Mr. President, There Is No (US) Engineer Shortage 580
McGruber writes "Vivek Wadhwa has written an article in the Washington Post titled, 'Mr. President, there is no engineer shortage,' which addresses the perceived national shortage of engineers. Wadhwa slams China for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to auto mechanics and technicians, yet fails to slam the U.S. for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates. He also says, 'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.'"
Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Insightful)
Shortage of engineering jobs, not of engineers or potential engineers. Its almost as if we moved many of our jobs to other countries for short term profits in exchange for long term economic vitality.
Exactly. If we actually protected our industries from being sent overseas, we would have plenty of things to "engineer." It's kind of hard to need engineers if you don't make anything. We make it easy to import cheap goods from countries like China, but it is almost impossible to sell our own goods to those same countries.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Insightful)
Net result: $14,000 iPads. I'm not sure I like the ramifications of that either.
Two counterarguments:
1. For the vast majority of consumer products, labor is not the largest expense. In addition, not all increased costs of production get reflected in the consumer price - some comes out of profits per unit, because a rational producer doesn't want to reduce the number of units sold too much. So you're probably looking a price of closer to a $1000 or $750 iPad rather than a $500 iPad even if you massively increase the cost of each worker.
2. If it really costs $13,800 to produce an iPad in a way that doesn't ruin the lives of workers, then that's the true cost of an iPad, and any price lower than that is in effect me (as the consumer) and Apple (via their profit margins) stealing value I didn't create from those workers in China. It means there might be fewer iPads in the world, but the world won't end if I don't have an iPad.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think iPad production is ruining Chinese workers lives. If it were (and I see no indication that it is) I would agree... we can get by without a widget that causes real suffering somewhere else.
Perhaps you might have seen this 2 days ago on Slashdot [slashdot.org]: "The report claims that over a 10-year period, 'many people have fallen sick, with a sharp increase in the village's cancer rates.'"
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Sure we can. The question is, will we? Does every American need an iPad? Nope. The iPad could disappear tomorrow and the only people would care are Apple stock holders, Apple employees and the Chinese who manufacture them. The rest of the country would get along just fine.
The same logic applies to just about every consumer widget made in China.
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What boggles my mind is that some how the government can afford to give unemployment to millions of people, but those same people cannot be employed producing things like iPads and everything else that we use domestically.
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Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Informative)
1) Shipping the product across the globe costs a lot of money. You can save money buy building near where you sell it
2) Labor costs are going up year after year, much faster than they are going up here in the US
3) Corruption in China is bad. Your cost savings start going out the window when you have to bribe the local protection racket (aka the local police)
4) Corruption in China is bad. Things can go "missing". Namely factory workers walking off with the goods and plans.
5) Corruption in China is bad. The factory next door has copied your product design and is now making knock off products. Patent protection? Copyright law? Go fuck yourself, you're in China.
So at first, the bean counters might think it's cheaper to manufacture in China, but after you count the beans, they're starting to realize the cost savings just aren't there after having to deal with all the new problems created by being in China. For smaller things, like small electronics, cheap toys, it's still cheaper in China, but larger, bulkier things, like planes, cars, they're all moving out. And companies who are sick and tired of their IP being stolen, they're moving out too.
As wages continue to go up, this trend is going to continue.
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1) Shipping the product across the globe costs a lot of money. You can save money buy building near where you sell it
Actually, that's just totally not true. You can send a shipping container halfway around the world for ~$3,000US. Its scary cheap. And you can fit a truly unbelievable amount of product into a shipping container.
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Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Insightful)
But expand it to everything you use, or even just all your electronics. Cars, trains, planes, your TV, the computer you're using now, your washing machine and dishwasher. The stuff that harvests your food and gets it to you. The elevator, your cellphone... etc. I don't have 300 million dollars to live like I do now, and we're not talking about foregoing one toy. It gets complicated quickly.
If your entire lifestyle is subsidized by borderline slave labor elsewhere, is it moral to continue living it?
And, really, is it? I dare say Americans were living pretty well in the middle of the century, without relying on cheap overseas labor.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Interesting)
But expand it to everything you use, or even just all your electronics. Cars, trains, planes, your TV, the computer you're using now, your washing machine and dishwasher. The stuff that harvests your food and gets it to you. The elevator, your cellphone... etc. I don't have 300 million dollars to live like I do now, and we're not talking about foregoing one toy. It gets complicated quickly.
If your entire lifestyle is subsidized by borderline slave labor elsewhere, is it moral to continue living it?
