What is really hot in STEM Jobs?

10 Comments

1. Paul McLaughlin January 21, 2013

   The problem isn’t that STEM posts are rare – it’s that Craigslist isn’t where they are advertised.

   Reply
   • Henry January 22, 2013

     I couldn’t agree more with Paul. It is laughable that the author went through all this trouble of performing analysis on a data set that is out-of-sample to begin with. Maybe think about the relevance of your data set before publishing a meaningless paper with a misleading title?

     Reply
   • PJW January 22, 2013

     Are they being posted any where then? If so where? Or are they found through network even more exclusively then programming and big data jobs?

     Reply
   • Ivan January 23, 2013

     The situation is very similar on other job boards/aggregators like indeed.com

     On East Coast, there are more quant finance jobs which require knowledge of PDEs, but their number has decreased recently.

     Reply
2. John F. McGowan January 22, 2013

   A couple of follow up comments to the article:

   1. The San Francisco Bay Area, which includes the Silicon Valley, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, UCSF, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), NASA Ames Research Center, and a number of other centers of STEM activities, probably has one of the highest concentrations of STEM employers, STEM jobs, and highly qualified STEM workers in the world.

   Note that the article discusses results for the San Francisco Bay Area, not just the city of San Francisco. It is possible to search Craig’s List for jobs only in San Francisco. That is not what was done; the search was the job listings for the entire San Francisco Bay Area which includes the city of San Francisco, but also includes the Silicon Valley, Berkeley area, and so forth.

   2. Craig’s List San Francisco job board is widely used by STEM employers and job seekers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

   3. About 80 percent of the job posts on Craig’s List San Francisco are the same job posts as found on other job boards for the San Francisco Bay Area including Yahoo Hot Jobs, LinkedIn, DICE, and Indeed.com. The distribution of job posts on these other job boards is similar to Craig’s List.

   4. One would expect STEM employers who are facing a dire shortage of STEM workers and struggling to find the rare candidates to post to Craig’s List San Francisco and other Bay Area job boards. Why keep their STEM jobs a secret from the rare highly qualified STEM workers in the San Francisco Bay Area?

   5. Regarding calculus, a high proportion of STEM job listings list highly specific skills such as MATLAB or OpenCV. Quite a number of statistics and data analysis job posts, of which there are quite a number, will list specific methods such as Bayesian statistics, support vector machines, and so forth. But, they never mention calculus or specific types of calculus, and rarely mention algebra. This tends to strongly support that there is little interest in calculus even though this comprises most of traditional mathematics in high school and college in the United States.

   My own experience is that calculus almost never appears in mathematically intensive industry work. Linear algebra, yes. Some types of statistics, yes. Calculus is very rare.

   I am not taking a position on the merits of learning or teaching algebra or calculus. I am simply identifying what skills employers appear to be seeking.

   Sincerely,

   John

   Reply
3. Phillip January 26, 2013

   Well, the author actually have a point. Here is why:

   In the book “why do good people can ‘t find jobs”, the author say employers tend to look for people that is both employed, and able to do the job “immediately”. This sort of excludes new coming stem workers.

   Employers usually say they could find workers, but this is of their own doing. Most employers are unwilling to train new coming stem workers on the job. As we can see from the Craigslist adds.

   Reply
   • Amy Devine March 8, 2013

     Is this a new trend? I graduated with a BS in computer engineering in 2001 and I feel that I have been able to progress in my career from company to company without a stigma of being “new”. However I did pursue internships and volunteer work in my undergrad which beefed up my resume.

     Are these employers unwilling or are they looking for at least some basic work experience?

     Reply
     • John F. McGowan March 9, 2013

       I don’t think this catch-22 situation is new, nor unique to STEM jobs. I think it has gotten much worse since the downturn began in 2008.

       I saw the same or a very similar pattern in STEM job posts in the classified section of the San Jose Mercury News newspaper and many other places before the Internet job boards.

       I think if one gets a job through the college recruitment process and keeps that job for at least 3 years so one has the magic 3 years of experience, one can be pretty insulated from this reality.

       There is a satire about this catch-22 situation (I can only get a job with work experience and I need a job to get work experience.) in the 1980’s movie The Secret of My Success. Michael J. Fox’s character gets a (non-STEM) job in New York City right out of college, moves to New York expecting to make it big, and gets laid off the day he starts work. Then, he tries to get a job on his own and discovers all the employers want real world work experience. He tries adding fake internships and other “experience” to his resume and eventually finds a job through a distant family connection. Obviously this is fiction and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but people were satirizing this sort of thing twenty-five years ago.

