[RealityShift]

1. STEM work is too esoteric. No one wants to listen to you ramble about STEM work unless they're also in the field. Work always comes up in conversations.

2. People in STEM have lower social skills and social connections on average. You don't have to make friends with people you immediately work with or the people you study with but it is a huge boost when you can.

3. Too many fobs and foreigners, not the connections you want to be making.

4. Social skills aren't required to succeed outside of management. Your work/the numbers speak for themselves in STEM. There's little motivation to improve presentation or networking skills.

5. STEM work is things oriented. People oriented/creative jobs and the humanities train people to pay attention to and learn about building blocks of good conversation and social intelligence (culture and people's motivations/emotions).

6. STEM trains the mind to think too logically and close minded.


STEM and bookworming in high school is highly recommended. Getting into a good college (and getting a scholarship depending on financial needs) is absolutely crucial. The college opens social doors (very hard to connect with people if you don't go to the college) and the brand name gets you a job (or greatly decreases the amount of effort to get a job).

At college, majoring in non-STEM is preferred. The cool kids and hot girls are not in STEM. Classes are a good ice breaker. Non-STEM major frees up time to maximize experiences and social life. Assuming you did high school right and got into a good college, you won't have a difficult time getting internships or a full time job.

After graduating from college, work in consulting, sales, account rep, marketing, analyst or project/program manager job at a tech company. YMMV on hours depending on the company, but it's not that hard to find something with good hours and six figures. STEM jobs don't make that much more than the non-STEM jobs.

[Truth Tiger]

Kek - coming from someone who clearly doesn't science successfully for a living.

STEM majors come in different colors. People come in a range of personality types. Some will be drawn to sales / marketing / people-oriented fields, others to product / process / object-oriented ones.

The best advice a STEM major can take is to broaden their areas of interest and make themselves well-rounded. Dance classes are a great way to socialize, in college and beyond.

Develop a hobby, get and stay fit, engage with and game women (being aware of potential risks where you may live) and become an expert in your area of STEM = life success, happiness, and endless career opportunities.

[Montrose]

Your points are very valid. Certainly not everyone should study STEM. And not everyone should learn to code. It depends on your abilities and tastes. But I want to add a few reasons to study STEM (I studied STEM):

1. STEM is a very demanding intellectual pursuit which will test the limits of your intelligence and help you master reason and logic.

2. If you are particularly good at STEM you can capitalize on your abilities to obtain jobs which are highly selective and well paid.

3. If you are weak in other fields, e.g. bad at communication or you hate management or you have little interest in business, a STEM job gives you relatively more independence than the average corporate job while still paying correctly. For example most App developers nowadays are freelancers who work when they want.

4. STEM is the only field where you learn an actual skill (as opposed to just making slides and answering the phone like in Business studies). This skill will always have some value.

5. Even people who understand nothing in STEM and are not interested feel a certain fascination. Consider that even though Albert Einstein was very bad at dealing with people he is widely quoted as an authority on everything just because he was a very good physicist.

[No More Mr. Soy Boy]

I’m in STEM and I approve this message.

[Jetset]

Fair enough, but I'll offer a counter-point.

(11-13-2018 03:45 AM)RealityShift Wrote:  

1. STEM work is too esoteric. No one wants to listen to you ramble about STEM work unless they're also in the field. Work always comes up in conversations.

The number of jobs anybody actually wants to hear about is very small. To the extent you have to talk about work, I've found it's effective to learn as much as you can about the business reasons for the technical work and talk about that, instead. The real goal, though, is to have an interesting life outside of work so you don't have to resort to gossip about your coworkers on Saturday night.

Quote:

2. People in STEM have lower social skills and social connections on average. You don't have to make friends with people you immediately work with or the people you study with but it is a huge boost when you can.

