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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
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.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
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 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.
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.
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.
You went to Surf City Tech?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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!
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.
Very true, at least in part. There are currently good reasons for HR to quietly dispose of the resumes from people over about the age of 55. One is that they are part of a protected group -- so in the event of a sizable layoff, there would be a bunch of extra hoops to jump through to demonstrate that there was no discrimination against older workers. Note that the case law on this is generally that there doesn't have to be intent to discriminate, you're guilty even if it just worked out that way. Second is if your firm has health insurance benefits. Through no fault of their own, 55 is about the dividing line where degenerative diseases -- heart disease, cancer, strokes -- quit being unusual. Particularly at small firms, group premiums will increase sharply as you add older workers.
For the second item, 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured out the answer -- single-payer health financing, or heavy regulation of the insurance companies so that the system functions as a virtual single-payer system. In that situation, hiring an older worker has the same effect on the firm's payments into the health care system as hiring a young worker. As a side effect -- US governments at all levels spend a bigger share of GDP on health care than almost all of the other OECD countries; but in the US that only pays for the elderly, the poor, and government employees (including the military and their dependents), while in the other 33 they manage to provide for the entire population.
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 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.