5 ms·

Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers

25 points by billclerico 17y ago

pmorici 17y ago
"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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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 17y ago
        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 17y ago
        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?
- timwiseman 17y ago
  Beautiful point. "very, very, very high-paying jobs" is a relative term. If you want someone with skills and options to go into that specific field then the overall compensation for that field has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.
  - eru 17y ago
    > has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)
imraj 17y ago
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.
Locke1689 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
tybris 17y ago
Seems like engineers are under-valued then.
natevc2 17y ago
In another article about the same report. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028_Study_asks__What_scientist_and_engineer_shortage_.html http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028... "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.
bavcyc 17y ago
see: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html I've not verified or looked into the issue beyond requesting the ucdavis document.
- scotty79 17y ago
  > 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. :-)
MarkPNeyer 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
  - eru 17y ago
    I don't know if your reasoning explains the observed facts. However, my grandfather is quite happy being a Diplom-Ingenieur of mathematics.
  - arctictony 17y ago
    Speaking as a Brit Manager who pays his engineers more than himself and is perfectly happy about this, I call Bollocks.
    - gaius 17y ago
      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.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
    A manager will never be happy to see a worker paid more than him, Hospital management doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it...
gamble 17y ago
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.
srn 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
DaniFong 17y ago
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?

25 points by billclerico 17y ago

"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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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 17y ago
        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?
timwiseman 17y ago
Beautiful point. "very, very, very high-paying jobs" is a relative term. If you want someone with skills and options to go into that specific field then the overall compensation for that field has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.
- eru 17y ago
  > has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)

imraj 17y ago

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.

Locke1689 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

tybris 17y ago

Seems like engineers are under-valued then.

natevc2 17y ago

In another article about the same report. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028_Study_asks__What_scientist_and_engineer_shortage_.html http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028... "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.

bavcyc 17y ago

see: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html I've not verified or looked into the issue beyond requesting the ucdavis document.

scotty79 17y ago
> 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. :-)

MarkPNeyer 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.
- eru 17y ago
  I don't know if your reasoning explains the observed facts. However, my grandfather is quite happy being a Diplom-Ingenieur of mathematics.
- arctictony 17y ago
  Speaking as a Brit Manager who pays his engineers more than himself and is perfectly happy about this, I call Bollocks.
  - gaius 17y ago
    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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
  A manager will never be happy to see a worker paid more than him, Hospital management doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it...

gamble 17y ago

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.

srn 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

DaniFong 17y ago

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?