The STEM Crisis Is a Myth

[Mormolyce]

Getting something published in a decent journal is a pretty big deal, especially in pure mathematics as opposed to applied math. You're also probably correct that your education level is a liability if its anything past an undergrad degree while still not having something published. A publication with a bachelor's degree likely looks better than a master's degree and no publication.

You can get a degree in anything math related and still become an actuary. If you can pass the first two actuarial exams it probably wouldn't be difficult to find a job at all no matter what your degree is in. Pass all 5 preliminary exams and you'll probably be able to choose whatever job you want.

I had two (or was it three? I forget) publications. Applied maths also wouldn't have been much better, most people outside of mathematics don't even know the difference.

There are certainly things you can do with a maths degree (becoming an academic for one), but it's not really making your life much easier unless you have a very specific role in mind. I certainly wouldn't go around preaching "get a maths degree" to young aspiring students, like this weird "STEM" agenda does.

[GodlyBob]

I don't know why you think this isn't what historians do. Ultimately, the ability to scientifically test this just isn't going to be there when it comes to discerning things like Athenian history. By all means, be empirical where feasible, but the idea that history's a "drain on society" (that's seriously what the guy I initially responded to claimed) is appalling stupid and anti-intellectual.

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And then you need archaeologists and linguists to find physical evidence for historians to catalogue and interpret. Then if you want to share that with the public you need somebody to bridge the gap between academic and layman.

[Mormolyce]

In truth IT is another sector that will suffer from automation. Write a script to automate some function that would normally be taken care of? You just wrote someones job. When i was in college the data communications teacher told us that a good networked admin was a lazy one who would script and automate as much as he could get away with. At least in so far as repetitive every day stuff was concerned. It occured to me that was just automating my way out of a job.

I had a friend who was a database admin for kpmg. Had been their for 5 years. Well one day they up and closed down his department locally to run everything from a cloud. Its the snake eating its own tail.

Better tech increases effeciency by reducing labor cost. If you cant grow the company the only other way to report a profit is to become more effecient. You simple cannot take the foot off the gas pedal.

I completely agree that there are some departments (and this goes well beyond the IT field) that are inefficiently doing laborious tasks as their whole job, and they can be easily automated away. Those people don't have a bright future. But in my view business has a never ending need for the kind of people who can do that level of automation, and if you work with data... well data is an exponentially growing field.

[Cosmic Janitor]

I was in tech and I had reached the top end of what guys in my profession earn (not a lot) and whenever i wanted a raise they said they couldn't give me more without managerial responsibilities. This wen't on for some time and eventually i said fuck it and went to sales.

In sales they had no problems properly valuing my skill set and gave me a substantial raise. Funny my technical skills were more valued in sales than in actually doing the engineering.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Whenever I see what harm the retards in sales with their lack of technical expertise cost the company I can't help but shudder. Selling non-existing tech, selling customers the wrong kind of machinery, not getting what the customers need the machine for and the list goes on and on. Add to that the unwillingness to understand the product they are selling (it's not like we have a huge catalogue..). Sometimes I have to wonder how we still have customers in the first place.. too bad that the intersection of "knows tech" and "wants to deal with customers" is rather slim :/.

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In truth IT is another sector that will suffer from automation. Write a script to automate some function that would normally be taken care of? You just wrote someones job. When i was in college the data communications teacher told us that a good networked admin was a lazy one who would script and automate as much as he could get away with. At least in so far as repetitive every day stuff was concerned. It occured to me that was just automating my way out of a job.

From what I've seen from our IT dep. it looks more like they can't automate everything fast enough (often to the detriment of the user in need of help) to keep up with the growing demand of their services. The parts of IT that can be automated away are rather slim imho, though I guess it depends on the buisness and their previous efforts regarding IT. Large companies might have an easier time to get rid of some parts of their IT staff which are highly specialized by outsourcing them. For smaler companies that is often not an option since the processes are nowhere near that streamlined without being nickel and dimed to death for custom solutions.

[Glorious Leader]

That doesn't surprise me at all. Whenever I see what harm the retards in sales with their lack of technical expertise cost the company I can't help but shudder. Selling non-existing tech, selling customers the wrong kind of machinery, not getting what the customers need the machine for and the list goes on and on. Add to that the unwillingness to understand the product they are selling (it's not like we have a huge catalogue..). Sometimes I have to wonder how we still have customers in the first place.. too bad that the intersection of "knows tech" and "wants to deal with customers" is rather slim :/.

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From what I've seen from our IT dep. it looks more like they can't automate everything fast enough (often to the detriment of the user in need of help) to keep up with the growing demand of their services. The parts of IT that can be automated away are rather slim imho, though I guess it depends on the buisness and their previous efforts regarding IT. Large companies might have an easier time to get rid of some parts of their IT staff which are highly specialized by outsourcing them. For smaler companies that is often not an option since the processes are nowhere near that streamlined without being nickel and dimed to death for custom solutions.

Theirs actually quite a tremendous amount you can do with even just basic.scripting. The company i currently work for is a 3rd party collectiom agency for one of the major financials. Weve essentially automated 90% of the collection call. They run on automatic dialers, with customer interactions recorded automatically and mailers also sent out. The only part thats really left is.negotiation.

I would not say its a particularly large frim but its large enough to require an it dept. Even medium size enterprises end up benefiting from automation. Anything smaller you can pay some 3rd party dudes in india to take care of. Not every company necessarily needs to have its own in house IT dept. The cloud is a thing now. I mean it depends what are your needs.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Theirs actually quite a tremendous admit you can do with even just basic.scripting. The company i currently work for is a 3rd party collectiom agency for one of the major financials. Weve essentially automated 90% of the collection call. They run on automatic dialers, with customer interactions recorded automatically and mailers also sent out. The only part thats really left is.negotiation.

I would not say its a particularly large frim but its large enough to require an it dept. Even medium size enterprises end up benefiting from automation. Anything smaller you can pay some 3rd dudes in india to take care of. Not every company necessarily needs to have its own in house IT dept. The cloud is a thing now.

I guess there are still quite a few companies/service providers that completely missed the point of having things digitial in the first place.

[Glorious Leader]

I guess there are still quite a few companies/service providers that completely missed the point of having things digitial in the first place.

Like i said it depends on your business. Its cliched to say the future is in the cloud but i very much suspect thats where its going. Theirs only a handful of it jobs that i think will either have growth or at least some measure of security. App development, security, web development and thats really it. The day of network admin and local it dept are slowly dying out. I had another teacher, this guy taught ibm systems as/400 and he said when he first got in he had a beeper and it was constntly ringing. Not so much anymore.

The best advice I would give for anyone prepared to get into is a simole recognition that you should never expect job security. Always always be educating yourself or going for more trainimg. The certifications kinda go that way anyway.

[Kellhound]

They may have grown up with PCs existing, but they likely didn't grow up having them.

Home computers really hit the market in ~1977 and became common home items by the early-mid 1980s, which means people in their early 50s and younger grew up having them.

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At 46, I grew up with a commodore Vic 20, others had a C-64 or the Texas Instruments TI-994a. Very few besides the geeks touch the things, and 50% of my time was playing video games on them. So I would agree that it might be generous to say we grew up with them, in comparison to kids of the 90s and 2000s.

Im in my mid 40s, most of my friends had computers, most of us used them for school starting in Jr High (including the required programming class). Did we use them mostly for playing games? Sure, but then again I still do and thats that my kids mainly use theirs for (or social media or online shopping).

[starlord]

i dabbled in coding in school, i think that much like math it takes a certain kind of mind to really grasp & enjoy it.
more of an art than a science imo, in the sense one requires an innate talent to be extremely proficient.

[BiggestNoob]

i dabbled in coding in school, i think that much like math it takes a certain kind of mind to really grasp & enjoy it.
more of an art than a science imo, in the sense one requires an innate talent to be extremely proficient.

Hmm, I don't know that I'd agree. It requires an aptitude in that you need to be able to mentally handle abstraction, but I don't think it requires a great deal after that.

Sure, there are people who are exceptionally gifted (as with anything really) who just do amazing things with minimal learning and practice, but for most people if you can grasp the basics with enough practice and with the right habits (reading, learning, in a constant drive to educate yourself because it never ends) you'll be good enough to get a fairly decent job.

The problem I most often see in this field is people who don't understand how software works. They don't get the abstraction of the CPU, how instructions are being executed and how memory is being stored or manipulated, but because they're smart enough to do basic memorization and connect black boxes together to build things (think legos) they can actually do "something" if there's an answer on Stack Overflow or by trial and error. I'm not sure if it's an inherent incapability or if it's apathy, but these people should really find a new career because they make the job of recruiters and managers hell, and there are SO MANY of them.

Like i said it depends on your business. Its cliched to say the future is in the cloud but i very much suspect thats where its going. Theirs only a handful of it jobs that i think will either have growth or at least some measure of security. App development, security, web development and thats really it. The day of network admin and local it dept are slowly dying out. I had another teacher, this guy taught ibm systems as/400 and he said when he first got in he had a beeper and it was constntly ringing. Not so much anymore.

In the modern industry we have people who do that, but only because there aren't yet great and widely available solutions out of the box that make this easy. Once you get enough servers running and have enough different software packages running on them communicating in different ways, microservices perhaps, different databases, different caches and search indexing things, analytics applications, and different teams producing code with different environmental needs, you run into a big logistical hurdle.

DevOps in the sense that they're engineers who work on building and maintaining scalable and adaptive infrastructure are still quite valuable, and their job is to build systems that make the whole "IT admin on pager duty" less needed by automating away everything. At the biggest scale (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) a lot of this has been solved to a much greater degree than in smaller businesses, but these solutions haven't yet been exported in a way that's friendly or truly beneficial to smaller businesses. You have these clouds with ways to run applications and deploy/update them in their clouds, but a lot of the same problems still exist, it's more like you're running a virtual infrastructure with some higher level abstractions in their cloud, but you still care about all the low level details (which is sad).

There are quite a few niche areas that are still fairly strong and probably won't disappear, but yeah a huge variety of jobs that were automated away or which tooling has replaced have vanished. I think, though, anyone who is smart enough to be a proficient engineer is probably going to be just fine. To be proficient in this industry requires an ability to learn quickly and to have a strong grasp of fundamentals which makes pivoting to a new area fairly straightforward (I've noticed that layoffs tend to happen less in these types of workers and I think it's for this reason).

[starlord]

Hmm, I don't know that I'd agree. It requires an aptitude in that you need to be able to mentally handle abstraction, but I don't think it requires a great deal after that.

Sure, there are people who are exceptionally gifted (as with anything really) who just do amazing things with minimal learning and practice, but for most people if you can grasp the basics with enough practice and with the right habits (reading, learning, in a constant drive to educate yourself because it never ends) you'll be good enough to get a fairly decent job.

The problem I most often see in this field is people who don't understand how software works. They don't get the abstraction of the CPU, how instructions are being executed and how memory is being stored, but because they're smart enough to do basic memorization and connect black boxes together to build things (think legos) they can actually do "something" if there's an answer on Stack Overflow or by trial and error. I'm not sure if it's an inherent incapability or if it's apathy, but these people should really find a new career because they make the job of recruiters and managers hell, and there are SO MANY of them.

thats sort of what i mean, unless you are really into it its mind numbingly boring. like anyone can do basic math but you need the right mindset to be a really good accountant or investor.

[Mad_Murdock]

Im in my mid 40s, most of my friends had computers, most of us used them for school starting in Jr High (including the required programming class). Did we use them mostly for playing games? Sure, but then again I still do and thats that my kids mainly use theirs for (or social media or online shopping).

