[NY_USA_Hacker]

It's simple. We're not short of "brilliant minds", not at all. Instead, the employers want to have a shortage of a simple word, a common, single, two syllable word, MONEY. It's not about brilliant minds but about money, just the money.

[ori_b]

So, why don't we see this in other professions?

[NY_USA_Hacker]

The answer is dirty: First, computing is relatively new. So, the 'old power structure' was surprised when people in computing started getting paid well enough to buy a house and more than some not very well paid low level managers.

But the start of this was not computing but math, physical science, and engineering during the sudden high demands in such fields in the 1960s due to both the Cold War and the Space Race. There, too, the old power structure was surprised and angry. Technical people were called 'The New Mandarins'. The old power structure, say, Ivy League history majors, were torqued.

Part of the situation is somewhat general: The 'suits' still want to be like in a Ford plant, say, 80 years ago when the suits knew more and the subordinates were there just to add labor, muscle, and sweat to the work of the suits. Then in the technical fields, suddenly the subordinates knew more than the suits, e.g., about Maxwell's equations for battlefield or satellite communications, about the fast Fourier transform and digital filtering, about orbit determination for navigation satellites, and about computers.

Yes, people in law and medicine also know more, but they are in recognized professions set apart from the hierarchy of an old Ford plant, but computing was not, was, say, in the CFO's group or the manufacturing group. Bummer.

So, some suit had a bright idea, "To keep people from wasting so much time learning higher level languages, we will use only assembler and, thus, save lots of money.". Right! "Also, programmers get paid much more than typists. So, we will hire typists for the typing and won't let programmers type.". With the ROFL, soon the suits saw that they were in deep, fuming, smelly, sticky stuff.

So, how can a suit survive? Sure: For each technical job, hire about three technical people. Then none of the technical people can have 'leverage' over the suit. Of course, for this, need MANY more technical people.

Second, the US DoD actually believed that for national security, the US should increase the supply of labor in technical fields and got Congress to agree. Then the NSF started throwing money around to this end and with considerable success.

By the 1970s, US citizens began to see that there was no pot of gold at the end of the picture of a rainbow drawn by the NSF and heavily quit going for those technical fields.

Third, but the NSF kept trying. Their next semi-bright idea was to write into academic research grant contracts that students must be supported. When US citizens wouldn't come, the universities got the students from other countries, at first, heavily Taiwan and India.

Fourth, when the computer industry caught wind of all this, they pushed for the H1-B visa program and got a big supply of essentially 'indentured labor' they could, and did, exploit.

Net, fields such as law, medicine, pharmacy, roofing, carpentry, pizza making, machine tool making, auto repair, accounting, etc. don't get the attention from all of the DoD, big employers, Congress, the NSF, and the universities.

So, net, computing is heavily 'targeted' by all of the DoD, ..., the universities.

E.g,, the targeting pushes for more in, say, electronic engineering. Thus, often there is a better career as an electrician than with a Ph.D. in electronic engineering:

At least in some states, the electrician needs a license and, likely, has liability, and the Ph.D. nearly never has either. So, the electrician is closer to having a 'profession'.

As an employee in industry, the Ph.D. will likely discover that before 40 he has to move into management or get fired. Yes, Virginia, they fire Ph.D. EEs. So, by age 40, only about 1 in 100 is in management.

Fired, the Ph.D. will discover that the electrician of the same age can have a nice business, several employees, a nice house, and take off Friday-Sunday, even if he doesn't bother to have his name in the Yellow Pages, really can't be fired, and isn't vulneable to age discrimination, office politics, industry M&A, Toshiba beating GE, etc.

Really, more generally, with 'globalization', the US citizens who get rich are okay but most of the others need a geographical barrier to entry. E.g., an electrician is not in competition with anyone more than, say, 100 miles away. So, if he does okay in a radius of 100 miles, then he can do okay.

In business, the Ph.D. hss only a very narrow list of candidate employers, heavily the US 'military-industrial complex', while the electrician has a huge range of candidate clients and can do okay as long as the whole economy is not in the tank. E.g., if there is new construction, then he does that. If not, then he does renovations.

Seeing such things, many US citizens are avoiding the fields targeted by the Federal government and, also, fields vulnerable to globalization. Net, at present, for nearly everyone in high school now, they better plan on a career as a Main Street sole proprietor.

Thank you NSF for 'targeting' technical fields and driving out US citizens and Foggy Bottom for 'globalization' as a source economic carrots to try to make nasty foreign countries 'behave' -- e.g,, give away much of the US bath towel market to Pukistan to make them 'behave'. How well are they 'behaving'?

Mo big gumment, Ma!

The less big gumment does, the fewer really big mistakes they make.

But the flip side of this disaster is an historic opportunity and right in the center of HN: Be an entrepreneur much as for a Main Street business but also technical. Maybe get venture funding and maybe not, but in any event be a technical CEO. Then can beat the pants off any competitors run by non-technical suits.