American companies need to hire Americans.
Period.
For 30 years we have been sending American jobs overseas, to foreigners.
Enough!
They are training lots of engineers, without regard for whether the students really have any aptitude to become a good engineer.
Welcome to the free market for labor. Supply and demand is a beotch.
The solution is NOT more H1B visas!!!!!!
Once Obamacare kicks in why wouldn’t U.S. companies send these jobs oversees rather than hire someone here?
Engineer ping
I got it! Let’s import more unskilled labor from third world countries.
That’s because they hand out engineering degrees and doctorates in India like candy and we import these idiots.
But it’s OK - I make a ton of money fixing their crapola software
I'm in the industry, and I have not observed this. Software people get the same rates here, whether they are foreign nationals or domestic citizens.
Specialization matters. Demand for engineers depends on subject. Don’t expect an optical engineer to design sewer systems.
Two nations with the world’s largest populations have been producing more engineers than they needed for years, with the idea that many would be used to syphon off jobs from more advanced nations, both through plant relocations and the outsourcing of jobs where the engineer can do the work from distant locations.
Now the jobs aren’t there for all the engineers being produced in India and China, and there’s probably no scenario where growth in the near future will create a need for the excess.
Engineers? I’m about to start a geek fight.... Most IT requires little to nothing that would be classified as actual engineering.
If India had a million actual trained Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical and Software (and related disciplines) engineers they’d have a true national asset that they could tap and create value.
Instead they have a bunch of software installers and hardware rackers that they call “engineers”.
IT depends on somebody actually doing something real before it comes significantly into play. “google” is nothing without people who actually do something real that provides the content for them to index, sort, and distribute.
Can’t those IT jobs be automated?
Somebody has to flip Burgers and push Fries with that.
In my 20 plus years of software development I’ve determined that college education only accounts for maybe 20% of the required knowledge for my career field. Technologies are changing constantly and only those who have the aptitude and desire to keep up with those changes will survive in this field. I’ve met people with only a high school degree who were brilliant coders/developers and other people from MIT who couldn’t write the most simple of programs.
Software development is as much an art as it is a profession. Some “artists” are just better than others and have natural ability to visualize an entire application in their head. Having a holistic view before even starting makes applications less buggy, easier to understand and easier to enhance. Just as Da Vinci visualized his art works and inventions before he put it on paper.
They could use about 100,000 engineers in India to design safer water systems for the population, as well as garbage processing systems, sewage systems, holy cow elimination systems, traffic systems, streets and housing,...
There are a lot of really poor engineering schools in India, turning out marginal and ill-trained grads.
It seems such a short time since anyone who commented about this on FR was met with a barrage of stories about how engineering graduates were still in huge demand. As someone who is as I used to say, “A world class expert in an obsolete profession”, let me say that it is hell. I am still very able to work at my old profession at which I used to charge fifty or sixty dollars an hour twenty years ago but looking for work would be like looking for buried treasure or worse. Things change rapidly now, you can go from hero to zero in a few months.
This is not new. It’s been going on in India for thirty years. I heard stories from Indian engineers years ago about graduates having to work at menial jobs because there weren’t any job openings for engineers. Things are changing, but if they ever hope to achieve what the U.S. has achieved, they will need to make some cultural changes. Unfortunately for them, such changes are usually very slow.
Few people in the U.S. seem to appreciate that the culture of the Americans as it evolved in the 1700s and 1800s is responsible for the tremendous economic growth, of which we are the beneficiaries today.
Professors who hate capitalism and the concept of private property have claimed for a hundred years that we are wealthy because we took advantage of poorer cultures. While abuse did occur, it doesn’t explain our wealth.
Our wealth is primarily because of our cultural foundation. Concepts of right and wrong from our Judeo-Christian heritage. Concepts of law and private property which our forefathers brought with them from England. Concepts of liberty and individual rights which became popular in Europe and America in the eighteenth century. Patent law. And this foundation is being destroyed today by the elites in our country.
India could solve this engineer surplus in short order by just easing the rules by which entrepreneurs can operate. They would have a huge economic and technological boom.