Ask HN: Why do we push people into STEM?
YouTube, Reddit, everywhere i see constant non-stop STEM-career propaganda
why does everyone NEED to learn how to code and pass tech interviews?
why does everyone NEED to learn how to code and pass tech interviews?
Do tech firms want to push H1B Visas because they deeply care about the people of distant lands and genuinely can't find anybody in America to do the same job, or do they simply want access to more cheap and compliant labor to keep salaries low?
Is tech trying to push stuff like Women and Black Girls Can Code Too for the sake of being noble and kind to all, or are they just desperately trying to increase the size of the labor pool to reduce the leverage that their highly paid employees have?
I don't want to be elitist about this because I'd love to teach anybody who genuinely wanted to try and learn to code, but the reality is that you cannot teach everybody to think in abstract terms and actually learn to code and this effort is futile, harms real programmers, and just benefits big firms who want to try and pay less.
PS: And this push is sort of ironic because saying "Learn to Code" briefly became akin to a hate crime for a while. https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...
Why are we allowing immature engineers and product managers to drive decisions that impact millions if not billions?
That’s not good enough. That’s why making software a trade is what some engineers have been pushing for.
> Some here don't want more STEM professionals because it would increase supply and reduce the equilibrium price (wages).
And some don’t want to see an influx of low-quality engineers, because these decisions have major negative consequences.
The OP mentioned the push for more STEM workers, but the push for more STEM workers comes doesn’t equate to more CS degrees or STEM degreed workers.
It’s also about bootcamps and a broad questioning of why a college degree is needed at all.
The problem was multifold, and I think the crux of the situation. The people who entered the field didn't respect the field, and only aimed to undercut the next guy, causing wages to plummet in the span of 5 years.
Software doesn't need that much protection yet, but that slide happens way faster than you think it will. It's not about keeping people out; it's about educating those who come in to respect the industry they are entering. Many people are actively preventing people from learning about the proper value of their work.
As far as unions go, I always support the right of anybody to voluntarily organize, but unions are IMO a horrible fit for programming.
I hate how this sounds, but programmers have a creative job that's not relatively fungible like say a house painter who does a relatively standardized task. The best painter in the world is physically capable of what, painting about 2 or 3 times more square feet per hour than an average painter? I don't know exactly, but I doubt that the best painter in the world is say 100x more effective than an average one.
Programmers vary wildly in the value they produce. Good programmers who want to unionize are going to plant themselves near the lower tier of compensation when they easily provide 10x or 100x of the value that a less skilled programmer brings.
by organizing, further commodization of this very challenging and relatively modestly compensated profession can be prevented.
How exactly did you interpret this?
maybe 10% of devs have actually complicated jobs, the rest is just crud BS
we have access to good jobs and good salary because the educational system is crap, not because SWE is some kind of elite field unreachable to most people
it's outrageous that learning about software development is not an option starting from middle school, at this point it's more important than like half of what you learn in school
Your GP isn’t a genius, and they’re more often than not just reading the solution from webmd the same way you might look it up on stackoverflow.
I know this because my GP flat out told me this is the case.
It’s certainly a job that requires a lot of skill, knowledge and experience so as not to do harm, but that’s true of software engineering too.
Some exposure to some kind of programming is probably a good thing, but I think this it is very unlikely for the average person to learn to code without either thousands of years of evolution, genetic engineering of humanity, or changing the definition of coding.
The average person cannot build a consistent mental model of complex abstract concepts. Schools have done lots of tests to prospective CS students trying to see how they'd be as programmers. The point isn't to see if they got the right answer, the point was to see if they could merely come up with a consistent mental model of what abstract symbols mean, and many people can't do that.
Many doctors' jobs essentially become following checklists that insurance companies require. Many of them do not do much of anything other than push whatever pills and medications that Pharma salesman wine and dine them to automatically push. And unlike TV shows like House, most doctors do not do much investigation to try and diagnose ailments outside of trying the most common solution: the number of stories you can read about patients' pain not being taken seriously by doctors and having to read WebMD and try and diagnose themselves and then begging a physician to try and seriously consider their theory is breathtaking.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be one.
What would happen if they didn't have that legal protection? Look at Pharmacy; it used to be a great field until they started opening up Pharmacy schools everywhere and pumping out graduates nonstop.
The same thing is now happening with CS. We have no legal protection to limit our supply.
Luckily for us, most normal people don't find fulfillment in abstract problem solving but there's no reason why that can't change overtime.
most normal people don't find fulfillment at work
People sincerely want higher inclusion for good reasons.
