Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2024/01/17/did-you-know-that-most-stem-grads-dont-work-stem-jobs/

by DamnInteresting • 3 years ago

80 134 3 years ago

tampabay.com

frantic2821• 3 years ago

They tend to all become BDRs or Consultants from my circles. Academia-Research trauma is tough too

jprete• 3 years ago

BDR?

makk• 3 years ago

Exactly.

ianbutler• 3 years ago

SDR == sales development rep: inbound sales

BDR == business development rep: outbound sales

JumpCrisscross6• 3 years ago

BDR

Business development...representative? Role?

archero• 3 years ago

I wonder if some just realize that they don’t like STEM. Maybe they only studied it for family or social pressures, or they heard that engineers can get paid a lot.

Anecdotally, I feel like some of my classmates had no interest in engineering. They seemed to stick around for the money or the benefits or the clout. But if landing a job in the industry became more trouble than it’s worth, I don’t see why they wouldn’t turn elsewhere.

devwastaken4• 3 years ago

STEM students can't apply for internships because they are on site and will not pay for relocation, will not pay for housing, and rent leases rarely will do short durations. Most grads get those because their family+friends had the resources to help them be successfull. Living in a large city with stem jobs and having an extra room.

As housing capital is squeezed so is the nation. The trend is not improving, many otherwise successfully people are or will be homeless and written off. The haves vs the have nots.

lumost• 3 years ago

aye - we've made the sciences into a bit of a hobby career, or a short career for those who want to pursue passion project for a few years.

Of my physics undergrad, around 1/10th were independently wealthy - guess who is still working in physics. The rest either did it for a few years, or got the picture over the course of the undergrad.

A 40k/year job is great if you are getting an additional ~120k in cash from existing investments at 22.

chihuahua• 3 years ago

Is Microsoft not considered STEM? They have always had a lot of interns, and the interships are paid lavishly.

devwastaken4• 3 years ago

The num of interns hired is very small, same as how tech has almost no scholarships.

reaperman• 3 years ago

For chemical engineering internships it was customary and expected for the employer to provide housing as well as some relocation money, in addition to wages.

I think lack of housing assistance is generally true of the sciences (biology, chemistry, etc) but less true for engineering. Computer science internships seem to be highly variable and not have any established industry-wide norms for internships.

devwastaken4• 3 years ago

Trends from 2010 are no longer applicable. Market has shifted significantly. When there is too many applicants it's easier to limit to local area.

al_borland4• 3 years ago

I worked a STEM job near a campus we got interns from. It was $26/hr, which at the time was more than we paid contractors for the same work, and possibly more than some entry level direct hires. They could work around school as much as they wanted, we had people there 24x7, so they could set their own hours… as little or as much as they wanted. It was just a few miles from campus, so they already had housing. And with all that, our biggest issue was them deciding to stop showing up after a while. It blew my mind how many of them just stopped coming to work.

devwastaken4• 3 years ago

That's a positive effect of having education close to industry. Unfortunately the costs and requirements to get into those schools is now so significant that few can do it. High cost of living = parents have to pay. There isn't the "self funded" student in those circumstances.

Responsible and reasonable individuals are not interested in giving up 5 years of their life and accruing high interest debt for the chance at a job. This may explain why many higher education students stopped going to work.

The people you actually want to hire likely are working other jobs to afford to stay in school.

kai_ferr• 2 years ago

The only one benefit of proximity between industry and education is apparent. However, the current financial burdens and stringent prerequisites render these institutions inaccessible to many. High cost of living necessitates parental intervention, often negating the possibility of self-funded students. Prudent individuals are unwilling to jeopardize five years of their life and accumulate substantial debt for a potential. This perhaps elucidates the high attrition rates among higher education students.

whispersnow• 3 years ago

Define “STEM” jobs

jansan• 3 years ago

Wearing a lab coat and writing very difficult math equations and complicated lewis structures on a huge piece of acrylic glass. Everything else does not count.

Joking aside, every job that requires knowledge from a STEM field that goes beyond standard high school education.