You must have been in a wealthy area. Computer class wasn't even mandatory in high school for us and it was so BASIC (pun intended) that it was not really worth taking. I still contend that saying we grew up with them, when most people barely touch them outside of video games, compared to even 2000 is being pretty generous. 2000 and above computers are used by everyone and it's a common component of the house, just like the TV, House phone, Cars. Computers in the 80s were hardly a commonly used component.

[Glorious Leader]

There are quite a few niche areas that are still fairly strong and probably won't disappear, but yeah a huge variety of jobs that were automated away or which tooling has replaced have vanished. I think, though, anyone who is smart enough to be a proficient engineer is probably going to be just fine. To be proficient in this industry requires an ability to learn quickly and to have a strong grasp of fundamentals which makes pivoting to a new area fairly straightforward (I've noticed that layoffs tend to happen less in these types of workers and I think it's for this reason).

App development isnt going anywhere, neither is security.

The proficient engineers are also the ones with the greatest toolset. One of the nicer things about cisco certification is that acquiring new certifications refreshes the expiry on your previous ones. It really encourages professionals to expand their skill sets. The people who wont be laid off are the ones who can continually expand their knowledge base.

I still think automation and cloud hosting solutions will be the way of the future. Theirs only so many ways you can keep growing a business, at some point it slows and if you need to keep reporting a profit then you need to look at cost cutting.

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If you want a job go to data analysis. Data science and finance go well in hand and you'll be making a good buck.

Theirs a reason MIT grads were being head hunted to write algorithims for wallstreet.

[Kellhound]

You must have been in a wealthy area. Computer class wasn't even mandatory in high school for us and it was so BASIC (pun intended) that it was not really worth taking. I still contend that saying we grew up with them, when most people barely touch them outside of video games, compared to even 2000 is being pretty generous. 2000 and above computers are used by everyone and it's a common component of the house, just like the TV, House phone, Cars. Computers in the 80s were hardly a commonly used component.

No, I did not live in a wealthy area, very much a middle class city. Most computers of today are used for no more useful activities than in the past, playing games has just seen social media and netflix added to the common uses. Hell, I used my computer in Jr High as much for school as my daughter uses hers in HS today.

[Mad_Murdock]

No, I did not live in a wealthy area, very much a middle class city. Most computers of today are used for no more useful activities than in the past, playing games has just seen social media and netflix added to the common uses. Hell, I used my computer in Jr High as much for school as my daughter uses hers in HS today.

And what exactly did you use your computer for? You weren't going on-line for research papers, you most likely weren't even writing your research papers on them and only a minority of people had printers at home (again, maybe your middle class area was a lot different). You weren't using it to help with math equations, no one was doing home spreadsheets or creating Presentation slides for class. Of course maybe you, like me, spent a lot of time on the computer, but we were more the exceptions than the rules. I'd argue that computers in the 80s were mostly a novelty item, just like VR is today. It's here, you can buy it and someone will say the kids of 2016-2020 grew up with VR. But I'll contend that it's generous application of what grew up with implies.

Maybe my interpretation of what "grew up with" is too rigid or narrow. But I think it implies a certain level of everyday\common use, If you went to a house today and they didn't have a Personal computer (not gaming console) that would be fairly odd. It wouldn't be odd at all to go to houses in the 80s that didn't have one, mainly because they had no real use or value for most people.

[Zelk]

Unemployed STEM > New Artists

Modern art is worthless rehashing.

Fuck me, you're not even joking are you? Your life must be entirely void of happiness.

[PC2]

Fuck me, you're not even joking are you? Your life must be entirely void of happiness.

Most modern art is not happiness it's just churning out nearly identical products based on what mass market data says will make the most money.

[Rennadrel]

Meanwhile trades jobs keep paying lower and lower wages as automation takes our work....

[Espe]

I read new non-fiction, but that's not art.

I've seen a lot of ignorant comments on this board, but this one takes the cake.

Bravo, champ!

[Zelk]

Most modern art is not happiness it's just churning out nearly identical products based on what mass market data says will make the most money.

so you're saying capitalism is at fault. Big change for you.