The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

by hncurious • 5 years ago

166 256 5 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

gvb• 5 years ago

(2013)

imglorp• 5 years ago

@dang

sputr• 5 years ago

Aged badly I would say.

nobodyandproud2• 5 years ago

I don’t think that’s true.

Getting hired as an older engineer hasn’t become easier, even in the current climate.

dang4• 5 years ago

Year added. Thanks!

sxp• 5 years ago

For the HN crowd, it's probably worthwhile to split "STEM" into "high-end engineering" and "normal engineering". The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience. But for normal SWEs and other engineering fields, there is a glut of talent (https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/) so it can be harder to find an engineering job that pays enough to justify the college tuition. This article is about the latter group.

However, there is still a significant shortage of talented engineers in non-SWE roles. We've outsourced engineering jobs such as semiconductor manufacturing and other tech production to other countries which makes it hard for junior engineers to find jobs and learn enough to become highly talented engineers. And that requires heavy investment by the government in our engineering ecosystem so that junior engineers can find good jobs and learn more. Tim Cook explained this well in the context of iPhone screws: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...

“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

Another problem is that just because a person graduates with a degree in X, doesn't mean they are any use at X. I know a bunch of CS degreed people who got out of virtually every coding course in university.

Unsurprisingly, they don't work as software engineers at the moment.

They are technically part of the group of potential employees for technical work, but they are arguably worse than someone who skimmed Python for Dummies.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Another problem is that just because a person graduates with a degree in X, doesn’t mean they are any use at X

Perhaps true, but this:

I know a bunch of CS degreed people who got out of virtually every coding course in university.

is arguably a different problem, because CS isn’t Software Engineering, though the right focus within CS study can be a good preparation for work in software engineering.

They are technically part of the group of potential employees for technical work,

If they aren’t working as software engineers and aren’t seeking jobs as software engineers, are they really?

nradov• 5 years ago

A CS degree was never intended to produce skilled coders. It's not a vocational training course.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

For the HN crowd, it’s probably worthwhile to split “STEM” into “high-end engineering” and “normal engineering”.

Isn’t that just splitting the “E” in STEM? STEM ⊃ Engineering

(EDIT: since you are really talking about SWE and not “classical” engineering, maybe its more splitting the “T” than the “E”; still, leaving out a lot of STEM.)

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

normal SWEs

Could you clarify what qualifies someone as a high-end SWE, and what would relegate someone to being a normal SWE? Is it just dependent on employer?

thinkharderdev5• 5 years ago

Not the OP but I agree with their comment. I think the distinction is mostly around experience. Specifically, experience designing large systems (understanding tradeoffs, resource requirements, etc.) based on product/business requirements. If I can come to you and say "I need a system to manage documents" and you can take it from their (eliciting more details from non/semi-technical collaborators along the way) then you are probably a high-end SWE.

randomdata• 5 years ago

A high-end SWE is one who is willing to endure a hiring process spanning months full of pointless trivia with the final prize being a slim chance at getting a job. A normal SWE is one who finds a job at a business that wants to actually hire people, not play games.

dsr_• 5 years ago

Yes.

If your employer feels that it is competing with FAANGMWSTXblah, they consider you a high-end SWE.

If your employer feels that software development is a cost of doing business, you are a normal SWE.

If your employer feels that everything can be outsourced, you are the cheap glue that holds things together.

If your employer is in the business of providing the outsourcing, you are probably a digital sweatshop employee.

handrous6• 5 years ago

Passing grueling multi-round leetcode endurance + memorization tests. That's the distinction.

So, yes, it's kinda dependent on employers.

There's another level of people who are the sort with a reputation that means the leetcode-hazing employers wouldn't dare force them through the usual gauntlet (as they'd refuse), but that's a vanishingly small set of folks. And anyway, I think a lot of them (but not all!) end up doing more "soft" work than banging out code, by the time they're in that phase of their career.

verall• 5 years ago

There is certainly a perceived difference between tech workers at, what I would categorize into T1/T2/T3 companies.

T1 companies invest in their reputation, tend to have long and capricious interviews, and pay obscenely.

T2 companies cannot afford to play that game against T1 companies and so try specifically to hire on different merits - they have a flexible vacation policy, they look for people passed over by the T1 interviews, etc. They are hiring looking for bang-for-buck.

T3 companies generally don't have either the technical expertise or bureaucratic structure to properly hire tech workers. They are nearly rolling dice.

There are many more T1 companies than FAANG, and interestingly, the company does not even have to be big or successful. It requires fat stacks of cash, but this could come from VC.

Devs with a few years experience at T1 companies are "marked"; interviews at other companies are easier, and you're paid better than coworkers if you go to work at a T2 company.

nell2• 5 years ago

I tend to agree here. There must be top performers in pool B willing to invest time and effort to move to pool A given how lucrative it is.

Anyone working on high-end engineering, could you please give some color here? Is it very hard or impossible to make a move from let's say a web developer to a high end engineering role?

What are the some examples of those roles?

If the jump is doable, there should be some training available for anyone wanting to make that investment. Are there any?

Bishop_• 5 years ago

From the (admittedly small) pool of folks i've talked to. It seems like you leetcode until your eyes bleed and hope you nail the interview.

brutus12133• 5 years ago

I posted something similar to you. I think the jump is not doable because it requires massive investment in a lottery ticket. Not only are FANG interviews leetcode level hard, I have heard friends at such orgs talk about the anti-loop. Even if you got to the point of solving most leetcode problems, the anti-loop can reject you. I know plenty of brilliant engineers not getting paid the value they create, because they have kids or work a tough job or volunteer or whatever, that makes it so they will never get a FANG offer.

ibains• 5 years ago

We want software engineers who understand compilers and query optimizers and systems.

This requires good theoretical foundations with solid engineering skills.

It is extremely hard to get these. Most CS majors don’t know much CS - top grads from top US schools undergrads are clueless usually.

That’s why you get projects like Hadoop- a large scale systems project written in Java instead of systems languages - because the engineers are poor quality in top companies as well.

majormajor4• 5 years ago

It's nice compared to many other industries because the interview process is pretty open and well-discussed and it's more rare to be blocked entirely just because you don't have the right names on your resume.

One part is pure numbers game: apply everywhere that pays well until you get some interviews. This may take a while.

The other part is practice: can you figure out the sort of questions that those companies ask? If not, can you do so if you practice enough?

Personally, I did the jump in two steps. This was ten years ago, but I've seen people do similar more recently. First I found a company with interesting work but still not a lot of prestige (after getting rejected, mostly silently, by dozens of others on LinkedIn). This gave me a lot of hands-on experience with the non-pure-algorithmic sorts of questions that I'd be asked in future interviews (like "what happens when you visit google.com" or say, around how internet networking and web service stacks work). This didn't increase my pay, though - but it was a place with a more conversational interview style plus a smaller pool of candidates, so my desire to learn came through and counted for more.

Second, I continued applying and bugging recruiters (thought not quite as frequently, since I was busier at work now!) until I got some interviews at higher paying places. Failed a couple, succeeded at one, got a 60% raise. It got easier from there since recruiters use company history as a big heuristic.

claylevering• 5 years ago

DevOps / GitOps. Good lord, DevOps / GitOps. Do the things nobody wants to do:

* Build out systems from scratch

* Maintain those systems (using the most arduous-but-verifiable methods)

* Maintain security of those systems

* Scale those systems

It means dealing with the nuances that app developers don't love. The jobs that used to be relegated to the "IT Guys" in the organization running the datacenter. With infrastructure-as-code, K8s, etc. it's not unlikely (in fact arguably the best idea) to maintain the "deploy" logic alongside your app as much as the app code itself.

Most app developers don't like doing this. It means tweaking, tinkering, testing, re-testing, re-re-testing and edge cases that break main usage cases. It means checking your app works in Internet Explorer as much as it does in Chrome and that every layer of your SSL configurations are right. It means pouring through five generations of AWS documents that may or may not be valid any longer (I'm looking at you, Launch Configurations!).

But it also means ease. It means your app developers can get their code to production safely, securely and capable of scaling effortlessly. It means your business team doesn't have to "wait" because something needs to be deployed in the middle of the night because your work has built in health checks, canaries, etc. that prevent a shitty deployment.

A friend once said "DevOps means automate all-the-things" and I agree but it's just the start of that role (and the exact reason that role can get paid the way it does). A truly great DevOp will have a near-infinite level of understanding of "how" the systems work from top to bottom but ALSO they are willing to step into anyone ELSE's code in the organization to learn and help optimize it for the steps outlined above.

Cloud certs help but honestly I think most folks I've seen doing it are just people that got fed up with a broken deployment one too many times and took it upon themselves to find an alternative.

thinkharderdev5• 5 years ago

It is certainly not impossible. Every "high-end" engineer started out as a junior at some point in their career/life. And I don't think it requires working at a FAANG either.

I don't think there is a clear, unambiguous process but the gist of it is that to get there you need to continually take on larger and more complex tasks. In particular try and find your way onto greenfield projects where you can meaningfully contribute to system design (or at least observe "high-end" engineers engaging with these tasks so you can see how the process looks from "the inside"). If you can't find those opportunities in your day job, either try and find a new day job or try working on OSS projects.

LeanderK• 5 years ago

I think there's a possibility for a SW-developer, but I wonder whether that's even possible for other branches. If you don't have the required background (sufficiently advanced university degree) then you just don't have the knowledge. I can imagine that if you really work on high-tech engineering, you need a solid background of physics, engineering, math etc. You can't just learn that on the job, or better, expect people to learn it on the job.

meheleventyone• 5 years ago

I tend to agree here. There must be top performers in pool B willing to invest time and effort to move to pool A given how lucrative it is.

One thing to remember is that pay might be bi or multi-modal but that doesn't mean the work is actually likewise shared out by "performance". There are lots of reasons other than merit why people might end up in a lower or higher paying position. You'll also find people going up or down between these positions over their careers. A normal one from my experience is people taking big paycuts to work in Europe.

GoatOfAplomb• 5 years ago

I graduated from a very respectable but not elite university, with a respectable but not noteworthy GPA and internship. (I do feel I took to algorithms and data structures somewhat better than most of my classmates, which helped with interviewing years later.)

I worked some jobs in "low engineering" as described here, for several years. I got into this new Android thing, and published some relatively successful apps on the side, before convincing my employer to let me build their Android app, which was also reasonably successful. (I also broke into some light algorithmy stuff to improve ad serving/ad sales for that employer, though it was entirely trivial compared to what "elite" shops were doing.)

I believe that skill was the key to getting contacted by a Google sourcer - there just wasn't much of an external talent pool for it at the time. I failed one interview after insufficient prep, a delayed flight, and very short sleep. They called me again a year later and I prepped some, got in early, and went in fresh.

I imagine ML is maybe the closest thing to an analogous "door-opener skill" over the last few years, but I'm not confident about that. Research roles may really emphasize the sterling academic credentials, and for applied ML roles, Kaggles don't give experience crafting a data set and productionizing a model.

giantg23• 5 years ago

I have a follow up question along the same vane.

What defines a high performance engineer? If we are talking about 10x engineers, then I would argue that level of performance isn't likely to be reachable by most people and teaching plays less of a role.

