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Mr. President, There Is No (US) Engineer Shortage
McGruber writes "Vivek Wadhwa has written an article in the Washington Post titled, 'Mr. President, there is no engineer shortage,' which addresses the perceived national shortage of engineers. Wadhwa slams China for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to auto mechanics and technicians, yet fails to slam the U.S. for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates. He also says, 'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.'"
leaving us short-changed
Who is this "us" you speak of?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Shortage of engineering jobs, not of engineers or potential engineers. Its almost as if we moved many of our jobs to other countries for short term profits in exchange for long term economic vitality.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.
So...we're not short on engineers...except that we are. At least we're short of excellent engineers and short of willing candidates to be tomorrow's excellent engineers. He whines that China labels sub-par losers and mere technicians as engineers, but then admits we're not putting out our best either. And still contends we're not short.
I'm really not sure how Wadhwa thinks he's disproving or even strongly contrasting Obama's postulate. He's certainly not coming within a thousand miles of justifying his title.
"... leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.
And it's only going to get worse if the education budget continues to act as some sort of financial punching-bag and educators keep being demonized. Think things are tough now? We haven't seen a damn thing yet.
where are our teleporters and dispensers?
(Sorry, it had to be done. Getting it out of the way early.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V3CfD8TPac
'Mr. President, there is no engineer shortage'
He also says, 'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed
So he's being misleading, if not outright contradicting himself. A crappy engineer is no engineer at all, so if we need more good engineers then there very much is an engineering shortage.
"fails to slam the US for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, "
I knew a woman who used to demand the title of "Domestic Engineer". Also known as "housewife"
So what you're saying is that I'd be wasting my time reading this article and we still have an effective shortage of engineers because our engineers are not motivated to do engineering, don't have jobs available to them, or found other jobs that pay better than their engineering field. I think I've heard this before. Sounds like we have an incentive problem.
If you want more software engineers, you can create them trivially : Allocate a half billion dollars or more to an academicly overseen open source initiative, roughly like google's summer of code, but higher salaries dependent upon education level. Voila, instant developers!
If unemployment means drawing down $50k per year working on your own pet project, that'll make the field unbelievably attractive to young people, and keep old folks in the game. And those projects will ocasionally convert into commercial open source companies that employ other developers.
Wadhwa slams China for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to auto mechanics and technicians, yet fails to slam the US for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates.
The question is this, do the Chinese count auto mechanics among those they count in their official job numbers as being engineers? I know that the U.S. does not count "sanitation engineers" as "engineers" in its job numbers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Some people complain about adding the word "science" to professions that may be less rigorous science.
Social Sciences
Computer Science
...we have too many of these types which skews the numbers by comparison:
"Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkley School of Information, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, Exec in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Emory University’s Halle Institute of Global Learning, and faculty member and advisor at Singularity University. He helps students prepare for the real world; lectures in class; and leads groundbreaking research projects. He is also an advisor to several startup companies, a columnist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and a contributor to the popular tech blog TechCrunch. He also writes occasionally for several international publications. Prior to joining academia in 2005, Wadhwa founded two software companies. He holds an MBA from New York University and a B.A. in Computing Studies from the University of Canberra, in Australia."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/vivek-wadhwa/2011/05/28/AGtx1eFH_page.html
It's hard to tell if this piece has any real content due to the barrage of [uncited] opinions; Otellini's blame of American market decline squarely on how many people graduate in a certain field, Wadhwa's push that it's a shortage of applied engineers rather than engineers period, and McGruber's notion that Wadhwa failed in making a valid comparison between the US and China. Wonderful.
(Personally, I think that pushing for too many Engi's will make the team weak to a Demo / Uber-Push and won't be sustainable. Better to have a heavy/medic team hold over the dispenser and have more modular support. )
How many NASA guys are now pumping gas in Florida?
Lack of engineers, my ass.
Hey Mr President, we need jobs and stuff to be designed and built. Then you'll see the engineers get back on the grid.
Huh?
Lawyer > MBA> engr
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical and practical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost.[1][2] The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenerare, meaning "to create". - Wikipedia
Anyone else have a definition they would like to bandy about?
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
True. He's a pundit. He did a Y2K COBOL-conversion startup back in the 1990s; that's his contribution to "engineering". His academic positions are "hanger-on" types, not actual professorships.
I've been a visiting scholar at Stanford. It's not a big deal.
There is definitely a shortage of engineers. A shortage of engineers that are willing to invest multiple thousands of dollars into a degree so they can watch BA majors rake in 3-5 times what they earn, who are willing to spend the better part of their life paying off their tuition bills while working their ass off, knowing that they, too, could have gotten that BA degree. Probably with less stress and less work.
Yeah, there's a shortage of smart people who are dumb.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I just addressed this problem a few minutes ago, here. Too many people with technical degrees feeding the legal, MBA, patent, PHB food chain. Too few doing work.
Anecdote: Back when I joined Boeing (many years ago), we had a 'lead engineer' system. The lead engineer was just the go to guy (women not yet taken seriously there) who had the final word on technical issues within a group. That freed the first level manager to to his reports, go to meetings, etc. He was just (usually) the senior guy in the group who knew the system and could mentor the new hires. Then, it became common practice for management to offload planning, scheduling, employee evaluations and other tasks onto the leads. Pretty soon, that was the majority of their job (the question was: where were the managers going during the day). Management had long since become detached from the technology and it was common for the boss to have no clue about how their system worked. A few leads took voluntary demotions or shifted to different groups to get out from under these duties. Pretty sad. Soon, even the leads had become mini managers and were becoming separated from the actual work going on. In my final position with the company, management brought in a lead engineer who had no clue about what we did or the state of the art in our field of work. All he did was to run around and pester people for formal reports on their schedule projections and progress, and budget inputs in order to assemble his own reports on the same thing (Even though he had no idea what we were doing. He reported that we were through task X because we said we were.).
