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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.
SEED is similarly not of interest to the average college student.
Once we start programs promoting BUD, then we'll see some results.
The enemies of Democracy are
In short, you say people suck, governments suck and corporations suck. Where do you go from there?
Don't the booms in STEM careers seem to come around times when the regular person finds more interest in them? Make them interesting again and people will flock to them. Glorify worthless endeavors and people will flock to those. How many children chose to go into engineering fields because of the space race? I'm betting a lot. How many today are instead following in the footsteps of modern celebrities and other people and groups that the media puts on a pedestal?
Maybe STEM just needs to be cool to Regular Joe again.
</mini soap box>
The problem with STEM jobs is that they involve actually doing things rather than directing them to be done: the lowest rung on the ladder. Nevermind that the skills required to perform these tasks are far more specialized and difficult to attain than those required by their managers. US students may have sensed that STEM careers are for suckers and are best outsourced; you need only compare the financial state of two equally intelligent 50-year-olds--a scientist and a businessman--to see why.
Most STEM careers are not worth the effort in the US. The ones that are combine technical skills with entrepreneurship or pure luck.
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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?
Nope. There isn't anyone that won't try to have a rewarding career "because the government make sure they get a certain quality of life." If someone isn't trying to be successful in life "the government will take care of me" is certainly *never* the reason. Even the think tanks that spread this bullshit propaganda know it isn't true. No matter how many times it's repeated it still won't be true.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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.
I have a 4 year physics degree, with 3 years experience working in a III-V semiconductor research lab, and I've been trying to find a job in science and engineering for the past 3 months. The problem here is that there is a shortage of entry-mid level jobs. Everyone is looking for 5-10 years experience.
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.
So its either race with the rest of the rats in a rigged maze or you are "lazy"?
Personally, I think that America has devalued intelligence, knowledge and hard work to the point that I can hardly blame someone who opts out. The "problem" that the powers that be are struggling with is that they want well-educated, well-trained (on someone else's dime, thanks) employees to work for returns that people of these qualities can figure out don't justify the effort.
So they futz around and do other things, some productive, some not, but that at least match rewards to effort.
Make engineering (or teaching etc.) a job worthy of a quality person's time and you will get an abundance of quality people. Make these careers a drag that requires a tremendous amount of risk and personal investment with the near guarantee that you will be screwed over within 5 years and you will only get people who think they can game the system.
Being only a few hundred kilometres from major oil deposits, I see tonnes of people graduating from my institution with Petroleum engineering degrees. Do the majority of these people have a undying passion for the subject? Nope. The jobs are available, and they pay excellently, without having to risk fingers as a rig-pig. It's a smart choice.
I would be curious though to see the employment rates across the US for degrees. Are there engineering degrees for which there is demand, and how does that break out of the overall statistics presented in the article.
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 a recent Wired article, Feb issue perhaps, there was a short one page feature on how across history the geniuses that made major strides came in clusters. The analysis was that great strides in a field are made when there is a focus and priority put on it, which we appear to be missing in the Engineering disciplines right now.
The final observation was that we are fostering a huge nation of geniuses, they just happen to be geniuses in sports.
Perhaps people sense that companies only respect the financial jobs these days as upper management is only concerned with pure dollars and cents. Anything to do with engineering is beyond their ability to manage intangibles and thus barely tolerated and utterly replaceable.
And so if you ask me, would you get into a career where management wouldn't recognize your work and threaten to replace you? Or would you go where you are respected... for raking in the money.
(Of course, I'm not really interested in that, but you gotta admit it's a huge draw.)
Has anybody tried making the hard science university experience less of brutal and life consuming Darwinian struggle??
I work for a major semi-conductor company in Silicon Valley (California USA), and we have been desperately looking for talented micro-controller firmware software developers and/or hardware engineers that are proficient with wired data-link protocols (UART, SPI, I2C, 1-wire, ISO7816-3, etc.) for nearly a year, and offering a 6 figure salary.
All of the applicants I came across, are either desktop/server developers that have no clue how to develop for a MCU with only a few kB of RAM and EEPROM, or an old school hardware engineer that is not familiar with the above mentioned wired data-link protocols.
If anyone is interested, please send me a PM.
Nope. There isn't anyone that won't try to have a rewarding career "because the government make sure they get a certain quality of life." If someone isn't trying to be successful in life "the government will take care of me" is certainly *never* the reason. Even the think tanks that spread this bullshit propaganda know it isn't true. No matter how many times it's repeated it still won't be true.
You typed this out knowing full well the utter sloth that pervades all of American society.
The problem with STEM is the same problem with all white collar jobs: Our country and our planet just do not need nearly as many college-educated professionals as it produces. A lot of the entry-level (but previously somewhat lucrative grunt work) can now be done with computers, and ubiquitous communications networks quicken the work that does have to be done.
STEM grads don't have it nearly as bad as architects or lawyers these days but I'm sure they'll get there.
The financial industry is lucrative for only a very small number of people. If you don't go to a small handful of MBA programs, you ain't getting on Wall Street. And entry-level financial industry people are going to start at $40k to $50k if they're lucky, and can work for many years without getting much higher.
For an informative glimpse into the future of STEM in the US, look to the MD profession in the UK. Public policy removed financial incentives from the doctors and students wised up quickly. Today there are very few native-born physicians in the UK; they all come with modest financial expectations from countries with a lower standard of living.
Physicians can't perform their jobs from abroad. Scientists and engineers, however...
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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.
Top US college majors are 1) Business 2) Social sciences and history 3) Health professions and related clinical sciences 4) Education 5) Psychology 6) Visual and performing arts.
How can one say that health fields are not a form of applied science? Business has a reasonable amount of math in terms of finance and there is plenty of statistics in business process management such as six-sigma. Social sciences are of course a form of science, and even educators need to learn about the science of childhood development and scientific results about what works in the classroom.
The truth is that there is a large demand for professional businesspeople, health professionals, and educators in the US.
On the other hand, I think most people would not be studying social sciences, history, psychology, or art if these majors did not receive significant subsidy either directly from tax dollars in state schools or indirectly in government loans (that end up not getting paid off). If students had to pay the full way on these majors up front, they would pretty much vanish!
Germany also has a pretty vibrant high-tech manufacturing sector, which requires people with all sorts of different skill sets. Part of the reason there isn't much demand in the US is we don't do much manufacturing any more, at least not on a per-capita basis.
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.
Stanford computer science enrollment of undergraduates more less tracks IPO fever in SIlicon Valley with peaks in the late 1990s and now . The same trend was observed at MIT. In both places 85% of the undergraduates are US citizens and 65% are women and/or minorities. This seems to say that quick money is the draw.
In the ivies 20% to 40% of undergraduates take jobs in financial services, with the number directly tracking the salaries offered in these fields too. The mid 2000s was a peak, late 2000s a low.
I don't understand why we place so much value in a system which is obviously meant to make money more than it is to educate. It is an abomination that job availability discriminates upon the boundaries of how much in debt the candidate is willing to be rather than upon merits of their knowledge. Academy is a life-long pursuit, and some people simply do not learn in rigid environments. Even for the ones that do learn well in a public school or a university, most of their eventual useful knowledge is gonna come from where? That's right: life experience.
Fuck the system.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
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General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
Well, government's responsible for policing the corporations, because they're the only ones with that power. And government is accountable to the people, and elected by them. So if the people suck at electing a decent government and the corporations are running amok, the only alternative I can think of is to move to another country.
There's a lot of dishonesty in the job market. Qualified job seekers are rejected all the time.
When an employer asks for 10 years of experience in 20 different languages, systems, applications, and platforms, that could say they don't want to hire anyone. They actually want to hire a cheap foreigner, or the boss's nephew, and are just going through the motions to satisfy the letter of EEOA requirements. They've already found their man, and just copied his resume to the job posting. If the position goes unfilled, then they can complain that there aren't enough qualified applicants no matter the real reason it wasn't filled. In a bigger company, there could be internal politicking going on, with one department using the hordes of hapless job applicants to send a message to other departments. It could also say they have to ask for that much so they aren't buried under resumes. Which of course happens because contrary to what they claim, there is in fact no shortage of qualified job seekers.
To add to the fun, there are the head hunters throwing out bait, to harvest resumes.
And job seekers are pressured to spin and exaggerate to the max without quite lying (wink, wink). Quite common for a good programmer to pick up a programming language quick, then apply for a job that asks for 10 years experience in it, and if hired, pull it off because as we all know, programming ability is not language specific.
