Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/study-there-may-not-be-a-shortage-of-american-stem-graduates-after-all/2013/04/24/66099962-acea-11e2-a8b9-2a63d75b5459_story.html?hpid=z3

by ilamont • 13 years ago

44 123 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

nathansobo• 13 years ago

My anecdotal experience says there's a ton of demand for skilled programmers. If we're graduating CS students that don't have the skills that tech companies need, that's a problem with quality rather than volume.

RyanIyengar• 13 years ago

And my anecdotal experience says there is not a ton of demand for skilled programmers. Guess we're back where we started now.

pbiggar10• 13 years ago

i'm interested to hear you experiences. Most companies I know (circleci included) are dying for skilled devs, though there's no shortage of not-great devs.

kkowalczyk• 13 years ago

Your "anecdotal" experience is rubbish.

I'm getting unsolicited requests for interviews from software companies by the bucket.

There are 180 open positions at Google in Mountain View alone (https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#t=sq&q=j&j...).

Multiply that by all Google's locations, add job listings from hundreds of other tech companies in SV.

Every time I hear this topic discussed by people who actually know what they are talking about (i.e. those running companies that try to hire competent programmers or those that are involved in the process, like VCs), it's always the same: finding good programmers is brutal.

Now, I'm sure that what you said is true in Alaska and many other parts of US that are not one of the tech centers, but when it comes to SV/Seattle/NY etc., it's clear that there is more demand than supply for skilled developers.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this? As a recruiter who gets recruiting emails to come recruit engineers at other companies quite often, I have a hard time believing this.

Locke16892• 13 years ago

It's important to note that even if this is true (and I suspect that the statistics lead more towards the statement that, "there is not a shortage of low-level IT trained workers" rather than "there is not a shortage of very talented developers") it doesn't mean that the right thing is to limit immigration.

Protectionism is almost always a negative for economic growth of a country. Even if wages in the US are depressed, that just means that wages were artificially high and that the US would soon become increasingly noncompetitive.

The biggest problem with H-1B visas seem to be the restrictions on working for a single established employer rather than having too many of them.

geebee3• 13 years ago

There can be a problem, though, with very uneven types of protectionism. For instance, suppose both apples and oranges are both subjected to very high tariffs. Then, you remove all tariffs from oranges, but leave them high on apples. you should expect domestic production to shift to apples and foreign production to shift to oranges, to the extent possible.

I can see how you would feel that creating more work visas would lead to a freer market. However, if these visas are heavily concentrated in STEM fields, this may end up producing a very distorted market that deters US citizens from pursuing degrees in this field.

One of the provisions of the immigration bill is to grant green cards to graduates of US-based STEM programs at the MS or PhD leve. Rather than a more general liberalization of immigration, that's just the sort of highly specific, targeted program that can produce severe market distortions.

Many of the people who object to these visas actually support more general liberalization of immigration - they just object to visa programs that are based on the notion that we need to use immigration specifically to increase the size of the STEM workforce. This is because they believe, as this article suggests, there is no shortage of STEM workers.

rayiner• 13 years ago

It's misleading to paint it as a simple "free market" issue when STEM education in the U.S. is massively subsidized by the public.

qiqing2• 13 years ago

Quick correction @Lock1689: It is possible for someone with an H-1B to transfer from one employer to another.

pbiggar10• 13 years ago

And you can actually work for 2 of them by holding 2 H1Bs at the same time (which is what happens naturally when you transfer to a new company).

Locke16892• 13 years ago

Cool! Didn't know that.

ebiester• 13 years ago

The problem is that you can't get very talented developers unless you're willing to let them enter into IT as low-level IT trained workers. That first job is often difficult. (The problem of course, is complex. An entry level worker may be worth x, whereas someone of 2 years is worth 4x. However, corporate incentives rarely work like that, leaving trained workers to leave in order to get raises.)

If we're really honest, starting salaries should be low, with a near doubling of salary within 6 months, if we were looking at real productivity.

icn22• 13 years ago

There is no such a thing shortage of IT workers. These companies (google, facebook…)claim shortage of talents because they always want top ones (at least with the standard they think). As far as there are better quality foreigner workers they always claim shortage.

pjscott• 13 years ago

So there's a shortage of good IT workers. Your point?

mjn• 13 years ago

Pretty much by definition, though. They don't have an objective quality standard, but a relative one.

icn22• 13 years ago

No shortage of good IT workers as well. My point is it doesn't matter how good local workers are. As far as there are better (their standard) foreign workers they claim there is a shortage because they want top ones.

