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Reversing the Loss of Science and Engineering Careers
walterbyrd writes "In response to the alleged shortages of qualified American engineers and technology professionals, numerous initiatives have been launched to boost interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers and to strengthen STEM education in the United States. Unfortunately, these programs have not proven successful, and many blame the laziness of modern students, the ineptitude of their teachers, poor parenting or, when there are no other excuses remaining, they may even jump to moral decay as a causative agent. However, the failure of STEM is because the very policies that created the shortages continue unabated. This is not a uniquely American problem. The best way to increase interest in STEM degrees is by making certain that STEM careers are actually viable."
I don't believe there is an engineering shortage in the U.S. If there were, engineer's wages would be increasing. They are not. I work for a very large computer company and wages have been pretty much stagnant for 10 years here. The real "problem" is there is a shortage of cheap engineers. Ones like those in India and China. US companies are hiring overseas like crazy and reducing employee count domestically.
who are truly passionate about it, whats your incentive? average pay? 40 18+ hour days with no days off? spending weeks at a time away from home and family while being anally examined by a customer?
who doesn't want a part of that?
every article written about 'the decline of american labor x' needs to wake up and realize that 'american labor x' ceased to have meaning when corporations became globalized. NYSE is not the New York Stock Exchange. it is NYSE-Euronext, with its tentacles in pies all over the world. They can have their headquarters anywhere. Companies like IBM are not 'American Companies'. They are companies that happen to have a lot of managers in the United States, but they really don't need to.
There is only one 'STEM labor supply', and it covers the face of the Earth, and that is where corporations and governments get their labor from. We are all in the same boat. The only way to 'save American labor X' is to save global labor x, and that means fighting against corrupt, repressive governments like China, where STEM people are thrown in prison if they criticize the system.
It's simple supply and demand.
Anyone who is smart enough to do STEM is also smart enough to get an MBA for a lot less work, and have 10x the earnings potential.
When CEO's making tens of millions say they can't find engineers, they really mean they can't find engineers for what they want to pay them. If you start paying engineers like executives, management, or sales, you'll have plenty of people stepping up.
The decline of engineering as a career in this country is primarily because of two groups: a) top management and b) government policies. MBAs control top management, lawyers control government. Nothing will change until and unless those two groups understand that things need to change.
I'm not optimistic.
Simple answer. Almost all "hard science" is completely outsourced to other countries who can do code for pennies on the dollar compared to US hired. Need something done domestically? H-1Bs are easy to get with "secret requirements".
For people heading to college, there is really only one lucrative major if one doesn't want to be in a tent at some Occupy convention with some sign asking where one's job is, waiting for the next Pike to give them a faceful of pepper spray. That would be law. If you can do programming or IT, you can sit through the classes, get your JD, pass the bar, and have yourself an actual profession, not a job. Law isn't going to be outsourced anytime soon.
There are two ways to make money in the world: Make a bigger pie, or take a piece from someone else. The pie isn't getting any bigger in the US with zero technology advances, the fact that China kills any US industry that seems promising (solar? Hack the US companies, slurp up the trade secrets, then dump the panels for cheaper than they can be made. A PRC victory achieved), and the fact that the US politicians are more interested in "terrorists" and political infighting than actually doing anything to advance the countrey. So, might as well take your pie from others and make a living somehow, because we are in a phase of history of "everything has been invented", and this isn't going to change much for the next 20-30 years.
I know this isn't something /. people want to hear, but you have to go where the money is, and both government and industry have their back turned any US-based engineering. So, you have to change and go with what makes the cash, and that's law.
If there really was a shortage then wages would rise.
Rising wages mean more people try to get into that field.
We're still hearing about the "shortage" but wages aren't going up.
Instead, there are a lot of companies lobbying Congress for changes in the H-1B visa program to get more cheap engineers from overseas.
It's about profits. Not a shortage of engineers.
I can't find someone who'll sell me a Corvette for $10. That must mean there's a Corvette shortage...
The MBA's, pols, and lobbyists that run our society can't seem to understand that supply and demand applies to other people as well. If the reward for several years of grad school were equal to the risk and cost, you'd see more people in STEM. That's why they went into finance, because that's where the money was.
