Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US 407
Nerval's Lobster writes Millennial tech workers are entering the U.S. workforce at a comparable disadvantage to other tech workers throughout the industrialized world, according to study earlier this year from Educational Testing Services (PDF). How do U.S. millennials compare to their international peers, at least according to ETS? Those in the 90th percentile (i.e., the top-scoring) actually scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 studied countries; low-scoring U.S. millennials ranked last (along with Italy and England/Northern Ireland). While some experts have blamed the nation's education system for the ultimate lack of STEM jobs, other studies have suggested that the problem isn't in the classroom; a 2014 report from the U.S. Census Bureau suggested that many of the people who earned STEM degrees didn't actually go into careers requiring them. In any case, the U.S. is clearly wrestling with an issue; how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market?
Suck it Millenials (Score:5, Funny)
Makes me glad I'm one of the last born Gen X'ers.
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Makes me glad I'm one of the last-born boomers.
Re:Suck it Millenials (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes me glad I'm one of the leading edge Millennials, one of the ones that grew up with Windows 95/DOS and all the associated bugginess and user-unfriendliness of the applications of that era. We actually had to learn how our computers worked and how to really get in and fix things. These later edge Millennials that got iPhones in middle school and high school have utterly no idea how any of this stuff works.
For reasons I don't understand, the media continues to refer to the trailing edge Millennials as technology whiz kids who have grown up with technology and are "technologically savvy", but to my way of thinking they really know nothing about technology at all. It takes absolutely no skill to use some Apple store approved iPhone app with a super simple, refined UI. It did take skill to try to install and run old DOS games and get all those crazy, primitive drivers to install, work, and not have conflicts with each other. Those issues led to a curiosity about computers, which led to me learning programming, which led to a computer engineer degree and ultimately a good career in IT, but had I grown up with an iPhone I wonder if it would ever have happened.
Oh, and let's not forget leading edge Millennials are phenomenal typers too, because we grew up with Instant Messaging clients, not texting with our thumbs. Not a bad skill to have in IT.
-Born in late 1983.
Re:Suck it Millenials (Score:5, Insightful)
For reasons I don't understand, the media continues to refer to the trailing edge Millennials as technology whiz kids who have grown up with technology and are "technologically savvy", but to my way of thinking they really know nothing about technology at all.
That one is pretty simple: The media have no clue about technology at all and think being able to use a simple user-interface is actually is some way comparable to "mastering" and "controlling" a device. Of course, none of that is the case. Instead, there are just even less incentives to learn how technology actually works. All surface, no deeper understanding at all.
Re:Suck it Millenials (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly that. Its as if knowing how to use a steering wheel and pedals suddenly turns you into a vehicle engineering expert.
Re:Suck it Millenials (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm a millenial who works on mainframes you insensitive clod!
Re: Suck it Millenials (Score:4, Funny)
I'm a millenial who works on mainframes you insensitive clod!
I had to bootstrap a PDP-8 in the Science building during college to complete my introductory programming assignments. That meant physically toggling in the octal sequence to start the high speed paper tape reader.
Now I'm not sure who should get off whose lawn.
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Re:Suck it Millenials (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone else remember typing games into their computer from a magazine? The would provide the printed source code and you would type it in. I had an Atari 400 which had a membrane keyboard. So many terrible memories.
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Sigh. What a difference a few years make. I am a late gen x. And I would say the same thing but with DOS, and not having a hard disk drive and a CGA 4 color monitor.
By the time windows 95 came out, I have already been hooked on Linux.
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This. I am so glad my sons have now got into the backend of minecraft and are currently skirting around simple mods. They have made the connection between the code and the game on their own and have begun researching into it. They think it's just having fun but they're teaching themselves how it works, how to problem solve, researching skills, making efficiencies on repetative tasks, hell, they now have a reason to learn to type effectively and asked about keyboard shortcuts. At 7 my youngest can now copy a
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Not really. His spelling was pretty good and he started his sentences with capital letters.
Re: Suck it Millenials (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think I'm pissed?
I've paid the taxes that paid for Social Security for the Greatest Generation.
My taxes went towards the failures of the War on Poverty, to cleaning up our environment, to three economic bubbles and the collapses, towards wars, and the education of the most ungrateful generations ever.