And, really, is it? I dare say Americans were living pretty well in the middle of the century, without relying on cheap overseas labor.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I have been to China (early 2002), to one of the factories that manufactured the pop-up tents that I designed as a U.S. based mechanical drafter. I was explaining to the supervisor that the welded joints were not always strong enough and some were breaking very easily. He called one of the welders over and was telling him what to do to fix it. This welder had no shoes and no welding helmet. He had a piece of cardboard with a pin-hole in it mounted to his welding gun to block the dangerous glare. He could not make actual eye-contact with me. His eyes had the look of someone who had burned out the center of their field of view. Ever since that trip, I have had a hard time thinking that the USA is making a wise decision to live on the backs of others. I complained to my boss about these conditions and he said that this worker was making more money in a year of welding than he would have been able to make working his whole life elsewhere in native China. Is it moral for us to take advantage of this?
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It's more nuanced than that. While those "borderline slave labor" jobs may be abhorrent to us, in those countries they are actually considered good, desirable jobs. In other words, not giving the people in those countries the "borderline slave labor" jobs consi
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Using the same approach, it can be argued that European colonialism in Africa was a good thing - after all, even for all the abuses, the natives were better off afterwards because they got jobs and infrastructure and tech.
But here's an important difference. When you take advantage of someone's bad situation, you become partly morally responsible for it. Whether you do good or evil depends on the kind of deal you're making with them - is it fair? would you demand the same of them if they were in a position t
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"2) iPad production in China is making those workers lives worse, instead of better."
I say in an act of kindness we fire all those Chinese workers so they starve to death, that is so much better then having them work in a poor working condition. We see the world in our spoiled American Eyes where Jobs such as working at McDonald and getting paid minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. Is the worse way to live. Well it isn't. For the most part these Jobs that the Chinese are doing while there is massive needs for i
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http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/32gb-ipad-2-costs-336-60-to-manufacture-20110314/ [geek.com]
(Estimates the component (326) + manufacturing (10) = 336 as the cost of an ipad 2 to apple.)
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Interesting)
Just read today that Gibson guitars from Nashville are facing their second federal shakedown to make them offshore jobs.
The first time was in 2009, when they were found to be importing wood from Madagascar in contravention of the Lacey Act 2008 Amendment. However, the lawsuit would be dropped in exchange for them offshoring some jobs.
Second time around, they have been raided with computers seized, and wood supplies confiscated. The charges are that India has a law that makes it illegal to export wood that hasn't been "finished" by local workers (varnished, polished etc...) Once again they are being asked to offshore jobs in return for the lawsuit being dropped.
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Please explain, because I don't get it at all:
What does the federal government have to gain by offshoring jobs? And in the case they do, why would they be pressuring a guitar manufacturer who probably employs very few people?
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds crazy but it is documented:
Gibson Guitar Corp. Responds to Federal Raid [gibson.com]
âoeThe Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Departmentâ(TM)s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.â
Gibson Guitar tangled in Madagascar wood law [ultimate-guitar.com]
Gibson has now become the first company in the world to be investigated, though not yet charged, with violating new provisions of a 100-year-old law called the Lacy Act. It says a plant can't be taken or a tree cut in another country against its own laws, and secondly, that illegal plant can't be taken into the United States.
But was the wood found at Gibson cut or traded illegally?
"Historically and currently, the laws of Madagascar have allowed for the exportation of ebony and rosewood in certain finished forms, fingerboards being one," said Bruce Mitchell, Gibson's attorney.
Guitar components called fingerboards were taken in the raid. The inlay and fret lines were added in Nashville, but Gibson said even what appeared to be bare pieces were not unfinished.
"Finished isn't an English dictionary term; it's a legal term in Madagascar. It's defined, and the law specifically defines a fingerboard blank as a finished good," said Juszkiewicz. "It's not illegal. It's not illegal under Madagascar law. You can't argue with the facts."
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You can tell the federal government favors offshoring because it's zealously enforcing an Indian law that it has no obligation to enforce and that the Indians themselves apparently don't care about.
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I dunno, ask Obama. He's the one in charge of the DOJ, and the DOJ submitted a court brief telling Gibson they need to offshore their work. Obama keeps talking about creating jobs, so why does he want to lay off workers in Memphis (who are probably all black, given that city's demographics)?
