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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.'"
So? Last time I looked, Japan is pretty crowded with a very limited amount of arable land. Why should someone in Japan starve to make room for a foreigner?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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.
Funny because the last I heard, Japanese universities were going to have to start enrolling foreign students otherwise they would stop certain classes due to lack of students. On top of that with the aging population, Japan is on its way to being a first world country to have a higher death rate than birth rate. Overcrowding won't be an issue. http://www.kairos-inc.com/Investing/IB%20on%20Japan.7.16.pdf (projected information) http://www.worldpress.org/profiles/japan.cfm (current since 2001) To suggest that the natives will starve as well is an over exaggeration, there is plenty of food and as with anything in life, people will adapt.
Jonathanjk.com
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.
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.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Oil_Prices_Medium_Term.png
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.
There are tons of management courses available at any decent buisiness college! Organizational behavior and management, small business management, etc. etc.The problem is more that many of those aforementioned PHB do not in fact have any management courses under their belt, and neither do they have the technical experience to be able to properly understand things from an engineer's point of view. The Org Behavior course I took was incredibly helpful, and I would strongly recommend anyone who is a manager with no educational experience take a few classes.
Nucor Steel and Licoln Electric are a good example of where management knows how to get their people motivated and keep them happy. But the techniques they use are VERY well explained in any management class- Go now! Take one! At a reputable college preferably. (and I don't mean one of those stupid self help seminar things)
Honestly, I'm not convinced you ever even went to college if you have never heard of a course in management.
University of Washington: school of business administration
http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/ba.html
Binghamton University: School of Management
http://som.binghamton.edu/
University of GA: Department of Management
http://www.terry.uga.edu/management/
University of Virginia: McIntire School of Commerce Managent Program
http://www.commerce.virginia.edu/academic_programs/undergraduate/management.html
University of Florida: Management Depratment
http://www.cba.ufl.edu/mang/
UNC Charlotte: BS in Business Administration
http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/bachelor-science-business-administration-bsba-degree-courses-major.shtml
The list can go on and on. I would say nearly every college in the US has at least one course in management. Nearly every 4 year public college in the US has an undergraduate degree in management or business administration.
On a degree, you find that you have to pay for very expensive text books (you never thought books could be that expensive)
Is that really a major expense? I did a 4-year engineering degree and only bought textbooks for the courses where I didn't go to enough of the lectures, otherwise all you needed was the lecture notes.
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.
New Labour didn't help things either - parents of children with behavour problems demanded that their children be sent to mainstream schools in order to avoid the stigma of being sent to "special schools". Teachers have to deal with students who will constantly hit other students or hide under their desk the minute there is a loud noise. Teaching Assistants were introduced, but that was seen as a tn attempt to recruit teachers on a reduced salary.
Then there was also the attempt to stop schools from telling off, expelling or suspending disruptive students as this would be a violation of their fundamental human rights. Then there was the requirement that schools should provide breakfast to students who don't have time to have breakfast in the morning.
Exam systems have been tinkered with. Previous governments introduced the concept of Foundation, Standard and Credit 'O' Grades so that everyone could say that they got an 'A' in their subject. Then there was switch to using coursework for assessment rather than exams, and the merger of Biology/Chemistry/Physics into General Science or the removal of various topics from Mathematics (permnutations and combinations, trigonometric equations and Physics.
As the same time, providing sanctuary to large numbers of asylum seekers who couldn't speak English as a first language, overloaded schools in London, which forced the government to "share the burden" across cities all across the UK. The side-effect of this was that the local parents pulled their children out of the popular state schools and send them to private schools instead. Now, the state schools are being forced to close due to lack of demand.
Then if there is a fight between students, the teachers can't intervene for fear of being injured, or being accused of being a pedophile for touching one of the students.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Depends on how you define IT; IT can cover a huge number of different areas - not just the pencil pushing mouth breathing MSCE's who seem to inhabit the IS departments of large organisations.
IT, engineering etc. are all going through trouble finding people - not only people, but *GOOD* people. The problem is that due to the pathetic recruiting procedures and what they consider important - they get a person who can sell themselves rather than a person who knows his or her stuff. They then piss and moan over the fact that the person they hire is as useful to their organisation as the plastic pot plant sitting in the corner of the room.
Heck, I've seen people working in IT who as thick as two short planks, put into positions of importance but constantly rely on ringing up the tech support desk of the software/hardware company to get something working.
So basically it comes down to:
1) Shit recruitment practices - those who use recruitment companies in lieu of their own in house hiring, I question why they even have a HR department in the firstplace given they've already outsourced the recruiting process already. Given the number of drop kicks who come through that system, one has to ask, with such a crap failure rate, maybe the old fashion sitting down and interviewing each one is better.
2) Companies don't know what the fuck they want - so the hire the person in the suit rather than the expert sitting a pair of jeans
3) When they find someone, they micromanage the person to death which forces them to leave
4) The pay is shit for what is involved, and interesting, in every company who hires engineers, the first place where job cuts occur is in engineering - not the pointless paper shuffling parts of the organisation.
5) Management are clueless morons whom, one doesn't expect them to have expert knowledge, but at least a a generalised overview of what the company is actually fucking doing goes along way in terms of communication between management and the engineers.
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.
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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.
According to a coworker who got some training in Japan, her Japanese classmates were saying that the Japanese government certification exams are just too hard.
In fact, the Japanese are giving the same exams elsewhere in Asia and not too many people are passing.
I'm an Engineering "Manager", actually I "Manage" our company's engineering (software and electronic) team across asia (including an office in Tokyo).
Firstly: I have no degree in anything.
Secondly: We've had vacancies in Tokyo for junior engineers now for about 18 months. You can't get them. Not young ones anyway. You can get the occasional old guy, who'll pretty quickly turn out to want somewhere comfy to finish out their careers. In our company it doesn't work, we have a reputation for being dynamic and innovative. It's something we have to take very seriously, especially in Japan where challenging tradition is only going to work if you are really really good at what you do.
It seems the old school of engineering lived in infinite cube land, had to do precisely as they were told (perfectly) and worked 100+ hours a week. This is a pretty unattractive career choice for young people so it's no suprise the numbers have been declining. What they need is to inject some cool into engineering as a career choice...
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
That's not the reason why people in Japan are avoiding the tech field though. The main reason is quality of life. When they say the hours are bad in the tech fields, they don't mean bad from a European or North American point of view (say 50-60 hrs a week), but bad from a Japanese point of view (say 80-100 hrs per week).
I've been to Japan on a couple of business trips lasting from a week to several weeks for GPS related company. Each time we (the foreigners) worked from 9am to 10/11pm 6 days per week. The Japanese coworkers worked even longer. While even in Japan that is unusual, it isn't nearly as uncommon as it is here. Word gets around and soon nobody wants to train for such a job.