I graduated with a PhD in engineering in 2006. At graduation, the President of the University told us to get to know our politicians. In the US it is every man for himself and engineering skills cost less in China. Between my stint as a postdoc and as an Adjunct I think it no joke that PhDs need to get representation and organize.
The posts on http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ reflect my experience. My advanced degree and frugal lifestyle has me making steady financial progress, only I've been laid off on a few occasions - wiping out my nest egg and I'm not really that far along. My experience has me convinced that no one in the government has my back. Lucky my wife has an awesome job - after many years of school where she made nothing and accumulated debt - and we are now in a top income bracket. I know what it is like to not have a job yet be willing to work and have 'in demand' skills. I don't live on the east coast otherwise I'd be out there representing the contingent of society that sweated their way through an engineering PhD. At the end of the day I want my 2yr old to go to a nice school and feel proud to live in this country. I don't see it getting better for him (my wife and I have a large income but will never be 'rich' like Bloomberg, Buffet, Gates, etc.) unless we all stand up now for the 99%.
Occupywallstreet may or may not fizzle out. Either way, I think this is the turning point. I hope this occurs to our leaders and convinces Washington to enact actual campaign/lobbyist reform. That is what I see tying together all the OWS concerns: life may not be fair, but for many it has become completely unfair in the favor of the 1%. Seeing them out there I am inspired because I realize that I am not alone. There are many others out there in the same boat that I am in while I watch the 1% prosper beyond all measure or need. The mere existence of 501c3 organizations - put into law by our own congress - is pretty much proof that our current politicians are nearly 100% corrupt beyond anything we've seen in the USA for nearly a century. Anyone in the world can donate to a 501c3 organization anonymously. Anyone. Isn't this a major national security hole? This country has and can do better than that in its elected officials. If OWS gets snuffed out I think the next movement will be larger and more aggressive. I hope OWS wakes up the conscience of our politicians enough to enact reform and/or wakes up enough of the 99% to start electing officials who will fight, actually fight, for reform.
I've moved on from science. In my mind I pursued science as a means to provide society options to advance. What I didn't realize is that most of the country wanted to buy condos in Florida at amazingly inflated prices. I wanted to research methods to produce clean fuels. I wound up in an underfunded computational lab. I stayed with it because I thought it would all pan out. Turns out I would have been much better off in an experimental lab somewhere, probably MIT. The reason for all these computational labs is that computers are cheap and grad students are cheap, experiments are expensive. Science didn't work out for me so, compared to my peers, I got lucky and found a pretty good job in a stable company.
When it comes to education I've come to believe that less really is more. I hope that my country puts every penny it can into educating children from birth to 12th grade. I advise my friend's children to only go into science if your professors literally are begging you to go, give you a ton of money and a scholarship to the very best school in the field. Even in that case think very carefully about your assumptions. Even in that case I pray for their sake that they don't take the offer.
I don't think much of science as a means to resolve social problems. I think that society needs to face its problems and solve them directly. Society only looks to science for solutions when it KNOWS it is really desperate. If this country finds itself in a dumb war I think the politicians, the rich people, and the CEOs are going to find a research/engineering job of the kind that have been outsourced for the past 10 years or so for me really quickly. I still hope that doesn't happen because a lot of people like me, including my son, might die in such a war. I think a great deal more of finding a good job, better yet starting a company, somewhere. Buying the smallest, least expensive, and most comfortable house possible. Try to get a nice backyard or, better yet, a fair amount of land. Raise a nice family. Living within my means. Saving for an early retirement. Avoiding office politics. Getting involved in local politics because I think those really count. Don't try to win anything in local politics, try to get issues resolved in a neighborly, sensible way. Trying to live at peace with my neighbors.
Simple fact that "supply and demand" leads to lower wages?
I think there is a large supply of folks able and willing to be the Goldman CEO...why isn't his salary rock bottom like a postdocs?
In the town I live in the local employers carefully specify business degrees. The result being that anyone with an engineering or science background is not appropriately qualified for a job. Business degrees are better than engineering degrees...just more chances at jobs.
I do not believe the poster is ranting on about capitalism per se. But that the current plan of these large organizations is to produce a huge surplus of skilled labor through tax-funded and citizen funded universities while keeping skilled workers afraid of being outsourced to push wages down. What outrages me, and I think the original poster, is the government is operating in lockstep with the corporations to enable this behavior when, in theory, the government ought to be looking out for the people. Instead, the gov't is cheering the greedy corporate bastards on while selling out the students who shell out tuition $$$ to study engineering and science.
Being one of the unemployed recently graduated engineering/science students I definitely feel there is a huge oversupply of engineers and scientists in the United States. Any position I apply for has a hundred qualified applications. Science funding is at an all time low but the government keeps churning students out. They want me to buy their goods but do not want me to get a job. I guess I should reach for the credit card just to afford my groceries. Thank you corporate America.
The original poster hit the nail right on the head. Excessive greed is the problem that is destroying the United States.
....because I cannot communicate with my CEO.
Me: We cannot layoff the tech support staff just because it is technically possible to outsource their labor. They have worked here for 10 years and, along with everyone, helped to build this company.
CEO: We don't owe our workers anything. The shareholders expect bigger and bigger profits. Go with your tech workers and find another job. I am on the board of all the local employers telling them the vast advantages of outsourcing your kind... This conversation has demonstrated your sincere lack of communication skills and will be noted in any recommendation. Thank you for working for .
I am way poor and underemployed. I have tried and tried to get interviews at Samsung, Hitachi, IBM and other major companies to no effect. They don't want me. They don't even want to talk with me. No I have it, I just need to start making illegal knockoffs of their main products and wait for them to come to me with a lucrative job offer!
I'd really consider it...but I cannot get my VPN connection or my wireless card to work in Linux. I nearly lost my job trying to make it work out. Tell you what, if the Linux community takes on hardware compatibility in a serious and systematic way I will migrate to Linux. If not, I'll go with my bosses and migrate to Vista.
Just tell me what hardware will work with what distro and what options and I am in. In the 100 or so person IT department maybe one of them understands how to configure a VPN in Linux...and they will not show me since I only do research in computational biology...
The person who wants things 'now' is my boss. He wants my work done now. The more I fiddle with getting SUSE Enterprise Edition to work on my laptop the dumber I look to my boss. There are many advantages to me having a working version of Linux. I would give a lot of money for a version of linux I felt would realistically 1) recognize my printer 2) recognize my wifi card. I have spent almost 4 days trying to get my wireless working; my boss is going to be pissed even if I succeed.
This quote, headlined today on google, is instructive:
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
- Neil Gaiman
I find that 'Experts' are largely chosen based on qualities other than their expertise. Usually they have good personalities and make friends easily, especially with leadership. The leadership prefers to pick and talk with experts who generally agree with their views and look good. So, it is very difficult for me to look at a given expert and think 'Hrmmm...this guy must really know something about X and that is why he is on CNN'. More likely he was friends with a CNN producer.
Many organizations pay or otherwise reward their membership to provide consumer data. In this instance the game ought to be free. Or, alternatively, EA ought to pay people playing the game a monthly fee.
Actully, most the targeted countries have water and food already. its a sterotype that too many people buy into.
the real reason for this laptop is to turn a second world country into one that interacts economically with the rest of the world. i really wish people would look closer before condemning the whole project, such ignorance.
I bet the guys without jobs in America would like to interact with the world economy too. If my neighbors had jobs I would feel better about exporting technology and skills to the rest of the world. As it is, most unemployed guys out there are considered chumps by the employed...much less the corporate/government leaders.
My experience with Matlab technical support (apparently located in India) was excellent. Those guys knew what they were doing. Now, I have never talked with any of the Americans involved in Matlab tech support so I have no basis for comparison.
Otherwise my experiences with call centers located elsewhere is typically negative: Dell comes to mind as well as some of the telecos....
...was a big field of study in the time period I obtained my PhD. I was sucked into the field along with many others. The study of complexity gave me a fast PhD... but really... there is no news here.
My advice is not to bother with a graduate degree in engineering. The rate at which jobs in engineering are being outsourced to other countries tells me that, by and large, the real salaries of engineers will continue to decline. If you want a post-grad degree go get something in Law or an MBA. (I have a PhD and it wasn't worth it). I could go on and on about the interesting projects I work on.... but in reality I make too little to raise a family...
I recommend picking a problem and making a robot to solve it. Then SELL! SELL! SELL!
Robotics, renewable energy, innovative recyclable waste technologies are just what this country needs. These problems will likely be solved in time with innovative ideas that are sexy, neat, and astonishingly practical. Few companies are actively pursuing this type of goal. Those companies that are pursuing idealistic ventures are run by people who are basically part genius/nutcase/idealist/dreamer and are usually interested in hiring their like minded friends.
What this means to you is that the number of actual jobs in the area of robotics is small while the relatively large pool of applicants includes an assortment of real geniuses with great credentials. It does not sound to me like you can beat an MIT/Standford/Cornell/Harvard genius with great grades, great friends, and rich parents out of a robotics job.
I have a PhD from a prestigous school and know full well to pick my battles carefully. There is no way in hell I'd recommend you seek a PhD in anything remotely robotic unless you went to a top notch undergrad school, had great grades, great friends and rich parents. Many of those guys have trouble finding jobs; their advisors already have the corner on the available positions. Intrinsically interesting areas attract the best and the brightest. If you do not fit the bill the best way to make headway is to pick a problem, make a product and SELL! SELL! SELL!
Oil dependence is a fact of modern life. Its derivatives power our cars, serve as raw materials to our plastic products, and serve a multitude of other uses. This resource is nonrenewable; there is undeniably only so much. At the moment there are only a few viable alternatives that MIGHT replace oil. Conservation of this resource is a sensible precaution in the vested practical interests of virtually everyone.
Given this basic starting point, all this hoopla about global warming is almost irrelevant. The recent precedent is what happened to New Orleans. Engineers and scientists knew a hurricane would eventually breach the levies; it was just a matter of time. The community in New Orleans bet the breach would not be in their lifetime and, anyway, would do nothing unless the Federal Government paid the bill. Nothing was done. When the event happened the politicians just ducked their heads and the community paid the consequences.
There are basic things we need to do to secure the future for our race. That we do little or nothing to actually address these issues is a sign of poor thinking on the part of the community as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
I graduated with a PhD in engineering in 2006. At graduation, the President of the University told us to get to know our politicians. In the US it is every man for himself and engineering skills cost less in China. Between my stint as a postdoc and as an Adjunct I think it no joke that PhDs need to get representation and organize.
The posts on http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ reflect my experience. My advanced degree and frugal lifestyle has me making steady financial progress, only I've been laid off on a few occasions - wiping out my nest egg and I'm not really that far along. My experience has me convinced that no one in the government has my back. Lucky my wife has an awesome job - after many years of school where she made nothing and accumulated debt - and we are now in a top income bracket. I know what it is like to not have a job yet be willing to work and have 'in demand' skills. I don't live on the east coast otherwise I'd be out there representing the contingent of society that sweated their way through an engineering PhD. At the end of the day I want my 2yr old to go to a nice school and feel proud to live in this country. I don't see it getting better for him (my wife and I have a large income but will never be 'rich' like Bloomberg, Buffet, Gates, etc.) unless we all stand up now for the 99%.
Occupywallstreet may or may not fizzle out. Either way, I think this is the turning point. I hope this occurs to our leaders and convinces Washington to enact actual campaign/lobbyist reform. That is what I see tying together all the OWS concerns: life may not be fair, but for many it has become completely unfair in the favor of the 1%. Seeing them out there I am inspired because I realize that I am not alone. There are many others out there in the same boat that I am in while I watch the 1% prosper beyond all measure or need. The mere existence of 501c3 organizations - put into law by our own congress - is pretty much proof that our current politicians are nearly 100% corrupt beyond anything we've seen in the USA for nearly a century. Anyone in the world can donate to a 501c3 organization anonymously. Anyone. Isn't this a major national security hole? This country has and can do better than that in its elected officials. If OWS gets snuffed out I think the next movement will be larger and more aggressive. I hope OWS wakes up the conscience of our politicians enough to enact reform and/or wakes up enough of the 99% to start electing officials who will fight, actually fight, for reform.
