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A couple of years ago it was reported that in 2012 more than half of all American wage earners made less than $30,000 per year. The Social Security Administration's new earnings report for 2014 is out and there's still much gnashing of teeth about the dying middle class. With earnings numbers that haven't changed much in 2 years, estimates running as high as 100 million working age Americans without a job, and no one tracking the population of H-1B visa holders, where are the jobs really?
The July 9, 2015, issue of The New York Review of Books carried a very thoughtful piece by Andrew Hacker. In "The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent," Hacker discusses a number of books and reports that address whether or not there really is a need for more tech talent, the justification for the H-1B visa program, and issues in the American educational system.
[...] Throughout his piece Hacker is basically questioning two things:
1. Is there really an unfilled need for STEM graduates, or are we actually graduating too many so that many end up unemployed or employed in different areas?
2. Are there flaws in the American education system, both at the K-12 level and in college, that lead us to be very dependent on foreign STEM graduates?
[...] The texts Hacker is reviewing, and his own information, seem to dwell predominately on overall job projections for the STEM fields. Nowhere does there appear a breakout of the job forecast for computing related job categories. With the increased ubiquity of computing across all industries and employment sectors, it seems unlikely that we will see the "deskilling" trend that may be occurring in engineering (whereby engineers create equipment that means they and others like them no longer have job opportunities). We know that there are many jobs in the "tech sector" but there are also a lot of computing jobs in banking, finance, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, etc. We can get an accurate picture of future job openings only if we can make a good determination of the computing jobs that exist outside of the "tech sector."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 27 2015, @07:12PM
If you haven't seen equivalent posts posted to e-mail lists by apparently US students, I have.
You've got to remember that there are a lot of students in each country, and they all have attituded different from each other (though they cluster in groupings). That said, there is a cultural bias in India in favor of flim-flam. China has more of a cultural bias in favor of hard work. But you're going to find Chinese who specialize in flim-flam, and I'm not certain how dominant the cultural biases are. (Chinese students in the US who retain cultural biases tend to work in groups to do school projects, and I'm told that the goal is for all members of the group to have mastered whatever the project was supposed to teach. This is also reported of Inuits who haven't been acculturated.) US students have (had?) a bias in favor of individual hard work with little group cooperation. When it was forced by an occasional school project, it generally proved that it was a bad idea, because a few students ended up doing all the work, and cooperation was minimal....proving to the hard workers that they shouldn't share credit and to the others that only suckers worked hard. (Perhaps others have had better experiences.)
Don't accept common beliefs about how people from different cultures act. They are generally wrong. Depend on either studies (which are hard to find good versions of) or on believable personal experiences.
P.S.: Don't trust my generalization about Indian culture, as it's drawn from a very scant sample. The comments in Innuit culture are from an anthropologist. The comments about Chinese culture are multiple second-hand observations. I don't know about other culture (except Japanese...hard workers, more individualist than the Chinese, but way more social conformity than the US, isolationist and prejudiced compared to the US, but I don't know about compared to other groups.)
And again...these comments are WRT traditional cultural biases (and don't apply to specific individuals)...which generally change slowly, but not always. Heavy internet exposure is likely to change things more rapidly than expected...and I can't guess in which direction.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.