Everyone wants to get an MBA and be a manager. Because its the hierarchy and that's what dictates reward and respect. We need a system like sports teams have. The coach might be a fat slob and not necessarily the best player in his career. The star players get rewarded commensurate with their skills. The coach is rewarded for the ability to hold the whole thing together. But those are separate skill sets and often its the bad coach that gets sacked more often than the players.
Have gnu, will travel.
There is a lot of engineering talent (and potential engineering talent) in the US. The problem is that companies aren't willing to pay for it! The MBA management style has made it very hard to have a long tern engineering career- the engineer is viewed as a commodity (why do you think it is called "human resources"?) that can be easily replaced by another unit in another location, across the country or across the world. Why give a raise to retain an engineer in a position when you can save money by shipping the job somewhere else? Many people who are smart and want to have an income that slightly outpaces inflation may start in engineering, but don't stick around.
Some manager gets a promotion for lowering (apparent) costs by outsourcing, and after they're gone, another gets stuck with fixing it. We are very good at training engineers in foreign countries how to do what we do well, and in that, we have managed to do is to shift the engineering talent overseas, where it also gets more expensive, negating the benefit.
applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates.
OK, who is an engineer? By "sanitation worker" I guess you mean the guy who picks up the trash, right? Boiler operator not an engineer - what sort of boiler? "FaceSpace coder"? Hoho, so amusing. I hate Facebook and Myspace as much as anyone who's been on the Internet more than 10 minutes, but are you suggesting that someone who codes something clever and effective for either is not an engineer? MSCE... irrelevant. I read the In A Nutshell guides for the MSCE exams about 11 years ago but never took them. Would I have un-become an engineer if I'd taken and (almost certainly) passed?
But the DeVry insult really takes the biscuit - especially when following the argument of someone who was obviously an engineer yet whose undergraduate studies were in Canberra (oh wow!) and whose next qualification was an MBA (sure aren't enough of them!). Hey, McGruber, maybe the problem is that you don't know what an engineer is?
I have to point out that the author of the article just earned from me a well-deserved title of dipshit for spewing uninformed crap about C programmers.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
My friend, an unemployed teacher who has been struggling for two years to find work, had a similar reaction when Obama claimed there was a shortage of teachers in his state-of-the-union address.
There may very well be a shortage of competent teachers, or skilled engineers, but that's an entirely different matter, and increasing the number of degrees handed out will do nothing to fix that. It is as likely to exacerbate the problem. The problem is more in the hiring and employment practices.
The problem with the US, is in most aspects we do slap the title Engineer on a lot of titles. In reality only those who hold a P.E. (Professional Engineer -- somebody who is licensed by the State to be an engineer) should be called an Engineer. Sure, lots of people do engineering (Software Engineers, etc), but they are not true engineers...
the US Federal Government are puppets for multi-national corporations & international bankers...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Really? I'm a DeVry grad.
says, 'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering, leaving us short-changed in solving the important problems of the day.'
I know many engineers who took years getting into an engineering position - 2/3rds of my graduating class did not find engineering jobs right out of university. So that's problem #1. Secondly, many engineers excel in a management role - problem solving, critical analysis, and cool under pressure - plus the opportunities that moving into a management role provides is enticing. Finally, 'potential' is not really quantifiable. If he is a brilliant student but has no interpersonal skills, and she is a C+ student but works great within a group, who the better potential engineer? What about someone who can almost instantly understand concepts such as thermodynamic closed systems and who is a deity in a machine shop, but enjoys creating art? What is their potential?
It's a silly argument.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
USA is suffering shortage of liberties, not shortage of engineers.
I am looking at Obama right now and I almost pity the ... man.
If I could do 1 thing right now in his place, I would stop the wars and bring all troops home.
If I could do 2 things, the second thing would be this: stop printing and borrowing money.
If I could do 3 things, the third thing would be this: stop subsidizing businesses and people.
If I could do 4 things, the fourth thing would be this: stop regulating businesses, especially this concerns all new startups. If you are a startup, you should be able to get up and running in a couple of days. That should be the goal.
If I could do 5 things, the fifth thing would be tax reform and abolishment of income taxes, payroll taxes, all income related taxes.
The thing that would be 6th: stop the drug war, let all the people out of jails who are there for non-violent drug related offenses.
The 7th thing: allow competition in money.
The only real thing is of-course: follow the Constitution, your job is to protect the liberties, not create jobs, not provide capital, not regulate monopolies, not be the world's police.
Of-course USA lacks engineering jobs. It won't get them back until it is clear that it stopped trying to destroy the foundation upon which the jobs can be created.
You can't handle the truth.
If the U.S. government weren't preoccupying its engineers with "defense", even more engineers would be available for productive endeavors.
The article says that China was inflating the engineering graduate numbers by including things the US does not count as Engineers. The US labor statistics has a very precise definition of Engineer and it includes none of the things McGruber cites. I am just trying to determine if he is an idiot, or I am for not getting the joke?
