The people who work in tech are usually people who were never going to fit into mainstream roles anyway. If you went into tech, you weren't ever going to be in sales or marketing. Same for those who went into the arts, they didn't see offshoring of tech jobs and went, "Yeah, I should really pursue the arts."
Most of the decisions people make in the US around careers has more to do with image than it does with financial sense.
I've thought the same thing about this, it's kind of depressing. It's like science and tech are both stigmatized. These are fields that have to compensate well, because if they didn't, very few people would take interest in them
And I don't think the problem is under-funding of stem, it's more cultural
I shouldn't be complaining from a money standpoint, but from a national standpoint it's probably bad for places like the DoD which hire mostly domestic citizens
It's not the quality of the education system, it's the motivation of the students. In the mid-2000s, it was very fashionable to believe that all programming jobs should be offshored to India. People imagined that the startups of the future would have executives living in California and programmers living in India. Some VC firms would even pressure their startups to structure themselves in this way.
Now imagine it's 2006, you're 18, you're American but you're hearing that the future of programming is going to be in India. Are you going to major in Computer Science? Probably not.
Fast forward to 2012. The problems of offshoring to India are much more apparent, plus some of the most successful startups of the mid-2000s (e.g. Facebook) did not rely on offshored talent. So now people want to hire in the US. But now there's a shortage of new CS grads.
But of course, companies/executives/VCs blamed the laziness of American students and the alleged poor quality of the American education system, rather than the messages they themselves had been sending out for the previous 10 years.
>It's also rather noticeable that the VC tech investor sector wants more cheap obedient labor, and doesn't want this point raised.
I've never been able to wrap my head around VCs, executives, and others in the US who have a obvious preference for foreign-born talent, but still complain about the lack of US-born workers.