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.'"
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.
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.
Re:Shortage of engineering jobs, (Score:2, Interesting)
If it were only that easy. Gibson has the paperwork, and the only people who are complaining are in the Justice Dept. What you won't read in the Newspapers or hear on CNN or MSNBC is that Gibson donates to (R) party, and this is nothing more than political extortion, Chicago style.
If this was GWB administration doing this, you bet this would be going differently in the press.
http://landmarkreport.com/andrew/2011/08/ceo-of-gibson-guitar-a-republican-donor/ [landmarkreport.com]
The question is, do you believe that Obama is just as bad as GWB yet?
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.
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
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.
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...
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?
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.