When the scientists and engineers make more money than the MBA's running the company, I'll imaging you won't have any problem finding them. (And I have both a MBA from a top 25 school and 12 years in high-performance computer. Guess who makes more around here...)
When you say something is unimportant, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.
So, unless one's heart is really into it, why would anyone consider a career in engineering and science?
In my youth companies would hire a talented engineer out of school and have him work with an experienced designer in the field to develop skills in a technical specialty such as this, and hang on to him for dear life once the skills were developed. Now the idea is that these specialists are just spring up to meet need and can be let go the instance such needs are fulfilled.
Well what happens is the skills don't get developed that way, and nobody is interested in going $100,000 in debt to get what amounts to be a temporary job.
In my experience, the problem you are observing with STEM career track is a systematic problem.
Often the folks that are coming into industry from graduate or post-graduate university are looking for a job where they can apply their newly minted skills (let's call that a mid-entry job for argument's sake). Most managers in industry are looking for people that can help them work out problems and are willing to hire smart people and throw them on the job to learn (let's call that an entry-level job for argument's sake), or folks that can help them that are already skilled in the industry who already have lots of experience (let's call that a job for an highly experienced person). Which is basically what you have observed.
Of course there are some jobs for folks that work on advanced projects that require more than entry level experience, but perhaps less than highly experience level. Maybe that is some type of "entry-mid" level job you might be interested in?
Here's the dillema. If you were a hiring manager, would you promote someone that you've seen working on an entry-level basis for a few years to that new advanced project, or hire what we like to call a new-college-grad++ for that position? Well, I can tell you that NCG++ had better knock my socks off before I'd take the risk to hire that person over promoting someone that I know is a smart and a hard worker. That's because hiring new folks is really a crap shoot (sometimes you win, sometimes you lose). Also, if I hire the NCG++ from outside, an inside person that I might have promoted might decide to take off to another company and we'd lose the institutional knowledge that came with that person as they walk out the door to a competitor. As a result, some of these positions just aren't open to outside folks.
Basically, it sounds like you are trying to "retrack" a STEM career from academia to industry. That's is one of the problems built into the system. Mid-career track in academia generally involves lots of publishing and research (which tends to be in one narrow area if you are only doing something for 3 years) where industry tends to value generalized knowledge or dotting "i's" and crossing "t's" on problems on its mid-career folks.
The only advice I have is that if you want to re-track your career at mid-track, you need to get data points on your resume where it shows you can dot i's and cross t's and have lots of general field knowledge (not 2-years of papers in a very narrow area). If you don't you probably have to wait it out until you get 5-10 years of experience at something specific where you can qualify for a highly experienced job in that more narrow area on its own merit, or you can take an entry level job and hope to wow someone. Sometimes that works too. In most successful companies, it doesn't often matter at what level you are hired in, as long as the company lets the good people bubble-up (and most successful companies have this attribute in common). Good luck.
Most of these solutions seem to be getting the cart before the horse.
Back in the early '70s, in Australia at least, you could get a university education almost for free. The result was that students studied what they had a passion for without worrying too much about what career they would end up with. The lucky ones got the careers they wanted, others with a real passion started businesses, and the rest ended up as teachers where they taught with that same passion.
Now a universtiy education is so expensive that it must be carefully tailored to where the good paying jobs already are. The passion has been lost, and along with it the good teachers and the innovative engineers - like those that started Sun, HP, etc.
Society has to put the investment back into education if it wants to get the rewards. Give the kids that education and they will go out and dream up new businesses that we cannot even begin to imagine.
Well heaven forbid you actually train someone to do it. That's why you can't find anybody, every company wants instant gratification with no work.
The government complains about a lack of scientists and engineers as it continues to cut funding to education across the board at the state and federal levels.
K-12 schools can't afford to give their teachers cost-of-living raises or even hire new, competent teachers in some cases. Colleges are raising tuition year after year despite overcrowding because attendance is up but funding is down. Schools in general have trouble keeping their labs and equipment up to date due to budget cuts as well. Less money for science and math teachers leads to fewer students pursing science and math in college. This leads to fewer science/math professionals, including fewer good teachers. And so on . . .
