Got a little meander-y, sorry about that.
I think I might just be exhausted by school and life more generally, but this all feels so surreal and useless. I’ve been pursuing a terminal degree in a STEM field for years now, almost done, and the job market is overwhelmingly bleak most days. I’m on the computation/data side of things, and I look at the listings out there and start to spiral. “You don’t want to go work for some FAANG company? Why not?” why do you? (The fat salary, but is that really worth it?)
I’ve got a textbook I was given during a library clean out, “Stochastic Processes” by John Lamperti. In the intro he says:
It is impossible for me these days to write or lecture about mathematics without ambivalence. It is obvious that in many nations, and most of all in my own, science and mathematics are all too often serving as tools for militarism and oppression… I believe that today it is a vital duty for the scientific community to struggle against such misuse of science, and to resist the demands – made in the name of “defense” or “security” – to develop ever more efficient means for killing and exploiting other human beings.
Even this attitude is basically absent these days. I guess the answer is to go teach, that would make my work feel sorta meaningful. But I don’t want to feel pressured to do research, I haven’t enjoyed it. I’m not sure what my question is, but do any of you all in STEM have ideas on how to make this all useful and not spend my life building weapons or working for “national security”? I’m almost thinking I’ll just get some neutral-ish analyst job and pursue stuff in my free time.
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Yes. Im watching wages drop in real time. Jobs that paid 90k for a warm body in 2019 want 5y exp for 70k now. Fed shit still pays but the checks not worth the remainder of my morals. Its dire out here
It feels like it’s fed shit all the way down.
Its a matter of degrees. Spreadsheet generators for megacorp B is less evil than surveillance for “adtech companies” is less evil than literal weapons companies. Ive only done the first, but ive given it enough thought.
Spreadsheet generators for megacorp B is less evil than surveillance for “adtech companies” is less evil than literal weapons companies
Thank you for this framing. Been beating myself up over doing pointless spreadsheet work for a corp XYZ and needed some perspective
Yes. And it has been for awhile.
The fact of the matter is that, epistemologically, the discreet subjects of science, technology, engineering and math have very little to do with each other. There is some overlap, but for example, there is as much epistemological overlap between engineering and math as engineering and anthropology.
However, because of corporate propaganda, pushed by people like the Clinton foundation and Bill Gates, they neglect the aspects of engineering that overlap with the liberal arts, to focus entirely on the aspects of engineering that overlap with math and science.
This leads to bad fucking engineers, and an overall underdeveloped understanding of what engineering is. Engineers who literally can’t do basic financial and media analysis. And the same can be said of people in the the other three departments as well.
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of half baked essays to be written about the dichotomization of the sciences from the arts and humanities. I think it leads to a lot of malformed thought processes and worldviews.
Engineers who literally can’t do basic financial and media analysis.
Lol, this one drives me nuts, because I love to talk about shows and movies with people (no one reads anymore) but even then it’s just the most surface-level vibes discussion. I guess my frustrations are just numerous, but I think the academy is much worse than I imagined it to be when I got here, and that’s been driving me crazy.
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of half baked essays to be written about the dichotomization of the sciences from the arts and humanities. I think it leads to a lot of malformed thought processes and worldviews.
sciences aren’t even equal. nothing against archaeology but stuff having to survive millennia and us having to find it is quite limiting compared to chemistry
Everything is cooked
In all seriousness though , what is happening to STEM seems to parallel what happened with IT jobs in the mid to late 2010s
I think this is definitely a “correction” period. There will be another surge once the new systems they’re attempting to build start failing (which is already happening, but they’re solving it by just throwing more tech debt at the problem).
I’m not so sure anymore 🥲
I recently saw a clip of ai slop on display at an airport (just utter shit with nonsensical letters and malformed faces brought to you by delta) and no one gave a fuck. Kinda viewed this as a warning for what’s to come in all industries
It’s still at the point where to get a decent one of those costs 10x more than having an in house team just crank one out. They only do it so they aren’t left out and get a chance to spend $100 to save $10 and punish their workforce.
AI is meant to be a more expensive scab that can be used to temporarily create surplus labor and exploit the following humanitarian crisis.
There is currently a fairly massive labor disciplinary action targeted at STEM (this also the c point of the last decades promoting stem - a larger reserve labor pool). The job market is bleak, comparable to many other industries that parts of STEM used to be exempt from.
It’s not guaranteed that this will continue, as the underlying productivity dynamics haven’t changed at all. There is just a concerted financial push and bubble with AI that is a massive distortion. How and when that resolves is will be the proximal forecast on STEM.
Though I think it’s also important to note that federal funding is down in STEM and that’s where a lot of basic research comes from so that means shrinking the number of jobs, i.e. increasing the reserve army of labor.
I don’t think STEM is a bad direction compared to others. They all suck under capitalism. STEM is just getting to experience some greater proletarianization whereas before it was a bit more professionalized and boutique (at all points still working class).
Yes and the best way to mount resistance against such disciplinary action is unionization. I’m surprised no other comment mentioned it. STEM and IT/coding were privileged enough long enough for people not to unionize. Both better working conditions and not working for war are demands that must be addressed collectively, not just by finding the right niche individually.
