For what it's worth, maybe the U.S. would have better employment among young men if the "IT is in demand and steady work" meme found a place here.
Also, while I definitely am much more well paid as an engineer than I ever would have been as an academic, the quality of employment the field (in terms of opportunities available, working conditions, peers, and other factors) is a bit underwhelming, in my opinion. Without some pretty big changes in some of these I'm not sure we should blindly encourage "everyone" to seek an IT career.
Show up for work at the designated time, sit in your assigned seat. Sometimes you will get interesting work. Most times you will get menial tasks. Sometimes you won't get any work at all.
After the first month, you're thinking, "Uh, I was here about the software developer position? Are we going to be building any software?"
le sigh
We had an abundance of IT people with little actual knowledge and even less interest around the time of the dotcom bust.
I used to work with a guy who was like that. He was a decent programmer but his limitations made themselves readily apparent when the performance of his code was observed.
I guess this is my long-winded way of saying to be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
I think just shoving people into tech is short-sighted. That's not what I want.
That being said, much of American youth sees "business", law, medicine, and even entertainment (including sports) as a great way to succeed. We would do well to put engineering, especially IT, on that list.
In India, IT sector escaped the clutches of red tape, and thrived. So it became a very good option to make a living.
/soapbox
Partly, many of those trades have ceilings. Your salary doesn't always scale with skill and ambition like it can in IT.
...that's a living, but it's not "damn good money" or "only limited by the amount of work you are willing to do". It's not even very competitive with entry-level salaries for IT jobs. It's competitive with "support" roles in those organizations. Like admins, entry-level HR jobs, etc.
That being said, I have a lot of respect for people with "dirty jobs" (my family and I have had them myself), and likewise, I have a lot of respect for Mike Rowe and his message. I'd be very happy if there were a newfound respect for those roles.
...but the money, work conditions, and career advancement prospects are certainly better for STEM degrees.
Lack of a degree and a code camp certificate only works in tech cities where it's hard to find coders who are gullible enough to work for free...I mean get paid in equity in a startup that's really only there to suck at the tit of an angel investor for a few funding rounds.
"the only way..." usually is a made-up fact designed to fit a circumstance.
The town I grew up in had 4 major tech employers.
- A weird segment of Department of Defense contractors that developed "mission simulators" (AKA first-person shooters) for the Army
- A banking umbrella company
- An insurance company
- A credit card payments processor
The state university in the same town had a Computer Science degree and offered a Bachelor's of Science with three different tracks/specializations:
- Games Programming: Focused on learning how to write 3D game engines. You learned C++, OpenGL, a bit of DirectX, a lot of Client/Server stuff like writing your own protocols on top of IP and UDP, and so on.
- Systems Programming: Dig into multi-threaded programming, write parsers as a way of learning how programming languages work, and magically segue into COBOL, IBM HLASM, DB2's unique takes on SQL, etc.
- Web Programming: JavaScript, ASP.NET, Windows IIS, Oracle.
Guess what those four employers filtered every candidate on?
Either 5+ years prior work experience littered with every keyword on the job description or a degree. There was literally zero way for someone without prior experience to get a degree, and because this wasn't Big Tech City X, even with 5+ years you pulled $65,000 tops.
Basically, the whole life cycle worked like this:
1) Tempt new students with cheaper CS degree compared to nationally famous college two hours away.
2) Use CS degree to snowflake their skills into a perfect match for a job with local employers.
3) Continuously have local employers show up on campus and talk up how cheap the Cost of Living is in small military town. Show hand-wavey "$65,000 here is the same as making $200,000 in San Francisco!" Neglect to explain how Social Security and Pensions/401ks work.
4) Convince students to "just get a few years under your belt" then go to Big Tech City with actual work experience.
5) Further pigeon hole skills and provide zero continuous learning, training, certification, or other ways of expanding employee's skill set, making it hard for them to find jobs in Big Tech City.
6) Profit by never paying anyone more than $80,000 to write software.
7) Avoid employing demographic profiles that are less likely to have kids. Grow your employee culture around "setting down roots". Profit even more by having almost perfect retention if you lump all four major employers together and colluding to maintain low wages.
EDIT: Formatting