People want to rescue people from the looming jaws of automation, etc. (Some walking alternatives to which you could say stormed the Capitol.)
Only bad programmers believe software scales with manpower. And it's those bad programmers who become hiring managers; the good programmers keep programming.
The drive to commoditize anybody seen as "worker" is frequently strong enough to overwhelm their perception of reality.
It's probably a bit of both, but I also firmly believe that DEI initiatives are largely supported from the top because this is the type of criticism that has historically led to unionization and labor organization efforts, and the software industry is trying very hard not push the workforce in that direction. Some of the early unions in the US were comprised of minorities that were excluded from the labor force by whites.[0]
I understand that labor organizing is still a fairly taboo topic, but it gave us things like the 40 hour workweek and the minimum wage. Those were not just handed out by the ownership class.
0: https://racial-justice.aflcio.org/blog/est-aliquid-se-ipsum-...
And some unions were comprised of whites who went out of their way to exclude minorities. It takes two to tango.
The underlying point still stands: a labor force that works together is vastly more powerful and therefore much more of a threat to the ownership class than a workforce that acts individually. It's in the best interests of executives to facilitate the conversations around DEI to avoid that anger spilling over into collective action, especially as sympathy in the labor movement continues to rise in America.
Most early unions were created for the exact opposite reason, to keep minorities from diluting the labor pool.
> Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks
How did they arrive at such a correlation? What explains such a correlation? Why are they tracking these metrics? If companies are tracking these metrics and found an actionable correlation, what does it say knowing that these corporations are very gung-ho about promoting DEI?
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Where I'm from doctors and lawyers as a career is what gets pushed. It's the meme of that place. Where you're from, or where you're from internet-wise has the "push people into STEM" meme. Here I mean meme as the cultural analogue of gene, not a funny joke/picture.
Now why does it get pushed? Because money can be made by both employers and employees. At different scales of course, employers want more supply so that costs can be driven down. Governments kind of sort of also push for STEM under the nebulous umbrella of preparedness for some conflict off in the distance. And people by now understand that lots of people that have gone into STEM have made a lot of money so they push it onto their kids. The biggest companies in the world by market cap are all tech. FAANGM.
Money. It's almost always the biggest reason. Not exclusively the only reason. And people will wax poetically about the other secondary/tertiary reasons. But really, come on, it's all about money in America.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: we who work in tech (specifically web-enabled commerce) have an interest in advancing the legitimacy and functionality of the internet, which is enabled by tech companies and those that create content for the purposes of teaching.
Is it? I have a friend who since retirement has worked full-time pushing STEM for girls. She's not chasing money either actually or vicariously. She wants girls to feel comfortable entering fields from which they have, for generations, been discouraged or actively dissuaded. Sometimes, it's just about being able to follow your preferred path in life.
Clearly, the way to get higher income for everyone is to get everyone a STEM degree. /s
This is a slightly more broad version of what I had growing up, where if you didn't know what you wanted to be as an adult, people would push you towards being a doctor, a lawyer, or an astronaut/fighter pilot. The intentions are good, but ignore any acknowledement of aptitude or desire/enjoyment. IMHO, it does makes sense to expose young people to lots of potential career options, and try to let them know what the income potential is (although, when they're 10+ years out, things can change a lot); let them figure out what they're good at and what's enjoyable, so they can try to find something that is good for them economically and psychologically.
My parents are both scientists. My brothers and I were exposed to science, and scientific thinking, from an early age, but also music, the arts, and so forth. I was interested in a lot of things, and ended up majoring in physics and math. Today I'm a physicist working for a tech company.
My parents seemed to have a pretty good careers and lifestyle. I was aware that there were potentially more lucrative occupations, but a person either has to be interested in something, or have superhuman discipline, to succeed in any field, and I didn't have the latter.
Part of the STEM push comes from people like me, who believe in good faith that developing good scientific and mathematical knowledge is a steady long term bet. The laws of physics will last you a career, and most pepole will always hate math enough to give you their math work. The science oriented company that I work for has just had a couple of its strongest years ever. I don't know that STEM propaganda has resulted in an actual bubble of people going into those fields.
There have always been some ominous signs on the horizon. The academic job market has always been overcrowded. The worst thing right now is the emergence of what I call the "sweatshop laboratory" business model, of running things like medical testing facilities 24/7 under plantation working conditions. (Okay, I exaggerate a bit).
