The Big (Employment) Squeeze
It’s funny how information tends to come in waves. Recently, I came across two articles that had similar themes about different victims. The first was the notion that engineers that are over 35 are essentially unemployable. The opinion piece from CNN discusses how “older” workers are perceived as too expensive to hire. It also discusses how the point of mass layoffs is to eliminate the older, more expensive workers and foist more work on less people. Fluxor has discussed the reality of this situation in many of his posts. Shortly before this article came out, another one showed up on Bloomberg. This one had the age of unemployability as 40, but around the same ballpark. All of this has been discussed often on EngineerBlogs. However, what brought this to mind was an article I came across a few weeks ago. This one talked about the other end of the employment…
WTF #18: Offer, Counteroffer
Although I don’t officially start work until tomorrow, I am in the office a day early to take care of some urgent matters. My first official order of business is to present a counteroffer to a team member who has just tendered his resignation. He has accepted an offer from some other giant multi-national to do analog design. I like to think that it isn’t an indictment of my management skills, and given the short amount of time I’ve managed the team, it shouldn’t be. Still, it kinds of nags at me at a semi-subconscious level. The IC design landscape in China is quite like Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. Job hopping is common and unrealistically high salary expectations are the norm. Of course, what makes it the norm is that giant multi-nationals are willing to pay those sort of raises. In this particular case, we are providing a…
Bring Back Manufacturing
Recently, there has been a significant amount of rhetoric by President Obama on how we need to re-establish manufacturing in the United States. This topic was front-and-center in the State of the Union speech in January. Additionally, President Obama has been touring the country, speaking at universities, businesses, campaign stops, and fundraisers about how we can boost our economy by emphasizing manufacturing. The President, thankfully, has backed this initiative with a serious amount of funding. Much of the following information is paraphrased from Manufacturing.Gov, the website detailing the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. In a nutshell, the government is looking to fund up to 15 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation in the next year backed by up to $1 Billion in funding. The pilot institute, with a focus on Additive Manufacturing, will be funded using FY2012 funds, meaning it will be awarded before the end of September. These Institutes will primarily…
Needing more than two PhDs to file taxes
This past week was the deadline for the joyous occasion of filing your 2011 taxes. This was the first time that DrWife and I have had to file taxes in the US in several years due to being overseas. For us, filling out our tax forms was a soul crushing lesson that simple math eludes us. At least we got a happy ending. In short, we’ve learned that either more education than two PhDs in Mechanical Engineering is needed to fill out your tax forms or the IRS and Congress needs to simplify the tax process. [Before I go on, I want to put a disclaimer in here. This post and forum is not meant to be a political statement one way or the other. Constructive criticism and comments will always be accepted. This is not meant to devolve into a political discussion about which political party contains the more out-of-touch…
Keeping It In House (by Carmen Parisi)
Back in 2008 I was out on my first co-op working as a production engineer making and documenting custom production test fixtures for a well established household name company. One of the great things about working for this company was that all the departments were housed under one roof – design, production support, marketing, quality control, production itself, and the machine shop – it was great. Whenever I had to ask someone a question or go on a fact finding mission everyone I ever needed to talk to was within walking distance. Not having to deal with pesky issues such as time zone differences like I do nowadays kept communication tight and efficient. I can’t seem to recall a time where I was sitting around waiting for a response from someone so I could move forward on a project. The full-fledged, well equipped, machine shop that was a stone’s throw…
The Grey Zone
This week, as part of Theme Week, we’re discussing our roles as engineers and how it might change depending on the level/status of the company. Now, I’ve already started by breaking the rules about our little post figure because my ‘company’, SnowU is actually a research university which deals heavily with the research end of the spectrum. However, my area within the spectrum is slightly different because I like to think that my research is right on the border between fundamental research and launching startups, which I’ve dubbed The Grey Zone (and hence the grey arrow). The Grey Zone is that terrible-yet-extraordinarily-wonderful place where you get to work on research topics that feel like they might be commercial products someday. The Grey Zone is fantastic because… It’s an easy sell for under/graduate students because not all of them want to be professors. Some fully recognize that working on a practical…
Weekend Journal — Wealthy, Driven, Inquisitive…Engineers?
I’m going to prompt everyone up front. This article was inspired by the Mega Millions Lottery that was drawn on Friday. No, I will not do the stereotypical thing and pretend I won (yay, April 1st posting date). And no, I will not be talking about the horrendous odds of the lottery (Gizmodo had a fine article about how you’re much more likely to date a supermodel). Though I usually rail against playing the lottery, I did capitulate this time. And for my $5 (inevitable) loss, I did get a good thought exercise out of it all: I began thinking of situations when you have 3 components: willing engineering/scientific minds, free time and gobs of money. We’ve actually seen this thanks to the dot-com bubble and the people that managed to cash out. And even beyond the dot-com bubble, we’ve seen millionaires and billionaires spring up overnight. And when they leave…
Patently Absurd
The US supreme court recently struck a blow to biological and pharmaceutical industries. They shot down a patent (and probably several others that use similar technology) on measuring a metabolite as a diagnostic procedure. In other words, even if someone came up with the idea to measure a particular naturally generated substance as a way to diagnose an illness or dose a medication, it’s not patentable. The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education states: Patent claims that merely describe natural phenomena are not patent-eligible, the court said, and the diagnostic procedure outlined in the patents at stake in the case “adds nothing to the laws of nature that is not already present when the steps are considered separately.” It makes sense why this would be problematic in medicine, a field that is facing rising costs. If tests require patents to be administered, this significantly increases the cost and means…
Work Hard, Play Hard?
DrWife sent me an article that she read titled Why we have to go back to a 40-hour work week to keep our sanity by Sara Robinson at AlterNet which makes a compelling case for why the 40 hour work week was initiated and why it’s need for us to be economically successful as a society. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do so now. It’s OK, I can wait. … There, all finished. The article essentially discusses how people are not that much more productive working more than 40 hours per week (or 8 hours in a day) and the work efficiency drops off significantly. There are many facets to discuss based on this article, ranging from the current unemployment level in the US to the work-life balance that many of us would like and overall human rights issues that the NY Times has pointed out in articles about China’s…
Weekend Journal — The Other Direction of Trickle Down Techonomics
A few weeks ago I wrote about Trickle Down Technonomics, or more simply: how large investments in prior research can and do still affect us in the modern day. Since then, an article from the author of a forthcoming book on Bell Labs wrote an intriguing piece in the New York Times. I highly recommend checking it out. And while I haven’t changed my mind about the necessity of high-level research and investment, there was a glaring problem with the last post and my focus on high level: it’s not realistic these days. I’m not sure about the socio-political feed-ins that allowed raw research investment back then, aside from the specific example of AT&T’s glaring monopoly in the case of Bell Labs. What I do know is that research for the sake of research in a for-profit company seems to makes people (managers) more squeamish these days. Perhaps it was…