Another factor that shows there is no shortage of qualified people is that employers can demand that new hires "hit the ground running". In other words, applicants are expected to bone up on whatever specific technologies are wanted on their own time and dime, rather than spend a month training. Employers don't train people anymore. They've externalized that cost, and gotten away with it, demanding that schools and applicants do that. They complain bitterly that schools don't educate people right, which too often means they were educated instead of trained for a specific position. And they're quick to moan about the waste in spending money to train someone who is just going to leave them. Whether or not it's fair or appropriate, the job applicant is expected to come in already knowing many of the arcane specifics of whatever oddball setup they use.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Engineer proffesion is not one of them.
Entry level jobs for STEM were in decline 20 years ago.
I went to a top engineering & science school, and have watched the careers of me and my friends.
Most of us have had less than a year or two working in our fields, then got IT or programmer related jobs in the 90s bubble. Some instead became stay-at-home parents.
One got an actual science job vaguely related to his field, got them to pay for a PHD and made money at it.
My sister actually managed to work in her field most of her career, but to do it she had to be self-employed about half of it, and willing to work for private consulting firms and the government some of the time.
Seriously though. The class of 1988 in my college were largely wasted. Maybe 20% actually used their specialized training directly. The rest of us parlayed our critical thinking, analytical training and problem solving skills into completely unrelated careers. (and had to learn people skills on the job, although at least my college was difficult enough that we actually learned teamwork just to graduate)
There are far, far fewer jobs in STEM open to a graduate with no experience than there was in my day. Companies have outsourced most entry level jobs and aren't willing to provide training or apprenticeship paths to more sophisticated jobs. Then they whine that there isn't anyone to do them.
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.
Maybe, but engineers graduating from the most elite engineering schools aren't going to ever make $1-50 million, unless they start their own company (which means they're no longer an engineer, but an entrepreneur, which is rather different and engineering school doesn't train you for this).
Unlike marketing, finance, operations, which is where people can boast of making money or saving the company's money, therefore that is where the bonuses go.
This is not necessarily the case everywhere, but it is the prevalent attitude.
To revive STEM graduates here in the USA, Tell American Businesses to stop fucking around and re-hire all the 35 to 55 year old engineers they have been laying off.
How about we take the CEO of each company that is complaining about not having enough engineering talent, stake them out spread eagled on the ground, and for every engineering position they have open, or for every engineering position they filled with an H1-B hire, we have an un-employed USA engineer who could have filled that position get a pair of steel toed boots and one free shot at that CEO's nuts?
I realize that the unemployed engineers are getting the bad end of this deal, but it's the best I could do.
You see, at the end of this the CEO may be terribly injured, but he's still rich. All the unemployed engineers will have is - still nothing. You want people to take the STEM path in college here in the USA? Show them that they will have a career path longer than 13 years!
The birds - a lack of STEM jobs, low quality STEM education
The stone- Pay STEM teachers a lot more- on all levels. Heck, pay teachers more period.
The jobs open up because teaching becomes a viable career for STEM folk. Education quality goes up because better people are attracted to the career.
I would love to teach, but I can't give up a living wage to get a credential (or a PhD) with little prospect of being able to survive on a teachers salary.
In years gone by, manufacturing plants employed a large proportion of STEM graduates in what was essentially manufacturing engineering. I used to know all sorts of engineers who worked in manufacturing plants that no longer exist in the US. And not just working in the plant, but also for the companies that manufactured the equipment that the manufacturers used to make their products. Most of those jobs went away in the '80s and '90s as manufacturing was off shored. I decided to go into a STEM field because of a low level technician job I as a young person. I went to work in the quality assurance lab of a local chemical manufacturer. In this job I got to work with chemical engineers. These guys were always willing to explain why different testing procedures were done and why we looked for various results. I was also encouraged to go to college and pursue a technical degree. I did. Across the US many communities had manufacturing plants and associated facilities that provided opportunities for young people to become exposed to people in STEM occupations. Not just exposure, but often the companies would pay tuition for technicians who were pursuing BS degrees part time. My first year at university pursuing a chemistry degree was paid for by a small chemical manufacturer. Did they have a job waiting for me? No, but they could write off my tuition because it was in a field related to their business. What kind of jobs are young people get exposed to today? Retail and service. Maybe construction. Manufacturing much less so. Who do they get as career role models? Everything but engineers. They're much more likely to run into some low level manager with a degree in business administration with a concentration in retail sales who is hoping to get their MBA and move up the company ladder. So that's what they do. When the US off shored its manufacturing, it exported more than just low skill jobs. It also exported the path by which many young people entered engineering.
