Quote: (12-26-2014 07:59 PM)Cattle Rustler Wrote:
Stem degrees will be useless soon, let's not forget that the "lack of Americans in stem" is a lie by silicon Valley to bring in hordes of Indians and Chinese for pennies on the dollar compared to the salary of an American.
There was an oversupply of engineers during the late 90s and early 2000s, even during the 08 recession I saw an engineering (Mech, elec, plum) company go from 62 employees to just 24.
I'll write a more detailed post after I get home. Currently sitting on a sofa at an ikea showroom.
TL; DR Don't focus only on STEM category.
Pick field where
(1) Current incomes are high (Based on US Dept Labor, not brosurveys) and employment forecast to increase
(2) Where you have both a talent for and a liking for the field. I ended made a good living in the social sciences although in the healthcare sector of it.
I think STEM is to a degree an overgeneralization, even if you list the collage majors which would be an objective list. It's not as bad as "liberal" "conservative" and the other extremely vague things that people talk about thinking they are solid and real, but there are a lot of nuances.
I was a comp sci major for a couple years and got a job before I even graduated, but I didn't like programming.
I eventually got a doctorate in social sciences and made good money, not millionaire money, roughly comparable to programming.
I've made a living both for years each as a programmer and as a health care worker in the social sciences.
One reason I think STEM is an overgeneralization is that I don't know if it includes learning research methods, and how we know things.
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Comp Sci FORCES you to be objective because a program that works 99.7% of the time is a POS and will get you fired if you can't fix it.
Probably why few women become programmers. ;-)
As you learn to program, you realize fuzzy ideas and general thinking are pretty much useless, when debugging a loop in a program you have to reach a point w/~99.999% certainty that the controlling variable is going to be true or false, there is no in between.
In the process of learning how to think clearly and rigorously like that, you encounter how very false your feelings of confidence in what you know are.
Science, or pure logic like programming, is a humbling discipline.
NO programmer has existed who hasn't gotten frustrated and said "It SHOULD work!"
Then found his stupid error.
I remember an early day in the computer lab ( before personal computers were common) when I spent about six hours finding where I had a zero instead of the letter "O" when trying to debug a program.
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So comp sci taught me that pragmatic logic is a hard mistress.
But it was research methods in social sciences that taught me the critical difference between empirical research and rationalist ("common sense") assumptions.
In real research, where you set things up and watch for results ( the details are a subject for a life-long career) sometimes results are opposite common sense conclusions.
Research can lead to wrong conclusions, but by definition that is flawed research.
For instance, regarding low fat diets, to my knowledge the original research leading to decades of advice against eating saturated fats was done on rabbits in the 1950s. Of course, rabbits are naturally a vegetarian animal, and they couldn't handle saturated fats.
Now it seems is is more complicated-- but extensive research on a large cohort of Seventh Day Adventists (7DA), who are almost all non-smoking vegetarians, showed a longer lifespan for them than other Americans.
One of the most important variables with longer life-span in 7DAs was frequent nut consumption.
So training in the social sciences trained me to be much more precise about understanding "What are exactly is someone discussing and measuring?"
Is someone who specializes in statistics in the social sciences a STEM graduate?
A publishing liberal social sciences professor will generally know far more about applied statistics than a computer programmer.
But is the Programmer a STEM guy and the SS guy is not?
As soon as you include the "T" in STEM you are including technology, which is not really "pure knowledge" but "how to get things done"
Maybe a better guide to high paying careers is :
1) Which careers are paying a lot now, and are not clearly already in decline in employment numbers. Also Barriers to entry are important, careers with licensing or certification provide you with a moat-- compare a math teacher to an actuary who has passed the exams. I believe the actuary provides more income.