming their resumes.

But as an economist once told me, the market clears. If you're realistic about the market price, you can absolutely hire qualified people. That's practically the definition of "market price." Price signals work; when programmer salaries get ridiculous, plenty of competent people take an interest in programming.

You can save money by offering other benefits, hiring outside Silicon Valley, being better at evaluating candidates than your competitors, not discriminating based on age/gender, or by figuring out how to work with talented remote experts. But you have to make an interesting offer if you want talented people.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#34

Post by walshemj »

dnautics wrote: post #25
hackula1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For gross incompetence it's not really that hard in either the USA or the UK of course this just means your HR dept has some performance issues it needs to address :-)

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#35

Post by anovikov »

angdis wrote: post #8
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I've interviewed recent UC Berkeley EECS [1] graduates and found they couldn't write a line of code, and Berkeley is a top 10 engineering and top 10 computer science school (or at least was a the time; haven't checked rankings recently). [1] Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; their B.S. degree in computer science. I think they have a B.A. as well.

Come on... do you _REALLY_ mean they can't write a line of code? I find that hard to believe.

I know Ph.D. in computer science who can't write a line of code.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#36

Post by dnautics »

walshemj wrote: post #34
dnautics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For gross incompetence it's not really that hard in either the USA or the UK of course this just means your HR dept has some performance issues it needs to address :-)

depends on the state in the US. And let's say the HR dept has performance issues. How do you fire someone in HR? They're the ones that know all the rules and all the laws that could get you in trouble. Where I work slid by, managed to can the HR head, but they were only able to do it because 1) she was super-overpaid and there was a budget crunch - which can be a legal problem for nonprofits (overhead) 2) there was a pretty serious SNAFU involving federal funds that happened under her watch, so she could have been in legal trouble herself.

Also, gross incompetence is not necessarily the problem... Death by a thousand cuts.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#37

Post by robbles »

One issue I keep seeing in these kind of studies is the use of the "STEM" acronym itself.

I'm sorry, but with the current job market, this kind of grouping makes NO sense. The jobs and opportunities are mostly in the middle two letters - technology and engineering.

Science and mathematics are still tied to academia enough that only the real go-getters with the ability to self-educate and work out how to transfer their skills to other fields will easily find careers. Despite the flaws in most of the institutions offering engineering degrees, an education in engineering/technology is still the most straightforward path to a career, with the most applicable job skills being taught.

Re: Is there a STEM worker shortage?

#39

Post by Balgair »

A couple of friends of mine decided to 'walk a mile in their shoes' and became hiring managers. Craigslist is a wonderful thing, especially since it is very cheap to post a job listing. My buddies put out a very generic job posting for the types of jobs they were looking for. It was a way to gauge the heat of the job market, to see the competition, and mostly to see what it was like. Their hypothesis was at least 100 resumes. And being good scientists, they posted in a lot of big metro areas.

14 total resumes came in, 7 from India. In 10 major US metro areas, and this posting lasting a cumulative 3 months among the areas they got 14 resumes in. 5 Cover letters. 3 of the guys were ok, and hirable.

It was a shock. They thought they were in a really hot market and the competition was fierce. That must be the reason they get no calls back. Nope, not at all. At least in the Craigslist sphere, there were no job hunters to speak of. Personally, I don't know what to make of the data either. Lots of jobs were posted, but no-one was there and answering. The only thing that came to mind was that MOST of the craigslist postings were fradulent, just like my friend's.

The job market is stranger every-day.

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