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.'"

Comments

Shortage of engineering jobs,

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[denzo]

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.

Exactly. 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.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[SomePgmr]

Net result: $14,000 iPads. I'm not sure I like the ramifications of that either.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[mikael]

Just read today that Gibson guitars from Nashville are facing their second federal shakedown to make them offshore jobs.

The first time was in 2009, when they were found to be importing wood from Madagascar in contravention of the Lacey Act 2008 Amendment. However, the lawsuit would be dropped in exchange for them offshoring some jobs.

Second time around, they have been raided with computers seized, and wood supplies confiscated. The charges are that India has a law that makes it illegal to export wood that hasn't been "finished" by local workers (varnished, polished etc...) Once again they are being asked to offshore jobs in return for the lawsuit being dropped.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[sandytaru]

From what I understand, the "off-shoring jobs" is a threat from Gibson, not the US government. Gibson has been asked to prove that the wood they source is environmentally harvested all the way to the source, and the US is charging that they knowingly purchased "tainted" wood from a seller that was illegally harvesting from Madagascar. Gibson contends the wood came from a legal sourcer in India. If Gibson has the paperwork that backs of their claim, the investigation is over. If Gibson doesn't have the paperwork, the investigation goes on. Gibson can threaten to offshore jobs all they want, but they'd lose their critical "Made in America" claim if they did.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[Technician]

There is a shortage of engineering jobs paying engineering wages. Due to the rising cost of education, it is hard to find enough low paid engineers and they have to pay their student loans.

Why is education prices high?

Education is expensive for the same reason home prices spiked. There was easy access to low interest government backed loans. If you are out of work, the answer is go back to school and learn a new skill. When you can't find an opening in your new field at your minimum income needs, you become underemployeed in a field other than engineering, while your engineering position goes to someone with lower overhead.

The student loan crises is the next Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac. Only problems are there are no short sales, no ropo, and no forgiveness of debt on student loans. The student loan crises is larger than the housing bubble. Tuition fees are the bubble. Nice if you are a school selling your wares. Bad if you are borrowing money to buy their wares.

The engineers will be working outside of the engineering field, in an under the table payment, so they can eat and not have their wages completely taken away to pay the student loans.

The bubble will collapse when free education of the likes of Kahn Academy become recognized as legitimate schools by employers and the high text book fees and admissions are replaced by on-line content.

For these reasons, I am NOT an Engineer, but I still work in R & D in high tech in the semiconductor industry. I am officially an Engineering Technician. I work under engineers. I have no student loan. I have not had any history of unemployment longer than 7 days. Without the overhead of a big loan, I keep more of my lower take home pay.

I know way too many friends and relatives with student dept that are unemployed, or under employed.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[dkleinsc]

Net result: $14,000 iPads. I'm not sure I like the ramifications of that either.

Two counterarguments:
1. For the vast majority of consumer products, labor is not the largest expense. In addition, not all increased costs of production get reflected in the consumer price - some comes out of profits per unit, because a rational producer doesn't want to reduce the number of units sold too much. So you're probably looking a price of closer to a $1000 or $750 iPad rather than a $500 iPad even if you massively increase the cost of each worker.

2. If it really costs $13,800 to produce an iPad in a way that doesn't ruin the lives of workers, then that's the true cost of an iPad, and any price lower than that is in effect me (as the consumer) and Apple (via their profit margins) stealing value I didn't create from those workers in China. It means there might be fewer iPads in the world, but the world won't end if I don't have an iPad.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[mikael]

Sounds crazy but it is documented:

Gibson Guitar Corp. Responds to Federal Raid

âoeThe Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Departmentâ(TM)s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.â
Gibson Guitar tangled in Madagascar wood law

Gibson has now become the first company in the world to be investigated, though not yet charged, with violating new provisions of a 100-year-old law called the Lacy Act. It says a plant can't be taken or a tree cut in another country against its own laws, and secondly, that illegal plant can't be taken into the United States.
  But was the wood found at Gibson cut or traded illegally?
  "Historically and currently, the laws of Madagascar have allowed for the exportation of ebony and rosewood in certain finished forms, fingerboards being one," said Bruce Mitchell, Gibson's attorney.
  Guitar components called fingerboards were taken in the raid. The inlay and fret lines were added in Nashville, but Gibson said even what appeared to be bare pieces were not unfinished.
  "Finished isn't an English dictionary term; it's a legal term in Madagascar. It's defined, and the law specifically defines a fingerboard blank as a finished good," said Juszkiewicz. "It's not illegal. It's not illegal under Madagascar law. You can't argue with the facts."

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[dkleinsc]

I don't think iPad production is ruining Chinese workers lives. If it were (and I see no indication that it is) I would agree... we can get by without a widget that causes real suffering somewhere else.

Perhaps you might have seen this 2 days ago on Slashdot: "The report claims that over a 10-year period, 'many people have fallen sick, with a sharp increase in the village's cancer rates.'"

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. 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.

The problem is that the stupid business people have this idea that you can move production overseas, but keep the high-level design in-house. It doesn't really work like that. When you move the actual manufacturing somewhere else, now you don't need your manufacturing or process engineers, who set up your factory, keep it running, and figure out how to improve yield. Those people need to be on-site, so all that work goes overseas along with the factory worker jobs. For a while, you can then have your design engineers in-house sending stuff over to the manufacturing engineers offshore, but that's not really very efficient, since the two need to interact a certain amount to get the best efficiency; so the foreign company brings in their own design engineers, and since they're on-site and more familiar with the manufacturing process (and their salaries are lower), pretty soon the offshore site gives a presentation to the company showing them how much money they can save them by having them outsource all their low-level design work, and just letting them do the really high-level stuff in-house. So, all the software engineers, PCB design engineers, etc. all get laid off and only some high-level "designers" are left, who design the plastics, the overall UI, etc. Of course, this isn't all that efficient either since the high-level guys need to interact with the low-level guys. But the offshore company then starts doing its own high-level design, since they have a whole facility set up with all the engineering and manufacturing expertise to build whatever their designers design, and they make products which compete directly with the original company's products, but are much cheaper. Pretty soon, the original company is out of business, and only the offshore company remains.

Obviously, it's not all black-and-white either; there's lots of places where, instead of having a vertical monopoly, a company will outsource (either offshore or not) certain parts of their work, because it makes more sense to concentrate on their "core competencies" (as one company I worked at called it), and not go to the expense of trying to build up capabilities in other things. So, for instance, an electronics manufacturer may outsource their PCB manufacturing, as it's pretty easy to just have your PCB designers generate some Gerber files and send them to any board house in the world for production. Or, an automaker may outsource design and production of their interior electronics modules (stereo, etc.), and concentrate on engines, suspensions, chasses, and final assembly. Unless your volumes are enormous, it may be cheaper to just outsource certain things like that to a company that specializes in that one thing (like PCB manufacturing), whereas you don't have either the expertise or the equipment and tooling to do it cheaply, and even if you did make that investment, you still wouldn't realize a savings because that task is only one small portion of your overall work.

So obviously, there's a balancing act there; trying to do everything in-house may be too expensive or may not pan out, but outsourcing your "core competencies" isn't a good idea either because you're basically giving away the things that make your company special.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[shutdown -p now]

But expand it to everything you use, or even just all your electronics. Cars, trains, planes, your TV, the computer you're using now, your washing machine and dishwasher. The stuff that harvests your food and gets it to you. The elevator, your cellphone... etc. I don't have 300 million dollars to live like I do now, and we're not talking about foregoing one toy. It gets complicated quickly.

If your entire lifestyle is subsidized by borderline slave labor elsewhere, is it moral to continue living it?

And, really, is it? I dare say Americans were living pretty well in the middle of the century, without relying on cheap overseas labor.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is education prices high?

Because students have to keep taking English over and over again, never quite passing it.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[Hognoxious]

Why is education prices high?

I don't no, why are it?

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[PhrstBrn]

Actually, they're finding the opposite to be true, especially for large bulky products. A lot of manufacturing is being moved out of China. Companies are realizing two things

1) Shipping the product across the globe costs a lot of money. You can save money buy building near where you sell it
2) Labor costs are going up year after year, much faster than they are going up here in the US
3) Corruption in China is bad. Your cost savings start going out the window when you have to bribe the local protection racket (aka the local police)
4) Corruption in China is bad. Things can go "missing". Namely factory workers walking off with the goods and plans.
5) Corruption in China is bad. The factory next door has copied your product design and is now making knock off products. Patent protection? Copyright law? Go fuck yourself, you're in China.

So at first, the bean counters might think it's cheaper to manufacture in China, but after you count the beans, they're starting to realize the cost savings just aren't there after having to deal with all the new problems created by being in China. For smaller things, like small electronics, cheap toys, it's still cheaper in China, but larger, bulkier things, like planes, cars, they're all moving out. And companies who are sick and tired of their IP being stolen, they're moving out too.

As wages continue to go up, this trend is going to continue.

Re:Shortage of engineering jobs,

[no1nose]

But expand it to everything you use, or even just all your electronics. Cars, trains, planes, your TV, the computer you're using now, your washing machine and dishwasher. The stuff that harvests your food and gets it to you. The elevator, your cellphone... etc. I don't have 300 million dollars to live like I do now, and we're not talking about foregoing one toy. It gets complicated quickly.

If your entire lifestyle is subsidized by borderline slave labor elsewhere, is it moral to continue living it?

And, really, is it? I dare say Americans were living pretty well in the middle of the century, without relying on cheap overseas labor.

I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I have been to China (early 2002), to one of the factories that manufactured the pop-up tents that I designed as a U.S. based mechanical drafter. I was explaining to the supervisor that the welded joints were not always strong enough and some were breaking very easily. He called one of the welders over and was telling him what to do to fix it. This welder had no shoes and no welding helmet. He had a piece of cardboard with a pin-hole in it mounted to his welding gun to block the dangerous glare. He could not make actual eye-contact with me. His eyes had the look of someone who had burned out the center of their field of view. Ever since that trip, I have had a hard time thinking that the USA is making a wise decision to live on the backs of others. I complained to my boss about these conditions and he said that this worker was making more money in a year of welding than he would have been able to make working his whole life elsewhere in native China. Is it moral for us to take advantage of this?

