Slashdot Mirror
NSF Reports No Geek Shortage
Baldrson writes "The NSF's report titled 'Graduate Enrollment in Science and Engineering Programs Up in 2003, But Declines for First-Time Foreign Students' (a pdf of the report released for the first time last month) is now available online. In an analysis of the report, Edwin S. Rubenstein of ESR Research states of these latest figures: '4.2 percent of science and engineering PhDs work outside their field of training, chiefly for financial reasons. This further weakens corporate America's claim of a shortage of high-tech workers.'" Interesting to see how things have changed since then.
I don't think corporations really complained about a shortage of high-tech workers.
It was *cheap* high-tech workers that they said were in short supply...
Just look at how many people read slashdot.
That's Edwin S. Rubenstein, the other ESR!
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Perhaps the shortage of high tech workers is due to the increasing demands for longer periods of schooling - the mandatory masters and doctorates that have replaced the undergraduate degrees of the past.
My other sig is funny.
or are the trolls getting lazier?
they say there's no shortage but the price is still $70 per barrel of geeks!
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
I'm a student at Carnegie Mellon, and I can assure you that there is no shortage of geeks in the near future.
In Canada atleast, it doesn't feel like there's any shortage in tech workers. The salaries for new graduates keeps going down each year - eventhough the cost of living and the cost of education keeps going up every year.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
So tell me how many PhD's in those fields there are. There can't be that many people with doctorates out there. How much could 4% of that possibly be? and what is that realtive to those with PhD's in other fields?
MS almost exclusively hires only graduates
I meant fresh graduates, just out of college. (And I think the grammer is messed up in that sentence, but I am too lazy to fix it.)
Table-ized A.I.
Personally, I know many people in my field of science who are doing other things because of the lack of academic jobs. Big pharmaceuticals and other corporations can use people with graduate degrees in almost any kind of science, because they have the statistical and/or logical toolkits that can be applied to other work. So these folks would be counted as doing work "outside their field of training", and are doing so because of "greater financial opportunities".
If anything, though, this doesn't mean there is a shortage of jobs for science and engineering degrees. It means that there are a shortage of people qualified to do trained statistics and problem-solving, and corporations are willing to pay a premium to raid surplus academics to get them.
--JohnPhysics produces in the neighborhood of 1200-1500/year. It's on the decline lately.
m l
you can see some statistics (including production vs time) here: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/emptrends.ht
Chemistry probably produces more, and Biology/Biochem even more than that.
The bottom line is that science and technology cannot be our comparative advantage anymore. That is why the dismal PhD pay. The laws of physics and science are the same the world over, but salaries are not.
Allegedly "innovation" is our comparative advantage, but are 5 Indians for the same price really going to have less total good ideas than one US citizen? This is an insult to other cultures and nations.
I am not sure what the US's comparative advantage is anymore. Cheesy advertizing and manipulative deal-making? It might be, but it is not something to be proud of.
Table-ized A.I.
You only have to read the articles. Every one of them has something to do with race and how white Americans are getting screwed by black/brown/yellow people.
I'm surprised they manage to get a front page story on Slashdot.
WTF? There were geeks in the NSF??? I thought you have to stay below the iq of moss to become a functioning member of their org...
"Computer sciences enrollment dropped 3 percent from the previous year, the first decrease in that field since 1995."
If US industry really needs more people with advanced degrees, then perhaps they should help fund our efforts to get advanced degrees.
I'm almost finished with my Masters in ECE, but it's been a rather large financial sacrifice. Of course, I started on my Master's degree when the economy was in the tank and there really weren't any engineering jobs to be had anyway. In the last year that situation has started to change and more jobs are out there. I've thought about going on for a PhD, but after 3 years of paying for my Master's I really need to go out and work for a few years.
We hear a lot from the likes of Gates and Groves about how their respective companies (Microsoft and Intel) need more people with advanced degrees and then bemoaning the fact that Americans aren't going to school to get those advanced degrees. Well, the big problem is money. When you finish your Bachelor's degree these days you've got a pretty good amount of school loan debt to pay off so you go to work in industry (and going to work in Industry right after getting your Bachelor's is a good thing IMHO: it gives you much needed real world experience you wouldn't get if you just continue straight away to grad school). After a few years you've got a house, cars, a spouse and maybe a kid or two. At this point going back to grad school is very difficult, you take a huge financial hit by doing so.
