245. The STEM Shortage

The 2023 tech sector layoffs have claimed a quarter of a million jobs to date, but this hasn't seemed to make a dent in the enthusiasm for getting more kids into STEM - what's going on here?

- Links for the Curious -

Butz, William P., and United States, eds. 2004. Will the Scientific and Technical Workforce Meet the Requirements of the Federal Government? Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
“Inspiring STEM Learning.” n.d.
Langdon, David. n.d. “U.S. Department of Commerce.”
Stevenson, Heidi J. 2014. “Myths and Motives behind STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education and the STEM-Worker Shortage Narrartive” 23 (1).

[Zeioth]

There is no shortage of people in Stem. There is a shortage of companies willing to pay a fair salary for high difficulty jobs.

[aquafish]

20 years programming experience, 10 of which as an IT architect, companies still balk at my resume and say they're going to look at someone with slightly better qualifications. In all of my experience I haven't found a company organized, skilled, or with a mature enough IT organization that deserves whatever MIT graduate they think they deserve.

[nickcorn]

Hear hear! As a materials engineer who went on to get a PhD in applied Physics I personally experienced how the "STEM shortage" is a lie. What makes it even worse is all the people, especially family, who continue to believe the myth and don't understand why I'm not rich and successful (at least by their standards).

I literally cringe when I hear the media lament how we need more scientists and engineers to "innovate" and to solve the big societal problems. Then why is there insane competition for those kinds of jobs? I WAS doing research on big societal problems and now I'm just messing around with data and IT systems. Societal relevance: 0. The best and brightest minds in the world are not solving the worlds problems; they are competing against each other in the zero-sum game of high finance.

Our neoliberal society just needs replaceable drones to manage mundane boring shit to serve the interests of those with capital. A STEM education is a pretty good signal that you can figure stuff out on your own. Probably you know how to calculate a weighted average. Most "STEM jobs" are pretty simple and do not require the lengthy education graduates went through. Almost no job requires a PhD, and getting one may even hurt your chances of getting a job. Most of my engineering peers are messing around in Excel all day "managing" projects or processes. Science/engineering education prepares you for R&D, but R&D is not what companies need most workers in.

Additionally, not all STEM education is created equal with respect to relevant employment opportunities. Ask all those underpaid biotech researchers how their job search is going. Ask how many astrophysicists found employment within their field. Since exiting academia I haven't done a job relevant to any of my domains of expertise. Instead, like many academic peers, we all somehow end up in data or IT. Even for degrees that ostensibly lead to the best opportunities job wise, e.g. computer science, there is a large disconnect between the education and the job.

Still, it's important to place things in perspective. Those without a "STEM" education typically do even worse in the job market.

[nukestrom]

There is NO stem shortage. I have seen 500 people applying for 1 position in the advanced tech industry. We have an oversupply of STEM graduates than what's needed. People hype STEM jobs, especially programming and software-related jobs on youtube and social media to make a living and sell their education courses.

[angelmarauder]

STEM shortage = "what ... you want us to pay you more? Aaaaah we have a worker shortage!"

[Thanzin]

As new STEM grad with no experience struggling to land my first job, I think the problem is companies refusing to train. Companies want someone who already has experience for entry level jobs who they can low ball and don’t have to train. Companies don’t even invest in workers anymore yet they are still making record profits. On top of that, if they cannot find that one unicorn worker who is overqualified and don’t mind being underpaid in the country, they will just abuse the foreign work visa system to hire people from India. They will post a job with impossible requirements just to tell the government that there are no qualified people in the country so they can hire overseas workers mostly from India. Indians are incredibly desperate due to the fact that salaries in their country are very low and they have very few jobs relative to the amount of competition they face. This creates a race to the bottom where people are competing against the entire world for jobs that exist in their own country.

[KynaTiona]

"STEM as a concept is a tool for maintaining the reserve army of labor" is not what I was expecting to get out of this video, and yet it's depressingly unsurprising. Thanks for the video as always.

[mb]

There's always a shortage of slave labor.

[Thanzin]

It’s not surprising why they are pushing more kids towards STEM. More STEM grads mean higher supply which will push down wages and reduce costs for the company thus leading to higher profit margins. Most of which will go towards the shareholders. I’ve had friends call me a conspiracy theorist for expressing this view.

[ishtaraletheia]

A sobering perspective that makes all too much sense. False scarcity is a classic marketing strategy. I'l have to keep this in mind as a math and CS student.

[BhaswataChoudhury-ee]

The biggest problem with STEM, at least in India is that, students do not want to do STEM, but rather are forced to, they have no love for their specializations and no love for math. They rather see it as a get rich quick scheme which creates artificial competition and makes it difficult for people who actually adore it for what it is. I would love for someone to confirm if its the same for US and EU.

[avernvrey]

They talk about a STEM shortage, but then it's extremely hard to find a job for a lot of CS majors...

[thebeautifulones]

I got sucked into the stem vortex. I wanted to solve real problems, improve my country and the world, and make money. it was a struggle to study something as difficult as electrical engineering and hard to get my first jobs, but after 10 years working there was lots of available work. However I could have got to the same place much faster and cheaper if I just became an electrician. And I didn’t get to save the world. I saved a bit, quit and now raise cattle.

[nikomancer]

Ten years in IT, and I can say that the best engineers I've met have all been incredibly well rounded people just as capable of having detailed discussions about art, literature, and history as they are at talking about the tradeoffs between different approaches to engineering problems. The takeaway from this? Being smart doesn't work like making a character in an RPG who is specialized at just one thing. Smart people tend to be able to be smart at a variety of things.

[SorryBones]

It’s so hard to explain this to my parents having just graduated… This isn’t 1975. I’m no longer competing against people in my area and having my resume read by a human being. Im competing against all of the U.S. and other countries. I’m being filtered out by algorithms. My generation is the most educated generation in the world, my degree doesn’t even get me in the door. I’m going to have to go through 3-4 rounds of interviews minimum IF they don’t ghost me. And they’re just going to hire a foreigner who depends on them for their green card so greedy companies can shortchange them and not have a job hopping U.S. citizen… Who will job hop because companies don’t give raises anymore.

It’s not the same world anymore, human beings are just resources and don’t matter. This is impossible

[Infantry]

I understand this video to basically be a discussion of one angle on how we understand (and market) STEM education as a society, and I agree with all of the points made.

Coming at it from a different angle, I’ve often heard arguments that the way tests and education rubrics are built is in a way conducive to creating a good worker: the idea of kids learning and doing work in an environment where they need to ask permission to use the bathroom, where imperfections are exaggerated by a 70% minimum acceptability bar, lots of homework, etc. creates a precedence of working conditions that favor business owners over the employees. For my part, I did very well in school, and I recognize it made me into someone particularly easy to exploit in the workplace.

So yeah, I’d say there are more than a few arguments about how discussions around education are really about its mechanism in generating profit. The more we can recognize that rhetoric, the better we can address it.
I don’t think we can reasonably continue on like we have been, for lots of reasons. The argument for social assistance programs like UBI grows stronger by the day, and I’ll be adding the points in this video under my hat for the next time I get into a discussion about the topic.

Thanks for another great video, I hope you find stable employment soon!

[nERVEcenter]

I obtained a great job at a smaller company working on projects independently DURING all of this. The key is: Money printing. All of these engineers were hired during a period of massive inflation, resultant stock price booms, and $2 trillion valuations. The biggest tech firms, receiving all this free cash, were hiring engineers just to sit on them; if they were working on anything, it was projects without a clear value add or future. I really think it's that simple. Engineers chasing jobs at giant tech firms must be wary of the amounts of cash these companies have to waste on projects they will cut without hesitation. If you want security, work at a company making a valuable product that people and businesses are already paying for.

[xxbatmanxx]

My problem with stem right now is how hard it is to actually get a job. I’m still in college for EE and even just internships are saying things like “you have to have experience” and to have work with things that no normal EE student works with or has worked with. All for a freaking internship. And internships are at this point the new entry level jobs, because actual jobs require 3 years experience as if I can just pull that experience from thin air.

[Enkidoo]

In my first engineering job at an aircraft company, they would lay off experienced engineers every year while hiring new grads for similar money.

Not sure what they thought they were accomplishing, except to provide experienced engineers for their competition. Maybe they saved on health insurance by illegally discriminating against older workers?

They would outsource projects to India, which had to be entirely re-worked back in the U.S. But those Indians sure worked cheap and didn't ask inconvenient questions. I guess this looked good on a spreadsheet somewhere.

Every effort was made to treat engineers as disposable cogs in the machine. They would lay off experienced workers... realize their mistake, then panic and filll those roles with contractors making twice the wage.

They'd spend a dollar to cut labor costs by a nickel.

[Default]

The S part of STEM hasn't been doing great for a while. A BS in chemistry or biology basically gets you a $35k/yr job as a lab tech with a career path that plateaus shortly thereafter. If you want a "real" job, hope you have a Ph.D. I got out of the lab myself and moved into the sales side of things years ago and never looked back. It turns out that selling the science boxes pays much better than using them.