Slashdot Mirror
Engineering Careers Short-Circuiting
8BitWimp writes "Today's edition of the Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article discussing the current plight of the U.S. engineering profession. One 29-year-old engineer recently caught in Nortel Network's layoffs said "I spent seven years in school, and it resulted in a six-year career." The article goes on to say a California computer science professor has statistics to show that a programmer's career is not much longer than a pro-football player. What do other Slash-Dot readers think of this situation as related to their programming and engineering careers? Would you pursue the same career path again?"
I still have my Linux Box, my CS degree, the whole nine yards - but I got a trade certification in massage therapy, and I got out of programming. The hours were way too long, and the pay cut from $55,000 a year to $52,000 per year isn't really a pay cut when you look at the hours I work at the hospital. And especially when you look at the amount of education required. Plus, these days I can actually look into the faces of people I've helped. It's so much more rewarding.
/. and I still program. But I can't imagine going up against the H1-B competition again - those guys were working 80 hour weeks for 35k a year... I just can't compete with that.
Course, I still read
Go to http://www.h1b.info to learn how to stop corporations from giving away all of our jobs. Despite the thousands of unemployed American tech workers. Evil CEOs and their cronies keep bringing in cheap labor from 3rd world countries.
And in many ways, this is both bit optimistic and pessimistic a view, both at same time. Optimistic from employer's view, that they save money even in the short run. I'm not convinced even that is the case, but I'm pretty sure they often directly lose in the long run. Some just completely fail in every sense (R & D often just doesn't work with half-assed move; doesn't have to be a move to India, it's enough to move it to another state), some produce lower quality results (support that customers hate), some just seemingly offload higher-paying personnel (ie. in theory support center in India acts as front line support, in practice they mostly forward requests back to more costly organization in USA). [I do have experience on both kinds of failures, observing efforts at 2 of companies I've worked for]
And I guess it's too pessimistic in assuming that all jobs that move to developing countries stay there. I'd guess that many more companies try and see if it works for them, and then make appropriate conclusions. Either smart way, by actually analysing the results, or by stupid way, going out of the business by letting customers draw their conclusions.
Still... if success rate of exporting jobs improves, it will effect US programming jobs. What would be interesting to see is how quick do 'succesful' developing nations (India first, others later?) get overheating effect. It's pretty much inevitable that the potential difference in earnings will become much smaller. That is, salaries in new hot spots will sky-rocket; supply of skilled engineers has its limits everywhere, and it can not be short-circuited. Without multi-year college degrees (or similar experience; I know many skilled developers are to some degree self learner) you won't have skilled enough labour force to get work done. Complexity of systems to be developed has steadily grown over time, roughly at same pace as processes and tools that make development easier have improved. Which means that caliber of programmers to do 'average' job has probably stayed pretty constant.
So I think eventually what goes around, comes around, that in many ways things are cyclic. Even when considering global economics.
No, it won't be enough. My company, which used to hire loads of CS grads from top schools like MIT and Harvard is now only doing tech hiring in India.
Welcome to the joys of global capitalism and the "corporate democracy". For years, the US preached the gospel of global capitalism, and now in the last decade or so, we finally have it.
Your company doesn't care about its employees or about its nation, it cares about profits for its supermen. This is how capitalism works. Now that capitalism has gone essentially global, companies are free to exploit whatever resource they want (be it natural, labor, or otherwise) anywhere on the globe in search of profits for the top dogs.
You are merely a pawn; you are unimportant.
Nationhood and the economies of nations don't even figure into it; the jobs and the products will follow the money. Period. Nations, governments and the electorate gradually lose power, importance and even relevance.
It's easy to see capitalism as benign and standards-raising when it is confined to the boundaries of a single nation. But once it has truly gone global, the devastating effects on individuals and the lives of the common man can be seen more and more clearly.
The root word of 'engineer' as in the one who creates is not engine, its genius.
Not exactly. The first known use of "engineer" in English was in 1839, meaning "locomotive driver." Another word for "locomotive" was "engine." "Engine" comes from the 13th century Old French word engin, meaning skill or cleverness. This word came to be used to describe any trick or device, particularly in the military sense. ("Siege engine," for example, means any device or tactic used to wage war against a fortified position.) Engin came from the Latin ingenium, meaning inborn qualities or characteristics. Ingenium came from the root word gignere, meaning to beget or give birth to.
"Genius" was first used in English to mean "person of natural intelligence or talent" in 1649. It came through Norman French from the Latin word genius, meaning the guardian deity or spirit which watches over a person from birth. Genius also came from gignere, to beget or give birth to, but in a different way.
Gignere, through various circumlocutions, gave us many modern English words: ingenuity, for example, came from Middle French ingénieux, which came from Latin ingeniosus, meaning of good capacity.
So while the words "engineer" and "genius" are indeed related, you have to go back 2,000 years to an extremely distant root word to find the relation. "Engineer," on the other hand, is a first-order derivative from the mechanical sense of "engine."
I write in my journal
Don't expect this to be maintained.
.NET and everything to do with my past experience.
Of my IT friends, 5 of six lost their jobs the last year (including me). Now 4 of us are working - and guess what? Our senior experience helps. A lot.
You may get a kid with the latest technology, but is he going to know how to troubleshoot? To find things on the net? Know the right users? Have a sense of history?
I just finished building an application in the latest tech (.NET sadly). 80% of what I did had NOTHING to do with
Sometimes it takes 10 new kids to equal one old fart. That's not good economic sense.
People will learn. The hard way.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
And in most cases, these fresh-minted graduates are coming out of an ivory-tower development environment, where it doesn't have to work well as long as it shows that the student grasps the concept that the professor is presenting. And the development environments make them used to writing code as if there's no limit on the amount of storage and memory they can use, so their code is elephantine and slow.
I remember a project I worked on involving electronic storage/maintenance of training documents. Because we only had a couple of programmers on the project, part of it was contracted out. When we tested the code on a real set of documents, one of their modules kept blowing up; it turned out that their code defined a fixed-length array for what was an indeterminate number of elements, and the real-world document had half again as many elements as the array had space for. Another module had every single routine allocating the same 3Mb data structure dynamically on entry, even if only 1% of that space was actually being used (3000-element array of a structure with 6 float fields and four 240-character text fields; the text fields were never used). The program I was responsible for, the import-export module, which would pull all of the pieces out of the Oracle dataabase that held them, including all their links, then link them back into the database at another site, was written using linked lists for all of its dynamic storage. When the project was completed and accepted for implementation, the contractor took over maintenance of the code -- and promptly ripped out all of the linked-list code in the import-export module and replaced it with fixed-length arrays -- even though it had already been proven that fixed-length arrays broke on real-world data.
There are morons everywhere; unfortunately, in the programming industry, the morons leave legacies that can survive for years beyond when they depart, with the task of actually fixing those problems hampered by those problems becoming part of accepted corporate practice -- once everybody's gotten used to doing it wrong, you can't change the user interface because all of the non-techies would *gasp* have to learn a new UI...
I will have been employed full-time as a programmer for 20 years come the middle of next month, plus three years as a student contractor before that, and I don't expect to retire until I've got more than 30 years in (actually, I can't retire on 30 years -- I come up a year short of minimum retirement age when I have 30 years); I've seen people burn out on programming, and I've seen people get pushed into management as the only available mobility option. It may keep me from making The Big Bucks(tm), but I don't ever want to get shoved into management; having to deal with the egos and prejudices where I work resembles a kindergarten more than it does an office.
in the aerospace field.
I work in a place where the big crisis is that all of our old engineers are close to retirement or already working after retirement age. When these old guys go, the rest of us are going to be royally screwed because they can solve a problem with a casual glance that would take us less experienced engineers weeks or months.
The Engineers were responsible for the placement and use of seige engines etc. That profession goes right back to Roman times.
That is why we have 'civil engineering' as a profession, it is civil as in non-military. The Institution of Civil Engineers is an independent engineering institution. It was established in 1818, and today represents almost 80,000 professionally qualified civil engineers worldwide.
A person who drives a train is called a train driver. They are not an engineer unless they are a member of a chartered institution (unlikely unless they drive trains for fun). Equally the guy who fixes your car is a mechanic, not an engineer.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I base it on supply and demand. The exact figure is irrelevant. But there is nothing particularly special about Americans, no particular reason why 3rd worlders cannot do the same job for a thousand times less money.
I have a friend (in a 3rd world country) who makes less than $10.00 a month. He manages to survive. But I think he's actually smarter than me. Why should he have to make so little just because of an accident of birth?
He would jump at the chance to make even $5.00 a day. For him it would be an improvement--a very big one. A global minimum wage would just introduce more unemployment into the world (just as it always does to the extent that it's not so low as to be irrelevant). It (any minimum wage) is an absurdly simplistic solution to a complex problem. The results are predictable.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
What a bullshit ! Where are you got those numbers? Or you've been working in indian bodyshop, right?
Normal american companies have less than 5% of H1-B workers usually and those numbers are declining. It's just too much hassle to hire H1-B engineer now..
Your first point:
... he also gave [workers] wages far above what was normal for the day and age... [because] it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Is debatable. You can't compare a graduate from India Institute of Technology to an unemployed MCSE. But that isn't my main point... what I have issue with is:
Back when Henry Ford was starting to build cars
I'm not sure where you read this, but from all accounts I've heard, Henry Ford *tried* to pay his workers low wages.
But they all quit.
After less than a month on the job.
Assembly line work was so bad compared to the other work available at that time, Ford just couldn't keep workers. I'm not talking about one or two people leaving after a couple weeks - I mean EVERYONE - the total employee turnover rate was a couple hundred percent as year. The situation was so bad that it was worth it to pay higher wages just to keep people around.
He paid higher wages because it was in his short-term interest.
I agree with what you said (enough to mark you as a friend in my prefs), but I think the main difference is the type of moving target. Fundamentally, the body doesn't change, but our understanding of it expands. Computers and software (or rather the set of problems which software should solve) are constantly changing. The parent thread (whom you responded to) made a nice analogy supposing if the liver were replaced by a new organ.
Maybe Doctors have more longetivity and market value because they are inherently respected as learned people. Our profession(s) still have the public image of code slingers. Software development is an infant discipline and we may be comparible to the barbers who also did dentistry on the side. I don't mean this as an excuse in any way, but rather as an observation and hope that software development finds its footing like other professions. Afterall, the need for software isn't going away.
-- Solaris Central - http://w