I've moved on from science. In my mind I pursued science as a means to provide society options to advance. What I didn't realize is that most of the country wanted to buy condos in Florida at amazingly inflated prices. I wanted to research methods to produce clean fuels. I wound up in an underfunded computational lab. I stayed with it because I thought it would all pan out. Turns out I would have been much better off in an experimental lab somewhere, probably MIT. The reason for all these computational labs is that computers are cheap and grad students are cheap, experiments are expensive. Science didn't work out for me so, compared to my peers, I got lucky and found a pretty good job in a stable company.
When it comes to education I've come to believe that less really is more. I hope that my country puts every penny it can into educating children from birth to 12th grade. I advise my friend's children to only go into science if your professors literally are begging you to go, give you a ton of money and a scholarship to the very best school in the field. Even in that case think very carefully about your assumptions. Even in that case I pray for their sake that they don't take the offer.
I don't think much of science as a means to resolve social problems. I think that society needs to face its problems and solve them directly. Society only looks to science for solutions when it KNOWS it is really desperate. If this country finds itself in a dumb war I think the politicians, the rich people, and the CEOs are going to find a research/engineering job of the kind that have been outsourced for the past 10 years or so for me really quickly. I still hope that doesn't happen because a lot of people like me, including my son, might die in such a war. I think a great deal more of finding a good job, better yet starting a company, somewhere. Buying the smallest, least expensive, and most comfortable house possible. Try to get a nice backyard or, better yet, a fair amount of land. Raise a nice family. Living within my means. Saving for an early retirement. Avoiding office politics. Getting involved in local politics because I think those really count. Don't try to win anything in local politics, try to get issues resolved in a neighborly, sensible way. Trying to live at peace with my neighbors.
Simple fact that "supply and demand" leads to lower wages? I think there is a large supply of folks able and willing to be the Goldman CEO...why isn't his salary rock bottom like a postdocs?
I agree: you have stated the major problem facing western society, indeed any society, beautifully. I just knew there was a reason to read slashdot...
Excellent insight into the excellent and insightful television show.
In the town I live in the local employers carefully specify business degrees. The result being that anyone with an engineering or science background is not appropriately qualified for a job. Business degrees are better than engineering degrees...just more chances at jobs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
I do not believe the poster is ranting on about capitalism per se. But that the current plan of these large organizations is to produce a huge surplus of skilled labor through tax-funded and citizen funded universities while keeping skilled workers afraid of being outsourced to push wages down. What outrages me, and I think the original poster, is the government is operating in lockstep with the corporations to enable this behavior when, in theory, the government ought to be looking out for the people. Instead, the gov't is cheering the greedy corporate bastards on while selling out the students who shell out tuition $$$ to study engineering and science.
Being one of the unemployed recently graduated engineering/science students I definitely feel there is a huge oversupply of engineers and scientists in the United States. Any position I apply for has a hundred qualified applications. Science funding is at an all time low but the government keeps churning students out. They want me to buy their goods but do not want me to get a job. I guess I should reach for the credit card just to afford my groceries. Thank you corporate America.
The original poster hit the nail right on the head. Excessive greed is the problem that is destroying the United States.
Wow. The scenario you described is almost purely evil and immoral. And just when I had begun to see the world in shades of grey.
....because I cannot communicate with my CEO. Me: We cannot layoff the tech support staff just because it is technically possible to outsource their labor. They have worked here for 10 years and, along with everyone, helped to build this company. CEO: We don't owe our workers anything. The shareholders expect bigger and bigger profits. Go with your tech workers and find another job. I am on the board of all the local employers telling them the vast advantages of outsourcing your kind... This conversation has demonstrated your sincere lack of communication skills and will be noted in any recommendation. Thank you for working for .
Check out the iRiver series; my T41 uses an easily replaceable AA battery.
I am way poor and underemployed. I have tried and tried to get interviews at Samsung, Hitachi, IBM and other major companies to no effect. They don't want me. They don't even want to talk with me. No I have it, I just need to start making illegal knockoffs of their main products and wait for them to come to me with a lucrative job offer!
I'd really consider it...but I cannot get my VPN connection or my wireless card to work in Linux. I nearly lost my job trying to make it work out. Tell you what, if the Linux community takes on hardware compatibility in a serious and systematic way I will migrate to Linux. If not, I'll go with my bosses and migrate to Vista.
Just tell me what hardware will work with what distro and what options and I am in. In the 100 or so person IT department maybe one of them understands how to configure a VPN in Linux...and they will not show me since I only do research in computational biology...