It's not just about training people for STEM either, anything that gets people into the profession has money thrown at it. Another example: https://www.gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigra...
It pairs well with politicians' desires to sell a viable route into the middle class. It's easy to roll money into nonprofits for this type of thing and claim tax deductions, so it's win/win/win.
I wouldn't build a tech business out of entirely physicists, but there aren't that many physicists anyway.
This is not all that uncommon in businesses that are not "pure software" plays. If a product or service involves domain knowledge outside of programming, you always need to keep one or two people around who are experts in it, or people who are willing to actually develop that knowledge, which is often what physicists do. I am the keeper of "how it actually works" for a number of product lines.
What I don't know is how I fare alongside CS'ists on payday, because I simply don't know. Even within the software department, there are some people with non CS education.
I didn't start learning how to code until I was 27. Ideally, our education system would prepare children to have multiple careers as adults. Focusing on specific skills early on may make it hard for them to transition to something later on in life when those skills become obsolete. That's the idea behind a liberal arts education--focus on critical thinking, communication, and learning a broad set of topics and they will be prepared for anything.
People get upset when they look at someone two years out of a liberal arts school who hasn't found a career due to lack of hard skills and has $30K in student loans. That college grad is going to be in the workforce for 45 years though...
Use a fresh browser like Brave and start "do not track" on any app/browser as much as you can and you'll see a different perspective of the internet.
If you were someone interested in farming and looked at plenty of farming stuff online, you'd be bound to be pushed into learning how to farm and make passes at hay bales.
It's not propaganda, it's supply & demand for a market that is novel and really hot right now with a low barrier to entry compared to a decade previous. There's much more dollars being spent on advertisements to get you in the process of learning (i.e. bootcamps, courses, certificates, etc) in tech than there is in something like farming where it's way low tech.
A good communicator with excellent reading comprehension can work in many fields including creating their own companies, generating new revenue for companies via sales skills, and/or learning new trades more effectively than someone who lacks those skills. Focusing strictly on STEM skills is a quick way to a dead end career for some people who become overly specialized in a technological space that changes constantly. Hence, the trend in tech to undervalue experienced workers, because their experience is not appreciated or valued by STEM managers and executives.
Generally fads in education have to do with parents' anxieties. Not so long ago everyone wanted to be sure their kids got basic computer skills i.e. Microsoft Office, because they were anxious about having to learn this stuff at work.
IT has eliminated many entry-level and management jobs. That also means that understanding of tech is more vital to operate in the corporate environment.
As a math and science teacher I support education broader than STEM in part because the more connections we have to life on Earth the more connections we can make, and that increases our resilience and adaptability as things change.
Plus I'd argue that STEM, or certainly the top level of STEM, most definitely doesn't fit my description of cogs in the machine.
Also I'd love to know how you can found a company on communication skills ... HR or perhaps even legal, perhaps, but ...
coding interviews act as a mechanism that demotivates people to quit or switch companies. it also helps with driving cost of hiring down. engineers tend to engage in pissing contests of who is smarter, especially at FANG companies. this furthers their goals.
If someone with a completely irrelevant arts degree can waltz into management or sales or other customer-facing jobs, there is nothing about having a STEM education that would stop you from doing that too, if you wanted. An aptitude for coding and automation can make you a shoe-in for a plethora of office-based jobs that traditionally have no STEM requirements.
That's where the demand for STEM comes. Parents and careers advisors push STEM because it opens additional doors.
Mobility isn't just about being able to afford to not work, it's having options to go into, which STEM educations and experience provide.
Your theory about supply and demand is interesting, but all things said, somebody with a STEM education is still automatically better off than other formal educations.
It's about opportunity. STEM education providers more career opportunity. Sales and marketing are great examples of careers that STEM educations and technical experience enhance.
So its probably not so much propaganda. It's more like if you already know a trade and are interested in knowing more or working at a higher-order than what you already do, there's likely a STEM field for you for exactly that pursuit.
i.e.
- Construction worker? Mason? Civil engineer
- Electrician? Electircal engineer
- Mechanic? Mechanical engineering
- CNC Machine operator? Software engineering (if you're interested by the machine itself) or Industrial engineering (if you're interested by the workflow)
As a bonus, the STEM way of thinking is very useful for an honest societal debate.
So you're saying it's the only tool to understand the world?
> As a bonus, the STEM way of thinking is very useful for an honest societal debate.
What about philosophy, sociology, and liberal arts?
> What about philosophy, sociology, and liberal arts?
