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I exited a traditional mechanical engineering role because 90% of my job was not engineering. I loved what I covered in undergrad, but most "engineering" jobs were 80% project management / paper shuffling / oversight, with a bit of engineering tacked on.

My last job was BA/QA work at an engineering software company, and it was by far the most "engineering" I'd done at any job. Even there, though, it was only about 1/3 of my responsibilities. I got good enough at the software stuff that I qualified for a 25% pay bump by moving industries. Year for year, my software experience pays more than my engineering experience.

I was a mechanical design engineer for a decade before switching to a software based role. The biggest thing to keep in mind is MechE is the paintbrush with the broadest stroke in engineering. You can work in a lot of different roles or industries. But I experience a lot of what you said but not to that extreme. I would say I did 50/50 fun stuff (engineering) vs boring stuff (project management and documentation).

I'm sure that the census and other researchers make a valiant attempt at distinguishing technical and scientific roles, but I don't think it's possible.

How can you determine that a something something service analyst at a random non "tech" company in Illinois is or isn't a programmer? If you don't identify an extremely technical position as a STEM job when it's not named in a particular way, then what are you counting?

Suppose someone does have an IT-related title, but they majored in biology and are working for a paper company in Pennsylvania in the HR department as a programmer. Should they be counted as using their degree? Are they?

What if you are counting employees of a large government organization and for obscure reasons, they call everybody who touches a computer an "IT Specialist"? Then you might be vastly overcounting.

People who have exactly the same title and work in the same small department, even, can differ wildly in their actual roles, too.

  > Extremely poor journalism... some shmuck journo...

This is a guest opinion column by a book author to promote a book. All of these facts are very visibly stated on the page, including the word OPINION (in all caps at the top of the page), the author's professional bio, and the title of the book being promoted.

It being an opinion doesn't excuse it for being half formed from half digested information.

The article is just paraphrasing what is reported on the census.gov page.

As such, we are being told (mislead) by an HN commenter that the Census Bureau is incapable of summarising their own data.

From census.gov:

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...

"Among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% reported a bachelor's degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation, according to the Census Bureau's 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.

This translates into less than a third (28%) of STEM-educated workers actually working in a STEM job.

The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling."

The graduates who did not major in science were more likely to end up in a STEM job. (The term "science" as used here, by me, excludes "computer science".)

"About half of workers who majored in engineering (52%) or computer, mathematics, and statistics majors (51%) worked in STEM."

Why don't more "S" grads work in "TEM" jobs.

Perhaps there are actually less "TEM" jobs than some folks believe.

Oh, if they're excluding PMs and tech leads because they're in management, this data makes perfect sense.

I looked at the census site and they're also including psychology majors, which is the most popular college major in America. Unsurprisingly, most of these folks don't go on to apply that major in scientific research. I think it's a pretty normal degree to get for social work, therapy, etc.

Seems that "STEM" has a very broad definition of "science".