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245. The STEM Shortage

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  • Опубліковано 14 лис 2023
  • 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 -
    Bulfin, Michael. 2017. “InSTEMnifying Youth: STEM, Capital, & Power.” Critical Education, November, Vol 8 No 15 (2017). doi.org/10.142....
    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.
    Carrell, John, Joshua M. Cruz, Andrew Mark Herbert, Michael Scott Laver, Emily Lazarus, Iris V. Rivero, Erika Nuñez, and Nafisha Tabassum. 2023. “Board 346: NSF DUE 2142666 and NSF DUE 2142685. Collaborative Research-Engineering Empathetic Engineers (E^3): Effects of the Humanities on Engineers’ Critical Thinking and Empathy Skills.” In . peer.asee.org/....
    Charette, Robert N. 2013. “The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.” IEEE Spectrum 50 (9): 44-59. doi.org/10.110....
    “Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2021 | NSF - National Science Foundation.” n.d. Accessed November 12, 2023. ncses.nsf.gov/....
    Heffernan, Virginia. n.d. “How We Learned to Love the Pedagogical Vapor of STEM.” Wired. Accessed November 10, 2023. www.wired.com/....
    “Inspiring STEM Learning.” n.d.
    Ito, Aki. n.d. “Watch Your Back: Here Are the 4 Kinds of Employees Most Likely to Get Laid off in the Current Downturn.” Business Insider. Accessed November 15, 2023. www.businessin....
    Kolata, Gina. 2016. “So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors.” The New York Times, July 14, 2016, sec. The Upshot. www.nytimes.co....
    Langdon, David. n.d. “U.S. Department of Commerce.”
    “Layoffs.Fyi - Tech Layoff Tracker and Startup Layoff Lists.” n.d. Layoffs.Fyi. Accessed November 14, 2023. layoffs.fyi/.
    “Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Battle Cry for STEM | American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).” 2012. November 5, 2012. www.aaas.org/n....
    “Nsf.Gov - NCSES Employment and Educational Characteristics of Scientists and Engineers - US National Science Foundation (NSF).” n.d. Accessed November 15, 2023. wayback.archiv....
    OECD. 2019. “PISA 2018 Results COMBINED EXECUTIVE SUMMARIES.” OECD. www.oecd.org/p....
    “One Decade, One Million More STEM Graduates.” 2012. Whitehouse.Gov. December 18, 2012. obamawhitehous....
    Salzman, Hal. 2013. “What Shortages? The Real Evidence About the STEM Workforce.” Application/pdf. doi.org/10.728....
    “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math: Education for Global Leadership: (555842013-001).” 2010. doi.org/10.103....
    “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, Including Computer Science | U.S. Department of Education.” n.d. Accessed November 5, 2023. www.ed.gov/STEM.
    “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.” 2023. In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.o....
    Siegel, Harvey, D.C. Phillips, and Eamonn Callan. 2018. “Philosophy of Education.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2018. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. plato.stanford....
    Stevenson, Heidi J. 2014. “Myths and Motives behind STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education and the STEM-Worker Shortage Narrartive” 23 (1).
    Stringer, Alyssa. 2023. “A Comprehensive List of 2023 Tech Layoffs.” TechCrunch (blog). November 3, 2023. techcrunch.com....
    “The STEM Crisis: Reality or Myth?” 2013. The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 11, 2013. www.chronicle.....
    “Wayback Machine.” 2019. February 28, 2019. web.archive.or....

КОМЕНТАРІ • 739

  • @aquafish129
    @aquafish129 8 місяців тому +834

    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.

    • @galaxypanda1288
      @galaxypanda1288 8 місяців тому +105

      I’m currently working for a university doing some basic IT work. Even the help desk staff here is outrageously understaffed to the point where if more than 3 people are out sick, zero tickets will get done. Yet still the university refuses to hire any new IT staff stating the “can’t afford it” meanwhile they blow hundreds of thousands on equipment they will never use and still expect us to service it all whenever their shining new machines stop functioning from misuse. I’ve been thinking about going back to school for software engineering instead but I’ve been worried it’ll be more of the same. Any advice?

    • @aquafish129
      @aquafish129 8 місяців тому +51

      @@galaxypanda1288 that's indicative of one or more issues. For instance: 1) non-technical people making technical decisions 2) people making emotional decisions based on either the emotional aspect of shiny new toys or the perception that purchasing = accomplishment 3) management not building an understanding of quantitative or conceptual capability that relates to drivers, priorities, principles, and goals/objectives. All of which are exceedingly common or incorrectly done for most IT organizations.
      I feel your pain.

    • @Mbrace818
      @Mbrace818 8 місяців тому +17

      ​@@galaxypanda1288Software engineering is just as bad, if not worse.

    • @aquafish129
      @aquafish129 8 місяців тому +5

      ​@@Mbrace818 Yup. That's my area, and it's like there is shenanigans around every turn.

    • @Mbrace818
      @Mbrace818 8 місяців тому +7

      @@aquafish129 It's my area too. Experienced my first layoff.

  • @Zeioth
    @Zeioth 8 місяців тому +1732

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

    • @vitalyl1327
      @vitalyl1327 8 місяців тому +64

      Bullcrap. There is a shortage of competent engineers, no matter how much you're willing to pay.

    • @nacpatil
      @nacpatil 8 місяців тому +195

      @@vitalyl1327 what is definition of competent engineer? If you want someone to know 10 frameworks and leet code and full stack, yes you have shortage but is that even necessary?

    • @vitalyl1327
      @vitalyl1327 8 місяців тому

      @@nacpatil web monkeys are not engineers anyway, and they will all be replaced by stochastic parrots soon. I am talking about the proper engineers.

    • @onionSpanks
      @onionSpanks 8 місяців тому

      Yes, it is. We need to raise the bar to entry because junior devs have no idea what they're doing.@@nacpatil

    • @doublesushi5990
      @doublesushi5990 8 місяців тому

      @@vitalyl1327 low iq take

  • @nickcorn93
    @nickcorn93 8 місяців тому +623

    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.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +22

      To put things into perspective, people who are in special forces, which may not involve all that advanced math that STEM fields claim to require, but are nevertheless way harder jobs than most office jobs, and more risky, are paid the same as anyone else in the military with maybe some extra pay.

    • @DrDiabolical000
      @DrDiabolical000 8 місяців тому +38

      ​@@cryoraWhat are you trying to do? He was not putting anyone down and just mentioning how there's a disconnect between the education system and actual job tasks required.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому

      @@DrDiabolical000 Trying to put things into perspective.
      To put things into another perspective, people generally want to pay for a solution or product, not for a person to spend time trying and failing multiple times before getting to a solution. The latter is what a person has to do in order to get to a solution. May take this person weeks or months. But this person competes with a market that has immediate solutions available, for example in the form of commercial off the shelf products. Faster and cheaper to buy, say, a robot than it is pay someone a professional salary to work on building one until he does.
      People in STEM need to think about how they can deliver value efficiently. Not just consume a paycheck for "working" towards a solution. That is expensive to pay for. Yes people need to eat and have bills to pay, but from the perspective of a paying customer, it is an unattractive deal. Same reason why homeless beggars are homeless, because it costs a lot to take care of a human being.

    • @paul5324
      @paul5324 8 місяців тому +4

      100% correct.

    • @zenrhys589
      @zenrhys589 8 місяців тому +4

      Eloquently said.

  • @nukestrom5719
    @nukestrom5719 8 місяців тому +192

    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.

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому +41

      The only people who profited in the gold rush, where the ones who sold the shovels.

    • @thatgui88
      @thatgui88 8 місяців тому

      ​@@honkhonk8009correct

    • @maythesciencebewithyou
      @maythesciencebewithyou 7 місяців тому +5

      Many people here like to say "There is no shortage, there is just a shortage of companies willing to pay a fair sallary". That would mean that STEM people are there, but don`t apply anymore because they don`t like how low the salaries are and instead prefer to stay jobless. Nonsense. Companies get tons and tons of application. The only people who can afford to say no to a job are people with a wealthy background or young people who stay with their parents.
      The real problem is that companies are looking for the "perfect" candidate with the perfect resume and will reject any applicant who isn`t their ideal candidate. Those who are the best of the best or just long in the industry (whether they are actually good or not), however, have often other options with other companies, so they can say "no" to a job offer and take another one istead. Them rejecting job offers doesn`t mean there aren`t many more graduates and people with not so great resumes out there who would love to get a chance and get the job.
      It has gotten so bad and companies so entitled, that they won`t even hire a fresh graduate, who would be willing to work for way less. I`m sick and tired of all the automated rejection mails I`ve gotten over the past year.

    • @mizutofu
      @mizutofu 7 місяців тому +2

      @@maythesciencebewithyou Companies think they can wait for the perfect candidate because there is an endless supply of applicants, so one again it's proof there is no shortage

    • @NoRockinMansLand
      @NoRockinMansLand 7 місяців тому

      What's the solution

  • @Thanzin1
    @Thanzin1 8 місяців тому +350

    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.

    • @Juandinggong
      @Juandinggong 8 місяців тому +31

      This is the best comment I have ever read!! You hit the nail on the head. One of my friend use to work for a company who hired lots of India software developers and she told me they work Indians here like slaves. I graduated last year and luckily I got on with a company given my previous experience and I must say it’s tough out there to find a reasonable employment.

    • @AnotherDayattheDock
      @AnotherDayattheDock 8 місяців тому +7

      based and goatpilled

    • @rcarterbrown1
      @rcarterbrown1 8 місяців тому +6

      You're right here. Due to outsourcing and remote working you're no longer competing with people in your city or even country. You're competing in the global labour market.
      Your only option is to make yourself more valuable than the competion. It's much easier to sell your services when you have a portfolio of software that you've built.
      You may need to work in a different field for a while that pays the bills while you build up a portfolio.

    • @losfromla1480
      @losfromla1480 8 місяців тому +8

      ​@@alexanderdvanbalderen9803that's why they need to stay in their own country. Not come here and drag down our labor market. They'll end up making our country as bad as theirs.

    • @cuchulainkailen
      @cuchulainkailen 8 місяців тому

      This started in about 1995 in Sillycon Valley, at Cisco for example. I saw it. The CIS has it well documented.
      Loopholes in H-1B & e-verify put in by D's like Schumer - strategically.
      ... a major force to corrupt the 1986 enforcement requirements:
      ua-cam.com/video/0lbvL-yfhsM/v-deo.html

  • @ishtaraletheia9804
    @ishtaraletheia9804 9 місяців тому +172

    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.

  • @angelmarauder5647
    @angelmarauder5647 8 місяців тому +284

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

    • @milandalosur1850
      @milandalosur1850 8 місяців тому +7

      Worker shortages mean higher salaries. This is supply demand 101 why would I claim a shortage of workers if I wanted to pay less?

    • @aecgem
      @aecgem 8 місяців тому +57

      @@milandalosur1850 You lie about there being a STEM worker shortage -> government pushes a ton of people into STEM -> oversupply of workers to jobs -> you pay less per worker. It's an artificial movement along the supply curve, which is *actually* in Economics 101.