UK-AL• 13 years ago

Theres a shortage of good everything. If there wasn't a shortage it would not be good.

parennoob2• 13 years ago

I'm confused by their conflation of STEM (in particular CS) grads and IT workers. For example they say, “For computer science graduates employed one year after graduation . . . about half of those who took a job outside of IT say they did so because the career prospects were better elsewhere, and roughly a third because they couldn’t find a job in IT,”

None of the people who work in the IT department at my company have CS degrees. They have, however, held various sysadmin and programming positions, and do a bloody good job running our IT. I'm not sure we'd hire a fresh-out-of-school CS grad for our IT jobs if they didn't have any experience doing sysadmin or equipment / facility maintenance stuff.

svachalek2• 13 years ago

Companies that aren't in the tech industry usually lump their programmers (for their web site, or internal process tools) into the IT dept. Still, the conflation of terms in this article makes it hard to understand what it's really saying; most interpretations I can make are just hard to believe.

bennyg• 13 years ago

Yep. My official title is IT Technical Specialist 2 - but I'm an iOS Developer if we're playing with words that actually mean something when said together. Funny enough though, I don't have a CS degree, I have an Art degree. Though everyone I work with is either CS or ECE.

pbiggar10• 13 years ago

This (and the discussion around it) are bullshit. They somehow think on STEM job is equivalent to another, which is lunacy.

- Talking about all STEM graduates as equal is pointless, because some people are useless and some are amazing.

- Talking about STEM in general is useless, because software is booming, and nothing else really is.

- Talking about all H1B jobs as the same is also bollox: half are employed by infosys (etc) as low cost (and low quality) contractors to avoid paying a fair wage (against the rules of the H1B program as I understand it). However, Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs).

So startups and high growth companies are being starved of great talent, because chemists can't find jobs and Infosys is trying to depress wages of low-quality IT workers? Makes no sense.

jmduke• 13 years ago

because software is booming

Do you have statistics for this? While the need for STEM is obviously rising, I feel like a lot of this conversation devolves into an echo chamber: I'd love to see hard statistics about STEM career demand.

pbiggar10• 13 years ago

I know that when I sent an email to the YC founders list cause I needed a job (2 years ago, but that's recent), I got 100 replies. I also know I find it hard to find really good devs for CircleCI. But those are just anecdotes...

microarchitect• 13 years ago

One statistic I remember is from Brad Smith's talk at Brookings (http://www.brookings.edu/events/2012/09/27-stem-education#re...). He says (around the 6:30 mark) that Microsoft has over 3400 open jobs for engineers and software developers in this US and this number is a 34% increase from last year.

jfoutz• 13 years ago

Natural gas is booming too. I think that employs a fair number of geologists and various types of engineers.

geebee3• 13 years ago

"Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs)."

Is there a possibility, though, that what they pay US employees is influenced by the ability to grant visas to non-citizen workers? In that sense, the program could still suppress wages.

pbiggar10• 13 years ago

Undoubtably. If you run out of good talent, then the price of talent goes up. If you increase the pool of good talent, then it stabilizes.

However, I believe (and the point of the H1B program is) that being able to hire great people is a competitive advantage of US companies, and is more important than increasing salaries of existing employees (to the economy).

Symmetry• 13 years ago

I'd be really interested in finding out how that study defines "IT". And also how it defines "STEM job". Would being a quant on Wall Street be considered a "STEM job", for instance?

samirahmed2• 13 years ago

good question, its probably much broader than you would expect... I think quant would fall under

27.0305 financial math

see the official list here

http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf

pdonis• 13 years ago

My BS detector went off when I read:

Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.

In other words, wages haven't risen because the reduction in the number of domestic STEM workers has been offset by the increase in the number of foreign STEM workers; the total supply of STEM workers has remained the same, but more of them are foreign.

Note that if you remove the word "domestic" in front of "labor shortage", the above quote would be correct; but it includes that word, which makes it worse than wrong.

graycat14• 13 years ago

It's the same old, same old: It's an old story that somehow too many powerful people in the US Federal Government want to do 'US national technical manpower management'.

E.g., when Sputnik went up, the Feds via the NSF flooded US high school and college education with money, scholarships, summer programs, etc. to get more US citizens into STEM fields.

