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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.'"
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.
'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
Replication is actually a side effect of dispenser misuse or neglect. It was part of the human kernel.
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
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 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 ?
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
...isn't new.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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?
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.
You're absolutely right. My older brother is a licensed engineer who operates heating systems. He had to learn mechanics and physics, the real thing.
On Slashdot and other fora people seem to think only civil engineers who build bridges are real engineers. If a steam engineer doesn't know what he's doing the boiler could blow, taking out an entire building full of people.
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
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.
You mean, "Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA" is not a real doctor? I'm shocked! Shocked! ;-)
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...
The black and white version would be that engineer is the person that designs, builds and maintains machines. Not the guy that operates them. You wouldn't call your grandmother an "engineer" because she is operating her computer. Or every car driver, blender/toaster oven user.
Granted, there's the grey area where the operation of the machine is impossible without an intricate knowledge of the machine's design and/or the theory behind it; in those cases you need an engineer to operate it. But in most cases a technician is enough
Let the engineers do actual engineering and the world will be a better place.
moi
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.
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.
Yes, there will always be lawyers, accountants, 'administrators' (today's term for secretaries), and so on.
I guess that's what's always kept me from considering a degree in any kind of computer science/engineering. The field just seems inherently unstable. I bet the same's true for engineering disciplines. But, then, most of the undergraduate level of my field of study (mathematics) has remained constant for quite a while. (I'm guessing centuries, since even complex analysis is more than a century 'old' (in years) and many mathematicians I've met consider complex analysis 'new'.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
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
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
No, we don't have teleporters or replicators, but there's something else we lack: a society that actually cares about inventing new technologies when there's hard work required to do so.
Inventing ground-breaking new technologies like those (or others that we haven't even thought of yet) requires doing a lot of fundamental scientific research, and investing a lot of money in both that and in R&D for other more focused fields. This investment will NOT yield a payback in less than 3 years, and because of that, we as a society simply aren't interested. We do not want to put any money into something that will not yield a giant profit very quickly. A society with this mentality will never invent great new things.
"'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.
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."
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.