Posted on 01/18/2006 8:26:15 AM PST by A. Pole
Many companies say they're facing an increasingly severe shortage of engineers. It's so bad, some executives say, that Congress must act to boost funding for engineering education.
Yet unemployed engineers say there's actually a big surplus. "No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage," says demographer Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
[...]
Within two weeks, Mr. Carver and a colleague at the Hudson Highland Group had collected more than 200 resumes. They immediately eliminated just over 100 people who didn't have the required bachelor of science degree, even though many had the kind of job experience the company wanted. A further 65 or so then fell out of the running. Some were deemed overqualified. Others lacked experience with the proper manufacturing software.
[...]
"Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn't mean there's a shortage of butterflies," says Richard Tax, president of the American Engineering Association, which campaigns to prevent losses of engineering jobs.
[...]
Under the H-1B temporary work visa program, U.S. employers are permitted to hire foreign nationals with knowledge and skills deemed to be in short supply.
[...]
Then came the deal-breaker. Wabtec would only consider candidates who had experience with Pro/Engineer Wildfire, a new 3-D computer-aided design software package, not an earlier package called 2000i.
"The basic difference between Wildfire and 2000i is not that significant," says Mr. Sylvester. "I say smart people can learn sister applications, but there is reluctance among hiring managers to see that.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
UNION drywall makes that
I was a draftsman in SOLIDWORKS, CADKEY, Autocad, knew some PRO-E, I never made more than $22 an hour as a temp
I can certainly see where a more specialized, higher educated industry would be less inclined to see the exploitation of the program. There just aren't the numbers to throw against the corporations that there are in the relatively less-skilled industries like software development.
Well, at least you provide some training for current employees. I have seen employers who don't even do that - in my opinion working for them is not a wise career move.
I doubt that - it is possible that the man or woman is from France, Germany, the UK or some other country and will be paid a rate very much like his American counter aprts - because he has to live here.
Could be that they are looking for a plug-in writer which
would require some familiarity with coding to some API.
Of course, any reasonable C++ coder should be able to do that but they want minimum learn curve.
Not neccesarily. I seem to recall that Sun Microsystems brought in a bunch of foreign programmers on H1-B visas, and they got into a ton of trouble due to the fact that they were paying them far below the "going wage," and keeping them in tiny dorm rooms.
Now maybe that stuff doesn't go on any longer, but it has happened in the past.
Mark
Don't know much about the payscale for engineers, do you? 30 bucks an hours is roughly $5000 per month, or $60,000 per year. A decent engineer with 10 years experience should make considerably more than that.
Think about it carefully before persuing the masters. Many folks in my field tend to be very sceptical of candidates with advanced degrees. There is no pay differential, so the perception is the guy/gal isn't going to hang around long.
It's labor arbitrage to get cheaper rates, not just to find a bigger pool of applicants.
If companies seriously were looking for highly qualified engineers, they would expand their search from China and India to Japan, which turns out large numbers of world-class engineers. But they don't, because Japanese engineers make very good money.
The very first project I worked on had a 3,000 amp, 480 V service. A few months prior, I had been in an electronics lab dealing with 3 milliamps and 5 volts. Six orders of magnitude is something to behold.
The chip or gizmo the electronics guy worked on is outdated in 6 months. Besides, nobody can really see, or envision it. A building on the other hand is a nice landmark, that you can say, "I did that".
AMEN. Someone had to say it. Personally, I believe (and Im not the only one, of those I know who actively work in the electronics industry), that engineering and manufacturing, here in the US overall, particularly electrical engineering, is on a downward trend, which seems to be accelerating.
The statement that there is a shortage of good engineers is one of those clever agenda driven half truths industry spokesmen put forth...the fact is that there are shortages of some engineers in some highly skilled specialty areas in some geographical areas of the country, but thats always been the case. Thats why consultants have traditionally made a good living satisfying those short term emrgency needs of clients.
The reason that those jobs are going unfilled now, is IMO, due to the fact that in many cases, the companies do NOT want to pay highly skilled SENIOR engineers to come in and solve their problems for them, even if on a consulting basis. There are managers out there who refuse to pay for engineering talent what they pay to have their BMW's serviced at the dealership. Some of that is not only penny wise / pound foolish management practice, it also reflects IMO an underlying cultural and age group bias at work, some younger Gen-X managers simply dislike Boomer engineers...perhaps Boomers in general. Thats a subject for another thread, however!