The OP complains that Wadhwa is inconsistent about engineer labels, but I think the entire article has a consistency problem: he asserts in multiple ways that, market forces being the way they are in the US economy, there is no problem with our engineer numbers, but at the same time says having more engineers is better than having less and that we need to make engineering "cool" because we have so many resource and other problems that need engineers to solve. If he really has faith in market forces, then he needs to acknowledge that too many engineers is at least as bad as too few (all those wasted years learning something no one wants you to know) and the reason we haven't got more people stepping up to become engineers to solve our resource problems is that, as a nation, we don't currently care about solving them.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
in-con-ceiv-a-ble
Adjective: Not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable
Seemed time to nail that one down too.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
The guys is quoted twice on the same slashdot page... do we have slashdot celebrities already ?
"...DeVry Graduates..."
With a comment like that, it sounds like someone is trying to justify their outrageously expensive Engineering degree.
I'll put my DeVry degree up against your engineering degree any day.
I had been in the aerospace industry as a thermal engineer and a systems engineer my entire adult life. I got laid off at 59. Two years after that I advised my doctor whose son wanted to go into aerospace engineering to tell him to instead go into accounting. The US's plethora of regulations plus insane tax code insure that that role is required by every business (big and small) in the country.
But there is a shortage of people willing to work for the rates that companies want to pay.
The problem is one of expectations. Most adults in the english-speaking world have a self-image of a nice big house, medical care, a partner, alimony, some kids, a pension, a dog, foreign holidays and a car for everyone (except maybe the dog). To support that lifestyle needs a certain, high, level of income.
However those very same people will baulk at paying for goods designed, developed and manufactured by workers who share that aspiration. They all want cheap stuff - and plenty of it. To satisfy that demand and price-point, the manufacturers can only afford to pay their employees enough for a bicycle, rice and vegetables and a family TV set.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Where do you think the word "engineer" comes from if not "one who operates engines?" The term has always been applied to those operating the large power plants of locomotives and steamships, and it is from the required knowledge of physics and mechanics to operate these large, complex devices that the term "engineer" has come to be applied to other, unrelated fields.
Let's call Scotty "Chief Warp Drive Operator" while we're coopting terms!
If you want to be a purist, if you have no idea what a "steam table" is, let alone how to use one, you don't get to call yourself an "engineer," let alone dictate who else can or cannot.
Jackasses...
...isn't new.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"There is no engineering shortage but here are reasons we have an engineering shortage"...um ok.
The same applies here in the UK.
I'm a trained Engineer with a PHD in Servo and stepper design. I'm also a qualified Toolmaker (did that before going back to Uni)
Can I get a job? Can I heck.
Pulling pints at my local is about all I can get.
All the jobs have gone to:-
India
China
Or what is worse
Indians working here for 1/2 the UK Minimum wage all perfectly legal.
Looking at getting a job right out of engineering school. Coming from a good school (top 15) with a high GPA (> 3.5). Looks to be easy. I don't really feel like my search is representative of what an average engineering grad deals with but it doesn't really seem that atypical. From what I know from friends back at the state school I almost went to they are getting good paying jobs, no prob. So is there a shortage of jobs? - I dunno, but all these ppl on slashdot are saying yes and all these ppl are saying no... I will say though after a few internships that there is extremely high variability in the capabilities of my fellow engineers. Some are good at hacking - really fast learners, can make anything work and understand anything and everything with ease but their work still ends up a little sloppy. There are some who are slower but put out solid work. Some that can do produce quantity and quality. Some that don't seem to do/know/understand anything and I can't figure out how they got hired.
With respect to the lawyer > MBA > engineer comments - that unfortunately is the feeling I get inside even though deep down somewhere inside I know that I like building useful and cool things. Something that always disappointed me growing up was that no one else built things. Growing up I built countless things, some stupid some awesome - but I did it because I got some internal satisfaction. I could train myself with books, the internet and ppl. I looked in middle school and high school for others that were interested in doing that sort of thing and it was scarce at best. I don't know why this feeling manifests in some and not in others but it does seem like a critical attribute for a successful engineer. I know so many ppl that don't care what they are building at work and so many that do. The ones that do always put out better work. The ones that don't still seem to be fairly productive, but not disruptive or particularly innovative. This has drifted way off topic but I feel like the reason I am struggling with staying in engineering really is the $$ difference that a lawyer/mba makes. It seems like such boring work but it pays so much better. I don't want to give in but at the same time, its hard when at our engineering recruiting events there are law firms head hunting and offering 30-50% more money starting. Compounding this is watching some of the companies I have worked for (as an intern) add/subtract/replace engineers like a commodity. Personally, I have to think that the engineer that innovates, always has the next great idea for their work or the company and enjoys working to make good things will survive commoditization but the engineer that is on autopilot all day will not, or at least I hope. I dunno, I have been so enchanted with engineering since elementary school and lately it has been such a disappointment. Patent wars limit innovation, closed environments suck, companies that don't allow for innovation to move up the bureaucracy. Marketing that makes or breaks good ideas, CEOs (or co-CEOs - no that I am sore or anything...) that have no vision and don't listen to the engineers beneath them and a constant complaint of the imminent demise of the US as China and India take over. What makes me want to stay in engineering? All of my expensive tuition, hard classes and advanced course work just to have w/e stupid task I do on a daily basis outsourced? Engineering needs more quality and less quantity (or at least less dead weight and ppl unwilling/incapable/indifferent to innovation). Then we could pay the real innovators enough to want to stay in it. There should be some kind of rotation in terms of management or some change that would limit complacency. There should be more democracies within companies and more accountability to consumers/employees rather than share holders. There should be so much change - but there won't be. There is no one in a position of power that would want to see this change.