During the Cold War and the Space Race, STEM students were paid nearly well enough to buy a house; then the powers that be got really scared.

But, with the stimulus, soon the supply exceeded the demand; US citizens who walked into a college STEM course saw the TA and half of the students from Asia or India, turned, and walked out.

So, right: Joe and Mary paid taxes to support public education K-college and graduate school. For their children they struggled to meet college expenses. And when their children went to college, somehow they found lots of students there from India and Asia. How come? These students were from families with annual incomes less than $10,000 yet somehow got their children into the college supported by the taxes of Joe and Mary when Joe and Mary had to struggle to pay for their children in that college? Bummer. Sure: The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer. Ripoff.

During the Viet Nam war, the head of the Selective Service system was old General Louis B. Hershey with the remark that "The US Selective Service System has national manpower management responsibilities far exceeding staffing the armed forces." by which he meant that US young men had two, just two, options, (1) do well in college or graduate school in STEM fields or (2) go to Viet Nam. Of course, that 'responsibility' was only in his egotistical imagination; still he executed on his delusion.

Later much of the US 'military industrial complex' concluded that there was a US STEM shortage. So, the powers that be got the NSF to set up a team of economists to calculate, with essentially supply and demand curves, how much 'stimulus' would be needed to increase the labor supply.

The stimulus didn't work well for US citizens, so the plan was to write into research grants in US research universities that with the grant money so many students had to be supported and that, hint, hint, there were plenty of willing students from India and Asia, hint, hint.

Then there got to be the H1B scam, mostly just a new version of 'indentured servitude' or 'slave labor'.

Basically, anytime STEM worker bees get paid well enough to buy a house, big forces in the US move to flood the market with STEM graduates.

It's dirt simple: It's capital versus labor. Capital has power and wants cheap labor.

These US powers that be are just seeking more money and power and, net, are seriously hurting the basic strength of the US.

The solution is for US voters to become informed and come together and vote for the US for the US as a whole and not just for the 1% richest capitalists.

Of course there's more at Prof. Norm Matloff's

    http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

parennoob2• 13 years ago

This comment seems slightly overwrought and racist to me, specially this part, "US citizens who walked into a college STEM course saw the TA and half of the students from Asia or India, turned, and walked out." -- Really?

I don't see an option to downvote here, but if I could, I would definitely do that for this.

eru3• 13 years ago

You need more karma to downvote.

Otherwise, it seems to me more like graycat is describing racism, but you can't tell greycat would support it based on that comment.

graycat14• 13 years ago

It's not "racist". It's just that the US citizens quickly saw that they didn't 'fit in'. So, they became afraid, rightly so, that somehow it was a game that promised not to be good for US citizens. And that fear was correct.

The US citizens just saw that they didn't fit in and turned, which is just what they should have done. There are lots of situations where a person might not fit in, and racism need have nothing to do with it.

Or, where were all the other US citizens that one would expect would be the TA and the students? Were they all racists? Or did they just see or sense something wrong?

There was something wrong, very wrong: The labor supply was being manipulated in DC. It was a rigged game and not what it looked like superficially. When see such a situation, don't ignore the obvious and wait 20 years to discover the details of how DC rigged the game and, instead, just sense that something's wrong and leave.

I saw situations where the division was really clear: Essentially all the worker bees were from India or Asia, and essentially all the managers were US citizens, white of Western European descent. In that situation, got to be from Asia or India to apply for a slot even as a worker bee -- US citizens of Western European descent need not apply. Period.

Look, set aside your PC sensitivities for a second and look at some simple reality: A big theme in the US from Alexis de Tocqueville on is for the US to create an identifiable, exploited underclass. That's what's going on here. Given that such an exploited underclass has been created, then other people don't 'fit in' and will not be welcome, especially by the higher ups. Again, it's not racism, especially on the part of the guy who sees that he doesn't fit in, turns, and walks; instead, it's reality.

markdown2• 13 years ago

> The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer. Ripoff.

Wait, are you saying someone like me from the third world can get a scholarship in the US from the US government?

Wish I had known that a few years ago. The people I know who studied in the US either did so out of pocket or via scholarships granted here in my country by local bodies.

graycat14• 13 years ago

Look, in a US college or university, essentially no student ever pays for the full cost. One-third is about the most a student pays. Instead the institution gets money from taxes, research grants, gifts, the endowment, and a few others. Essentially all the money coming in is from US citizens or US taxes from US citizens. So, the US is paying for those institutions.

If a student from outside the US gets accepted, arrives, and does well, then typically they can get a scholarship. So, who's paying for their education? Not the student, or their family. Instead their education is being paid for by US citizens or US taxes. Even if the foreign student doesn't get a scholarship, likely two-thirds or more of their education is being paid for by US citizens, not the student.

When I was in one graduate school, a Midwest state university, somehow there were a lot of students from India there. That university was expensive for students from that state and much more expensive for any students from other states. A year there could cost as much as a new US car. Today that would be ballpark $40,000. How is a family in India going to come up with $40,000 to send their child to a US university for one year?

Given the currency exchange rates at the time between India and the US, tough for me to believe that people in India were paying for those students from India at out of state rates at that university. I believe I know where the money was coming from, some special program of the US State Department. So, it was US taxpayers, struggling to get their own children through college, paying for the college educations of students from India. Why? Because somehow some people at the US State Department believed that somehow it was good for their effort to 'organize the world' to take money from US citizens and use it to educate students in a distant, poor country.

At another university, I had a graduate scholarship for my Ph.D. The students were good but were nearly all US citizens and not very many of them. At one point a prof confided in me that the department had a lot of tuition scholarships going to waste: US citizens who were good students didn't want to come, and the department didn't like the quality of the applications from foreign students. But, whether the student was US or foreign, the cost, no doubt very expensive for the professors, buildings, supplies, overhead, was being paid for by US citizens.

Let me be even more clear: The list of the world's top few dozen research universities is dominated by the US, e.g., Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, ..., University of Chicago, ..., Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Now, they are 'research universities' which means that heavily what they do is research. The research is mostly paid for by research grants, and those are heavily from the US NSF and NIH. The grants are very competitive. It is standard for a university to take, as I recall, about 60% of the grant money for 'overhead'. Hint, hint, that's how the English department gets funded, along with the student center, the string quartet series, the limo for the president, the concert hall, the lawn care, the bronze statues of earlier presidents, the fountains, etc. And that 60% number tends to come up again -- about 60% of the budget of the university can come from such research grants. YMMV, but look up details in the annual reports of the top research universities. So, it's clear: Those research universities, right down to the grass mowing, are being paid for heavily by the US Federal Government from tax money from US citizens. Any student, US or foreign, however much they are paying, is getting most of their education paid for by US tax payers.

Then a question for US taxpayers is, why should they, struggling to get their own children through college, be paying for the educations of students in distant countries?

If you went to a well known US college or university, no matter how much you paid (maybe there are some exceptions for students from some Mideast oil kingdoms), most of your education was paid for by US citizens, via gifts or taxes.

mturmon2• 13 years ago

So crude as to be worthless. I'll pick one:

"The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer."

I went to Cornell. The undergrads from India and China were often from extremely wealthy families (far more so than the average undergrad). They were typically paying close to full boat to an Ivy League school, after all. Currently, here's the guidance on scholarships for international undergrads:

"Cornell has a limited amount of funding available for international undergraduates, only 30-40 scholarships are awarded to students in each entering class."

That's out of an entering class of 3300, 19% of which were international -- meaning maybe 1 in 20 had a scholarship. For calibration, the Indian undergrad I knew best was in the immediate family of the president of Tata group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group -- $100B in revenue).

Now, at some level Cornell was eager to get people of that ilk, just as prospects for future giving. No telling how much special treatment they might get. But in no way was the typical Indian/Chinese undergrad on scholarship (as the figures above indicate).

The picture changes dramatically, of course, if you consider international grad students. These were typically supported by research assistantships or teaching assistantships. But in either case, they were being paid the same ~10K/year as "domestic help" (like me) to do work on government-sponsored research projects (advancing US government interests -- NSF, NIH, and DARPA aren't charities), or to grade papers and hold tutorial sessions.

But that's poorly paid, the same deal as offered anyone (US or international). In fact, while there, I held a US government fellowship (NSF) that was closed to foreign students. It was paid for by your hypothetical Joe and Mary.

I think you do have a point that the H1B program is, in many areas, employer-driven to depress wages. But your surrounding narrative is wrong.

graycat14• 13 years ago

No, I am still correct. That some wealthy foreign students went to Cornell is no doubt recent and not at all what I am talking about.

If you will read what I wrote, then you will see that there were students from India in a US Midwestern university. They were not wealthy. And at the time there's no way they could have been paying their way. Net, in US universities, even in undergraduate programs, a major fraction of STEM students were from foreign countries, especially India and Taiwan. In simple terms, they were on scholarships of various kinds.

Further, again, yet again, this time just for you, over again, no student in a well known college or university pays the full cost. Rarely do they pay more than 1/3rd. E.g., as I have already posted in this thread, Mike Bloomberg gave $100 million to Johns Hopkins, and a founder QUALCOMM recently gave $133 million to the Cornell technical university being built on Roosevelt Island, and this story is standard all across US colleges and universities. At a research university, expect that a professor will get about $500,000 a year from NSF, NIH, etc. About 60%, 300,000, will go to the university as 'overhead'. The remaining $200,000 will cover the professor's salary, travel, equipment, supplies, etc. And a little will go for graduate students. So, again it's Joe and Mary paying for the university.

Net, students don't pay the full cost. Instead the full cost is paid by gifts and taxes, taxes, e.g., for Joe and Mary who are still having a tough time paying for their own children to go to college. Some of the taxes go quite directly to the institutions, e.g., all the state schools in NY, MD, CA, the Big Ten, etc. A lot more money goes from tax payers to the universities via NSF and NIH.

You mentioned DARPA: There were old rules that the US DoD could not fund work at universities. Long much DARPA (ARPA) work was so 'confidential' that it could not be done in universities. But clearly, e.g., with some of the DARPA Challenge projects, e.g., at CMU and Stanford, some DARPA funding is making its way into universities. Still I doubt that a major fraction of DARPA money goes to universities.

Yes, the situation of the NSF flooding the US with foreign STEM students is more extreme in graduate programs. But the NSF money that goes to students is not really because the research projects need the student's labor! No, the money is because the NSF demands that students be supported because the NSF wants to flood the US labor markets with STEM students with graduate degrees. Maybe you believe that you worked hard for your research assistantship, but, really, the NSF, NIH, etc. mostly just want you to add to the US STEM worker pool to keep down costs to US industry and the US 'military-industrial' complex.

dbond• 13 years ago

A little of topic but...

Having read the comments here and many blog posts on HN on this subject it seems that many recent graduates are not up to scratch with what the industry expects.

Yet a degree is required to obtain a H1-B visa or 12 years (IIRC) work experience, could the removal of this requirement ever possibly be lobbied for with judgement left up to the potential employer?

I realise that a degree is used as a general quality standard in immigration processes but this seems like a situation in which it could actually be detrimental.

Note: I'm from the UK, I see the same problems here and I'm curious about the U.S situation.

ecdavis• 13 years ago

From what I understand, companies are currently asking for the H1-B visa quotas to be increased. This suggests that they are finding plenty of people to hire who qualify for an H1-B visa but there are simply not enough visas to go around. With this in mind, dropping the degree requirement is probably not necessary yet.

nickff• 13 years ago

This piece fails due to a logical fallacy: the fallacy of composition. What is good for each scientist or engineer is a higher salary, but this is not necessarily good for all of them, or the rest of a country.

Perhaps having more scientists and engineers would depress their salaries, (though this is not necessarily true,) while increasing the country's total productivity, and making the average citizen richer.

So this article proves nothing, and fails to clearly define what they mean by shortage.

gojomo• 13 years ago

Be careful trusting data from the EPI, a left/labor/economic-protectionist think tank. It will be selectively chosen and spun to advance their core idea that domestic/union laborers need constant government rescue, via things like immigration restrictions. (Of course data selected by think tanks with other ideologies deserves skeptical reading, as well.)

As was pointed out last time the EPI scored a press hit with their claim of stagnant IT wages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4880332), they appear to be leaving out the very real possibility a younger/earlier-career mix of workers -- a demographic bulge -- makes their broad wage averages look worse, even while each individual cohort is better off.

And, when in this latest study they highlight how many college graduates who fill IT positions have non-IT degrees (Figure F: 38%+), or of all IT workers have no degree at all (36%, p. 8), they should realize that one way to deal with a skills shortage is to make-do with less-skilled/less-trained people, but then pay them less while they learn or simply play-out-of-position. (This making-do also creates the early-in-career demographic bulge mentioned above.)

On the other hand, when the EPI looks at the fact many STEM majors don't wind up working in STEM jobs (Figure D), it is spun as: "For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job." From that wording you'd think the streets are filled with woeful idle STEM graduates! But maybe, given the still very low unemployment among all with college degrees (and especially technical degrees), these graduates found something else they preferred? Or maybe they really weren't very good at or happy with their exact STEM degree area?

It requires the EPI's factory-floor mindset, where STEM degree recipients are cogs that could (or should) be dropped into closely-matching STEM jobs, to make this natural dynamism sound like we might have way more idle STEM graduates than we can use.

samirahmed2• 13 years ago

for those who need clarification of what counts as STEM for immigration purposes

http://www.ice.gov/sevis/stemlist.htm http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf

qiqing2• 13 years ago

Thank you for that list, Samirahmed. That was substantially more broad than I expected.

TIL - STEM as defined by the government apparently includes:

- Agricultural Animal Breeding

- Livestock Management

- Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering Technology/Technician

- Explosive Ordinance/Bomb Disposal

jmspring2• 13 years ago

I won't go into EPI numbers, any study -- left, right, or center -- there is always a bias. There is a simple fact in the STEM debate, however, there was a period in time where companies invested in people, trained them, and established a relationship with the employee based on mutually beneficial growth.

Today, that is long gone. There are many STEM individuals that did not adapt with the times that are considered no longer employable. Rather than reaching out to and training these individuals, companies want the quick fix -- thus the H1B path. There are amazing individuals that want to establish or work for businesses in the US that may be victims of the process, at the same time, there are average individuals getting work visas that could just as well be handled by a local (possibly skilled, possibly w/ a bit of training).

Companies no longer invest in the average individual, after a certain point it is all about the dollar. I think any immigration policy around STEM in this country needs to include some incentives for training and investment in current citizens.

smackay• 13 years ago

The mix of interests of governments, companies and individuals are never going to be perfectly aligned. Indeed greater transparency on the motives of companies can only be a good thing - then nobody is disillusioned when they act in ways which are apparently at odds with other groups in society. The problem is how do individuals create institutions which are supportive and sustaining. The two options so far have either been government or unions, both of which, given their track record, are discredited to different degrees. For STEMs some form of professional society (non-political union) along the lines of the American Medical Association would seem to be a good approach. However this carries significant risk of degenerating back into the morass of competing factions and once more the interests of individuals lose out. Perhaps a step up from the current levels of organization, based on technical interests, e.g. The Professional Society of Python Developers or Amalgamated Interests Of Developers in the Finance Industry, similar to the original Friendly Societies, might provide a more robust model that meets the long-term interests of its members.

jlgreco8• 13 years ago

> "There are many STEM individuals that did not adapt with the times that are considered no longer employable. Rather than reaching out to and training these individuals, companies want the quick fix -- thus the H1B path."

I think it is very easy for companies to lose their patience with people who have not kept up with technology and need to be retrained when, on the other hand, a large portion of the people that they are hiring are kids with no experience who trained themselves with current technologies and require less handholding with those current technologies.

So basically let's say 25% of your new-hires are out of school and ramp up in a few weeks. What do you do with the other 75%? Hire people who have more industry than the young 25% but require more training with recent tech, or look potentially outside the country for some more of those 25% types?

illuminate• 13 years ago

"Be careful trusting data from the EPI, a left/labor/economic-protectionist think tank."

Thankfully there are no thinktanks that are willing to fudge the existing data to "prove" the opposite to serve their interests.

john_w_t_b• 13 years ago

There is a shortage of technical specialists in computer programming. It seems that companies are reluctant to train local workers. Startups like to show growth by listing jobs, but they only want "rock stars" so the positions sit unfilled. This saves on labor costs and signals a growing business. It gives an artificial view of the job market however.

prostoalex• 13 years ago

What kind of training would a company offer? CS is one of those disciplines where wealth of materials, books, documentation, videos and working code examples are available online, for free or at pretty reasonable prices.

Why would you sign up to waste a day at New Horizons listening to some drone over-explaining stored procedures on a whiteboard?

TheCoelacanth• 13 years ago

The problem with this whole discussion is that it is lumping all STEM graduates together. There is really only high demand for CS and some engineering fields. There is a surplus of graduates in many of the other fields that are categorized under STEM. When someone says there is a shortage of STEM graduates, they are really only talking about the T & E, they aren't talking about the S & M.

Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all

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