Alarming Export: Engineers

Not really.

Hearing an Indian accent on the other end of the line is just irritating to me, particularly those cold calls for getting you to switch telephone services. And, some of those guys are just plainly rude.

IN 5 years i think it'd be a thing in the past. Dell has already moved all of its corporate call centers back to the US. Even the software outsourcing things are getting bad -- people realized more and more that you have to micromanage them in order to get results. A specification alone isn't enough.

As a college graduate, I can attest to the frustration coming from the mouths and minds of American engineering students. I was on the fast-track to getting a BS in Computer Engineering in early 2000, but in many cases, you had to be capable of understanding the instructions of a teacher who many times had a hard time understanding, communicating in and functioning in English language and standards. I contend that my eventual change in majors was due to an increasingly difficult-to-understand math department and an abysmal response by the university to bring in more talented, less difficult-to-understand teaching professionals.

I graduated with a degree in English Composition and Linguistics with a minor in Psychology, and I am quite content with my decision.

More often American companies are looking for college graduates with advanced language and communication skills, and I've been seen as a critical-thinker and fast-learner by my management teams and my peers. Americans increasingly add to the pool of "thinkers and doers," and we're outsourcing our functional capacities, which in the end may lead to a nation of managers with no ability to control.

I fear for our nation and where we're headed. More and more kids are dropping out of high school, starting families with ignorance and divorcing with greater regularity. Not sure if I want to marry or bring kids into this world.

Here's the denouement of this process: Sometime in the next ten or fifteen years there will be a Chinese "Sputnik". I was in middle school in 1956 when the 'beep, beep, beep' from that first satellite put the educational establishment into a panic. Enormous sums were pumped into scientific and engineering education. This is the capital the country has been living on for the last generation. It came to an end in the early nineties.

The Chinese "Sputnik" whatever it is (new terrifying weapons system, incredible biotech advance, generational leap frog in computer technology,...take your pick) will wipe the glaze from the eyes of establishment and another crash program will be instituted to educate American scientists and engineers. However, it's not 1956 and it's unlikely that we will ever be able to catch up to a rapidly accelerating China / India / Russia. Mark the day when this happens as the end of an era that started with Ben Franklin's experiments with electricity.

"licensing requirements aren't there for EE and computer engineers. It actually doesn't mean anything for EE or software, most of the questions on the exam has to do with civil engineering."

The EE PE exam is specific to EE's (I'm licensed in 4 states) - the requirement is there for EE's if you are doing power distribution, or other public safety impacting type of work.

There is no license for Computer Engineering.

PE's are more prevalent in Civil and Mechanical

Again, this is the fault of the various state engineering boards who do not take their profession seriously enough to pay attention. They have allowed it to be encroached upon and the title "engineer" to be usurped by many entities - they do not truly understand the scope of the practice of engineering as it has developed over the past 25 years or so, and have been content to sit back and occassionally bust someone's chops for doing something the oughtn't have done - then issuing a trivial fine.

They are almost all worthless. Now, due to treaties like NAFTA, there is a defacto national certification - but only for Canadian or Mexican engineers. (for instance, a Mexican Engineer can get registered in Texas (because of NAFTA), but an engineer from, say, Kansas, cannot without more extensive paperwork- Texas recognizes Mexican Engineers as having qualifications that other US state's engineers do not have

Because state engineering boards are so worthless, and treaties supplant state oversight without their objection, I believe it is time to make a national certification available to engineers. Done on a national level, I believe it would be possible to provide relevant certifications for high-tech engineering fields - the state boards could then provide oversight and enforcement instead of sitting around like the cement-heads they are claiming to be relevant.

Not that I have an opinion........

Some American-born engineering grad students say they feel isolated, with few friends to talk to in the cafeteria.

As an undergrad CS student at SUNY @ Stony Brook in the late 1980s, I could go DAYS in the engineering buildings without hearing english spoken once! In a digital logic course, the teacher was a visiting professor from China. He spoke very little english, and would occassionally lapse into chinese during his lectures! And the Chinese students in class would just ask questions in chinese, and he's answer them in the same language. Every American wound up dropping the course. So did my roommate, a Korean (as did all the Koreans in the class), because he didn't understand the professor either!

Mark

The really big fright America will awaken to is the lack of Americans interested in engineering. My town sends 95 percent of its high school students on to college. I have yet to hear about any of them going on to engineering schools. America can forget about it's future without the technological edge. It needs engineers to keep that edge.

And it doesn't help when these "financial 'rocket scientists'" like Carly Fiorina and the rest of so totally wrecked some of the greatest sources of technology that the US (or the world, for that matter) has ever seen, like HP and Lucent (formerly Bell Labs)

Mark

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