In the mean time, either I take an engineering job for less $$ and sit i
Seriously, if you reward certain jobs with lots of money, the smart people who don't care what they do will go there. It's the same problem with engineers, general practice physicians, teachers, and nearly every other skilled position. They are paid on a fixed basis, and there is only so much "fixed" to go around. Find some smart kid and tell him he can have 2% of a transaction if he manages it, and show him billions of dollars of transactions a day - then tell him he can get $40/hr to work in the system or 2% of ten million dollars to close a deal, directing the $40/hr people to do all the work. Which will he choose?
If I knew now what I knew in college, I'd have gone Wall Street and been retired by now. As it was I wanted to work for NASA as an aerospace engineer, so I did - and I've got some really cool memories and patches of missions I was in charge of, and a $100k in a 401k that's gone nowhere for the last decade.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"yet fails to slam the US for its practice of applying the 'engineer' label to sanitation workers, building janitors, boiler operators, FaceSpace coders, MSCEs and DeVry graduates."
I went to DeVry a while back and it was no cake-walk. To earn my CIS degree, the was a while back, but we had courses covering programming, databases, online systems, systems analysis.
I was a CIS graduate.
We wrote a ton of programs and we used 6 programming languages that I remember and wrote mainframe as well as Unix and MS-DOS programs.
So I'm not an "Engineer" because I graduated from DeVry with a CIS degree, but I've held the software engineering title several times in my career and I've had to mentor and supervise ( and fix bad code written by ) grads with CS and EE degrees ( even one 2 guys with CS doctorates ) from universities?
In Canada and most of the Unitied states, you can not call yourself an engineer unless you are licensed to be one. Just like doctors, the use of the title is restricted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_engineering
If there are an janitors calling themselves "engineers" they can face legal action.
Mr. Wadhwa should really learn to find out the full story before he goes ranting. I believe the original source of this story is probably: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/14/eveningnews/main20071167.shtml
I remember when all that H1 Visa BS started we'd all sit around knowing lots of engineer in the U.S. looking for work while news would talk about shortages. It's typically U.S. corporate BS, putting profits before people and trying to increase margins. I was working for IBM and our jobs got outsourced to India and I got to stay an extra month if I help with transition. Talking the replacements in India I find out they were hire 3-4 in India for each they laid off here. So salary wise no real savings, but no benefits, workman's comp, unemployment and other US costs that where they were saving money.
I think it was President Eisenhower that said the large corporation would be the downfall of this county. Decades later he's being proved right.
I read about some job fairs specifically targeted at this resource.
Its a cultural thing. Parents want their sons to be "engineers". So many vocational, college and business degree programs are called engineering.
The past several presidents of China have been "engineers" although I believe they've been managers for most of their careers.
My own unemployment situation is terminal - but it's a product both of the economy and my inability to relocate. If I'd been free to move to an area where the jobs in my field are three or four years ago, chances are I'd never have become unemployed in the first place. Of course, I've now been unemployed so long that I couldn't even get a job in those areas anymore. However, living where I do there's a major mismatch between what employers seem to want (seems to mainly be enterprise Java coders) and where the bulk of my experience lies (systems engineering). However, while I have the skill set to work with EJB 3 or Spring, that's just a side effect - in my last job, the work I was hired for never really materialized, so I ended up doing a fair bit of Java before they decided that they'd be better off using the money they were paying me to get a couple of dedicated coders, without all of the baggage of my experience doing other stuff, straight out of college.
While I've given up looking, I think a lot of problems lie in the areas of HR, whether in-house or through an agency. With the exception of a few particularly specialized tech-oriented agencies, there's a real disconnect between the people who run the departments who have the vacancy and the people who do the hiring. That's a problem, since it's difficult to convey what's really needed for the job, and where having skills A and B is a valid substitute for C, or cases where you've got experience in D and they don't know that implies your expertise in E and F is off the chart, or where experience in G can get you up and running with H very quickly even if you're not experienced with it. They feed the resume through their buzzword checker, and kick it out if it doesn't include C, E, F and H. So somebody who is quite capable of doing the job doesn't even get through the preliminary culling of resumes. A good tech agency can do a lot there - and I had one for a while, who put me forward for jobs that even though I didn't look like a good match to HR, they knew from extensive interviews and their own expertise what I could and couldn't do.
In the end though, I think a bigger contribution to me stopping looking was the way I'd been treated by employers and potential employers over the years. In my last job, my boss was *so* insistent that I had to get a specific piece of work done by an arbitrary date (arbitrary because it was between Christmas and New Year, and those who were depending on it weren't going to be back in the office until January 5th) that I had to work over Christmas day, and *then* laid me off on January 7th. Then there was the Dream Job where the hiring manager seemed *super* enthusiastic from the first interview, and had me in for a second and third interviews on the next couple of days, then told me that while he couldn't say I had the job since he had to get his manager's manager to sign off on it, it was really just a technicality - then it took 2-3 weeks for them to actually pin down the right people and get them to sign on the dotted line, so long in fact that the company changed its policy so that they would no longer hire people through agencies before it was all done, and after keeping me hanging on with "any day now" for close to a month it was "Sorry, we can't hire you, bye." Of course, the agency that had put me forward had me under an agreement whereby the company in question couldn't hire me directly for a year. Even though the agency went out of business about three months later, it was still too late. That one pretty much broke my spirit completely - it was the only job in my field that I've *ever* seen advertised here (excluding one local company that has as a mandatory requirement experience with a particular DoD standard that you can only get in this state by working for *that* company).
