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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

I worked with a guy in a data center who had a degree in geology. Computers paid better I guess, so he transitioned over.

Makes me question our decentralized assignation of studies. With communist centralized planning, the country makes a 5-year plan and students are assigned to the fields in demand, with the (high) risk that the central planner was wrong (because his pay doesn’t align with accurate planning). With decentralized capitalism, students decide for themselves, agree to be in debt for life if they’re wrong, attempt to collect information among a jungle of commercial bullshit from for-profit universities and marketing, so that they’re very often wrong as well, and choose a field of study at the junction between interesting, in demand (as perceived), and nice pictures on the uni brochure (principal criteria in my opinion).

Then they convert to IT anyway. I wonder whether our acceptance for this system isn’t just that we blame the student for having chosen wrong, relieving us from feeling that we’re responsible for their debt and horrific life conditions.

With communist central planning the world lost about as many people to starvation and murder by their own governments as were killed in WW2 in an actual enormous war. It might be worth letting people make their own decisions rather than forcing them to be what you want them to be.

There may be some value from having those different backgrounds spread across various industries. If everyone in IT was a CS major, there would be one primary view on how things work and what CS can solve. Bringing in other points of view can lead to more interesting solutions and solving problems that may have otherwise gone unsolved.

The intersections of different disciplines are where a lot of innovation happens.

Programming and related careers have to have the lowest entry as well. I know a lot more people who made the switch from other tertiary educated disciplines to IT than the other way around.

And there's no way the state will employ me to model and plan their dikes with my Cs degree.

> 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.)

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23...

Thank you. For the curious: 49% of "computers, mathematics, and statistics" majors in STEM jobs (51% including STEM-related) versus 15% (46%) for "biological, agricultural, and environmental sciences" [1].

(Engineering is 49% (51%) while social sciences is 7% (11%).)

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23... Table 10

My biology teachers in high school had all studied their subject to much higher levels than those of other subjects including doing research, they became teachers because there were no other jobs available.

It seems kind of obvious that if you explicitly exclude medicine jobs from STEM you end up with a low % of biology grads in STEM. My experience at University was that 80% of Biology as a program was doing it as pre-med.

The vast majority of biology majors do not end up becoming doctors. If you include all of healthcare then you're getting closer, but still not a majority.

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.

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).

I’m sorry but B2C startups are an anomaly in the overall history of IT. I agree it’s a sad turn of events but IT is way bigger. Banks, accounting, industry, military, maps, GPS, health, and infinite ways it helps humans. Selling ads was only a way to monetize, and Google is tanking like the Titanic since ChatGPT arrived (at least its 7 tanks are pierced, but the captain said to not evacuate), and most platforms even have a non-ads way to monetize, although the real price is high (Facebook $16, Netflix, Twitter, etc.).

It is very possible, with the post-covid changes, that platforms become paid-for and that there is much less of a focus on dark patterns in the future.

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