Posted on 12/26/2002 2:03:20 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
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."
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.
Don't know about universal, but a lot of people get shaken out of the tree from time to time.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
What an out of date boss you are. A real throw-back to the fifties.
Well, engineering does not last without inovation or creativity teams. Secular colleges certainly do not foster personal helpfulness, but little slaves bowing to the god professors. So what do we expect.
The latter being the one who located the spark plugs where they cannot be removed without lifting the engine out of the car...
I understand your post. Simply writing a program is far different than designing the system which flawlessly integrates the sub-systems and the OS capabilities.
I always hear people say that. But ask them if they can let you do one of the jobs available, and they'll look at you stupidly, like they did not understand your question.
There is plenty of work out there, but there are plenty of people blocking the access, always interfering in the job others do or want to do. It ends up into a pi$$ing contest every time instead of the sought after enthusiasm in the first place.
Hmmm.... Be an investment banker, get your million buck bonus, and go day trading for the rest of your life. That's the best job security ever.
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. Therefore, there's no real reason to teach assembly any more, since there's no real reason to program in assembly any more.
Hate to say it, but the world changed when you weren't looking ;)
optimizer n. A compiler with three switches for controlling its object code output: big, slow, and both. Compare PESSIMIZING COMPILER.-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Computer Contradictionary.
No you don't. You owe me that money. I earned it. Go get your gray flannel suit cleaned, power-tripper.
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).
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.