
Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers - billclerico
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2009/db20091027_723059.htm
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pmorici
"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified before the House Committee on Science
and Technology and said salaries are not the problem when his company tries to
recruit top scientists and engineers. "It's not an issue of raising wages.
These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs," he said."

It maybe true that they are very high paying jobs but I doubt they are as high
paying as say a job on Wall Street.

~~~
scotty79
The trouble is that as engineer or researcher you have to actually do some
hard, useful things.

As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they
can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all.

I guess people claiming they can predict future always earn disproportional
amounts of wealth without doing anything useful. That is as long as everything
goes well.

Squeeze this free-riding and casino mixture that is called financial market a
bit and you will have plenty of smart people available for hacking physics as
they loose incentives for hacking money game instead.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that
they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at
all._

Fail.

I've been through the interview process at a couple of such places, and you
don't get in without having some skill.

In fact, I'd say the typical financial job is more technical than the typical
engineering job. A large number of engineering jobs consist of little more
than the electrical/mechanical/chemical equivalent of CRUD programming, but
not very many finance jobs fall into that category [1].

[1] The financial industry requires many CRUD-type jobs to be done just like
any other industry, but those are usually outsourced.

~~~
scotty79
I overshot myself a bit with "without having any skill at all". I meant
"without skill that they must had to get comparable salary from engineering
type of job".

Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere
else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast.

I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested
for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require
skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would
d it, and that would make it less profitable.

If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high
because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier
of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people
actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their
barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with
the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students
were gone. After first semester only half remained.

~~~
yummyfajitas
According to the people I've spoken to working in finance, they routinely use
moderately advanced math. By advanced math, I mean PDEs, numerical problems
requiring cleverness and more probability than most engineers learn [1].

They also do it at a speed and level of distraction that many _good_ techies
can't handle. By this I mean a trader has the absolute right to yell at you at
any time and make you drop everything debug the program he is using.

As for "barriers of entry need not be so high", college is different than a
job. Your college still collected tuition from the students up until they
dropped out. Goldman Sachs has to pay the bad techies they recruit until they
fire them (and this may also be legally problematic [2]).

[1] It's usually not as deep as, e.g., a PhD in math or theoretical physics.

[2] If they did as you suggest, and women or minorities disproportionately
couldn't handle the job, they are inviting a disparate impact lawsuit.

~~~
geebee
I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty
brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds.

That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money
and absolutely _do not_ have a strong math background.

Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on
wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few
minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential
equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math
class?

~~~
yummyfajitas
To clarify, my claim isn't that everyone in finance (or even above a certain
pay scale) has a strong math background. My claim is that many of the engineer
cum quants are doing technical work (not simply paper pushing) in a difficult
environment.

~~~
geebee
I agree with you that "engineer cum quants" do hard math work, but you're not
really comparing similar groups anymore (your original claim was that a
"typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job").
My impression was that _quants_ almost always have an academic background in
math or physics, but I don't think this level of math is typical for most of
the folks in finance, including many who make gobs and gobs of money.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Oops, I was unclear. I should have specified that I was comparing engineers
cum quants to engineers qua engineers.

(These are the two groups of people we were originally discussing.)

------
Locke1689
_Stephenson says the number of computer science courses taught at the high
school level has dropped for the past six years, especially at advanced
levels. In 2005, 40% of U.S. high schools offered Advanced Placement courses
in computer science; that number sank to 32% in 2007 and to 27% in 2009. "It's
clear that the number of students taking computer science is dropping," she
says.

Heads of other professional organizations also criticized the study for its
lack of specificity among industries. The argument is that some STEM students
and graduates may be worth cultivating more than others. The report's authors
said it would have been too difficult and costly to perform a longitudinal
data analysis by individual industry._

There's your problem. Anecdotal evidence here: they're all medicine. Everyone
under the frickin sun wants to be a doctor.

~~~
alexgartrell
There's a huuuge cultural bias against computer science here, which is killing
it. Downstream, this results in very few girls, athletes, etc. having an
interest. They pursue medicine, business and traditional engineering instead.

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natevc2
In another article about the same report.

[http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028...](http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028_Study_asks__What_scientist_and_engineer_shortage_.html)

"In the last decade, U.S. colleges graduated three times more scientists and
engineers than the number of jobs available, the researchers said. The data
went through 2005 and did not reflect the recession."

It sounds like this research was "Hey department of education how many science
or engineering graduates are there in the US every year?" and "Hey bls.gov how
many openings are there that match engineer or scientist for entry level
positions each year?" Now divide and we are done. Conclusion, there are way to
many people with science and engineering degrees.

This is drawing conclusions about the labor market with a data set that
includes a wide range of degrees many of which are only prerequisites for
graduate degrees in other fields.

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MarkPNeyer
It's all about the money. Why would someone intelligent want to work as an
engineer when they can make way more in finance or law?

~~~
gaius
Money is only a symptom. What it's really about is the vestiges of the old
British class system. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, managers, and so on are
upper-middle-class professionals. Engineers of any sort, no matter how
skilled, no matter how many degrees, PE or CEng status, have the taint of
blue-collar about them (from the POV of the upper-middles). A manager will
never be happy to see a worker paid more than him, even if by the laws of
supply and demand they ought to be.

This is much much less of a problem in say Germany where Engineer is a
respected, prestigious title in its own right.

~~~
arctictony
Speaking as a Brit Manager who pays his engineers more than himself and is
perfectly happy about this, I call Bollocks.

~~~
gaius
Are you asserting that Britain is now a Blairite classless utopia? I don't
think even he himself would agree with that... And neither would his buddies
Lords Falconer and Mandelson.

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DaniFong
Breaking news from the office of fallacies: People are fungible!

Seriously speaking, however, money is a pretty major problem. It is hard not
to feel unfairly treated when the lawyers working on translating your product
into patentese make 5-6x per hour that you do. Of course, I have equity. I
don't know how I'd feel were I an engineer, paid market rate, without it.

Why is the market rate for engineers so low, compared with other
professionals? Do they need a union? Negotiations class? What is it?

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imraj
We live in a time when average person will have multiple careers for shorter
durations, so this is not a surprise to me. I personally feel that its hard to
make life decisions about careers at the age 18 or 19, so a shift in
professions after graduation considering science and engineering students have
strong backgrounds in math, algorithms & models for better paying jobs is
quiet understandable.

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tybris
Seems like engineers are under-valued then.

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bavcyc
see: <http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt>

<http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html>

I've not verified or looked into the issue beyond requesting the ucdavis
document.

~~~
scotty79
> At Microsoft, a new PhD in computer science makes about $90K, while
> Microsoft pays newly-minted lawyers $140K. And the gap grows after that.

That really shows who brings beacon to MS. :-)

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gamble
There will always be a 'labor shortage' if your definition of a shortage is
being unable to find staff at the price you like. It's refreshing to see at
least one attempt to swim against the tide of propaganda produced by industry.

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srn
It's about Dilbert. If I have the skills to go into a profession where I'll be
respected or into a profession where I'll be treated, well, shall we say not
so well, which will I pick?

~~~
srn
Well, obviously Dilbert is an extreme caricature of what happens in most
offices, but the comic in and of itself is not a good emissary for the
software engineering profession. It unfortunately may have unconsciously
biased many people away from jobs in industry.