When a government begins attacking education - banning printing presses, burning books, defunding schools, demonizing teachers' unions - its because they want a stupid, docile populace. If you're raising sheep, don't expect to get anything more than wool out of them.
Out of curiosity, what are your geographic limitations? For a lot of careers, you have to go where the jobs are, to a certain extent. Certain industries tend to congregate in certain geographic areas (not necessarily just one, many times there'll be several). So, for instance, if you want to be a petroleum engineer, there's certain places where there's a lot of those jobs available: Texas, Louisiana, Alaska, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, etc. So if you're dead-set on living in Maine because your family is there, you're simply not going to find a job, and you were stupid to choose that major. (I'm assuming there's no oil in Maine.)
Similarly, many engineering professions only have a good supply of jobs in major metro areas. So if you're dead-set on living in Bumpkinville, Wyoming, because all your family is there, again, you're stupid to choose that major or to even go into college for a professional degree. You should have just skipped college and gone to work at the local feed-n-seed store or Piggly Wiggly.
If you're dead-set on living in one specific place, you need to choose your profession around this limitation, and the industries available there. If that means working at the feed-n-seed because that's the only thing in that small town better than McDonald's, then you need to pursue that. But if you're really interested in working in a certain industry, you need to go where that industry is located, and give up on geographic limitations. Of course, there's middle ground; if the industry is only located in one place, then you either need to go there or find a different profession/major. But if the industry has many locations (like how electronics and software are big in Silicon Valley, RTP, Austin, Seattle, plus a bunch of other large metro areas), then even if you hate one of those places, you still have others to choose from and can afford to limit yourself to a certain extent.
So find someone with a clue and maybe some experience in related areas (e.g. kernel or device driver development), and hire them. I've done microcontroller firmware and had to bit-bang both SPI and I2C, and neither one is rocket science; I learned on the job from the data sheets. Stop looking for the purple squirrel -- the candidate who has exactly the experience you need on the tools you use -- and start hiring people who have the basic skills. This is still difficult, but it's a lot less difficult than looking for the niche candidate who probably already has a job with your competition.
(I'm on the wrong coast and am currently employed doing something else, sorry)
ad454 I believe you but think you are missing something. You, as the technical person, are not seeing any candidates because the generation who cut that technology with their own teeth are too old to get past HR.
My experience spans the development of those protocols; there is a veritable museum's worth of 7816 prototypes in my basement; there are ARM, PIC and MSP430 projects-in-process in front of me right now and I would very much like a job as you describe. You would never even see my resume because I am sixty-something. Anyone who is not sixty-something would not have my experience. Anyone trained in 'software' now would have started with GUI toolkits and unlimited memory. Hardware people are using UML design leading to implementation in astonishingly capable programmable logic devices.
Many of the posts above hit the nail on the head: the MBA managers deliberately under-value the contribution of engineering to their own wealth. They pretend that they somehow create wealth by having meetings. The same people use some of that money to buy politicians at all levels. They also write business textbooks to further solidify their dogma.
Meh. I'll get off your lawn now.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
People aren't interested in shows like Cosmos. It's not like the TV networks are forcing people to watch Desperate Housewives; they show that junk because people like it and the ratings are high. PBS shows educational shows all the time, yet their ratings are lousy and they're constantly begging for money. Discovery Channel used to have lots of great educational programming, but then they found that people preferred to watch shows about moronic people building shitty motorcycles and arguing with each other constantly, so that's what they show now.
WTF? I2C and the like have been around for decades; I did I2C bit-banging on an MCU in college back in '95. The others aren't much different. The old-school HW engineers could easily figure that stuff out, these protocols are not complicated.
Maybe your problem is you're too cheap. 6 figures in Silicon Valley is peanut pay. If you were in Nebraska or Tennessee or wherever, that'd be a very good salary, but that's nothing in SV. Any employee making that will have to commute 1-2 hours each way to find an affordable place to live.
