The advancement of medical technology is an unequivocal good. Like we have more advanced prosthetics than ever, and those auto self dosing insulin things for diabetics are better than the finger pricking I grew up watching people do. Just two quick examples.

Surely there is massive data analysis happening in disease research, which the US government probably no longer does, meaning you’ll have to find a rare NGO job or work for a for-profit corporation.

Let’s see, what else has a lot of data and isn’t evil… Astronomy? Uh… What’s that running app that keeps leaking the position of American warships? There are plenty of cybersecurity applications I can think of that would protect people from prying governments and AI training; Signal is one quick example.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finding “neutral” work and using funds and free time of a tech salary to contribute and participate in your local orgs.

But also I think there’s a whole generation of Americans who got lied to by their parents that seeking a tech degree would be a deed to a consistently comfortable working life, because their parents are rubes who are so enamored with the past they grew up in that they forget they destroyed it.

Have you considered working for a non profit or public utility?

maybe my parents were right, maybe i should’ve become a doctor and pursued computer engineering on the side as a hobby.

on a more serious note, i don’t like the term STEM it’s more from the prospective of education rather than labor, mathematics has always been fucked. i also remember about some nefarious reason behind the term, but i can’t remember it so just ignore it. anyway the push to STEM entirely came from the fact that STEM labor was the most expensive, and they wanted a non-unionized, entirely atomized and alienated workforce of desperate scientists and engineers. you can’t do modern STEM without the equipment or funding, so either find ethical funding (or funding that you can sleep with at night) or get into some other profession and engage with it as a “hobbyist” i.e. follow the news and get excited about some unreproducible paper.

if you currently do not have any engagements, you can also consider continuing your academic career by applying to phd/post doc positions in foreign universities. it (sorta) doesn’t matter where you got your degree from, as long as you are white you are miles ahead of the competition simply because the candidate pools are saturated with indians and chinese, and you are seen as a more “desirable candidate”, plus you can afford more application fees so you can try your chances more.

EVERYTHING is cooked tbh

There is currently a fairly massive labor disciplinary action targeted at STEM (this also the c point of the last decades promoting stem - a larger reserve labor pool). The job market is bleak, comparable to many other industries that parts of STEM used to be exempt from.

It’s not guaranteed that this will continue, as the underlying productivity dynamics haven’t changed at all. There is just a concerted financial push and bubble with AI that is a massive distortion. How and when that resolves is will be the proximal forecast on STEM.

Though I think it’s also important to note that federal funding is down in STEM and that’s where a lot of basic research comes from so that means shrinking the number of jobs, i.e. increasing the reserve army of labor.

I don’t think STEM is a bad direction compared to others. They all suck under capitalism. STEM is just getting to experience some greater proletarianization whereas before it was a bit more professionalized and boutique (at all points still working class).

Yes. Im watching wages drop in real time. Jobs that paid 90k for a warm body in 2019 want 5y exp for 70k now. Fed shit still pays but the checks not worth the remainder of my morals. Its dire out here

STEM has been cooked for many decades, you’re just seeing it up close now since you’re in school

Even decades ago all the STEM jobs were downstream from military investments

You’d probably have to go back to post WWII as the last time where STEM jobs were mostly careers doing things bettering society

I’m on the computation/data side

I’m on the computation/data side

This sounds perfect for bioinformatics and GIS though. Probably the 2 data/coding fields most useful on average

Science is completely neglected under capitalism, it was only ever funded really well last century in part to compete with the Soviet Union. It’s completely cooked, especially in the last 15 years, it’s just been going downhill.

Yes. And it has been for awhile.

The fact of the matter is that, epistemologically, the discreet subjects of science, technology, engineering and math have very little to do with each other. There is some overlap, but for example, there is as much epistemological overlap between engineering and math as engineering and anthropology.

However, because of corporate propaganda, pushed by people like the Clinton foundation and Bill Gates, they neglect the aspects of engineering that overlap with the liberal arts, to focus entirely on the aspects of engineering that overlap with math and science.

This leads to bad fucking engineers, and an overall underdeveloped understanding of what engineering is. Engineers who literally can’t do basic financial and media analysis. And the same can be said of people in the the other three departments as well.