So, if industry really wants more PhD's then they should put their money where their mouth is and fund more of us. A lot of us would be more than willing to work on a doctorate if we knew that we would be able to make it financially if we did go back to school. Companies should offer funding in exchange for a commitment to work for the company for X number of years after finishing the degree. The funded student would also agree to work perhaps part time or during the summers at said company. Funding should include health insurance - this is a must; how is someone who has a house, spouse and kids going to be able to get by without health insurance.
I really don't buy the whole idea that the reason we don't get enough applicants for advanced degrees is because of poor highschool education levels in the US. You don't go directly from highschool to an advanced degree. Usually you get a bachelor's first and then (as I've suggested above) you work in industry for 5 or 10 years and then consider getting a Master's or PhD - this is often the way it works. Besides, having that 5 or 10 (or more) years of real-world experience and then going on to grad school makes you much more valuable than someone who goes directly to grad school after the bachelor's degree.
There are tons of reasons why people change their career. If less than 1 in 20 science and engineering Ph.D.'s work outside their field, there must be tremendous demand for them. Hell, more than 5% of the science and engineering Ph.D.'s I know are incompetent.
I find this "analysis" superficial and self-serving. A vocal segment of the high-tech community, including, evidently, the author of this piece, is protectionist and consistently opposes higher visa limits for foreign workers. I, personally, think this is short-sighted; I think continued immigration of the best and brightest from the rest of the world is a positive for the US. But that's not what I'm criticizing in the report.
The author attempts to argue that American students are becoming more interested in engineering, and that foreign students are less so, based on the enrollment numbers into US graduate programs, and thus we don't need more foreign workers. From my experience as a professor, I offer an alternate explanation:
I feel this "analysis" is far from objective; the Hudson Institute, a far-right think tank, evidently has quite the axe to grind with immigration (just as they do with Social Security and organic foods).
since I am finishing a Ph.D in evolutionnary biology but am passioned by cooking, gaming, and technology! How could I go on to be a faculty staff?????? at least this adventure (that is what a Ph.D. is for those of you who don't know!) will haw been worth my whyle! indeed, I have learned much sciencewise and humanwise! althougth I am feed up with this academic stuff (in a professionnal sort of way) I am veryu glad to have gone trougth it! (sorry for the english mistakes, I am french canadian, québécois, if you like!)
Do the Slashdot editors even check the nature of the sites that are linked to? Apparently, VDare.com is an extremely biased site that shouldn't be linked to. What happened to objectivity? What if we started linking to KKK sites?
For one thing, this tells alot about the poster of article.
There is a glut of Ph.D's in the US creating an over-competitive environment that's drastically deflating the pay level. What really should be done, is restricting the Ph.D's that schools push out to help overcompensate for the over inflation. But this won't happen. Why? Grad students are cheap labor for PI's. Schools accept grad students not because they are interesting in training and bringing more qualified people into the field, but rather because they need them to work for PI's. A PI is only as good as his/her grad students. If you add in a post-doc period, you are looking at, in some cases, 10+ years (a figure nowadays that has been increasing as many people are having to do multiple post-docs) of getting paid 1/2 of what you would have gotten if you had just gone straight into industry. Mind you, this isn't a bread and butter time either. This is a period where (in most cases), people are spending ridiculous hours working weekends/nights trying desperately to get data. And for what? An even more competitive academic environment where the positions to applicants ratio is (in some fields) 1:10. We haven't even gotten to the whole tenure track part. Add in all these factors and it is not surprising that 1 in 3 of these students never even complete their graduate "training"--most fighting for a masters.
I hate to seem pessimistic, but this article is long overdue, and at the same time, disturbing. We are flooding the market with ambitious bright individuals with promises of great prestige and fortune.
I really think they need to make a "Sims:The rise to professor" game depicting the rather long and gruesome journey to professorship. It would have to be realistic, so on average, you should only be winning, say, 5% of the time. Most people don't realize how different the actual and perceived opinion of prospective graduate students is from the actual reality of academia. I'm actually quite surprised that only 4-5% of Ph.D's are working outside their field (mind you, this figure doesn't include people that wanted to be in academia but couldn't get a position and ended up in industry). Sadly, I know a few that are working in simple jobs as security guards.
(And before someone jumps down my throat saying that I am bitter because I had a bad experience--I actually haven't. However, I know many more that have, and while I can't empathize (as much) with them, I certainly sympathize).
4.2 percent of science and engineering PhDs work outside their field of training, chiefly for financial reasons
Sounds like someone is off by an order of magnitude?
Well, there would obviously be a large shortage of racist sites. Ah the power of the slashdot effect.