This is true, but one of the biggest professional advantages you can develop in STEM is connecting with people who work in non-STEM fields and need your expertise. Specifically because many cannot do this, it makes you a bigger fish with minimal effort. It also makes you a lot harder to lay off when half the women in the company have branded you "my favorite developer". Most good companies have plenty of opportunities to participate in the company culture and make yourself known outside of your day-to-day work.

Quote:

3. Too many fobs and foreigners, not the connections you want to be making.

Not been my experience, but I mainly work for smaller firms on the east coast who don't want the paperwork hassles of sponsoring visas.

Quote:

4. Social skills aren't required to succeed outside of management. Your work/the numbers speak for themselves in STEM. There's little motivation to improve presentation or networking skills.

I think this, like #2, addresses itself: if you want to advance into leadership roles, social skills are required, and because so many have questionable social skills, it's a low barrier to entry.

Quote:

5. STEM work is things oriented. People oriented/creative jobs and the humanities train people to pay attention to and learn about building blocks of good conversation and social intelligence (culture and people's motivations/emotions).

Agreed, although I'm not sure that I think people in the humanities have good social intelligence, or even conversation skills. If anything, it attracts a different part of the autism spectrum.

Either way, like conversation material, social skills are something to cultivate outside of the workplace.

Quote:

6. STEM trains the mind to think too logically and close minded.

This is a common feminist criticism of STEM, because thinking logically is patriarchy.

[Duke Main]

Aaron Clarey takes the opposite side of this debate and makes a lot of strong points. Obviously STEM is not for everyone, but if that's what you're good at, what's a better alternative?

[PixelFree]

Agreed - if your focus is on developing your social skills and networking for women purposes it's not a good profession.

If you are good at it, it's good for stable good rates of pay (and is internationally transferable).

I believe it has had some negative effects in my life, in terms of turning me into someone who over-analyses / overthinks relationship and other 'life' decisions/issues rather than being able to use my intuition and go with my gut.

I work in STEM but try to balance it out with Yoga practice, meditation, creative pursuits and so on.

I wouldn't be able to earn the same amount of money doing anything else. As far as a regular job goes, best I could earn would be about 70% of what I do. Any regular jobs that would be good for developing social / women skills would be 50% or less (Bartender, Tour Guide, Photographer, etc) - let's face it most of those jobs earn low pay.

Overall I have decided it's better for me to earn the $$$ and nurture my social side outside of my day job.

The only way to have the best of both worlds would be to run your own business that could generate decent amounts of money in a profession where you can develop your social skills.

[Soy Jooce]

STEM drop-out checking in. I ended up doing a very light version of computer science and minored in economics for my bachelors and graduated in 5 years.

I fooking hate IT/computer science work, especially in the corporate world. Trying to make a career change...

[General Stalin]

This sounds like a bunch of bullshit. I don't see why the argument against skilled white-collar work where you can make close to 6 figures with only a 4 year degree.

Who cares about how cool your job is to talk about? It's a job. Have a life outsode of your job - if you don't have interesting shit to talk about then that's a personal problem not a problem with one's field of work.

It sounds like OP is more or less specifically talking about computer programming and/or other IT-type jobs. "STEM" is an extremely broad brush.

[Jaxon]

This slightly tangential, but I want to talk about the misconception that STEM = success, while non-STEM = bullshit, low paying jobs.

I majored in a liberal arts major and am currently working sales at a SaaS startup. I make almost 30k more than friends in finance who have CFA's and CPA's, people who majored in biology, and even some entry-level coders and programmers. The market for salespeople is exploding right now. Every company is building out sales development teams. It's a great entry level job -- as long as you make your calls, have decent social skills, and can get meetings you'll make good money. They explicitly look for Political Science and other liberal arts majors too.

Any young cats out there should keep an eye out for tech sales/SDR jobs. I may write a datasheet on it soon. Anyone with a decent college degree and a pulse can do this job and make above-average money.

[Shemp]

>>Anyone with a decent college degree and a pulse can do this job [technical sales] and make above-average money.

