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Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

No, they don't address the issue in that article, they carefully circumvent it. Like all shortage-denial articles, they focus on education rather than actual practical competence.

There is no shortage of STEM graduates. There is a shortage of people actually capable of doing the jobs which, amongst other things, require a STEM background. And for most software development jobs, the latter isn't even the most important qualification.

The STEM shortage is a myth created by people who want to deny that there is a shortage of qualified knowledge workers by equating "qualified" to having a STEM degree.

Nobody actually in the business ever complained about a STEM shortage. We complain about a shortage of competent people.

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> We complain about a shortage of competent people.

As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".

>We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent.

The trouble is, in software, single individuals in that top 20% are capable of doing things in a short time that individuals from the bottom 80% couldn't do in 1000 man years. Software is funny like that, some people can think different kinds of thoughts.

So in a way, for certain values of incompetent, this is actually true.

In which case, merely adding more software developers won't help the problem. You need to add more people of the quality of the current top 20%, thus expanding that to "top 30%", "top 40%", and eventually the actual majority, hopefully.

I'm not quite sure why I collected the downvotes, but you're spot on. For example, I'm short and relatively uncoordinated. I have a few chronic physical problems in addition to this that make me "unredeemably incompetent" at the sport of basketball. I could work my ass off for the rest of my life and still never come within shouting distance of Michael Jordan. I simply cannot perform at an NBA level no matter what I do.

If there were a shortage of talented basketball players, it wouldn't matter how many copies of myself you were able to get into basketball training programs, you'd never get an MJ. We need a better system to find MJ's of STEM and allow their talent to work for us.

"Nobody actually in the business ever complained about a STEM shortage."

Yes, they have, to the point where legislation is being considered to award green cards specifically to recipients of MS or PhD degrees in STEM fields.

http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/issues_STEM%20Jobs%20Act.h...

I completely agree with you that STEM should be a red herring. But it's hard to say that a focus on STEM is circumventing the issue when the notion of a shortage of STEM degrees is specifically built into the proposed legislation.

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