One of the things that seems suspect to me about this article is the conflation between "STEM" and "Computer Science / Software Engineering / Computer Engineering".
No where in the article is "STEM" defined precisely, but the author clearly notes that is NSF number includes health-care workers, psychologists and social scientists. Even if we replaced "STEM" with "Engineering" in the entire article, it's still a fallacy to say "there are 0.3 million engineering jobs, and 11.7 million engineering graduates -- there can't possibly a shortage of engineers." I wouldn't automatically assume that someone with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering or Civil Engineering is qualified to work at <insert software company here>[0], in the same way that I would be completely unqualified to be hired run an oil field or draft up a plan for my city's mass transit system. Sometimes people do have extra skills atop their degree that lands them in a job outside of their field, but that's not true for everyone.
If anything, I think the whole "STEM shortage" sounds like a plea to US post-secondary institutions to make their CS/EE/CE/SE graduating classes bigger -- perhaps at the expense of other STEM programs.
Edit: [0] I'm assuming a software company small enough that it's not doing city planning on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were Civil Engineers working at the likes of Microsoft and Google, trying to figure out the master plan for their main campuses, but that's not my point.
No, I think the issue is that software developers have reached a limit of how low a salary they are willing to work for, and not enough of them have a limit that is low enough for what companies are willing to pay so rather than cave in, the companies are playing politics with the hope of flooding the markets to drive prices down nationally.
If that is indeed the rationale, I don't think having more bodies in the SF Bay Area is going to help. (More people means housing prices will go up, and thus, the rational price accepted by half-decent developers should go up. It's easy to spend 70% of a entry-level Google salary on housing in the city right now.)
I wonder if buying up a bunch of houses in Detroit, and offering one as a starting bonus (along with gigabit Internet and a nearby Wal-Mart) would be enough to entice people to work for less.
No where in the article is "STEM" defined precisely, but the author clearly notes that is NSF number includes health-care workers, psychologists and social scientists. Even if we replaced "STEM" with "Engineering" in the entire article, it's still a fallacy to say "there are 0.3 million engineering jobs, and 11.7 million engineering graduates -- there can't possibly a shortage of engineers." I wouldn't automatically assume that someone with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering or Civil Engineering is qualified to work at <insert software company here>[0], in the same way that I would be completely unqualified to be hired run an oil field or draft up a plan for my city's mass transit system. Sometimes people do have extra skills atop their degree that lands them in a job outside of their field, but that's not true for everyone.
If anything, I think the whole "STEM shortage" sounds like a plea to US post-secondary institutions to make their CS/EE/CE/SE graduating classes bigger -- perhaps at the expense of other STEM programs.
Edit: [0] I'm assuming a software company small enough that it's not doing city planning on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were Civil Engineers working at the likes of Microsoft and Google, trying to figure out the master plan for their main campuses, but that's not my point.