No. Everyone has a fixed underlying personality that can't be changed. For example, born introverts cannot change themselves into extroverts because the underlying basis for introversion is high sensitivity in the nervous system, which is genetically determined. Maybe you fiddle around with drugs to change the sensitivity, same as you can boost/reduce testosterone. But you're playing with fire when you do that. And introversion/extroverts is just one aspect of personality.

What is very clear from my own experience is that not everyone makes a good salesman. Some people just hate it and when you hate something, you tend to suck at it. But maybe those same people are great at certain types of solitary and very highly paid STEM work. Computer programming, in particular, will continue to offer huge incomes (salaries, stock options, buyouts of you start your own company) for decades to come. But you need to be top tier, of course. Second rate programmers get menial incomes. Computer software a winner take all business, same as other foms of software: music, books, video.

[Jaxon]

^I agree that an extremely introverted person (a World of Warcraft addict, a natural recluse, or someone with extreme social anxiety) will not succeed at sales. Most people, however, don't fall into that category. The average person has below-average to average social skills, which is really all you need for sales. If you're able to ask good questions, understand what your product does/what need it fills, and grind through a ton of calls, you can succeed as an entry level salesman. You could major in bullshit and only have soft skills and still make good money in sales. That's the real appeal of the profession -- you don't need to grind through shitty, difficult STEM classes, get a million certs like in finance, or bust your balls that hard in college. It gives a great return for a relatively low effort in school and even on the job.

This is why I think people approach STEM incorrectly. It's a great field to get into, but it's not the end-all be-all employment-wise that people seem to think it is.

[rogue]

I'm a fob foreigner in Silicon Valley and I think the OP has some pretty accurate ideas about Tech. I cannot, however, agree with the idea that choosing one degree over another is going to change you. Before we reach adulthood our characters are already quite fixed and we just choose what we like and what matches our characters. I always enjoyed code and computers and I would become a programmer even if it didn't pay so well.

There are a few good things about working in software though. The best are good pay and flexible hours. Good software engineers with can easily make over 300k in Silicon Valley or New York, which used to be the kind of money reserved to doctors and lawyers, and the best part is that it doesn't matter you graduated in the Third World and your English could be improved.

[Lampwick]

100% disagree.

If you are interested in working in almost any capacity at a tech company, having a computer science degree is a tremendous advantage, at least with getting hired. Many business roles require technical knowledge, and unfortunately the way many companies screen for this knowledge is still whether or not you have a piece of paper.

If you think you can get a job as a program manager/project manager without any technical background, good luck. When you get into a room full of engineers, they will fuck you up.

I would say the people with the biggest advantage have followed this track:

Computer Science bachelors -> 3-5 years as an engineer -> maybe reaching senior engineer level, depending on company

The demand for people with this background who can also talk to customers/business teams is very high. And it's a background that's very difficult to replicate outside of this track.

The point is that you don't have to code forever in isolation if you don't like it. But it's still one of the best backgrounds to have.

[rogue]

That's actually a good point about switching careers that Lampwick made.

[Haarolds]

I think OP is slightly warping the reality to fit his points. I'd even go so far as to call this a clever attempt of trolling. haha

[Soy Jooce]

STEM is excellent and obviously more valuable than a majority of degrees offered at various universities. If I had the study discipline back in my undergrad (to study a minimum of 4-6 hours a day, with 1 day off), I would have completed a biomedical engineering or architectural engineering (true passion, even tho the job market was okay for this field) bachelors degree.

Since I graduated from my bachelors, I have been stuck in IT/software/computer science. I enjoy Public Health and trying to change careers to healthcare. Will definitely not pursue a master's or any grad degree from the U.S. -- no chance I am taking on student debt. I am currently debt free (my parents paid for my undegrad) and love the financial freedom that I have.

[Jaxon]

What's everyone's advice for someone with a non-technical background who wants to get into Product Management/Product Marketing/Program Management? I'm currently on year two as a sales development rep. I've learned a good amount about the analytics/cloud space but can't code at all.