I mean, I would love to be a 10x dev, but I don't think any amount of training will make that happen. I'm just a shitty mid-level and have to live with that.

lumost• 5 years ago

It's really not impossible. The main difference is in LC practice and system design experience. The latter of which is likely covered by any reasonably scaled startup.

The barrier to the former is practice and knowledge of fundamental algorithms. There are a lot of algorithms that come up in practice, and it can be intimidating to learn the first time.

As the parent mentioned part of the problem is that engineering productivity as measured by dollars/engineer is proportional to the profitability of the firm more so than the skills of the engineer. High end engineering firms are highly profitable and select the best engineers. There are diminishing returns to hiring more engineers so companies prefer to hire the number they need at the maximum competency they can pay for.

IIRC 2 decades ago engineering was more evenly distributed in salary expectations as there weren't as many mega cap companies, and the ones that did exist had the philosophy that they should hire more engineers rather than better engineers.

bcbrown• 5 years ago

All my experience is with the job market in Seattle. A decade ago I took a job at 80k (via craigslist), against competing offers around 95k, because it involved NLP and Hadoop. A year later I got a 40% raise to a Series E startup that ultimately flamed out, working on ML-adjacent big data stuff. I slowly bumped along until, with an average job tenure of ~2 years, until in the past four years I went from ~160k to slightly over 300k. Technologies have been Hadoop/Spark/Kubernetes ecosystems. First two job hops were via LinkedIn, next two were personal referrals.

The two books I think had the most impact were Mining Massive Datasets by Ullman et al, and Data-Intensive Text Processing by Lin & Dyer, but neither is very cutting-edge now.

I've never worked at a FAANG, but I've had a ~40% interview success rate with them.

My advice would be:

- If you're early in your career or want to switch subspecialties for higher potential remuneration, be willing to take a slight pay cut or work for a slightly shady/low-prestige company for the right experience.

- Actively maintain a detailed profile on LinkedIn. It's a shitty site/company, but that's where the recruiters are. Another tip I've used to get interviews is to do a search for recruiters at a company of interest, and just visit all their profiles. They'll get the notification, and if your profile has the right keyword bait, they'll reach out. Probably more effective than cold submitting a resume through their website.

- Be really lucky. There seems to be a huge amount of variability in terms of how well interview questions match your experience/competencies, as well as being lucky in picking sub-specialties in technologies that end up booming. Also I'd say my personal productivity across all my jobs had probably a 3x variation, so be lucky in that wherever you end up working happens to match your personal strengths and weaknesses. Productivity (and promotions/experience to showcase in interviews) is not just a function of the developer, it's a function of the developer plus the working environment.

A final comment I'll make is that I have a STEM BS, but it's not in CS. Instead I gave myself a virtual CS degree by working through textbooks over 3-4 years, covering the entire course curriculum of a CS undergrad. I'm probably lucky in being temperamentally suited to completing that sort of project.

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

Is it very hard or impossible to make a move from let's say a web developer to a high end engineering role?

Depends. What was your major? Where did you study?

brutus12133• 5 years ago

You raise an interesting point. I think most non-FANG engineers would say that that the leetcode culture is getting out of hand, and the FANG's quest for the 10x engineer leads to both (a) rocket high salaries+competition from the people who can pass leetcode, and (b) passing on lots of smart engineers who could not or did not want to run the interviewing gauntlet. What is the economic sense to not lowering the bar rather than constantly attempting to raise it?

sokoloff• 5 years ago

There’s coordination costs that scale super-linearly with people and many of the FAANGs have such high leverage from a slightly higher output of a software engineer that the costs aren’t a barrier for them.

In other words, if they don’t have to lower their standards for financial reasons, they just don’t.

runawaybottle3• 5 years ago

I made the point in another comment that one of the reasons other industries kind of suck is because of the heavy gate-keeping. You want to be an investment banker? There is no path but to have gone to an Ivy League school. Stuff like this is a tragedy. Industries that are cordoned off in this way are extremely selfish.

I understand the need for the elite to be brain surgeons, but for a vast majority of professions, the filtering for elite is not conducive to a healthy village.

Leetcode is fine, but the trend I’m hearing is that it is getting more and more absurd and somewhat becoming our version of the same gate-keeping that makes finance, law, politics, etc bad.

I’m hopeful overall since you can’t bullshit good software. Over time, the less elite can make better products and make the gatekeeping look stupid when it’s all said and done.

shagie3• 5 years ago

There are a lot of new grad and junior developers who can follow instructions. There are surprisingly few who can solve problems that they haven't seen before and are able to pattern match against.

The issue isn't lowering the bar. For a new grad/junior the bar is often lowered to the point of "can you do FizzBuzz in the language we use?" (and there are a lot who can't do that).

Rather, the issue is the "we need to solve problem XYZ" and have the developer figure out how to solve it.

For example, I just finished debugging a problem of an application that would run fine in the IDE, but fail when run on the command line when packaged into a jar. It turned out that the cause was that you can't open up a File inside a .jar (but you can open up an InputStream).

It got passed to me when the developer failed to get it working and gave up on the problem. The happy path failed.

That isn't a "lower the bar" thing - the developer who wrote it can write reasonably complex code. It's a lack of problem solving of the unknown problems.

This sort of problem isn't something that is easily tested by adjusting the bar. Its a "we're graduating people who don't have problem solving skills and are finding that those skills are rare."

bcrosby95• 5 years ago

We've outsourced engineering jobs
And that requires heavy investment by the government in our engineering ecosystem so that junior engineers can find good jobs and learn more.

We'll just outsource them again next quarter. It's a losing game. You need a willing participant to play.

kktkti9• 5 years ago

It was stupid to put all our manufacturing eggs in one basket, not just for nation state politics but species security against regional war, acts of god…

In the end our decisions were guided by elder concepts of correctness, that coincidentally enriched them at our expense.

Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson - “the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.”

We’re due for a rethink of our social obligations, not just this attacking fiscal margins, and coddling the business elite of yesterday.

Who were enriched in an era of higher taxation and much lower costs. But they are obviously owed big returns on their decades old effort. Our reverence for them is of course etched into the physics of the universe. Hmmm…

dotcommand2• 5 years ago

The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience.

The reason FAANGs/etc are willing to pay $300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee. Nothing to do with shortage of high end mid-level talent.

Facebook, Google, etc are some of the most profitable companies in the world ( outside of finance of course ).

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tech-companies-highes...

there is a glut of talent

If there is a glut of "low-level" engineers it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers.

Besides, the tech industry historically prefers to hire young people and push out older ones.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-companies-admit-to...

So if there is a lack of "high-end" mid level employees, they aren't doing a good job of developing their younger "low-end" employees.

Or it's all just bullshit used by the tech industry to offshore more jobs, import more employees and create downward wage pressure on "high-end" mid level salaries. Just like with every supposed "shortage" of "talent" we've ever had.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

$300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee.

Why would a company pay more than they need to? I would pay 4x the price for grapes if required. I don't as I would prefer to spend less on grapes.

it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers.

Unless there is something that prevents from from becoming mid-level engineers. Like companies that don't hire junior level engineers at all and have mid-level be the entry level.

BeetleB3• 5 years ago

The reason FAANGs/etc are willing to pay $300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee.

So can other companies that don't pay anywhere near as much.

magneticnorth• 5 years ago

They recoup many times $500k per every employee, not just mid-level engineers, but only the engineers are able to command that much because there's more demand than supply.

HR, marketing, sales, etc. - while still paid well - are not compensated at the same level as engineers, especially when comparing by years of experience on the job.

lkbm• 5 years ago

If there is a glut of "low-level" engineers it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers.

I was going to point out several reasons why this statement is false, but you went ahead and falsified it later in your own comment.

So if there is a lack of "high-end" mid level employees, they aren't doing a good job of developing their younger "low-end" employees.

Seems like by "impossible" you mean "avoidable if you allocate enough time and resources".

paulpauper3• 5 years ago

exactly. facebook generate among the highest profit margins of any company. Multi-illion dollar ad budgets by fortune 500 companies, plus tons of small business adverstiing, is jsut pure profit for instagram and facebook. Mobile ads are very expensive, too. More expensive than desktop.

austincheney• 5 years ago

If there is a glut of "low-level" engineers it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers.

That is a faulty assumption that cannot be true if in conflict with a bias. For example what is your data driven definition for a high-end versus low-end engineer? The answer to that question is almost certainly subjective.

In my experience employers optimize for hiring and onboarding first. Everything else is a secondary consideration that impacts tools, delivery, quality, and so forth. Employers could optimize for faster delivery and higher quality code, but that would mean fewer frameworks and abstraction layers which harms speed of hiring and speed of project onboarding.

From a purely numbers perspective that is absurd. Hiring and onboarding are one time problems per employee and are prioritized over concerns which cost the company significantly for the life of that employment. It isn’t about numbers. This isn’t about numbers explains the high pay rates for developers.

It’s about having employed developers already available.

mahogany2• 5 years ago

The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience.

I thought it was because they generate >$1 million per employee.

mrtranscendence4• 5 years ago

It only matters how much revenue they generate per employee when that revenue dips below salary. If the supply for epic superstar 10x devs greatly exceeded demand, they could make $100M per employee and they still wouldn't pay as much as $300-600k. (Unless they were forced to by, say, unionization.)

tssva• 5 years ago

How nice of Tim Cook to describe the issue the Tim Cook's of the world created.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Should we call FAANG high end engineering?

Shouldn't that term be reserved for things like quantum computing, particle physics and fusion reactors and stuff?

ampdepolymerase• 5 years ago

Create value, capture value. Hardware is hard.

akomtu• 5 years ago

That stuff is research/science, not engineering.

TuringNYC5• 5 years ago

> However, there is still a significant shortage of talented engineers in non-SWE roles.

Not sure I agree. Seems more there is a shortage of housing in SWE-heavy metro regions. I have so many friends from college who graduated with computer science degrees and ended up in non-engineering roles -- because of a total mis-match between SWE pay and housing costs, especially in the Bay Area where the jobs used to be.

Now, before anyone cites FAANG L6+ salaries, note you dont get into those after graduation, and not everyone gets into those roles. Also note, for the majority of non-public SWE roles with "high" total comp, you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity, you pay rent with cash comp.

Also, before anyone cites the cost of a studio apartment in California, note not everyone is single and not everyone wants to stuff a family into a studio apartment.

All this may well change with WFH and remote-work, which will open up talent pools across the US and the world.

treis• 5 years ago

have so many friends from college who graduated with computer science degrees and ended up in non-engineering roles -- because of a total mis-match between SWE pay and housing costs, especially in the Bay Area where the jobs used to be.

What did they do instead?

ptmcc2• 5 years ago

you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity

Sure you can, you just sell it as it vests. Which is the commonly-recommended thing to do.

At a public company RSUs are so liquid they are damn near as good as cash. Once you're on the vesting treadmill they're hitting every quarter, or even every month. That's not much different from a paycheck.

Yeah there's market risk that dictates the actual value, but when you're getting your salary again as RSUs it's still a boatload of cash regardless of market performance. Cash that you can pay for things with. Like rent.

paulpauper3• 5 years ago

SWE roles with "high" total comp, you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity, you pay rent with cash comp.

Also, before anyone cites the cost of a studio apartment in California, note not everyone is single and not everyone wants to stuff a family into a studio apartment.