If there is no shortage of IT/Tech workers then why is it that I can't find a half-way decent IT person at my organization? Why is it that at a recent multi-agency training session the one IT person attending was completely clueless about the most basic network stuff? Why is it that I am better off being my own IT person (for which I have no formal training) than I am to rely on anyone remotely associated with any IT department for any company I've ever worked for? I know there are still smart IT geeks out there, I just want to know where they are because this seems to be the only place I can find any and no one here is going to do a darn thing about any of my IT issues.
I sure hope everyone elses experience with their IT departments is better than mine. It just seems that the longer I hang around the worse the IT personnel have become. I don't believe the shortage of IT workers can be determined by university registrations as many are no longer working in the industry because they became disgruntled and found they could do other things for similar or more money and be much happier at it while getting their geeky IT fill on their friends and relatives PC's and home networks. The only shortage in the IT industry is in the salary, benefits, and respect afforded those willing to work in IT who have the knowledge to actually handle what's going on and manage a business' IT infrastructure.
I'm going to put some noses out of joint here, but education in the USA sucks, and it doesn't really get better until you've got all the way through a PhD programme. Sure, there are good schools, but they aren't exactly in the majority. They also have to deal with incoming students who were given a woeful high school education, which has an effect that ripples through the entire system. Also, schools here don't seem to see it as their job to try teach you and flunk you. The number of people that make it through such as system is only vaguely proportional to the number of people you can employ for the jobs they are technically trained for.
I've been involved in the hiring process, although I am an engineer. Generally, if you are hiring someone with less than a PhD, an H1B applicant will often be a better bet than someone local with an "equivalent" degree. You'll pay more and it will be worth it. Amusingly, when applying for an H1B, your foreign degree is often deemed by the government to be equivalent to an inferior local degree.
Also, I suspect that the extra effort an applicant has to go to to get a job overseas is a good filter - you only get the bright and motivated who have passed the extra hurdles.
Anyone who says that H1Bs are cheap hasn't checked the lawyers bills that are required to get them into the country (and doesn't count in the cost of a six to nine month wait before they arrive). Also, companies are obligated to pay a minimum salary set by the government. For example, an "Embedded Software Programmer" gets > $70K per year. I know because I was classified as that once.
I am an H1B worker, and get paid quite a lot better than most, and usually have three or four job offers on the table regardless of my job status. I realise I am just a single data point, but the job market I see isn't one that thinks it can make do with local talent and education systems. Not all foreign degrees are equal, but HR will know how to rank them.
To be fair, the calibre of a person is often more important than their education, but education systems should only allow high-calibre people to do well. In other words, when you are hiring you want a filter that tells you when someone is high-calibre, and the US education system isn't it.
---
Science & Engineering != "high tech". This summary lumps in things such as astronomy, oceanography, psychology, economics, etc as high tech, which is absurd.
... enrollment in computer science declined 3% two years ago according to the linked pdf.
Furthermore, the only calls for "high tech workers" I've seen is for computer programmers. And hey, what do you know
The poster also neglected to consider that a "shortage" merely means that there are fewer people available than positions are open -- ie: they failed to compare enrollement to changes in the number of available conditions. If enrollment had increased by 10%, but open positions increased by 30%, then there would still be a shortage.
Additionally, the pool of available workers IN the United States INCLUDES "foreign students." They've already got green cards, and don't count against the H1B quota cap.
Finally, the fact that we've got fewer foreign students reflects somewhat on the quality of education available here relative to wherever it is they're coming from -- meaning that workers here are losing some of their competative advantage relative to people educated in foreign countries.
The only thing this document does is counter the point the original poster is trying to make.
As I have noted on slashdot before, as of right now, there is no reason for an American to pursue a PhD in science or engineering. The same person will make much more money as a doctor or lawyer, for example.
Why the difference?
Simple - your doctor or lawyer, almost by the definition of their job, must be local. They are relatively immune to competition from foreigners. This is not true for scientists, who right now are most definitely competing with very able Chinese, Indians, etc.
That being said, the usual panic cry of "keep out the foreigners" is also wrong. Each and every American scientist is competing with each and every foreign scientist in his or her field. This is true regardless of who hires them or where they work. Which do you think is best for America?
1: An American company hires the Chinese scientist, sponsers his visa and brings him to the US.
2: An American company hires the Chinese scientist, but the scientist works in the company's Chinese division.
3: A foreign company hires the Chinese scientist, and employs him overseas.