So I gave up. In theory I'm having a go at getting going on my own in iOS/OS X development, trying to funnel what I did for fun in my spare time into a job, but that's getting nowhere. I've spent seven of the last ele
That's because there remains a thriving job market for petroleum distillate transfer engineers.
China's lower ended engineers are the equal to our upper ended engineers though.
We would have better and more though if people could afford to go to school. I would love to be an engineer but I cant come close to affording it and if I took a loan it would destroy my credit and put me in severe financial ruin
in addition to engineers is factory workers. We once were a manufacturng giant. People had decent middle class jobs. Corporations declared war on the middle class and Washington didn't stand up for the little guy (predictable) because they are greedy too. Now we all see what a f*cking mess we are in. Third world countries treat us like chumps because they took our manufacturing jobs and left us with a trade deficit and a shrinking middle class. And now Obama wants to find out how to fix the country. I knew the Republicans would tear that socialized medicine bill into scraps. We need manufacturing. We need middle class jobs which create tax revenue. If he was so damn smart he would send someone out to pitch major companies on relocating their factories in the USA. That'll help fix the economy not socialized medicine. /RANT
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
The U.S. is a bitterly, almost militantly divided country, with every everything or nothing being Obama's fault. To survive the current crisis (not caused by Obama, and not caused by Bush), the country needs to stand together.
Whoa, how is computer science less rigorous science? If anything, it is probably more rigorous than any other science field short of theoretical mathematics, since it is basically applied mathematics.
Mandatory xkcd link
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I can't buy a Ferrari for $50. We must have a Ferrari shortage...
While the overuse and subsequent devaluation of the term "engineer" is deplorable, boiler operators (stationary/power engineers), locomotive operators and marine power plant operators (marine engineers) were here first and have every right to their traditional nomenclature.
Some of the best engineers I have every worked with came from there.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSCE
MSCE can mean:
Master of Science in Civil Engineering; see Civil engineering
Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology
Master of Science in Communications Engineering; see Telecommunications engineering
MCSE, assuming he meant the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification and just accidentally Typo Engineered(tm) the acronym, is no longer being developed by MS in part due to the reasons he's implying. MS has created MCITP to replace the MCSE certs - there are no MCSE certifications for Windows Server 2008 and beyond.
Sincerely,
Joel M. Leo, MCSE
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
There's an easy dividing line between real engineers and fakers in the United States: it's the Professional Engineer licensing program. Graduates from an engineering program can take the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam; if they pass they are considered "Engineers in Training" (EIT). Fourish years later, the EIT can take the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam; after passing the candidate can be licensed by their state as a Professional Engineer, and put the initials PE after their name like doctors do. Licensed PEs can take on legal liability for the designs they create and are consequently eligible for work in fields where public safety is a concern.
I get why many PE type engineers get bent out of shape over the use of titles sanitation engineer, software engineer, and domestic engineer; it dilutes the title, and makes a joke of the profession. Honestly, though, I'd be fine with programmers joining the Engineering club; all they have to do is take the test (yes, there is a computing version of the PE exam, and its requirements don't look too tough to me). As long as they don't use the PE title without earning it I'll be happy, though.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
China's lower ended engineers are the equal to our upper ended engineers though.
No, they're not. I've met their students, first-hand, at two colleges now. Some of them are brilliant, and others can't see the forest for the trees. All of them have some level of difficulty with English. And I'm willing to bet the sample is aversely selected (look it up).
The same thing can be said of US-born graduates, but they generally speak English fluently, know the US culture, have (some) work experience in the US, and actually live here.
It's just wildly, unbelievably stupid to think it would cost that much to manufacture them in the US. There's no basis for that. It's retarded. How could it cost more to manufacture an iPad than it does to manufacture a car? There are cars which are made in the US and sell for under $14,000.
I suspect the myth comes from some idiot taking the ratio of the average American manufacturing wage to that of the average Chinese manufacturing wage and then multiplying the price of the finished product by that ratio.
Funny you should mention 'free markets' WRT jobs. The tech industry had the benefit of an ample workforce. In fact, there was such a glut of workers, the tech industry got exemptions from paying overtime into law. Such was the state of the workforce that it became expected that we programmers would work 60 hours/week. If someone didn't want to work that hard, it was easy to find a replacement. No other engineers that I know of would be expected to work such long hours. I was one who discouraged people from attempting a 'career' in tech.
'Free market' forces came into play and the next generation of college students avoided the tech industry with its draconian demands on its workforce. Enrollment in CS dropped off, and supply and demand started to revert to the mean. Of course, H1Bs, another sop to the industry, helped kill off the American tech workforce.
Any wonder that there is now a 'shortage' of workers in tech?
Here's a wacky idea, give people back decent pay, job security, company paid health benefits, decent pay, 401k matching funds, decent pay, and cut back on the hours. Did I mention decent pay? Now get a mature management in place and treat the workforce with respect. Does the industry truly believe there's a shortage of people willing to do the work, or are they just pining for the days when they had it so good?
Reminds me of the claims by the farming industry that there's a shortage of Americans who are willing to work as farm workers. Farmers were sneaking low-paid illegal workers into the country, and pretty soon you had to have a migrant workforce to be competitive. Result? Low pay and job losses for American workers. Money leaving farming communities and ending up south of the border. Rural towns drying up, and nobody willing to be honest about the reasons why. So they blame the victims, they claim that Americans are 'not willing to work'.
Best regards.
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. -- Will Rogers
When they came for Accounting staff (outsourcing to PayChex) I didn't complain because I was not in Accounting,
When they came for Photocopier operators (outsourcing to Kinkos) I didn't complain because I was not Photocopier operator,
When they came for Janitorial staff (outsourcing to any number of them) I didn't complain because I was not a Janitor, ...
When they came for Programmers, I looked around but there was no one.
Outsourcing has been going on for a long time but we start bitching only when it starts hurting our own selves.
I am not against Outsourcing, though but at the same time I say the top guy should not get more than three Pi times the lowest paid person in any hierarchy. As general rule, Capitalism values labor very low compared to other means of production, and consequently we (in the West) don't see much of a problem in pillaging natural resources of not so developed countries or occupying Middle East oil but we see all sorts illegalities, unfairness and damaging effects when other countries get our jobs are send their people here.
Labor should have equal and unimpeded rights as Capital and other resources to move wherever it sees higher rewards. This is the only fair arrangement and everything else is just plain criminal extortion ring operated by out Governments (West) and we are direct or indirect supporters of the same crime.
I have a Security Engineer II title. Most of my time these days is being spent doing desktop support. :/
China, and many others around the world, follow the British application of nomenclature, which designates what in American parlance are designated machinists, Engineers. For this, counts of 'engineers' in Britain, China, India and other countries that follow the British model, counts of engineers are counts of machinists.
For American companies and foreign educated machinists, both, not being aware of the difference in uses of the two terms the difference often translates to foreign educated machinists applying for engineeering positions with American companies, and American companies hiring machinists believing them to be engineers.
As both fields background in essentially the same basic mathematics, machinists, given time to come up to speed, can usually handle the bulk of work American companies normally assign to engineers.
After all, in many large American companies only a few engineers engage in actual innovation. Most fit detail elements to or around the innovation element, doing work machinists do in setting up machinery to translate the innovation to a product.
The real engineering, below innovation, lies in calculating to define limits and tolerances for materials and application (the 'gruntwork' of engineering), after which the machine-shop is assigned to "make a prototype", meaning to make a sample working product, adjusting as realities require. Meaning, "do the final engineering".
"'Some of [the U.S.'s] best engineers are not doing engineering, and some of its best potential engineers are not even studying engineering"
That sure sounds like an 'engineer shortage' to me.
Oddly enough I am not really seeing a lack of Engineers, at least in my class. I graduated about four months ago from one of the most prestigious ABET accredited Aerospace Engineering universities in the country. Out of my graduation class of about 80 Engineers of various kinds the vast majority of them are not currently employed in an Engineering position.
Now from my class if you remove the ones going to Grad School and the ones that were guaranteed jobs from ROTC, my current estimate sits at about 20-30% of my class being employed in an Engineering position at this point. There are a few taking odd jobs such as being a counselor for Space Camp, working a winery in California, and even as recruiters hiring engineers (rather then actually being one).
I myself took an engineering job straight out of college as a lead engineer doing contract CAD design work with a small LLC. When it was all said and done I ended up making about 13 dollars an hour over 3 months time. This was after I doubled my rates for my last two weeks making about 50% of my total income. The week before I eventually left that job (I provided about a month notice) my boss told me that the simplest model that I generated for about $500 he was charged $3000 by an experienced non-Engineering contractor whose design ended up not even being able to be manufactured without several hundred thousand dollars worth of specialized equipment that we didn't have.
From what I am seeing there is indeed a lack of engineering positions rather then Engineers. Most of the engineering positions that we have gotten have been contract work. There were a few engineers that were hired on as non-military government, but due to the senate budget cuts and downsizing of DoD funding, it is looking like those engineers are now on the chopping block. On the air force side alone some of the larger aerospace divisions are going through a 2 for 1 hiring process right now. For every 2 preexisting available position they are only able to hire one employee. Similarly these same divisions are downsizing, attempting to retire some of the older employees that are not yet of retirement age with lucrative severance packages. However it is looking like even then the number of employee downsizing will not be enough, the new highers are on the chopping block, especially the ones that gained their employment through the Space Scholars program.
But at this point for most of the large companies and organizations have been resume black holes such as the Government, Boeing , Lockheed Martin, and Honeywell. Few of us hear back, and even fewer make it to the interview process. To my knowledge from my class there are perhaps 3 or 4 of my peers that have received jobs in large multi-state organizations (excluding military). I believe we have had the best luck with the small companies of under ten employees designing custom cabinets and tables. But at this point it has gotten to the point where a few of us are considering enlisting as our student loans are going to eat us alive.
Death-By-Foreign-National is not laissez-faire!
Death-By-Foreign-National is not free-market!
MNCs' (and academia) are not [supposed to be] in charge of U.S. immigration.
IN A SANE WORLD, visas such as H-1b, L-1, etc., (We can keep the O-1, which was meant for true genius) would be suspended. MILLIONS of our better paying jobs would be instantly made available, in America, for Americans.
HOW can anyone speak of returning jobs to Americans, while they ignore, or worse, condone, the continued replacement of Americans, in American offices and worksites, with foreign nationals, at a ‘clip of’ hundreds of thousands (we are not told the exact number! more likely, all-told, closer to a million or more) per year?! (not including out-of-status/illegal...)
There are real solutions, not lies masquerading as same, but few, will even speak of them, let alone...
H-1b, L-1s, OPT, J-1, B-1, lotteries, green-cards, and on and on, and on, and on, it is no longer enough to stand as a nation and compete with the world-at-large, but no, the world at large will be brought to you, so that you may compete with them in your own offices and worksites...
We should also revoke some or all green-cards. Again, a MASSIVE number of American jobs would be returned to Americans.
And then there is the issue of sending our jobs offshore, often implemented by those brought to our country on visa, or those having become a green-card holder, who then coordinate the shipping of entire departments, knowledge-bases out of our country, ultimately, entire industries.
This country has an admittted employment rate of over 9 percent. Thousands of engineers over 40 can't find a job.
If no one wants to work for your comany, then it's because your company's reputation precedes you, and the competent labor pool is avoiding you like the plague.
It's like listening to someone with a 400 credit score complain that they can't get a mortgage...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
UNemployment rate of over 9 percent...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
So let me get this straight ... a Mexican can come to the US, make pay thats too low for american workers, send the majority of their income home, and yet still manage to live, eat, breath, and drink in the US? Are you stupid? Its not like the American's in these jobs have to pay more to live, at that level there are no taxes.
You don't speak a word of Spanish, do you? I work with a food charity. I'm the son of Southern cotton-choppers. My father grew up eating racoon and possum as a staple. Let me see if I can explain.
These families cram into filth-infested apartments and sleep in shifts. Their children go hungry. If we didn't help feed some of them, they wouldn't eat. Many of the field laborers are shorter in stature. There's a reason for that. The rare time some of these guys smile, they're missing teeth. My wife is getting a dental implant this month. Their's don't. The fashion of wearing big work shirts as jackets came about because these guys can't afford the gore-tex my kids take for granted. Their medical care and insurance coverage consists of alcohol, if they're lucky.
It's not that they're not hard-working, although God knows they do work hard. It's that they don't have any choices. Mexico is currently run by criminals on both sides of the law, and once-proud families are reduced to subsistence living.
Shame on you for that post. You don't want any part of what they have.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Oh, I'm good. I don't have any trouble finding guys, because people want to work with me.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
All aboard the Rage Train cattle car. -Engineer Wive[r]n at ye servix.
The people are only willing to work if money is involved. Because the people are prevented from MAKING their money, they are unable to embrace a barter system of equivocal trade. Because they are unable to trade unhindered due to regulative harassment, they can't pay the registration maintenance fees to Form a company of skilled workers to work together to build an actual product. Because they can't get an actual product made, then they will never have it appraised and deposit somewhere as escrow with a Warehouse Receipt monetised in US Domestic "dollars", and thus they are forced to use Debt Currency issues by a monopoly corporation called FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM that in-effect pledges the Future of the People (aka tomorrowland, your life, slavery) to pretend that some day you can repay someone the privilege of working for FREE (dumb, imho).
Don't you want to work for FREE? Use Debt Currency, or otherwise you are undermining the FREE aspect of FREEDUMB if we ever catch you using Warehouse Receipts of actual certified deposits of valuable property (treasure-ee). Ignore the man behind the curaint using Site Drafts, International Bills of Exchange, Certified Promisory Notes, House Joint Resolution 192 "debt-discharge instruments", or even conditionally non-endorsed private credit in Rule e8 of Admiralty rules!
Remember all those ahhem "antique" and "obsolete" books on Negotiable Instruments Law? Yea, who is saying those are obsolete, because a bank actually once held property in a Security Deposit Box like a specialty warehouse that enhances trade.
How many NASA guys are now pumping gas in Florida?
Lack of engineers, my ass.
Hey Mr President, we need jobs and stuff to be designed and built. Then you'll see the engineers get back on the grid.
EUROPA!
Pumping ass /w jobs! That explains why so-many pornstars have PHD's! They just figured they could make more money than engineers and none will go hungry with that kind of job!
Get to work, 'murika!
Yep; if you've got it and flaunt it, you're a faker.
The Professional Engineer program is just a licensing program. Engineering has been going on for longer than that, and furthermore there are other professions (including licensed ones) whose practitioners are traditionally called "engineers" which are not included in the Professional Engineering program -- e.g. operating engineers, locomotive engineers.
I've been doing software development professionally (that term means I've been getting paid for it) for about 20 years, much of it with a title including "engineer". If you want to argue software development isn't engineering based on the nature of the work, fine. But to argue it isn't engineering or that I'm not an engineer based on the fact that neither I nor anyone I was working for had some government-recognized stamp of approval from a board of bureaucrats is ridiculous.
One of the best Engineer I know never graduated. Another graduated from DeVry.
Labels mean Frak, talent in any form and a means to exercise that talent in an active workplace is all that matters.
How many Engineers have sold their BS degrees for a higher paying IT job? Many of the ones I'd gone to school with have made the jump.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
I'm sorry, but when in the last decade did computer programmers become "engineers?" It sounds like some kind of bullshit self-appointed title that is similar to calling a janitor a "sanitation engineer."
Real engineers take classes in statics, dynamics, electronics, fluids mechanics, materials science, and programming... in addition to taking electives like math and chemistry. What components of a real engineering curriculum do "software engineers" take? Programming, "software design," and maybe math?
Give me a break. If you can't become a Professional Engineer in your field, you're not a fucking engineer. If you code or design software, you are a "programmer" or a "software designer."
