Growing dissatisfaction among career engineers

CHICAGO (CSM) - Paul Porter is closing the door on his engineering career - even though he's only 29. In recent weeks, his wife and five close colleagues were added to the more than 50,000 employees axed by his employer, Nortel Networks. That was the catalyst that prompted the New York native, already disgruntled with his choice of profession, to look into attending either business or law school.

"I spent seven years in school, and it resulted in a six-year career," says Porter, who feels his master's degree in engineering is little more than "a base."

It's a pattern that's recurring with surprising, and disturbing, frequency in a profession long known for job security.

Dissatisfaction with the field is growing rapidly. Layoffs, the influx of foreign workers, and offshore outsourcing of jobs have caused the pocket-protector set to either leave the profession in large numbers or seek new careers after being laid off.

And if that isn't enough to make engineers' neckties curl in Dilbert-style desperation, there's the nature of the work itself. In an era when high-tech gear becomes obsolete almost as fast as dairy products, many in the field feel they must advance at a steady pace or risk being cast aside.

It's a far cry from the era when engineering skills were a ticket to a lifelong salary and, some say, it raises questions about America's ability to remain at the forefront of technology.

"For people who view this as a career, engineering is in worse shape now than it's been in years," says LeEarl Bryant, president of the Institute of Electronic and Electronic Engineers, which represents 235,000 professional members.

The downturn in the profession has taken many by surprise. In the '80s many felt there was an engineering shortage in the United States to compete with Japan's dominance of technology markets. Then, the commercialization of the Internet created a hiring frenzy in which high-tech corporations gave huge bonuses to new hires and the employees who referred them. The IEEE-USA reports that such bonuses pushed the median salary for its members to $93,100 at the peak of the dot-com era.

But all that changed with the dot-com bust and the recession. This year, for example, telecommunications and computer makers have already slashed nearly 400,000 workers - and that's down from last year's 500,000 layoffs - according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Even Dilbert creator Scott Adams, himself a former engineer, has an eye on the trend. "The general balance of power has swung. Engineers had it for a while, now the bosses have it back," says Adams, whose comic-strip boss has hair shaped like a pair of horns on either side of his balding head.

Adding to the frustration of some engineers are the numbers of foreigners competing for jobs. In 2000, near the end of the high-tech boom, industry CEOs convinced Congress to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, allowing up to 195,000 skilled workers from India and elsewhere into the United States. Some engineers contend that those CEOs kept many of those H-1B workers while cutting higher-paid U.S. citizens.

"About 80,000 engineers were unemployed a few months ago. If you take out the H-1Bs who came in, you'd have jobs for all of them," the IEEE-USA's Bryant says. The organization is lobbying Congress to lower the number of H-1B visas issued.

But U.S. companies may continue to rely on foreign workers as the number of people entering the profession shows signs of decline. Demand for engineering courses is down in the United States, according to the National Science Foundation statistics. In 2000, there were just over 59,000 engineering graduates, compared to 63,000 students in 1996.

Not everyone is gloomy about prospects in the profession, however. "Salaries are up, and we're faring better (concerning layoffs) than many other professions," says Win Philips, chairman of the American Association of Engineering Societies.

Many engineers are facing a challenge of a different sort. Graying engineers who have decades of work experience are as rare as a black and white television. Even those under 40 are often considered old: A computer-science professor in California has statistics to show that programmers have careers not much longer than pro-football players.

"The half-life of engineering knowledge, the time it takes for something to become obsolete, is from 7 to 2 1/2 years. Lifelong learning is critical in this profession," says William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering. Still, he says, engineering is "an incredibly exciting and rewarding profession."

Thanks for the ping.

I have B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and a P.E. My career as an engineer is 14 years long, and I still enjoy it. I make good money (wouldn't mind a little more) but no complaints here. If there is one secret to my success, it has been to stay versatile and current. The first eleven years were spent in the pressure vessel industry at one company. Since then I has branched into the defense, aerospace, and consumer industries, while continuing in pressure vessels.

Don't been afraid to try new things. Take a course at a local college (most employers will pay for it), develop expertise in a new software package, and/or join a local technical society and attend the seminars. It is not just a 40-hour a week job; no successful profession is anymore. Opportunities exist to advance skills, and since the competition does, so must you, regardless of the profession.

If there is one problem with this profession, it is the concept that "it must be right, the computer says so". Anybody can input anything into a piece of software, but how do you know it is correct? Most of my work involves finite element analysis, and while even a child can put a model together, it takes an engineer to make sure the results are correct.

St Augustine on carreers. control freaking, it has not changed a bit since then. http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF1-01/npnf1-01-09.htm#P217_55917

Chapter IX.-Concerning the Hatred of Learning, the Love of Play, and the Fear of Being Whipped Noticeable in Boys: and of the Folly of Our Elders and Masters.