That 'way of thinking' originated in Philosophy (and much of what we call STEM today was originally termed Natural Philosophy), and Sociology does in fact fall into the 'Science' bucket.
As for the arts, I personally prefer the STEAM acronym in order to include it.
Philosophy, sociology, the liberal arts would never put person on the moon, do heart transplants, give us vaccines, the internet, computing devices, etc.
STEM is the foundation of all progress.
They teach calculus and SQL to undergraduate business students in universities. I'm not sure what the confusion is, programming is a useful skill in many diverse fields.
https://www.ucf.edu/online/engineering/news/comparing-stem-v...
The bigger the supply, the less you have to pay.
I criticized the Tokyo Olympics Doodle as being ridden with cliches of Otaku/Nerd culture tropes of videos games and anime. I worked at Google and all too familiar with the financial incentives and tainted behavior around the promotion process to declare projects "launch" and "land" despite public reception and user benefit. At the time, most Japanese people were opposed to the continuation of the Olympics. This is a society that avoids confrontation and dissonant. The olympics were not cause for celebration. It was something politicians wanted to proceed with, and people had to accept. Who was the intended audience for this Doodle? Westerners? It seemed like it was someone associated with the Google Doodle team who shilled and self-promoted the Doodle here on HN. I made this criticism and was downvoted without a substantive response. Point being, this is an example of Doodle being culturally oblivious.
A few weeks later, Google Doodle followed up with another Japanese related doodle. Like HA!, we'll show that uncultured guy how much we know about Japan. The Doodle featured Michiyo Tsujimura. Of course she is depicted in a lab coat. She was a scientist who discovered the health benefits of green tea. If you search her on YouTube, the results have less than a thousand views and all generated after the release the Doodle, seemingly by bots or other low quality content produce. I think she an obscure figure, and I'm curious if Japanese people care.
As part of my art history minor during university, I took a 5 credit class on Chado, Japanese tea ceremony. My professor was a caucasian guy who went to Japan and got a Masters Degree in tea ceremony. I guess it's a thing. This is very impressive for any non-Japanese person because a high-level of language proficiency is needed, but moreover Chado is a practice of the elite. Japan ranks 2nd lowest on the 35+ countries that took the TOEFL, people don't speak English here. Back to tea. Japan is historically a classist and hierarchical society. Only the nobility engaged in tea ceremony. Despite its rustic and subtle appearance, the Japanese tea rooms and straw tea huts are incredibly expensive. Per square footage, they would cost the same as a luxury apartment in NYC if not more. Imperfectly looking Japanese chawan tea bowls with the "Wabi Sabi" aesthetic can easily fetch $10,000. Same with other tea instruments. There is the Raku style of bowls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_ware, which technically can only be considered a true Raku bowl if it is made by a particular lineage of the Raku family in Kyoto. A sub class of Wabi Sabi is Kintsugi which is mending broken tea pottery sometimes with gold. For the purposes of simply drinking a beverage, this is all impractical. Tea ceremony is a symbol of the elite, in the same way Minimalism in the West is a privilege of the affluent. Warlords settled diplomatic matters in tea rooms. Museums and such in Japan put these cultural elements on display for the public, but historically a farmer would never see the inside of a tea room. Japan still retains elitist traits of its history, and tea is no different. The tea organizations and society are still relatively closed to the public, so for them to accept a foreigner into their ranks is mind blowing to me. The tea research estate in Kyoto literally has guys in suits and sunglasses as bodyguards.
I also spent a year backpacking Kyoto 996 where I went to every pilgrimage and historical site related to tea. All of this to say, I know about green tea and its culture. I don't think Japanese people give a damn about the health benefits of green tea. If they did, it's probably after the fact rationalization.
Japanese people drink green tea because its culture. If Japanese people cared about the health benefits of beverages, there wouldn't be such high consumption of alcohol and sake. Japan never really went into lockdown during the pandemic, but kept daily cases in the low hundreds, despite low vaccinations. By March 2021, Japan had less than 1% vaccination rate. There was a very clever policy: establishments aren't allowed to serve alcohol 8PM. With the surge in omicron, this policy has been re-instated for like the 5th time. This policy is enough to deter people from traveling and dining out by a visible magnitude.
Again, who are these Doodles for? Who cares about the health benefits of green tea?
