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.'"
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.
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.
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.
An economist is not a "bean counter". An accountant is a bean counter. An economist studies how people and collections of people make choices. The most famous example is the choice of "guns versus butter"--that's an economics issue. Bean counters try to balance the equity and make sure that the change in equity equals the difference between positive and negative cash flow.
Probably the people you are thinking of are "managers". Managers make short-sided decisions to make themselves look good and temporarily improve cash flow. They are different from accountants and economists. Managers change jobs frequently to avoid dealing with the problems their short sided decisions create.
Just callin' it like I see 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm getting real tired of people who want to employ engineers (and their sock puppet politicians) continually screaming "Shortage!".
Japan has (by and large) a market economy. There is no such thing as a shortage in a market economy. If they want more people to do engineering, pay engineers more. You can bet the bank if engineers and scientists were paid football players or rock stars wages, then you wouldn't be able to move for people clamouring to be engineers and scientists.
What people mean when they say "there is a shortage of engineers" is "there is shortage of engineers prepared to do amazing work while being paid less than the idiot with the history of art major in middle management". Big surprise there.
Excellent post. So many people miss the effect of societies respect for a profession - it's huge. One of the reasons that UK schools find it hard to get good teachers... our society has respected them less and less over the past several decades.