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.
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.
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.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Malinvestment (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.
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.
Re:more software engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
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, usually around $1000 or more. For what's essentially a couple small pieces of wood bolted together with some metal wires, that's a lot of money.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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'.