Replies

“... Freepers … have no clue how hard it is to get a STEM degree. If salaries for STEM employment go up then more Americans with the aptitude will major in STEM.... nobody that majors in STEM is lazy...” [central_va, post 26]

central_va has unscrambled half of it.

But most of the forum seems to be laboring under the misconception that merely upping salaries will attract more qualified people. A central point of dogma for economists, but it’s not true in every place and every time.

STEM is much more difficult than most can bear to admit. I learned this attending a federal service academy in the early 1970s; many classmates attempted to major in engineering, chemistry, physics, math, or (then newly-created) computer science, but were unable to cope. No matter how hard they worked, some simply did not have the smarts. Many flunked out, but many changed their major to something less demanding.

By dumb luck, my time on active duty (which stretched to almost 25 years) coincided with the computer revolution, from punched paper tape, through central mainframes accessed through remote terminals, through floppy-disk desktops, through local nets, to the first phase of the dot-com bubble. Every device imaginable (and some that weren’t) received its very own microchip or CPU, and all of them had to have programming installed.

All of it led to the explosion of jobs in programming, coding, and various related fields - especially in what was previously termed “electrical engineering” (very loosely).

Specialization became unavoidable: there was simply too much intellectual material for one person to absorb. No longer could any single individual design a software package and program it; they could not even gather in the major subprograms necessary, then hold them in their personal imagination all at one time.

By the early 1980s, firms building software-controlled devices had to create coding teams to cope with the mounting complexity. These had to cooperate with other teams (power systems, antennas, materials and structural, environmental) to make sure all of it fit together and functioned. Yet more specialties were created: in systems engineering and systems integration. All of which were gleefully sneered at by the super-specialists at the cutting edge.

A premium was put on teamwork. More vexing still, each of the unrelated specialties had to communicate with each other: something they were incapable of to begin with. Worse yet, engineers and other tech types knew they are smarter than everyone else. Most are indifferent to interpersonal relations; they looked down on us lesser mortals (whom they worked for) and expected us to adjust to them - when they bothered to think about it at all. And they are parochial to a fault: the more specialized they become, the more disdain they develop for everybody else.

Management (and those of us in uniform who led these folks and guided their work) coped only partially. The massive uptake of science and engineering types of the early Reagan years did help a little, but those of us in mid-level leadership billets often found we had to perform extra duty, explaining to newly-commissioned Ensigns and 2Lts just why they were doing things.

Most of it dragged along, or flopped, because no one could really appreciate the proliferation in information systems, and the explosion in system complexity that derived directly from it. Maintenance, operation, and employment concepts had to be re-invented from the inside out. And senior leaders - who were shielded from the changes by the coterie of lackeys and eager aspirants that always cluster around high rankers - got a clue only by accident. They hadn’t gotten where they were by being tentative, nor open-minded. “Timeless truths” and “unchanging verities” were their thing. Rarely did any perceive that giant changes were going on, that they could not reverse.

Just a microcosm of the changes that have hit American industry and the economy over the past 50-odd years. Bear in mind that it went down before affirmative action, diversity, mandatory corporate-cultural sensitivity training, and devolution in higher ed really began to have an impact. None of those have done a thing to improve the smarts of the average STEM-hopeful college student.