(Programmers, mod me down all you want if it helps ease the pain of the truth.)
While I'm all in favor of more engineers, one of the biggest problems facing the US today is the cost of health care, especially as the Boomers retire (which means both that they'll be increasing demand for government-funded health care and decreasing the supply of doctors.) We've needed to prepare for this by increasing the supply of trained doctors and nurses, and that means partly increasing the capacity of American medical schools and partly making it much friendlier for foreign-trained medical people to immigrate to the US (which is partly an immigration issue and partly a medical-certification issue.) For doctors especially, it's long-term activity, with a long lead time, and part of the problem is at the state licensing level as well as partly at the Federal level.
And with engineers, we need to have them working in fields that make American life better and give us more things to trade to foreigners to make their lives better as well - building better bridges and better biomedical technology and better civilian aircraft and more efficient cars are good; building better tanks and military aircraft may require highly-trained high-tech people who get great salaries, but selling them either to the US or other countries is at best a waste of money and talent and usually is a way to make other parts of the world worse for the people who live there.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We need an engineer to do it now!!!
Back in the late 70s / early 80s recession, chemical engineers getting out of college could get really decent salaries (usually with oil companies), while civil engineers could get anything (the joke was that oil companies would hire them too, but only to pump gas.) They might end up with odd working conditions (e.g. working at an oil field out in the middle of nowhere in 120-degree heat or arctic cold), but they'd also get to learn a whole lot of in-depth operations and practical engineering (like how to fix things that break out in the middle of nowhere when you don't have the right parts.) But a lot of that depended on how the chemical industry and their suppliers in the oil industry were doing, and oil booms, plastic-stuff booms, and computer booms don't all happen at the same time, much less at the same time as the rest of the economy. And aircraft engineering had a really strong 4-year cycle, driven by which political parties got elected in the US and how much they liked to buy military aircraft.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cover piece for the tiger penis soup and curry eaters he employs in WallaWalla Gajungudahedra.
This is the coolest post I've read in years. Where the hell are my mod points when I need 'em.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'd rather have the reply than the points any day. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Hey, no need to get defensive. You've made valid points, and I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings with the "faker" comment (although it was callous, sorry). I've got 10 years of DBA/sysadmin in my resume, too, that carried an "engineer" title; right now I'm in a job that requires a BS in mechanical engineering but doesn't carry the engineer title (no PE for me yet), so I've been on both sides of this particular argument. The poster I replied to was asking what the nuances and dividing lines were, and the PE license is a clear and easy one to point to.
There are other computer-related certs that aspire to similar glories, with varying success. I've learned to respect my coworkers who earn their CCNA, and I'd argue that they earned their engineer title. I've learned to understand the perspective of the PEs, though, too: until the title "software engineer" carries liability for errors it will never carry the weight that the PEs want the term "Engineer" to have.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
An engineer that mows lawns isn't an engineer, he's a gardener.
And where does it say they had to do other things?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We're better than AC sock puppets and 'leetspeak, aren't we?
Well, maybe not. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The above should read "actually removed all references to their PhDs from their resumes"
It was Novell that began the bequeathing of "Engineer" titles to people who could simply pass a test. The Certified Network Engineer title was granted to people who knew how to administer Novell Netware, and I was very unimpressed with the scope of the information needed to pass the test. I have spoken with people that don't want to hear you are any kind of engineer if you don't have at least a PE.
In fact, Vivek Wadhwa believes that colleges should tell computer science and engineering students that "between age 40 and 45 you'll hit your peak, so plan for it." It happens that I hit that peak in 2000 when outsourcing took it's toll on domestic software contracting. Between the loss of my hard saved retirement when the tech stocks dumped, and the subsequent difficulty competing with disposable H1B pseudo engineers from India... The time and money I invested in equipment, software development tools, and reference materials, in addition to the time and effort invested in my own engineering skills, I was unprepared to see all that come to naught. It is difficult not to be bitter, especially when I hear people talk about how Bill Gates invented the personal computer and made computers easy to use. I want to vomit.
If we actually protected our industries from being sent overseas, we would have plenty of things to "engineer." It's kind of hard to need engineers if you don't make anything. We make it easy to import cheap goods from countries like China, but it is almost impossible to sell our own goods to those same countries. I have started a Handyman company out of need due to lack of industry jobs. Handyman Orange Park
American business is whining about the shortage of _cheap_ engineers.
CEOs make more money off cheap ones than off expensive ones (not true but the CEOs cannot understand the logic that demonstrates it--hence you end up with Google and Facebook and other new businesses.).
Unfortunately, perhaps, software engineering falls into the more dubious side of the divide, along with sanitation engineer; if you want to hang out a shingle as a mechanical engineer you need to be certified and probably have had to take a lot of courses; to be a software engineer you can just fool around with C++ in your bedroom and stick it on your resume. and that's why windows crashes more often than bridges do.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Michio Kaku made some accurate statements about smart people and america in a broader sense (not just relating to engineers) in this interview
That was useful, and it makes sense. Or at least as an old big-e / little-e definition.
And I get why someone that has done all that would want to avoid having anyone dilute the term. Though I do understand why others get a little grouchy about being snubbed for legitimately describing what they do, too.
I guess any time you co-opt a word from the english language for a more narrow and specific use, and defend your use with authority, you're going to run into problems like this.
I was in my apartment (and subsequently lost the apartment) when the jobs went overseas, thanks to Bill Clinton.