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CS grads are the most likely to work in their field post-graduation. It's the other majors bringing STEM down, like biology.

Big surprise, the jobs that pay more attract more people than the jobs that pay less. My partner has a bio undergrad degree, she works in a field having nothing to do with it because she didn’t want to pursue masters/phd.

I worked with a guy in a data center who had a degree in geology. Computers paid better I guess, so he transitioned over.

Makes me question our decentralized assignation of studies. With communist centralized planning, the country makes a 5-year plan and students are assigned to the fields in demand, with the (high) risk that the central planner was wrong (because his pay doesn’t align with accurate planning). With decentralized capitalism, students decide for themselves, agree to be in debt for life if they’re wrong, attempt to collect information among a jungle of commercial bullshit from for-profit universities and marketing, so that they’re very often wrong as well, and choose a field of study at the junction between interesting, in demand (as perceived), and nice pictures on the uni brochure (principal criteria in my opinion).

Then they convert to IT anyway. I wonder whether our acceptance for this system isn’t just that we blame the student for having chosen wrong, relieving us from feeling that we’re responsible for their debt and horrific life conditions.

There may be some value from having those different backgrounds spread across various industries. If everyone in IT was a CS major, there would be one primary view on how things work and what CS can solve. Bringing in other points of view can lead to more interesting solutions and solving problems that may have otherwise gone unsolved.

The intersections of different disciplines are where a lot of innovation happens.

With communist central planning the world lost about as many people to starvation and murder by their own governments as were killed in WW2 in an actual enormous war. It might be worth letting people make their own decisions rather than forcing them to be what you want them to be.

Programming and related careers have to have the lowest entry as well. I know a lot more people who made the switch from other tertiary educated disciplines to IT than the other way around.

And there's no way the state will employ me to model and plan their dikes with my Cs degree.

> CS grads are the most likely to work in their field post-graduation. It's the other majors bringing STEM down, like biology.

Source? (Not challenging you. Curious to see how wide the range is across majors.)

It seems kind of obvious that if you explicitly exclude medicine jobs from STEM you end up with a low % of biology grads in STEM. My experience at University was that 80% of Biology as a program was doing it as pre-med.

The vast majority of biology majors do not end up becoming doctors. If you include all of healthcare then you're getting closer, but still not a majority.

My biology teachers in high school had all studied their subject to much higher levels than those of other subjects including doing research, they became teachers because there were no other jobs available.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23...

Thank you. For the curious: 49% of "computers, mathematics, and statistics" majors in STEM jobs (51% including STEM-related) versus 15% (46%) for "biological, agricultural, and environmental sciences" [1].

(Engineering is 49% (51%) while social sciences is 7% (11%).)

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23... Table 10

Here in European country my understanding is even if physics is hard Science job. There really isn't much demand for it. So either you got to teaching or computers. If not later, yeah you are doing something else...

Other areas can be similar.

That's my point, and why I quoted that part. The only bit of this that needed some kind of big training push was computer nerdery, and that, mostly for selling ads better. Putting that under the "STEM" umbrella gave that crap an association with, you know, things that actually matter, which made selling it easier and generally raised CS' prestige (in a PR-campaign sort of way).

I’m sorry but B2C startups are an anomaly in the overall history of IT. I agree it’s a sad turn of events but IT is way bigger. Banks, accounting, industry, military, maps, GPS, health, and infinite ways it helps humans. Selling ads was only a way to monetize, and Google is tanking like the Titanic since ChatGPT arrived (at least its 7 tanks are pierced, but the captain said to not evacuate), and most platforms even have a non-ads way to monetize, although the real price is high (Facebook $16, Netflix, Twitter, etc.).

It is very possible, with the post-covid changes, that platforms become paid-for and that there is much less of a focus on dark patterns in the future.

Google and Facebook pay well and employ a good number of software developers, but there are more types of software out there by the many other companies out there that don't involve selling ads. Sure, if you want to be depressing and toxic to the people around you, be reductive about it and oversimplify things, and disqualify the positives - software has done good things for the world, I'm sure you can think of some.

The top-comp tier skews toward harmful things, though, and if not for those bad things... would there be a shortage?

It doesn't take a majority of the market—not even close—seeing such huge price- and demand-distortion to mess things up really bad for the whole thing.

I must be really lucky. I work at a smaller engineering company, working for engineering clients, making software that analyses engineering data, and I get to use the languages and tools I want. I must be a unicorn at this point given how miserable most programmers seem to be.

Nope, you're not alone. I've spent most of my 30-year career writing embedded software for generally pretty interesting systems.

Miserable people love bitching about it.

I don't think hacker news is the best way to see how miserable most folks are.

A lot of (younger?) people in web development seem to forget that other software continues to be developed, much of it unglamorous and not consumer-oriented, but still interesting to work on.