I think ppl way overestimate living expenses relative to wages when making this argument. http://greyenlightenment.com/2019/01/02/the-sam-vimes-boots-...

just break down the numbers:

If you make $210k/year, after taxes you are still taking home $135k/year. In Silicon Valley, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,300 a month. So you are still left with $107k. Not bad. Add $1,500/month for other misc. expenses such as food and health insurance and internet access and phone plan and car payment for a crappy car (no need to splurge). Still have $89k. This is not even counting stock compensation or sign-on bonuses or other perks. Of course, if you add children to the equation, expenses rise dramatically, but this can be offset to some degree by having a double income family.

$210k is the lowish end of FAANG. Most people are not expecting to have kids until later in life . You can also borrow from equity. The notion that stocks is not cash is wrong. If you are fully vested and deep in the money, it is effectively cash.

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience

They want the golden childs. They want 5-10 years experience but still balk at anyone aged over 40. You have to have an "upper level degree" but then again they don't want someone who spent too long in school. You need a breath of multi-disciplinary experience but also know absolutely everything needed to "hit the ground running" in their very narrow field. And of course they must be a good "culture fit". At anyone one moment there are perhaps ten such people on the planet.

I have met some of these people. They do exist. They are essentially walking professional resumes. They look great on the corporate website but rarely accomplish much practical work before they are off to live on a different website at an even higher salary.

helen___keller4• 5 years ago

Maybe at the 600k mark, but the 300k mark is a very wide net. Source: levels.fyi

paulpauper3• 5 years ago

This is not a surprise. same reasons why the armed forces, west point, and police academies seek younger people: there are many benefits, some of those being:

more malleable

faster learning (studies show working memory falls with age)

not weighed down by family and other obligations

flexible hours due to fewer obligations

no 'baggage'

no old, ingrained habits

subsubzero• 5 years ago

I think this was true 5-10 years ago but having worked at FANGISH companies for over a decade I am starting see older devs come into the company, and also diversity in ethnicity and background which is great. I know my current company which has about as difficult an interview as google doesn't really care about your degree, if you can pass the interview and are not a total a*hole you are hired.

seattle_spring3• 5 years ago

Your claims do not match my experience at all. Have you worked at a FAANG?

cactus20932• 5 years ago

What you're describing are the people making $1M+, you basically need to have had amazing luck of being in the right place at the right time and being involved in projects that turned out to be massively successful and grew quickly. That's how you get those Director or Sr Staff/Principal titles at FAANG.

To make $250k+, honestly you just need to be able to ace a random assortment of Leetcode level Hard problems under pressure. Which is actually a very tangible and unbiased skill. To get in the door of that interview in the first place, now that can be a challenge without the right kind of experience. But it's not impossible to gather that right kind of experience, without an Ivy League education or advanced degree, by gaining experience on the job for several years at a lower tier tech company or startup.

And then for some lucky few, a $200-$300k mid-level engineer salary can grow into a $1M+ salary without any promotions, e.g. every mid-level and above engineer who joined Snapchat two years ago. That's the real holy grail.

tarsinge• 5 years ago

Tangential but it make me think, given the network effects and associated monopoly position of some FAANGs like Google or Facebook, it seems they could hire engineer to do nothing and still be vastly profitable. In fact, it would have the benefit or preventing top talents joining or creating a competitor. Therefore, how much is a "real" labor shortage vs a perverse side-effect of monopolies or a capital intensive hack of preventing competition? It's just an intuition from their monetized output from their profit centers compared to their workforce, maybe a dumb idea but I'm curious of what people than know more than me think of it.

bsder• 5 years ago

“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

Then perhaps Apple needs to start training some tooling engineers?

Companies like Apple outsourced everything and killed domestic manufacturing in the pursuit of a couple pennies are now complaining that domestic manufacturing is dead?

I'm currently listening to the world's tiniest violin.

"Tech" companies like IBM used to own such prosaic things as low radioactivity lead mines in order maintain access to the resources required.

Vertical integration got sacrificed to the financial gods in favor of Always Late Inventory(tm). And, now, everybody is finding that it's really hard to reverse.

Suck it up and do it yourself, or bend over for China, Tim.

jhbadger• 5 years ago

Also see the "S" of STEM. Many people going into science at the graduate level believe the hype that there is a huge shortage of scientists and that they'll have no trouble getting a tenure-track job in the end. This isn't the case. The system is set up to generate many more Ph.D's than faculty positions because grad students and postdocs are useful sources of labor for faculty. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't go into science (there are jobs in industry and government for example), but realize that getting a faculty job is statistically unlikely.

analog312• 5 years ago

What I've observed is that virtually every science grad student is aware of the academic job situation, unless they are deluding themselves or have their heads in the sand. In fact, my dad (chemistry PhD) told me this was already common knowledge in the 1950s.

Disclosure: Physics PhD.

unemphysbro• 5 years ago

Another Physics adjacent PhD.

When I was in my 20s, I was aware of the situation anecdotally from other grad students. However, I wanted to shoot my shot and by the time I hit my late 20s and 30 all of those weekend hours in the office and the low pay made those software jobs very alluring. So I jumped ship.

I miss research in academia quite a bit, I still read papers and review articles if I'm contacted. However, I don't think I'll go back with the work-life balance and higher salaries in industry.

dnautics• 5 years ago

It may have been bad in the 1950s, but there was an acute acceleration of how bad it got in the 1990-2010 era.

MontyCarloHall2• 5 years ago

You can both be aware of the situation and delusional.

