Where are the workers?

[jimbogumbo]

Sorry for the double. Wall Street bros work insane hours, and do make tons of cash. Same for young lawyers, with the hope of a similar financial upside (often more hope than reality). Tech jobs have good compensation, but with crazy long hours (see Elon's recent pronouncements). And for many reasons the sci side of much tech just doesn't have the allure to US students to even position themselves for jobs.

[Hegemony]

If you look at any CS/Math/Phys/CHM/Engr programs in the US there are simply not enough US students enrolled in them to fill the jobs which will be needed.This has been true for decades, and at both undergrad and grad levels. The jobs those students would be seeking are already well compensated. If wages rise much more the work will be done overseas even more than it is already.

And yet, according to an article from Business Insider from Sept. 9, 2019, Computer Science is no. 13 on the list of majors that have the highest number of graduates unemployed in their field. What accounts for this? Weak students going into to the field? Not enough jobs in the field for the level of graduates?

[Anselm]

If you look at any CS/Math/Phys/CHM/Engr programs in the US there are simply not enough US students enrolled in them to fill the jobs which will be needed.This has been true for decades, and at both undergrad and grad levels. The jobs those students would be seeking are already well compensated. If wages rise much more the work will be done overseas even more than it is already.

I am one of those people and after 800 applications I am still stuck at my current job.   I got 16 responses and 2 actual interviews.   They only hire new grads.  If you miss that opportunity then you will not get in the company without some inside connections.  If I am wrong then I challenge anyone here to apply to a Fortune 500 company through their career website and then report back what happens.   Entry level jobs ask for two years of experience.  When you ask them how to get the two years they will say internships but no one really does two whole years and the advertised internships require you to be an enrolled student.   The HR people who post on Linkedin openly admit they will not hire people like me for various BS reasons.   They will be bored.  They won't stick around.  They can't take orders from a young manager. 

Regarding a shortage of STEM students in the pipeline, the brightest people are going into finance for obvious reasons.   The entry level salaries that are posted for STEM jobs are not enough to live on in a large metro region.   I saw an ad for "Junior Mechanical Engineer" in Fremont, CA with a salary of $65,000.   The cheapest rent in that city is $2000 per month.  I tell young students to go into plumbing.

[jimbogumbo]

CS is a big field, with lots of layers. A coder is not the same as a product developer or a systems manager or a systems analyst. Our university could simply not hire tech folks as we couldn't pay what the local tech companies could, and they were always looking for people. I'll stand by my statement also due to this: many people are place bound. Anselm is correct about $65,000K in most of California, but in much of the Midwest and South you can start at roughly that salary and live really well.