I'm thinking of sticking out another year on this job, then trying to get my MBA (which I will be able to pay for). I'm also considering taking a coding bootcamp -- I know a guy who majored in Public Policy and became a sales engineer after taking one. Alternatively I can just try to get progressively better at sales. OTE (overall salary) where I am for a decent Account Executive (closing salesman) is around 100k. More senior guys will make around 200k which isn't bad at all. This is SaaS sales.

STEM is cool if it's what you want to do and you play your cards right. My dad's friend's daughter is making 300k out of the gate as an AI specialist at a big company. That's easily the best starting salary I've ever heard of. My Electrical Engineer buddy (who has a masters) will be making 150k out of the gate, with stock options on top. But on the flipside, I know biologists and chemists making $18 an hour in labs. Plenty of biotech people aren't making anything special out of the gate either.

On average, STEM is absolutely better than non-STEM, but the upper tiers of non-STEM (SaaS sales, some types of consulting, etc) absolutely crush the middle and low tiers of STEM in my opinion. To be fair I'm a fresh college grad so my perspective is more oriented towards starting/low-level salaries.

[MANic]

Pretty much M is the only sure bet in the modern economy for the average guy. I know loads of unemployed/underemployed in STE and pretty much every other field. Unemployed doctor? Never met one.

Regardless, things are tough all round and a bachelors in most respected fields isn't a sure bet these days

[Lampwick]

(11-14-2018 12:42 PM)Jaxon Wrote:  

What's everyone's advice for someone with a non-technical background who wants to get into Product Management/Product Marketing/Program Management? I'm currently on year two as a sales development rep. I've learned a good amount about the analytics/cloud space but can't code at all.

I'm thinking of sticking out another year on this job, then trying to get my MBA (which I will be able to pay for). I'm also considering taking a coding bootcamp -- I know a guy who majored in Public Policy and became a sales engineer after taking one.

Product Marketing is a different animal than Product Management/Program Management. Sales is more adjacent to Marketing, so that may be a more natural transition, but the skill set and job function are very different from Product Management/Program Management.

Program Management (often synonymous with Project Management or Technical Product Management) is almost always a role filled by someone who came from Engineering. Since you don't have this background, I wouldn't recommend this route.

Product Management has three main types:

1. UX/UI focused. This seems to be the most common, and most of the job postings I see are looking for this type of Product Manager. Any company that offers a website or app as a product usually has someone in this role.

2. Performance focused. This usually involves some type of optimization. For example, matching buyers and sellers in a marketplace, improving search engine results, improving recommendation systems, etc. This requires a strong math background, and usually a strong engineering background. This role is becoming more common as more companies are using machine learning to better solve problems.

3. Business focused. This typically involves defining market segments and the products to match them. This type of role is less common. The company that seems to have the most people in this role is Amazon, which has a more consulting/investment banking culture.

If you are interested in becoming a Product Manager, the first type is most likely what you would be aiming for. Knowing how to draw wire frames and how to design an outstanding user experience are skills that are most important. An engineering background definitely helps, but is not 100% required. As companies get to a certain size, a Product Manager will work closely with a counterpart in Program Management, who works directly with the engineering team to plan their efforts. Therefore, a Product Manager must know some of the technical context, but doesn't necessarily need hands-on engineering knowledge.

The more technical the users of a product, the more technical knowledge the Product Manager must have. So if your product is a babysitting app, the ideal Product Manager may be a working mother. If your product is a suite of developer tools, then the ideal Product Manager may be an Eastern European guy who knows Linux inside and out. You get the idea.

There are a few things to keep in mind when trying to get this role:

- Almost always, a person's first Product role will be from a transition within a company. Jumping to a new company as a first-time Product Manager is something that hardly ever happens. When companies hire for this role, their first criterion is almost always 3-5 years of previous Product experience. If a candidate doesn't have any Product experience, then generally the candidate must thoroughly understand the company's product. Moving from Engineering to Product is a common path, but a candidate may also come from a design background, or a support role. As mentioned earlier, the ideal background of the person depends on the product.

