There is not a shortage of STEM graduates. However, from an employer's point of view, there is a shortage of cheap STEM graduates. Hence the recent tech company uproar over the skilled visa changes.
"There is a shortage of STEM graduates at the price I want to pay."
The reason companies can't get STEM grads at the prices they're willing to pay is because those STEM grads can simply work for a company willing to pay more. That's not a problem for the grads (you bet your ass I'm not complaining too much, haha), but it is for everyone who wants to hire them.
http://fightthefuture.org/articles/hr-170-will-all-large-com...
Isn't it just the opposite? The large consulting companies are the ones paying these low wages. They submit a lot of applications and, because it's a pure lottery system, soak up a large portion of the available H1B visas.
This means that small, struggling companies like my own cannot hire H1Bs to get the talent that we desperately need. A higher wage floor or an auction system would mean that we would actually stand a chance at getting an H1B visa approved for the 1 hire that we need.
> However, I think what we’ll actually see are large companies in tech hubs like the bay area, Seattle, Chicago, New York and others, start to absorb the largest swatches of the immigrant talent pool, while shorting smaller companies and public sector jobs from the same access to skilled workers.
I'm saying that, under the current system, large companies absorb the largest swatches of the immigrant talent pool. These large companies submit a huge number of visa applications for $60k and because of the lottery system, they get allocated on a pro-rata so many of their visas are approved.
Under the proposed system, visas from small companies would have a much large chance of getting approved.
You can say there is not shortage of anything if you want to pay a good price. Then ignore what I said or remove the word 'shortage' for your world.
instead, get a decent software engineer job instead, without degree, without any real world experience.
If the market is the same in biology and programming related jobs. I would get job related to my degree.
It is obvious there is a shortage in people who have programming skills.
I manage to get above average productivity compared to my coworkers. I realized that even more shortage for productive software engineer.
sure, any adjective is relative.
I told him he could triple his salary if he applied for non-research positions. He's now a research developer at a pharma company making three times as much.
Many hard science STEM graduates don't realize that their programming skills (even if they're not totally honed) will make them more valuable on the market. If you can find a position that uses both your degree skills and programming, then you'll be a unicorn to that company.
There is a gap between cheap and the good price. Sometimes "cheap" is too cheap.