Slashdot Mirror
Japan "Running Out of Engineers"
bfwebster writes "A story in the New York Times reports that Japan, a country that rebuilt itself as a technological power after World War II, now faces an increasing shortage of college graduates with degrees in science and engineering. Says the article: 'By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.' The article goes on to point out that the overall trend of waning interest in science and technology has been going on for 'almost two decades' and that the shortage is made worse by the traditional reluctance of Japanese companies to hire and use foreign workers. The US has had a similar trend for quite some time: 'Undergraduate engineering enrollment declined through most of the 1980s and 1990s, rose from 2000 through 2003, and declined slightly in recent years.'"
Let's face it. People are lazy and getting a bogus humanistic degree is much easier than an engineering one.
Yet just like America, Japan is gradually raising the virtual borders on immigration for gaijin (foreigners) even for those with engineering degrees.
It's probably not really waning interest in engineering...
It's probably more like waning interest in working like a slave and being managed by incompetent managers with no little/no engineering background.
Or perhaps HR departments playing keyword roulette on resumes, requiring ~100% matches in skills vs requirements.
Considering the overlap between techies and otaku is something like 4200%, I fear for the future of US-Japan relations after the first big wave of American emigration hits their shores.
It's not about the shortage of engineers, it's about the shortage of cheap engineers. If Engineering is to survive as a profession, we should be demanding to be treated as such.
I've had many a friend doing engineering (in mechanical and civil) in school end up in an accountancy firm or bank because nowadays junior engineers get peanuts. Whereas these financial and professional services firms love people with an engineering degrees because they are normally better adept to deal with the quantitative issues, even though they man not have the exemptions from the chartering institutions if you come out with a degree in accounting for example.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Graduate at or near top of high school. Go to a higher ranked university, take more hours, get ca ~0.5 GPA point less. Get treated like dirt by some politicos that had difficulty with trig in hs or were the bottom fish in a lower tier engineering school but managed to always get kicked upstairs instead of fired. Watch the admins take credit for that which they violently opposed, but you cleaned up after the major damage, thereby saving the company, again. Great career magnet, only for those who are hopelessly addicted to the thrill of the unknown and progress, or really are planning to get the MBA, too. Japanese kids are becoming more cognizant, as US and European kids did, are of the current engineering reward structure. Face it, marketing and PR are currently far better investments, with more and better slack time in college.
Plus degrees are expensive.
A shortage in degree holders does not imply a shortage in people able to contribute in scientific or engineering teams. I bet there are many autodidacts and amateurs around with no degree, but who have all or most of the knowledge necessary to undertake scientific or engineering work, or in many cases they may even possess more knowledge than the degree holders. Perhaps a shortage in degree holders will force lazy companies to start thinking of more effective ways of hiring talent. I think employers should stop taking pieces of paper seriously and start actually testing the real skills of wanna-be employees or associates. Prospective members of staff should be *tested* instead of being hired solely on them possessing stupid pieces of papers and answering stupid irrelevant questions during interviews. If you want to hire a programmer, have the candidate actually write down a program instead of asking for a piece of paper. If a candidate can program, there is no need for the paper (except if your clients demand degree-holding staff or if you need degree holders for marketing purposes). Some employers think degrees equip candidates with skills necessary to survive in a bureaucracy, but that's not true because school already provides such skills, like meeting deadlines etc, and in any way you can always get rid of unproductive employees easily (except if you are incorporated in a socialist or European country, where employment at will is seen as too radical).
I'm a PhD student in engineering at a pretty good university in the UK. I've recently been an undergraduate, taught undergraduates, and looked at engineering jobs.
If you take your engineering degree and go to work at an engineering company, they will offer you maybe £22,000 a year as a starting salary.
If you take the same qualification, and take a job as a programmer for a London financial institution, they offer more in the region of £40,000 a year (including bonuses) as a starting salary.
I'd like to get an engineering job when I finish my PhD - it sounds more interesting than programming for a bank. However, it is also my ambition to some day own a house (marriage, children, you know the drill). I know this will involve a mortgage of about a quarter of a million pounds, and with interest factored in, about half a million pounds.
To put it bluntly, I would like an interesting job, but that may be a luxury my family cannot afford, so I'm willing to compromise. And apparently the free market values my engineering degree more in non-engineering roles than in engineering roles.
In the mid to late 70's the university I was attending seemed to actively discourage students from majoring in the sciences and planning to go the engineering route. Numerous studies were quoted to us and posted on departmental bulletin boards in some cases. One that I particularly recall in essence but not in specifics was one study stating the numbers of PHDs and engineers driving cabs and selling hot dogs on the streets of New York City. Essentially they were stating that due to the cutbacks in defence speading post Vietnam and with NASA cutting back as well, then adding in the effects of reduced tax cuts for research and capital improvements that you would be underemployed or unemployed if you majored in the sciences or set out for engineering certification. Many of the students listening to that would have been graduating during the 80s when the reductions started showing up.
Engineering is simply unattractive compared to other professions, the pay is too low, therefore the social status derived is too low. Employers are simply not paying enough for engineers to make it an attractive profession, therefore people do something more rewarding.
Deleted
What surprises me is that Japan has started to experience it only now. (I guess we can call it "national character"). It has been quite wealthy for a while, and wealth and love of education (which is the root of the problem here) does not go together very well...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I did an engineering degree. When you start, your illusions get shattered when you find out that you are not valued like say, someone that did English, art or politics degrees. When you leave, who is in charge of engineers, more engineers? No, people that studied worthless English or art subjects who cream more money then you (unless you're a top-notch engineer).
On a degree, you find that you have to pay for very expensive text books (you never thought books could be that expensive), whilst courses like English get away with £5 ($10) or less cost books to study. All science degrees take up a load of time in study, whether at university or your own time.
Engineering / IT are uncool subjects because most lecturers teach in a style that it's just one long math test.
Students should be given grants to study sciences, and no grants for the other easy subjects that universities seem to push these days.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Dear Mister Manager with an MBA,
If the paper your degree was printed on is good for more than wiping your posterior, you took a basic course in microeconomics.
As such, you should know that increasing profits (in this case, wages) tend to have a stimulative effect on supply. Decreasing real wages -- which are what we are experiencing what with flat wages and an inflationary economy -- tend to have the opposite effect.
Please apply the education you spent tens of thousands of dollars, and recognize the truth: If you can't find enough engineers at the price you want to pay, it's most likely because the price you want to pay is too low.
Sincerely,
An engineer who recently took a microeconomics course in his MBA program.
PPS: On a related note, Americans DO want to do those jobs, just not at the wages you want to pay. Economics, yes? kthnxbye.
I heard about the "lack of engineers" a lot in the late 1980's. I went to engineering school and found out schools were turning out engineers like a puppy mill. We graduated in a recession. Looking back, the shortage hype appears to have been "engineered" by educational institutions and sponsoring companies heavily advertising in the media. Don't fall for it, unless you make plans to settle for low paying jobs just to find something interesting.
I've been in science for 15 years. On my present salary, I can barely afford the same standard of living as when I started science, even after a PhD and an exemplary career so far. If a "shortage" actually existed, then pay would increase concomitantly. Since pay hasn't increased, the shortage, by definition, does not exist. It boggles my mind to see obvious BS like this.
Just callin' it like I see it.
In many countries good Universities are way expensive, and accessible only to a reduced portion of the community.
Besides, most (if not all) of the stuff they teach (syllabus included) can be found on the internet. Many choose this alternative.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
...views this as an attempt to lower the bar for foreign workers in an attempt to drive down salaries, because over here, we've heard this for a while.
When people throw out numbers like "already short half a million", the smell of bullshit tends to follow, along with greater foreign worker quotas and a larger number of students enrolling into the programs that "need employees".
Inevitably, 5-10 years out, you end up with a large number of poorly trained / poorly qualified students looking for jobs along with a number of foreigners who are willing to work for a lot less than a native.
Sure, it's easy to pay these people less, but quantity doesn't overcome a shortage of quality - especially in fields such as engineering.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
It's also a matter of
A) rewards. If you're going to put 10x more work into something, then you'd expect the rewards to be worth it. That doesn't mean only salaries (though that sure helps too), but also stuff like overall job quality, social recognition of your efforts, etc. I'd say that in the west, for various reasons and to various degrees, all of those gradually declined.