Many people I’ve spoken to with tenure track aspirations genuinely believe they’re in the top 1% of their field, and thus have a good shot at making it. I’d wager that far more than 1% of graduate students/postdocs believe this about themselves. In general, the vast majority of people will rate themselves as above average for any given ability, even though that’s by definition impossible.

ghaff• 5 years ago

And PhDs and tenure track aside, many undergrad science degrees are probably not much more useful as a credential than liberal arts degrees that many here like to mock. There's nothing wrong with majoring in biology if that's your thing. But unless you're pre-med or plan to get a PhD, it's probably not a more useful major than history or English--and may be less useful depending upon what sort of job you're looking for.

dmch-12• 5 years ago

Very true. When I was doing PhD in pure maths I had random people explain to me that a PhD would not necessarily give me an advantage in the job market. Like I would come to do a PhD without figuring that out.

jl27185• 5 years ago

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

We vote for these people and pay their salaries. Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us?

spamizbad• 5 years ago

Most voters - and donors - aren't highly skilled engineers. But politicians are judged on their overall stewardship of the economy. Anyway, the US voter is weird; they think all sorts of professions are overpaid. Why should a bunch of nerds sitting at a desk make six figures?

With that said, that might be changing - it might be shifting more towards overall worker outcomes over just the stock market.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

Indeed. People think it is crazy that government software engineers make 80K for "typing."

jl27185• 5 years ago

Oh yeah because they did such a great job at raising median citizen wages too.

What is this ‘economy’ that they are such great stewards of? Who owns it?

iso16313• 5 years ago

Anyway, the US voter is weird; they think all sorts of professions are overpaid. Why should a bunch of nerds sitting at a desk make six figures?

But oddly enough not PE teachers, who tend to be the highest paid public employees in the state -- https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/09/21/these-are-th...

JohnWhigham3• 5 years ago

There's large swaths of Republicans that think public teachers are overpaid...it's mind-boggling.

LorenPechtel2• 5 years ago

Yup. 15-20 years ago, factory floor, troubleshooting a problem that only showed up in production. I overheard a couple of guys saying that I was overpaid for being able to type fast, especially as I spent most of my time just standing there.

fabianhjr• 5 years ago

Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us?

They are looking out for buisness-owner interests (capital interests)

whywhywhywhy• 5 years ago

Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us?

I mean... if Greenspan has been the chairman of the Federal Reserve then almost his entire career has been focused on disempowering you and keeping you in your place.

Why would helping and empowering tax payers be something anyone in government would ever want, you'd lose your slave class if they could actually build wealth and be in control of their own destiny.

Much better keeping them living paycheck to paycheck and scooping off the cream then chip away at their savings while you're at it to keep those from stacking too high too.

lr4444lr• 5 years ago

The Federal Reserve has 2 missions: stable dollar, low unemployment. That's all. They have a powerful and limited set of levers to do this.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

I think lately it has been more about keeping the investment class happy.

tarr11• 5 years ago

Here is the quote from Alan Greenspan:

"Yes, there are options to combat that decline, but contrary to what many people believe, we do very poorly in opening up our borders to skilled immigrants. Our H1-B visa restrictions are a disgrace. Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow."

https://www.theglobalist.com/globalist-interview-with-alan-g...

hannasanarion• 5 years ago

The standard of living for Americans doesn't depend on the pay rate of software engineers. The profit margins of software companies are already astonishingly high. No tech firm is buckling under the weight of their payroll, they are making bank.

Google's 2nd quarter financials show a 64% operating profit. Arguably there isn't enough money from these companies going back to the people who actually did the work to generate that success. They could start paying everybody double and still be making more money than any other market sector could dream of.

Depressing the wages of software engineers doesn't mean increased standard of living for Americans, it can only mean increased profit margins for stockholders.

btilly5• 5 years ago

And he's right.

Immigration restrictions are economically like any other kind of import barrier. It will boost the money to be made in the sector in question, while being bad for the US economy as a whole. In the long run we are all better off from free markets, no matter who is impacted by the short-term disruption.

fiftyfifty• 5 years ago

Funny how they never talk about doing this with medical doctors, or expanding the number of medical schools. I guess their wages aren't considered too high, despite the insane costs of medical treatment in the US. Engineers need a stronger lobby, see the AMA for an example apparently.

thinkharderdev5• 5 years ago

Counterpoint: the ridiculous cost of medical care in the US is (in part) BECAUSE of the AMA and it is bad for the vast majority of Americans who are not Doctors. We should be looking to make medicine more like SWE, not the other way around.

Eridrus2• 5 years ago

Why should the government be protecting software engineers from competition at the cost of other people who would pay a higher price for our labor?

jdgoesmarching3• 5 years ago

Most people have the idea that the job of a government is to make conditions better for its citizens.

renewiltord3• 5 years ago

They are looking out for the collective us not for any subgroup. If you think about it, there’s lots of ways to make subgroups wealthier at the expense of America herself.

Subsidies are one such tool. Tariffs are another. He was right, you know, and fortunately the H1B helped with the growth of the American tech economy - which benefited all Americans far more than if it had been delayed (or worse, taken from us by others).

There is a ride in the affairs of men, and they managed to take it at its flood.

jl27185• 5 years ago

How exactly do you know that it helped? What evidence can you point to that says the whole tech boom would have gone to Trans-Dniester otherwise?

Doctor salaries are massively inflated by limiting supply even within the country. That must mean that the entire medical industry has already moved to India.

fullshark• 5 years ago

The populists, even though they induce a gag reflex from our years of aspirational cultural conditioning, are the only option at the moment.

raziel2701• 5 years ago

We actually don't vote for the chair of the Federal Reserve (currently Jerome Powell) and that's a problem. These people have an outsized influence in our lives and they're not publicly elected.

failuser• 5 years ago

Why would he be looking out for you? How much lobbing money did you spend on him? Did you pay millions for his speeches?

runawaybottle3• 5 years ago

The software industry does a very good job on-boarding people into this career. I don’t know if the same kind of support exists in hardware, for example. If there’s a glut of graduates and a shortage in industry, it could be argued that those industries have archaic processes that don’t build up entry level into those positions (zero training, you are either top of your class, or not, good luck).