TimTheTinker• 3 years ago

Type "STEM career poster" into Amazon. You'll get a taste of the kinds of jobs that are being promised to kids who go into STEM.

wharvle7• 3 years ago

The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs. These include diverse sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and energy, but about half of STEM jobs are in computers, and tech firms typically complain the loudest of STEM shortages.

I’ve long suspected that the whole “STEM” education movement is a way for big tech to attach prestige-by-association to computer nerdery that’s mostly employed to sell ads better, then use that to improve their hiring pipeline.

STEM promise: progress! Science! Engineering marvels! A new age of exploration and advancement on all fronts!

STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.

[EDIT] Since I seem not to have communicated it well, judging from the responses, I mean those two examples at the end as 1) What the "more STEM education!" movement was selling, by choosing to frame it that way, if not explicitly, (though, often, explicitly) and 2) What I suspect was the kind of work that the folks funding & lobbying for that movement actually had in mind.

I don't mean that everyone working in tech is working on ads, as some have taken it—rather, easier hiring for that kind of work was the point of the STEM push, to the organizations largely driving it. (I strongly suspect, to be extra-clear). I think it was sold as 1 because selling 2 would have been a whole lot harder, and more-closely associating programming with those other things isn't bad PR for the industry as a whole, besides ("STEM" as a buzzword has been incredibly successful in education—a whole generation now lumps all those things together, and they're working on a second, so, mission accomplished)

CydeWeys2• 3 years ago

CS grads are the most likely to work in their field post-graduation. It's the other majors bringing STEM down, like biology.

JumpCrisscross6• 3 years ago

CS grads are the most likely to work in their field post-graduation. It's the other majors bringing STEM down, like biology.

Source? (Not challenging you. Curious to see how wide the range is across majors.)

bavent• 3 years ago

Big surprise, the jobs that pay more attract more people than the jobs that pay less. My partner has a bio undergrad degree, she works in a field having nothing to do with it because she didn’t want to pursue masters/phd.

wharvle7• 3 years ago

That's my point, and why I quoted that part. The only bit of this that needed some kind of big training push was computer nerdery, and that, mostly for selling ads better. Putting that under the "STEM" umbrella gave that crap an association with, you know, things that actually matter, which made selling it easier and generally raised CS' prestige (in a PR-campaign sort of way).

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Here in European country my understanding is even if physics is hard Science job. There really isn't much demand for it. So either you got to teaching or computers. If not later, yeah you are doing something else...

Other areas can be similar.

FirmwareBurner7• 3 years ago

STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.

That couldn't be more false. The vast majority of STEM jobs do not pushing ads to people., only FAANGS and such which are a minority of the total STEM jobs.

unsui• 3 years ago

source? (I am challenging you :) ).

The quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is a fairly robust heuristic for determing what skillsets are valued today by Big Tech. I'm sure there are exceptions (there always are to every heuristic), but overall, probably a fair assumption.

bluetomcat2• 3 years ago

Most of them are driving and sustaining user engagement in online services of some kind. It's mostly a zero-sum game between many services competing for user time and attention.

JumpCrisscross6• 3 years ago

vast majority of STEM jobs do not pushing ads to people., only FAANGS and such which are a minority of the total STEM jobs

A majority of STEM jobs fall under a category with "computer" or "software" in it [1]. Unless a majority of those are in adtech, you are correct.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23... Table 7

wharvle7• 3 years ago

And how bad would the "STEM shortage" (... but mostly just computer folks) be if, say, we outlawed dragnet-spying in the name of advertising, and the air went out of that market?

We might have more than enough "STEM" folks (but we actually mean programmers) to do everything except the stuff that we'd be better off not doing.

aquova• 3 years ago

I had this experience. Got a degree in physics and heard throughout my time about how awful this STEM shortage was. Went to graduate and couldn't get a job in my field at all (granted, I don't think I knew how to market myself nor was I well educated on how to do so). Ended up working towards a CS degree instead and getting a job in that field. All of my friend group in high school ended up with a diverse range of STEM degrees, but every one of us ended up in some sort of software work in the end.

prewett• 3 years ago

I read "STEM shortage" as "shortage of excellent software developers". The STEM shortage was after my time in uni, but what jobs actually need physics? I studied physics, too, and as far as I could tell my options were get a Ph.D. and then postdoc until a professor died, become a quant (might require a Ph.D., since it was the math that was attractive), teach high school physics, or do software.

