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You mean the same way our banks learned about substandard loans?
It doesn’t pay for a person in charge of making decisions to do something that is beneficial in the long term that hurts in the short term. Such people rarely are concerned with the long-term interest of the company they work for because they seldom pay the price for their decisions.</p>
<p>…and it eventually caught up to the banks.</p>
<p>I just don’t see how being so protective of entry into this field in this country can help in the long run. If I was running a computer engineering business and it’s gotten to a point where I can’t hire cheap enough labor here, why would I not just ship my entire operation overseas? What’s there to stop me?</p>
<p>What I’m trying to understand and get at throughout this thread is… what’s the benefit for a company to employ American engineers as opposed to foreign engineers? Short-term <em>and</em> long-term? What is it about hiring foreign engineers that’s causing Microsoft’s decline? Are we saying American engineering wouldn’t survive in a true laissez-faire economy?</p>
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And here is a great example of the problems with unregulated free-market capitalism.</p>
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In the short term, nothing at all. In the long term, it is in having an America with an actual functioning economy. Companies think only of their needs, and assume that other companies or the government will fix whatever messes they make. The problem is that when too many do this, the problems are not fixable. </p>
<p>This plays out in many small ways, but as an example, eliminating the domestic workforce makes the company dependent on foreign workers, many of whom are drastically raising their salary expectations as the US workforce in these areas shrink. It also diminishes the salaries made in the US, salaries that usually purchase their products as opposed to pirated copies or knock-offs commonly available to (and often produced by) those third-world replacements.</p>
<p>Guess what? The banks are STILL doing it. Takes a while to learn their lesson. Not to mention they’ve been doing this for years before that.</p>
<p>American engineers are cheap enough to be worth more than it costs to employ them. This isn’t the problem. The problem is the companies that choose to cut corners. In the short term, American engineers will provide a slightly higher quality of work, maybe 50%. This is not enough to offset their salary boost, so companies prefer the cheaper foreign engineers. </p>
<p>But the real advantage is in the long-term. The biggest problem with foreign engineers is actually not that they are worse overall. They are, but this isn’t the biggest issue. The fact is that they do not have the interests of the company in mind the same way that American engineers do. The American workers benefit from the long-term success of the company in ways that foreigners do not. As such, they work to the benefit of the company in the long-term, significantly improving it. H1-Bs will do nothing more than the job expected of them because they get nothing for doing more than that.</p>
<p>Furthermore, as cosmicfish pointed out, foreign labor is unsustainable. War, trade disagreements, new legislation, and change in the quality of life all kill the benefit of foreign labor. These happen all the time.</p>
<p>Microsoft is on the decline for one simple reason: they haven’t made a single good product in years. Their last invention that wasn’t a pile of garbage? Windows 7 (2009). Before that? Windows XP (2001). Their real strength is their legacy programs, such as MSWord, MSExcel, MSPowerPoint. They focus so much on the short-term that they forgot to ensure their long-term future. IBM and Intel are on the decline for the same reason. As one early Apple marketer said, where would Apple be now if they sat on their original cash cow, the Apple II? No Mac, no smartphones, no tablets. They would be bankrupt by now.</p>
<p>Perhaps American engineering wouldn’t survive in a true laissez-faire economy. This legitimately may be the case. But I hope you realize that a true laissez-faire economy would not survive in the modern world. If not, I could explain why this is the case.</p>
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<p>Many employers with unfilled positions merely receive thousands of applications, are completely unrealistic on what they’re looking for qualification-wise, interview almost nobody, and then wonder why they have unfilled positions.</p>
<p>Also, there seems to be a large disconnect between ‘unfilled positions’ from the perspective of the engineering managers who want to fill them, and ‘unfilled positions’ from the perspective of the HR departments and senior management who want to keep them vacant to keep costs down. Engineers working inside the company will be told by HR that there are ‘no qualified applicants’, as an excuse for the employer to work the existing engineers particularly hard.</p>
<p>Since management bonuses are usually tied to short-term profitability, rather than the long-term health of the R&D in an organization, there is a tendency to under-staff. R&D efforts and output is notoriously difficult to measure on a short-term basis, so firms have very little way to measure the economic value of building an asset in a long-term R&D program. </p>
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<p>If American engineers are uncompetitive globally, then our bankers, who can’t seem to survive without bailouts and earn salaries that are basically a king’s ransom, are even more uncompetitive. At some level, what’s a greater evil – society getting behind American engineers and, heaven forbid, letting them innovate, build, create a better standard of living. Or getting behind our bankers who have proven to be very competent at being incompetent?</p>