I've interviewed people for all sorts of engineering jobs and I've never found anyone who was a "perfect fit." No one can ever tick off all your boxes. You have to pick someone with reasonably related experience who is smart enough to figure out what they need to learn on their own. If you are afraid that won't guarantee results for you, then hire two smart people instead of one and they can figure it out together.
As a side note, what you're describing as far as job knowledge is not rare or strange. I work with people who could do that kind of work (as could I), but we're all happy with our current jobs.
And as far as "6 figure salary." I assume that's a euphemism for around $100k/year. How much will this person's manager be paid? And that manager's manager? How about the executive team? How much profit sharing is there? What? There isn't any profit sharing for engineers? It's almost as if you don't give a shit about the people you want to work for you and you can't figure out why no one will bite.
Rather than holding on for dear life, they could try giving the guy an unsolicited big raise when he's worth more money. Then he wouldn't be inclined to jump ship.
THIS. I am capable of writing just about any type of software or firmware you can put in front of me - any of assembler, C/C++, Java, Scala/Clojure, Haskell, Python, etc., and steer my way around oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG units, ICEs, and so forth. Not only that, within 2-3 weeks of starting at a company I can be completely productive - writing code, documentation, code reviews, etc., and my interpersonal and communications skills with other team members is exceptional (I mean engineering exceptional, not sales/marketing exceptional.)
I've been (almost) continuously employed during my career (outside of a 2-3 week sudden layoff a few months after 9/11), and I haven't had too much trouble finding employment, but getting my resume through corporate HR or hiring managers that are looking for specific buzzwords is really difficult. Most of them can't seem to fathom how I can pick up what I need to know in such a short amount of time.
Instead of giving 700 billion to keep bank and finance types from going bankrupt and losing their jobs ( and creating a huge incentive to enter those fields), let them go belly up.
Then those careers will not attract the smart people.
For bonus points, have pure engineering and science programs to the tune of 100 billion per year.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've always been fascinated by that time in the mid-20th Century known as the Space Age. The public was excited about "atomic power" as it was known then, breaking the sound barrier, the moon race, and all that. That, and certain strands of modern art combined to make architectural elements echoing the themes of space and atomic/nuclear physics - orbits, star shapes, etc. These memes escaped their birthnests and could be found all over - restaurants, gas stations, signage, furniture, etc. Regular Joes and their families bought "transistor radios" - cool stuff back then! Color TV became real for most people in the 1960s or 1970s. Computers and anything NASA did were the ultimate in coolness. There was a lot to be excited about. (And of course, plenty of stuff best left ignored, as in any era.)
Now that I think about it, seems like many areas of engineering and science made contributions that lead to product ideas that lead to stuff everyone could get in their hands or see while driving about town.
Yeah, STEM needs to be cool and resume giving things to the people.
What new gadgets, or imagined gadgets, does everyone yearn for? Tablets and smartphones, okay, those are cool. These are wonderful for practical reasons, but somehow not as amazing as small radios were fifty years ago, only the logical next step in miniaturizing known technology. We have amazing TVs/monitors now, too. What are the big itches to explore we can all rally together under? Orbit the Earth? Been there done that. What next? Deep sea exploration impresses some people, but hasn't influenced the arts or architecture or much of anything else.
Any /. subscriber knows there's no shortage of awesome science and new technology today. But much of it is so remote from practicality, very abstract. Our most important ideas don't translate as easily into physical expression. What can a architect or industrial designer do with the idea of Higgs bosons? Have we made a decent effort with that? How 'bout nanotechnology memes incorporated into architectural decorations? Sadly, architecture has been lacking in any decorative drive the last couple decades (see Against the Architects of Empire, essay by theorist Nikos Salingaros) That needs to change.
Everyone, your missions are to think up things that are amazing and that can, in principle, lead to something practical that Regular Joe can hold in hand or see while driving about on errands or weekend trips. Do the science, or invent something from the science, or find ways to express the key ideas in some artsy way within reach of the general population. Stuff on the internet doesn't count. Actual physical reality needs to carry the banner of Current Hot Science Ideas.