We went for example from a culture which put its intellectual elites on pedestals, to a culture where being technically illiterate or even outright stupid, is cool and fashionable. In fact, if you show any intelectual interests or aptitudes, it's kinda mean of you and insensitive to your below-average neighbours/classmates/etc.
In programming alone we went from being those wizards doing high tech stuff, to being outright disconsidered. Nowadays for the average outsider it's not "I don't know how to do the things he does", it's more like "I have a life, I don't have time for that crap" or "yeah, the neighbour's 12 year old can do that kind of stuff." The idea from the 90's that you can just retrain an unemployed pizza-delivery-guy or burger flipper off the street, and he'll be just as good as those snotty CS and engineering graduates anyway, also didn't do much for recognition. It was hammered in everyone's head that you _are_ no better than him, and he could have had your job too if only he could be arsed to take one of those two-week java courses.
Now not all countries are at the same point, and not all went in that direction as fast, but that was the general direction all went slowly.
That's one reason to put in the extra effort, that went down the drain right there. For a lot of people that criterion is now actually a disincentive, since all that extra effort might actually _lower_ their prestige in the community instead of raising it.
B) Rampant age-ism also doesn't help. Back then, sure, I was young, I thought I'd never get old. When 15 years is your entire life so far, and you probably remember only 10, living another 45 years to 60 seems like a bloody eternity. No point worrying about something _that_ far in the future. Now I see perfectly competent programmers pushed aside or into a corner, because some PHB learned the mantra that only the smart young kids are any good.
If I had a kid, I'd tell him to stay well away of that field. Chances are you _will_ live to _at_ _least_ your 40's, even if you chain-smoke and get to twice your idea weight and go alcoholic too. If you want a job where you start being discriminated against as early as the 30's, heck, go into prostitution or porn instead. (And considering some bosses I've occasionally seen, prostitution might even be the more dignified job.)
C) It's also a matter of, well, excitement.
In all science or engineering domains, there was a time where it looked like there's so much interesting stuff to do or discover, and only the sky is the limit. (Or in aerospace not even the sky.)
In programming, for example, when I looked at some primitive games or programs on the old ZX-81 or later ZX-Spectrum, I thought, "I can do better." Often I actually could. Heck, I could even paint my own sprites by hand, although I'm no graphics artist, and they still looked good enough at that resolution.
Nowadays, if I look at a modern game, well, there's just not the same sensation. Duly noted, nowadays about half can be modded, so you can still tempt someone to programming that way. But for a while even that wasn't the case.
Ok, so that's only games, but the same applies to any other programming domain. At some point you could have been the guy who created the next big language, wrote the OS for some underpowered mini, or did the next great maths thing with a computer, or designed the next computer itself, or whatever. Nowadays you'll be a cog in a 20-people team writing the front-end to some database app.
Or if we move away from programming, as I was saying, the same applies to any other engineering domain. At one point we
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
After all, the ultimate goal of any engineer is to render him or herself obsolete.
Exactly. MOD PARENT UP.
At the same time that technology is giving more than ever to humankind, respect from management for those who are knowledgeable about technology is lower than ever.
Part of the problem at Microsoft is that it is run by someone with little or no interest in technology, Steve Ballmer.
Releasing products that are unfinished because programmers have not had time to finish them seems to be normal top management policy at Microsoft. Microsoft Windows Vista is just the latest example. Microsoft employees say things like, "even a piece of junk will qualify". There's no joy in working at a place that doesn't allow you to do a good job.
The process of getting an engineering visa in Japan is absurdly complex. I've personally gone through the interview process and gotten 3 different job offers as a network engineer at Japanese companies earlier this year, only to be turned down flat at the visa office because my current visa wasn't of the correct variety. To get the requisite engineering visa:
1)You need to have graduated in engineering from a 4-year university somewhere, preferably somewhere famous
2)You need no less than 10 years of experience in the field.
3)You have to pass some funky test that the visa office administers.
4)The guy in the visa office who approves all the visas is subject to mood swings, and will approve or reject a given application based on a) the position of the moon the previous night and b) whether there was any Pocari Sweat left in the vending machine at lunch time, among other things.
You won't even get close to 4) unless you clear 1~3).
This "shortage of foreign workers" is artificially imposed at a far-higher level than what is implied in the article.
Japanese corporations typically pay based on seniority, not based on job classification, at least within a given rank. As a result, at my company, if you're a new graduate with a degree in English literature and you get a job as entry level sales staff, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. If you have a degree in computer science and get a job as an entry level programmer, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. (Yeah, really, in a major Japanese metropolitan area. My fellow graduates from a US engineering institution think I'm flipping insane, and indeed in strictly dollars per hour terms I must be. Luckily I started with a few years of seniority baked in.)
You'll also regularly be expected to put in heroic hours (difference with America: we actually do get overtime pay) when something breaks, which is not typically required of sales staff, although approximately nobody on Slashdot would think our sales staff puts in slacker hours.
Given that you're not compensated extra for being an engineer, and engineering is a more difficult course of study in college (you actually have to, you know, work -- most majors treat college as a 4 year reprieve between murderously difficult high school and murderously difficult life), and that most of your training is going to be on the job anyhow, why bother studying engineering unless you have a particular passion for it?
I should note that I'm in charge of managing our new team of Indians because the suits here are as in thrall of the "Why pay a senior engineer $40k when we could pay him $20k?" logic that American suits are. Not to disparage my Indian coworkers at all -- like my Japanese coworkers, we get the usual mix of engineering supermen and people who could not be taught to make peanut butter sandwitches if they were issued a subordinate to butter the bread.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I don't know of any undergraduate course called "management". Managers have degrees, often in economy or accountancy, but also, in many cases, engineering as well. The problems caused by short-sided decisions do not come from one single profession in particular, but from a general system where managers make all the decisions without much supervision.
I believe the root of this problem comes from the current capitalist system where large corporations are never owned by a single person. If a company is owned by one individual, or a family, who depends on that company's profits for the foreseeable future, they care more for the long view. With modern corporations, if the profits are likely to drop in the near future, you sell the shares. Since most companies today behave in the same way, no shareholder cares for anything more remote than the next quarter.
And, still worse, is that too often corporations own other corporations. All their respective managers have to do is take care of each other. Cronyism at its worst.
The title should read "Japan running out of Cheap Engineers". This is the same scenario in the United States where big corporations want to import "cheap engineers" from countries that have lower costs of living (such as India) because they do not want to pay.
As everyone else seems to be hinting around is the fact that it is CHEAPER and EASIER to get a non engineering degree and the payoff is about the same. So why expend extra energy to get into a field that is less lucrative? Essentially, "corporate world" is turning engineering into a field littered with hobbyists (for lack of a better phrase). Engineering is perhaps the most noble of all professions, its a shame that the rewards are not greater.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Japanese engineers are pricing themselves out of work. The fact of the matter is that it is that the insular tendencies of Japanese companies is pretty much the only thing keeping Japanese engineers in Japan. Any and all the work can be shipped overseas, but due to the Japanese belief in the higher quality of nationally produced goods, there are still engineering jobs in Japan.
However, because the work is hard and the demand for quality is so high and international competitive pressure works to keep the prices low, engineers are forced to work long hours for relatively low pay. Worse, Japanese engineers are typically paid worse than foreign counterparts, especially those from overseas. The hierarchical structure of Japanese companies which puts engineers at the very bottom of the pile guarantees that any "company man" engineer will never rise very far in the company system.
This is a big problem in the United States as well, though not necessarily in the computer industry. What is ironic is that the Japanese put their finger on the problem almost 10 years ago when they claimed that Americans are overpaid and lazy. Due to those two traits, countries that have been industrious and have low wages have been able to siphon most of the manufacturing jobs from the U.S. Now it is Japan who is fighting tooth and nail against the onslaught of Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Indian knowledge workers as well as factories across southeast Asia. These upstarts have low cost and reasonable quality. And to compete, Japanese engineers take the brunt.
http://www.slideshare.net/linhares/outline-of-globalization-course-at-fgvebape Check out slide 9, which compares the explosion of engineering degrees in China, India (& to a certain extent the EU) to the US and Japan. I use it on my classes, and people think it must be bogus. Data from Morgan Stanley, by the way.