As it turned out, I ended up with a job doing high-level tech support at a company selling measurement equipment to engineers, so they wanted people with a science/engineering background. I think physics is great to study, but more like another poster said, like studying classics if you want to write literature.

bhattid• 3 years ago

I had a similar experience when I was doing physics in undergraduate as well. I read online and was often told that a physics degree opened a lot of doors - academia, government/industry research, engineering, high school teacher, software development. But during my senior year when applying for jobs, I was hard-pressed finding any place that was interested in me. I was fortunate enough to find a job as a laser engineer immediately after graduating, but the specific role was leading to a deadend career.

I self-studied from my alma mater's computer science program (fortunately, many of the resources were all online) and was able to pivot into a career in software development, but it was a colossal amount of work and energy. I may as well have just done the computer science degree originally. A lot of my peers who had studied physics/math also took the same route, transitioning into data science or software development.

netbioserror• 3 years ago

I must be really lucky. I work at a smaller engineering company, working for engineering clients, making software that analyses engineering data, and I get to use the languages and tools I want. I must be a unicorn at this point given how miserable most programmers seem to be.

rockemsockem2• 3 years ago

I don't think hacker news is the best way to see how miserable most folks are.

HeyLaughingBoy• 3 years ago

Nope, you're not alone. I've spent most of my 30-year career writing embedded software for generally pretty interesting systems.

Miserable people love bitching about it.

TillE• 3 years ago

A lot of (younger?) people in web development seem to forget that other software continues to be developed, much of it unglamorous and not consumer-oriented, but still interesting to work on.

albrewer4• 3 years ago

I have a mechanical engineering degree and work as a software developer. I tried for a long time to find a company like this but they all seem to only want people who very narrowly fit a senior engineer role in either specialization, never someone who can do both.

rbanffy• 3 years ago

STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.

It wasn't that bad when we ended up working for large banks, but a lot of we are asked to do these days is plain evil and a disservice to humanity.

torginus3• 3 years ago

The thing is even though I went to school for EE, I found it weird that EE jobs demanded an incredibly wide and difficult to obtain skillset, including rudimentary CS knowledge, yet paid less than what I could sell said CS knowledge for.

We live in a society.

ghostpepper2• 3 years ago

I would go back from software to EE in a heartbeat if the compensation was even remotely comparable

icedchai• 3 years ago

I started EE, switched to CS because it was easier.

hiAndrewQuinn2• 3 years ago

I saw getting my bachelor's in electrical engineering as similar to when an aspiring writer gets a degree in classics instead of English lit. I always knew I'd end up a software engineer, I just also knew I really wanted to know how things worked on the physical level and wouldn't be able to muster up the energy to touch enough differential equations and vector calculus to actually grok it for myself ever again after college.

Walking in with that mindset made the whole thing really enjoyable, actually. Recommended!

spacemadness2• 3 years ago

This is why I switched out of firmware after years of twiddling bits and routing circuits. Imagine working on difficult threading issues one minute then needing to deeply understand a circuit layout the other and getting paid less than entry level bootcamp python programmers. Oh yes, with constant threat of being sent to country_of_manufacture to work out manufacturing issues on a moments notice. It’s capitalisms way of saying “we don’t really want or need this right now.” I heard you loud and clear, American tech companies.

bmmayer1• 3 years ago

By comparison, what % of humanities majors are working in humanities-related jobs? That would seem to be an important comparator that is excluded.

yongjik• 3 years ago

Meh, you can make any industry look awful by picking the worst side effects.

Rocketry: We can now incinerate civilians 0.5 seconds faster than before.

Pharmaceutical: The stage-4 cancer patient will spend five more days in agony.

Electronics: Your new smartwatch can now render ads at 60 fps.

Chemistry: We added a dozen new forever chemicals to rainwater.

wharvle7• 3 years ago

My suspicion, and what I'm getting at, is that the people selling "STEM education is vital!" were likely on the payroll of places that mostly just wanted to have more workers to sell ads better. They had the money to make the push for that, and the incentive to try to fatten their hiring pipeline, and dragging the other three letters along was just a sales tactic.