I hope you realize the first option is the best. There is nothing the government can do to stop the competition created by these new scientists, and nothing it can do to prevent wage deflation because of it. It should give up trying.
If, for national security reasons or some other random excuse, the government feels it important to have lots of native-born scientists, it will have to tackle the problem at the graduate level. Asking talented 22-30 year olds to slog through 6+ years of 70h weeks for a wage topped by the guy cleaning the toilets, while a lawyer is making $75k at age 25, is pure silliness. Making graduate school less financially miserable would be a start. Of course, it is too late for me.
I really don't buy the whole idea that the reason we don't get enough applicants for advanced degrees is because of poor highschool education levels in the US. You don't go directly from highschool to an advanced degree. Usually you get a bachelor's first and then (as I've suggested above) you work in industry for 5 or 10 years and then consider getting a Master's or PhD - this is often the way it works. Besides, having that 5 or 10 (or more) years of real-world experience and then going on to grad school makes you much more valuable than someone who goes directly to grad school after the bachelor's degree.
Like the subject says, it's *much* tougher to get a graduate degree in Comp Sci. I have my undergrad in business, but I worked as an IT geek, a programmer, and eventually, a senior database developer for several years. Recently, I looked into going back to school for a Masters in Comp Sci. What I found out was that unless you have an undergrad degree in Comp Sci, it's pretty much impossible to get a Masters. The schools I asked about it said that these "How do Compilers Work" and "What is a CPU?" classes were require pre-requisites, but I couldn't go back to get a second undergrad degree. My only choice to even be allowed to APPLY for a Masters was first to go back and do about 4-5 years of Continuing Education. That's a hell of a risk, so I said, "fuck it". So much for well-rounded Comp Sci graduates...
Background: I'm an engineering grad student, and have TA'd/taught classes at 3 schools. I've found that the schools without grade inflation (courses graded on a curve, almost allways a C+ average) had a much higher percentage of students excited to be engineers. This (geekily enough) lead to alot of late night brainstorming sessions over beer, and as a result ideas were shared across majors, and still are. But students who werent excited about engineering were weeded out of the programs quickly (we gradauted 11 out of 35). Fast forward to the grad school I'm at. engineering classes are curved so that almost everyone gets a B+ or higher. The students dont work, dont learn, and an insanely small percentage of undergrads here actually go on to be engineers. I found the same thing at another school I visited for 1 summer. For the record, both schools are considered top 10 schools for undergrads in various news reports, and are ranked similarly for both graduate and undergraduate engineering.
Re: resident vs non-resident enrollments...
Supply and demand, simple as that. Resident tuition is also generally remarkably lower than non-resident tuition. Most legislatures demand that the state's colleges charge "full price" tuition to non-residents. Because resident tuition is cheap, cost of living has a higher probability of being cheap, more in-state students apply for limited supply of enrollment slots. Because $$$ then isn't a limiting factor, schools have no choice but to make resident enrollment standards higher. Non-resident applicants have $$$ as a main limiting factor, not enrollment slots, so, to encourage more non-resident students (and, their "full tuition" tuitions...), enrollment standards are lower. Esecially for (wealthy) foreign students.
Politics has a hand in it as well. It looks good for legislators and governors to be able to brag to their colleagues (and/or fend off the PC Police) that they have a "diverse and broad" student population. Fill in your favorite minority groups.
I feel the main issue, is not the shortage of geeks, but an excess of value put on jocks, as long as people who like to "administer business" without giving a damn about what business it is have power it will be hard for young people to understand the value of being passionate about anything.
:-)
:-)
What is needed is a concerted plan to oust the jocks
When all the top jobs are occupied by strange, funky propeller headed geeks, geekettes and assorted nerds, the numbers will go up.
Too much god damn blinking in that troll article.
Someone mod this shit down.
Newbie, stay in a conversation about tech.
... better - That PHB is one with an education degree, you know, and more experience than the teachers below. Hardly a PHB.
Yes, but a conversation allows for lateral moves, yes? In any case having criticized him for being off topic, you then engage him point by point. What's up with that?
Errors with your points (my wife works in admin for school district):
And so you get the party line from management, yes? So I thought I'd add a few remarks from a real teacher.
1 - at least one PHB (or PhD) - First, not different every year. Only when change dictated by state. One PHB? You do realize that the principals almost always PhD's in education, not MBA's?
No, every two or three years as they get their vitas together. Still a source of disorder.
2 - endless mandatory meetings - No. Mandatory meetings are usually one per quarter, and they get the day and are paid travel. Every day is a blatent lie, plus it's not held in the county seat.