14. O my God! what miseries and mockeries did I then experience, when obedience to my teachers was set before me as proper to my boyhood, that I might flourish in this world, and distinguish myself in the science of speech, which should get me honour amongst men, and deceitful riches! After that I was put to school to get learning, of which I (worthless as I was) knew not what use there was; and yet, if slow to learn, I was flogged! For this was deemed praiseworthy by our forefathers; and many before us, passing the same course, had appointed beforehand for us these troublesome ways by which we were compelled to pass, multiplying labour and sorrow upon the sons of Adam. But we found, O Lord, men praying to Thee, and we learned from them to conceive of Thee, according to our ability, to be some Great One, who was able (though not visible to our senses) to hear and help us. For as a boy I began to pray to Thee, my "help" and my "refuge,"39 and in invoking Thee broke the bands of my tongue, and entreated Thee though little, with I no little earnestness, that I might not be beaten at school. And when Thou heardedst me not, giving me not over to folly thereby,40 my elders, yea, and my own parents too, who wished me no ill, laughed at my stripes, my then great and grievous ill.

15. Is there any one, Lord, with so high a spirit, cleaving to Thee with so strong an affection for even a kind of obtuseness may do that much-but is there, I say, any one who, by cleaving devoutly to Thee, is endowed with so great a courage that he can esteem lightly those racks and hooks, and varied tortures of the same sort, against which, throughout the whole world, men supplicate Thee with great fear, deriding those who most bitterly fear them, just as our parents derided the torments with which our masters punished-us when we were boys? For we were no less afraid of our pains, nor did we pray less to Thee to avoid them; and yet we sinned, in writing, or reading, or reflecting upon our lessons less than was required of us. For we wanted not, O Lord, memory or capacity,of which, by Thy will, we possessed enough for our age,-but we delighted only in play; and we were punished for this by those who were doing the same things themselves. But the idleness of our elders they call business, whilst boys who do the like are punished by those same elders, and yet neither boys nor men find any pity. For will any one of good sense approve of my being whipped because, as a boy, I played ball, and so was hindered from learning quickly those lessons by means of which, as a man, I should play more unbecomingly? And did he by whom I was beaten do other than this, who, when he was overcome in any little controversy with a co-tutor, was more tormented by anger and envy than I when beaten by a playfellow in a match at ball?

Chapter X.-Through a Love of Ball-Playing and Shows, He Neglects His Studies and the Injunctions of His Parents.

16. And yet I erred, O Lord God, the Creator and Disposer of all things in Nature,-but of sin the Disposer only,-I erred, O Lord m.y God, in doing contrary to the wishes of my parents and of those masters; for this learning which they (no matter for what motive) wished me to acquire, I might have put to good account afterwards. For I disobeyed them not because I had chosen a better way, but from a fondness for play, loving the honour of victory in the matches, and to have my ears tickled with lying fables, in order that they might itch the more furiously-the same curiosity beaming more and more in my eyes for the shows and sports of my elders. Yet those who give these entertainments are held in such high repute, that almost all desire the same for their children, whom they are still willing should be beaten, if so be these same games keep them from the studies by which they desire them to arrive at being the givers of them. Look down upon these things, O Lord, I with compassion, and deliver us who now call! upon Thee; deliver those also who do not call upon Thee, that they may call upon Thee, and that Thou mayest deliver them.

LOL - that has less to do with quality education than you think. For anything more than a few hundred lines of code, a good globally-optimizing compiler will produce tighter code than any assembly programmer. Period.

I don't think so. A usable rule of thumb is that hand-tuned assembler will run twice as fast as code generated by a good C-compiler. There are reasons that this will generally be the case that aren't going away any time soon. However, this is not a good reason to write everything in assembly since economics is the primary concern, not execution speed, particularly since you can just move the code to a faster system a few months later and get the same results. For extremely performance sensitive programming, key sections of the code may be re-written from C (or whatever) into assembly code or Fortran (which often compiles into faster code than C for some things).

Therefore, there's no real reason to teach assembly any more, since there's no real reason to program in assembly any more.

There still are some types of work that require knowledge of assembly programming, but not much.

However, there is a good reason to still teach assembly languages. I've noticed an alarming trend in that a lot of young people coming out of schools now HAVEN'T been taught assembly code, with the noticeable consequence that they have no clue how software ACTUALLY interacts with the hardware. Instead they continue using the assumption that they are programming for an idealized abstraction of hardware, having no other way of looking at it. 99% of the time, this works fine, but there is that 1% of cases where they become totally lost when bumping up against some intrinsic limitations of whatever architecture they are working on. This is a failing of this type of education. Without carnal knowledge of what the hardware and software are actually doing on modern system architectures, there are many cases where you cannot make intelligent design choices. A lot of times this weakness is covered up by the ever increasing power of systems that software runs on, but when they hit a wall, they have to talk to people like me to tell them why they've hit a wall and explain to them what they need to do to get around it. Sometimes fixing these problems requires a very expensive redesign effort that could have been avoided if they truly understood the internals of what they were using in the first place.

Even worse, some places have stopped teaching C, which is the only high-level facsimile of assembly language in most important aspects (being the Universal Assembly language that it is).

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