Whole Foods and tea exporters probably care most about the health benefits of green tea. Zen buddhism, green tea and other such homeopathic remedies are the new wave conceptions Westerners have of the East. As an American, I used to this think Buddhism is this individualistic practice of self-discovery. One of the most popular schools of buddhism in Japan believes in heaven and is closer to monotheistic faiths like Christianity than to the Zen buddhism that Westerners think of. Then again, Japanese monks can get married and drink alcohol, so it's another uniquely Japanese thing.
Despite its attempts to be cosmopolitan, Google Doodle succumbs to Western Perceptions and Biases. There is the ideological views embedded in the obsession with woman in lab coats such as Michiyo Tsujimura. I have a dozen friends who majored in Feminist studies, ironically at "Woman's College" commonplace in Asia. They've explained that urging woman to careers in male-dominated fields is entry level feminism. Even though woman are overrepresented in creative fields, if they like it then they should be empowered to do so. If they want to be a house-maker, they should be empowered to do so. Woman should be empowered to do whatever they want. Does it seem right then to portray scientists/STEM as somehow more noble? If we wanted a female Japanese figure for a Doodle, why not someone like Rei Kawakubo? She's arguably the most cultural influential Japanese fashion design. And Japanese people care about their fashion. Her businesses are huge commercial successes, too, her label Commes Des Garcons raked in $280 million in sales in 2017.
Here are other examples of Google Doodle. They feature Westerners summiting Mt Everest, while the sherpas who buried the figure out of an avalanche, nurtured them back to health for the next 2 days, carried them to the top, was left invisible from the Doodle. When they featured Wanda Rutkiewicz, it was for her successful summit of Everest, rather than her accomplishment at K2. Everest is commercialized, you can't pay sherpas to risk K2. Even when Doodle highlights people, they miss the opportunities.
Seeing the biases and shallow wokeness of the Google Doodle team, I would resign immediately if I had to work with them ( I already quit Google ). I had dinner with the Google Arts & Culture team once. They were so likable and actually cultured. Strangely, the ones I met were temp contractors. These people deserve full time jobs. I just found that Google Arts and Culture already featured Rei Kawakubo: https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/rei-kawakubo. This is unsurprising, and reiterates my point that Google Arts & Culture is actually cultured. We can empower woman and enrich/educate the world about different cultures, without the narrow ideological views of the Doodle team. I would buy some Google stock if Google replaces the Doodle team with the Google Arts & Culture, but then again maybe the Doodle team is doing exactly what Google needs it to
I shudder to think what it reveals about me. I may be immune to Google's algorithms through my total abstinence, but it seems that there exists a non-random sequence of words that can capture my attention against my will.
This concerns me deeply.
Based on your other comment responding to OP, you've already assumed that STEM is the only tool to interpret the world and I responded that the liberal arts can also interpret the world.
I was never surprised, I am just giving context about Japanese tea culture. I have a condo in central London, thanks. I've had over a hundred Michelin star restaurants in the UK, I am very well of elitism. Have you never attended Central Saint Martins? Don't be a snob.
Google Doodle promoted an obscure female scientist because she discovered the health benefits of green tea.
I argued Japanese people care about the culture, not the health benefits.
If this is not for Japanese people, who is the Doodle for? Westerners? This is the first point about the Western bias. Beyond this, was it intended to educate the Western audience about the health benefits of green tea?
The lab coat fixation isn't specific to the Google Doodle team, nor to women (and possibly not to the West, but I lack data).
Did you know that (in the US and UK at least) members of various medical and medicine-adjacent professions are rated more highly (in terms of their perceived competence, professionalism, trustworthiness, etc.) by their customers/clients/patients if they wear a white lab coat? This applies to doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and veterinarians. In general, this effect is bolstered by wearing 'office' attire under the coat, except for surgeons who benefit more from wearing scrubs under the coat.
In the UK, there has been a move to shorter sleeves since full length sleeves have been implicated in spreading pathogens, but the public still prefers the full length sleeves and continues to rate doctors that wear them more highly even when they've been made aware of the the data on pathogens.
You can find all sorts of research on this with searches for 'lab coat survey' or 'white coat effect'.
This part I did not know.
This does bring up a good point as to whether Google itself believes in these cliches of STEM. Google's company cultural mentions "you can be serious without a suit" and management follows suit with jeans and a shirt. Of course, I don't think jeans and a shirt actually changes whether it is any less corporatey.
Meanwhile Google fired and silenced scientists such as Timnit Gebru.
Which is all to say Google doesn't even uphold the very ideals it is pitching to the masses.
Here is a recent study you may find interesting. It includes data and conclusions about gender bias as well as preferences about attire, and how they intersect:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...