Not a blatant lie; that would be an example of hyperbole. The professional development overhead in my state (Texas) is not trivial.
3 - PHBs telling
Some are assuredly PHB's. Parent's wife I'm sure is one of the good ones I'm sure, but some are entirely as clueless and mean as Dilbert's boss.
4 - Time at the job is valued more - That's called tenure. It's the largest problem with ridding the system of bad teachers. When was the last time you knew a tech with tenure?
Score one there, kinda. We do have a much better quality of life than many tech workers (except perhaps our own). In particular, anyone who cares about raising their family (read: women) can be forgiven for finding tech a barren and unlovley place, and preferring the public schools. And I haven't noticed managers having much difficulty dislodging bad teachers, but that may be just my environment.
5 - can't move up to another position - A great display of your ignorance about the school systems. The organization is thus: Principal and staff followed immediately by a flat level of all the teachers (not University system). No team leaders, no senior programmers, no analysts; none of the hierarchy you see in many businesse
Score one there, sorta. No, you don't move up by getting other teacher's jobs. But Grandparent is basically correct that you can't go up the ladder as a teacher very readily. It takes a vast committment of time and money and bending your head around the principalship (which ain't for everyone). Though the barriers to entry seem (to me) quite high, the compensations must be nice; the competition for principalships is fierce.
Instapundit
It looks to me that science and engineering in the U.S. is on the collpse, and has no coming shortages.
Population grows by ~2.85% per year. So substract 2.8 percent from each year and you will see that we are producing about the same amount of engineers per capita since the 70's. This occurs as other countries expand science and engineering.
This is mainly the result of false government set exchange rates with other countries. I.E. a dollar in India buys a bunch more than it does in the U.S. when it should be the same.
The Fascist Police state will destroy the U.S. as a result. Leaving the U.S. as a slave state of India and China along with the rest of the world.
--
Len of Len Corp.
At least according to large companies like Intel and Microsoft. This helps them justify to the government why the H1B visa program needs to be expanded. It's all so they can continue to get cheap labor.
This is very reminiscent of the kind of comment you see over mass (mostly illegal) immigration of low-wage workers from Mexico. While I think I'm fairly moderate on that debate (I'm not against allowing more immigration per se, but I think it's up to the US voters to decide how much they want - just because lots of people want to enter the country does not oblige anyone to let them or to treat illegal immigration as anything other than illegal.), I get extremely annoyed by the argument that "These people do the jobs no American wants to do".
It would be much more accurate to say "these people do the jobs no American wants to do *at that wage*". If no one wants to do the job for the money you're offering, then you should offer more or get into another business. Yes, if there wasn't a ready supply of illegal immigrants then maybe the cost of e.g. oranges would go up. But if picking them is a long, hot, tough job that has to be done by hand, and which people who are in the US legally are reluctant to do for slave wages, then I think it *should* go up.
I guess the largest US tech company agrees .
This is FAR from true at my Alma Mater. At RPI, the graduate student enrollment is down nearly 40% over the last 5 years. This is due to the new Presidents policies to attract only students that will "further the research goals of the institution" while actively discouraging everyone else. The graduate tuition for part-time students (like me) has doubled in the past few years (from $700/cr to $1350/cr). They have fostered all the buzzword programs like Biotech and Nanotech at the expense of traditional programs. My program, Electric Power, went from being an autonomous department to being folded in to ECSE to nearly non-existant in the span of four years. All of this was done by the short-sighted decrees of Ms. Jackson, the highest compensated president of any college or university. In addition, the US News & World Report rankings have shown a steady decline since her reign began. In short, if you're thinking about RPI for undergrad or graduate study in Engineering, forget about it. The place has gone to shit. I can't get any of the courses I need to finish my Master's in Electric Power, but I can take a class in "Deep Listening" or "Advanced Deep Listening". Van Rensselaer is probably turning over in his grave.
I don't know what universe you crawled out of, but it bears no resemblence to mine....
1 - The principals are usually either lowly teachers (at most Masters-level graduates) or other random people that the school board happens to like. These people generally have no management skills or experience. Some of them don't know how to deal with the politics that can be avoided by lowly teachers. Some of them let the promotion go to their head and micromanage everything (after all they are the principal so they must know how things work better than those that didn't). For the type of job principals do, MBA's would probably be better able to deal with the administrative and political aspects and would be less likely to micromanage.