It's the money guys. You can try and BS that away but that's the reason.
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Funny that institutions are charging twice the inflation rate. Back when I was in a private university, it was $75 per quarter hour and the instructors were not making much at all. Last I checked, it's nearly $900 a semester hour and the instructors are making out like bandits. It's time to hold the high learning institutions to a higher standard and reduce the cost of attending a university. I know, everyone wants to make huge money, but it's not working out as students have to get larger and larger loans and that degree is now a debt anchor. Shoveling more tax dollars into the system isn't going to work, wages need to be cut back to reality and lower the cost to the students. Oh, and make it economical to hire people again in the US. The brain dead way it is now, there is no way I would start a business up in America, not economically viable to do so anymore because of high taxation (at all levels) and nightmare of regulations that keep getting pumped out by the day.
This is yet another attempt to talk up engineering careers. There ain't many young people buying it because they see what it takes and what they will make. They've been watching large companies laying off engineers by the tens of thousands in mid-career. They know wages have been stagnant for the past 2 decades. They're doing a cost benefit analysis and concluding that there is too much stick and not enough carrot.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
By the time today's grammar school kids are ready to go into the workforce, there won't be any STEM jobs. Why train for a position for which there will be no jobs?
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Not just sports, but entertainment in general.
of people with Masters in Engineering willing to work for $40k/yr. I guess that qualifies as a shortage. Still, doesn't matter. Engineers are primarily anti-union with libertarian leanings. You know, there's a reason the Lawyers have a Bar you know? Same for the doctor's Union, whoops, I mean AMA. The only way things will get better for US engineers is by banding together as single issue voters. No more giving a flying fsck if some welfare queen is getting by on tax dollars or having an abortion. You've got better things to worry about. If you tax me and extra 10k but my Union and single issue voting nets me another 30k, I'm still ahead you know.
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...but it's worth mentioning again: businesses should operate and be structured similarly to sports teams, where the people directly doing the actual core work are the highest-paid and the deciders of the coaching staff. They may not direct all of the decisions, but have considerably more influence than some dispensable employee in a typical business atmosphere.
Management and executive positions are just cogs (old, dirty, worn-down ones as it seems most of the time) in the machine, no more important or less replacable than any other, and should be treated that way.
Walmart started the trend of "made in China" , if this trend is not reversed, chances are US gonna lose more engineer jobs.
until it is once again a good idea to manufacture in the USA. That isn't going to happen when the Feds are taxing corporate income at 35% while the states pile on another 4.5% to equal the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate on the planet. Plain and simple, the taxes have sucked the prosperity out of the USA. It has gone to foreign shores, and will not return until we learn to zeroize the income taxes, all of them, and tax something else. IOW, we should go to a consumption tax, and free our businesses to compete internationally again. Read about it at www.fairtax.org.
Return the 35% of profits skimmed off by corporate income tax (or the money spent on lawyers and accountants guiding your corporation's every step so it is least exposed to the corporate taxes) and then we can compete with the Chinese and bring these jobs back to the USA.
Think just because they are making a dollar two ninety eight we can't compete with them? Think again - look at how they work. Thousands of people standing at tables assembling everything from I-pads to gym shoes. We here in America don't pay 1000's of people chicken-feed wages, we automate and pay 1 guy or 11 guys (and gals) to do the work of 1000s with the aid of machines. We automate. And we pay them well to run these machines. If we don't, the union will see that we do.
But we can't do it while the gov't is sucking the lifeblood out of our economy in the form of income taxes. As RR said, if you want less of something, tax it, and income taxes are taxes on prosperity. Soooo... we have less prosperity, probably less than we've ever had. If we want to fix it, we havet to quit taxing income. See how at www.fairtax.org
endless education debt, dead end careers, layoffs, outsourcing, and employers with unatainable qualifications that rarely hire qualified expensive american employees couldnt possibly be the problem
Good people go to bed earlier.
Who needs STEM? We can make our livings promoting corporate agendas by rephrasing talking points to every online forum as well as dumb down any discussion to lower the chances people figure out what is really going on.
