Supply and Demand in the skilled trades.
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.
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.
posted by Oberon at 3:09 PM
1 Comments:
Here's my main beef - you've got a bunch of people engineering product that they know little about, or at least they know little about the final assembly and the end user. That makes it difficult for people to understand the full implications of their actions. I think that's a major reason we're seeing so many stupid recalls in the auto industry on what should be home-run tasks (Ford's latest due to fuel lines that aren't secured properly is a good example). I think this plays right into your point about competency, or lack thereof. Sorry, folks, but if you're in charge of specifying wheel studs, shouldn't you be able to ensure that they at least hold the wheels on the vehicle?
The problem with accreditation is that it's frankly quite useless for practical engineering. If I used more of my education, I'd feel differently, but the practical application of knowledge is so different than the educational environment that I feel accreditation is totally useless. And one has to question the real-world usefulness of the FE and PE - there's a clue when I'm looking through the study materials and thinking to myself "I haven't had to use this since college". I'm convinced that good engineering skill can't be tested.
It seems to me that a real hands-on-dirt-under-the-fingernails sort of engineer is shunned nowadays. Whether this comes from HR (as you mentioned) or just from the preppy SOBs that have polluted the engineering world, I don't know. I just know it's sad when I'm considered an oddball (albeit an occasional useful one) for knowing a thing or two about cars. I had an intelligent conversation with a "specialty" manufacturer last week, and you'd think I'd just won the World Series because I managed to do something more than just talk about a PowerPoint slide.
I totally agree that there's little correlation between pay and engineering skill, because there's other things that are valued more nowadays. Kinda odd that in this age of specialization, we want our engineers to do all sorts of other tasks, like program management, customer interaction, and their own secretarial work. Forget being able to run a mill, lay down a weld bead, or solder a connection - it's much more important to be "political".
I don't quite know where I'm going with this, either - I'm just pissed that it's so difficult to be a highly-paid geek.
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