And what makes you think one of the most prominent guitar makers in the world "probably employs very few people"? Guitars require a lot of labor to make; in case you haven't noticed, the good ones aren't cheap, usuall
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Informative)
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Sorry, no. The DOJ filed court documents telling Gibson they need to offshore their jobs:
http://www.redstate.com/aglanon/2011/08/31/doj-advises-gibson-guitar-to-export-labor/ [redstate.com]
One possible reason:
http://amerpundit.com/2011/08/27/gibson-guitar-competitor-uses-the-same-wood-but-donates-to-democrats/ [amerpundit.com]
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Gibson guitars from Nashville ...
Second time around, they have been raided with computers seized, and wood supplies confiscated. The charges are that India has a law...
So, did Indian authorities execute the raid? WTF are we doing kicking down the doors of our own businesses in search of evidence to support foreign charges? [The answer is: We need foreign law enforcement's cooperation in order to enforce things like unitary taxes. So its a quid pro quo.]
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. If we actually protected our industries from being sent overseas, we would have plenty of things to "engineer." It's kind of hard to need engineers if you don't make anything.
The problem is that the stupid business people have this idea that you can move production overseas, but keep the high-level design in-house. It doesn't really work like that. When you move the actual manufacturing somewhere else, now you don't need your manufacturing or process engineers, who set up your factory, keep it running, and figure out how to improve yield. Those people need to be on-site, so all that work goes overseas along with the factory worker jobs. For a while, you can then have your design engineers in-house sending stuff over to the manufacturing engineers offshore, but that's not really very efficient, since the two need to interact a certain amount to get the best efficiency; so the foreign company brings in their own design engineers, and since they're on-site and more familiar with the manufacturing process (and their salaries are lower), pretty soon the offshore site gives a presentation to the company showing them how much money they can save them by having them outsource all their low-level design work, and just letting them do the really high-level stuff in-house. So, all the software engineers, PCB design engineers, etc. all get laid off and only some high-level "designers" are left, who design the plastics, the overall UI, etc. Of course, this isn't all that efficient either since the high-level guys need to interact with the low-level guys. But the offshore company then starts doing its own high-level design, since they have a whole facility set up with all the engineering and manufacturing expertise to build whatever their designers design, and they make products which compete directly with the original company's products, but are much cheaper. Pretty soon, the original company is out of business, and only the offshore company remains.
Obviously, it's not all black-and-white either; there's lots of places where, instead of having a vertical monopoly, a company will outsource (either offshore or not) certain parts of their work, because it makes more sense to concentrate on their "core competencies" (as one company I worked at called it), and not go to the expense of trying to build up capabilities in other things. So, for instance, an electronics manufacturer may outsource their PCB manufacturing, as it's pretty easy to just have your PCB designers generate some Gerber files and send them to any board house in the world for production. Or, an automaker may outsource design and production of their interior electronics modules (stereo, etc.), and concentrate on engines, suspensions, chasses, and final assembly. Unless your volumes are enormous, it may be cheaper to just outsource certain things like that to a company that specializes in that one thing (like PCB manufacturing), whereas you don't have either the expertise or the equipment and tooling to do it cheaply, and even if you did make that investment, you still wouldn't realize a savings because that task is only one small portion of your overall work.
So obviously, there's a balancing act there; trying to do everything in-house may be too expensive or may not pan out, but outsourcing your "core competencies" isn't a good idea either because you're basically giving away the things that make your company special.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a shortage of engineering jobs paying engineering wages. Due to the rising cost of education, it is hard to find enough low paid engineers and they have to pay their student loans.
Why is education prices high?
Education is expensive for the same reason home prices spiked. There was easy access to low interest government backed loans. If you are out of work, the answer is go back to school and learn a new skill. When you can't find an opening in your new field at your minimum income needs, you become underemployeed in a field other than engineering, while your engineering position goes to someone with lower overhead.
The student loan crises is the next Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac. Only problems are there are no short sales, no ropo, and no forgiveness of debt on student loans. The student loan crises is larger than the housing bubble. Tuition fees are the bubble. Nice if you are a school selling your wares. Bad if you are borrowing money to buy their wares.
The engineers will be working outside of the engineering field, in an under the table payment, so they can eat and not have their wages completely taken away to pay the student loans.
The bubble will collapse when free education of the likes of Kahn Academy become recognized as legitimate schools by employers and the high text book fees and admissions are replaced by on-line content.
For these reasons, I am NOT an Engineer, but I still work in R & D in high tech in the semiconductor industry. I am officially an Engineering Technician. I work under engineers. I have no student loan. I have not had any history of unemployment longer than 7 days. Without the overhead of a big loan, I keep more of my lower take home pay.
I know way too many friends and relatives with student dept that are unemployed, or under employed.
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Wow; I didn't realize that student loan officers were convincing undergrads to take out bigger loans than they needed (and loans that the lenders knew were bigger than the students could afford) just so they could sell them off to bundlers. And that those bundlers didn't care about the possibility of non-payment, because they were just combining them all together, skimming a top tranche off the top, and selling it as a AAA-safe investment, ev
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Those loans are safe for investors. They come with a government guarantee. The next bailout is will come due soon. The bailout will be bigger than Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac combined.
Think about it. The loans are made to people that are out of work. There is no collateral.
When the student remains unemployed after graduation, doesn't graduate, or is under employed, what assets do you have? The only card is the debt is not forgivable. It will haunt them for the remainder of their life.
The losers are t
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Funny)
Because students have to keep taking English over and over again, never quite passing it.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:5, Funny)
I don't no, why are it?
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Does Not Compute (Score:3)
Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.
So...we're not short on engineers...except that we are. At least we're short of excellent engineers and short of willing candidates to be tomorrow's excellent engineers. He whines that China labels sub-par losers and mere technicians as engineers, but then admits we're not putting out our best either. And still contends we're not short.
I'm really not sure how Wadhwa thinks he's disproving or even strongly contrasting Obama's postulate. He's certainly not coming within a thousand miles of justifying his title.
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Maybe so - but facts on the ground in Silicon Valley prove his point.
There are thousands of out-of-work engineers looking for work here in all disciplines. Granted that the valley is not the entire US - but it is certainly one of the premier US technical hubs. Mind you - California prices and anti-business policies don't help any.
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That, and well-paid engineering jobs that earn respect in the public eye. No one blinks at a doctor pulling down $400K after a few years but engineer salaries are often flat across an engineering career. A lot of people think they can do engineering as well as an engineer. no one would operate on them selves, but they think that most of engineering is "common sense" and "anyone can do it". Either that or that engineers are dweebs who deserve no respect.
Re:Does Not Compute (Score:5, Funny)
Can the medic build a sentry gun? No. Can the medic build a dispenser? No. Can the medic build a teleporter? No.
There are some good medics out there, and a good medic/heavy combo can wreck your ass worse than goatse, but most of the time a team will have 2 or 3 engineers and not a single medic.
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Can you live without clean water? Can you live without reliable power? Can you live with bridges that collapse, buildings that pancake? Can your doctor provide "health" without all his / her instruments, MRIs, medicines?
Sorry, but that is one of the most ignorant things I've ever heard. Without good engineering, modern civilization and all the things we take for granted will collapse. Thousands die when engineers fail. Doctors kill retail. Engineers kill wholesale.
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There was another story from the same Wadha guy a short while ago, about age bias in IT? Looks a bit like someone might be hitting on easy tech hot button talking points to get their name out there.
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> some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed
I'm pretty sure I'm potentially the worlds best brain surgeon, although I don't know because I've never studied or practiced anything to do with medicine.So because of my actions there's now a shortage int the US of brain surgeons.
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You too? I myself am potentially one of the worlds' best brain surgeons, although I also potentially dabble in world's best rocket-scientistry and mathematiciancy.
Perhaps we should get together and potentially discuss our potential for world domination.
-dZ.
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Nonono, what he says is that some of our best engineers noticed that they can make more money as a crappy manager than as a good engineer. People follow the money, it's that simple.
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Well, not directly related to TFA, the main problem from what I hear is that there are no decent engineering jobs in the US so any decent or good engineers are finding other lines of work and college students are taking other majors that are either easier and/or will give better paying jobs. You know that huge glut of MBAs in the 1990s and 2000s? So, there is an engineer shortage but, it's a chicken and egg problem now. Until there are engineering jobs, there will be no engineers and right now, unless th
X Engineer (Score:5, Funny)
"fails to slam the US for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, "
I knew a woman who used to demand the title of "Domestic Engineer". Also known as "housewife"
Re:X Engineer (Score:5, Funny)
I knew a woman who used to demand the title of "Domestic Engineer". Also known as "housewife"
You should have told her to go engineer you a sandwich.
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sudo engineer you a sandwich.
Noob.
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sudo engineer you a sandwich.
She's a "Domestic Engineer." Sounds to me like she's already rooted.
like "compuer scientist" (Score:2)
Social Sciences
Computer Science
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Well it depends.
Computer Science can be proper science. Algorithms, Formal Languages et cetera are ultimately based on mathematics and scientific principles. So Computer Science is forgivable.