I may or may not receive Social Security and Medicare, but I don't expect to retire anyways.
I didn't grow up on computers and technology. I spotted them, adopted them, and made a living from them, fr
32 Hour Work Week (Score:2)
It's not that hard to figure out.
4 jobs at 40 hours equals 5 jobs at 32 hours.
And each worker now has an extra 8 hours to learn stuff,
If they desire. Create more positions if you want people
To invest time. They will not do it for diminishing
Opportunity.
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That equation does not work at all, except in menial jobs that are not physically demanding.
And as an employer... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that hard to figure out.
4 jobs at 40 hours equals 5 jobs at 32 hours.
And as an employer, my per-employee loading costs go up by 20%.
Tell you what: Go to a single payer health care system, roll unemployment, disability, and retirement into a Basic Guaranteed Income program, and define away poverty because with a BGI, it doesn't exist, and I'll happily split up jobs into as many pieces as you want, down to 20 hours/week/worker, because it won't cost me extra to hire more people, as long as the same number of hours get worked.
Until then, thank your government unfunded mandates and offshoring for current unemployment levels (26%+, according to World Bank numbers, since DOL unemployment statistics only count people receiving unemployment insurance, and vastly underestimate the number of unemployed).
If you want to fix the offshoring problem, I can help with that, too, but you really need to abandon the TPP, modify NAFTA to eliminate the trans-shipment loophole, and eliminate MFN status for China (for starters; there's other things that will need to happen on top of that, but it's the minimum foundational bedrock necessary to move forward).
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Makes me glad I'm one of the last born Gen X'ers.
Yeah, we may not have H1B's either. But we do have the competitive advantage being over 40. We're a shoe-in to get hired!
introduce more STEM....? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's also about a career. Need more people who know stuff, not just people who pass a test and do the minimum necessary to graduate. Ie, learn the S, the T, the E, and especially the M. Not just the R, and the R, and the R.
We've been complaining about this since Socrates first did so: the younger generation is a bunch of lazy bums!
Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay us well (and give us raises as we gain experience so we don't have to job-hop to be paid market rates).
Treat us well (no more 70 hour weeks, no more rollout-on-weekends-with-no-comp-time, no more demand to fix bugs on our own time, no more keeping us in meetings all week then wondering why work didn't get done on time, etc).
Give us job security (no more you-are-useless-if-you-are-over-40).
Do that, or even some of that, and the workforce will swell with tech workers.
Re:Yep (Score:5, Informative)
Give us job security (no more you-are-useless-if-you-are-over-40).
Especially when you consider that study after study has shown that older programmers consistently outperform younger programmers. This has been shown to be true up to about age 70.
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Spot on, all this pursuit of youth is futile, i dont ever want to be that stupid again.
Re: Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but 38 year-olds don't want to work 90+ hours a week for the minimum amount of money that the company is willing to pay. Typically those 38 year-olds have thing like lives and families that these companies hate seeing in workers because it distracts them from working long grinding hours for little pay.
Those 25 year-olds are young, impressionable, and best of all cheap. They will do whatever you tell them because, "this is the way it is everywhere and if you don't like it, you are just not cut out for this profession and can be quickly replaced by someone who is."
Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay us well (and give us raises as we gain experience so we don't have to job-hop to be paid market rates).
Treat us well (no more 70 hour weeks, no more rollout-on-weekends-with-no-comp-time, no more demand to fix bugs on our own time, no more keeping us in meetings all week then wondering why work didn't get done on time, etc).
Give us job security (no more you-are-useless-if-you-are-over-40).
Do that, or even some of that, and the workforce will swell with tech workers.
Wow, these are all so true. I was at a company I really liked... really liked the people and my boss. I was the lead engineer on a team of 15, but was the second lowest paid guy. Everyone coming in got to negotiate, but I couldn't. Went to my bosses, they agreed I deserved the same wage, fought for it, but HR shot them down. I guess HR didn't think I'd leave or something. But I did. I have a young family of five to support, and I can't afford to be underpaid. At the end, the difference between my pay and the industry average was $30,000. I left and immediately ended up at the average. Now they have to replace me with someone who doesn't have eight years of experience with the company (and new people are always a risk), and they will have to pay the market rate I was asking for. And I actually wanted to stay and would have if they had just paid me what they WILL now have to pay the external hire. Why are idiot HR departments so short sited?
