Myth: STEM is a meritocracy

DesignerDebates · 2018-04-21T03:10:19+00:00

This post does not seem suited to PPD.

Atlas_B_Shruggin · 2018-04-21T02:56:27+00:00

STEM is objectively better than retail. Almost anyone would rather work in STEM then in retails.

i would rather rather DIE than work in "STEM" and enjoy retail, sales and customer service

am woman

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bonersNlaughs · 2018-04-21T03:18:20+00:00

STEM isn't objectively better than retail. STEM & retail aren't conscious or in any control of what we understand these fields to mean. Marketing is natural for survival, so is market manipulation for the same reason, neither is objectively better.

lost_jellyfish · 2018-04-21T03:24:04+00:00

In software development, you can either do it or you can't. You need the brain and desire that will spend four days digging through thousands of lines of code to find the single misplaced comma that made your webserver start slowing down. People who are on the spectrum are practically the only types who will do that.

There are easier tasks in software development, but you can't just go giving those to less qualified and skilful women. You never know when one of those will turn out to be one of the hard tasks. But more than that, if they fuck it up the consquences can be very expensive. And you don't really know in advance which tasks will be simple. You could just have tasks that turn out to be too difficult get handed over to someone who can actually do the job. But its expensive to do that because of wasted time and its toxic to a strong team culture which is usually necessary in software development.

In general engineering you can't hand any task over to a less qualified person because people will die. Even when engineers do everything right people still die sometimes due to something that was very hard to forsee. That bridge which collapsed recently was possibly due to an engineer incorrectly saying the workers should tighten a single bolt. Its actually takes a lot of very detailed analysis to ensure that all the things around you don't kill someone. Your phone does not catch fire, your car's wheels do not fall off at speed, the balcony rails don't fatigue over ten years and fail unexpectedly, every single component on a 737 can handle worst case vibration modes so an unbalanced fan blade failure still results in the plane landing safely rather than cascading failures that cause the plane to crash. All of those things take mind numbingly detailed analysis by people that really care about getting it right and even a single mistake can result in two hundred dead people.

There in a reason STEM degrees are difficult and do not get dumbed down. And there is a reason only qualified engineers are allowed to do this work.

Generally productivity drops off rapidly as the quality of people drops below a certain threshold. So even though people are cheaper it saves no money. Unqualified people create problems faster than they create solutions so they're a net drain, even if they are cheap. And in real engineering their misakes will causing injuries/death or massive cost overruns though mistakes. Engineering is inherently a high complexity environment so small mistakes have big consequences. You can kill people with a wrong number on a spreadsheet.

Title	Myth: STEM is a meritocracy
Author	Cunari
Upvotes	3
Comments	6
Date	April 21, 2018 2:51 AM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/8dt38c/myth_stem_is_a_meritocracy/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/myth-stem-is-a-meritocracy.262807 https://theredarchive.com/post/262807

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