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"less rigorous science.. Computer Science"
You really think Computer Science is less rigorous? When I went to school at Berkeley most of the professors in computer science had joint appointments in either the Mathematics or Engineering departments, departments not usually considered "less rigorous"
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Computer science isn't less rigorous science, it just isn't science. Depending on your work it's a form of engineering or math, or some combination thereof.
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Oh, that label inflation doesn't end at engineer and scientist. How about "Facility manager"?
Back in my days at Siemens, we used to add "The only manager whose job description actually requires him to do something meaningful".
Lack of Incentive? (Score:2)
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We have a salary problem, simply and plainly. As long as there's more money in lawsuits and shoving money around than in actual, meaningful work, people will sue and manage hedge fonds rather than, well, work.
It is not a matter of job title (Score:2)
Wadhwa slams China for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to auto mechanics and technicians, yet fails to slam the US for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates.
The question is this, do the Chinese count auto mechanics among those they count in their official job numbers as being engineers? I know that the U.S. does not count "sanitation engineers" as "engineers" in its job numbers.
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It's not that we don't have enough engineers... (Score:2)
...we have too many of these types which skews the numbers by comparison:
"Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkley School of Information, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, Exec in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Emory University’s Halle Institute of Global Learnin
Too much Vivek Wadhwa (Score:3)
True. He's a pundit. He did a Y2K COBOL-conversion startup back in the 1990s; that's his contribution to "engineering". His academic positions are "hanger-on" types, not actual professorships.
I've been a visiting scholar at Stanford. It's not a big deal.
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I was curious about that myself. This is the second /. article mentioning him in the last 5 hours or so. How did he manage that, I wonder?
NASA Engineers (Score:5, Informative)
How many NASA guys are now pumping gas in Florida?
Lack of engineers, my ass.
Hey Mr President, we need jobs and stuff to be designed and built. Then you'll see the engineers get back on the grid.
Who is an engineer? (Score:2)
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical and practical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost.[1][2] The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenerare, meaning "to create". - Wikipedia
Anyone else have a definition they would like to bandy about?
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Some are accused of throwing the words around like they don't mean anything, but as you pointed out, sometimes that gets directed at folks that seem to fit the descriptions.
It really is a bit confusing.
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Sounds like what I do. I suggest design changes, and point out critical design flaws all the time. (I have also been given tasks of giving design alternatives in the past.)
Prior to taking this job, I used to custom fab farm equipment and did computer technical work. It is only now that I realize that I was always an engineer.
I am certain that there are no shortages in the total numbers of such people. The problem is that our society looks down on manufacturing and fabrication as being somehow "dirty", a
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The "shortage" is there (Score:5, Insightful)
There is definitely a shortage of engineers. A shortage of engineers that are willing to invest multiple thousands of dollars into a degree so they can watch BA majors rake in 3-5 times what they earn, who are willing to spend the better part of their life paying off their tuition bills while working their ass off, knowing that they, too, could have gotten that BA degree. Probably with less stress and less work.
Yeah, there's a shortage of smart people who are dumb.
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Umm.. engineering is one of the best college majors for return on investment relative to loan cost. About the only ones that are better are law and medical, and both of those take on a much higher risk.
The failure rate for business majors is significantly higher than engineers, even if the possible top rewards are higher.
That said, as someone who interviews entry level software engineers, I'll say only roughly 1/3 of the grads we talk to are people I would ever want to work with.
Re:The "shortage" is there (Score:5, Interesting)
You're in good company. Provided you don't mind my company.
I twisted the rules a little. I put on a suit and now call myself "consultant". Security consultant, to be exact. I work way less than in my programming days, make about three times the salary and am, essentially, peddling common knowledge as gems of insight.
At first I was a little hesitant to actually step that low. Then I met my first boss in this trade and now I know there are people even in my business (not just in management) that know a LOT less than me and make a LOT more money... it kinda puts my own scam into perspective...
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Results may be different depending on your location...
I get my results from the numbers of students at our universities. The business/economy oriented studies are overcrowded, worse than medical and legal even. And while technical/engineering oriented degrees are also on the rise, this is mostly due to a sharp increase of total students (mostly due to influx from abroad, that's what you get if you have government funded schools and universities, my degree cost me about 1000 Euros in tuition bills, ok, plus
Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
I just addressed this problem a few minutes ago, here [slashdot.org]. Too many people with technical degrees feeding the legal, MBA, patent, PHB food chain. Too few doing work.