It is no longer attractive to take a technical education. I think there are many factors involved - first of all, it isn't 'cool', engineers, scientists etc are seen as geeks, and who wants be a social misfit? Up until the sixties at least, scientists and engineers were seen as almost demi-gods who were fearlessly exploring worlds unfathomable by normal human beings - just think of the many scientists that are almost cult-figures: they are mostly from the beginning of the 20th century.
Secondly, there is a clear, anti-intellectual trend in many Western societies. Most people have never understood that scientists are not there to find The Answer; that the most important thing in science is the question. So, they have become disillusioned and don't feel they get what they want from scientific research.
And of course, the money. You study hard - sometimes even extremely hard - for many years, you borrow money to survive and to pay for your education, and then you find that you don't actually earn much afterwards. In many countries an academic earns less than the average tradesman, whose education was 3 - 5 years of salaried apprenticeship; as an academic, you will normally be in debt when you are newly educated, whereas a newly educated welder, builder or whatever is likely to have no debt.
All in all, the only reason why anybody would choose an academic career is because they feel a deep calling.
Joe, is that you? I need you to come to my office and give a presentation on how many 'engines' you've been 'ering.' The Mid-Level Lower-Sector Managers would like it to be at least 30 slides and I want to ensure that you can re-write it by tomorrow.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
www.isoHunt.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny, I just got back from the SODEC trade show in Tokyo last week promoting our company's outsourcing services... As someone whose company which is engaged in providing software outsourcing services to Japanese companies, I can personally attest to the barriers to entry involved in doing this. Language is a serious one: while we would like to think that we are motivated enough to try to learn, it is a very tough language to try to master, and misunderstandings can be costly. We were humbled when we were handed a Japanese software specification which took us a month to reasonably understand but a only week to implement and test. Japanese also seem to have an entrenched attitude of looking down on foreigners, and having more than a little skepticism that the people in companies such as ours will be able to adapt to their ways of thinking and doing things. So far, we haven't seriously disappointed our existing customers, but still, even a brick-headed software engineer like me can sense their skepticism. They are also a lot less flexible than other outsourcing markets that we have had the experience of working with. These are some of the problems that we've encountered, but still, we do think that going into the market for the long haul will be profitable. They really have few choices to remedy their situation with the way things are going.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Oil_Prices_Medium_Term.png
Japan's birthrate has been dropping, and the number of young kids entering school as well. Fewer students means fewer engineering students, fewer doctors, fewer nurses, fewer firemen, etc. Japan and Europe are going to be hard-pressed to keep up their standards of living with shrinking enrollments. It will hit the US sometime later, although we seem to be okay with the "boomer echo" generation.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Spies are sapping their sentries and stabbing them in the back. Their squishy backs.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Oil_Prices_Medium_Term.png
They let education become unaffordable and then complain that they're short on engineers. And how about the outsourcing lie: "De native population will only have to do the thinking-jobs." What bullshit that turned out to be.
Seriously: when being a scientist or an engineer will mean high salary and social status (in other words: when girls will want to fellate scientists and engineers), is when more young men and women will take up that career choice.
Simple as that.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'm a bachelor of science in organic chemistry, but I've been making websites for money for the past decade, because I became tired of begging for underpaid jobs in engineering.
Best way to reduce labor costs is to increase the labor supply
I've been hearing this litany in Germany for quite some time now. Not enough expert workers, no engineers, no IT people, Jada-Jada-Jada. Every 5 years or so the industry goes through the same bullshiting ritual.
How else is it then that I'm struggling to survive as a freelance Software Developer with 8 years of experience under my belt? Why is it that I'm not even considered because I don't have a grade - allthough I can easyly out-develop any graduate I've met?
This whining is nothing but a salary lowering measure. The best that will happen for true experts is that salaries and benefits will reach the old levels.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...does a story about an engineer shortage in Japan turn into an argument about the definition of censorship in the first post!
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Yeah, but you can't make a giant mecha using a bogus humanistic degree.
I don't know about you, but I went into Engineering for the chicks.
I consider it a long-term investment.
=Smidge=
(...any day now...)
That isn't the case; I'm doing a 'humanistic degree' right now - Bachelor of Arts majoring in Religious Studies and Philophy (going to become a teacher in the area of history/social studies etc).
Before going to the university I attempted for 2 years to get into the IT sector; I just gave up in the end and got myself a job as a department manager. It is the industry itself which treats engineers (and other qualified people) like shit, then turn around pissing and moaning because there aren't enough people with the said qualification.
Sorry, but when you have engineers (and others) who have gone through the mincer and spat out the other side - many of them bitter, they tell kids what their experience within the engineering area is like, most kids end up saying, "fuck that for a joke" and look for a job elsewhere. That is the cold hard reality of the situation.
When you have wankers have recruiters, wankers as bosses, and the pay is just one big giant wank - one can't help by feel one is just one big giant bitch for the system to have its way with.
Would I ever go back to IT? no way. Many engineers who get out of the field never want to go back - unless they trip over an idea in their garage and they can be their own boss.
No they are not. You can buy an engineering degree for ~$1000 in India.
My Blog | Badsh
Australia has been resonating with cries of a national shortage of engineers for years now.
In telecommunications in particular, we have floundered. Some of that is due to the influence of Telstra, our AT&T-equivalent, as they pull every managerial and political stunt from their bag of tricks to maintain their monopoly on ancient telecommunication infrastructure, and to prevent others from installing modern networks. The rest is due to a long succession of misguided governments who believe we should not aspire to high-tech and manufacturing. Evidently, our fate is to forever remain a primary producer, hacking off whatever LIMITED national assets we have to China at mates' rates.
All of our universities, even the most prestigious, have now become no more than diploma mills for international students whose parents buy their degrees, and who will then most likely head home to wallow in Asia's newfound wealth. At a conservative estimate, 90% of my classmates fall into this category.
Everyone wins, right?
The pollies win because they can claim diplomatic victories, that they are securing a veritable torrent of incoming finances from overseas.
The universities win, because they receive by far the largest portion of said funding.
All of 15% AT MOST of those in my course will remain here after we graduate, and two-thirds of that lot are the Australians. And we look on in grim amusement as our industries lament our lack of engineering talent.
Without a voice to represent us, the more progressive among my classmates watch in dismay as our riches, our educations, our futures are sold off to the highest bidders.
Comp sci has been an achilles heel in Japanese education.
Not even at the college level will you find decent computer courses that can mass produce decent programmers. Japanese is naturally a less abstraction oriented language, and in school, they get attached to the details and technicalities, making the courses boring, difficult, and alienating, not to mention unproductive. What they really need to teach is how to abstract those details away and how to be constructive. This is done creatively, not logically.
Then there is the whole video game situation. These programmers don't mix with other industries, so it acts like a huge black hole for programming talent by not sharing their talent pool with the software industry.
Overpriced and incompetent, software houses in Japan have wrecked havok on Japanese businesses since day one, and now pretty much everyone is just scared to try anything.
1- The Japanese society is getting older: fewer kids, fewer graduates, fewer engineers.
2- Regarding the similar situation in America (or Europe) : in constant dollars, average hourly revenue has barely risen since the early 80s. Consequently people have chosen careers that pay better than engineering.
The problem is that without engineers the future of our technically-dependent society is at stake. The solution is simple in theory but hard to implement in practice, and not instant: Japan should open their borders to immigrants, start making more babies, and everywhere in the developed world Engineering should be a prestigious career path again.
I don't know about you, but I went into Engineering for the chicks.
Don't forget the beer. Its the one thing engineering students can count on, before and after graduation.
I've been an engineer for more than 10 years now from IC design to embedded software. I recently quit my company (actually, I got paid a 6 figure salary) since money doesn't interest me if it also implies servitude. Now I'm runnin my own open source embedded software project and making much less, but I wake up every morning feeling great. The best thing about an engineer is that you can make something that can change people's lives. I'm sure that writers, poets, artists, and musicians probably feel the same way.
larger number of deaths than births. And they are certainly not the only European country. Unlike Japanese, Germans have had healthy immigration policy.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
This sounds to me like one of those travel ads that are trying to attract new people to come to their country. "Hey, we have 500,000 jobs and need more people desperately. Come move to our country and take more power away from America!"
