Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.