And yeah, the meeting thing is so true. Seriously, STOP the meetings. If I have five hours of meetings and three hours of emails being sent to me each day (many of which turn out to be FYIs that I didn't need to be copied on that waste my time), how can I get anything done? I truly believe the fix is agile for infrastructure: pick what you are doing for your two week sprint, and work solely on those items for two weeks. Instead of that though, most places give you an annual list of 15-40 projects that you work on simultaneously (impossible), and you have the overhead of having to go to status meetings and send constant emails about them every day/week, even though you really aren't working on most of them in a given week. Such a waste... it's like a computer that has too many processes and spends all its CPU time doing context switching rather than actually processing meaningful work. I really think the ideal number of projects at a time would be about 3. If people were allowed to work on a small number at a time, knock them out, and then move to the next thing, I think they'd actually get more total projects done in a year than the "work on them all at once" method that seems way to common.
Sidenote: IMO, the "do them all at once" method is nothing more than a crutch for bad managers. They don't want to tell anyone their project is less important and needs to wait until mid-year to start, so they pretend they are going to start it right away. They don't care if having 20 active projects at a time bogs everything down in project overload and everything takes longer, just so long as they can make themselves look good because they are "servicing" it.
Re:Perhaps you are not entitled? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Pay us well" Meaning that Fair Market value shouldn't be based on what you can pay people in a third-world country where the cost of living is 1/8 what it is here.
"Treat us well". Not equally, Working everyone to death equally is like Communism - everyone equally poor.
"Give us job security". Once upon a time, your knowledge of the company and how it runs and how best to make it run was considered as important as actual technical skills and not something to be lightly discarded just because this quarter ran under than management wants to keep their bonuses up/prop up stock prices by laying off people en-masse.
Just because you have a cushy job where they still behave companies did pre-1980 doesn't mean that that's how the majority of today's corporations work. If they should happen to change - and companies do change - I worked at one where doing a good job was guarantee of employment until one day - literally one day - their new owners threw that policy away, dumped whole departments on the street. It was such a big cultural shift that the local news agencies reported on it.
And when that day comes, you'll find that all those job offers you've been getting aren't so shiny as they appeared.
Finally, one last bit of advice. Before you go quacking out that Nobody owes anyone a job, remember that nobody owes a company any business either. If you're going to go by third-world market rates and lay off the greedy locals, don't be surprised if the unemployed locals can no longer afford your products and the third-world potential customers don't want to pay first-world prices.
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Many smart potential or even fully educated STEM workers take one good hard look at the way STEM workers are treated and compensated and go somewhere else. What is left is the not-smart ones and the ones that for some other reason have no alternatives.
Re:introduce more STEM....? (Score:5, Interesting)
The cognitive disconnect is amazing, isn't it? "Most STEM degree holders don't go into STEM jobs ... How do we get more STEM workers into the market?" You have a market oversupply, and you want to make it worse?
I keep explaining that we need to cut away the entire college education system from the Government's hands. Leave that to the market; leave it to businesses to say, "Fuck! We are paralyzed, because we have to pay $250,000 for a professional, and need more than available to accomplish our business strategies!" Businesses should never be in this position, because their mode of growth gives them more-than-adequate warning about what positions they'll need filled; therefor, they should hire, train, and send to college cheap entrant employees, with preference for the lower-risk but similar-cost investment of hiring an available professional.
People don't believe in this because the mechanism is disconnected. By giving out the ability to go to college on the public dime or on indelible loans, you are enforcing the responsibility onto every individual to educate himself and prepare for the workforce. This means individuals have to make complex market analysis across the whole body of growth of industries and of the needs of those industries, whereas businesses only need to look at their operations and growth and work performance information and cross that with their prediction of their particular market to project the next few years of staffing needs. Projecting staffing needs for more than two years out is a normal business operation; is predicting the complex behavior of the job market a normal human operation?
By creating an institution to provide everyone a path to college education, we are demanding everyone get educated or be ignored by employers. The risks they must take are easily absorbed by the rich, and not so well absorbed by the middle class; the poor have the least ability to make these complex analysis and to handle the consequences of selecting a degree that leads to oversupplied markets with few employment opportunities and many prospective applicants. Meanwhile, the onus of building a workforce is moved off the businesses, who only need stretch out their hands and grasp at the abundant skilled labor, and throw back the pieces they don't like. All power is taken from the individual, and moved to hiring managers and directors and business executives.