Anecdote: Back when I joined Boeing (many years ago), we had a 'lead engineer' system. The lead engineer was just the go to guy (women not yet taken seriously there) who had the final word on technical issues within a group. That freed the first level manager to to his reports, go to meetings, etc. He was just (usually) the senior guy in the group who knew the system and could mentor the new hires. Then, it became common practice for management to offload planning, scheduling, employee evaluations and other tasks onto the leads. Pretty soon, that was the majority of their job (the question was: where were the managers going during the day). Management had long since become detached from the technology and it was common for the boss to have no clue about how their system worked. A few leads took voluntary demotions or shifted to different groups to get out from under these duties. Pretty sad. Soon, even the leads had become mini managers and were becoming separated from the actual work going on. In my final position with the company, management brought in a lead engineer who had no clue about what we did or the state of the art in our field of work. All he did was to run around and pester people for formal reports on their schedule projections and progress, and budget inputs in order to assemble his own reports on the same thing (Even though he had no idea what we were doing. He reported that we were through task X because we said we were.).
Everyone wants to get an MBA and be a manager. Because its the hierarchy and that's what dictates reward and respect. We need a system like sports teams have. The coach might be a fat slob and not necessarily the best player in his career. The star players get rewarded commensurate with their skills. The coach is rewarded for the ability to hold the whole thing together. But those are separate skill sets and often its the bad coach that gets sacked more often than the players.
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All about pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Some manager gets a promotion for lowering (apparent) costs by outsourcing, and after they're gone, another gets stuck with fixing it. We are very good at training engineers in foreign countries how to do what we do well, and in that, we have managed to do is to shift the engineering talent overseas, where it also gets more expensive, negating the benefit.
no true engineer (Score:2)
applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates.
OK, who is an engineer? By "sanitation worker" I guess you mean the guy who picks up the trash, right? Boiler operator not an engineer - what sort of boiler? "FaceSpace coder"? Hoho, so amusing. I hate Facebook and Myspace as much as anyone who's been on the Internet more than 10 minutes, but are you suggesting that someone who codes something clever and effective for either is not an engineer? MSCE... irrelevant. I read the In A Nutshell guides for the MSCE exams about 11 years ago but never took them. Wou
This dipshit again? (Score:2)
I have to point out that the author of the article just earned from me a well-deserved title of dipshit [slashdot.org] for spewing uninformed crap about C programmers.
Teachers, too. (Score:2)
There may very well be a shortage of competent teachers, or skilled engineers, but that's an entirely different matter, and increasing the number of degrees handed out will do nothing to fix that. It is as likely to exacerbate the problem. The problem is more in the hiring and employment practices.
Real Engineers... (Score:2)
The problem with the US, is in most aspects we do slap the title Engineer on a lot of titles. In reality only those who hold a P.E. (Professional Engineer -- somebody who is licensed by the State to be an engineer) should be called an Engineer. Sure, lots of people do engineering (Software Engineers, etc), but they are not true engineers...
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In my experience, a PE license is a license to hire non-PEs to do all the engineering, under the PE's "direct supervision and responsibility" (supervision usually amounts to glancing at the work and asking when it will be finished, and responsibility is often figuring out how to wriggle
the gov sold out the uc citizens a long time ago (Score:2)
Best is not the best (Score:3)
says, 'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.'
I know many engineers who took years getting into an engineering position - 2/3rds of my graduating class did not find engineering jobs right out of university. So that's problem #1. Secondly, many engineers excel in a management role - problem solving, critical analysis, and cool under pressure - plus the opportunities that moving into a management role provides is enticing. Finally, 'potential' is not really quantifiable. If he is a brilliant student but has no interpersonal skills, and she is a C+ student but works great within a group, who the better potential engineer? What about someone who can almost instantly understand concepts such as thermodynamic closed systems and who is a deity in a machine shop, but enjoys creating art? What is their potential?
It's a silly argument.
Malinvestment (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no shortage of engineers OR jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
But there is a shortage of people willing to work for the rates that companies want to pay.
The problem is one of expectations. Most adults in the english-speaking world have a self-image of a nice big house, medical care, a partner, alimony, some kids, a pension, a dog, foreign holidays and a car for everyone (except maybe the dog). To support that lifestyle needs a certain, high, level of income.
However those very same people will baulk at paying for goods designed, developed and manufactured by workers who share that aspiration. They all want cheap stuff - and plenty of it. To satisfy that demand and price-point, the manufacturers can only afford to pay their employees enough for a bicycle, rice and vegetables and a family TV set.
SHOW ME THE MONEY! (Score:3)
Seriously, if you reward certain jobs with lots of money, the smart people who don't care what they do will go there. It's the same problem with engineers, general practice physicians, teachers, and nearly every other skilled position. They are paid on a fixed basis, and there is only so much "fixed" to go around. Find some smart kid and tell him he can have 2% of a transaction if he manages it, and show him billions of dollars of transactions a day - then tell him he can get $40/hr to work in the system or 2% of ten million dollars to close a deal, directing the $40/hr people to do all the work. Which will he choose?
If I knew now what I knew in college, I'd have gone Wall Street and been retired by now. As it was I wanted to work for NASA as an aerospace engineer, so I did - and I've got some really cool memories and patches of missions I was in charge of, and a $100k in a 401k that's gone nowhere for the last decade.
Overly Picky HR Is An Issue (Score:5, Interesting)
My own unemployment situation is terminal - but it's a product both of the economy and my inability to relocate. If I'd been free to move to an area where the jobs in my field are three or four years ago, chances are I'd never have become unemployed in the first place. Of course, I've now been unemployed so long that I couldn't even get a job in those areas anymore. However, living where I do there's a major mismatch between what employers seem to want (seems to mainly be enterprise Java coders) and where the bulk of my experience lies (systems engineering). However, while I have the skill set to work with EJB 3 or Spring, that's just a side effect - in my last job, the work I was hired for never really materialized, so I ended up doing a fair bit of Java before they decided that they'd be better off using the money they were paying me to get a couple of dedicated coders, without all of the baggage of my experience doing other stuff, straight out of college.
While I've given up looking, I think a lot of problems lie in the areas of HR, whether in-house or through an agency. With the exception of a few particularly specialized tech-oriented agencies, there's a real disconnect between the people who run the departments who have the vacancy and the people who do the hiring. That's a problem, since it's difficult to convey what's really needed for the job, and where having skills A and B is a valid substitute for C, or cases where you've got experience in D and they don't know that implies your expertise in E and F is off the chart, or where experience in G can get you up and running with H very quickly even if you're not experienced with it. They feed the resume through their buzzword checker, and kick it out if it doesn't include C, E, F and H. So somebody who is quite capable of doing the job doesn't even get through the preliminary culling of resumes. A good tech agency can do a lot there - and I had one for a while, who put me forward for jobs that even though I didn't look like a good match to HR, they knew from extensive interviews and their own expertise what I could and couldn't do.
In the end though, I think a bigger contribution to me stopping looking was the way I'd been treated by employers and potential employers over the years. In my last job, my boss was *so* insistent that I had to get a specific piece of work done by an arbitrary date (arbitrary because it was between Christmas and New Year, and those who were depending on it weren't going to be back in the office until January 5th) that I had to work over Christmas day, and *then* laid me off on January 7th. Then there was the Dream Job where the hiring manager seemed *super* enthusiastic from the first interview, and had me in for a second and third interviews on the next couple of days, then told me that while he couldn't say I had the job since he had to get his manager's manager to sign off on it, it was really just a technicality - then it took 2-3 weeks for them to actually pin down the right people and get them to sign on the dotted line, so long in fact that the company changed its policy so that they would no longer hire people through agencies before it was all done, and after keeping me hanging on with "any day now" for close to a month it was "Sorry, we can't hire you, bye." Of course, the agency that had put me forward had me under an agreement whereby the company in question couldn't hire me directly for a year. Even though the agency went out of business about three months later, it was still too late. That one pretty much broke my spirit completely - it was the only job in my field that I've *ever* seen advertised here (excluding one local company that has as a mandatory requirement experience with a particular DoD standard that you can only get in this state by working for *that* company).
So I gave up. In theory I'm having a go at getting going on my own in iOS/OS X development, trying to funnel what I did for fun in my spare time into a job, but that's getting nowhere. I've spent seven of the last ele
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Two people I know actually, who had actually been in the workforce for a decade, removed all references to their PhDs from their resumes before they managed to land their current jobs. HR in various places was pidgeonhol
more software engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want more software engineers, you can create them trivially : Allocate a half billion dollars or more to an academicly overseen open source initiative, roughly like google's summer of code, but higher salaries dependent upon education level. Voila, instant developers!
If unemployment means drawing down $50k per year working on your own pet project, that'll make the field unbelievably attractive to young people, and keep old folks in the game. And those projects will ocasionally convert into commercial open source companies that employ other developers.
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Re:more software engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:more software engineers (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking as a young engineer, I have to say that most major tech. companies seem to abhor the idea of actually investing time and resources in my generation's workforce.
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It's kind of what happened to Michael Dell. He built his company up to a decent size, and had a very, very good idea for how to run a computer company. Just-in-time manufacturing can be freaking awesome when done right. And it was, for a while.
His company went public, on the Nasdaq, if I remember correctly, and there was a silent change in operations. Not at first, but slowly, over time. His already efficient and extremely good-willed (you couldn't buy that kind of goodwill with a bottomless purse) company
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And how do they get experience when no one wants to employ them? I speak from personal experience. I have both a BS (U of MD) and a Masters (Texas A&M) in Chemical Engineering, and I graduated (both times) to unemployement. I must have sent out close to 1500 resumes. Got 3 interviews and didn't get hired for any of them. Did some time working in law enforcement, and now am underemployed as a computer tech. My degrees were worthless. Part of that was the economy wh
Free markets and jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
'Free market' forces came into play and the next generation of college students avoided the tech industry with its draconian demands on its workforce. Enrollment in CS dropped off, and supply and demand started to revert to the mean. Of course, H1Bs, another sop to the industry, helped kill off the American tech workforce.
Any wonder that there is now a 'shortage' of workers in tech?
Here's a wacky idea, give people back decent pay, job security, company paid health benefits, decent pay, 401k matching funds, decent pay, and cut back on the hours. Did I mention decent pay? Now get a mature management in place and treat the workforce with respect. Does the industry truly believe there's a shortage of people willing to do the work, or are they just pining for the days when they had it so good?
Reminds me of the claims by the farming industry that there's a shortage of Americans who are willing to work as farm workers. Farmers were sneaking low-paid illegal workers into the country, and pretty soon you had to have a migrant workforce to be competitive. Result? Low pay and job losses for American workers. Money leaving farming communities and ending up south of the border. Rural towns drying up, and nobody willing to be honest about the reasons why. So they blame the victims, they claim that Americans are 'not willing to work'.
Re:Free markets and jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
So agree with this. What we're running into isn't that there aren't enough IT / CS / SE people out there, it's that they don't want to work in those fields for the pay that's being provided. If someone with a CS degree doesn't like the pay they're getting, guess what they do? They change fields.
What we are seeing now is nothing more than an attempt to place a false order for IT / CS / SE people, like placing a false order for stock at some ridiculous price. By the time the order looks about to be filled, it gets cancelled. And everyone else is left holding the bag. These people WANT a market distortion, because then they get to pick through the leftovers from the bloodbath, looking for highly-priced programmers working for a song. The problem isn't that there aren't enough programmers, it's that there aren't enough Porsche programmers working for Denny's Grand Slam prices.
You invest 4-5 years of your life in a degree, with the idea that the pay / benefits / etc. is better in your chosen field than in other fields. When those supposed payouts become anything less than trivial, especially with 'market distortions,' we begin to price in RISK. Hence, the payouts now must be higher than before, for someone to invest in said degree. If a half-decent developer was $120,000 / yr, 8 years ago, accounting for inflation and distortion, he / she is now going for $360,000 / yr or more.
Every dime-store business major wants to make the next Facebook these days. Fine, learn to program yourselves, and you'll quickly realize why programmers get paid. The stock options, equity sharing programs, and so on are nice, but since it's been an industry staple to see programmers getting the shaft here, it's not as enticing as before.
Sure, there are some people who like to program just for the giggles of it. And there are some people who run non-profits. They aren't the majority, and you lack any means of motivation at a large company when dealing with said people: remember, they like programming for fun, not because you're paying them, so offering them more money, when the company is in a pinch, may not be a motivating factor. Would you hire a stock-broker who wasn't focused on earning money?
But, it's fun to see this happen again. They placed a false order years ago, they went through the pickings afterwards, then they off-shored until recently, when they saw their bills climbing yet again. Now they want to do local, but still want a 'deal.' Hence, pay us according to the kind of work you want out of us. It's a bloody rule of the market, for God's sake.
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Because Academia doesn't want to do this, lack of money isn't the problem.
Entrenched professors who want to sit on their comfy asses while collecting a decent salary for doing whatever research they want to do rather than teaching which they are supposed to do.
Vocational education actually requires real work, physical labor in almost every case.
Modern Academia wants no part of your dirty shops and construction sites, they also have no interest in providing usefulness.
You want a change in Academia, you're go
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As to "keep old folks in the game" You WILL NOT GET HIRED if you are over 50! Don't challenge me on this, I've lived it, and everybody I know in my age group who has lost their job has experienced the same thing! There are thousands of older engineers, technicians and system administrators who with a little brush-up could be re-integrated into the work force!
The little twenty five year old HR drones have been instructed to shitcan any resumes that appear to come from older workers and if one slips by then
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