Increased reliance on centralized constant capital (like AI data centers) always creates incentive for labor to unionize. More constant capital lowers the former tradesperson turned more replaceable workers ability for individual bargain. They used to be able to threaten just packing up their tools (laptop) and going elsewhere. The tools of the trade now include more constant capital, which workers don’t own. With less ability for individual bargaining, collective bargaining needs to rise instead.
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STEM has been cooked for many decades, you’re just seeing it up close now since you’re in school
Even decades ago all the STEM jobs were downstream from military investments
You’d probably have to go back to post WWII as the last time where STEM jobs were mostly careers doing things bettering society
I’m on the computation/data side
I’m on the computation/data side
This sounds perfect for bioinformatics and GIS though. Probably the 2 data/coding fields most useful on average
I also graduated into a shit economy. I took a defense contractor job writing training simulators because my alternative was homelessness. After two years I was out.
I wrote about this before; we are in the Bust part of the cycle outlined in The STEM Crisis is a Myth (IEEE, 2013). Here’s some highlights, and remember all of this is from earlier than 2013.
And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.
Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.
We graduate three times the STEM workers than the number of open positions every year. And that doesn't count the number of existing STEM majors that don't work in STEM fields.
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.
Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.
Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
And just for the money shot, the IEEE calls out the whole industry.
What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”
That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”
Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists? Michael S. Teitelbaum … has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.”
“The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.”
Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.
Governments also push the STEM myth because an abundance of scientists and engineers is widely viewed as an important engine for innovation and also for national defense. And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as “taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities” by allowing them to expand their enrollments.
(emphasis obviously mine)
Science is completely neglected under capitalism, it was only ever funded really well last century in part to compete with the Soviet Union. It’s completely cooked, especially in the last 15 years, it’s just been going downhill.
It’s not neglected. What about race science? What about all the man made horrors beyond our comprehension used to kill people and destroy nature?
Learn to hack, learn to make them pay in your spare time.
As ‘hacking’ slowly becomes the domain of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on AI tokens to bruteforce shit, this will be an ever more exclusive enjoyment of the rich.
Lol, sure it will.
Lol, I don’t want it to, but sure. No need to be a sarcastic ass 'bout it.
The “dual use” world still pays, is normally still hiring, and is only half as soul crushing as working directly for the MIC. But the people are just as shitty.
There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism, and on the flipside there is no ethical production either. I’m not really sure what that means for culpability of individual action. These decisions only matter on a large-group scale.
Still, I’m in an adjacent tech space and I could never stomach working for the MIC. I make sure to apply for the jobs and then tell them to piss off a lot though. That’s a fun waste of their time.
I work in another space that does a lot of work for the public sector, the stuff that helps people. Which you’d think would feel nice, but I’ve learned that all the companies doing this actually spend about half the time just working out how to suck more money from the public fund with lies, lobbying and disinformation campaigns. So it’s still fucking shitty.
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I am continuing my STEM degree eventually in China. They’re the final frontier at this point and the only ones who fund research.
Academia fulfils a supporting role to capitalist society. But that’s with most fields nowadays.
There are STEM researchers who do good work on documenting the existing oppressive structures that science upholds. Look for indigenous researchers, they have expanded the sciences into new dimensions that most people are blind to. It’s really interesting, and you should use it to organize within your field.
The day I can afford to go back to school for a STEM degree, if that is even possible by then, I already expect I probably won’t get a job. I still want to get a degree because I want to develop myself as a human being, and education should ultimately be for this purpose. If there is anything I want to achieve before I die, it is this. I may try to be a professor, or start an electronics repair business, but no matter the outcome, my goal is to use my knowledge and skills for the revolution, whether that be during a hot class war or to teach the next generation of students after the revolution. I’m really dissatisfied with current education institutions, and how many classes are rushed and slopped together in the most ridiculously lazy and incompetent (or underfunded and overtaxed) ways possible. If I become a professor, my goal is to unionize or become the leader of the union, push for a revolutionary change to the curriculum, and give students the education they deserve and paid way too much for. I also want to push for boycotting industries/corporations involved in the military, surveillance, police state, and genocide, and push for research in fields to help fight against the numerous crises and improve the quality of life of workers.
The advancement of medical technology is an unequivocal good. Like we have more advanced prosthetics than ever, and those auto self dosing insulin things for diabetics are better than the finger pricking I grew up watching people do. Just two quick examples.
Surely there is massive data analysis happening in disease research, which the US government probably no longer does, meaning you’ll have to find a rare NGO job or work for a for-profit corporation.
Let’s see, what else has a lot of data and isn’t evil… Astronomy? Uh… What’s that running app that keeps leaking the position of American warships? There are plenty of cybersecurity applications I can think of that would protect people from prying governments and AI training; Signal is one quick example.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finding “neutral” work and using funds and free time of a tech salary to contribute and participate in your local orgs.
But also I think there’s a whole generation of Americans who got lied to by their parents that seeking a tech degree would be a deed to a consistently comfortable working life, because their parents are rubes who are so enamored with the past they grew up in that they forget they destroyed it.