There are Senior engineers out there, particularly guys in their forties and fifties, who are underemployed, or in many cases unemployed as engineers....I'm talking about guys who never made the transition to management. These are guys that companies are unwilling to invest any training time in, even guys with solid credentials and good education backgrounds.
Please, nobody tell me the solution is that we all become "managers"...most of us learned in management theory years ago, that a management heavy organization is a bloated, inefficient organization...that was proven and dealt with in the lean, mean managenment purges in the early nineties. Wealth is largely created by worker bees AND managers in an efficient pyramid organization, with help from bankers, money managers and a whole host of people in the overall societal infrastructure, but today that system is out of kilter IMO..
Its also foolish to assume that in the long run, engineering research and product development is going to be done on a different continent from where the product is manufactured, as far as I know, TQM and six sigma quality requires a cooperative team effort across all the engineering and management disciplines, and is made more efficient by proximity and shared language.
And as always, the market verifies the true story for the so called shortages of engineers; wages for contract hardware design engineers are at the same basic levels they were back in about the early to mid nineties...this is the market speaking. This is a market, incidently, distorted by the influences of H1b and L1 workers...a government sanctioned market interference and corporate handout if there ever was one.
Meanwhile, the cost of doing business here in the US is going UP UP UP, not only taxes, but liability, workman's comp, disability, and health insurance, auto insurance, energy costs, regulatory costs, legal costs...in short all of the infrastructure costs we see here in the US. Maybe this is one reason companies are moving high tech development not only over to India and China, but to IRELAND, yes, that third world hellhole (/s).
Meanwhile, the parts and materials market also tells a story, as while the costs of semiconductors may be holding steady, the costs of all other electronic raw materials, particularly any products which use metal / copper, are up significantly in the last year. Ive seen increases of between six and twenty percent in some materials ...this is the prices quoted in the new 2006 catalogs...a couple months old, and the prices actually quoted TODAY by the distributor. Something is definately going on here. Is all this increased demand due to activities HERE in the US...or is it elsewhere?
Ive spoken to a few guys who tell me they are being forced to go to ASIA for production out of necessity to cut costs to the bone to stay competitive. What if ALL American companies did this...its a complex nonlinear equation baby, forget your simple linear x/y economic curves that only go UP with offshoring.
At a recent social gathering, I ran into a former collegue who is currently laid off, he is a super sharp EE guy who survived through his third (and probably final) merger / buyout / layoff (in the past eight years). He will be leaving engineering. His wife, a doctor, had to quit her practice here in PA due to the liability nightmare...another issue I grant you...but related in my mind to the problems faced by business in this country in general.
What does it all mean...frankly IMO we are in a vicious self perpetuating cycle, which will see as a long term overall byproduct the GROWTH in government and government programs. Its already starting...just look around.
Hows that for some "doom and gloom"?
You might be interested in this link:
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx
It goes to the DOL website where you can actually search by employer and State for H1B labor condition applications for H1B visas. You can download a *.csv file with all the records for a given state, which can be imported into Excel for exploitation. You can see what occupations are getting used by H1B's as well as how much the position pays.
You have that so on the mark. I sell product for a Romanian importer here in the US who hires immigrants that will work cheap and take abuse. I have had to butt heads with this idiot more than once when he gets out of line with his abuse. Being an independent contractor is a plus when dealing with this kind of ah@le.
Fortunately after 6 years of working with him, I have him finally convinced him that he needs to offer some benefits to his employees, if nothing else so he can attract others to work for him with the skills he needs.
I think he will completely get rid of the abuse streak... it seems to be ingrained.
Very fortunate indeed is the man (woman?) who finds his calling early in life.
China ramping up for war, maybe?
Agreed. A pox on HR.
I have my current job with a major defense contractor in spite of HR, not because of them. My boss asked for HR to do a resume search to find what he wanted. When what they provided didn't satisfy him (guess the resume didn't have the keywords they were looking for), in desperation he asked for them to give him pretty much every resume they had for entry-level EE's. Out of that, he found me and a couple of other names that had some actual hardware experience. Interviewed, accepted, and the rest is history.
Mind you, I didn't even apply for the job. I submitted a resume several months before that for another position, and they just kept the resume in the database to gather electronic dust. HR folks even tried to dissuade my boss from hiring me because I didn't have a security clearance. He fired back "I'm not going to not hire him!", for which I'm grateful, to say the least. Pretty tough for somebody in engineering without clearance to get a job with the big employers here in Huntsville.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.