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.
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.
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
...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.
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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Oil_Prices_Medium_Term.png
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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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/
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Lawyers work even more insane hours than engineers - at least the ones that you're referring to that make the big bucks. Your average humble straight-out-of-school variety starts at maybe $40-$50k. Big salaries exist only if you make it into a big firm or a big corp. Ditto crazy hours for the accountants that make the big salaries.
I second the other replier's call for pharmacy school. Two years of undergrad, 3-4 years of Pharm.D. program (6 years total after high school). I have 5 cousins who just finished the program. 35 hours a week. $20k-50k sign on bonus (one even was given a 5-series BMW). Frequent dinners at Ruth's Chris while you're an undergrad, courtesy of pushy pharm salesmen. $110,000 starting salary for essentially doing two things - looking up drug interactions on a computer screen and verifying with the insurance company on the phone (if you work retail like Walgreens). You don't even need to count pills anymore - some other schmuck does it for you (and they get paid $28/hr to do it - and we wonder why American health care costs so much?)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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...