    • @the_expidition427
      @the_expidition427 8 місяців тому +6

      @@aecgem Saving this

    • @milandalosur1850
      @milandalosur1850 8 місяців тому

      STEM workers have always out performed Non-STEM for salary.
      Now is there a multitude of movements to get workers into stem that could lower that wage disparity?
      Yes there have been for decades and it's not moved the needle. There is a legitimate shortage of workers compared to what other industries has that drives the wage disparity.
      You can grandstand about how this is all a plot to get salaries down, but it does not change the current fact that there is a labor shortage and that shortage a cause for higher salaries.
      If you want to say there is not a labor shortage the burden of proof is to explain why STEM jobs pay more.
      @@aecgem

    • @retardo-qo4uj
      @retardo-qo4uj 8 місяців тому +5

      ​@@milandalosur1850shortage = cant find inside country = outsource to india for cheaper price. Its part of globalization for programming

  • @4mb127
    @4mb127 8 місяців тому +54

    There's always a shortage of slave labor.

    • @htconexify
      @htconexify 8 місяців тому

      I'll be a slave for 300k a year dw

  • @CaraiseLink
    @CaraiseLink 9 місяців тому +497

    "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.

    • @Khyranleander
      @Khyranleander 8 місяців тому +15

      Agreed, tho it's not the ONLY reason, eg: Types like me didn't like "artsy" fluid studies as we could only "get" stuff divisible into formal rules. There's also the post-medieval backlash against classical education which put law & medicine above logic/rhetoric, with the early "sciences" at the bottom. Probably other reasons.

    • @TheThreatenedSwan
      @TheThreatenedSwan 8 місяців тому +7

      Wat. People just forget everything they don't use

    • @gitgudnga
      @gitgudnga 8 місяців тому +1

      work for lockheed martin

  • @Thanzin1
    @Thanzin1 8 місяців тому +167

    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.

    • @matthewgilfus1640
      @matthewgilfus1640 8 місяців тому +35

      I love people calling me a conspiracy theorist for saying that a thing that happened in the past is happening again.

    • @wardibald
      @wardibald 8 місяців тому

      Any time someone mentions a _they_ doing a concerted-effort-good-for-them-bad-for-society-anything that would require all of _them_ to be in on _it_ for _it_ to work, that someone is a conspiracy theorist.
      What happened is the covid crisis created a lot of temporary need for extra IT tech, mostly for the big tech companies, asymmetrically situated in the US. The IT tech market in Europe is doing quite fine at the moment. It's not perfect, but when has it ever been?
      Current problem I see is companies want their tech cheaper, but can't get it cheaper due to the still existing IT tech market shortage. So we get overworked with unrealistically tight deadlines for ever increasingly complex and business-critical projects.

    • @thomashenry4798
      @thomashenry4798 8 місяців тому +10

      @@wardibald I think its better to conceptualize it as a systemic problem rather than a conspiracy of deliberate action: The system itself is bad and so it pushes people into these behaviors and conclusions. Its no *one* persons fault but rather its all of us acting according to our incentives and interests to produce a faulty outcome. The fish dont need to talk to each other to know to swim in a school; because all the fish who didnt wound up dead.

    • @wardibald
      @wardibald 8 місяців тому

      @@thomashenry4798 Humans are not fish. We're able to do self-reflection and evaluation of an existing system we're part of. In this case, to get to the 0P-described outcome, teachers from all types of schools for all ages from - say - 8 year old all the way to university, need to be consistent in pushing kids to STEM while knowing it's bad for them but good for whatever cost-cutting scheme they're part of.
      Obviously there is a business-education connection, more so in the US than in Europe, since US schools are essentially for-profit businesses, and it can be argued that is not an ideal situation, but this fish-like behaviour explanation of people in positions that require critical thinking, leaves much to be desired.

    • @thomashenry4798
      @thomashenry4798 8 місяців тому

      @@wardibald Sure, we arent fish, but neither are we above the systems in which we find ourselves. If we are hungry, we eat food. If we cant find any, we go looking for it. Some individuals may choose to let themselves starve, sure. But the overall trend of behavior is that given hunger, most people will seek to eat.
      Even the very wealthy and elite are cogs in the machine. The rich spin too; they exist in a rarified vacuum and struggle to connect emotionally with their fellow humans. Instead having potentially a warped perception of what life is like for most other people. As an example. So even if they want to do good they struggle to understand just what it is other people might actually need and fall back on the traditions and socialization they were raised with.
      We are a part of nature, a part of the system, a part of the machine, and we always will be. Its just that some pieces of that machine we can potentially tear apart and replace with better, more intentional and deliberate machines that actually address our needs. If we so choose.
      But even as we choose we are still servants of the incentives we create; bad KPIs and metrics that judge workers will drive worker behavior. People need jobs, they need money, they need to pay rent, to eat. So as what happened with Wells-Fargo bank, where new accounts opened where the metrics by which bank workers were judged, people took peoples money to open bank accounts to drive those metrics so that they would not be replaced until the whole thing exploded.
      KMart had a loyalty program where workers were judged by how many loyalty accounts were opened or used. Most people didnt have one. *Every* cashier padded their numbers because if you did not pad your numbers you would be replaced by someone who did because *everyone* was judged based off of it. This was only exacerbated when the elderly, the most likely demographic to have an account or want one, were cut off when email requirements were enforced.
      I can go on and on and on. So long as we want to do stuff like eat food, drink water, sleep in a shelter, we cannot refuse to be a part of the social systems that govern our lives.

  • @nakedwzrd
    @nakedwzrd 8 місяців тому +129

    I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.-Rockefeller

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому

      I want a nation of beautiful loose women.

    • @gavinlew8273
      @gavinlew8273 8 місяців тому +5

      The 2023 version: I don't want a nation of talkers. I want a nation of do-ers!

    • @naniyotaka
      @naniyotaka 8 місяців тому

      They want a nation of slave wage workers.

    • @xxbatman69xx98
      @xxbatman69xx98 8 місяців тому

      @@gavinlew8273real

  • @user-vq1cc7br4v
    @user-vq1cc7br4v 8 місяців тому +313

    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.

    • @lordwiadro83
      @lordwiadro83 8 місяців тому +51

      Yes, it is very similar here in the EU...

    • @TheElementAce
      @TheElementAce 8 місяців тому +78

      There is a similar culture in the U.S., but if a student has a parent in STEM, they are likely to actually adore it, since they were exposed at a young age. But everyone else is usually in it for monetary gain like you mentioned.

    • @Daniel-tx2vt
      @Daniel-tx2vt 8 місяців тому +28

      There definitely is a get rich quick aspect to STEM and even people who get in burn put quickly because they find the hours you study outside work to stay competitive are not paid, on too the fact they don’t like what they’re doing to begin with.

    • @fischergriess6321
      @fischergriess6321 8 місяців тому +4

      I can confirm is similar here in Brazil.

    • @Hexnano
      @Hexnano 8 місяців тому +15

      ​@@TheElementAceNot "everyone else", my parents are writers and teachers and I decided to be the first in my family to go into electronics engineering from a younger age. It can be random

  • @nikomancer69
    @nikomancer69 8 місяців тому +32

    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.

    • @yoeyyoey8937
      @yoeyyoey8937 7 місяців тому +2

      I tried that and then got told by employers and mentors that I should do the opposite, I wasn’t specialized enough. I’ve gotten passed over for people who have more specific experience than me every single time. They don’t care about any of that stuff they want someone who knows how the specific industry works right off the bat and they want to pay that person barely above minimum wage

  • @thebeautifulones5436
    @thebeautifulones5436 8 місяців тому +75

    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.

  • @avernvrey7422
    @avernvrey7422 8 місяців тому +356

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

    • @thecodebrief
      @thecodebrief 8 місяців тому +86

      STEM is more than CS , if you ask the medical profession they will tell you they are bleeding for doctors and nurses right now and its true. So there can be demand in one area but not another. Biology is also "STEM" and all those grads are either pre-med or have to take higher education to even be competitive for research.

    • @RealisiticEdgeMod
      @RealisiticEdgeMod 8 місяців тому +34

      @@thecodebrief It theres a shortage of medical personnel then they would drop the false requirements for entry. For example having to pass a course in chemistry.

    • @Saberking875
      @Saberking875 8 місяців тому +25

      A lot of cs jobs are outsourced to India, they will all be gone within 2 decades

    • @lalithrockz
      @lalithrockz 8 місяців тому +3

      ​@@Saberking875I think there'll be enough for high skill jobs.

    • @NoDrizzy630
      @NoDrizzy630 8 місяців тому +22

      Medical! The majority of my family works in the medical field and they are always in demand and pay very well. Unfortunately I’m studying data analytics because I don’t want be covered in someone else’s bodily fluids.

  • @nERVEcenter117
    @nERVEcenter117 8 місяців тому +17

    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.

    • @slop123456789
      @slop123456789 8 місяців тому

      Bitcoin fixes this.

    • @joshavery
      @joshavery 7 місяців тому

      Same situation as you. I got a data job at a smaller company. I will probably end up staying for quite a while because I can see my work impacting people directly, and people don't seem to want to die all the time, as you might see in large companies. The pay is decent, not like the flashy numbers CS youtubers talk about, but enough to live on comfortably with a modest lifestyle. Plus, I have job security. I do my job well, and my company wants to keep me around for as long as possible. Many other employees want to and have stayed for 10, 15+ years, which you don't see often at large companies.

  • @xxbatman69xx98
    @xxbatman69xx98 8 місяців тому +27

    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.

    • @NtandoMbele
      @NtandoMbele 7 місяців тому

      try and work 10 hours a week or even 20 within your field. that's what I did. I had a friend in Aeronautical Engineering who worked full time by 3rd year. I know it sounds scary, but it's possible with today's edge of working from home too. I had class mostly in the morning so in my afternoons I'd work. get a student job in a small company.

  • @Infantry12345
    @Infantry12345 9 місяців тому +127

    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!

    • @ikegru4346
      @ikegru4346 8 місяців тому +4

      I agree on almost everything, but making yourself dependent on government through UBI is the road to authoritarianism. So it is just not the way to move forward.

    • @Infantry12345
      @Infantry12345 8 місяців тому +7

      @@ikegru4346 I mean, I'd prefer a world where money didn't or hardly existed, and people agreed to share resources and services because its a good thing to do rather than because someone coerced them into it with money, but I feel like UBI is easier to obtain. I grant that UBI isn't a silver bullet, it can be done poorly

    • @ikegru4346
      @ikegru4346 8 місяців тому +2

      @@Infantry12345 I am in doubt, that AI will replace people. Every expert in the field probably works at an AI firm, so they won't say, that it is overrated, because that might negatively impact their career. Also, they afraid to be wrong, because if they were predicting doomsday and everything came out ok, no one is going to remember that, but if they said it would be fine and it wasn't, they might at least get some serious guilt for helping the worst case scenario to come to life, if not made pay for their incorrect opinions of the past by some angry mob. Most of them admit, that they do not have enough understanding to model, how the AI actually works from the inside, because it is at this point almost to complexed to be adequately modeled, so they definitely would not want to be the one underselling the potential danger there might be.
      Other people have no clue about what is going on, so Big Tech can sell them the need for AI regulation (and more regulation benefits large corporations by eliminating the competition, which is not able to dedicate a whole department for AI safety and other regulations the government will throw into the mix) and tell them that this AI thing is some innovation on the level of invention of fire is going on, so people need to invest even more money into their shares or they will miss out on opportunity of the century.
      And government can tighten surveillance on the people to "ensure AI safety and that no criminal activity being commited with its help" and also to sell you UBI, because soon you will lose your job to the scary large language model, which got to good at predicting the next word, or to an image generator, which if not explicitly asked to generate some creative idea won't generate anything.
      While AI might be a threat to a guy who writes pornographic novels or draws hentai first, and then some mediocre writer or artist starts loosing his job, the jobs where precision and deep understanding of what you are doing is demanded (like coding or math) will simply experience a boost in productivity, so less of these people will be needed, but they will find another job, which AI won't be able to do for at least ten more years. Those who are good at what they do, will become better, and those, who are below average will find another job. It is literally industrial revolution and automatization for the second time.
      So while AI will definitely be influential, it would not be the pivotal point for the species, that we expect it to be.

    • @aomorgancool1775
      @aomorgancool1775 8 місяців тому

      @@ikegru4346 let's just hope your right. I don't think that a UBI system is sustainable if I'm honest. There are other social programs the government uses that we could just bolster that would be more useful than UBI.

  • @Default78334
    @Default78334 8 місяців тому +29

    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.

    • @picklerix6162
      @picklerix6162 7 місяців тому

      My brother learned the hard way about sales. It’s a young man’s game and he resisted the move into management because he didn’t want all of the headaches dealing with subordinates and upper management. Once he turned 50, he became a target for layoffs.

    • @yoeyyoey8937
      @yoeyyoey8937 7 місяців тому

      Yup. I drive the sample for the lab I work for and I make more than the lab techs. And I have a biology degree lol

    • @eisenkrieg553
      @eisenkrieg553 7 місяців тому

      ​@yoeyyoey8937 I like the idea of being a chemist, but my pockets and my appetite for debt only allow me to consider a bachelor level investment into that education; and I saw what that gets you. You get to be some geriatric's fetch hound for his community college chemistry course. That poor woman, doing little more than setting up labs for a handful of students.

    • @yoeyyoey8937
      @yoeyyoey8937 7 місяців тому

      @@eisenkrieg553 yeah don’t do graduate school unless you know where you’re going or what you’re getting yourself into or you have a free ride deal. If you have a good mentor then maybe you can have network to get into an industry job or coveted position elsewhere but make sure that’s gonna happen first

  • @Enkidoo
    @Enkidoo 8 місяців тому +39

    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.

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому

      India and China prolly pose the biggest threat in general.
      They breed like rabbits and now force everybody to suffer the consequences of their overpopulation.
      Iv been saying this for years now. Im litterally half indian too.
      We need to put an end to outsourcing. This is ridiculous.
      We pay taxes for the infrastructure these companies run on, and we end up getting fucked over by it.
      Most businesses right now are praying that the US implements some feature that forces them to hire only Americans.

    • @thomashenry4798
      @thomashenry4798 8 місяців тому +3

      Yes because the money by itself is not the goal. Its the publicly stated goal, but not what the incentives and KPIs are pushing people towards. You could say its incompetent management, but the fancy gold plated cogs spin in the machine the same as the plane old iron and brass cogs.
      What is unstated is the company wants control over their employees. As you said the indian contract workers dont ask inconvenient questions. They are easy to control, and thus, importantly, they are replaceable. They can be thrown away at any moment. Older workers are pushed out because they learn how the system works and that makes them hard to control. Yes skilled engineers are being dumped into the labor market for their competitors to hire. But thats not important, easily controlled college graduates *are* what is important. So the company will absolutely spend that dollar to save that nickel because the nickel isnt what they actually want even though they say it is.

    • @Enkidoo
      @Enkidoo 8 місяців тому

      @@thomashenry4798 Yes, that makes sense. The corporate world is a game with many unspoken rules.

    • @yoeyyoey8937
      @yoeyyoey8937 7 місяців тому

      Same is happening at the lab I work at for technicians. They pretty much replace you as soon as you ask for a higher wage. Then they call you back with a better job offer months later when they couldn’t replace the person with a good candidate. None of these people come back. I’m hoping to exit soon as well but economy is weird rn so it’s risky

  • @orthodoxcaveman5819
    @orthodoxcaveman5819 8 місяців тому +46

    There is something else that could play into this. After covid and most of us outside of the US went full remote, we've been getting job offers from US and other international companies, with salaries that are high for us, but low for a US citizen. At least here in Portugal, the labour is cheaper and the delivered work has the same quality, so they might be taking advantage of that.

    • @nicolasreinaldet732
      @nicolasreinaldet732 8 місяців тому +2

      Also here In Brazil boeing oppened a huge building for 500 people to work there.
      If you can separate the gold from the trash you will find at least one or two universities in every middle income country that deliver very high quality workers but that will be amazed by a fraction of the pay.

  • @cowl6867
    @cowl6867 8 місяців тому +25

    The issue also comes down to how corporate and rigid these fields have turned into. Making enigmatic and driven students into workers rather than professionals, leaving them miserable. The amount of skill and expertise people have in these fields end up going to waste because they got stuck into corporate capitalism or politics, not letting them have the freedom they should. The people I met who work in stem are either miserable or so brainwashed by living the 9-5 so much they just view it as any other job having all the passion drained out and repeat the same tasks as any other cog in the machine.

    • @adrianm7203
      @adrianm7203 8 місяців тому +1

      That one's difficult, almost all white collar jobs suffer from that '9-5 draining' atmosphere. It's a consequence of an education system teaching people to view work as a series of pointless assignments. Now in the wake of pandemic many companies have shifted to remote work, reducing even your co-workers to just names on a screen. Even the human connection you might have formed with co-workers is gone.
      There's not much anyone can do though, you gotta work to pay the bills. Most people come home too drained to do anything else, so life just becomes a repetitive grind. The only solution I've seen is getting up early and filling the hours before you head off to work with projects you are passionate about. Not everyone has the option of getting up at 4-5am, but I'd recommend it to anyone who can.

    • @dan-allen
      @dan-allen 8 місяців тому

      Yep I’ve seen this up close at three different companies during acquisitions. And look at how much big companies like Google and Facebook spend acquiring tiny companies.
      Like six people will leave a giant company because they have an idea they can’t get management to invest in, get traction acquiring customers faster and faster, old company tries to build a competing product, uses 10x the resources and still fails, only to finally spend even more money to acquire the new company (which was founded by their own employees).
      Companies cry about how expensive smart people are, but when those people leave to start competing businesses they end up creating dramatically more value than the salary they left. The best way to get paid for your skills anymore is to work for yourself.
      I suspect the staggering size of modern giants also slows down technological progress. Instead of investing in developing new things, they just buy out potential competitors when they’re small to protect their market position. I know one of the companies I worked at hadn’t launched a profitable new product in decades. Instead they bought up companies that they were losing customers to.

  • @mitchio86
    @mitchio86 8 місяців тому +13

    yeah it's nonsense. I was told this lie when I went to uni in 2004. I was also told that the workers in STEM were old and about to retire such that there was going to be many vacancies in the coming years. Looking at the number of STEM graduates per year there is clearly nowhere near the number of jobs available

    • @DrunkenUFOPilot
      @DrunkenUFOPilot 8 місяців тому +4

      LOL! Who was saying that about old workers leaving openings? Sheesh! I think every kind of lie possible is being told by someone somewhere.

  • @raylopez99
    @raylopez99 8 місяців тому +44

    Excellent, subscribed. But lacking was a mention of the theory that university is nothing but signaling; the smart people will eventually make it to the top, and largely the value of higher education is for networking and signaling to employers you are smart, not what you learn in school. I made my money in science, retired after a decade and a half, most of it in Silicon Valley, while still in my 40s. My secret? Besides the several advanced STEM degrees, the legal expertise, and the entrepreneurial drive (I managed others and also ran my own firm for a while), I earned my money the old fashioned way: I inherited a boatload from a rich, childless relative. Good luck to you!

    • @shimadabr
      @shimadabr 8 місяців тому +15

      Was not expecting that last sentence hahaha.

  • @SorryBones
    @SorryBones 7 місяців тому +2

    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

  • @hunivan7672
    @hunivan7672 7 місяців тому +4

    I always thought the reason for so obviously pushing STEM down everyone's throats was a way to push down the cost of STEM-labor by increasing supply.
    But it does make sense that if you remove bright minds that would go into philosophy, theology and literature, you are de-facto reinforcing capitalism.

  • @peterhub1
    @peterhub1 8 місяців тому +11

    I studied engineering and found a job that was boring to me. After becoming restless I got a second engineering degree. Looking back I believe university was not a good environment to make an informed decision about what path to choose. I worked very hard during those six years and graduated the second on the Dean's list. If I got an A+ cert instead I could have paid less than 20% of the money and had my foot in the door fixing computers within two years. That quickness would have allowed me to experience real work and understand what things would bother me about it. I didn't understand that the same things that suck about working as a cashier are fully present in an engineering job. I didn't understand that I would kind of suck at engineering. I didn't understand that what they teach you in college is rarely relevant at your first job, each job will train you to work that job the way it is done at that particular place(meaning all four years of study are worth less than one month of just freaking start doing it) I didn't understand that what I enjoyed about university wasn't the engineering, it was the close fellowship I had with my friends, the campus itself, the ability to walk everywhere and have quiet places to study all around me. The real job lacks those things. Anyway, my point is this. Univiersity shouldn't be the first choice for everyone, in fact I believe that only those who are already aiming for research and phd should go to college straight out of high school. Certificates, vocational training, learning a second language, that would be what I would do if I could start over. not 100,000 in debt, confused, depressed, restless and naïve.

    • @FirstnameLastname-bx4zk
      @FirstnameLastname-bx4zk 8 місяців тому

      Thanks for your input ❤

    • @NtandoMbele
      @NtandoMbele 7 місяців тому

      Completely agree. for me any career, it's also important to have connections within the space especially family. If your family has an engineering company then you can get into that space with more ease than most people. and be better inform.

  • @morkzorckerborg5000
    @morkzorckerborg5000 8 місяців тому +8

    "there is a shortage of people in stem" - company offering 35hr/week part time jobs at minimum wage.
    On the other hand, many companies would rather hire consultants to tell them the right way (how their competitor does it) and fix entire infrastructures; instead of maintaining and teaching a team.

  • @shoshanna8475
    @shoshanna8475 8 місяців тому +12

    Got straight As in mechanical engineering from a TOP (east coast) engineering university. As a woman, it was the LAST level playing field I've ever had. Now, my playing field will be duking it out to launch my own business(es). In my current job, I was interviewed for a positon that didn't really exist (unfortunately, not the first time either - they're straight-up liars) for a PRODUCT that didn't exist either! Yep, absolute FRAUDSTERS. I'm done asking corporate for ANYTHING.

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому +3

      University is not a level playing field.
      Women naturally are more discplined than men, which is why they have exponentially higher grades.
      My mom told me the same thing lol.
      Generally women have a harder time in business, because they make friends differently than men.
      My mom had the same problem. She has a masters in stats, but always wondered why my dad did so much better career wise.
      Shes been telling me to focus on more business courses than math/science courses as a result lol.
      Opportunities only arise from connections now.
      Something simple as asking a bunch of proffesionals when they want to have lunch together, or if they wanna do something in the free time, is good.