And I should know--I left exactly that kind of job at an NTT subsidiary (despite having that rarest of rarities: an intelligent, competent, understanding boss) for a much smaller software company, and negotiated a salary more than twice what I had been making earlier, even taking into account that I couldn't live in a $70/month apartment anymore. It's totally possible to make a decent living here if you're willing to push for it.
Of course, given the way Japanese society works, I imagine most people here don't even consider the possibility of salary negotioations.
I guess I should have used the 'Preview' button (more often)!
Is often not talked about here. Engineering is a heavy subject and if you want to have a life outside of work and prospects for decent pay in the future, why would you go into engineering? Unless you are the rare bird with a very high intelligence and have the speed to back it up so it doesn't impact your quality of life, in that you can get more work over a sane period of time.
This is just propaganda to get kids to fall into doing a degree in engineering. It's a con trick, don't fall for it! Even if you are very good, it's just not worth it.
If you want a good fulfilling life, forget it, become an accountant or lawyer instead, your career will last longer, year on year you'll be paid better, and with a higher social prestige.
Even the top end of the engineering profession don't match the half way mark of lawyers and accountants.
threadeds blog
I work as an outsourcer. Only thing why my company employs 20 people with university degree is bad management at our clients. They don't want to design things, they don't want even to define meaningful specs. That way, we have to have highly trained people, just in order to make everything extremely fast, since our people have to do everything by trial and mistake, hoping that it would be something that will please the client. With good management, we could have 1/4 of people with university education, other people could be less trained people guided by educated ones.
But that would require: someone technically educated in our client company to really do the analysis (i.e. "system analyst") and willingness to pay that person some real money. It is much more simple to hire dozen of engineers in Serbia, to feed them with minimal amount of information and to wait if something will eventually appear as a usable product.
No sig today.
Every college that has a business program has a course offered call "Management" or "Management of Organizations" or something to that effect.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/0436218
The Japanese aren't interested in bringing foreigners into the country. They prefer Japan to have its culture preserved no matter what the price. Thus, to compensate for the shortage of people due to the population becoming old and having less and less children, they prefer to invest strongly in robotics. Nowadays there are personal robots over there to do things, such as house cleaning and other unpleasant jobs, that in countries which opt for immigration are left to immigrants.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, it's just the way they want it to be, and it's different from the way chosen by Europe or the USA. But one thing is certain: by pursuing this policy Japan has no "risk" of becoming "less Japanese" over time, while Europe is slowly becoming more Slavic, Arabic, Latin etc. each day. Whether "going international" is ultimately good or bad for Europe on the long term, or whether "going ethnic" is ultimately good or bad for Japan on the long term, is something we'll only discover when that long term is over.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Degrees are not expensive in France, but there is the exact same shortage here.
When the word shortage is used, the price at which the shortage exists
should be specified. I'm correct when I say there's a shortage of gasoline
at $1/gallon. But I can find plenty of gas around here at $3.80/gallon.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Sometimes I share your sense of despair, but not often.
/always/ going to be "the next big thing". There is /always/ going to be innovation. In fact, I'd say that until today's technology becomes common place you aren't really /primed/ for the next big thing. Maybe engine design has to become as boring as applying formulas and tweaking injection pressures before the next big leap in engine technology comes along.
I used to work with an engineer who constantly lamented he was not an engineer in the late 1800s, when many of the now-common mechanical mechanisms were being invented. He too felt he could have "been someone" if only he lived then.
But the thing is, there is
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I work for a London University; I'm one of their IT technical monkeys, with some serverside and strategic work thrown in. I get to call myself SysAdmin, and they get their computers fixed. It's not an ideal job, but I enjoy it, and, more importantly, it's possible to buy a home based on the wage packet. If you can bite the bullet and admit to yourself that you're not going to get that lovely three-bedroom detached house with a double garage until you're in your forties, then life can be good. I live in East London, and I own a flat there. Even with the stupid house prices, even with the crippling interest rates, even with the ever-increasing food and energy bills, it's still possible to live, and do so comfortably.
You're technical people. Get used to the fact that you'll never earn anything like what a CEO's PA does: they've got more on their plate thn we give them credit for. Not only have they got to organise a capricious meatsack with an ego the size of God, they've got to interpret the whims and rants of said person into intelligible commands for their minions. On top of that, they've got to look good while doing it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not belittling our associated trades: I love what I do, and the day that I give it up for something else will be a sad one. The 'engineer as demi-god' days are over, for now, because we don't have the same sociological drives anymore: we're not in a post-war depression, there is no cold war, there is no great enemy that's immediately tangible. We are, currently, comfortable, aside from the self-imposed economic problems.
While we're not as socially respected as we once were, I don't believe that we were ever part of a richer social subset, unless employed by a government program of some description. Culturally, we're more used to luxury now. The traditional view of an engineer/technician is that of someone who is rather conservative in their habits, choosing to express themselves through their craft and abilities, rather than having three EeePCs.
Of course, having said that, the next manager that asks me why I'm so special, and whether I deserve the money that I earn, because 'we can outsource' is going to get a knee in the groin.
http://xkcd.com/313/
Industrial countries on the other hand, happen to be more socially sophisticated, do not look at it the same way hence People are lazy and getting a bogus humanistic degree is much easier than an engineering one. comes into play.
Humanistic degree's here are a dozen a dime (dirhem), hard to get employed and is just plain easier to graduate from.
So I guess this means I can start signing up for work on Japanese employment sites.
Japanese students are obviously losing faith that Japan will be able to construct the Gundams, and without that hope they have no motivation to do the extensive studying a gundam engineering degree requires.
Because they're so busy on their photography projects.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Not too long ago Slashdot was posting articles about how Japan was replacing it's laborers with robots because of it's low birth rates. Now Japan's running out of people who actually build the frigging robots?
Look Japan if you need help with impregnating your women I'd be happy to help.
I have nothing compelling to say
Seems to me that would make these degrees not so worthless after all...
Hmm - USA, Japan, both very rich countries for several generations now. Is this possibly a natural behavior for countries in their twilight, where many of the citizens have lost their "hunger", and focus more on superficial , shiny things, like the NBA and Paris Hilton?
When you eke out a living, you won't pay attention to Ms. Lohan and her ilk, but probably focus your efforts on working hard to advance your career to get bread on the table, and since science/engineering jobs often pay well with some hard work.....
My grandparents came over on a boat from Eastern Europe, after growing up in a bombed out basement in WW I - my Dad was an engineer, and I'm a surgeon. Many immigrants families have similar tales.
..........FULL STOP.
I have only one objection to your post.
Um... puppy mill? Is that a place where they mill puppies, like a grain mill?
If so, it sounds horrific. I hope I never encounter such a place.
Convert it to Romaji: furii-taimaazu ... furiitaimaazu ... furiita-imazu ... furiita
Got it?
By the way, your description is neither satire nor exaggeration. The security side of it is no longer reality, but other than that, you're better than 90% accurate.
I'm one of those who have bailed.
I've seen some companies that have tried to do the right thing by their engineers, but they just get eaten by the next wave of college grads at the next startup willing to burn themselves out for the mirage of a permanent posh position. Only to get their company killed by the wave after next, two years down the road, about the time they've all hit the wall and simply can't compete any more. Those who stay in the industry go into management or go back after taking a break as free-timers to recuperate (never getting married), or do something equally self-destructive.
I place the blame squarely on Microsfot for setting the role model: selling broken dreams.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Subtract 2 years from any degree obtained in India, 1 year from a degree obtained in England.
Not sure about China or Japan... probably the same figures apply, respectively.
Language is another issue. I've known Indians who have lost jobs mainly because they overrated their English abilities.
OK, so name *one* person who graduated from a "Management" course and got a job as a manager straight out of college, without any previous experience. To call a Business Administration course "Management" is like someone calling himself "Senior" after a year on the job.
People graduating from the courses you mention start working as clerks or secretaries, unless they have several years experience on a job and go to college to get a promotion.
