I was listening to NPR this morning on the way into work, while simultaneously contemplating career moves. On that front, I learned there is a telematics system engineer, a telematics product engineer, a hardware engineer and possibly an EMC engineer position open in our Electronics group. Of course, the positions keep coming as more and more people bail out after getting 2% raises and working insane hours with 4 bosses yelling at them.
In any case, I forget the point of the NPR story, but the comment was made that more and more nurses are not actually qualified even though they meet state/government standards. I'm sure many engineers have felt, or even had good reason to believe, that their coworkers are not competant as engineers. Now, accreditation through agencies like ABET is supposed to make sure that colleges are not graduating incompetant students. I have to wonder though, with the demand for engineers having been historically high, whether there is any meaning to ABET. I'll use my job situation as an example. The Hardware and EMC engineering positions require me to know what I'm doing. The product and system engineering positions you can BS through, they are essentially project management and requirements management positions. Now, I don't know what things are like elsewhere, but the guys that actually don't have to know anything for their job....they get the higher pay.
Of course, this makes my dilema whether I want to sell out (even more) , forget doing any further "engineering" and take on one of these psuedo engineering positions. The alternative is to risk being a lay-off target as an hardware engineer who's above his pay grade for his position. You're all welcome to labast me on either count.
OK. So what we have is a chicken-or-egg situation. Did the demand for engineering students draw in unqualified candidates? Or, was the demand for project and requirements managers with engineering backgrounds? I would place myself with the former, noting that HR still wants people with very specific experience for systems and product engineers even though (in my opinion) they really don't need to know much about the product or discipline to perform the task, just basic engineering knowledge. That brings up a third possibility, perhaps the rise of HR (stereotypically pleasant outgoing well-adjusted types) has weeded out the stereotypical engineers ( grumpy, quirky, introverts).
The end result of all of these cases is that when the high-paying engineers are called out on the carpet to make key technical decisions they are not necessarily the best person to be making those decisions. My unanswered question, is whether the past demand for engineers was met with too many subpar engineers? If that is the case, did the supply of subpar engineers contribute to the idea that anyone, anywhere could be a subpar engineer; that is outsourcing. Did you know that there are no tests or grades in China, it's all on the honor system! While not a fan of tests, I'm concerned about anyone who graduated from a college with a 100% graduation rate (ref IEEE Spectrum).
Our company had a meeting a few months back where managment explained the purpose of outsourcing. Outsourcing, they said, let us do the things we want to do. Too many people, they claimed were stuck doing boring repetitive work...isnt' that what new college grads are supposed to be doing? Huh, we haven't hired any of those in awhile. So, who is going to replace the retiring engineers? Our company's answer is more offshore workers.
In a related meeting, the managers were all pulled into a room and told that a good number of upper management positions will be opening up in the next 10 years. The result has been a barrel of monkey's climbing all over one another to out ass-kiss the others at the expense of their employees. Likewise, the non-skilled engineers are angling themselves into management positions. Doesn't this all make engineering irrelevant? What real value does a project engineer or requirements manager bring to a program, other than being a customer interface? As an automotive parts supplier, what value do we provide to OEMs when we're just the customer interface?
If I can apply this line of thinking to the medical profession, a word of warning to nurses, after the boomers pass on...you're going get screwed in the same way.
I don't know what I'm going to do with this thought. Some revisions could turn it into a letter to the editor for IEEE spectrum, some data, research, and a crackpot theory could turn it into a management book: the ultimate sellout. People who write management and motivation books have got be one of the lowest forms of useless, parasitic lifeforms that ever existed.