The disconnect in this thinking is a powerful tool. It allows us to convince the masses that these education policies are good for them, are important social institutions, that we are helping them. Meanwhile, we not only create a terrible institution of disenfranchisement of the poor and the laborer in general; but also avoid addressing the problem of K-12 education by simply claiming there isn't *enough* education, and thus publicly praise ourselves for remedying the failing education system by sending more people to college when they would have more success in life if we abandoned them to the job market after high school and simply focused on giving them every advantage of education up until then.
I patently despise our current education system. I believe we can do much better; that we can, for little cost, adjust the education system to produce much better results in the general case, churning out an endless supply of geniuses through good educational technique. In theory, we should also be able to address specific challenges in poverty-stricken districts, not satisfying ourselves with a simple general improvement in the education of the poor, but instead acting to bring them even further up to meet with the educational success of the middle class by delivering that same education in a manner more effective for their situation. This would provide much greater academic advantages to our students than extending their state education through college, even if state-supported college education programs didn't have such negative impacts on the job economy.
College is too Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:College is too Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations! (Score:2)
College might not guarantee a job, but how much harder is it for those applying for jobs where a college degree is a prerequisite?
Congratulations!
You have just made the "A college degree is not a guarantee of competence, it is a union card substitute". argument. If you don't value your degree more than that, it says a lot about how much effort you put into actually learning from your courses, and it begs the question of why I should value your degree more than that, as well.
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College might not guarantee a job, but how much harder is it for those applying for jobs where a college degree is a prerequisite?
Congratulations!
You have just made the "A college degree is not a guarantee of competence, it is a union card substitute". argument. If you don't value your degree more than that, it says a lot about how much effort you put into actually learning from your courses, and it begs the question of why I should value your degree more than that, as well.
Actually, it's more of a signaling argument where a college degree indicates a willingness to put in effort and learn and thus will probably apply those characteristics in the job. It's not a perfect signal as there are plenty of educated derelicts and smart, talent people without a degree but as a first cut it is easy and thus used.
Re: College is too Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
How the fuck is he supposed to fill that wallet with anything if there are no jobs available, in any field? What, are you saying he should vote with the dollar bills that he doesn't fucking have?
Re: College is too Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
What the fuck? I've never met somebody who is as out-of-touch with reality as you are. Do you really think that starting a business costs nothing? Even very small businesses have significant startup costs these days, comparable to several years of college education. Seriously, I can't believe how fucking ignorant you are about reality. Your solution to the problem of somebody not having money for college is for them to take this money that they don't have and to spend several times that amount starting a business. What the fuck!
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Hi, I'm not the original poster etc.
Your right about the overhead of starting a business, it can be crushing.
That's not to say though that there aren't ways around that, I run darrencaldwellwebdesign.ca (shameless plug I know) but I built that server, I setup all the software on it, got it onto the internet and wrote all the code for it server and client side.
It's only real overhead is the 30 dollars for domain name (yearly), and the 4$ per month for a static IP address along with the 450$ for the computer
Re: College is too Expensive (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe for a bricks and mortar business, but online businesses have nearly no start up cost at all. All you need is a cheap web host and you're set. Learn to code and maintain it by yourself to keep start-up costs low. Once you have made a profit, then you can buy specialised hardware or additional things for your business.
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> but online businesses have nearly no start up cost at all.
Oh, my. Advertising, wages, travel, laptops or computers, and public facing online services rack up very quickly. Even without travel, most online startups _fail_. That day of "once you have made a profit" is fairly rare for startups.
Without specialized tools or services, which may be all software but cost time and money to develop, most startups have nothing to distinguish them from dozens of other startups with the same "paradigm shift" bright
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finger pointing (Score:2)
I think at this point everyone agrees that the STEM job market in the US is screwed up. Right now we're all pointing fingers at eachother blaming millennials, gen X, baby boomers, immigrants, business owners, politicians, civil servants, the whole government, high schools, colleges, testing services, misogynists, political correctness, investors, people who don't invest, Obama, Bush...
Anyone have any ideas on what to do about it? How about we work on that now.
