"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."
The huge disparity of pay between different STEM disciplines should clearly show where the demand is. Biologists compete over shrinking government grants, while petroleum engineering students receive job offers of $90K starting. Treating STEM as a homogenous bloc will hurt the less in-demand fields while failing to treat the shortfall in others.
One of his points was that it is extremely hard to predict where the next boom in the greater STEM field will be. Several years ago, internet boomed, then bust, then boomed again. Meanwhile, petro rose while aerospace fell... It's precisely the point that, because STEM skills cannot cross fields (you try getting a rocket scientist to build you a photo-sharing app) that leads to moments of massive oversupply, then terrible shortage, and then massive oversupply again.
Cannot cross fields? My major was Me/Ae, took no CS courses, worked for Boeing designing airplane gearboxes and hydraulic systems, and yet I had no trouble transitioning to a CS career.
When I took mechanics/fluids/electronics/materials classes, I discovered that the math was all the same, except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'.
This speaks to how quickly what we're taught in school goes out of date. You were able to transition to CS, compete with same-age CS graduates, because much of what they were taught in school had become obsolete, while what you learned on the job became more and more valuable and relevant.
> ... except that the EEs liked to use 'j' instead of 'i'.
And that only because of the coincidence that 'i' refers to current in electrical equations.
It also addresses the issue that, with respect to getting useful results from a computer, one's mathematical knowledge and ability is now more important than one's knowledge of a computer's inner workings.
In other countries it's worse rather than better. China comes to mind. In Germany I'm not hearing a lot of "mind training matters" noise out of education either.
The huge disparity of pay between different STEM disciplines should clearly show where the demand is. Biologists compete over shrinking government grants, while petroleum engineering students receive job offers of $90K starting. Treating STEM as a homogenous bloc will hurt the less in-demand fields while failing to treat the shortfall in others.