Even though we are edging towards serious gatekeeping with Leetcode, overall, we are still one of the most generous industries in society.

1970-01-01• 5 years ago

I have never seen a formal definition for a technologist. How exactly is that position measured? Are we including IT workers in this STEM crisis?

meetups3232• 5 years ago

The author seems to think students go to a school, get a degree that says "Bachelor of STEM", "Masters of STEM", or "Ph.D in STEM", then carry on to apply to job postings that say "STEM degree required".

This is so very obviously not the case I have to wonder what the author's motives for not diving even the slightest bit deeper are (for instance, splitting S/T/E/M and showing stats for each).

gojomo2• 5 years ago

Indeed, this is a 2013 article, largely based on a favorable/credulous reading of some 2012 & 2013 analyses from the EPI, a left/organized-labor/economic-protectionist/anti-immigration think tank.

Those analyses were being marshalled by the EPI, early in Obama's 2nd term, to support their anti-immigration lobbying goals. One of the analyses declares their goal: "Conclusion: Now is not the time to increase the number of H-1B visas and STEM green cards".

EPI's obliviousness to variety within the STEM category, including with regard to age cohorts & the dynamism of people moving to- and from- "STEM" jobs no matter their formal degree, was obvious when their writeups were new.

EPI somehow manages to spin both the large number of "STEM" grads outside "STEM" industries, and the large number of "non-STEM" grads in "STEM" careers, as simultaneously being bad, instead of a sign of people & businesses dynamically adjusting based on real-world experience, preferences, and changes.

EPI's ideal would seem to be: "Stay in the exact field your Motherland trained you for, comrade - or you might mess up the 5-year-plan."

My 2013 comment criticizing EPI's inflexible factory-floor mindset: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5605289

My 2013 comment on EPI's cohort-obliviousness & deceptive wordcrafting to imply, wrongly, that STEM grads aren't finding jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5805530

btjfktntnrn• 5 years ago

OT: Why do so many news sites hide 75% of their article under a "keep reading" button that you need to push to reveal the rest if the article?

There are no ads in this site shown there, you just see the article footnotes and the site footer.

Is it to not scare the user with a long article before hooking him?

sgdpk• 5 years ago

Might be as a way to differentiate between page views and people reading the article. I think Quora does this. You get a separate counter for people who expand your post.

jdgoesmarching3• 5 years ago

Maybe to also break reader or rss views, but I feel like we’re a pretty low percentage of the hits.

gruez2• 5 years ago

surely attaching an onscroll handler would also work and be less intrusive?

coding123• 5 years ago

It's a myth because the demand ended up being in other areas - construction really. Construction will remain massively in demand, especially now that labor pool for that is drying up.

Sindrome• 5 years ago

More like a Leetcode crisis

devwastaken• 5 years ago

8 years later and it's still correct. If there truly was such a demand companies would be on their knees for new grads, they would take on more junior engineers to learn from their current superior engineers. In software a degree doesn't even get you a call back in job applications.

bojan• 5 years ago

This entire discussion seems to be very US-centric. In the Netherlands, the situation is exactly like you describe how it'd look like if the proposition in the title were correct.

Possibly because Dutch companies simply refuse to increase salaries, and 60k per year is still somehow considered good.

halfmatthalfcat• 5 years ago

Maybe a good use case for a union?

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

It's beyond US focused even, it's only really New York and Silicon Valley that are compensated at the insanely high levels I hear about.

hinkley• 5 years ago

I was just having several conversations about this with a mixed group of tech people. Several agreed and one who missed the original convo volunteered essentially the same sentiment.

It’s like traffic management. More capacity means more cars and traffic stays as bad or gets worse. In many fields, but especially software, there’s a lot of redundant work being done because there are enough developers that companies think they can almost afford (and exploit people to make up the gap) to do it themselves instead of using something that exists.

If there were just not enough devs to make your bespoke CMS or enough materials scientists to invent a new shade of pink, we would just deal, and more people would work on things that actually matter. Not a larger fraction of people. More people.

thamer• 5 years ago

When at the onset of the pandemic the Trump administration decided that foreign students couldn't stay in the U.S. if they weren't attending classes in person, I was surprised to learn how much of the STEM students they represent. Thankfully this was reversed (after strong pushback from universities and many more stakeholders), but it still highlighted how dependent the STEM field is on foreign students.

Some numbers[1] from 2017: 81% of Electrical Engineering, 79% of Computer Science, 62% of Mechanical Engineering and 59% of Civil Engineering students are foreigners, to list just the top 4 (the top 2 have by far the largest enrollment).

Isn't this a crisis too? To be clear, I'm not suggesting they shouldn't be in the country; they are incredibly valuable. But doesn't it show that American students are just not going into these fields in sufficient numbers? The U.S. has amazing engineers and scientists, but it needs to import 3/4 of them. And there's no guarantee that they will even stay in the country once they graduate, it's not that easy. Are American students not interested? Just imagine what they could achieve if the same number of American students went into these careers as do foreign students.

A crisis like this pandemic shows just how badly the country would be affected if these foreign students weren't there. Just like for any other resource, a country that has to import most of what it finds valuable is always a serious problem.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

tzs• 5 years ago

The US is over represented on most "top N" rankings of best STEM universities. I'd guess that this leads to a lot of foreign students wanting to go to US grad schools, and that this is why engineering programs have so many foreign students rather than it being due to some shortage of US students wanting to go into those fields.

derekdahmer• 5 years ago

Important to note that these numbers are for graduate level students. Still wild that well over 50% of masters, docs and postdocs in the US are are not US citizens.

