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Comment by ydkditfi | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that "STEM" was just a buzzword designed to flood the skill-intensive labor markets with a generation of idealistic youngsters, all with the intention of driving down wages.

There never was a labor shortage, or as it's occasionally framed, a "talent" shortage.

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Wages are not being driven down by labor supply. Rather as this particular example clearly shows, they are being driven down by the underlying economics of production. Another example of this trend is Detroit. The United Auto Workers union succeeded in keeping the wages high, but the underlying economics of production destroyed the industry.

The lesson in this scenario, is counter-intuitive. You can regulate, unionize and force wages to stabilize. But that can only help you in short term. On a longer timeframe, innovation and foreign labor catches up and now instead of losing few jobs to talented foreigners you end up losing the entire supply chain. The Software Industry thankfully has been able to resist this trend. The same report shows solid growth across all software related professions.

STEM is misnomer. Ever met an unemployed or underemployed biologist, ultrasound tech, environmental engineer, or statistician?

The real sweet spot is PI - physics and informatics. These roles are unique in that they can be explosively productive and create more jobs than were there at the start. PI, or "STEM" is more than a buzzword.

I'm confused if there ever was a field at the intersection of Physics and Informatics, EE has got to be it. Shannon literally invented information theory....

I've often read in physics communities that explicitly getting a job in "physics" is pretty hard outside academia, is that wrong?

There is also the intention to produce, which is easy to forget when the rhetoric gets thick in protectionism-promoting circles.

Yes. We need fewer STEM graduates, and/or more money in science.

Care to explain why this was modded down? I think the lack of resources for new graduate students is sad, and it blights the lives of many people in science. There are too few tenure track spots, so many PhDs have to wait until their 40s to have a normal job and salary. People are not willing to question authority or publish negative results because that would slow down the all-consuming struggle to outcompete the other 50 people applying for the same fellowship / grant / position / whatever.

A little competition is good, but most STEM careers are a ridiculous vow of poverty at this point. If we're not going to fund it more (and we should...) we should at least be honest to kids about what's waiting for them. The idea that there was ever a shortage of STEM graduates is really a very deceitful piece of propaganda, when the real shortage is funding.

Perhaps the issue isn't that a STEM career is a vow of poverty. I have met many people who are quite wealthy in STEM. I have personally done very well. In America we have become good at identifying talent, and promoting it. And we reward people higher up much more than people lower down the ladder.

I'm not going to say whether I think it's good or bad, but it's quite clear the the rich are getting richer, while the rest stay the same.

"STEM" isn't a single thing (another reason why it's a deceitful term.) The term encompasses a lot of different fields with a lot of different economic situations. For example, you might find it difficult to find a job in nuclear engineering, but easy to find a job in computer engineering. There isn't really a "shortage" of people in almost any math or science related field. Whenever you hear management talk about a personnel shortage, what they really mean is that "we have to pay people more than we think we ought to."

If people want to advance science faster, the way to do it is to divert some of those truckloads of money that are going to blowing up stuff in Iraq and putting it back together, or buying fighter planes that even the air force thinks we don't need. Paying scientists and engineers less (by having more of them competing for the same pool of resources) won't advance science and may even hold it back if it makes the best people go into other fields where they can earn a decent living (like finance of medicine).

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