This may result in an influx of Spanish-Speakers to Japan. There are already significant communities of Spanish speaking laborers in Japan. Spain and a number of Latin-American countries have good educational systems, but fewer economic opportunities. (Cuba is one example.) Also, the visual arts and comics are tremendously popular in Spain, and Japan is the world's epicenter of comics.
So let me see if I understand this: You can get a degree in engineering, and if you stay in engineering your salary will cap out in the $100k - $250k range.
Or, you can get a degree in management, and your salary range at the same level of achievement as the engineer in the previous sentence will be in the $250k - $1m range. And you'll have the option of going senior executive, and hitting numbers 20 times that.
And management is not harder than engineering. (different skill set, and hard, but not harder)
Gwarsh, I just can't understand why there's a shortage of engineers. Oh well, perhaps someday this inscrutable enigma will be solved.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
That was the reason that my undergraduate Computer Science course started up - the world was facing a shortage of knowledge workers - they didn't quite figure out the growth of India and China.
One mature student I knew, came from the Merchant Navy. He did the course for three/four years, then found himself pushed out by cheaper staff, and went back to the Merchant Navy because the salaries were better.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Lets face it. Doing anything in the technology field requires a lot of economic resources. In the states, at least, people with money have been spoon fed opportunity like geese getting ready to loose their livers. Investors don't have to give a rats about anything but returns, and care even less about the engineers that create the stuff that makes them money.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Furthermore you are making the incorrect assumption that most corporations are large corporations. Actually the opposite is demonstrably true. There are far more small companies, many of which are owned my a single person or small group, and small companies account for an enormous percentage of the economy. With modern corporations, if the profits are likely to drop in the near future, you sell the shares. Bear in mind that MOST companies are not publicly traded on stock exchanges so most stock isn't going to have a ready buyer even if an owner wanted to sell.
That said, Uhh yes... and? As long as management is not buying/selling based on non-public info (that would be insider trading) why is that evil? If you accept the premise that the value of a company is the net present value of its future free cash flows and you get information that profits will drop then yes, you might sell. Or you might not. It's a GOOD thing that you have that option. Would you rather be unable to sell if you were an shareholder in Enron after you found out what they were up to?
(and if anyone reading this has to look up what net present value or future free cash flow means please don't waste your time responding - go learn some finance 101 first) And, still worse, is that too often corporations own other corporations. Again, this is bad how? A corporation owned by another corporation is no different than a company with two divisions that make different products. Sometimes it makes sense to keep the management of the two separate so the management teams can concentrate on their respective businesses. It's just a management structure. It's smart to do that. What you are really doing is making the ridiculous claim that one person should never have a stake in more than one business.
I haven't seen it brought up but I'm sure it must be a contributing factor to this shortage and how badly engineers are often treated: engineers are often incompetent. Yes, they took a harder road through college but that doesn't make them qualified. I'm finishing up my degree in mechanical engineering at MIT which has an excellent (and damn hard) mecheE program, both in the theoretical and practical aspects, and still wouldn't trust 60% of the graduating engineers to design something of importance. In my experience with real engineering jobs the people I usually work with DO make the MIT students deserving of the high reputation they carry, the average engineer I have worked with is downright useless. Huge gaping holes in knowledge pertinent to their work, inability to think critically, and they don't even understand how the systems they work with work.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Oh, I didn't say that the only "golden age" was the 1800. I'm more like saying that each domain has its own "golden age", somewhere near the beginning of it. Then it becomes mostly salary work.
So for most mechanical stuff, yeah, the time where it was "exciting" was in the 1800's. For aerospace it was in the 20'th century. For computing stuff, it lasted more or less into the 90's.
So yes, some new thing will eventually come along, and for a while it will be all exciting to be in it. Then it will become just peon work too.
Basically I'm not saying that progress has stopped, or anything. I'm saying that the motivation to go to university in that domain looks a bit like a gauss curve, sorta. The "excitement" factor of it is high in the beginning, when there's so much to do, and it looks like you too could make your own contraption or just do things better. Then that excitement dies down, most (but obviously not all) stuff in that domain has been discovered, the industry has consolidated into a few dominant players, salaries went down, and what's left is whole teams doing tweaks to already refined designs. And to the guy looking at the question, "do I pick X as a major?" it already looks a lot less exciting than in the early years. He might choose it because the salaries are still good, but not because he actually thinks any more that he'll be the next big inventor of that domain.
Take, say, airplane building. In the beginning it looked so much like everyone's game, that we even had kids building a glider in the barn without telling their father. The feeling was there that you too can make your own flying contraption, and maybe even get it better than the ones that tried before you. There's a certain "excitement" factor in being at such a beginning. Then roll forward a century or so, and you have only a handful of big players who pushed everyone else out, and you're reduced to tweaking turbine blades in a CAD program and testing them in a wind tunnel. There's about as much excitement in it as in accountancy. And unsurprisingly a lot less kids dream of having that as their future job. (Just as well, because pay and number of jobs went down too in that domain.)
Or to better explain what I'm trying to say, that last point in my original message, well, was merely about why less people rush to enroll in a mature domain. I'm not saying that progress stopped. I'm just saying that eventually it just becomes less "exciting" a job. The same people who 100 years ago might have thought "OMG, if I only could work in aeronautics, it would be sooo cool and exciting" now look at it as, meh, just another possible desk job.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Why are engineers paid low? It's because Engineers simply don't produce much value per person. The average Engineer is poorly trained for the kind of work he or she is expected to do. Don't expect an Engineer to be any good until 8 - 10 years of DELIBERATE, FOCUSSED effort has gone into actually mastering their craft. It's easier to gain more valuable expertise in other fields much faster for the same time and effort investment. Hence the irony: if you're a reasonably smart engineering graduate, the first thing you do is to jump fields to management or finance.
Hell, if I had to do it over again and could put up with the pre-med bullsh*t, I'd go into Radiology. Those guys get BIG bucks. The sad reality is that we in the US seem to be churning out more Ship B folks. You know, like lawyers. What's even more disgusting is the fact that we here in the US place professional athletes and so-called musical artists far above scientists and engineers. And this has been going on since the early 70s. I can remember being made fun of in fourth grade for getting all excited on the rare days when we'd do a science class.
Should anyone really be surprised?
... err.. I'm going to go talk to the Doctor, I can talk about my colon'
In the west, the perception is that Engineer as a professional is lumped in with joe MSCE and Information Technology. It is just assumed that anyone can do their jobs and they are no different from a CS major or community college student. Thus they earn the respect of the lowest assumed denominator, which is none. I believe other countries like Germany this maybe different, but at this day and age who knows.
The other reason why Enginners do not see respect is that the layman cannot relate to what we do. Even a doctor can discuss medical issues with friends.
'What's that Doctor? Oh, you do colon exams, hey! I have an colon, let's be friends.'
'What's that Mr Engineer? You programmed a DSP to efficiently process a multi-spectrum signal? Hey! I have an
So even a person who has limited knowledge about the human body can still understand or get an idea or concept easier about medical issues and conditions. You can relate on some level because you own a body. Unless you are in the tech field, you don't understand the tech field, but expect way more out of it and get upset because it doesn't do more. You also don't see that expectation from the other professions. There is still a mystical aura about being a Doctor, but not-so for the people who make the technology that medical professionals use.
The other problem is that companies that treat people poorly and are fly-by-night have the same survivability as a well run company that does not treat people poorly.
Bottom line, Engineers are taken for granted. If you are taken for granted you will be treated as such.
The funny part is that we ourselves don't do anything about it. The only way out of the system is to be your own boss and reap the rewards of your knowledge.
From what I've heard, Japan is having a huge population decline. Some call it a crisis. I wish the US would have such a "crisis".
Anyway, how does the "decline in engineers" compare to the "decline in working people"? I bet it's pretty much equal...
But, who doesn't enjoy freshly ground puppy in their morning coffee?
Then there will be enough engineers.
Business Major types have been scamming engineers and scientists really hard for the last 50 years.
Smart people in general see this and avoid the engineering programs which are bloody hard, have as much as a 2/3 failure rate in the sophomore year, have low status with regard to females/dating, typically have long hours, hare been out-sourced like hell recently (since a smart indian or chinese engineer can do the same work for peanuts)* and don't even pay well even when not outsourced (compared to the effort put in).