    • @shoshanna8475
      @shoshanna8475 8 місяців тому

      @@honkhonk8009 In the 1990s, university WAS a level playing field. It didn't matter about smiley glad hands - it was raw work and talent. If playing golf is equivilent to success, that explains why something like 90% of women leave engineering within 5-years of graduating. (I've been at it for decades...) Please don't minimize my experience. What you've described is still the "old boys network". I've seen a brilliant woman EE left home because the wives of the other engineers wouldn't have been okay with her traveling with them (Beth was 5-10, natural blonde, just GORGEOUS - it worked against her...) But they did hire her BF who worked at a pawn shop to go on her dream assignment.

    • @therenvy3091
      @therenvy3091 7 місяців тому

      "Women naturally are more discplined than men" no
      "which is why they have exponentially higher grades." The K-12 system in the U.S. is geared more towards teaching girls
      @@honkhonk8009

  • @matthewgilfus1640
    @matthewgilfus1640 8 місяців тому +9

    They want to push wages and salaries down. They've done this for years and years. Remember the push for nursing and pharmacy? My ex was a nurse and I think her union was on strike for at least 10 years because of wages and staffing shortages. I know a pharmacist that graduated 9 years ago and has never gotten a raise.

  • @silpheedTandy
    @silpheedTandy 8 місяців тому +35

    even if education was only about creating workers whose training can directly and obviously be applied to benefit society, fields like nursing, early childhood educators, trades, and psychotherapists (and others of course) weren't nearly as pushed as STEM was, when i graduated in high school in the early 2000s. i never thought about it, until you articulated it, that STEM skills help companies make money more efficiently, but fields like nursing and childhood educators etc don't really.

    • @vitalyl1327
      @vitalyl1327 8 місяців тому

      Medical sciences are a part of STEM though.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +2

      STEM skills are basically company builders, the way railroad tracks were built. Once built, they are no longer needed, and their products help the company make money, costing them only maintenance and operations.

  • @JayVal90
    @JayVal90 8 місяців тому +21

    The push for STEM has generated a glut of low quality STEM workers.

    • @fruitloopz311
      @fruitloopz311 7 місяців тому +2

      I think you mean to say H1B visas lol

    • @misterleegains4020
      @misterleegains4020 7 місяців тому

      ​@@fruitloopz311Yeah,as a result we will become a H1B-type third-world shithole, except with ethnic and cultural conflict on top of it. 😂

    • @Michael-it6gb
      @Michael-it6gb Місяць тому

      If a 2 year education in software development is a "low quality STEM worker" then companies are spoiled garbage people. A person wasted years of their valuable life because these companies said "shortage of stem, we need more engineers", and then refuse to hire anybody who just graduated. These "CEOs" are liars and criminal people who deserve to sit behind bars for this scam.

  • @vyliad
    @vyliad 8 місяців тому +19

    I unfortunately completely fell for the whole thing, I wasted my childhood gaining a decade of software development experience instead of being a kid. And now my choices going forward are to compete with people who have decades more experience than I've been alive for difficult cutthroat jobs with a meager salary, be unemployed for the rest of my life, or forget the whole system that's been stacked against me since birth and do things my own way and hope that one day I'll get an opportunity somewhere. I regret going into a STEM field, I should've focused on art.

    • @warriordx5520
      @warriordx5520 8 місяців тому +2

      rip bozo lol

    • @retardo-qo4uj
      @retardo-qo4uj 8 місяців тому +1

      In art you compete with dead people 100s years old older than you though

    • @gavinlew8273
      @gavinlew8273 8 місяців тому +5

      The same cut throat competition applies in Art. As long as there are humans. There WILL BE competition. And did you know that software development is an art form as well? You'd need to be a good craftsman at that!

    • @RSlayer001
      @RSlayer001 8 місяців тому +7

      So you can't use software engineering/programming skills to make art? Why don't you try messing around with programming in a 3d software like Unreal Engine or Houdini?

  • @michaelcherry8952
    @michaelcherry8952 9 місяців тому +47

    Straight up I'm extremely uncomfortable with defining education solely in terms of "big paycheques for graduates". In my province, the government has tied educational funding to statistics regarding how quickly graduates attain full-time employment. The result is universities being starved for funding while trade schools get the lion's share. The fact is, we need all manner of university graduates as well as welders, pipe fitters and coders. Also, I think telling students to study STEM subjects ONLY because it will theoretically get them well-paying jobs is ignoring the fact that STEM learning AS WELL AS learning the so-called "soft subjects" is vital to the development of a well-rounded, intelligent population, able to work in a variety of fields and with the imagination and skills to see through a lot of the B.S. that the world throws out (such as any given speech by any given politician). Hmmm. Politicians are eager to over-promote STEM learning at the expense of other subjects that might enable the B.S. detector in the students. Coincidence? I think not!

    • @jackdeniston59
      @jackdeniston59 8 місяців тому

      Soft subjects? You couldn't cut it in stem eh. Pay attention, currently the 'soft subjects' destroy well rounded intelligence. Toe the party line comrade is the only lesson being taught.

    • @tamanpara2682
      @tamanpara2682 8 місяців тому +2

      I graduated university in 2020. Let me respond to your assertion that post-secondary education should not only be about making money for the student in the future in a way that is authoritatively, logically and emotionally resonating all in one: WHERE IS THE MONEY???!!! PAYCHEQUES PAYCHEQUES PAYCHEQUES!

    • @michaelcherry8952
      @michaelcherry8952 8 місяців тому

      @@tamanpara2682 And I totally agree that a university graduate both desperately needs (thanks to the ridiculous costs) and deserves to have employment. What I object to is a single-minded focus by government solely on employment outcomes. Two things need to happen: Firstly, the cost of post-secondary education needs to be reduced or even eliminated for the first four years. Secondly, there needs to be a pro-active approach from government to make sure that qualified people get employment in their fields. Currently, the approach seems to be to stick a giant vacuum cleaner hose into the students' wallets and once they have managed to graduate, tell them "You're on your own, kid!" Not helpful in the least. Does this mean that government alone should be responsible for all of it? I would say not, but in today's hyper-capitalist world there would need to be major incentives for businesses to get off their collective butts and actually do something to help the situation. It's a dual situation: higher education costs too much, which encourages young people to compromise on their futures in favour of a secure (but low-level) paycheque. On the other hand, once students actually achieve a higher level of education, neither government nor business seem that interested in taking advantage of these people. Then you have people with doctoral degrees driving cabs to earn any kind of a living. This is unsustainable and actually impairs the advancement of the society as a whole.

    • @chesshooligan1282
      @chesshooligan1282 8 місяців тому +2

      Well, that's your opinion on who should get financed by the taxpayer and who shouldn't. Other people have different opinions. The problem is quickly solved when the government doesn't finance anybody and everybody pays for their own stuff. I'm extremely comfortable with universities being starved for funding. If it was up to me, unis would get zero funding from the taxpayer. And don't worry, people would still study engineering and mathematics. A few with money to burn would even study sociology or gender studies.

    • @michaelcherry8952
      @michaelcherry8952 8 місяців тому

      @@chesshooligan1282 Right. Lets leave university education to the rich elite. Brilliant. What the hell do people think tax revenue is supposed to be used for anyway? Take a look at what the U.S. government spends on the military versus what it spends on education in all areas--not just post-secondary. Middle and high school teachers are buying classroom supplies out of their own meager wages while the military gets whatever shiny new toys it wants. That's just screwed up. Democracy is nowhere near a perfect system, but it sure as hell goes pear-shaped when you have an uneducated electorate. That's when you elect people who think Israel has secret satellite based laser weapons that they use to start forest fires (for some reason). That's when you elect people who believe that vaccinations will turn you into Godzilla. That's when you elect people who don't give a good God Damn about the people they are supposed to serve and use their office as an opportunity to line their own pockets. That's what you get when you starve education because you think it's "wasting taxpayer money". Give me a break. A government's job it to protect and support the citizens of the state. Yes, the military comes under "protection" but so do things like food inspection, drug approvals, work safety regulations, environmental protection. Support includes things like education, health care, social services, infrastructure like bridges, roads, water treatment plants and so on. That's where your taxpayer's money is supposed to be going. There are countries in Europe where the first four years of university are government funded. You would say "Oh, but they pay so much more in taxes" as if it were a one-way street. Your tax payments are returned to you with the services that the government supplies to you, or at least that's the way it's supposed to be. Instead of whinging on about how universities should get zero funding, how about taking a leaf out of Woodward and Bernstein and "Follow The Money". Where is the tax money being spent? Who benefits?

  • @dluu13
    @dluu13 7 місяців тому +3

    I'm a STEM graduate and worker (very fulfilling, by the way). My mind would go numb if I couldn't come home and watch a movie, or video about art or music. STEM is necessary, but the other subjects make life worth living.

  • @dinzoharris6294
    @dinzoharris6294 8 місяців тому +52

    The reason we don’t include psychology or sociology into STEM is not because it doesn’t make money, but because its object of study is too abstract for mathematics to properly apply to it. Yes, psychology and sociology make advanced use of statistics, but so too do certain parts of the humanities, and we wouldn’t call them STEM. Science involves more than just the statistical organization of observations.

    • @escthedark3709
      @escthedark3709 8 місяців тому

      Social sciences aren't even proper sciences, and I find that the term gives them far more weight than they deserve. Social 'sciences' steal the legitimacy of scientists and engineers while rubbing their crap all over the name of science in order to seem more reliable and trustworthy.

    • @lanceemry5899
      @lanceemry5899 8 місяців тому +2

      Yes and that is why Neuroscience is included in STEM.

    • @SevenThunderful
      @SevenThunderful 8 місяців тому

      Psychology is a failed pseudo-science. All the big so called theories of the mind have been falsified over the years. It's best use case is something like Neuro linguistic programming in marketing. You learn how to lie effectively.

    • @zenrhys589
      @zenrhys589 8 місяців тому +8

      application to mathematics is not a prerequisite to being a science. Geologists use about as much math as psychology does and yet its considered STEM. Science is any pursuit that uses empirical data to make hypotheses and predictions. So no, science is not more than just statistical organizations of observations. Thats literally all it is.

    • @escthedark3709
      @escthedark3709 8 місяців тому +2

      @@zenrhys589 Take a look at critical theory. It is based on challening and critiquing (hence the term critical) social structures rather than using scientific methods to understand society. The whole point of critical theory is to take a step away from the scientific method, yet it is seen as rather reasonable in the world of social "sciences" in spite of being rooted in trying to understand society sans scientific methods.

  • @dragonfyre1589
    @dragonfyre1589 8 місяців тому +16

    What an excellent video! I've yet to see anyone else address these points so effectively. I do think the universities could help mitigate this crisis a little bit by graduating less STEM students. Talk to any STEM professor and they'll tell you that standards have dropped dramatically because the universities want to keep their graduation rates up and keep tuition rolling in. This means that students who may not have the aptitude to do well in STEM (often simply because they would've been better at something else and were forced into STEM because of the supposed career prospects) are graduating with STEM degrees and having a hard time finding work. It would be better if these students failed out of STEM early and transferred to a degree that better suits their talents. Of course, this won't happen, because the universities will lose money and the finance / big tech / MIC industries will all lose money, so we'll sadly keep pushing natural born artists and historians into STEM.

  • @eisenkrieg553
    @eisenkrieg553 8 місяців тому +7

    I appreciate how an education only continues to rise in price while our means to ever pay off that debt evaporates like water on Mars. What a system, make the employees pay to train themselves, cry about a shortage of educated workers, get a glut of them, get to pay them less.