- Many companies weigh academic pedigree very highly for this role. People who went to an Ivy League school have an advantage.

- Many companies also weigh candidates with an MBA more highly. This is stupid (except for business focused Product Managers), but that's what companies are choosing to do.

- Recently, Product Management has become en vogue, so every other person you talk to wants to move into this role. The ironic part is that it takes a particular kind of oddball person to actually be good at it, mainly because you have to really love it. It pays well, but you have to work your balls off, doing an often thankless job. A good place to start is by reading Marty Cagan to see if the role appeals to you, and get a sense if you are one of the rare people that will actually excel in it. If you don't love it, someone will happily take your place.

Quote:

Alternatively I can just try to get progressively better at sales. OTE (overall salary) where I am for a decent Account Executive (closing salesman) is around 100k. More senior guys will make around 200k which isn't bad at all. This is SaaS sales.

If money is a primary motivator for you, then you should stick with sales, doubly so if you actually like the job, and are good at it. I'm not sure what area of the country you're living in, but 200k in SaaS sales is scratching the surface in the Bay Area, for example. If those guys hit the right opportunity, their compensation seriously blows up. It rivals Engineering, and Product, for that matter.

The ROI for an MBA typically only makes sense if it's from a top tier school. They're most useful if you're trying to move into a managerial role. A coding bootcamp would be useful to get frontend development skills, which would be helpful for demonstrating UX/UI skills for Product.

Another thing is that coding bootcamps almost always teach Javascript, which is also a job requirement for a lot of Sales Engineering roles (customer website/app integration). Cloud knowledge is also a big plus for Sales Engineering roles. Analytics knowledge helps, but I think it's really its own beast. If you haven't been an analyst or worked with data warehouses or things like that, I think it would be difficult to establish credibility as a Sales Engineer for an analytics product. Sales Engineering roles often require a breadth of technical knowledge (frontend, backend, infrastructure, etc.), but not necessarily as much depth, depending on the role.

Your sales experience would make an easier transition to Sales Engineer if you could pick up the technical skills. Potentially lower stress, but much lower upside as well.

You have to explore a bit and see what feels right for you. Hopefully this helps on some of the avenues.

[Salesian]

Can confirm. Last Saturday night I spent 5 hours programming, working on a game a Battleship in Java, instead of spending $40 to drink vodka and listen to Cardi B in a nightclub full of Axe deodorant and THOTS.

Now I have Asperger's and a neckbeard. I smell like a roast beef sandwich no matter how much I shower. All my pants have cargo pockets, all my tshirts have ketchup stains. All my knuckles have long thin hairs on them like Sasquatch.

I am hideous ! Save yourselves !

[Jaxon]

^^Fantastic post from Lampwick. Repped.

[SteezeySteve]

Major in Bio,Ecology,or Environmental science. Hoes galore in those majors. Become a crony epa regulator or environmental lobbyist.

[The Golden God]

Don't take advice from people on the internet about your career choice...

Engineers, doctors, scientists all make good money and work in intellectually stimulating jobs.

I work in STEM, civil engineering specifically.

I don't have to work with any women. There's no HR department. I am actually challenged in my job and I like that.

If you think that STEM majors are a waste of time because they're "boring and too hard"; sorry to break it to you but you most likely couldn't succeed in it anyway.

Who even talks to people about their job anyway?

[Sooth]

I disagree with OP.

I was a straight C student all through my STEM degree. It took me 2 extra years to graduate because I hated school but I could always see a future and the light at the end of the tunnel.

3 years later I'm in meetings with government officials as an expert in my particular field.

It's all about attitude. If you're focused on the negatives as in your post you will never find success in anything you do. All the points you mentioned can be refuted with a positive aspect about what you're complaining about.