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<p>As many technology companies are finding out, the foreigners are just stealing the intellectual property they were paid to develop, taking it back to India/China, and selling it under their own brands. Essentially looting our economy. Also a 100% foreign workforce crowds out our most talented domestic workers (who invented things like the Internet, etc.). </p>
<p>In the case of banks, another problem that arose is that H-1B’s, being tied to their jobs, were basically unable to speak up or recommend against the fraudulent and often disasterous policies of their bosses with respect to the mortgage market. Basically H-1B’s are, at some level, hired mercinaries – interested in only themselves, not the communities that ultimately were devastated by the predatory lending.</p>
<p>Mark,</p>
<p>Maybe that is true in other places, but not here. In fact, there were newspaper articles and TV clips on this. Have to wonder why some of the positions are so hard to fill, but I suspect they want a specific niche. And I suspect many of the resumes sent in do not meet the qualifications, not the other way around.</p>
<p>** as an aside, a person with the pseudonym “Wolfgang Henderson” sounds an awful lot like you…</p>
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<p>There’s a lot of propoganda in the media, and many lies. Bill Gates, for instance, routinely complains that he can’t hire enough engineers, yet Microsoft only bothers to interview less than 1% of the applicant pool. Which tells me that Microsoft isn’t trying very hard to find people before crying for more guest workers.</p>
<p>Many of the media articles carry the tagline, “if only we’d have higher guest visa limits for foreign workers”, and often insinuate that Americans are not studying STEM subjects. Even though over 90% of STEM students are US citizens. These claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially since they usually come from companies just looking for cheap labour. Any company that needs engineers and made it clear that they’d be paying lawyer or investment banker-like salaries for them – would have enormous numbers of applicants.</p>
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<p>And many times those ‘niches’ may be specific, but they refuse to recognize transferrable skills. Or the need for the niche skills are exxagerated. For instance, its not uncommon to see job ads demanding experience with a particular flavour of Linux (say, Redhat), whereby they would reject someone who has extensive experience with another flavour (say, Ubuntu or Slackware). </p>
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<p>Only 1/3rd of the USA’s STEM graduates are properly employed in their area of training, leaving the other 2/3rds pounding the firms with their applications. I don’t believe that floor sweepers are applying to Google software engineering jobs, if thats the sort of thing you’re implying.</p>
<p>Wow. The negativity is a bit intense. Maybe, just MAYBE the media attention for this R&D facility was not for some nefarious, dishonest purpose. Can’t speak to why you have had such a tough time of it, but both my s’s are engineers, both are employed, and all of their classmates, AFIK, were fortunate to have multiple job offers.</p>
<p>**ETA: “STEM” major covers a broad array of math, natural/biological/physical/agricultural sciences as well as the engineering and computer/information sciences. So its likely many of the un or underemployed have degrees in other than the engineering field that are contributing to the statistic you present.</p>
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<p>“all of their classmates”? You surveyed them? How about you look at the post-graduation surveys from places like Cornell or UC Berkeley – in the STEM subjects, they can usually only substantiate approximately 1/3 to 1/2 of the graduating classes actually being employed. Even in some of the (allegedely) hot fields such as Computer Science and Engineering. </p>
<p>Obviously I don’t know the very specific circumstances about the particular R&D facility, so I am left to extrapolate based on what I’ve seen at other firms out there. Not being able to recruit people usually comes down to money, and the overall quality of an organization. With the enormous number of STEM graduates in the labour pool (employed or not), I find it rather unlikely that such a facility actually made very many moves towards ameliorating their problems, such as paying decent salaries, working with applicants to find employment for their spouses, etc.</p>
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<p>I am well aware of that, but engineers and many of those other STEM fields are quite interchangeable in the real world, sometimes with almost no extra training, and sometimes with minimal training. For instance, a physicist can probably do most of the work of an Electrical Engineer almost straight out of the box with the same amount of training/mentorship as would be required for a new grad EE. Much of the training of a Chemist and a Chemical Engineer are not dramatically different. Mathematics grads are usually very well positioned to work in computer software, and many areas of Electrical Engineering. </p>
<p>It is possible that this new R&D facility needs people who are so freakin’ specialized that very few of them exist, but if that’s the case and they can’t fill the positions – instead of leaving them vacant, why don’t they hire more generalized STEM grads, and arrange for training? Instead of twiddling their thumbs that they can’t fill their positions with perfect matches?</p>
<p>Wolfgang-
My s’s tell me about their classmates. I don’t have to “survey” them.