The person who wants things 'now' is my boss. He wants my work done now. The more I fiddle with getting SUSE Enterprise Edition to work on my laptop the dumber I look to my boss. There are many advantages to me having a working version of Linux. I would give a lot of money for a version of linux I felt would realistically 1) recognize my printer 2) recognize my wifi card. I have spent almost 4 days trying to get my wireless working; my boss is going to be pissed even if I succeed.
This quote, headlined today on google, is instructive: It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. - Neil Gaiman I find that 'Experts' are largely chosen based on qualities other than their expertise. Usually they have good personalities and make friends easily, especially with leadership. The leadership prefers to pick and talk with experts who generally agree with their views and look good. So, it is very difficult for me to look at a given expert and think 'Hrmmm...this guy must really know something about X and that is why he is on CNN'. More likely he was friends with a CNN producer.
Many organizations pay or otherwise reward their membership to provide consumer data. In this instance the game ought to be free. Or, alternatively, EA ought to pay people playing the game a monthly fee.
I bet the guys without jobs in America would like to interact with the world economy too. If my neighbors had jobs I would feel better about exporting technology and skills to the rest of the world. As it is, most unemployed guys out there are considered chumps by the employed...much less the corporate/government leaders.
Yep. This post hits the nail on the head.
My experience with Matlab technical support (apparently located in India) was excellent. Those guys knew what they were doing. Now, I have never talked with any of the Americans involved in Matlab tech support so I have no basis for comparison. Otherwise my experiences with call centers located elsewhere is typically negative: Dell comes to mind as well as some of the telecos....
...was a big field of study in the time period I obtained my PhD. I was sucked into the field along with many others. The study of complexity gave me a fast PhD ... but really ... there is no news here.
My advice is not to bother with a graduate degree in engineering. The rate at which jobs in engineering are being outsourced to other countries tells me that, by and large, the real salaries of engineers will continue to decline. If you want a post-grad degree go get something in Law or an MBA. (I have a PhD and it wasn't worth it). I could go on and on about the interesting projects I work on .... but in reality I make too little to raise a family...
I recommend picking a problem and making a robot to solve it. Then SELL! SELL! SELL!
Robotics, renewable energy, innovative recyclable waste technologies are just what this country needs. These problems will likely be solved in time with innovative ideas that are sexy, neat, and astonishingly practical. Few companies are actively pursuing this type of goal. Those companies that are pursuing idealistic ventures are run by people who are basically part genius/nutcase/idealist/dreamer and are usually interested in hiring their like minded friends.
What this means to you is that the number of actual jobs in the area of robotics is small while the relatively large pool of applicants includes an assortment of real geniuses with great credentials. It does not sound to me like you can beat an MIT/Standford/Cornell/Harvard genius with great grades, great friends, and rich parents out of a robotics job.
I have a PhD from a prestigous school and know full well to pick my battles carefully. There is no way in hell I'd recommend you seek a PhD in anything remotely robotic unless you went to a top notch undergrad school, had great grades, great friends and rich parents. Many of those guys have trouble finding jobs; their advisors already have the corner on the available positions. Intrinsically interesting areas attract the best and the brightest. If you do not fit the bill the best way to make headway is to pick a problem, make a product and SELL! SELL! SELL!
Isn't the next version of office called 'Writely'?
Oil dependence is a fact of modern life. Its derivatives power our cars, serve as raw materials to our plastic products, and serve a multitude of other uses. This resource is nonrenewable; there is undeniably only so much. At the moment there are only a few viable alternatives that MIGHT replace oil. Conservation of this resource is a sensible precaution in the vested practical interests of virtually everyone.
Given this basic starting point, all this hoopla about global warming is almost irrelevant. The recent precedent is what happened to New Orleans. Engineers and scientists knew a hurricane would eventually breach the levies; it was just a matter of time. The community in New Orleans bet the breach would not be in their lifetime and, anyway, would do nothing unless the Federal Government paid the bill. Nothing was done. When the event happened the politicians just ducked their heads and the community paid the consequences.
There are basic things we need to do to secure the future for our race. That we do little or nothing to actually address these issues is a sign of poor thinking on the part of the community as a whole.
Microsoft has a search engine?