2 - The mandatory meetings (around here) are usually weekly to biweekly affairs that can last 3 or 4 hours. The non-hierarchal structure of school organization means that everything that needs to be discussed will be discussed during these meetings, whether its relevant to all members or not. This means that most of this meeting is completely irrelevant to the individuals present.
3 - The principal as more experience at what? Teaching 3rd graders math? 7th Grader's Spanish? Blind children colors? The fact is the principal is not all-knowing and probably only knows a bit about the specific subjects and grades that they taught. That they generally wave this around as generic years that are applicable from Algebra to Special Education only makes it worse.
4 - Tenure is meant to save good teachers from the whims of the current principal and school board. It accomplishes this job pretty well, but those untenured few who happen to come up for tenure at the wrong time are more likely to get fired than tenured (more likely than not for political reasons). And of course it also may keep bad teachers around too, but that was just a side effect...
5 - Sometimes there are team leaders. In primary schools, where every subject is generally taught by a single teacher, teachers are divided into grades and a leader is chosen. In schools where teachers only teach one subject, they are divided into departments and a leader is chosen. Of course being a team leader doesn't mean you get paid more, it only means you carry more responsibilities. Of course even though they're divided into teams, they all have to go to mandatory meetings to discuss everything...
Since 9/11 however, things have tightened up at the border. The result is that now the farmers are crying about how they can't find farmworkers.
What they are really saying is that they can't find CHEAP farmworkers. There are plenty of people who are willing to work; just not at the wages that the farmers are willing to pay. Construction firms apparently come down to the farms, offer more money, and off go the farmworkers.
So here's another clear example that what companies want is the cheapest labor that they can get away with, in the form of bringing in immigrants - no matter what it takes. And these companies truly start crying when they can't get bring in these people who are willing to work for peanuts.
Here's the URL of the article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/1267833 5.htm
If you hit an issue with registeration there, bugmenot.com works just fine. But in any case, here's a copy from google's cache:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:IZeb9ugcOlIJ:ww w.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/12678335.htm+sit e:mercurynews.com+farm+labor+shortage
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
of US technical workers is just that, a myth? The problem is that business would rather hire low-cost foreign labor, either here or abroad, than train their own loyal staff members, or hire domestically, at domestic wages that reflect the cost of living in the US. However, they have no problem with charging domestic rates for their services, and freezing out foreign firms when it comes to providing many much-needed inexpensive services in the US (like blocking access to identical, but low-cost prescription drugs, inexpensive hardware from abroad, etc.) Working Americans living and working abroad are also expected to pay US taxes! Meanwhile, many of the nations richest pay little or no taxes, by manipulating the rules to exploit loopholes.
I work right in tech central, Silicon Valley. I'm one of the little peons, not the management who does hiring.
I can tell you from our own company experience, and having dealt with our vendors and customers, there IS DEFINITELY A SHORTAGE.
We're not talking about a shortage of "cheap" labour. We're talking about a shortage of QUALIFIED labour. There are still a ton of so-called "engineers" out there who should never, ever have been hired in the first place (and I have no idea how they graduated). I've talked to guys with 20 years in the industry, worked for "names" like Fairchild, National, Intel, etc. and yet, I really wonder how they keep their jobs. I'd hire a new grad. over them any day. That's how bad some of them are.
I have no shortage of head hunters asking for my skills all the time. My friends and acquaintences have no problems finding WELL PAYING jobs in the industry.
I find that our company, like many others, are quite willing to pay handsomely for the right person with good skills, that's because they are very rare. When I was interviewing, they straight out told me that I was the first decent guy they talked to after a long string of boneheads that came along.
(Oh, and by the way, to those who think you don't need to go to university or get some sort of advanced training to be a good engineer....either you are a genius or you're not doing any real engineering work. Just being able to hack out software code doesn't count as engineering).
There's still plenty of engineers in town. But if you haven't noticed, most of them are not US trained.
(Even myself, I hail from up north of the border).
As much as I hate to admit, the problem is not the quantity but the quality of those tech workers. Over the last 10 years or so I am willing to bet that less than 10% of programmers, sysadmins etc even have a clue. How many of those around you can even program a web application or even know basic html dialect. How many of them know that a web server runs on port 80 or even what a port is? How many are fluent in more than one structured language? How many of them even know how to formulate a simple sql query. How many of them spend a hour or so every night keeping on top of the skills that make them desireable in the workplace.
Yes the H1B visa program needs to be killed, it's only purpose is to cheapen the workforce. By doing so you will provide incentive to perhaps elevate these marginal techies.