I don't mean that everyone working on computers works on ads, I mean that, for a lot of the people behind the STEM push in particular, my suspicion is that their main concern was in fact to be able to more-easily hire folks to sell ads slightly better. I think the form of the campaign was to make it look more noble.

fragmede• 3 years ago

Google and Facebook pay well and employ a good number of software developers, but there are more types of software out there by the many other companies out there that don't involve selling ads. Sure, if you want to be depressing and toxic to the people around you, be reductive about it and oversimplify things, and disqualify the positives - software has done good things for the world, I'm sure you can think of some.

wharvle7• 3 years ago

The top-comp tier skews toward harmful things, though, and if not for those bad things... would there be a shortage?

It doesn't take a majority of the market—not even close—seeing such huge price- and demand-distortion to mess things up really bad for the whole thing.

lolinder2• 3 years ago

I hate this stereotype on HN that we're all working in or adjacent to adtech. It's simply not accurate.

There were 4.4 million computer programmers in 2022.

Taking some extremely rough numbers: Google employs ~190k people worldwide. Meta another 86k worldwide. Microsoft 120k (in the US). Amazon 950k (in the US).

Even if we were to treat every single one of the employees I listed above as if they were a programmer living in the US (which is clearly ridiculous), we'd still only account for 1/3 of US programmers. Once you factor in the number of those employees outside the US and the number who do things other than programming (and even more those who work on, say, AWS), the number would become even smaller.

The vast majority of programmers do not and never have worked in ad tech. Working in ad tech is a choice that some people make, and yeah, it can pay even more money than a regular software job, but choosing one of the millions of other jobs available isn't exactly choosing poverty.

wharvle7• 3 years ago

Huge market distortions can come from a small absolute proportion of the market. Say, those with spying-advertising money-spigots. Nothing I wrote contradicts what you've written—rather, and the phenomenon paying incredible wages to capture the top talent—so, those with both a lot to gain from improving labor supply—and the coincidence of having a whole lot of money to fund PR and lobbying pushes to get more grads in the pipeline for computer-stuff hiring, is concentrated largely among ad companies.

What I mean is the STEM push sold one thing, but it was largely about another thing, which was more workers to help sell ads slightly better. It was about that to the people pushing it, that is.

mechhacker• 3 years ago

As a STEM working remotely in the area of this newspaper, I'd definitely consider a non-stem job that paid more than what I make working remotely...but I haven't seen an obvious opportunity like that.

majormajor2• 3 years ago

Some of the way this is being presented makes it seem like "bad for the workers" findings, "don't study STEM after all" but this is more about "is this the best way to employ people with STEM degrees", with a central complaint being something along the lines of "innovative IC STEM work is underpaid compared to neighboring business/management-ish fields that capture a lot of graduates"

Many able STEM grads bolt for better-paying careers, especially in business, finance, management and medicine (government programs focused on STEM exclude medical practitioners and are not designed to increase those numbers). Some do find high salaries in STEM jobs, many right out of college, especially in hot fields such as AI. But STEM grads even in the most dynamic sectors, including computer science and engineering, see their salary advantage fade over time, increasing the odds that they’ll leave for greener pastures.
Employers also incentivize moves from technical work to management with higher salaries at their own firms, yet many bemoan a shortage of technical STEM workers, not managers.

This article is not so much anti-education as anti-management/investor-class-incentivization.

smarx007• 3 years ago

I fail to see how being a software developer in a financial sector or in healthcare is not a STEM career?

Equally, having many STEM professionals move to management doesn't mean that a STEM degree is oversold. There are a lot of STEM management positions where a STEM education and industrial experience are a mandatory job requirement.

BobaFloutist• 3 years ago

Also "Why is the best path to a lot of non-STEM jobs to get an unrelated STEM degree, why don't jobs the primary duties of which are well covered by liberal arts (reading, writing, interpersonal communication) hire for liberal arts degrees?"

anon291• 3 years ago

Employers also incentivize moves from technical work to management with higher salaries at their own firms, yet many bemoan a shortage of technical STEM workers, not managers.

Well... yeah if you have X engineers in the class of 1990, then in order to continue to be able to provide STEM services at the same rate a decade after that cohort retires in 2055, you'll need X graduates in 2000. Obviously, you can't just depend on aging workers, or you'll run into the retirement and death problem and be unable to continue the endeavor. This is not unique to STEM. All industries require new workers to be produced. Humans die, retire, and move on. Without a constant supply of new workers, industries fade, inventions never happen, progress ceases.

Also, a STEM manager is very much a technical worker. You have to be delusional to think you can substitute an MBA for an Engineering Manager.

mp055• 3 years ago

I say this with 90% sincerity: I thought this was STEAM now?

But with all seriousness... I went to university out of high school in 2005 to get a mech engineering degree but never finished because I liked to party too hard and web dev was easy and paid better than most people I knew with entry-level engineering jobs.

Flash forward to now as a non-trad student and I'm in my 400-level coursework. It's all easier than it was, 100%. "We only need you to pass the FE" is what they say. I'm getting a 3.7 GPA by just showing up to class and doing the homework they assign. It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.

Makes me wonder about the quality of the graduates we're cranking out even at ABET-accredited schools.

JumpCrisscross6• 3 years ago

thought this was STEAM now?

What's the A?

EDIT: It's the arts [1]. It looks like a classical education.

[1] https://theconversation.com/explainer-whats-the-difference-b...

lainga• 3 years ago

Arts

lebean• 3 years ago

An asinine addition to an already asinine acronym.

mp055• 3 years ago

It looks like a classical education. "[...]humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design and new media."

I think of a classical education as debate/rhetoric, philosophy, and Greek/Latin but I went to public school so I'm just going off of hearsay.

nothercastle• 3 years ago

I thought it was something useful like accounting.

Should be more like FTEAM.

Finance Tech Engineering Accounting Medicine

wing-_-nuts• 3 years ago

Man, I did not think you were serious. I love how the liberal arts grads are trying to sneak in through the back door! That's hilarious. STEM is a hard nosed group of disciplines that build things. You'd have an easier time convincing me that CS doesn't belong in STEM than convincing me liberal arts does.

troupe• 3 years ago

So you think the classes are much easier? Might it be related to your life experience and focus you have now? Or are there things that simply aren't are rigorous as it used to be?

mp055• 3 years ago

It's hard to say, it may be both! But we get a page of notes for every exam in all of my classes pretty much without exception. I don't recall that ever being a thing.

ordinarypuddle• 3 years ago

Obv this is anecdotal, but I graduated in 2023 from a T10 CS school and it was not very challenging. Most of my friends in college agreed that besides 1 or 2 classes, we never had to work late nights or seriously stress about passing a class. I wasn't a 4.0 student, but I got a 3.7 with very little studying. University is getting a lot easier, and I genuinely think that as long as you are trying to ask the professor questions and for help, you cannot fail a class.

https://gradeinflation.com/

Workaccount22• 3 years ago

My old school electronics company has gone through some recent EE grads.

One of them is very sharp and definitely could have done the grind even 20 years ago.

The other three I have absolutely no idea how they passed those classes. They aren't engineers either, they are technicians doing low level work. All three also completely whiffed to a worrying degree when given a basic assignment to see how well they knew electronics (the one who is an engineer smashed his assignment no problem.)

majormajor2• 3 years ago

You may have changed more than you give yourself credit for, my experience at a highly-regarded place 20 years ago was that homework and showing up and passing the final went a similarly LONG way. But it was easy to not do those things.

RoyalHenOil• 3 years ago

I started university in 2004, and I did not party. My university coursework was no harder than my high school coursework, outside of a couple of weed-out classes (like organic chemistry) -- but those were graded on a curve, so they FELT difficult, but in practice weren't hard to pass at all because we were being graded against the students who were there to party and missed the fundamentals that everything else was built on.

I suspect that your partying made the coursework seem a lot more difficult that it really was.

Animats2• 3 years ago

I thought this was STEAM now?

The "STEAM" thing was invented by a guy at the Rhode Island School of Design.[1] It hasn't had much effect on education or hiring, but it transformed the maker movement into a branch of arts and crafts. Newer "maker spaces" tend to be heavy on construction paper and hot glue, light on milling machines and drill presses.

[1] https://www.risd.edu/steam

albrewer4• 3 years ago

It wasn't like that ~20 years ago.

I've found that learning entirely new fields of study to be easier as I get older (although I'm "only" 33); I think going to college straight after high school is a disservice to those of us whose brains developed more slowly than others. Long-term thinking and impulse control are some of the last things to develop.

mp055• 3 years ago

impulse control are some of the last things to develop.

If at all. Guanfacine helps that though.

LASR• 3 years ago

There is a huge difference between software and non-software STEM jobs. The required education/qualifications are different. The job market is different.

I graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics (non-sofware). I loved writing software as a hobby, but I wanted to "change the world" working at NASA or CERN or something.

In my 3rd year a FAANG offered an internship that paid better than what I would hope to make at NASA. I took it. Been in software ever since, bouncing between FAANGs and startups. I don't think I'll ever change the world. But hey, I have a family I can support.

Big tech steals you away with offers you can't refuse.

Basically my expected, actual diverged in this manner:

Path1: Not software

  - Complete undergrad
  - Join an engineering firm
  - Definitely make <6-figures
  - Wait years before you become a professional engineer
  - Maybe make 6-figures

Path2: Software

  - Maybe complete undergrad
  - Join a FAANG
  - Make 6-figures as a new grad

torginus3• 3 years ago

It's kinda weird that your 1%er flex of owning a home would've been absolutely unremarkable for your typical working class Joe a couple of decades ago - sign of the times I guess.

Workaccount22• 3 years ago

You don't even have to finish school to out earn non-tech STEM workers.

drngdds• 3 years ago

I don't know how accurate/inaccurate the overall argument here is, but they're saying "STEM" a whole lot when their criticisms are pretty specifically about tech, and mostly software companies.

tekla• 3 years ago

Programming is easy money, very little effort, much larger salaries.

fhub• 3 years ago

Census.gov has a less opinionated article which appears to be the source. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...

adverbly• 3 years ago

I can't speak to the international community at large, but at least in Canada, post-secondary education is not a stream for prospective employees to undergo training. It is a product which is marketed and sold for profit.

They will enroll as many people as they can convince to apply(rate limited by how quickly they can expand infrastructure and enrollment).

I remember 10 or so years ago when I was in school, if I wanted to get a real challenge when preparing for a test, I could just go back to look at exams from 10 years prior and things would be noticeably more difficult. I can't imagine things have improved significantly since then, and more likely they've gotten worse.

gnicholas• 3 years ago

This may be true, but does that mean they didn't benefit from a STEM education, either because of the skills they learned, or the signaling value? I used to be a lawyer, and it was generally accepted that a student who had a STEM major would be given more leniency on GPA than other students. This was because of the perceived rigor of STEM disciplines. Applicants who were looking to work in patent law would get a boost since they would presumably know some things relevant patent cases they would be assigned to, and I don't know if this article would consider 'patent litigator' to be a STEM job.

I do think that the STEM push has been a bit overdone at times, but we should still consider that people who majored in STEM may still have benefited from their degrees because it allowed them to stand out, and to learn things that are useful in some jobs that may not be considered 'STEM jobs'.

snakeyjake2• 3 years ago

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

My company has approximately 1,000 open positions for engineers. Not "build a website" or "use AI to sell ads" engineer but "build a TX tuner for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar from scratch" engineer.

We don't grant massive quantities of stock as part of a get rich quick lottery scheme, but I make over 3x the current US annual household income in an area where a 4 bedroom house on an acre and a half is $400k and that's enough. Anyone who thinks that isn't enough is crazy-- sociopathic, even.

Maybe there's not a shortage of biology and IT skills and coding bootcamp grads but there is a shortage of people who took, and paid attention in, a linear algebra class.

There is 100%, irrefutably, undoubtedly, unquestionably, a shortage of engineers. Actual engineers not "use AI to sell crypto ads" engineers.

jiggybling• 3 years ago

What's your company and how can you get experience in this kind of engineering?

linuxftw• 3 years ago

1000 open positions? They should hire people for work/study programs, train them, pay for their education, and then they'll have a pipeline of engineers they so desire.

