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…
Ask The Readers — How Much Is An Engineer Worth?
I was talking to my brother-in-law about salaries the other day. He mentioned he knew some police officers in the area that had base salaries in the $70-80K range. With the regular overtime they got policing public events like carnivals and sporting events (rough gig!), their salaries went into the six-figure range. Aside from the shock I had at my decision not to be a police officer, I caught myself wondering: How much do I think that job is really worth? Part of me thinks that the police should be paid well. They are protecting people and that’s an important thing. It’s an odd situation too, because we are in a relatively safe area. Should cops in the safer areas get paid well because they continue to keep us safe? Or should they be paid less because the area is already safe? (And for those wondering: yes, this is a suburb and…
Ask The Readers — How Far Would You Go?
A funny thing happens when you try and hire someone you know: they usually tell you more about their life than a potential employee would ever tell an employer. In the midst of talking to an acquaintance and trying to convince him to come work with me, we got talking about location. He did not currently live in the same city as me. He also divulged that he was considering a different job further away, just about as far away from where he lived as he could get (without leaving the country). We began discussing the merits of moving for a job and he stated it quite simply: For the right job, he would move just about anywhere. I, of course, immediately began probing him on worst case scenarios. What about completely barren areas or moving to a place that had very few resources (grocery, gasoline, etc)? What about if the weather…
No deadwood here
On Tuesday, I posed a question on my own blog: what would happen if academia required PIs to fund their own salary and not get tenure? To clarify, I don’t think this would necessarily be a good thing…but I also don’t think it would be a bad thing, either. I can see the pros and cons of such a move, and it’s very hard to say if one side would win out. I also think there are several possible outcomes, and I think that it would change from school to school. However, I anticipate a few potential changes to the system that would probably constitute some general trends. 1 – I see groups becoming more bimodal in their distribution: they’ll either be really big so that PIs can keep writing grants like crazy (something that already seems to occur a lot in bio and medical fields) to try to cover their…
Weekend Journal: Keep On, Keepin’ On (Engineering Stuff)
We decided to try out another theme week at Engineer Blogs this coming week. And being an admin, I took the first slot! Bwahahaha. All others will only be a derivative of my brilliant musings! (nah, they’ll be much better) The question this week is: What keeps you motivated in engineering? Engineering is a lot of things. Engaging, challenging, frustrating, rewarding, time consuming, under appreciated and often occurs with lots of fits and starts. To be honest, some days engineering really sucks. Yup, a blog about engineering is the best place to swallow a dose of reality. Some days you will bang your head against the desk hard enough to make your forehead bleed. Some nights you’ll rest your head on that desk because you’re still at the office at 10 pm, trying to figure something out. So what keeps us going? Specifically, what keeps me going? I’ll leave the rest…
Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn!
This past weekend, Chris Gammell posted about changing demographics in engineering and was kind enough to have a survey on it. I’ve had a chance to preview some of the results and some of the comments from readers that responded. One of the themes that I saw in the results was definitely a case of older engineers essentially saying “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”. And while I am somewhat sympathetic to that sentiment because it sucks being passed up for someone else, let alone someone (potentially) half your age, it’s pretty lame for older engineers to complain about younger engineers. There are some pretty acute reasons why it sucks to be a young, new engineer. I’ve commented on this in the past, but I’m going to expand it here. On the job training – Back in the day, when companies wanted good engineers, they took competent, dependable people, and trained…
The Economics of Academia (Part 1)
A question was posed my way on the economics of academia. The question(s) asked are as follows: Why, with the high cost of university tuition, can’t schools have teach-only professors? With a ratio of 20:1 in the classroom and a rate of 100/hour (roughly), why do professors still need to get research dollars? Is it economically feasible to have teaching-only professors? Why doesn’t this happen more? Why do universities have to rely on research funding to stay afloat? We were talking about the demands on researchers and how that prevents better teaching (because so much time is involved chasing funding) and were questioning why not just give up the research side of things? Wow, that’s a loaded set of questions. There is, actually, an easy answer to this. In short, we have institutes that do specialize in teaching. Community colleges and technical colleges specialize in teaching rather than research. If…
STEM Recruitment Ponzi Scheme
A couple of days ago my colleague GEARS covered some STEM Employment Data that the US Department of Commerce recently released titled STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future. Regular readers of mine know I tend to be overly critical of these sorts of assessments. I tend to see them as optimistic and naive. On my own blog a couple weeks ago I talked about engineering jobs by discipline, then I looked at engineering employment over time and engineering pay, and then I broke down engineering employment and pay for mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. One of the favorite myths the powers that be like to toss around is that a bunch of engineers and technical workers are going to suddenly retire and STEM jobs will be in demand. So in my eyes this report isn’t a whole lot different. Their two major claims: that a STEM degree leads…
STEM Employment Data
This past weekend, Ken Cid from the US Department of Commerce was nice enough to leave us a comment about the administration’s jobs prospects for STEM workers. The link to their blog is here [figure credit] and the actual report can be downloaded from here. Naturally, this sent us Engineer Bloggers into a tizzy for two reasons. One, They found us! And two, we would actually have to craft some sort of response that might actually be read by government media folks. You’ll probably find a better response from Chris Gammell or FrauTech, who are much better with stats than I am. Sadly, they post later in the week so you’re stuck with me for now. In Summary: The STEM Jobs Report says that 7.6M people or 5.5% of the workforce is employed in STEM fields and over the past 10 years, STEM fields have had more job growth than non-STEM fields. Also,…