International students make up around 5% [1] of the undergraduate student body. Can't find the number specifically for STEM but I imagine its still < 20%.

[1] https://opendoorsdata.org/data/international-students/enroll...

jdgoesmarching3• 5 years ago

Any industry “shortage” or “crisis” is only from the perspective of the investment class. It is always a “crisis” when the supply of labor isn’t high enough for accountants to name their price, and in this state you will see businesses try to either reduce their own demand (typically via automation or overworking) or increase the supply rather than enter a labor market where they do not have the upper hand.

Overnight you will see huge media campaigns about these shortages, depicted as some national crisis. This will be used to justify government expenses on programs that simultaneously subsidize training costs for businesses while increasing their labor supply.

At least, that’s how it used to work. Now every company I’ve worked for just backfills American jobs with overseas contracts.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

Good observation. It seems most economic policy these days is made from the perspective of the investment class.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

You could say the same about unemployment though. There’s no economic shortage of jobs, just greedy workers who think too highly of themselves.

EvilEy34• 5 years ago

Doesn't work that way. Greedy is a made up concept to low-ball people.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

People who study STEM know a bunch of stuff about science and technology. There may be science and tech firms out there that feel that's what they need, but what they actually need is people who can learn how to do the work in their businesses.

The connection is that the kid who takes his time to learn how transistors work is more likely than most candidates to be able to figure out how your swaption contracts work. He's more likely to be interested, and he's more likely to be motivated than say the kid who studied French poetry. Or so we think, naturally there are type-O people who just love learning all sorts of things. But neither of those kids knows enough to actually do the job out of college. There's a small head start if you've studied CS and you want to be a coder, or if you studied finance and you want to be a swap trader. But it's actually quite small, and more of an indication of interest than actual competence.

The problem is we're now creating a narrative that STEM degrees cause competence in technical fields. It's not true, it's a correlation caused by people who like taking shit apart going to take-shit-apart classes so that they can indulge their curiosity for a bit. That metaskill is then used to get into whatever comes next. Software, solar cell manufacturing, whatever.

Look back at your degree. How much if it was actually useful, directly? How much was just exam cramming wastage (formulas, derivations)? I think the only time anything ever happened that I found useful, it was implementing a Bessel function in an option pricing library. So basically a few minutes saved, because everything else in that project (compiling the C lib, studying the option theory, calculating the model params) was of the "I'm gonna learn that now" type.

The danger here is we tell a generation of kids that if you study organic chemistry or quantum physics, you'll find a job. What they really need is that get-to-the-bottom attitude that will lead them to more satisfaction both intellectually and professionally. And just so we don't forget, that attitude is just as useful in non-STEM fields. Being able to thoroughly learn something is a universal skill.

renewiltord3• 5 years ago

The overwhelming view on HN is that labor shortages cannot exist but chip shortages can. The only difference between the two is whether HN users are buying or selling.

Chris20483• 5 years ago

You can always switch jobs for a higher offer, that's not true of a chip purchase.

bialpio3• 5 years ago

Care to explain what you mean? Of course you can switch jobs for a higher offer _if you can find it_ (and if you can "always" do it, it could mean there's a labor shortage), the same way with chips to buy.

bluedino2• 5 years ago

It's hard to find anyone. Desktop support techs? Can't find them. Cabling/wiring installers? Nowhere to be found. PHP CRUD programmers? Nope. CNC machinists? Haven't seen one either.

masterof0• 5 years ago

I'm truly curious, for folks here that don't like the FANG (leetcode + system design) interview approach. What would you prefer: - (framework x, language y, ....) trivia questions? - take home type of assessments? - make an app with X tech stack while someone else is looking over your shoulders? - "tell me about what you are working on, and the tech stack you are using" type of conversation?

I have been in all this types of interview, and I find them to be all flawed, but I would prefer the system design type if I have to choose.

autotune• 5 years ago

My last interview where I accepted the gig was two qa interviews in a conversational style format, I much prefer that over leetcode type questions. I'm DevOps rather than a software engineer though so YMMV.

__app_dev__• 5 years ago

I would prefer a take home assignment to the typical leetcode questions or a review of my work and code samples.

Interestingly I spoke with a former Microsoft Product Manager earlier this year and he told me "the most senior engineers give the worst interviews because you have to use parts of your brain that you haven't used in 20 years".

I live in Los Angeles and years ago (and for most companies where I work) algo interviews are not a thing but this year I've been getting contacted non-stop by recruiters including several FAANG so I've been cramming leetcode and it's not fun.

I've come to realize that by cramming leetcode I'm also missing out on important topics such as security, real-world performance, and other things that I used to actively study.

But at the price Silicon Valley companies pay it can be worth it I guess.

anm89• 5 years ago

This article seems to treat "stem workers" as exactly interchangeable cogs. Like not even programmers are interchangeable but it seems like a biologist would be interchangeable with a civil engineer here.

This seems pretty obviously stupid.

dang4• 5 years ago

Past threads:

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848918 - Aug 2019 (102 comments)

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13562277 - Feb 2017 (177 comments)

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612021 - May 2015 (3 comments)

The STEM Crisis is a Myth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426617 - Sept 2013 (25 comments)

The STEM Crisis is a Myth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6305671 - Aug 2013 (145 comments)

tobmlt• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what the process for interviewing for a highly technical spot at Nvidia looks like? I mean like where you are building specialized scientific computing frameworks for accelerating ML (but also accelerating computations for physics). Assume it’s the sort of role that basically requires a PhD in computational mechanics or optimization. Phd in one/experience in the other or both maybe.

Do I grind leet code for this?

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013)

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