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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.
The career path for these occupations is bad and getting worse. Just as Dell outsourced to ASUSTek till AsusTek basically started building their own boxes. You've probably seen this before: I'll recap. Dell started using ASUSTek for small boards. ASUS told them they could do more, so Dell tried giving them more complicated circuit boards. Then they started small motherboards. Then bigger motherboards, then the supply chain went, and finally engineering. As ASUS did more, their own expertise improved. In the process, Dell exported manufacturing and engineering for their entire line. Now Dell isn't alone. Others have done this too. Engineering? In US? Oh, just for training the overseas people, before shuttering the local office/plant for good. And people want more engineers? Who are those people, and why do they want them?
As a gay mathematician,
they may even jump to moral decay as a causative agent
made me laugh. It would have been nice if they cited a source actually saying something so ridiculous.
I went to an Ivy League school in electrical engineering. Of the people I kept in touch with, no one lasted more than 5 years with a career in engineering. The smarter ones bailed for business quicker, dumb ones like me got a PhD in engineering trying to improve my engineering opportunities, but in the end, we all moved to business because the opportunities were better.
By the way my pay has gone up. It's about 2.3 times larger than in 2001, though it requires moving around the country (no settling-down and raising a family). I'm surprised to hear people say their pay has stagnated
It has stagnated. After about 10 years of experience, a typical engineer's pay is frozen
If your income has stagnated after 10 years of experience, the root cause is that you have stagnated your own career
In Engineering, as well as in Computing (and most other fields of Science) every single day there are new developments, new things, new discoveries
If one works in 2012 but still having the knowledge and skill-set of 2002, please tell us how you expect others to pay you salary increases?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I studied Telecommunication Engineering in Spain. It's one of the toughest degrees in the country, with an average time of just under 8 years to complete the courses (officially it's 5 years + 1 year for the Diploma Thesis).
When I started my studies, the entry requirements were pretty high. You needed to bring very good grades from high school to get accepted, and lots of students applied lured by good job perspectives. Of course, a great number of the ones who got accepted fell out in the first years because they couldn't cope or simply because they realized they didn't like what they were doing, but the ones who finished did get pretty good jobs for local standards.
However, in the last 15 years everything has turned upside down. Nowadays, an engineer barely makes more than a policeman or a regular public servant for example, funding for R&D (the thing which people are willing to do without thinking so much about the money) is being cut by every government that comes and young people simply don't see any benefit in spending so many years at University, specially when it's becoming more and more expensive to study and people have less and less money.
In the last course, an old colleague who now works as an associate professor told me that only 25% of the places offered in our course were filled, so now virtually anyone who applies gets accepted. And a great number of the engineers who study in Spanish universities emigrate to other countries (now especially to Germany) desperate to get a decent job.
I don't know it this has anything to do with what is happening in the US but I do know in other European countries the situation is similar. Right now, there are still a few good havens for engineers in Northern Europe (Germany, Holland, Scandinavian countries), but who knows what will happen in another 15 years.
Lawyers don't want to create more of their own kind, they already do a lot to artificially limit the supply of lawyers to keep their pay high.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Everyone making the same (or less) than they were making 13 years ago, raise your hand.
Cost of living. 'Getting one' is indeed easy. Getting one that pays sufficiently and offers a viable career, is not.
Where do people get this shit in there head? Almost every decent company in silicon valley starts their junior engineers at $70k (or more) and after 5-7 years they will be at $110k-130k (minimum - Cisco and google, to name a couple, pay significantly more) - sure it may not be millions, but engineering is certainly a nice middle class profession with a much more stable outlook than law or finance (if you are any good at it and willing to go where the action is)
You do realize that the "research in-house like they used to do around WWII to 1970s-ish" was mostly government subsidized.
Where else do you meet girls? In my case, it was match.com, but considering the experiences I had there, I count myself lucky and wouldn't recommend it as a general answer to this question. For most people, the answer seems to be "go get plastered in a bar and meet women there". Yeah, that sounds just great. For other people, it seems to be "meet them through family members", but a common theme through these threads, and something that was definitely true for me, is that you have to move to a different geographic area to be successful in a profession, which means you're probably not going to be living anywhere near where your family members live if you want to pursue a STEM career (unless your family just happens to live in the Bay Area, for instance).