*Business majors could also be replaced but they decide who is replaced and somehow never choose to replace themselves.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
First, we have to be careful that this is not a lobbyist plot to import cheaper, more docile workers. I've seen similar such BS from US-corp lobbyists.
Second, it may be that engineering just doesn't pay well enough. Those who are academically gifted may choose to be something else that has better long-term prospects. Supply and demand would work to boost tech/engineering wages if globalism stopped dinkering around with salaries and making it less stable. Perhaps tech/engineering is just not a comparative advantage in higher-wage countries like the US and Japan.
This conflicts with the idea that technology drives individual economies, but perhaps this assumption needs to be challenged. If all the physics research can be done in Timbuktu for 1/8 the wage cost, then economics would dictate that low-wage countries have a comparative advantage in that area. It's not who innovates, but who can take advantage of those innovations. (Some may suggest the word "exploit", but I don't want to make a value judgment here.)
Table-ized A.I.
Everyone seems to be under the impression that engineering jobs are severely underpaid. My question is: compared to what? I know plenty of people who graduated with me from school (in 2007) and are getting salaries of $90k/year. I work at a smaller company, so my salary is lower, but still way better than any non-engineers salary. Non-engineers I know start out at $30k/year in the Los Angeles area, which is barely enough to cover rent and food. What are these majors that pay well compared to engineering? Pray tell.
"When people have no idea whatsoever what it is engineers do they have no way of assessing how much respect it deserves."
Good point. Fundamentally, though, I think that the worst abuse, and the abuse that loses the most money and causes the greatest business risk, is having technological companies run by managers who have no knowledge of, and little respect for, technology.
Hmm, I fell for the 'shortage of engineers' joke back in the 70s, ten years before you did. This must be the longest running joke in the history of mankind.
If there is a shortage, why have we had vast armies of out of work engineers knee deep in this shortage for the past 40 years?
Oh, uhmm, 'Ya want fries wizzat?'
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Us in the industry certainly are not shy about telling people interested in the industry the reality of the profession (which you summed up nicely).
Long hours not compensated for (because you are salary), outsourcing, lay-off's, incompetent managers getting promoted while expertise and pride in what you do are rewarded by making you a slave.
The US used to have a number of really good places to work in engineering. We all knew where they were - Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, HP Labs, DEC R&D, IBM Almaden, RCA Sarnoff Labs, Lockheed's Skunk Works. At one time or another, I've visited most of those places, and been impressed with the people. All are gone, or a shadow of what they once were.
What do we have today? Google? Google is an advertising agency. All the classic good places were part of manufacturing companies, where engineering turned into working hardware. I know of little places doing good stuff, but the little places come and go; you don't have a career there.
Is something similar happening in Japan? As manufacturing moves to China, in time, the engineering follows. The outsourcing organization is hollowed out, and eventually replaced by a China-based company. Japanese companies have been outsourcing electronics manufacturing to China for about a decade; not as enthusiastically as US companies, but outsourcing nonetheless.
Yes, there are good engineering places where people have full careers in the US. I visited one recently, a well-known visual effects movie studio. Some of their staff have been around for 15-30 years, and everybody is very good at what they do and proud of it. Their CEO is big on keeping the core team together, because they know they have an organization that can deliver good work on tough jobs on schedule. The place is advanced technically but felt very retro, in a good way, as an organization. Few such places are left.
That's why few people want to become good engineers.
lets see.... in tech, you're required to work crazy hours with no overtime for all the after-hours work, you get to compete for low pay, then get treated like crap from management as if you're overpaid, you're looked on as a cost center instead of added value.... hmmmm yea, I wonder why no one wants this career....
In a country where the man who invented something as ubiquitous as the blue LED got paid a whopping bonus of ~$200 by his employers, I'm really not surprised that Japanese teenagers are more interested in majoring in business management and the like.
Reminds me of the IT industry. Yeah don't fall for the hype just do something you're interested in and do it well.
There's nothing like being a former humanities major reader of /. and being called worthless in every fourth post.
That means I won't be able to see real life Gundam in the near future!
$2200! Seriously!? Why'd you do that? Does the pay go up exponentially? Do you have a prospect to join the Yakuza? Real life tentacle Hentai? There has to be something....
The fact that I would mod this insightful and not funny deeply saddens me :(.
Personally, I tend to agree with these stories of shortages of engineering talent. I've been in tech for 12 years. I have met and worked with exactly 2 people in all that time that I would consider "good" engineers. I've worked with well over 500 tech/IT/software developers in that time on various teams and projects.
As others have posted, especially in IT I don't think there is a shortage of people in the field, but there is a huge shortage of actually skilled labor in the field. I feel it is this huge glut of unskilled, poorly trained IT people and developers that are holding our wages back. A company cannot reasonably assess the talent of anyone in the IT field, and so, they go with a least common denominator pay approach, because at least if they get crappy employees, they aren't paying them much.
Engineering doesn't make you attractive to women.
Um... puppy mill? Is that a place where they mill puppies, like a grain mill?
If so, it sounds horrific. I hope I never encounter such a place.
Its worse than you think. Imagine a puppy mill with only male dogs. It gets ugly. They can't find new owners, so the job placement counselors encouraged them to "network together."
...why don't they just build robotic engineers?!?
(Oh yeah. That would require an engineeer....)
It's probably more like waning interest in working like a slave
Agreed.
and being managed by incompetent managers with no little/no engineering background.
Probably not this reason. The advancement structure in Japanese companies usually runs people up the management structure of their department primarily by years of experience (with some other factors thrown in as well) so actually engineers often end up as managers of engineers.
I would guess (as the article suggests also) that young people are more turned off by the dirt cheap salaries paid to engineers. Back in the day, engineers were a dime a dozen in Japan (relatively speaking compared to the US at least) and so companies could pay them as such. Now the situation has changed, and as is sadly common, Japanese companies are adapting too slowly.
I think there is a lot to what you said. It may not be necessarily the "twilight" of the USA or Japan (it could be a temporary lull), but I can attest to seeing and meeting plenty of glitzy young people in Japan who just don't have that hunger that you mentioned as their parents do.
Compounding the issue is the fact that some/many younger adults in Japan (20s and 30s) live at home due to cultural norms, convenience, etc. I don't think they fully realize how little money they are making in their job and how it won't support their lifestyle when the parents are gone. Engineers in Japan are actually paid quite little, but more than the part time jobs many young people in Japan are opting for recently.
Country is in need of wealth
Hoards of men (normally men) get put to productive work like engineering, where they work their asses off to bring wealth to their own families and the nation
This wealth is then spread to other parts of the economy (law, healthcare, service...)
Generations pass and the young men suddenly start to question why they should work their asses off in engineering when they could instead be an X, and earn more money with less work.
Nation claims to have a lack of engineers.
Engineering moved to new country where a new generation of young men are put to work in engineering.
Rinse and repeat.
On the CS side, all that talk about social networking and fan culture has led to a whole generation of girls who code CSS/HTML and manage PHP forums and SQL databases and are otherwise very involved in webtech and write great IRC tutorials. Don't discount it 'cause a lot of these girls end up either in CS or doing great things without that CS degree.
open source modern art: laser taggi
If you look at job postings they are not looking for engineers they are looking for people with very narrow skill sets. HR people are a huge problem, they just do checklists of skills rather than actually looking at the overall work experience.
Example: I know programmers that have broad software and language experience but get turned away because they don't have the newest fad skills.
has the Japanese government considered offering pre-release Gundam merchandise only to students who complete an engineering degree?
Being somewhat overlooked at least in the US, and I suspect also in Japan, is the lack of long term investment in Engineers. Going to seminars, taking training classes, and even spending time learning new tools is always lowest priority. Basically companies only want to hire perfectly matched engineers who are current on state of the art tools/technology, use them till they are obsolete, and then "Right Size" them. Instead of looking at new hires on a 20-30 year career cycle, folks get hired only looking at the next project or two on the books. If you can't keep your skills up to date while working the 60 hours a week to meet stupid and arbitrary deadlines, you are a marked man for the next layoff cycle. Once you've been through this cycle a couple times, how can you in your right mind reccomend this work for the next generation?
Well of course they're running out. Every time a giant lizard goes on a rampage in Tokyo...
OK sorry, but it needed to be said.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At least in the USA today's lack seems to be more bunk than anything else. Now it is Japan's turn to complain to get their government to loosen up on importing CHEAP foreign workers. That's what the plan is, not more science and engineering grads. It worked in the US so they are trying it in Japan now.
OK, lets look at the US model which I believe is very telling for Japan since they are copying the same approach:
1) Supply & Demand (econ 101): If the supply is so short why are engineers and programmers paid so little for their level of education and and hours of work they are expected to put in? They can't have it both ways. Salaries need to really come up a long long ways!
2) Slave Labor: Many (most?) engineers and programmers are treated as interchangeable cogs not as professionals. If we are so valuable show us the respect and realize that engineering is NOT manufacturing. It is a different mindset and a different process. Trying to force engineering and science into a manufacturing mold has been a disaster. The software industry is a fine example of how things have gone down hill since the manufacturing model was adopted. Quality has NOT been improving. If anything it has gone down (Microsoft Vista is a fine example of that).
3) Recognition & Respect: Decades ago engineers and scientists were respected. Today that doesn't seem to be true. Part of it is that when you get paid poorly in comparison to other professionals you lose status. Part of it is that when you redefine engineers as cogs not professionals you lose status. And of course part of it is media reflecting what they see in society and reinforcing it.
This is why kids no longer want to study science or engineering. No respect and the pay is poor for the volume of education and self study that is required.
4) Lack of Excitement: Engineering and science are no longer projected as exciting in the media. Much of that is due to society devaluing it and divesting from it. The US space program is a joke. The moon program had been dead for decades. The current promises for moon and mars programs are decades off. Kids can see through that. They know its for political purposes and nothing will come from it. Federally funded R&D is upside down. It used to be that roughly 80% went for basic research and 20% for military research. Now it's the other way around with something like 20% for basic research and 80% for military research.
5) Age Discrimination: Once you are in your mid to late 30's in many engineering disciplines you are considered to be over the hill and too old to be an engineer. This is especially true in the computer (hardware, software, and related) industries. Kids have watched for years now as their parents have had increasing trouble finding and maintaining technical jobs as they get older. What kind of message has that sent to the next generation?
As long as the everyday FACTS, SALARIES, BENEFITS, and DISRESPECT continues fewer and fewer people are going to want in or to stay in engineering and science fields.
Something doesn't quite make sense. Based on the facts listed above the law of supply and demand tells us there is most likely an over supply of engineers.
Europe is becoming "more" Slavic and Latin? You seem to be confusing Germanic with European.
In other professions, there is a professional organization that decides who is a member of that profession. These organizations set standards and sometimes tests to decide who gets admitted. Think of the American Medical Association or a Bar Association. There is no equivalent for engineers or computer science folk, neither the IEEE, ASME, nor ACM fulfill the same role for the engineering "profession". This goes a long way towards explaining why engineers don't get the same respect (and wages!) as other professionals.
Everyone here has chosen the "technical ladder". It has taken most many years of education and experience to reach a high level of competence. Two problems exist. 1) little or no job security, retirement benefits, etc. and 2) an almost impossibility to explain anything to your Boss or his boss. OTOH an affable manner, and a BA degree in political "science", history, or business goes a long way today. There is no incentive to develop intellectual capital except love of the field.
You can google 'tech worker shortage myth' and find various sites that point out the fallacy of the claim that there is a real shortage. You can see loads of undercurrent disgruntlement among engineers and scientists regarding conditions and compensation. But the situation only get worse. You see loads of major companies getting out the litigious steamroller to protect IP too. (Now in full rant mode) How are all of these items related? How is Management Scum?
Let me explain...
IP laws are tweaked to favor the established business over the guy in the garage. So, the guy in the garage can't afford to make the patent profitable on his own anymore after the daunting 10k to 25k$ investment alone to protect it. SO.. he gets a job. Now his new employer want the fledgling inventor to sign IP over on anything developed, SO, what is the point of busting your ass on a friday night for something that your employer is likely to take?? But now the employer wants any and all work you do for them to be innovative as well, and even if you do develop IP for your employer they give you no reward!! The best I have heard from current developers is a patent plaque, an awards dinner, and 200$. Notice no sharing of royalties. The honest bonuses for this is for the Management. To top that off, when some BA degreed marketer who could pass a freshman science course promises a flying car that runs on water, you get your ass chewed for not delivering, let alone falling behind a ridiculously accelerated schedule for an optimistic budget at best! Now .....
Who in their right mind works for all that shit? These kids see their parents who really believe in the coolness of science come home dis-enchanted every day, burnt out on their dream job from hell.
The management team manages the situation of keeping the wages and compensation down by advertizing that they are'nt getting what they want, which is smart cheap inventors willing to sign over profitable IP for mediocre wages. That is the real world translation of 'Tech worker shortage' which is why H1-B Visas tech workers from India in the late 90's and early 00's were brought over on starting wages below the new grad hiring salary.
No, I dont have a solution other than a letter campaign to state legislatures and congress to bring IP laws to make feasible invention for the little guy again.
Sorry, I do not intend hurt any feelings, but the vicious cycle looks roughly as I described above.
By "Slavic" I mean that nowadays Western Europe "invites", by way of forming a single entity with them, the people from Eastern Europe to emigrate to their are. Being that they were satellites of Russia for decades, they're much poorer than their neighbors, so they go. Of course this happens first to the rich member countries nearest to Eastern Europe, but over time they'll spread all over Western Europe. So, Europe as a whole will end up seeing lots more of both Slavs and Slavic cultures.
And for "Latin", I meant people from Latin America. Sure, their (our actually, as I'm Brazilian) culture came originally from Southwestern Europe and all, but it's undeniable that over time the culture of Spain, Portugal etc. diverged from that of Latin American countries. Thus, by "more Latin" I mean the "coming back" of a different strand of Latin culture, similar sure, but not quite the same as that of the old continent.
That's it, basically.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Oh, you mean That kind of engineer....
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Thus, to compensate for the shortage of people due to the population becoming old and having less and less children, they prefer to invest strongly in robotics. Nowadays there are personal robots over there to do things, such as house cleaning and other unpleasant jobs, that in countries which opt for immigration are left to immigrants.
Where can I buy some of these robots? (I assume you're talking about robots more advanced than a Roomba.) My wife and I tried hiring various Mexican immigrants to do house cleaning, and it didn't work too well: they're completely flaky, they want to make their own hours, come when it's convenient for them, want to push you into learning Spanish, etc. When you can get them to actually work, they do good work, but there's so much hassle with dealing with them that it just isn't worth it. And that's if you get some fairly honest ones: there's some out there who "case" your house for their buddies to come steal all your stuff when you're gone. A friend of ours had that happen.
It's not just Mexicans who are a problem, either. We hired a white woman to clean up our back yard, and she refused because we had some Thai princess statue there. She claimed it was a "false idol" and "offended God", and wanted to destroy it for us.
I think the Japanese have the right idea. Having people to do all your chores really isn't the best solution, because people are too unreliable and untrustworthy. Robots are a much better solution. They do exactly what you want, when you want, without complaining. Just make sure to not make the robots too intelligent, or else you'll have a Cylon rebellion on your hands.
My Dad is a university Physics prof; I have an engineering degree (AOE/OE) that I never used.
Right now, I'm a layout tech at a concrete plant.
As my Dad says, we don't need more engineers here in America. We need more doctors, lawyers, politicians, and people sueing each other.
We don't pay engineers. And when the pay for engineers goes a tad above the pizza delivery guy, we quick publish "we need more engineers!" to get the price back down, and keep enough engineers unemployed. So we don't need more engineers.
What's currently paid well? That's what we need. We need more litigators, more doctors, more managers, more politicians, and more realtors (up until recently, anyhow.)
If Japan's the same, this headline should have been ignored.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Remember the late 90s and the dot.com bubble. Programming and web programming in particular was hot and everyone and their dog wanted in.
Everyone, with or without any technical knowledge was jumping on the bandwagon and commanding high salaries even.
When the bubble burst, only hard core techies stayed. And today the industry is mostly filled with people who love what they do, even though the salaries on average are not as lucrative any more.
