Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2009/db20091027_723059.htm

by billclerico • 17 years ago

25 35 17 years ago

pmorici• 17 years ago

"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified before the House Committee on Science and Technology and said salaries are not the problem when his company tries to recruit top scientists and engineers. "It's not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs," he said."

It maybe true that they are very high paying jobs but I doubt they are as high paying as say a job on Wall Street.

scotty795• 17 years ago

The trouble is that as engineer or researcher you have to actually do some hard, useful things.

As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all.

I guess people claiming they can predict future always earn disproportional amounts of wealth without doing anything useful. That is as long as everything goes well.

Squeeze this free-riding and casino mixture that is called financial market a bit and you will have plenty of smart people available for hacking physics as they loose incentives for hacking money game instead.

yummyfajitas4• 17 years ago

As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all.

Fail.

I've been through the interview process at a couple of such places, and you don't get in without having some skill.

In fact, I'd say the typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job. A large number of engineering jobs consist of little more than the electrical/mechanical/chemical equivalent of CRUD programming, but not very many finance jobs fall into that category [1].

[1] The financial industry requires many CRUD-type jobs to be done just like any other industry, but those are usually outsourced.

timwiseman• 17 years ago

Beautiful point. "very, very, very high-paying jobs" is a relative term. If you want someone with skills and options to go into that specific field then the overall compensation for that field has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options.

Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.

eru2• 17 years ago

> has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options.

It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)

imraj• 17 years ago

We live in a time when average person will have multiple careers for shorter durations, so this is not a surprise to me. I personally feel that its hard to make life decisions about careers at the age 18 or 19, so a shift in professions after graduation considering science and engineering students have strong backgrounds in math, algorithms & models for better paying jobs is quiet understandable.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

Stephenson says the number of computer science courses taught at the high school level has dropped for the past six years, especially at advanced levels. In 2005, 40% of U.S. high schools offered Advanced Placement courses in computer science; that number sank to 32% in 2007 and to 27% in 2009. "It's clear that the number of students taking computer science is dropping," she says.

Heads of other professional organizations also criticized the study for its lack of specificity among industries. The argument is that some STEM students and graduates may be worth cultivating more than others. The report's authors said it would have been too difficult and costly to perform a longitudinal data analysis by individual industry.

There's your problem. Anecdotal evidence here: they're all medicine. Everyone under the frickin sun wants to be a doctor.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

There's a huuuge cultural bias against computer science here, which is killing it. Downstream, this results in very few girls, athletes, etc. having an interest. They pursue medicine, business and traditional engineering instead.

tybris• 17 years ago

Seems like engineers are under-valued then.

natevc2• 17 years ago

In another article about the same report.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028...

"In the last decade, U.S. colleges graduated three times more scientists and engineers than the number of jobs available, the researchers said. The data went through 2005 and did not reflect the recession."

It sounds like this research was "Hey department of education how many science or engineering graduates are there in the US every year?" and "Hey bls.gov how many openings are there that match engineer or scientist for entry level positions each year?" Now divide and we are done. Conclusion, there are way to many people with science and engineering degrees.

This is drawing conclusions about the labor market with a data set that includes a wide range of degrees many of which are only prerequisites for graduate degrees in other fields.

bavcyc• 17 years ago

see: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt

http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html

I've not verified or looked into the issue beyond requesting the ucdavis document.

scotty795• 17 years ago

> At Microsoft, a new PhD in computer science makes about $90K, while Microsoft pays newly-minted lawyers $140K. And the gap grows after that.

That really shows who brings beacon to MS. :-)

MarkPNeyer• 17 years ago

It's all about the money. Why would someone intelligent want to work as an engineer when they can make way more in finance or law?

gaius3• 17 years ago

Money is only a symptom. What it's really about is the vestiges of the old British class system. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, managers, and so on are upper-middle-class professionals. Engineers of any sort, no matter how skilled, no matter how many degrees, PE or CEng status, have the taint of blue-collar about them (from the POV of the upper-middles). A manager will never be happy to see a worker paid more than him, even if by the laws of supply and demand they ought to be.

This is much much less of a problem in say Germany where Engineer is a respected, prestigious title in its own right.

eru2• 17 years ago

I don't know if your reasoning explains the observed facts.

However, my grandfather is quite happy being a Diplom-Ingenieur of mathematics.

arctictony• 17 years ago

Speaking as a Brit Manager who pays his engineers more than himself and is perfectly happy about this, I call Bollocks.

HeyLaughingBoy• 17 years ago

A manager will never be happy to see a worker paid more than him,

Hospital management doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it...

geebee3• 17 years ago

This is the right starting point for any serious discussion of the "engineer shortage." Instead of expounding on how wonderful the unfilled engineering jobs are, we need to know how they stack up against other professions.

If someone is capable of getting into a (top or even middle tier) MS or PhD program in engineering, it means they are 1) capable of working extremely hard in an academic environment with highly rigorous subject matter, and 2) able to score high on standardized tests. This is the same skill set required for law or med school.

So how are the grads of the top engineering MS/PhD programs doing compared to law or medicine? Unless it's competitive, we can end the analysis right there (and a recent RAND study concluded that this lack of competitiveness with other options was, in fact, driving the low interest level of Americans in engineering).

By the way, I actually do think there are some good reasons to pursue an engineering or science path. Your opportunity to contribute to the general welfare is immense in engineering. You may be intensely satisfied with the work, or craftsmanship involved. You may find yourself at home in the immensely logical world, and there are actually many opportunities to work with people and improve their lives, in spite of the "loner" image engineers often have.

But this is the discussion we need to have, one based on an honest assessment of the rewards of engineering relative to other paths available to people with high levels of talent and academic ability.

gamble• 17 years ago

There will always be a 'labor shortage' if your definition of a shortage is being unable to find staff at the price you like. It's refreshing to see at least one attempt to swim against the tide of propaganda produced by industry.

srn2• 17 years ago

It's about Dilbert. If I have the skills to go into a profession where I'll be respected or into a profession where I'll be treated, well, shall we say not so well, which will I pick?

srn2• 17 years ago

Well, obviously Dilbert is an extreme caricature of what happens in most offices, but the comic in and of itself is not a good emissary for the software engineering profession. It unfortunately may have unconsciously biased many people away from jobs in industry.

DaniFong• 17 years ago

Breaking news from the office of fallacies: People are fungible!

Seriously speaking, however, money is a pretty major problem. It is hard not to feel unfairly treated when the lawyers working on translating your product into patentese make 5-6x per hour that you do. Of course, I have equity. I don't know how I'd feel were I an engineer, paid market rate, without it.

Why is the market rate for engineers so low, compared with other professionals? Do they need a union? Negotiations class? What is it?

Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers

Related Stories