Re:finger pointing (Score:5, Interesting)
copy finland
whatever they do, we do the same
#1 thing we should copy from finland's universities:
https://www.jyu.fi/en/academic... [www.jyu.fi]
Doctoral sword
The sword used at the Degree Ceremony is independent Finland's official civilian sword. The sword comes with a scabbard and a black or golden holder. The University's golden symbol will also be on the sword. Other traditional swords can also be used if available.
The sword is traditionally carried on the left side. Men carry the sword in its holder. A loop for the holder can be sewn into pants and the sword will stay firmly in place because there is a catch on the scabbard. Female doctors should also have a sword. In most cases the sword cannot be directly attached to dresses, because the material is not strong enough. A belt with a loop can be used, or the sword can be attached to a skirt at the waist by taking out some of the seam, or the fastening can be hidden under the top of a two-piece outfit. There is also the option of carrying the sword in hand.
The person's name, the date of their dissertation and the date of the Degree Ceremony is etched on the sword. One does not need to attend a Degree Ceremony to purchase a sword.
To buy the doctoral sword the Promovendi can join the collective order. Additional information on the collective order will be sent later for all registered Doctors.
i mean, that's just awesome. if we gave our graduates swords, i think they would try harder, right?
all joking aside, we really should just copy finland
fuck japan, it's a closed society and a stifling culture that doesn't have anything to translate to our own
but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale
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but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale
sounds like a deal. we get a good system AND we avoid paying full retail.
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unfortunately, republican state houses across the country are cutting down on funding state universities
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02... [nytimes.com]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
etc., etc.
so tuition will increase and quality will decrease, and those who are bright but come from limited backgrounds will wind up working in retail or fast food instead of becoming good STEM candidates
of course, this makes sense, as poor and stupid is the republican base
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all joking aside, we really should just copy finland
fuck japan, it's a closed society and a stifling culture that doesn't have anything to translate to our own
but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale
Finland is in the process of revamping their education system. They are tired of being #1 in the world, and everyone comparing themselves to them, so they have decided to fuck it up.
Re:finger pointing (Score:4, Interesting)
Teaching has become female-only profession and only people who are accepted to study to be teachers here are straight-a geeks(the bad kind) who lack the proper authority in front of the class.
There is/were large number of good class teachers in the post-war generations, but those people are now/soon retiring.
The trade union of teachers, AKAVA is well known joke in the union field and isn't strong enough to actually do anything that matters to improve things.
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Finland is in the process of revamping their education system. They are tired of being #1 in the world, and everyone comparing themselves to them, so they have decided to fuck it up.
Finland is #1 at being average. We have full literacy at the expense of holding down anyone smarter than the average. The universities are bureaucratical sausage factories designed to produce set amounts of average masters and doctors. We simply don't have/tolerate the kind of variety and diversity that you see around the world.
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I do not think it can be fixed. The western world managed to acquire technological leadership, and then its governments found out that they do not actually like their citizens to be educated and smart. Hence they have been sabotaging that systematically for a long time and the fruits of that sabotage are obvious now. This decline will continue for a long, long time.
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Stop hiring Indians and Chinese.
Ridiculous. Actually, part of the problem is that due to wealth transfers (Welfare and tax credits), government handouts to unions (especially federal union jobs), etc, have made it so that engineering take home pay gets held down through taxes, and some other jobs get paid more than they should. It's not that I want lower wages for some people, but, when the disparity in earnings gets artificially reduced, a lot of people may not be willing to take the much harder STEM career path for only marginally highe
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We really have not seen much innovation in the past 10 years. If you think about it, what is really new and improved from this time in 2005?
You have a really narrow view of STEM.
1. DNA sequencing is several orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, as are ways of making use of the data for diagnostics and theragnostics. Moore's law might be better applied to bioinformatics than to transistors these days.
2. Cancer therapeutics that use the immune system to selectively attack cancer cells instead of stuff that is just somewhat more toxic to cancer cells than the rest of your body.
3. Just announced this week: Some of the first promising candidate d
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3: Solar. There is so much Silicon Valley can do to improve energy efficiency of the grid, houses, PV panels, charge controllers, inverters, and every aspect of energy gathering.
I will *HAPPILY* work on an solar power project!
As long as it get launched into space, where the sunlight is 24/7. Otherwise, come up with a storage system for the 75% of the time ground-based solar won't work as a sole source, or piss off.
Wrong. It also says: (Score:2)
Wrong. It also says:
"The comparative data on skills attainment and parental education highlight another salient point:
The scores of U.S. millennials do not compare favorably with those of their international peers who
have parents with similar levels of educational attainment. In fact, across all three levels of parental
educational attainment, there is no country where millennials score lower than those in the United
States.48 Additionally, while a relatively large percentage of our millennials (and the pare
No kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: No kidding (Score:2, Insightful)
The ony problem with your post is your username. We've destroyed the liberal education and then wonder why we have useless tech schools instead of a proper university education.
Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
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But! (Score:2, Funny)
God I wish we'd stop hearing this myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
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What I'm hearing, for example from Carol Dweck, [stanford.edu] is that self-esteem is not a noble goal by itself. Certainly, we shouldn't be trashing people's efforts, as Microsoft discovered after they canceled Courier; [cnet.com] at least, I'm guessing that's the client who called Dan Ariely (video) [ted.com] for help. (Text summary.) [ted.com] In general, good work is intrinsically rewarding. I'm sick of this culture of fake cheerfulness.
Sensative much? (Score:3)
Sarcasm is not "dumping" on someone. I'll go further and point out that correcting someone is not "dumping" on them, punishing people for violating the rules is not "dumping" on them, offering advice is not "dumping" on them. Study after study has shown that children require enforced rules and guidelines for proper development, as well as positive reinforcement.
Yeah, I agree with you that we should not be a culture of disposable humans. At the same time if you never see any humor in anything life has to
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Study after study has shown how fragile children's psychs are and how important positive reinforcement is.
The problem is that this "positive reinforcement" is mostly trying to not get people hurt and inflating their ego.
You get people that have never been hurt in their lives, and who knows what happens when something meaningful happens, like the death of some parent, or being rejected by others.
Life is hard, and "positive reinforcement" is a way to create a fake sense of security.
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Incompetence and only be fully developed and utilized to its maximum potential if it is paired with arrogance, as otherwise people could utilize undesirable insights into their own skills (or rather lack thereof) as motivator to increase their competence level. One of the tried-and-true ways of establishing arrogance is fostering high self-esteem that is not founded in accomplishments, but in the believe that everybody can and should regard themselves as highly valuable, regardless of whether they have actu
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I have it on pretty good authority... (Score:2)
The white upper middle class males who moved back in with their parents after college and who prefer video games to traditional sports, those are the ones who really make this country work!
I have it on pretty good authority... you *will* need algebra later in life, and you *won't* need football later in life.
Imbalanced Incentives (Score:3)
If the STEM wages in other countries are almost double relative to the local standard of living, then typically those people would put more effort into it. Capitalism incentives 101.
The threat of being outsourced here also tends to make one treat hands-on technical work as a mere stepping-stone job, hoping to move into management, which pays more relative to heads-down tech work. If it's a temp job, obviously one will tend to put less effort into fine-tuning their skills.
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Yip. I've also been tossed around by the boom and bust cycle. California was highly glutted after the dot-com bust and I tried to move out of state, which was very difficult due to family issues. My legacy tool skills are the only thing that saved me, being that all those web newbies had no pre-web experience.
I suspect that something more programmer-friendly will soon replace the bloated layer-heavy HTML/CSS/Lamp stack et al currently used; and techies will fired en mass. "Remote" GUI standards are ripe fo
Why do we need more of the damned things... (Score:2, Informative)
... when we're having increasing problems finding jobs for what we currently have. ACS reports chemist employment has been dropping for decades, all sorts of people 35-40+ have issues finding work, lots of talk about a jobless recovery. The last thing we need are more disposable workers tossed into the marketplace without any concern for long-term employability.
If this trend continues, we're going to be awash in smart financial or medical people. Y'know, stuff that's harder to outsource so easily. We'll
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I understand why medical is hard to outsource, but I would think finance would be incredibly easy. I'm pretty sure Excel and calculators are plentiful in other countries.
Pay more (Score:2)
how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market?
The answer to this is simple: Pay more to qualified STEM people.
But of course, we all know that the real questions is actually:
how can it introduce more (qualified) STEM people into the market while keeping the price just as low?
That, would require artificially flooding the market with oversupply, but luring qualified people with false promises through continuous propaganda of "STEM shortages".
Invest in workers (Score:4, Insightful)
Another problem is that very few companies want to invest in their workers. They want somebody who already has the skills that they need, and will be performing the same role for the extent of their employment there. No wonder there is so much job hopping among the people who are qualified. Never mind that even qualified people take weeks or months to get up to speed in a project of any complexity. Everybody's asking for, "Hit the ground running."
My problem is that my last 15 years of education, work, and hobbies, they just sweep it away as "Not qualified." Heinlein's Specialization is for insects? [wikipedia.org] Doesn't exist as far as recruiters are concerned. You've been a network admin but haven't used OSPF? Fail. You've been a Clojure programmer but haven't used it for a commercial client? Fail. You've run a helpdesk for dozens of clients but haven't supported thousands of clients? Fail. Well, you recruiters fail, as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Invest in workers (Score:4, Insightful)
well (Score:2)
Um.... (Score:2)
Define "Qualified" (Score:2)
I am a largely self-taught millennial, and I have been experiencing the hardest time getting a technology job right now. Almost every job I apply to, when I do get a response, I get a form letter: "Blah blah blah, we're impressed by your skills and experience, but we're going to concentrate on other candidates who match our needs more closely right now. kthxbye." A few of the companies make me jump through hoops, the coding challenges, before sending me the same form letter. This is in Silicon Valley and Sa
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Why train employees when you hire the exact pre-trained skill set you need? Companies aren't hiring programmers or developers or designers, they're hiring 5+ years javascript, node.js, SASS, ruby on rails, .net, and/or whatever other buzzwords they think they need. Even the most outlandish and demanding job description will get a list of candidates, from which the company can select a proper "culture fit."
Networking matters more than paper qualifications now more than ever before - we're heading for a pos
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A millennial with a 5 digit UID? That would mean you started your account when you were, at most, ten years old and this site less than three years old. Something smells fishy.
Haha, yeah, I'm a bit ambivalent about whether I should classify myself as the youngest Gen Xer or the oldest Millenial. I was a teenager when I made this account. I'm also a third-generation computer user.
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Ugh. "Don't give up." As if I had a choice.
Your advice is evidence of your privilege. At the moment, between my part-time job, my tech-related volunteering, and my job applications, I don't have a whole lot of time to contribute to open-source projects. I've been avoiding buying gadgets because my part-time job doesn't pay enough to afford it, and also I don't have time. I like what I do, but my employer is non-profit and doesn't have a lot of respect in the technology industry, for good reason.
Those are al
Busy (Score:2)
I'm too busy supporting the baby boomers to give a shit about the millennials.
green card (Score:5, Insightful)
Two cents (Score:3)
Maybe it's the religion interfering with real education and being indoctrinated to accept unsupported claims (like one that a god exists) leaves you less capable of doing evidence based work.
My 'old man' is coming out (Score:3)
Seriously... have you worked with US millennials lately? I'm in a senior position where I work and regularly get to interact with new hires that have some form of computer science or MIS degree and are unable to comprehend simple sql or even how to use excel. Sure they got great grades and can kinda sorta regurgitate the facts they had to memorize (and mostly forget) for their classes but God forbid you ask them to do any sort of independent thinking. On top of it almost without exception they always think they are the smartest people in the room.
Are you telling me...? (Score:3)
Perhaps the smartest decided a business degree was simpler, paid more, and had less fail written all over it. I'm certainly not encouraging my kids to get a "I'm a manager degree. " Yea they could probably make more short term in IT for a few years, but having lived through several booms and busts, I'm looking back at the promises and lies. It would have been much easier and cost effective to just take the first management position and work into retirement at the hospital or bank or retail corp or manufacturer or any of the other places I worked at in the past in IT.
Ohhh, what a mystery.... (Score:3)
Somehow, the actual answer, commonly referred to as, "money" never seems to come up.
If STEM salaries are low COMPARED TO THE LOCAL COST OF LIVING, then there will be few interested in STEM careers. A smart person can become an engineer (relatively low pay) or a doctor (relatively high pay) or a Wall Street trader (relatively high pay). Hell, even Dentists and Optometrists can sometimes beat a starting engineer's salary.