Got Code?
This is just my opinion, based on personal experience. Companies I have worked for do not realize the value of the data they keep. As such, they do not see the value in maintaining high-quality facilities to maintain that data. They pay for servers and big ERPs, because the CFO and his friends at $LARGE_CONSULTING_FIRM told them to, but mining the data in those servers is considered too expensive to do and support, so they don't do it. Customizing a user interface to let workers input and retrieve information more efficiently is likewise too expensive to implement and support. Since most white-collar joobs are salaried (i.e., no overtime) in the US, the waste of employee time is not a 'cost' per se - they'll have to spend whatever time it takes to do their jobs, no matter how bad their IT support infrastructure is.
For the above reasons, companies don't need to hire quality IT people - an A+, MCSE is sufficient to do most things a business 'needs' done. Managers have no idea what solid infrastructure and intelligent, IT savvy employees and good Engineering staff can do.
I am right now fighting to use FoxPro in my office - as it stands right now, it can save my department (12 auditors) 5 WEEKS of prep-time for a particular review we do by pulling a bunch of reports in and selecting test samples automatically, which would otherwise be done by hand. The head of IT would rather we waste 5 weeks per year (on this one test alone - there are many more we can and will reengineer) because "we don't support FoxPro, only two people in the company know it, and what if they leave?"
That is the kind of managerial idiocy that makes for the hit-or-miss market for good IT/engineering. Some firms 'get it', others just don't. You can't apply typical business math to good infrastructure - "if I invest $X today in efficient, well-engineered data support, when will it pay me back? Will I recoup my costs by Q2?"
Well, you can, but most don't - I posed this issue to a friend who has an MBA from U of C, on of the best MBAs' you can get. His response was, "you ask your IT guy and your CFO for an IT budget. Who are you gonna trust to get good numbers? The CFO, of course, so you put him in charge of IT." If the CFO doesn't 'get it', and in my experience, they don't, then your stuck. Increasing your capacity by using your employees time and intelligence will pay huge dividends, but since opportunity-cost accounting is simply not part of the typical American business process, they can't actually quantify what they get - so they assume (incorrectly) the value is $0.
Me - I'm figuring to create or work for one who 'gets it', then go back and eat my previous employers' lunch for them. All you un- and under-employed engineers out there - find yourselves a business geek and start a company. Finance and Accounting are screaming for good solutions, and companies will pay - just not their own employees. Remember, the expert is always the Person from Out of Town.
BTW - anyone know a good open-source solution that does what FoxPro does?
This report should come as no surprise. When the economy is lousy, grad school enrollment rises. The real question is undergraduate degrees awarded in technical fields. Most technical workers do not have a postgraduate degree.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Be honest, most Chinese scientists, students and workers in the U.S. are spies and profiteers for the PRC. They're all shipping info to the PRC as fast as they can and getting paid for it. The FBI has already acknowledged that the problem is so serious and widespread that they can't control it.
There are plenty of geeks around, we're just all bitter and vengeful from having our jobs sold to India for pennies on the dollar. We've reached a point where 1% of the bunch can keep their decent jobs, and the other 99% either work for peanuts, or do something totally unrelated like construction labor or sales in order to earn something half-decent.
These "research" firms can kiss my shiny metal ass.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The 4% rise in graduate science and engineering students seems to be the continuation of a rather erratic past: decline till 1998, rise thereafter. Probably correlates to the economy: jobs look good, why continue for an advanced degree? Job outlook poor, why not stay in school? Looking back since 1993, there has only been about a 9% rise on the whole. Clearly looking at the undergraduate picture would be more informative for any statement about the overall number of geeks.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Unlike the number of total students in graduate school, the number of postdocs has been increasing monotonically over the past 10 years and is 50% higher then in 1993. (Total number of grad students rose only about 9% over that time period).
Were there a serious shortage of "geeks" in companies, many of these people could have been recruited away from the postdoc with money. Naturally, some only want to stay in academia and are willing to endure temporary work and the low pay of the postdoc position for a better shot at their ultimate goal.
In physics, there are far more PhDs being generated then permenant "traditional" physics research positions. (I'm using "traditional" here to exclude really applied research like transistors or batteries or golf club heads - there may be a booming business there - I simply don't know as I have not looked). Thus physicists who want to follow a traditional physics career mostly do postdocs and the time spent in postdoc positions is rising precipitously.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
How the heck did this site get linked to by Slashdot? The article is just flamebait, for anyone who bothered to look through the site.
http://www.vdare.com/why_vdare.htm
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
"Companies, particularly tech companies can break this cycle by one-way globalisation. They can hire workers in other countries or outsource work, but the tech workers cannot. They are stuck in their place with mortgages, families etc. That is why this is a problem."
