A friend in Silicon Valley sent me this article on career choices for engineers in the U.S.
[If you’re looking to transition out of coding you might consider opening a helicopter flight school in Edmonton. The economy here is booming due to the high price of oil (Alberta actually has more petroleum reserves than Saudi Arabia but they require some work to extract, unlike in the Persian Gulf). There is one CFI here with a Robinson R22. He charges CAD$500 per hour! The price in the U.S. is closer to USD$200 or only about half.]
But would that mean I’d have to move from Los Angeles to Edmonton? Oh well, I suppose there’s no such thing as the perfect job. 🙂
It used to be that engineers were advised, after 10 or 15 years, to choose one of two career tracks: engineering management or engineering guru.
But now kids out of college are advised to become managers because all engineering problems can be solved at $10/hr in India, while they sleep after a hard day’s managing.
When they start building helicopter avionics systems like this, that would be time to renew your interest in RVs.
Honeywell has been outsourcing jobs like crazy, and looks like, according to internal memos, are going to continue the craze…
—– Honeywell’s Plan for Census Adjustment by Globalization —–
Honeywell executives have decided that revenue spent for engineering must go below 15% of their total expenditures. In order to cut costs they will “globalize” their engineering departments. This globalization process will focus on cutting the cost of labor by using the following methods:
Replacing current Honeywell workers with L-1 visa holders. These L-1 visa holders will come mostly from Russia, Czech Republic, and India.
Whenever possible all positions in engineering and its support functions will be outsourced to overseas locations.
All new IT jobs will be required to be outsourced offshore.
No external hiring will be allowed, and transfers of employees within Honeywell will be discouraged until the job terminations are complete.
Open job positions will be “backfilled with globalized engineers at a lower cost.” Managers that refuse to go along with this process will be replaced with more cooperative ones.
American subcontractors are currently being eliminated and replaced with foreign companies.
If you’re interested in a longer read, I’ve always found this article by a prof (of political science) at UW to be interesting: http://evans.washington.edu/fac/Zumeta/pdf/attracting_the_best.pdf. Zumeta appears to be concerned about the drop in s/e interest. However, what I like so much about his point of view is that he clearly understands the forces that drive this decline – i.e., that s/e careers have become very unattractive. That second part is mysteriously missing from the handwringing I read in columns like the one Friedman wrote (referenced in the link). He also spends a lot of time analysing where the best and brightest are going when they turn away form s/e (i.e., “opportunity cost” of a s/e career – you’d think econimists like Friedman would pay more attention to this).
By the way – Phil, I’m particularly interested in your take on this, if you’ve got the time to read it.
Bud – I actually just assumed that he was an economist, since he writes about economic issues so often. Regardless of his background, I’m sure he’s familiar with the notion of opportunity costs, which is why I’m so puzzled by his insistence that more americans “should” study s/e. It’s so wierd how these analysts fail to consider where the best and brightest are going *instead*. I mean, it’s not like they’re choosing between phd’s in s/e and janitorial work. I remember reading about an exchange between Senator Fienstein and a CEO lobbying for more visas during the big h1b debate. The lobbyist wanted to hire someone with a Ph.D-level background in software and biology, and couldn’t hire one in spite of offering 80K and a lease on a new BMW. Fienstein looked impressed and joked “what was the name of your company again”? But the thing is, starting JD’s and MBA’s from elite schools were making at least 40K more than that, and the educational requirements for those degrees, while still impressive, are much lower than for PHD’s in the physical sciences and engineering. Fienstein’s response *should* have addressed opportunity costs – i.e., “80K and a lease certainly is nice, but why do you think you should be able to hire a six-year PhD with specialized skills for 2/3 the cost of a newly minted lawyer or MBA?” The link I posted earlier (Zumeta’s article) is one of the few things I’ve read that truly addresses this…
Sounds to me like a sense of entitlement among CEOs and those like Friedman who curry favor with them. They feel they are entitled to low price high skilled science and engineering labor, because they’ve always had it, due in large part to hidden government subsidies. They’ve always had to pay alot for lawyers and MBAs so they don’t feel it is a violation of their entitlement.
“sense of entitlement”?
I am pretty sure CEOs would offshoring work for lawyers and MBAs if they could, too. It is just not as feasible.
Look, CEOs are paid to look after the interests of their shareholders, which generally means increasing revenues and decreasing costs. If they feel the need to extend charity to US engineers, they will be replaced with CEOs who are more business minded. So don’t hate the players, hate the game.
Having said that, while offshoring sucks for those who have lost their jobs to offshoring, economists are in general agreement that offshoring is good for us and for them in aggregate. As a source for this proposition I can cite marginalrevolution.com and cafehayek.com, both of which are econo-blogs run by economics professors.
jose – true enough, but CEOs have yet to lobby congress to help solve the shortage of jd’s or mba’s, and nobody writes handwringing articles about the dangerous drop of interest among american students in jd or mba or md programs.
For that matter, you don’t see CEO’s complaining to congress about the skyrocketing cost of CEO compensation. Wonder why that is.
To summarize the AP article: “blah blah Stanford blah blah average blah blah Stanford blah blah average blah blah”.
Stanford. Average. Unless their CS department is their worst, these are not words that go together well.
Huh? Get a clue. The word “average” is used exactly once, and it’s in the context of the average programmer’s salary in india.
How many times do I have to tell you?
http://www.cortexity.com:8080/nicksblog/Permalink.do?category=technology-%3Esoftware-%3Emethdology-%3Ecriticism&selectedPostId=43