Unfortunately, companies think they can skip investing in their people and expect people to spend $100k+ just for the privilege of applying to some company that doesn't respect their work/life balance and wants to pay them $50k/yr to start. Hard pass.

snakeyjake2• 3 years ago

They should hire people for work/study programs, WE DO

train them, WE DO I started over a decade ago as a technical writer and am now a senior principal engineer.

pay for their education, WE DO I had to get a degree and the company paid for almost all of it. They flexed my schedule and looked the other way when I slacked off due to fatigue because I was a single parent of three daughters at the time. Any cert I want, any conference I want, any class I want- gets paid for. Gratis (except owing them time).

and then they'll have a pipeline of engineers they so desire. WE DON'T

Highschool work study participants are paid $34.62/hr which is $72k full time, which is just below what techs earn. College engineering interns are paid more. New hires even more.

Also highschool work study participants are given full benefits. Have you ever tried to explain health insurance and 401k to a 17-year-old?

Like I said, I feel like I'm living in a parallel dimension.

I do not know where people work.

I do know that if you're a god damned receptionist at my company or any of our competi-mates and you say "hmmm.. can I take some classes to try to get more technical" they will throw wheelbarrows full of cash at you. They will give you WAAAAAY past the non-taxable benefit for education and then give you a raise or bonus to cover the taxes.

spacemadness2• 3 years ago

Kind of a weird reply. What it sounds like they need is an EE with experience in radio/comms. That’s a rare skillset these days. I’m not sure why that’s rage worthy.

NanoYohaneTSU• 3 years ago

Extremely poor journalism.

Very misleading and a misunderstanding of what's actually going on.

Example: "The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs."

It's not 28% of all STEM grads, it's 28% of physical science STEM grads.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...

I'm going to do a better job than some shmuck journo.

"37% reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation" & "About half of workers who majored in engineering (52%) or computer, mathematics, and statistics majors (51%) worked in STEM."

This makes a lot of sense, about half of all STEM grads are going into STEM jobs. It's in tandem with the famous 50% of lawyers are not practicing law.

I'm certain that if you started doing breakdowns of demographics you would result in it making even more sense and easily explainable.

albrewer4• 3 years ago

I exited a traditional mechanical engineering role because 90% of my job was not engineering. I loved what I covered in undergrad, but most "engineering" jobs were 80% project management / paper shuffling / oversight, with a bit of engineering tacked on.

My last job was BA/QA work at an engineering software company, and it was by far the most "engineering" I'd done at any job. Even there, though, it was only about 1/3 of my responsibilities. I got good enough at the software stuff that I qualified for a 25% pay bump by moving industries. Year for year, my software experience pays more than my engineering experience.

syntaxing• 3 years ago

I was a mechanical design engineer for a decade before switching to a software based role. The biggest thing to keep in mind is MechE is the paintbrush with the broadest stroke in engineering. You can work in a lot of different roles or industries. But I experience a lot of what you said but not to that extreme. I would say I did 50/50 fun stuff (engineering) vs boring stuff (project management and documentation).

legerdemain• 3 years ago

  > Extremely poor journalism... some shmuck journo...

This is a guest opinion column by a book author to promote a book. All of these facts are very visibly stated on the page, including the word OPINION (in all caps at the top of the page), the author's professional bio, and the title of the book being promoted.

Grimblewald• 3 years ago

It being an opinion doesn't excuse it for being half formed from half digested information.

vba616• 3 years ago

I'm sure that the census and other researchers make a valiant attempt at distinguishing technical and scientific roles, but I don't think it's possible.

How can you determine that a something something service analyst at a random non "tech" company in Illinois is or isn't a programmer? If you don't identify an extremely technical position as a STEM job when it's not named in a particular way, then what are you counting?

Suppose someone does have an IT-related title, but they majored in biology and are working for a paper company in Pennsylvania in the HR department as a programmer. Should they be counted as using their degree? Are they?