Hope you are a bit more charming in your face to face interviews…</p>
<p>My older s changed jobs a few times, once after his employer became a victim of the economy. Finally discovered that there were a few buzzwords to be put in his resume that generated hits from the programs and/or consultants hired to do the first scanning of the resumes. If yours doesnt have the right buzzwords for what they are looking for, yours will remain in the dogpile. But you know that.</p>
<p>As for the company with the open positions, my guess is that they are filling them a bit at a time. And sorry, but they are the employers. They are entitled to be as picky as they feel they want/need to be.</p>
<p>Would be curious to know what the percent unemployment is for engineers, not “STEM” majors. I believe its in the single digits.</p>
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<p>So 2nd, maybe 3rd hand information. From people who, themselves, probably didn’t conduct rigorous surveys. </p>
<p>My name is not Wolfgang, BTW.</p>
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<p>Doesn’t sound like a characteristic of a vibrant market if you ask me. A few buzzwords preventing the hoardes of unemployed engineers from getting hired? Really? At least you acknowledge that there is a dogpile, and it is a huge dogpile. Sometimes 99% of the applications at firms who often are in the media claiming a shortage that requires the use of foreign nationals.</p>
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<p>Typical response, but why should we take them seriously if they’re balking on actually hiring talent that comes along? I mean, seriously, I’d love to date and sleep with a movie star – but I have to be realistic about my prospects for doing that, and the employers need to be as well when they go into the market to hire talent. </p>
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<p>Official ‘unemployment’ numbers are of minimal relevance for STEM – an unemployed engineer who even delivers one pizza is considered an unemployed pizza delivery driver, not an unemployed engineer. US students studied electrical engineering, software engineering, computer engineering, and engineering physics in record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s chasing the high salaries that were paid in the tech sector, only to graduate to a decade of minimal expansion in the sector and mass importation of guest workers on H-1B. I suspect unemployment/underemployment rates in engineering specifically are close to 50%. ie: slightly better than the overall universe of STEM qualified workers (which suffer 66% unemployment/underemployment), but still dramatically worse than the broader labour force non-participation rate.</p>
<p>Engineering fields are also dominated by men, so unemployment/underemployment structurally should be lower because men don’t have to deal with maternity leave, child-raising, etc. Yet this isn’t seen.</p>
<p>Really? This isnt you? You must have a clone.
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Wow. Charming and sexist. Discriminatory stereotyping is not a good thing.</p>
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<p>Sexist? Hardly. Everyone knows that STEM fields, particularly those in engineering, are male-dominated. That’s just a fact of life. The male dominance of STEM should rationally lead to higher labour participation rates than would be experienced in cohorts dominated by females. For the obvious biological and social reasons given.</p>
<p>Until you figure out how to attach the female parts onto a man, and give them the complete responsibility for child-bearing, I think your claim of my being sexist is completely unfounded and out of line.</p>
<p>Good night, Wolfgang. Regardless of whether a field is male or female dominated, positions, vacations, leave time, etc must all be considered equally. Most employers offer paternity and maternity leave. Thats as it should be. All other thinking is, well, sexist.