  • @paulywalnutz5855
    @paulywalnutz5855 8 місяців тому +7

    Half the sales jobs I have been in are filled with stem grads. *Stem shortage lol*

  • @dekumutant
    @dekumutant 8 місяців тому +13

    This is exactly what ive been saying for years. Big texh companies have soend money on glamourising software jobs to reduce how much they have to pay in the long run

  • @brandonturner9065
    @brandonturner9065 9 місяців тому +45

    I’m a current mechanical engineer and philosophy double major at LSU and yeah I get told all the time how stupid I am for wasting my time but the way I saw it was always I wanted to learn philosophy and I liked engineering and it will guarantee me a job so I’ll just do both and luckily I’m still graduating in four years but Ive never seen someone put into words my feelings about the distinction. I’m also a co-op at nasa and I’ve found that my philosophy expertise helps me at work just as much as my technical competence. Thank you !

    • @FaCiSmFTW
      @FaCiSmFTW 8 місяців тому +3

      Wow good for you, how are you able to do it in 4 years? I'm in my first year of mechanical engineering and I wish I could take more philosophy classes but I don't want to be in school forever.

    • @belx4955
      @belx4955 8 місяців тому +4

      I'm doing a double major in CS and economics for the same reasons! good to know other people feel the same about their academic goals.

    • @belx4955
      @belx4955 8 місяців тому +1

      @@FaCiSmFTW idk how engineering works in the US but if you do a double major usually it's 4 years total, 2 for each major.

    • @internallyinteral
      @internallyinteral 8 місяців тому +1

      Nothing will guarantee a job.

    • @tohanFreerun
      @tohanFreerun 8 місяців тому

      Can you tell more about how philosophy helps at work in your case?

  • @kintustis
    @kintustis 8 місяців тому +18

    I come from the viewpoint that everyone needs to eat. and while stem fields are laying off, who else is hiring?
    The concept that education as a vocational training tool is reducing kids to future numbers in HR spreadsheets is true. But I also want to point out that humanities isn't going to help put food on the table any better. The argument in favor of humanities always seems to come from a mouth that's never had to worry where its next meal is coming from.
    I don't have all the answers to how to fix our system. I'm just a teacher, and not a great one at that. But I look at my students and see a population that desperately needs the skills to not have to resort to crime to put food on the table. I see kids who I know want to grow up to make more than a janitor or cashier. And while I respect those who can afford (both financially and temporally) the luxury of becoming more cultured with history and literature, I want my students to grow up and be able to use what they learned on honest skilled labor. Even if that means they use a mechanical engineering education just to turn bolts, because at least that means they're not in the retail rat race, or breaking into cars.
    So that is all to say, I don't have the solution for the system. STEM is just one person's solution for finding a livable spot within the system. While it no longer is a straight shot to a high paying job, it's at least a shot to A job in a world where fairly payed work is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

    • @slipperytiger
      @slipperytiger 8 місяців тому +8

      This is the most insightful comment here. I have a degree in CS and work as software engineer, I've been interested in this since I was 10. I also have huge passions for art, film, philosophy, and history. In college I was lucky enough to take classes in all of those areas of study, even acting, but I still got the degree in CS and work in that field because I need to support myself.
      Labor, in all forms, is becoming increasingly underpaid in the U.S., it's just now starting to affect "STEM" workers so the problem is being brought to light. Every other field has seen stagnant or decreasing salaries across the board since the 90s and early 2000s. My dad had a degree in sociology, the cost of his degree was $20k, and he graduated in 1992. His first job out of college he was making $80k/yr doing sales; that's equivalent to $173,000 today when accounting for inflation.
      30 years later only a fraction of my friends broke $80k out of college, and all of the ones that did were STEM degree holders. While $80k is still decent money, it's not nearly what it was back in the 90s, and the wages have barely increased since then. STEM is the only area where salaries have shown any improvement over the past 30 years, everything else has completely shit the bed.
      The flooding of STEM is indicative of a bigger issue, I really think the blame on these government incentive programs is overly pronounced. Sure, it didn't help the situation, but people aren't going to flood degrees like this entirely because of advertising. The root of the issue is that houses are mostly unaffordable to the average earner, cars are more expensive than ever, cost of living has skyrocketed, and salaries have not improved to account for this EXCEPT in STEM.
      Idk we need a bigger change than just telling people to major in other degrees, this is an economic issue, not an educational one, in my opinion.

  • @cloudboysmusic5223
    @cloudboysmusic5223 8 місяців тому +2

    Don't work at the shitty "Top Tier" companies that fire you as soon as your project 'goes to shit'.
    The Salaries might be tempting but the Quality of Life + Work Safety Net is GARBAGE!!!

  • @EachSenseTalk
    @EachSenseTalk 8 місяців тому +6

    I am happy that you discussed about the agenda espoused by many lobbyists, business owners, and businesses to take advantage of labor. You even see this with the "trades" where they are trying to push people into that sector without investing in their own work force

  • @kapoioBCS
    @kapoioBCS 9 місяців тому +35

    Well, in my case I pursued what I loved the most, which was theoretical research (PhD) in pure mathematics and mathematical physics (string theory) and now I cannot find any jobs to pay my bills :(. (There is zero funding for post docs anymore, they pay very bad anyway, also no chance for an academic position like professor..)

    • @Drakeblood97
      @Drakeblood97 8 місяців тому +1

      Let others waste their time with string theory and study something more useful like dark matter or black holes, you could probably find a real job for that stuff.

    • @kapoioBCS
      @kapoioBCS 8 місяців тому +9

      @@Drakeblood97 how about no..

    • @drd4059
      @drd4059 8 місяців тому +5

      Migrate to another topic. There was a crash in demand for nuclear physicists after 3 mile island. A lot of the talent left the field and fueled a boom in medical imaging technologies. Others went to Wall St. and develop analytic models of capital markets. I went from slow neutron physics to polymer physics as a post doc and now do food safety and medical diagnostics. I founded a R&D company in 2000 and now own about 40 US patents. On average, it takes 13 years (known as the valley of death for tech start ups) to go from concept to commercial. My perspective has survivor bias: do what I did and become wealthy. Most don't make it out of the valley of death. The key is to use your high level math in a field where high level math is not common whether as a well paid employee (low risk) or as an entrepreneur (high risk, high reward).

    • @scepticalchymist
      @scepticalchymist 8 місяців тому +6

      I feel you, because I did the same :). We idealists have to learn that what gets paid is not idealism, passion, devotion, that's only ever gets one abused and exploited by others, but to be have a practical skill that is valuable to others, and this can be very basic, something like being able to write well, being able to think clear, being able to get things done fast, not perfect, but fast, and reliable. Unfortunately short term goals are favored by society, not being persistent and having the endurance to master a field as difficult as string theory. This said, I admire you for all the things that other people find not fancy and cannot see and appreciate. Understanding the inner workings of the universe still is a decent way of living and has its own rewards. This is something, that 99% of humans will never understand.

    • @DrunkenUFOPilot
      @DrunkenUFOPilot 8 місяців тому

      That's how my career path went. (Checking to make sure this isn't an answer I wrote... nope!) But I was lucky to be out of college and grad school at a time when anyone who could program a microprocessor to make an LED blink was hot stuff in the engineering world. Easy to land a job in manufacturing, medical imaging, or anything involving electronics. That world is long gone now.

  • @asw654
    @asw654 8 місяців тому +19

    Computer science is part of math.
    The clarification "including computer science" is for laymen.

  • @adamaubry4598
    @adamaubry4598 8 місяців тому +3

    Everyone is trying to predict the future yet forget that the ones working their asses off now, forgetting what everyone else is predicting, are going to be far well off in the long term.

  • @rabbitcouch15
    @rabbitcouch15 8 місяців тому +3

    Graduated with a PhD in chemistry this spring. Spent 7 months looking for a job since I defended my dissertation the previous winter. My first job after getting out of grad school was as a cashier in a gas station. Now I’ve got a job I could’ve gotten with my BS out of college without wasting 5 years of my life. Pays like shit too compared to the six figure salaries everyone always told me I’d be able to get in industry.

    • @javiersaenz1040
      @javiersaenz1040 8 місяців тому +5

      You have been replaced, and your job was given to the HB1 immigrant for less paid.

    • @TerryJulianLive
      @TerryJulianLive 7 місяців тому

      Damn thats insane.. Have you looked into working at Dow Chemical?

  • @mrECisME
    @mrECisME 8 місяців тому +11

    "I can write some web development code " isn't being trained as a engineer. The "Shortage in Stem" is people who know how to build a power plant or a bridge that doesn't collapse of fix a factory production machine when it breaks down. No one is being trained in any of this because they can't and/or don't want to.

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому +8

      Litterally. People forget the boring shit and it all falls apart.
      Ask a CS grad how to do a basic math proof, and they utterly collapse.

    • @C_oboe
      @C_oboe 7 місяців тому

      Actually it IS about building a bridge that collapses bc you need to create more work for the workers to justify keeping the jobs going...

  • @ijuhi
    @ijuhi 7 місяців тому +3

    I have a b.s. in maths from a tier 1 research university. There are no non-teaching jobs for a fresh graduate with a maths degree. You're expected to have 5-10 years of experience if you want to find anything.

    • @THUNKShow
      @THUNKShow  7 місяців тому

      One of the brightest mathematicians I know bailed on academia & became a barista. I guess she decided chasing the carrot forever didn't add up.

  • @sirhenrystalwart8303
    @sirhenrystalwart8303 8 місяців тому +11

    The low salary of STEM jobs outside of FANG software plainly shows there is no STEM shortage. When there is an actually shortage, you will see folks with a bachelors in chemistry make 500k+ with a few years of experience.

    • @milandalosur1850
      @milandalosur1850 8 місяців тому

      STEM is full of 6 figure jobs outside of FANG. There’s just no evidence to support what you’re saying.

  • @trashpanda5947
    @trashpanda5947 8 місяців тому +5

    You're making a logical fallacy. You assume that if you don't study something in uni that means that you don't learn it. For someone educated in tech you should know this is BS. University is so that you get a piece of paper validating skills that you will use in a job or to prepare you to do research in a topic. You can simply read the books without getting the paper. Student debt is voluntary.

  • @timisa58
    @timisa58 8 місяців тому +3

    Thank you for this. Opened my eyes to a few things I hadn't considered. As someone who has benefited from STEM education and career paths, I sometimes have a myopic view. I agree. The Employer is who benefits most, overwhelmingly so, than the new graduate or employee. More efficient tech, abundant workforce, means more MONEY MONEY MONEY for LESS LESS LESS.

  • @legoguyver7459
    @legoguyver7459 8 місяців тому +4

    STEM is oversaturated.

  • @denimGoldenBlues
    @denimGoldenBlues 8 місяців тому +5

    Having more STEM graduates is not a bad thing, given they are at the forefront of product creation and brings in substance. What we did do wrong is relying on “giant corporations” to assemble the industries and provide us a job we can clock to. If we started developing our own several series of collaborative small businesses that can not only bring American capabilities before early 2000s and we won’t have to worry about product dependence on other nation to fill in many of our needs. The economics of it should bring the inflation down as well. We are stronger when we don’t participate as a victim.

  • @Fireclaws10
    @Fireclaws10 8 місяців тому +15

    I’m moving from a lit degree into programming, your analysis of the world is super on point.
    It’s disgusting how much the western world devalues the humanities, and how much the people i work with just entirely lack an understanding of basic ethics.

    • @jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613
      @jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613 8 місяців тому

      I would call it the Anglo-Protestant world view, not so much the Western World.

    • @georgeokello8620
      @georgeokello8620 8 місяців тому

      @@jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613nah, Anglo Protestantism has been dead for 60+ years. The current age is the hyper individualist post modern age and it shows from corporations and institutions to even legal and economic domain in many obvious ways.

    • @jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613
      @jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613 8 місяців тому

      @@georgeokello8620 the Anglo Protestant just evolved to be the hyper individualist that would result from sola sciptura.

  • @4Fixerdave
    @4Fixerdave 8 місяців тому +13

    2 counterpoints, related: 1st, I question that idea that there are too many STEM graduates for the number of positions available. I work in Tech. We struggle to hire competent people. And, that brings up the 2nd point, competence. There are a lot of STEM graduates that are not Techs. There's a big problem pushing people into fields they ought not to be in.
    Adding some detail to those points:
    1st, we have hired recent graduates into positions that require 3-5 years experience. We hired a supervisor that had nothing but a few months of coop experience, because she was the single applicant. Now, we're not a top-payer so we don't expect top talent, but the average talent these days is NOTHING like it used to be. Now, this is Canada and the last stat I heard was that IT related fields now only have 50,000 unfilled positions, down from 75,000. So, all those layoffs probably did us good. Also, we are aggressively pushing skilled immigration, including poaching 20,000 US H1B(whatever) work-permit holders. Even with that, recent graduates are being snapped up before they finish exams.
    2nd, not all graduates are Techs. You see... and I'll probably get flamed for this, but not everyone is a Tech. It's not just that someone takes a course and, ta-da, they're a Tech. We have no issues with Jocks that can see something fly through the air, turn around and start running, and then catch that thing over their shoulders. They're Jocks, what do you expect? Same with Musicians. You can't just take anyone and say "you will learn to play this instrument" with the expectation that they will excel at it. Yeah, you can make them learn, they may be able to play a song... but not all of them have real talent. It's the same with Science and Tech. Some people have a natural talent for it, others just don't.
    Not everyone in Little League becomes a professional athlete. Not everyone force to take piano lessons becomes a professional musician. And, not everyone that learns to code or whatever is going to have real success as a Tech. Now, you can't look at some kid and say... you have the talent to be an athlete, musician, scientist, or coder. They have to try it all out and see what fits. I think that's what schools should be for. And, when you consider the preponderance of teachers in schools are not Techs, it makes sense to have a bit of affirmative action to push that. Given a decent education system, we can better fit natural ability to career choice. No point losing out on great Techs, Jocks, or Artists because they never found out they were particularly good at.
    Right now, it's skewed too far. We have a lot of people that think 'Tech' is an education. People that aren't Techs think that a lot: managers, politicians, teachers, and even students in STEM. But, an education in Tech will only make those without the natural talent for it barely competent in the field. Is it surprising that a lot of STEM graduates end up never getting a job in their educated (but not not natural talent) field?
    TL;DR: If we just accepted that people have natural talents in specific fields then all of this nonsense will go away. Pushing people into fields they have no talent for isn't doing anyone any good. It's not just Jocks and Musicians, it's Scientists, Coders, Mechanical Engineers, Mathematicians, and probably Accountants too. People need to "find themselves" and that's what we should ask our schools to do.

    • @chickenstrangler3826
      @chickenstrangler3826 8 місяців тому +1

      Don't you think the quality has gone down simply because there are now more tech type jobs today compared to 30 years ago? And so more people getting involved to fulfill the demand probably diluted top quality people? And this fact would be applied across the board; that the pool of all jobs globally now calls for higher education due to technological advancements but the gene pool hasn't yet caught up.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +2

      I feel like I am a tech generalist, even after completing a Chemical Physics PhD. I know coding, electronics, CAD design, fabrication, mathematical modeling, data processing and analysis. But jobs look for specialists, like the ultimate electronics PCB designer, or the ultimate PCB assembler, all separate roles. It's like if I am good at many different sports, and am in very good shape, but can't get a job as a pro athlete because they are looking for someone extremely good at just one sport. Not just one sport, but extremely good at one specific role in one sport, like quarterback.

    • @4Fixerdave
      @4Fixerdave 8 місяців тому

      @@cryora "... but can't get a job as a pro athlete because they are looking for someone extremely good at just one sport." Did you put in an application? Even where we are, the standard adverts go out... "5 years experience," yada, yada. Like I said, we're hiring recent grads with zero experience because that's all that are applying.
      I signed up for LinkedIn just because I was curious, wondering what was out there for post retirement half-time stuff, and the postings are a joke. One asked for 10 years experience in Kubernetes. Good luck with that. Does anyone hire or get hired from that site? Job boards from individual places are probably a lot more useful.
      My advice from the peanut gallery, apply for everything and if anyone bites then make demands because they're desperate. But, I'm off in an obscure corner of the tech world and I move around departments by reputation. Haven't had to fill out a job application in decades. Your experience will differ.
      Besides, being a generalist myself... would you really want to work in a job where you just did ONE thing all day long? Sounds awful.

    • @4Fixerdave
      @4Fixerdave 8 місяців тому +2

      @@chickenstrangler3826 "Don't you think the quality has gone down simply because there are now more tech type jobs today compared to 30 years ago?" Yes. And yes it's true that most jobs require more intelligent workers these days. I remember one documentary about people on the extreme low end of the intelligence curve and the presenter lamenting that there just aren't ANY jobs they can do now, and why that's a problem for society. It was an interesting perspective.
      But, pushing people into occupations that they just can't succeed at isn't going to solve any problems. It just hurts everyone involved. Maybe that's what this video is about.
      I don't see a lot of unemployed people educated as Techs around here. Maybe that's a US thing because they went way overboard and pushed people into Tech that had no natural ability for it. If that's true then, yes, you can have a chunk of unemployed graduates in the same field there are a shortage of competent workers. If there were giant Tech companies pushing this nefarious agenda to drive down wages, well they wasted a lot of time and -bribes- campaign contributions doing it, right?

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому

      @@4Fixerdave I've put in a number of applications, like 40 so far after a few months. Some job sites like Indeed, but also through company websites. Had a couple of legit interviews, and a couple of other screening interviews, but was either turned down or they never got back to me.
      I don't want to put in too many applications, because then companies won't get the impression like I am interested in working with them specifically and won't decide to make an offer. Currently trying to send a strong application to this postdoc position, as well as applying for the Air Force as an Officer.

  • @TheAlchemist1089
    @TheAlchemist1089 7 місяців тому +1

    The US needs to remove country caps for green cards first

  • @javiersaenz1040
    @javiersaenz1040 8 місяців тому +4

    STEM is oversatured now. There is no shortage

  • @antoniobortoni
    @antoniobortoni 8 місяців тому +3

    Automatization is growing exponentially in all areas but nobody expects that programer become obsolete by chatgpt, its socialism or seeing capitalism collapse because who is going to buy?? the middle class is not growing, people are not having children because life its more hard, collapse of population is happening, sooo, socialist is the way... the more kids the more money people should get to promote life... its that or collapse.

  • @oflameo8927
    @oflameo8927 8 місяців тому +3

    They been advertising the STEM shortage for decades and I personally been burned from the fib.

  • @ManTheRabbit
    @ManTheRabbit 9 місяців тому +40

    Thr thing that gets me though, is that many people will take it for granted these days that the role of the institution IS to be as profitable as possible (by providing students the best "return on their education") which usually means overemphasing "STEM" to the detriment of other departments. This is patently insane. Society probably needs to be restructured to truly reward other pursuits in the way "STEM" fields are so people in search of a {good, comfortable, interesting?} career/life aren't just funneled into a relatively small set of roles that they compete to the de*** over

    • @richardshipe4576
      @richardshipe4576 8 місяців тому +5

      So, then find a way to make those other fields profitable. Otherwise, why bother with subsidizing subjects you can just learn for free off Coursera or UA-cam?

    • @ImLure
      @ImLure 8 місяців тому +3

      @@richardshipe4576the funny part is all of our well known High IQ individuals throughout history were majority Liberal Arts fanatics such as Philosophy, Psychology, Musical Arts. We do not need to make these things profitable as the profit they provide is by shaping the very structure of societies, however most liberal arts will fall under research related jobs which are usually filled by people who would rather push the boundaries of those arts than worry about money. I believe we need a balance because tbh there’s no reason why everyone should HAVE to go into STEM in order to live a decent minimal life

    • @chesshooligan1282
      @chesshooligan1282 8 місяців тому +7

      So you think we need more philosophers, sociologists, and gender studies graduates? Nope, what we need is bricklayers, plumbers, and handymen -- people who do the stuff nobody wants to do. Society doesn't need re-structuring. The free market takes care of the problem by offering tradespeople higher incomes than it offers those with useless degrees. Do you want a useless degree in philosophy or gender studies? I say go for it, but only as long as you pay for it out of your own pocket (and I don't think self-financing should be limited to degrees I considered useless; STEM graduates should pay for their own degrees as well).

    • @chesshooligan1282
      @chesshooligan1282 8 місяців тому

      @@user-gp3qt5qd5w As compared to Cuba, the Soviet Union, or even Argentina? Correct. Socialism is what got us in 34-trillion debt, universities full of parasites, and the government spending half your income to give you practically bugger-all in return.

    • @ImLure
      @ImLure 8 місяців тому

      @@user-gp3qt5qd5w the free market it’s self is not the problem the problem is believing that a free market can exist without a external mediator from humans. The market itself is and will never be free, just as a meritocracy can never be achieved under human watch.

  • @IdiotWrangler
    @IdiotWrangler 8 місяців тому +4

    Most companies do not pay enough or give enough no work hours to justify their positions.
    Home depot for example, was using leetcode questions google used.
    This was for a front end dev job for making web page updates to their app.
    Like.... Wut

  • @picklerix6162
    @picklerix6162 Місяць тому

    I remember hearing a technical manager complain about the high salaries commanded by experienced engineers. Of course, the manager thought his, even higher, salary was fully justified.

  • @Pulchism
    @Pulchism 8 місяців тому +36

    I agree. I also find myself to becoming more of a curmudgeon with age. I would add that the same goes for trying to get more women into stem for “diversity” or something. The ownership class wants to suppress wages. For my own kids I want them to know math, and enough about tech so as not to be intimidated by it. Beyond that, only if they have an interest in it.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +1

      Then how do you beat the system so that you can be an owner yourself?

    • @Pulchism
      @Pulchism 8 місяців тому +1

      @@cryora I have not yet found a way. I’ve been in a non software engineering startup for five years and it’s a very slow grind getting it off the ground

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому

      @@Pulchism Does the founder have a good business plan? Has it been defined what it means to get "off the ground"? Whether it's getting initial funding, or if it's getting the product / service widely adopted in the market?

    • @Pulchism
      @Pulchism 8 місяців тому

      @@cryora I'm not sure what you're getting at. You mean I have a defeatist view? We are building machines to solve problems in the metal forming industry. It's capital intensive and not exponentially scalable, so its not got sex appeal for the ownership ..ahem venture capitalists. In fact our investors are our customers, who are also the ownership... ahem "family business" people. We skim off a little ownership over time by bootstrapping as much as possible, but that is mainly by moonlighting as general engineering consultants, and you can('t?) imagine how little that is tradeable for...

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +1

      @@Pulchism Not the kind of startup I had in mind. I'm involved in a startup and the founder is in the trenches working to get his idea off the ground. Think robots and gaming. The point of working for a startup is to get some equity for a possible bug future payout. In your case it sounds like any other company except it calls itself a startup by name mainly.

  • @ISpitHotFiyaa
    @ISpitHotFiyaa 8 місяців тому +1

    The media needs to stop referring to STEM when they're solely talking about computer scientists, computer engineers, and data scientists. Those are the people who make up the technical workforce at tech companies. Google and Facebook aren't hiring very many biologists or civil engineers. The STEM category is so broad that it isn't meaningful.

  • @siphonedshisui5667
    @siphonedshisui5667 7 місяців тому +2

    No shortage exists. Companies don't want to pay a fair salary nor do they want to give entry level people an opportunity to work for them (self taught or fresh out of university)

  • @braumski2
    @braumski2 8 місяців тому +2

    Looked through your channel, I'm gonna have to binge some of these 😁

  • @raifkenedy3
    @raifkenedy3 7 місяців тому +2

    Becoming more scared as a STEM student

  • @userMB1
    @userMB1 9 місяців тому +33

    I think that most people, including me to be honest, think that social sciences and especially arts and humanities, don't really require much brain power; you can learn them on your own. The looking down on anything other than STEM is everywhere but in the US it's more common because of extremely high student loans.
    How are you supposed to pay back those loans with a philosophy degree? So the problem is very broad.

    • @fnorgen
      @fnorgen 8 місяців тому +15

      I'm inclined to agree. I have a lot of friends who spent 3+ years to get a non-stem degree, and to most of them it was purely a waste of time. It may have been interesting, but all it did was keep them out of the labour market and not gaining any experience until after graduation. The vast majority of them ended up with work completely unrelated to their education, and many of them later went back to uni to get a new degree related to their actual work. Many of the others have just settled into retail jobs they technically didn't even need a high school education to qualify for.
      Not that there's really a need for more people in STEM either. It's more that trade schools around here have a reputation as the dumping ground for bad students who just want to get their education over with as quickly as possible. This creates a large surplus of high schoolers chasing the limited supply of relevant university courses, so a lot of them settle for the irrelevant ones that still look interesting.
      I may be projecting though. During the last year of middle school I visited an electrical trade school for a day because I considered becoming an electrician. I found the subject comically easy, and most of the students there to be complete idiots. I figured this stuff was way too easy for me, so I decided to pursue a STEM degree instead. I could have been guaranteed a steady job at 18 as a licensed electrician, with the opportunity to later get into electrical engineering, but instead I've been stuck in limbo for the last 10 years, as studying turned out to be complete poison for my mental health. It all left me a little disillusioned about higher education in general. Pardon my rant.

    • @milt0n290
      @milt0n290 8 місяців тому +2

      I’m leaving the country for grad school in computer science. You absolutely can learn stem on your own as well. It’s just tedious. Don’t let anyone gaslight like stem is for smart people. It’s all a scam. I say do what makes you happy because unless you’re exceptional, no matter what route you go, you’ll struggle like everyone else. I decided to say fuck it and max out my education but really just to travel and find a country I can work and live decently

    • @urip_zukoharjo
      @urip_zukoharjo 8 місяців тому +1

      Except for IT jobs I suppose, had known a person who's from botanical background and now works as a senior IT person in banking, also tech bubble happens and everyone's rushing to data jobs
      I don't live in us btw

    • @pepsiman9840
      @pepsiman9840 8 місяців тому +4

      sometimes i feel like the opposite. anybody can learn math if they read the textbooks and dedicate the time. I don't understand any social theory though, not unless I take a class or have a youtuber explain it to me

    • @forstuffjust7735
      @forstuffjust7735 8 місяців тому

      ​@@pepsiman9840Social theories are quite easy to grasp in theory, the hard part is when it comes to applying them

  • @pokpok97642
    @pokpok97642 8 місяців тому +6

    STEM companies are finding the best way to undercut salaries. Mainly through saturating the job market by promising high paying jobs that in reality are long gone.
    A large portion of the U.S population has a university education (associated with high pay) yet their peers who chose to focus on manual trades tend to earn higher wages. Since in recent history sending your kid to college is almost assumed, there's a huge number of people fresh out of college who must settle for low-pay jobs since it's their only opportunity to climb up the social ladder and gain experience.
    On the other hand, many people straight out of trade school will find well-paying jobs since there's a general shortage of manual laborers, no matter their skill. Personally I met a guy who spent 3 years in prison and then was able to go through trade school, eventually landing a decent job as a plumber.
    I think in all honesty its mostly about supply & demand. Companies will demand the most and pay the least until eventually demand outpaces the amount of skilled scientists, engineers, etc. in the job market.

    • @tupoiu
      @tupoiu 8 місяців тому

      Honestly, I think people are being short sighted here. Yes getting a well paid graduate job is hard, but once you have any job, you will learn a lot that can't be taught by a degree (at least in my experience). The career progression in being a plumber is very limited. After 5 years, there will have been a significant plateau in how much more valuable stuff they can learn.
      This is much less the case in a field like software (which I'm in), where you can go from taking a month to implement a feature to taking a day, given enough experience. In parallel, understanding which features are actually useful and easy to implement is not a skill that can be taught without practice.
      I am earning the same as a bus driver. In 5 years I will not be.

    • @excalibro8365
      @excalibro8365 8 місяців тому

      @@tupoiu People work to put food on the table, not to learn.

  • @badawesome3047
    @badawesome3047 8 місяців тому +16

    I received a degree in a STEM field about a hundred years ago at a liberal arts college, when education was cheap, that demanded I also take many humanities classes. This resulted in very few actual electives. Students today are taking too many electives that could easily be learned online for no cost. If education was inexpensive this probably wouldn't matter but tax payers should not be forced to subsidize underwater basket weaving classes or women's studies.

    • @Pulchism
      @Pulchism 8 місяців тому +1

      Would underwater women’s studies be compromise enough for the tax payer do you think?

    • @badawesome3047
      @badawesome3047 8 місяців тому

      I like it. @@Pulchism

    • @plaidchuck
      @plaidchuck 8 місяців тому

      They take the same electives as they did before. And don’t act like no public schools are any better

    • @internallyinteral
      @internallyinteral 8 місяців тому +1

      ​@@plaidchuckpublic day schools are daycares. A degree holder shouldn't be forced to take courses on "the arts"

    • @andrewpascal6096
      @andrewpascal6096 8 місяців тому

      My degree in the last decade came with about 6 hours of pure elective, out of a 120 hour curriculum.

  • @internallyinteral
    @internallyinteral 8 місяців тому +11

    There has NEVER BEEN a stem shortage.

    • @duellinksantimeta7636
      @duellinksantimeta7636 8 місяців тому +5

      It depends. I would say that electrical and civil engineering has not enough graduates and computer science is getting outsourced.

    • @vitalyl1327
      @vitalyl1327 8 місяців тому +1

      Oh, really? We are already a Type 1 civilisation and ready to start colonising the galaxy? There is a massive shortage.

    • @internallyinteral
      @internallyinteral 8 місяців тому

      These companies cry shortages every year so they can pull visa workers and pay them pennies

    • @DrunkenUFOPilot
      @DrunkenUFOPilot 8 місяців тому

      How do you view the 1950s, 1960s, especially the push for science and engineering education due to the space race and related matters?

  • @roginutah
    @roginutah 8 місяців тому +2

    There is a shortage of people with real skills. A degree is not skills. The idea that anyone can do any job well just by going to school is just a fallacy. Too many people are getting degrees without any real talent. They just sat through lots of courses. But yeah, the colleges aren't encouraging the logical, analytical types to attend. DEI is not merit.
    You mention the reason at around 1:15. Joe Blow looks around, sees a job that pays well and says: "That's what I'll do." when Joe isn't really 'cut out' for that type of work. You don't just 'train' creativity/ingenuity.
    Most jobs should be based more on a person's character than school time.

  • @joaquin67
    @joaquin67 8 місяців тому +2

    It’s the quality of the education that placed us lower in STEM, not the “lack of” number of STEM professionals. On the cscareerquestions subreddit, I often see hiring managers come across the issue that most applicants are not qualified for these jobs. Just a small handful. So the market is flooded with poor quality candidates, and that goes back to my first statement. We lack quality not quantity.

    • @haloslippin6894
      @haloslippin6894 8 місяців тому +2

      Not qualified because they don’t want to train or be patient some people can GAIN those qualifications. Output and profit NOW.

    • @joaquin67
      @joaquin67 8 місяців тому

      @@haloslippin6894 when they would say not qualified, they would say some people had zero business applying to those positions. And not only that the few who did, they could barely code. So they’d be left with like a few candidates at the end who were qualified

  • @landspide
    @landspide 9 місяців тому +12

    There is a root of all evil, forgot what that was again, too busy rat racing 🤔... We are rapidly approaching post scarcity, I would argue AI is going to be the catalyst, automation as a means to decouple from external dependencies is also going to be critical. I am getting old now but it really does feel like we are hitting saturation across many markets. I do agree, we need a shift in gears with respect to education.

  • @Michael-it6gb
    @Michael-it6gb Місяць тому +1

    There has never been a "STEM shortage", even before these layoffs. I graduated as a C# developer back in 2015 and have not been able to find a real steady job since then. I worked briefly until 2016 and haven't found a job in stem then. I work with something completely different now. Shortage of any workers is a scam, these companies lie because it is legal to do so.

  • @fullmetaltheorist
    @fullmetaltheorist 8 місяців тому +4

    Coming from a country with a very high unemployment rate, I think STEM is worth it. Other careers are rarely as profitable and worth whilw.

  • @TheThreatenedSwan
    @TheThreatenedSwan 8 місяців тому +4

    You think having a shortage of competent stem workers and the tech lay offs are contradictory? Suddenly the lay offs are making more sense

    • @yaboy7120
      @yaboy7120 8 місяців тому +2

      I think the layoffs are more attributable to the increase in hiring during the 2020-2021 period

    • @TheThreatenedSwan
      @TheThreatenedSwan 8 місяців тому +7

      @@yaboy7120 Yes, they overhired and disproportionately in non-tech jobs in tech companies, which he doesn't seem to realize or is deceptive about, so they trimmed the fat

    • @JJSmalls
      @JJSmalls 8 місяців тому

      No more free money thanks to the Fed.

  • @agentfires101
    @agentfires101 8 місяців тому +12

    Having managed people in STEM before in college and at work, it’s a multi faceted issue. Bad recruiting, bad business practices, and a slew of incapable people.
    The go to example for the slew of bad people is an electrical engineering masters student I was overseeing in college. He worked for Edison for a few years and didn’t see a problem with a Live battery cable flopping around in an engine of an experimental vehicle design.
    The guy was smart but when it came down to thinking about something I got more processing power from a rock. Schools have a bad time teaching the thinking required in stem.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +2

      Has he taken the FE exam? That's where it teaches you about ethics and prioritizing safety. I don't know about EE college courses though, as I was a physics major and I learned some safety stuff as a graduate research assistant. Safety training was required for things like lasers, chemicals, etc. Those aren't taught in college courses. College courses are designed so that students don't hurt themselves. Low voltage electronics projects. Low power HeNe lasers.
      If they don't get trained, then they just won't know. Just because someone mastered how to solve differential equations using Laplace Transforms doesn't mean they are smart and know how to ensure safety in a lab. I can tell you the Army gives a lot of good training on things like driving, explosives, and cold weather and the soldiers that go through those training become quite reliable, even though they don't have degrees or know how to do even algebra. Granted they are usually supervised by leadership, but that is another area that the Army takes seriously.
      If you have a problem with safety when it comes to your employees, then ask yourself, are you willing and able to put together a class that will teach them about it?

    • @stuckinthepast
      @stuckinthepast 8 місяців тому +1

      @@cryora All ABET accredited colleges will require a course on Ethics in any engineering program. Safety is taught within this course but at a top level and does not dig deep into any specific scenarios for your specific major as it is a "general" class with other eng majors in it. They just dissect major engineering faults/oversights and use that as a guideline for "chose life over the project".

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому +1

      @@stuckinthepast In the FE handbook for electrical safety there is literally a picture of a stick figure human where each stick, or body part, is a resistor with a resistance value associated with it. What about the degree specific courses? Does an EE never during their degree learn about power dissipation, grounding, what constitutes lethal voltages, and other safety stuff?

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому

      I thought yall were joking but holy shit you people have a POINT.
      There are genuinely people out there, that can ace exams, but are so incompetent its insane.
      The entire premise of having tests for people is flawed. The existence of Leetcode is proof that people will find a way to regurgitate.
      You litterally discriminate against 90% of the competent workforce if you use leetcode for CS grads.
      When filtering the NPC's out, you should test for real world activity.
      For CS grads, its github or personal projects.
      For engineering majors, its their past time projects.

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому +2

      Alot of people here are talking about "ethics programs" which is utterly against the point.
      People arent robots. You cant force someone to memorize how to be competent.
      Only way to gauge that is by having em do actual work./

  • @1three7
    @1three7 8 місяців тому +2

    Sorry, but as a psychology major myself. I'd say the question is "Is psychology a science" and the answer is no. At least it isn't a hard science like physics, chemistry, engineering etc. You can make tons of money as a psychologist, but your research is personal report surveys and P hacking

  • @johnhershberg5915
    @johnhershberg5915 9 місяців тому +9

    This is a bit of an odd take because it leaves out the actual students. The actual people in question here. At some point you stop the pattern of living with your parents and going to a school. Everyone wants this. But unfortunately accomplishing that takes money. The idea that's been pushed for ages is education = money. And especially in STEM that's true. So it's not so much that we as a society value money over knowledge. It's that there's a dishonesty in the system. If STEM were removed from higher education, and higher education was all things like history and the humanities, I would say that would actually increase the value of education. You'd get a degree in order to become a more well-rounded person, not just to get a bigger paycheck. But also much fewer people would go get a degree in the first place if they didn't think they'd get a bigger paycheck out of it.
    But I don't see how you can divorce those things. Some professions like law or medicine straight-up legally require you to get an education. And those are high-paying professions. The only thing changing is that STEM is now slowly entering into that same sphere.
    Another way to look at it is that a doctor that also has some education in the humanities is a better doctor. And maybe the same is true for a programmer, I don't know. But as a programmer myself I feel like programmers are more akin to plumbers and electricians than we are to doctors and lawyers. Maybe that should change?

  • @zdspider6778
    @zdspider6778 8 місяців тому +3

    Audio vol too low.
    Right click, Stats for nerds, see -11.3dB.

  • @gilbertocamacho6769
    @gilbertocamacho6769 8 місяців тому +1

    Why does Silicon Valley employ so many Chinese and Indian engineers?

  • @durandus676
    @durandus676 8 місяців тому +1

    Yeah. I had a professor who complained endlessly at how they should stop hiring finance majors for company budgeting and hiring and hire systems and process engineers because everyone else is too stupid to make a good decision, they’ll refuse to hire because they don’t understand your resume, they’ll fire because they don’t understand the projects you nailed, etc. 7:04 engineer here, those kids better be reading Shakespeare because when they need to write a report and explain a issue they fix they better be able to translate it into the Situation Task action Resuslt and repeatability format similar to the classical story structure with a into rising climax falling and resolution. My most formative class for my success in college and engineering was 9th grade English with a brutal teacher who gave equally thorough feedback.

  • @firejuggler31
    @firejuggler31 8 місяців тому +2

    I work a finance job. Have seen a lot of resumes with engineering degrees. When I ask, the answer usually goes along the lines of “it’s harder to get a job in engineering”.

    • @slop123456789
      @slop123456789 8 місяців тому +3

      One of the many symptoms of a fiat monetary system; an overgrown, overpaid finance sector that sucks the best talent away from solving tangible, real world problems and diverts them towards a meaningless fantasy that serves purely to enrich the wealthiest few and transfer risk to the many.

    • @firejuggler31
      @firejuggler31 8 місяців тому

      Maybe in general. In my case my job helps make sure your home being destroyed in a fire doesn’t also cause financial ruin for you.

  • @tomawey2141
    @tomawey2141 8 місяців тому +1

    There no shortage. Just a shortage of companies willing to hire, and pay a good wage to stem workers

  • @scottfranco1962
    @scottfranco1962 8 місяців тому +1

    There is a lot of incentive to inflate engineer wanted numbers. Combine that with the well known studies that want ads for engineers are inflated for various reasons, companies that list jobs they have no intentions to fill, ads that are required to be posted before hiring a foreign worker they wanted to hire anyways, etc.

  • @XAUCADTrader
    @XAUCADTrader 7 місяців тому +1

    Wow, so glad I found this channel, had no idea it existed! Hopefully it blows up, but I think it probably caters to a smaller demographic =/. I'm doing a computer science degree now in my late 30s, health sciences before...But seems like the economy is precarious in general, and even a skills reset may not even save me lol.

  • @argentaegis
    @argentaegis 8 місяців тому +1

    There's a difference between "things that are valuable" and "things for which we want to subsidize the acquisition of credentials". The cost of subsidy for many liberal arts degrees is higher than that of engineering degrees because theater production is less employable and less well compensated, thus making repayment of tuition an issue. As long as we're compensating professors for sharing their knowledge, this will be true, even if we change who does the compensating.
    A society might well value classical reading, and consider it a worthy thing to have done, but not be willing to pay people for professionals to train people in those readings if they consider that sort of life enrichment to be a primarily personal good, and not a good that will enrich people other than just the reader. Arguments to be made there, surely, but it's an argument of scarce resources.

  • @TRAVIESO_NA
    @TRAVIESO_NA 8 місяців тому +1

    SHORTAGE OF TECH SECTOR JOBS, AND GOVERNMENT GRANTS IN THE SECTOR ALSO. ID SAY RATHER UR NOVICE OR EXPERT. Become a entrepreneur, Invest in your self, and Focus on mathematics and business and economics and a second language. My plans to Pivot with a second & third language skill set. Mathematics is by far the hardest to get a JOB in. But The best thing for you to know to understand ( Machine learning and Deep Learning and A.I. )

  • @ditpook
    @ditpook 8 місяців тому +14

    I am a retired scientist and after my first few years of work, I developed superior skills for my paygrade to the point companies rewrote job descriptions and redefined paygrades in order to hire me. These companies were seriously failing and were grateful for me to be there. Then I fixed everything and they pushed to get me to leave to reduce salary. Imagine the largest pharma company in the world trying to replace lab staff with BS and MS with high school grads who have never been in a lab, expecting the one leader to train, review and cover for all of these unqualified people as well as do their own job. From the day I started work the government betrayed us by opening the borders and allowing foreigners to come take our STEM jobs. Did you know in India, Gujjarat University Masters is only barely equal to an American Bachelors? Dumbing down your scientists, especially those in quality assurance, allows failing product out the door but profits to increase as you use a kabuki theater of fake quality control by people with no skills in lab coats rubber stamping everything as passed.

    • @andressilva2055
      @andressilva2055 8 місяців тому

      Well said. Many companies arent hiring Engineers and IT workers because many of them are underqualified. And many of them are underqualified because they were imported from India.
      It is specially funny when they use ethnic nepotism to take over companies.

    • @tylerfusco7495
      @tylerfusco7495 8 місяців тому

      why blame the government for “letting in foreigners” instead of the companies actually pushing to fire and replace you in the first place (with mostly domestic workers!). The government is just doing their bidding anyways.

    • @NtandoMbele
      @NtandoMbele 7 місяців тому

      elaborate on these superior skills and how you got them if you don't mind. I'd really appreciate the information. I'm 5yr's into my career.

  • @joaquinbecerra7405
    @joaquinbecerra7405 9 місяців тому +3

    This is a great take, thank you for sharing!

  • @Saberking875
    @Saberking875 8 місяців тому +6

    The reason for the layoffs is because a lot of companies like LinkedIn are outsourcing to India

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому +2

      Accurate. Blue collars get outsourced to Mexico. White collars outsourced to India.
      We need to protect our jobs more than ever. Nobody should be subject to the abject horrors of overpopulation that another country forced upon them.

    • @darthbumblebee7310
      @darthbumblebee7310 8 місяців тому

      Companies have been outsourcing to India for decades. There are better explanations for the layoffs that coincide with more recent events

    • @Saberking875
      @Saberking875 8 місяців тому

      @@darthbumblebee7310 its definitely been ramping up, they have been targeting high end jobs specifically entry level jobs, because they are cheaper to get done from India

    • @misterleegains4020
      @misterleegains4020 7 місяців тому

      Exactly,if you are not a nationalist at this point you are a moron

  • @mba2ceo
    @mba2ceo 7 місяців тому

    ALL jobs suffer from AGE discrimination aka layoffs !!!

  • @brandonb9764
    @brandonb9764 8 місяців тому

    + shortage of people. The population is shrinking

  • @Atlas92936
    @Atlas92936 8 місяців тому +2

    Note: ACADEMIA stem jobs (research) I think are in shortage. White collar corporate Tech jobs are not in shortage.

    • @cryora
      @cryora 8 місяців тому

      Entry level jobs are. And if you have a PhD, people aren't going to want to hire you for an entry level job nor do they think you are qualified for a more senior job because you don't have job specific entry level experience.

    • @honkhonk8009
      @honkhonk8009 8 місяців тому +1

      Both are. Academia is beyond saturated. Do not think for a second it has a shortage.

  • @CosmoShidan
    @CosmoShidan 9 місяців тому +7

    This is really needed to be said and the shortage of STEM explored. Well put together.

  • @NigelIncubatorJones
    @NigelIncubatorJones 8 місяців тому +2

    Agreed, it's a lot of BS. Such a push to put kids in STEM only results in a lot of mediocre to bad fits. A lot of them just aren't intellectually or temperamentally suited for these roles, and will just be miserable. So congrats, companies, now you have that big labor pool to force down salaries, but at the same time you get to complain about the lack of quality, while holding higher expectations because the labor pool is so large.

  • @ronpearson1912
    @ronpearson1912 8 місяців тому +1

    The only way out of this is by punishing taxes for these companies as well as punishing anti-trust enforcement and massive company breakups. Absent that we will yield to China very soon, and actually technical people might be better off in the USA from a Chinese take over. The situation in the USA is simply not sustainable, they claim trade jobs are the way but they are paid just as poorly most of the data is taken from sole properiterships (people who were able to boot strap their way to carving out their own company that does well). Average trades men working for an employer dont make anything.