X Engineer

[Haedrian]

"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"

Re:X Engineer

[ctrimm]

I knew a woman who used to demand the title of "Domestic Engineer". Also known as "housewife"

You should have told her to go engineer you a sandwich.

more software engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:more software engineers

[interval1066]

I can't buy Mr. Wadhwa's initial premise here; in simple terms that even I can understand he's saying the bulk of US engineers are allocated to non-engineering or trivial, applied engineering tasks. So he's saying qualified engineers are stuck doing work they weren't really trained for, I'm an electrical engineer, and here's what I see; job requisitions go unfulfilled for months at my work and others I speak to in the industry, and a lot of the people I see are recent grads, not appropriate for installed bases running dangerous machinery, or they often of a lower quality, don't speak english well enough for the job, or recent grads with no experience. A younger crowd may command the top salaries at a "hi-tech" (or all software) position, but you really need some experience with process automation. The qualified applicants are few and far-between. Just what I see, and I'm out in the field.

Re:more software engineers

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Speaking as a young engineer (albeit, not electrical) how the hell do you expect any of the young, new graduate engineers to gain the experience necessary to eventually fill the open positions at your company when there isn't a single company in this country interested in hiring anyone with less than 5 years of professional experience?

Speaking as a young engineer, I have to say that most major tech. companies seem to abhor the idea of actually investing time and resources in my generation's workforce.

NASA Engineers

[wideBlueSkies]

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.

The "shortage" is there

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:The "shortage" is there

[Opportunist]

You're in good company. Provided you don't mind my company.

I twisted the rules a little. I put on a suit and now call myself "consultant". Security consultant, to be exact. I work way less than in my programming days, make about three times the salary and am, essentially, peddling common knowledge as gems of insight.

At first I was a little hesitant to actually step that low. Then I met my first boss in this trade and now I know there are people even in my business (not just in management) that know a LOT less than me and make a LOT more money... it kinda puts my own scam into perspective...

Wow!

[PPH]

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.

All about pay

[Matt_Bennett]

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.

Malinvestment

[michaelmalak]

If the U.S. government weren't preoccupying its engineers with "defense", even more engineers would be available for productive endeavors.

Re:Does Not Compute

[larry bagina]

Can the medic build a sentry gun? No. Can the medic build a dispenser? No. Can the medic build a teleporter? No.

There are some good medics out there, and a good medic/heavy combo can wreck your ass worse than goatse, but most of the time a team will have 2 or 3 engineers and not a single medic.

There's no shortage of engineers OR jobs

[petes_PoV]

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.

Overly Picky HR Is An Issue

[awrc]

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

Free markets and jobs

[mollog]

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'.

Re:Free markets and jobs

[lightknight]

So agree with this. What we're running into isn't that there aren't enough IT / CS / SE people out there, it's that they don't want to work in those fields for the pay that's being provided. If someone with a CS degree doesn't like the pay they're getting, guess what they do? They change fields.

What we are seeing now is nothing more than an attempt to place a false order for IT / CS / SE people, like placing a false order for stock at some ridiculous price. By the time the order looks about to be filled, it gets cancelled. And everyone else is left holding the bag. These people WANT a market distortion, because then they get to pick through the leftovers from the bloodbath, looking for highly-priced programmers working for a song. The problem isn't that there aren't enough programmers, it's that there aren't enough Porsche programmers working for Denny's Grand Slam prices.

You invest 4-5 years of your life in a degree, with the idea that the pay / benefits / etc. is better in your chosen field than in other fields. When those supposed payouts become anything less than trivial, especially with 'market distortions,' we begin to price in RISK. Hence, the payouts now must be higher than before, for someone to invest in said degree. If a half-decent developer was $120,000 / yr, 8 years ago, accounting for inflation and distortion, he / she is now going for $360,000 / yr or more.

Every dime-store business major wants to make the next Facebook these days. Fine, learn to program yourselves, and you'll quickly realize why programmers get paid. The stock options, equity sharing programs, and so on are nice, but since it's been an industry staple to see programmers getting the shaft here, it's not as enticing as before.

Sure, there are some people who like to program just for the giggles of it. And there are some people who run non-profits. They aren't the majority, and you lack any means of motivation at a large company when dealing with said people: remember, they like programming for fun, not because you're paying them, so offering them more money, when the company is in a pinch, may not be a motivating factor. Would you hire a stock-broker who wasn't focused on earning money?

But, it's fun to see this happen again. They placed a false order years ago, they went through the pickings afterwards, then they off-shored until recently, when they saw their bills climbing yet again. Now they want to do local, but still want a 'deal.' Hence, pay us according to the kind of work you want out of us. It's a bloody rule of the market, for God's sake.