I have a mechanical engineering degree and work as a software developer. I tried for a long time to find a company like this but they all seem to only want people who very narrowly fit a senior engineer role in either specialization, never someone who can do both.

>STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.

That couldn't be more false. The vast majority of STEM jobs do not pushing ads to people., only FAANGS and such which are a minority of the total STEM jobs.

> vast majority of STEM jobs do not pushing ads to people., only FAANGS and such which are a minority of the total STEM jobs

A majority of STEM jobs fall under a category with "computer" or "software" in it [1]. Unless a majority of those are in adtech, you are correct.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2013/acs/acs-23... Table 7

>t would appear a majority of STEM jobs fall under a category with "computer" or "software" in it

But not all STEM jobs. And not all software or IT jobs involve ad targeting for +400k/year.

And how bad would the "STEM shortage" (... but mostly just computer folks) be if, say, we outlawed dragnet-spying in the name of advertising, and the air went out of that market?

We might have more than enough "STEM" folks (but we actually mean programmers) to do everything except the stuff that we'd be better off not doing.

Most of them are driving and sustaining user engagement in online services of some kind. It's mostly a zero-sum game between many services competing for user time and attention.

Which mechanical engineers are doing that?

In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, probably. Not predominantly in the US.

No, I meant which mechanical engineers are, to quote you, "driving and sustaining user engagement in online services of some kind"? Those guys are also STEM grads/workers.

source? (I am challenging you :) ).

The quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is a fairly robust heuristic for determing what skillsets are valued today by Big Tech. I'm sure there are exceptions (there always are to every heuristic), but overall, probably a fair assumption.

>source? (I am challenging you :) ).

The entire jobs market. Look it up.

STEM jobs doesn't mean BigTech. Mechanical engineering is also STEM. So is chemical engineering, architecture, etc.

The thing is even though I went to school for EE, I found it weird that EE jobs demanded an incredibly wide and difficult to obtain skillset, including rudimentary CS knowledge, yet paid less than what I could sell said CS knowledge for.

We live in a society.

I saw getting my bachelor's in electrical engineering as similar to when an aspiring writer gets a degree in classics instead of English lit. I always knew I'd end up a software engineer, I just also knew I really wanted to know how things worked on the physical level and wouldn't be able to muster up the energy to touch enough differential equations and vector calculus to actually grok it for myself ever again after college.

Walking in with that mindset made the whole thing really enjoyable, actually. Recommended!

I kinda find this relatable - in HS, I did some summer work writing software (amateurishly doing what felt right instead of being taught how to do it properly - if only I'd have known), and went for EE, because I felt like "wait this cannot be it"

I chose EE cause it was harder (for me at least) and everyone would drop out into CS. Wound up doing software development, which I loved as a hobby and wanted to avoid ruining, so to speak.

Fast forward to today, I've ended up coming to the conclusion that the whole university system (much like the tech, banking & finance industry) subsidizes foreign nationals to the detriment of anyone who's native & pays taxes to support these institutions of "learning".

I didn't really see a straightforward way to do anything interesting with EE, which seems to entail going for a phd and navigating all the financial costs along with that.

It's the other way around, most of the big universities charge international students through the nose to subsidise domestic students.

Immigrants pay taxes. Maybe question your own biases.

I have no problem with immigration but having worked for many (supposedly critically important) organizations it's clear to me that the immigration system we have now that they depend on to staff their departments (which there are certainly native americans who could be doing those jobs) is just a scam for corporate profits that corrodes society. Additionally I've found immigrants themselves are often possibly even more racist than the average American. Couldn't believe it when I found out the racial disputes that had to be managed between foreign workers.

I would go back from software to EE in a heartbeat if the compensation was even remotely comparable

This is a huge source of emotional pain for me to be completely honest.

Why? Genuine question, what is the exciting differences in the day to day work for you?

Playing with electricity just feels more "real" in the sense that you're working directly with the constraints of the physical world. It's more tangible.

This is why I switched out of firmware after years of twiddling bits and routing circuits. Imagine working on difficult threading issues one minute then needing to deeply understand a circuit layout the other and getting paid less than entry level bootcamp python programmers. Oh yes, with constant threat of being sent to country_of_manufacture to work out manufacturing issues on a moments notice. It’s capitalisms way of saying “we don’t really want or need this right now.” I heard you loud and clear, American tech companies.

I started EE, switched to CS because it was easier.

I had this experience. Got a degree in physics and heard throughout my time about how awful this STEM shortage was. Went to graduate and couldn't get a job in my field at all (granted, I don't think I knew how to market myself nor was I well educated on how to do so). Ended up working towards a CS degree instead and getting a job in that field. All of my friend group in high school ended up with a diverse range of STEM degrees, but every one of us ended up in some sort of software work in the end.

I had a similar experience when I was doing physics in undergraduate as well. I read online and was often told that a physics degree opened a lot of doors - academia, government/industry research, engineering, high school teacher, software development. But during my senior year when applying for jobs, I was hard-pressed finding any place that was interested in me. I was fortunate enough to find a job as a laser engineer immediately after graduating, but the specific role was leading to a deadend career.

I self-studied from my alma mater's computer science program (fortunately, many of the resources were all online) and was able to pivot into a career in software development, but it was a colossal amount of work and energy. I may as well have just done the computer science degree originally. A lot of my peers who had studied physics/math also took the same route, transitioning into data science or software development.

I read "STEM shortage" as "shortage of excellent software developers". The STEM shortage was after my time in uni, but what jobs actually need physics? I studied physics, too, and as far as I could tell my options were get a Ph.D. and then postdoc until a professor died, become a quant (might require a Ph.D., since it was the math that was attractive), teach high school physics, or do software.

As it turned out, I ended up with a job doing high-level tech support at a company selling measurement equipment to engineers, so they wanted people with a science/engineering background. I think physics is great to study, but more like another poster said, like studying classics if you want to write literature.

I hate this stereotype on HN that we're all working in or adjacent to adtech. It's simply not accurate.

There were 4.4 million computer programmers in 2022.

Taking some extremely rough numbers: Google employs ~190k people worldwide. Meta another 86k worldwide. Microsoft 120k (in the US). Amazon 950k (in the US).

Even if we were to treat every single one of the employees I listed above as if they were a programmer living in the US (which is clearly ridiculous), we'd still only account for 1/3 of US programmers. Once you factor in the number of those employees outside the US and the number who do things other than programming (and even more those who work on, say, AWS), the number would become even smaller.

The vast majority of programmers do not and never have worked in ad tech. Working in ad tech is a choice that some people make, and yeah, it can pay even more money than a regular software job, but choosing one of the millions of other jobs available isn't exactly choosing poverty.

Huge market distortions can come from a small absolute proportion of the market. Say, those with spying-advertising money-spigots. Nothing I wrote contradicts what you've written—rather, and the phenomenon paying incredible wages to capture the top talent—so, those with both a lot to gain from improving labor supply—and the coincidence of having a whole lot of money to fund PR and lobbying pushes to get more grads in the pipeline for computer-stuff hiring, is concentrated largely among ad companies.

What I mean is the STEM push sold one thing, but it was largely about another thing, which was more workers to help sell ads slightly better. It was about that to the people pushing it, that is.

It's a nice theory, but do you have any evidence for it at all? STEM is a new acronym, but the same line has been being pushed ever since Sputnik. What makes you think that this new version is suddenly ad tech and not just a continuation of the same old national security concerns that it's been about for generations?

1) The timing of when the term and the push for more "STEM" education got a huge boost and became far more prominent (again—you're right that there was another freak-out over science and math education during the space race, fizzling out a bit when it became tied to the disastrous "New Math" approach). Having some insight into the education side of things, the sudden renewed vigor in that movement always struck me as suspicious.

2) The actual outcomes for STEM grads, as covered in this article. Looks like only one of the letters reaped large benefits from the push more more grads in those areas. Surely anyone could have looked at science, engineering, and (non-actually-CS) math and noticed that wages weren't acting like there was a major shortage, back in, say, the '00s and early '10s? But they were in programming. So now we've told a generation of kids there's a bright future in STEM (all four letters!) but it was kiiiinda a lie, and it kiiiinda wasn't hard to see it was a lie back when these kids were in grade school.

> STEM reality: we got you to confuse an ad for a search result 0.5% more often.

It wasn't that bad when we ended up working for large banks, but a lot of we are asked to do these days is plain evil and a disservice to humanity.

By comparison, what % of humanities majors are working in humanities-related jobs? That would seem to be an important comparator that is excluded.

Meh, you can make any industry look awful by picking the worst side effects.

Rocketry: We can now incinerate civilians 0.5 seconds faster than before.

Pharmaceutical: The stage-4 cancer patient will spend five more days in agony.

Electronics: Your new smartwatch can now render ads at 60 fps.

Chemistry: We added a dozen new forever chemicals to rainwater.

My suspicion, and what I'm getting at, is that the people selling "STEM education is vital!" were likely on the payroll of places that mostly just wanted to have more workers to sell ads better. They had the money to make the push for that, and the incentive to try to fatten their hiring pipeline, and dragging the other three letters along was just a sales tactic.

I don't mean that everyone working on computers works on ads, I mean that, for a lot of the people behind the STEM push in particular, my suspicion is that their main concern was in fact to be able to more-easily hire folks to sell ads slightly better. I think the form of the campaign was to make it look more noble.