Where the STEM Jobs Are (and Where They Aren’t) | Hacker News Reader

Where the STEM Jobs Are (and Where They Aren’t)

nytimes.com

42 pointsstablemap14 comments

Another in the long line of clickbaits. While it starts out by making a case for lack of non-CS jobs, it slowly devolves into an ad for "Insight Data Science Fellows Program".

Then to avoid being marked as native advertising, it adds info about data sciences division at University of California, Berkeley. The article then ends abruptly without having a satisfying conclusion.

Is it just me or we can't seem to get lot of infomration from the media without some kind of covert advertisement in between?

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Almost all news is paid for outside of current events and politics (although those sections are biased by the editorial room). Pay enough money and you’ll get into the NYT, it just takes the right PR agency to pitch the story correctly.

I don't think it's necessarily advertising. There's a huge societal narrative that education is "the answer." (No specific question given). The statistics imply that maybe it's not, maybe it isn't a skills gap, maybe this is just how things are now. That's too terrifying, because then there's no solution, so they have to restore the natural order by finding some other way education solves the problem.

News is free. News costs money to produce. Do the math.

Much better data on what people actually do with their majors has been gathered by the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project. This initiative, published earlier in 2017, looks at career paths for about three million people, major by major. A link is here:

http://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/median_earnings_for_la...

What Brookings/Hamilton observes ... and the NYT overlooks ... is that lots of people with STEM majors find work in relevant fields that happen to be classified in irrelevant ways. For example, math majors tend to show up as financial analysts, actuaries, high school math teachers, etc.

There's a lot of quant work on Wall Street these days, all of which is classified as financial sector work, even though it's STEM-intensive and miles away from gabbing about mutual funds with retirees.

Is this implying that 2/3 of those who graduate with an engineering degree don't get a job in engineering? Because that sounds absurd. Sure, people can and do get jobs in industries not exactly related to their degree, but over half? No way.

2/3ds not getting an actual engineering position or a job in their immediate field sounds about right.

As an engineer, this data doesn't jibe at all with my experience. Is it some catch with the data treatment, or am I just missing something that others experience?

Likely not having an engineer in the title and not having an engineering discipline as a requirement.

Your experience also might be skewed if you are a “software engineer” which in many places today is abused as a title both in education and in the job market, same goes for computer science degrees.

In too many places SE and CS share nearly an identical program which traditionally wasn’t the case and with a very lackluster focus on the engineering part as too many people equate programming with software engineering.

OK, this is not a geographical thing that I gleaned from the title but more a simple summing of the graduates in the four STEM areas and the number of job openings in those areas.

It appears that in spite of the much touted shortage given as the reason the H1-B program must be expanded that the number of graduates for every field far exceeds the number of job openings except for computer science - where it is roughly the same. Where are these underemployed STEM graduates going - the article points to STEM graduates who gave up on academic careers/paths to go into computer programming/data analysis.

I was also expecting a discussion about the geographical "where" jobs are found.

Political problems mean that I can't go to California for work, so now I'm working for a tech company in Taiwan.

My boss asked me to do data science courses that seem similar to those advertised in the article, but despite learning the concepts, I haven't had any new interesting projects because of it. I'm personally more interested in hardware design and backend programming, which isn't as "trendy" as machine learning. Even if I could get a job more easily doing statistics and making pretty graphs for board meetings, I don't think I'd enjoy it as much as soldering together a little gadget.

I feel like the math sciences could be pasted into the comp sci field. They're good to separate, but there's definite filling of CS jobs with math backgrounds.

Sure, people can and do get jobs in industries not exactly related to their degree, but over half? No way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com