I've never worked ANYWHERE where more than 5-10% of the people were part of a couple with their spouse working at the same place
So did you ask them where they did meet their spouses? I'll bet that, for many, it was "while in college". Which is actually a very good place to meet girls. The problem is if you graduate college and enter the workforce without having found a spouse (maybe you were too busy with those engineering classes), or if you graduate with a girlfriend, but after you enter the workforce you end up breaking up, and now you're no longer in the college atmosphere surrounded by single girls but instead in some city working at MegaCo and surrounded by married people.
Bro--listen to me. Ignore the naysayers. Trust your instincts. If it looks good to you....DO it, and don't look back. If it doesn't......be patient keep waiting for the right opportunity. You are in no way shape form or fashion "naive." You are on the road to success.
And you would soon go out of business due to the misery and low morale created in your company, leading to shit products, pissed off customers, and slumping sales.
Business doesn't work exactly like you seem to think it does.
... you're no longer in the college atmosphere surrounded by single girls but instead ...
Easy there tiger...please remember that most engineering universities are extremely male-dominated, campus-wide. The problem becomes even worse if the institution is the only university in a small to medium sized city and has attracted a truckload of tech companies around it as well. So essentially from the moment you enter such a place you are pretty much toast unless you invest inordinate amounts of energy into competing with the other guys over the few single girls on the campus or unless you have been blessed with an extensive social network in a different city or in a different university than your own - with all the logistical problems this might entail. And no , 'dance classes' and other activities that 'attract women' in a place with skewed demographics don't help. Heck in my university you can't sign up at a dance class unless you bring your own (female) partner due to the catastrophic oversupply of guys.
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
For example, when we were losing 500,000 per month during this recession (October 2008), Meg Whitman calls for 500,000 new H1Bs a year (they are typically for several years, so this would mean millions of new H1Bs). Instead of being ostracized for being so blatently anti-worker, the California Republican party actually nominated her for governor in 2010, along with Carly offshore Fiornia for Senator.
Put heart disease drugs in the water supply so we can combat the racism of these envious disgruntled aging white males who are opposed to importing a substantial portion of the population of Asia to the US.
Its almost as though they think the US is entitled to territory or some Holocaust-spawning idea like that.
Seastead this.
I don't know what kind of university you went to, but I went to a large state university that was highly ranked in engineering (for a public state U), but even so, engineering was far from the only department on campus with 25-30k students. There were still all the other departments: liberal arts, a highly ranked business school, agriculture/veterinary (it was a land-grant U), architecture, etc. There were tons of women there, just not so many in the engineering college, and almost none in the EE school. So if you were walking around the engineering buildings, you wouldn't see that many women, but if you were walking around the other buildings, or the dorms, there were tons of them. It was the same at the other big state U I attended for a couple years before transferring to the better-ranked one.
If your "university" is dominated by an engineering school (which kinda makes it not a real university--the word itself means that it's an institution that teaches everything, not just one narrow subject, and normal universities have many different colleges), then obviously your experience will be rather different. I wouldn't expect to have very good odds meeting women at MIT, but that's not exactly a typical engineering school, and not really a university anyway.
Last year I became a truck driver when I needed a career change. I'm told that the industry has a dearth of over-the-road (OTR) truck drivers. Most guys don't want to spend their entire day on the road, not getting home every night (or even every week), not seeing their families or having a social life. OTR is the position that newbies get dumped into, it's just what they have to take to get a foothold into the profession, but a lot of them end up pulling regional or local work as soon as they can get a year's experience under their belts.
Having said all of that, I've also read trucker forums where some guys say they wish new OTR drivers would stop joining the profession, because then maybe the pay would finally go up. The average OTR company driver is making $40k-$50k depending on their experience levels, and what's more, it's entirely dependent on how much work you get since you're usually paid by the mile rather than hourly or salary. You run all day and don't get home much, but you have to fight for that middle-class salary.
This is something that I've heard across various professions, that wages are just not going up even when there's demand. I suspect the "real problem" here is actually not that companies want to secretly give all the jobs to foreigners. I think the problem is that the American economy no longer correctly pays for employment in accordance with demand. As other people have said about the way managers get paid more, we have some long-ingrained ideas about who is supposed to get paid what in this country, and it's hard as fuck-all to get anyone to change their minds on that, even when they aren't attracting anyone at that price.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
The earth sucks!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)