There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism, and on the flipside there is no ethical production either. I’m not really sure what that means for culpability of individual action. These decisions only matter on a large-group scale.

Still, I’m in an adjacent tech space and I could never stomach working for the MIC. I make sure to apply for the jobs and then tell them to piss off a lot though. That’s a fun waste of their time.

I work in another space that does a lot of work for the public sector, the stuff that helps people. Which you’d think would feel nice, but I’ve learned that all the companies doing this actually spend about half the time just working out how to suck more money from the public fund with lies, lobbying and disinformation campaigns. So it’s still fucking shitty.

Everything is cooked

In all seriousness though , what is happening to STEM seems to parallel what happened with IT jobs in the mid to late 2010s

Academia fulfils a supporting role to capitalist society. But that’s with most fields nowadays.

There are STEM researchers who do good work on documenting the existing oppressive structures that science upholds. Look for indigenous researchers, they have expanded the sciences into new dimensions that most people are blind to. It’s really interesting, and you should use it to organize within your field.

I also graduated into a shit economy. I took a defense contractor job writing training simulators because my alternative was homelessness. After two years I was out.

I wrote about this before; we are in the Bust part of the cycle outlined in The STEM Crisis is a Myth (IEEE, 2013). Here’s some highlights, and remember all of this is from earlier than 2013.

And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.

I was curious, so I found the rest of the relevant part of that intro. here it is with fucked-up formatting:

Such concerns, of course, are not new. The American mathematician who has contributed most to the theories devel¬ oped in this book is undoubtedly Norbert Wiener. In 1947, in the Introduction to his influential book Cybernetics, ’ Wiener wrote:

“Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral posi¬ tion which is, to say the least, not very comfort¬ able. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I have said, embraces techni¬ cal developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these new technical develop¬ ments. They belong to the age, and the most any of us can do by suppression is to put the development of the subject into the hands of the most irrespon¬ sible and most venal of our engineers. The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present wqrk, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and exploitation.”

That was an important statement, but we must now go further. I believe that scientists have an obligation to try to estimate which of the possible results of new technical developments are likely to occur in reality. This cannot be done in a social and political vacuum. In a peaceful, lib¬ erated, nonexploitative society there would be little to fear beneficial applications would be pushed while harmful ones would wither. But in today’s United States it is mainly the government, especially the Pentagon, and the giant corpora¬ tions which have the resources and the desire to exploit ad¬ vanced technology for their own purposes. I do not think the prospects here for the benign application of science are en¬ couraging. Elsewhere in the world the outlook is rarely much better, and sometimes worse. What then can be done? To personally abstain from immediately harmful work is a first step, but no more. Wiener’s emphasis on public education is surely important; the vital decisions must not be left to the experts and rulers, but should be made in a broad political forum. This is beginning to happen in the nuclear energy controversy, for example, despite powerful efforts to exclude the publi c from meaningful participation. Individual scientists and engineers, and several organizations of scientists, have played important roles in this process. Perhaps the key word which must be added to Wiener’s statement is “organize.”* The great day of the dedicated solitary researcher is over, if indeed it ever existed. Now our scientific work is elaborately planned and supported, but
the old individualistic idealogy of “disinterested research” and “knowledge for its own sake” persists. These concepts can serve as intellectual blinders which prevent us from under- standing the social role which we in fact do play as mathematicians, scientists and engineers, and which keep us from working effectively for change. In their stead, con¬ cern for the human consequences of scientific and technologi¬ cal achievement must become part of our working lives, of our teaching and learning, of our professional meetings and writ¬ ing. Only through organized collective action can this be achieved. The goal of controlling and humanizing science will not be fully attained, I believe, until radical changes have been made in the structure of society. I also believe that to wait for that day before beginning to act invites disaster. Fortunately there appear to be a growing number of people, in the U. S. and elsewhere, who are deeply concerned about the social consequences of their scientific work, who are ready to give this concern a major role in their professional lives, and who are getting together in old and new ways to develop their ideas and to put them into practice. Since this must be the starting point, perhaps there is some basis for optimism

Learn to hack, learn to make them pay in your spare time.