So, yeah, in the bubble lawyers weren't switching to web programming, but high school dropouts, people who barely knew anything about technology or even cared remotely about it did.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
for identifying the race to the bottom
I fear japanese youth has been idioticized by all the bogus videogaming scene in the past few decades. While old pictures of japanese showed serious, hard-working people, today we look at casual hipsters with colored hair, anime-inspired clothes and seemingly no goals towards life other than getting to the next level in some virtual world...
I pity them.
I don't feel like it...
It is perfectly possible for talented software developers to have no degree and yet generate verifiably working code from an appropriately detailed spec in a reasonable period of time. It is likewise possible for a talented student to complete a full complement of coursework to acceptable standards, not receive a degree for whatever reason, and go on to generate verifiably working code from an appropriately detailed spec in a reasonable period of time. I dare say there's little to no positive correlation between utility as a software developer and holding a degree.
In comp sci, and in part for electrical engineering, the tools and materials for experiments are cheap and readily available, and going to uni doesn't get you access to anything really cool except like minds. For something like an industrial technology cert or a chemistry or biology degree, access to the tools and materials you need to experiment is not cheap nor readily available.
So, industry has unintentionally through economy of scale reduced the barrier to entry into software development and electronics engineering. In other fields a degree may actually certify that you didn't disfigure yourself through missing some "mundane little detail", but in CS a degree is little more than a very expensive, standardized reference that externalizes the cost and risk of management.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Perhaps you need to measure expense in more than cash. As I recall it was common for engineering students to take 1/4 more units than those measuring in math or the hard sciences. This translates into a lot more work per semester/quarter/however you measure your commitments. Now a lot of that was lab course work, but that doesn't mean less time invested. And that's a heavy expense when your fellow students are locating their future spouse.
It's true that this wasn't France, but I doubt that France is any different in this respect.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That WAS a great post. Two things you didn't mention though:
a) Chicks. It's really important to realise that we're all basically (with a few VERY rare exceptions) motivated by the desire for sex. That respect you talked about in society for jobs goes double, when it comes to choosing a career that'll actually get you the BIG reward (a family).
b) That over-30's ageism... you think it's about people over 30 being ignored because their experience is seen as worthless? I doubt that. I think it's much more likely that they're being ignored because they know that people over 30 have (or want) mortgages, families, etc., and that means they'll want higher incomes. On the other hand, people under 30, as you say, have a hard time planning for the future, and are just happy to get some experience in a reputable company, even if the pay is bad.
I thought school was paid for by the government in Japan? But you have to absolutely work your ass off for almost your entire pre-college life to pass the entrance exam, not just for college itself but for every school on the way to college. Surely that's a strong disincentive for some (and a major source of burnout for others).
I call BS on that.
I live in Japan and work as an engineer and I can tell you, engineering work pays crap here. Starting pay out of university is barely over 200,000 yen/mo. You'd only do it in Japan if you really enjoyed the work.
And the quality of japanese engineers you do find is generally crap too. Every engineer in my department is a local-hire foreigner.
Just not any suitable for Japanese business culture that aren't already working for Japanese companies.
yeah don't bother complaining about the competition cause you wouldn't be up to standards anyway
In Business Japan...
... Most Japanese Woman quit work after getting hitched. Thats about 50% of the population right there. Its all about becoming a baby-making machine (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6306685.stm)
... Innovation is looked down upon if you on the lower level of the feeding chain. Do something great and you just pissed off your boss.
... Your invention is not yours, it belongs to the company. You'll be lucky to get a small bonus for a billion dollar invention. (http://www.out-law.com/page-5208)
... Seniority is what counts; being the Kacho - section chief. (http://xogij.blogs.com/xogij/2004/11/are_we_really_h.html)
... Simple-minded thinking is rewarded. Rather then hire one programmer to program a rather simple data parsing algorithm in 3 days, some companies prefer to hire 3 employees for a year for manually data entry. (i don't remember where I read this, but its out there)
... Car drives you! (obligatory "In Soviet Russia" joke)
However, it isn't all that different from how United States was not too long ago. Socially, you can draw many parallels between USA 50 years ago and Japan today. Japan still has many social issues to overcome. With Japan having the second largest economy in the world, I expect more social revolutions taking place to better the nation's backwards social issues. Otherwise, Japan will have more issues then just a slacking work force.
I have been wanting to work in Japan for forever, but how do you go about finding a job there, especially when you're in America?
I can speak the language fairly well, and can read and write fine. (Listening comprehension is a little difficult for me on occasion, however.) I have a CS degree from Georgia Tech and have been in the work force for about a year and a half. I'm sure there are people here on Slashdot that have been in the same boat, or just somehow ended up working in Japan. Any advice?
If companies are not paying because they cannot afford to, and not because they do not want to, that would make it not a shortage, but a shrinkage! Demand is there, but everyone's broke.
The industry has Erectile Disfunction.
Dilbert classic sits on the wall above my desk.
,misleading explanation, or the one you won't understand?"
PHB: "Tell mewhat the issue is again"
Dilbert: "Do you want the simple but
PHB: "Either is good I wasn't planning on listening"
Dilbert classic sits on the wall above my desk. PHB: "Tell mewhat the issue is again" Dilbert: "Do you want the simple but ,misleading explanation, or the one you won't understand?"
PHB: "Either is good I wasn't planning on listening.
Damn posted AC by mistake first time.
I look back on my forty years of software engineering and remember many many years of a feeling of accomplisment when difficult technical problems were solved and mountains of hardware could begin shipping from the factory.
I also look back on decades of loneliness. Long distance romances while on site in foreign countries, weekends where I kept working while my friends went to the beach and partied. I thought I was doing it to create a business. Or for my family, or for the money. But when the bottom fell out from software, the business failed, the wife committed suicide because she so hated the software business and didn't know how else to make a living.
I did it all because I desperately wanted to earn the respect of people that couldn't relate to my nerdness. Now that all the affectations of success are gone, I am just bitter about the time and effort I spent so you all could have nice computers. Today I am another burned out old engineer who would have achieved independence on time if I had not insisted on doing the technical work. As a manager, I could have been successful, earned my pile of money, and enoyed life a lot more.
At this point I cannot say I recommend that young people shoot for engineering professions. It is a hard road that is mostly unappreciated.
Of course I klung to the old idea that you should do what you liked, and I thought I liked writing assembler code and drivers. I was very good at it, and many other people weren 't.
Your first link says almost exactly the opposite of what you claim it says (it's actually about how the govt seems to have a hidden policy of inclusion to force closure of expensive special schools) - yet you're modded informative?
/. ....
.sig :)
Your second link is about how much teachers love breakfast clubs and how much Tories hate them for being expensive (as usual). I'm surprised you didn't find some similar contradictory links for your racist asylum rants.
Also you're talking bollocks about exams. You can't get an A at foundation level "O level", or GCSE as it's now known. The highest you can get at foundation is a B, Standard is A and the highest level can get A*.
Only on
p.s. At least we can agree on your
Nick
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
That was the way it was explained to me by my then boss some ten years back. That's also the way I've seen it described in the newspapers. Didn't snip any articles, but you might try searching the newspaper sites. (My wife subscribes to the Daily Yomiuri. I suppose it's because they give her the Japanese ads in the English paper.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Not sure what your point is, but Is "free timer" English?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
My school (Lafayette College) has the same thing, but we call it AB Engineering.
Basically, you have two drop-out paths
1. If you drop by your second year, there's the business school at the bottom of the hill. You can count all the math, and apply your core engineering classes as electives.
2. If you drop later, AB Engineering is your savior. Basicaly, you stop taking technical classes, and spend the rest of your college life taking business and social sciences/humanities.
I actually knew two people who took this major. One of them was a lazy bastard who played too much UO; somehow, he hadn't failed all his classes, but the third year of engineering was killing him, so he moved to AB. The other actually started out in the program, which really surprised me.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
People interested in science are obviously being given the shaft at the workplace too often... so that people don't want to go in those fields. Less stress, better working conditions, and less hours... and more pay wouldn't hurt either. It's the same old thing... business exec types love taking advantage of people, and a lot of techies don't enjoy fighting against the business exec's sneaky ways.