What if you are counting employees of a large government organization and for obscure reasons, they call everybody who touches a computer an "IT Specialist"? Then you might be vastly overcounting.

People who have exactly the same title and work in the same small department, even, can differ wildly in their actual roles, too.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

The article is just paraphrasing what is reported on the census.gov page.

As such, we are being told (mislead) by an HN commenter that the Census Bureau is incapable of summarising their own data.

From census.gov:

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...

"Among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% reported a bachelor's degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation, according to the Census Bureau's 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.

This translates into less than a third (28%) of STEM-educated workers actually working in a STEM job.

The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling."

The graduates who did not major in science were more likely to end up in a STEM job. (The term "science" as used here, by me, excludes "computer science".)

"About half of workers who majored in engineering (52%) or computer, mathematics, and statistics majors (51%) worked in STEM."

Why don't more "S" grads work in "TEM" jobs.

Perhaps there are actually less "TEM" jobs than some folks believe.

Moomoomoo309• 3 years ago

Oh, if they're excluding PMs and tech leads because they're in management, this data makes perfect sense.

rockemsockem2• 3 years ago

I looked at the census site and they're also including psychology majors, which is the most popular college major in America. Unsurprisingly, most of these folks don't go on to apply that major in scientific research. I think it's a pretty normal degree to get for social work, therapy, etc.

0763e39aa• 3 years ago

Anyone can get into a college program (and anyone does); one has to self-select into the "rigorous" fields of study to attempt to signal intelligence. What used to require a HS diploma now requires a college degree and so forth.

Humanities are now just a dumping ground for morons when they used to be the smartest people on the campus.

Animats2• 3 years ago

Humanities are now just a dumping ground for morons when they used to be the smartest people on the campus.

It's hard. An old friend of mine was a music major. Masters in music from Harvard, majoring in early music. Read and wrote Latin and Greek. Read and wrote early music notations. Could play a wide range early instruments. Never got a job that used those skills. Died recently, forgotten, in a Maryland suburb, her most visible lifetime accomplishment a book on needlework.

Another, younger friend also got a music degree from an Ivy League school. But she went to work for an app toolkit startup which was acquired by Microsoft. She's done very well.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

All of us will be forgotten sooner or later, and sooner for the vast majority. While it wouldn't be for me, I can see a lifetime spent studying music would be more meaningful to some than building an app toolkit. I'm not naive enough to say that money isn't important, but it's not everything either.

swader999• 3 years ago

I wish more STEM grads would work in journalism.

albrewer4• 3 years ago

The reason they're not working in STEM jobs is due to pay, usually. Journalism famously pays poverty wages.

nmstoker• 3 years ago

Wait till they notice what's happening with History majors

tzs• 3 years ago

Their goals include reducing perceived shortages of STEM workers, boosting American innovation and competitiveness and diversifying this highly paid workforce. The message of lucrative STEM careers appears to have reached students and tuition-paying parents — the number of STEM majors has surged in recent years.
But there is a problem with these massive investments: Most STEM graduates don’t work in STEM occupations. The Census Bureau reported in 2021 that a paltry 28% of STEM grads are working in these supposedly in-demand, highly paid and important STEM jobs.

Isn't that at least partly to be expected? When you have a shortage of workers in a field where it takes a fair bit of talent and years of training to do the job well and we don't have any good way to identify up front which people will be good at it the you are going to have to put more people through training that you actually need in order to get the number you need.

If we decided for example that the US does not produce enough chess grandmasters probably the most effective way to increase grandmaster production would be to make chess a competitive school sport starting in elementary school and continuing through college, much like we do with football, with funding for coaches, scholarships, and all that. 99.99% of the kids who go through that would not become grandmasters, but it would greatly increase the chances that kids with the talent to become grandmasters get discovered and get the resources they need to do so.

Maybe having 72% of STEM graduates (just using the article's numbers, but note that other comments have disputed those numbers) end up not going into STEM is just a reflection of how many you have to train to find the 28% that are suited for the available STEM jobs?

karmakaze• 3 years ago

Sounds like the story about there being no devs to hire without mentioning that they want the best for predefined salary bands. Those who would meet the hiring standard find the salary doesn't meet their standard.

Most STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs

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