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."
It is sad as he loves what he does
When the US no longer has engineers ..kiss what is left of our competitive edge goodby
Hey, I am an EE with a CSP. Many times my systems engineering moved me in the direction of Systems Safety too. About half the time we were worried about software initiating some high energy device. Many times I interfaced with the fine engineers at Sandia. You are in a great area. I am retired now, but there was no end of available work.
Right on... Sotware System Safety is a helluva niche and it is really getting important now, as I said, as humans are being taken out of the loop.
I like the work.
You need a better compiler. I highly doubt you can come up with enough examples of arbitrary code that will run "twice as fast" in assembler than they will in C to make anything resembling a rule of thumb....
The above is part of the big lie on engineering in the US. For the effort it takes to get an engineering credential, engineering is not a high-leverage career track in the United States; it's never been a ticket to heaven and generally not to major worldly success either (Lee Iacocca, a decent junior mechanical engineer who designed a working automatic transmission for his MS thesis, saw the light after 6 months at Ford and transferred to sales). A common phenomenon even during the well-paid Cold War days was the "tramp engineer" who never stayed (usually couldn't stay) in one place long enough to get vested in a pension plan and then couldn't retire. One thing you don't get in engineering is a dignified old age.
Anyone who tells a kid the old wheezes about employability, high salaries, etc. is misleading the kid. The only reason to pursue engineering of any kind is because you love it and can't imagine doing anything else. And even then you should be aware of its pitfalls. Most engineers who succeed in a worldly way do not do it as engineers - they do it on career switches such as business, finance, medicine, or patent law.
Major in chemistry. It offers more options (including chemical engineering graduate school, if you insist).
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