You wrote "The comment was clearly directed at the programming profession."

No, it is not clear. The SMH article was on STEM. The thread concerns STEM. The IEEE position you doubted is (almost certianly) about STEM (see https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-... ). You presented a data point about programming, which is part of STEM. Nowhere did you say that the data point was only meant to be restricted to programming.

Even then, you defined it as those tech companies which pay high wages. There are plenty of tech companies which do not pay high wages. (Especially if your definition of "tech" includes things like "biotech", though I know that's not what you mean.)

Here's another IEEE piece, this one a podcast interview (with transcript) from "Techwise Conversations" titled "Why Bad Jobs-or No Jobs-Happen to Good Workers" from 2012, at https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-b... . It concerns Peter Cappelli's book 'Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It.'

You ask "You're not seriously expecting a business to provide a 4-year degree program to train their engineers?" That's of course silly. A 4-year liberal arts degree in computer science is different than job training. Few companies will require me to learn a foreign language, or take a fine arts course, as part of becoming a software developer. Or, as you point out, take a history course. Which is all fine. Colleges aren't trade schools. (And I think we need more trade schools.)

Instead, I'll quote that podcast:

> Well, the employers, if you look at what the hiring managers are saying and what they’re looking for, they’re not, for the most part, hiring people out of college anyway or out of high school. What they want is three to five years’ experience. So the shortages that they report, the difficulty hiring, are for people who have quite specific skills, and those skills are work-experience based.

So no, most employers are NOT looking for the equivalent of someone of a 4-year degree in the first place, so they aren't going to pay for someone's college degree.

In fact, that podcast concurs with my point, which you think is incredible:

> the shortfall is in giving people experience, taking people out of school who are bright and capable, and giving them the basics and getting them up to speed in these work-based skills. And the problem is, employers a generation ago used to do this routinely; now, virtually none of them are willing to do it.

Cappelli makes the argument (which I hadn't heard before):

> the craziest thing about high tech is the Silicon Valley model, which sort of became dominant in the U.S., replaced the model where IT people used to be groomed and trained from within. And the Silicon Valley model of hiring just in time for what you need came about largely because they were able to poach talent away from these bigger companies that had spent a lot of time training and developing people.

What I (and hprotagonist) wrote here is nothing exotic or abnormal in the discussions about the "myth" of the need for more STEM training. Nor does it ignore basic economics like you think it does.

Since you are so incredulous that the IEEE (or at least articles in the IEEE) can have a position which can be summarized as "there is no shortage and certainly no skills gap; employers just won't pay you what you're worth and people won't work for peanuts." , and yet it's so easy for me to find IEEE articles making that point, suggests that you need to take a closer look at what the IEEE has written on the topic before making such a blanket response, or characterizing our viewpoints as fundamentally flawed from an economics perspective.