WTF #21: Can’t Buy Me Love
Three weeks ago, I offered one of my analog IC designers a 30% raise, hoping to entice him to stay with the company. Unfortunately, he’s still leaving despite our better offer than his soon-to-be new employer. Back in WTF #18, I mentioned that salary wasn’t the only issue and in fact, wasn’t even the main issue. He had other personal reasons to leave and I was trying my best to accommodate him. At the end of the day, I wasn’t able to convince upper management to make that accommodation. Hence, all the leverage I had remaining was money and my charming personality. Apparently, both failed miserably. Analog IC desginers are hard to come by in China. I’ve recently hired four and they weren’t exactly my top choices. But given market conditions, I’m forced to go with the traditional route of hiring those with good foundations and then developing them in-house.…
WTF #17: Seditious Traitor
A very happy fourth of July to my American friends, colleagues, and readers. On this most patriotic of patriotic days in the US of A, I am going to write a very patriotic-themed post on … Canada. The reason is simple. Tomorrow, I will leave this hockey-loving, maple-syrup-drinking, igloo-dwelling nation for one that produces no hockey, no maple syrup, and no igloos. Living and working in China will of course be very different than living and working in suburbia Canadiana. But more than lifestyle and cultural changes, a question that has come up in my mind is whether I should be working for “the enemy” at all. After all, China is seen by many in the West as their primary adversary on the international stage. One that sells cheap crappy goods. One that sells unsafe toys. One that unfairly manipulates its currency to maintain an economic advantage. And one that…
WTF #13: Show Me the Money
In my last installment of WTF, I briefly discussed the career aspirations of my Chinese engineering team and how they wish they are no longer viewed by multinationals as second class engineers. In the comments section, “Bill” opined that: Hopefully as time goes on they demand increasingly higher salaries as well… I can only surmise the thinking behind this comment is that Chinese wages are horribly depressed and workers are powerless to do anything about it. Perhaps this stems from the well publicized stories regarding alleged helpless workers at Foxconn being paid a pittance to produce iPhones and iPads. Or perhaps it was simply tongue-in-cheek. But whatever…I’ll go with the former because it ties in nicely into what I’m about to write. I’ve been in China for three full weeks now. On my very first day at the company, I already had to deal with my very first major issue…
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…
WTF #12: In the Belly of the Beast
That beast being China, the one that’s devouring all the jobs from the West. For the past two weeks, I’ve witnessed my team of chip designers at work, both analog and digital. I must say, they’re really good for their experience level. Companies similar to ours continue to expand operations in China. And we’re not hiring technologist either. These are real engineers with real engineering experience with some of the big names in the industry — Intel, Broadcom, Analog Devices, etc. What most multinationals tend to do is to see their Chinese (and Indian) engineers as mere supporting casts for their team of engineers in their home base, be it North America, Europe, or other parts of Asia (Japan/Korea/Taiwan). The Chinese engineers simply don’t have the same depth of experience when compared with developed nations. Hence, they simply cannot take on as much. But over time, as Chinese engineers gain…
WTF #8: Let It Be
I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, “Let it be.” — Paul McCartney As inclined as I am to favour the Christian faith, having Mother Mary speak to me as I awake would totally freak me out. Which is too bad, because the words she is imparting to Sir Paul is wisdom indeed. This past Friday marked my last day at my old position, my last day with the same local colleagues that I’ve been honoured to have worked with for the past 7 years. It was a day of mixed emotions, though I kept most of that emotion to myself. I called up those I worked with in the US, thanked them for having made my working life pleasurable, and uttering that old clichéd line about staying in touch. As for my local colleagues who are about to be…
How good we engineers have it
You may think we here at Engineer Blogs are “glass half empty” folks when it comes to employment and salary expectations for engineers (though really, the glass was poorly designed with too much capacity). I’ve talked about the overhyped STEM recruitment here before. It’s no secret I don’t believe in an engineering or STEM shortage. I’ve looked at engineering employment over time and it doesn’t seem to indicate any increasing demand or a salary increase based on a higher market value for engineering professionals (unless you’re a software engineer). Cherish just wrote last week about engineering being a common background for CEOs. One of our commenters asked whether engineers need really be concerned with having more options beyond the engineering job. As a former non-engineer in the workforce, I can certainly sympathize with this perception. It does seem like an engineering degree is much more the key to a job and…
Imaginary STEM labor shortage
The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training employees and keeping them. Zig Ziglar Back when the economy wasn’t in the dumpster, I was talking to a friend who works at one of those Internet (with a capital I) companies. He was complaining about their inability to find people with the right qualifications. After spending time talking with him, I ascertained that what his company really wanted was for someone in the same position at a different company to be laid off so that they could hire them. His company had a very exacting list of qualifications and wasn’t willing to train any potential employees. They wanted someone off the shelf, so to speak, and weren’t going to take anyone without those qualifications. On the other hand, they would wait months rather than train the employees themselves. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time. FrauTech has…
STEM Recruiting Games Exposed
There’s been a constant call in the media to recruit more people into science, technology, engineering and math. I’ve talked a lot about this issue on my own blog. Mainly that I believe the argument that we are graduating too few people into STEM disciplines is one propagated by industry to keep wages low on the one hand but also to feed their desire to expect more and more from entry level employees and cut back on training that was standard in the past. There’s been reports on both sides, arguing that impending mass retirement will create a shortage and others that we’re falling behind other countries and need to catch up. Other concerns are probably valid but mis-targeted. Analysis I have done on open jobs shows that the kinds of engineers we’re actually short of are software engineers and programmers and developers rather than the more core engineering disciplines. But…
Not Your Father’s Career
Engineering has changed a lot and continues to change. I think a lot of the technological aspects of this are pretty obvious. But something that might be more appropriate to this economy is what engineering means as a profession. I remember earlier this year when we asked on here whether engineering was a respected profession. But now I think there’s a new question being asked: whether engineering is a stable job. According to the census bureau there are something like 1.6 million engineers employed in the US. A whopping 12% of those are direct employees of state, local or the federal government. It doesn’t list how many engineers are indirectly funded by the government by working on government grants in science or engineering, working for companies that receive direct payment for goods and services from the government for infrastructure programs or even direct commercial goods, or how many are employed…