Why can't they? The same technology that allows outsourcing to work, also allows telecommuting to work.
And even if that "tied down" worker can't work for a company? They can start their own company.
Making Money with Your Computer at Home is a SMALL example of businesses that modern technology makes possible. The other is Peterson's the Ultimate Home Office Survival Guide Maybe the mistake everyone's making is assuming that the US needs big corporations to succeed, when we all know it's the small companies that drive the US forward.
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Outsourcing America: What's Behind Our National Crisis And How We Can Reclaim American Jobs
The article said nothing about "geeks."
Instead, this is a two-year-old study on yearly graduation rates of some selected technical degree programs in the U.S.
Anyone care to explain why we aren't seeing 2004 or 2005 numbers here?
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Money isn't everything, but isn't nothing either. As long as we have huge pay differentials between various jobs that require similar intellects, we are going to find people choosing the high paying field until competition evens out the wages. At the moment, we are losing scientists for this reason.
Perhaps in the future, when enough would-be scientists have switched to medicine, law, and MBAs, the wages will be equal and the flow will stop.
Yeah, right.
I disagree. I live and work in SV (and am a local). First, there's always a shortage of so called "qualified" labor. There always will be. What I find when I hear that phrase is that people are just too picky. I've never seen an example to the contrary yet.
The real barometer of whether or not there's an actual shortage is what people are willing to pay. I can absolutely guarantee you that you'll find a qualified person if you pay $100 per hour. But you aren't. So quit complaining about not finding so-called qualified candidates.
From the sounds of it, you're just paying around average. Probably below average, if all you've been able to find are "bone-heads".
I do contracting, and have for a long time. The rates are at least stable, and maybe going up slightly. But all the places that I work either have a lot of H1-Bs, or a significant off-shore group. You can't get VC money these days unless you have plans for an offshore group.
I don't mind the offshore people. They just can't compete as effectively as an on-site person. The H1-B's though, are only here to keep wages low.
I don't have any trouble finding work myself (and I am "very expensive" supposedly, and like to keep it that way). But I feel sorry for the new college grads. I don't see them being hired by either the startups or the big companies.
For whatever reasons I'm not privy to, our head office decided to replace the routers in all the branch offices.
Head office sends out a junior tech (though he was the same age as myself) to do the installation (they don't trust us branch techs to do it). He drove two hours to bolt the router in, remove the old, and drive home. Too bad he forgot to bring ANY tools except his mobile phone and PDA... so I help him install it asap so the poor fellow can get back. It becomes apparent that the router hasn't been configured correctly back at head office, and it also becomes apparent this kid doesn't know a thing about networking beyond setting up a simple MS Windows LAN. He spends a half hour on the phone trying to find out what he's supposed to do. (As a lowly branch tech, I'm not allowed to configure the router - they wont even give me the admin password in case of emergencies!). He can't get hold of anyone at head office to help him (it was around 5pm and they'd all gone to the pub according to him) so he has to come back tomorrow to finish the job.
Tomorrow comes and he returns with a sheet of paper covered in hand written instructions and configuration settings. He spends the next couple hours doing this (while I'm off seeing to other jobs). I check in to see how he's doing and offer him a coffee - router still not working. I inspect the instruction sheet, and notice the settings he needs to enter are all written with (ENTER) on the end. This kid actually typed (ENTER) on the end of every line of the router config...
Not to mention, every job change I've had requires a huge relocation. When you have a family that can cost you thousands of dollars your new company will not spend. making lots of money is just an effect of Karma.
-PMP-
Also, Asian immigrants, like Jewish immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, heavily value education, and make sure their kids work hard and get it. Most of the Asians who've moved here in the last few decades are educated as well, so they want their kids to get educated, but even the ones who weren't educated had the initiative to get off the farm or out of the slum and go for the opportunities, and just because they're working in restaurants doesn't mean they want their kids doing that when they grow up. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are lots of after-school/weekend-tutoring businesses to help people make sure their kids get ahead, and when I drive by them at the times the parents are picking up their kids, it's about 90% Asians (mainly Chinese), a few Caucasians, and a few Mexicans. My town's probably about 1/4 Chinese and 1/3 Mexican; we don't seem to have a lot of Indians compared to some of the other towns in the area.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks