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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?"
You can look back on a lifetime of discomfort and wonder what exactly it was that you were thinking...
IMO, the surges in the industry attract a bunch of riff raff, which get purged when times get tough. Not to disparage the articl poster (or is it poseur :-) jest kidding); he may be a great engineer, just too much of the riff raff feeding from the new jobs trough. When it comes to staying employed, it's really about whom you know and your reputation. Anyway, during the slumps is when the real core of the industry gets to innovating the next wave...
cat
What I see disappearing are the median income jobs. It seems like things are becoming more and more polarized w/many many low pay jobs and a few very high paying jobs.
I don't think this is a good trend for our nation as a whole. In the long run it will hurt everyone.
I interview for a new job probably about once a month. The last one was for a single opening w/the USDA for slightly lower than average pay. It was to do development and database administration. There were over 100 applicants. They wanted a programmer that had been an accountant and got it. Being just a plain old programmer hasn't been helping me a lot lately.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I used to be very picky, in hiring, choosing people that really wanted to work in the area we were in (games, etc.). You ought to be really sparked by games. Then I came to appreciate proffesionals that just know how to do their job. It's not my worry how they are motivated, if they can do their jobs.
But still, I think the internet boom had an incredibly bad effect of attracting people that were only in it for the money and the idea that they could pull it. I still suspect that you need to have logic geeks for good software engineering, smart-but-not-into-it really doesn't tend to be good enough in a field where we are still trying to figure out the best practices and everything is controversial. You have to care, because there is no way for an automoton to solve the harder problems.
There was a glut of new engineers, many not really interested in software engineering, though maybe they do want to do a good job. But no one knows what entails "just" doing a "good job" is in software engineering, so I think they are at a great disadvantage because they are not into really working out what works by experimentation and perfecting their practices.
One other thing: the half life of technology is an illusion. Logic is the tool. It's timeless. Software engineers are applied logicians, and it's the same logic forming a substrate underneath all technologies.
If build up a learning curve cost, you have to take a salary cut because you are asking your employer to help educate you, it's worth it for all involved, and if you understand logic then you can be sure that when you do learn, it will be with expertise.
However, I know in the real world people that hire don't always know that.
Frankly, I hope people that like software stick with it. But a lot of people who were so-so on it probably do need to vacate the industry.
-pyrrho
For those who would brave the storm, have you thought about how you would stay valuable in this market? I would be interested to hear if anyone has tried to learn an Indian language in order to communicate with their intercontinental coworkers.
If this becomes a major resume item in the next five to ten years and/or an aspect of computer trade school programs, I would be interested in getting a head start in case the issue becomes reality for me. Now may be the time to buck the trend of securing your job and/or career by simply learning one language and a couple APIs per year, and get down to following the twists and turns of the business that funds the IT industry. You know. For those who are up to it.
PS. I'm Canadian, and I have work from American firms already. To some degree, getting Canadian work is a lesser version of getting Indian work: there may be timezone and communication barriers, but the work is cheaper. When you're from a country with a much smaller economy than the US, it 's often necessary to get American work. Canada's economy makes up for 3% of the world's. Not that much, for the second biggest mass of land in the world, eh? :-)
I'm a self-taught engineer and firmware programmer with no degree. I started out fixing minicomputers in the early 70's and I've never been unemployed longer than 2 months. I look forward to a comfortable retirement in my paid-off house with a full shop/lab in the garage. I'd do it all over again in a second, with the only regret being that I didn't get a degree.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
What the tech industry seriously lacks is any certification that says "This person does quality work." MSCE just says that the person knows how to sell you Microsoft products, CCNA does the same for Cisco... there is no credible certification that says you know when to use a Cisco product, and when all that's really needed is a Linksys.
"Look for the union label" is supposed to convey an image of quality. Especially in freelance fields, being hiring a union member means that the person qualifies for membership, and only performs work that complies with the union standard. More expensive, yeah. But it serves as a great way to convince others that the work complies with standards. "Yeah, we use subcontractors, but everybody we hire is union."
Think about it, how many companies will want a Linux server set up, but then not be willing to pay you to patch it or and don't know how patch it themselves. A union standard could prevent such a situation, by refusing to set up servers for people who do not committ to also have them supported by a union member. Yeah, they could go the cheap way by having non-union techies set it up, but that may hinder the company when trying to impress other companies.
Exactly. Not only that, but there's lots of software fields where hobbyist programmers simply aren't interested in writing free (or Free) software, and an intelligent company would spend their time pursuing those fields instead. I don't see a lot of open-source EDA programs for instance (Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc.).
But if you make a product that tons of people would like and then give it an astronomical price, don't be surprised when someone writes a free version. In this guy's example, he complained about BugZilla. BugZilla was developed to help the development of Mozilla, a very large open-source project. What does this guy expect, all the thousands of developers (paid and unpaid) to go out and purchase ClearDDTS contracts for thousands of dollars per seat? Obviously this is a product with a large appeal but a ridiculous price tag, and it got superceded by a free replacement. Too bad. If some developers could make a similar product for free, Rational obviously was charging far too much.
After getting quite a bit of well deserved criticism, including one guy who offered ITAA a $1000 bounty to find his unemployed programmer buddy a job, they released an update scaling back their optimistic outlook. They still spin the industry as an under-staffed career option among other rosy interpretations. The problem is, these reports are relied on by all sorts of people who have a very real effect on my career opportunities: