Speaking from personal experience, it is hard to find engineers who can truly take a project and run with it. For any given job posting, there are typically hu

Speaking from personal experience, it is hard to find engineers who can truly take a project and run with it. For any given job posting, there are typically hundreds of applicants. Yet often, not a single one of the applicants could build a non-trivial application without intensive mentoring. Many of them couldn't do it even with mentoring. I don't know what this says about our economy. Maybe nothing--maybe it just says something about the nature of engineering. I can offer only my anecdotes. I'm not in a position to draw from those anecdotes a conclusion about what our economy needs.