       Do some companies hire enough people through the college recruitment process to fill the jobs demanding 3-5 years of experience, presumably posted by other companies, on Craig’s List, LinkedIn, and other job boards? Maybe. I doubt it. As I note, there are frequent, loud claims that companies are unable to fill large numbers of STEM (and non-STEM since the Great Recession began) job postings — but this is not really that surprising.

       My point is that many employers seem to be expecting on-the-job learning and training to magically occur somewhere else at no cost to them. Taken at face value, they expect a competitor to hire and train new college graduates for 3-5 years, then pay these freshly trained employees too little or mistreat them sufficiently that they leave this previously generous employer of new college graduates for their — the complaining employers — company. This shortage of brain-damaged competitors somehow morphs into ardent complaints about STEM teaching and education at the elementary and high school level.

       John

       Reply
4. John F. McGowan January 27, 2013

   A follow-up on Calculus in the real world:

   I conducted a search of the popular LinkedIn job board worldwide — not restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area — on Sunday, January 27, 2013. This turned up a total of thirty-nine (39) job listings matching the keyword “calculus”. Of these, twelve (12) were quant (quantitative finance or financial engineering) jobs. The quant jobs have fairly specific requirements in calculus such as:

   Strong knowledge of financial theory, stochastic calculus, statistics, and knowledge of risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR), Term Structure modeling and Monte Carlo Methods

   The thirty-nine jobs included a couple of tutor positions, a physics and engineering teacher at a prestigious private school (prep school) in New England, about three computer game software jobs, a scattering of mechanical engineering and aerospace jobs. A few jobs used the word “calculus” in ways that did not refer to the calculus taught in high school and college mathematics, e.g. “ROI calculus”, or simply listed calculus as a course requirement without identifying any specific work that would require the actual use of calculus.

   This is a tiny fraction of the technical jobs listed on LinkedIn. As a point of reference, here are the numbers for various other keywords and phrases on LinkedIn:

   Word/Phrase            Number of Matches
   SQL  16082  (Structured Query Language for databases)
   C++   5916
   C#    4839
   Java  8350
   PHP   2700
   Perl  3018
   Ruby  1864
   MATLAB 806
   Mathematica  24
   
   Statistics
   
   SAS   1782   (statistics package)
   SPSS    23   (statistics package)
   R programming language  23  (statistics)
   
   statistics            3064
   statistical analysis  2726
   machine learning       847
   data scientist         554
   "big data"            1792
   biostatistics          249
   bioinformatics         159
   statistician           121
   "regression analysis"   88
   stochastic              90
   Markov                  14
   "probability and statistics"  36
   Bayesian                90
   "support vector machine"  9
   "neural network"        18
   "artificial intelligence"  210
   
   
   Ph.D.                 2270
   
   
   High School and College Math
   
   algebra                153
   geometry               172
   trigonometry            70
   calculus                39
   differential equation    2
   theorem                  7
   "group theory"           0
   "linear algebra"        50 (mostly computer game software)
   
   Miscellaneous Mathematical Topics
   
   "signal processing"    557
   "image processing"     240
   OpenCV                  36 (computer vision toolkit)
   OpenGL                 234 (3D graphics toolkit)
   MPEG                    56 (video compression)
   H.264                   88 (video compression)
   H.265                    7 (new video compression)
   Kalman filter            6 (actually a widely used method)
   

   While there is considerable evident interest in statistics, there is very limited interest in most of the mathematics taught in high school and college in the United States including geometry, trigonometry, algebra, and especially calculus.

   While calculus may be useful background knowledge, there appears to be negligible actual use of calculus in private industry: taking derivatives, solving differential equations, computing integrals, etc.

   It is worth noting that the United States alone, not counting foreign universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Tokyo etc, turn out thousands of Ph.D.’s in physics, mathematics, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, econometrics, and other fields every year.

   Sincerely,

   John

   Reply
5. Amy Devine March 8, 2013

   Isn’t it assumed that a STEM graduate is proficient in calculus thus there is no need tss for it in a job posting? I assume that anyone with a BS in a STEM field has this skill and can use when necessary. Oftentimes with my job I never knew when I was going to need to at least understand mathematical theory.

   I would wonder about the pay for a job that mentioned calculus as a needed skill as it sounds entry-level to me.

   Reply