Maybe, just maybe, capitalism is working and people are choosing to put their efforts where the money is. Maybe, just maybe, people are choosing NOT to compete with workers in India making $10 an hour when they could be choosing a career that generates $100 an hour.
Maybe, just maybe, the fucking morons who keep writing these hand-wringing articles should learn to see the the obvious thing in front of their noses.
Indeed (Score:3)
Sycophancy. It's much more fun to botch a project with unqualified offshore people who say "we'll work harder next time" instead of with qualified people who say "define the damn business requirements and stick to them if you want us to be done on time." It's hard to tell a qualified techie from a guy off the street with acronyms on his/her CV.
Low salaries. Companies are willing to spend 60 days training and 3 months of work to fail a project offshore that can be done onshore
Problem isn't STEM, but statistics (Score:3)
The problem is not that US STEM students are falling behind. The problem is in who gets tested. In many, many countries, only those students who show an aptitude for a STEM field get educated for that field, while many others end up getting trade skills. So, the top 10% of the US scores tend to single out the cream of the crop, in general, while the top 10% of others is the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop.
It would be similar to only using people in the comparison in the US who scored 32 or above on the ACT when comparing with other countries. But in the US, anybody who can pay (or borrow) can go to college, so the testing is using different types of populations which skews the statistics.
To be meaningful, statistics need to have the same base for comparison. You would think they would teach that in a STEM curriculum.
They take things for granted (Score:3)
That is just my experience with the majority of younger software engineers I have worked with over the last 5 years. And it's not to say they can't learn, many of them listened to us old guys over a beer (I'm 34 haha), study up and adjust their approach. It's just kinda sad that they didn't have any interest in that stuff until they were forced to learn about it on the job. To me, hardware is the most interesting part of computing.
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That's sort of like proclaiming you want to be a mathematician and being put off by Calculus.
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Not at all. Programming is just a tiny portion of game creation, especially over the last two decades with affordable engines. A better analogy: It is like saying you want to own a bakery but are put off by organic chemistry.
I'm actually a professional videogame programmer, so I'm aware of the various disciplines involved. My point was this: if you're taking a C++ class, you're typically choosing the programming route (a CS degree), not one of the many other disciplines (designers, modellers, animators, texture artists, concept artists, writers, audio engineers, production, etc).
The implication of that post seemed to be that "I wanna make games" = "not serious", and therefore less likely to learn a "serious" language like C++.
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No, he's right. The "I wanna make games" crowd is usually not very serious. The "I make games" crowd is where the serious skill is at. But only a tiny, tiny subset of the "I wanna make games" crowd is actually serious enough to make it to the "I m
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My point was this: if you're taking a C++ class, you're typically choosing the programming route (a CS degree), not one of the many other disciplines (designers, modellers, animators, texture artists, concept artists, writers, audio engineers, production, etc).
Sadly, You can no longer take a C++ class at most universities in the United States. You can take a "Databases using C++", and be expected to learn C++ on your own, but of course, that's much more likely to be "Databases using Java" these days.
The ABET standards first changed in 1985 to discourage teaching of programming languages in classes which count towards a CS degree, and again in 1994, and again in 2006.
http://www.abet.org/DisplayTem... [abet.org]
Currently, ABET accreditation is "Outcome Based", a criterion wh
Contradicting yourself? (Score:2)
They used to teach them C/C++. Pointers and memory management would filter the serious people from the "I wanna make games" crowd.
Games are one of the last bastions of C/C++ and raw memory management, so what are you going on about? =)
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"what's the difference between reference counting and garbage collection".
I know enough to answer that question, but I also know enough to understand that it is not an important thing to know. 99% of programmers do not need to know the difference, and the 1% that do, can learn it when it comes up.
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Actually no, several studies have shown that money isn't the primary driver. Instead, once the cash level hits a certain point (basically, comfortable living), how much people enjoy the job dominates salary increases.
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What if you broke out United States statistics by race? I wonder what you'd find.
The Fine ETS Study [ets.org] discusses that starting at page 37.
Re:US tech jobs are not for US workers (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a good point, but H1Bs are slave labor because it gives the employer power to kick an employee not just out of the company but out of the country. It's tough for locals to compete in that market.