Heres your/your clone’s other post, btw <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13746477-post31.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13746477-post31.html</a></p>
<p>He had the bad luck to graduate during an industry downturn (2002), which can be very damaging to one’s career, since having a long time of unemployment tends to scare employers away. This does not mean that his experience is typical overall, although it does point out the risk that any student faces if s/he gets unlucky enough to graduate during an economic or industry downturn.</p>
<p>Mark/Wolfgang:
This might be of interest: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1403337-those-you-still-looking-internships.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1403337-those-you-still-looking-internships.html</a></p>
<p>Even though it says “college students” they may be willing to be flexible.</p>
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<p>Looks like Ken drank the Kool-Aid. Sure, globalization has net economic benefits for the world economy, but not necessarily for America’s. It does not have to be a zero sum situation for there to be net economic drawbacks in the US. Yeah, it’s good for American consumers that Microsoft is able to hire foreign engineers and sell their software for less. It’s also bad for Americans that Americans are paying 5x the tuition that the foreigners do and are unable to find jobs to recover the tuition costs. Obviously Americans demand higher wages - we have to pay a lot more to become qualified for those jobs. If salaries paid by American employers of engineers are being spent in the Indian economy (via remittances) rather than ours, and if salaries paid to outsourced workers are being spent entirely abroad, we lose a lot. Being able to buy Windows 8 for 10% less (if that), does not make up for that. Outsourcing might reduce the cost of Nike shoes and iPods, but it doesn’t (really) reduce the cost of education, houses, food. You know, all of the other stuff we spend our money on that is more expensive here. Of course, I didn’t mention the laundry list of other downsides, like foreigners leaving after a few years and taking their skills elsewhere.</p>
<p>I’m not against hiring foreign engineers, but an American should only support it when the jobs cannot be properly filled domestically. A company should be expected to have to provide some training to an American if their needs are very specific. As Mark has pointed out, companies are exploiting the hell out of the cheap foreign labor and not to our benefit. More H1-B visas is not the answer. If Gates got his wish, the average engineer’s salary in America would be cut in half overnight, and I promise you the next version of Windows wouldn’t be especially innovative (although I’m not sure Microsoft innovates to begin with).</p>
<p>A highly biased first-person accounting of engineering employment recent history, filled with my typical misrememberings:</p>
<p>1965: 100% employment, 99% male, slide rules and drafting tables. Almost everything bought in the US was made in the US. An engineer made about $10,000/year, enough to buy a house and a car, pay for private schools and keep the wife at home. You had enough left over for hobbies and vacations as only about half your salary went to living expenses. You had a country club membership and your own airplane. You had a fully funded pension and no-deductible healthcare.</p>
<p>1972: A lull in the hiring of engineers and huge growth projections in other areas prompted some tech types into choosing other fields, but job outlook stays steady.</p>
<p>1979: Torrid competition for engineers results in 20 job offers and bidding wars for new graduates. Computers start to change from punchcards to magnetic storage. Any Texas Instruments emloyee willing to go to engineering school will receive full funding and a guaranteed job at graduation. Starting wages are around $30,000/year, the highest they will ever be in terms of real dollars. About 10% of new graduates are females. Co-pays and HMOs start to become common. </p>
<p>1987: The veneer of American dominance is beginning to crack as Japanese companies start taking over electronics and old-guard brands are closing down. New accounting rules passed by Congress allow Paul Bilzerian to buy out companies and loot their retirement and healthcare funds. IBM cancels all on-campus recruiting. Graduates average about 3 offers, but these are largely concentrated in the hands of the best qualified. About 90% of graduates have offers averaging about $35,000, but offers can be as low as $25,000 due to competition from experienced engineers recently laid off.</p>
<p>1998: The rapid run-up in tech spending creates a huge need for engineers. The Seattle Times has 6 full pages of High Tech Help Wanted ads. Signing bonuses and stock options become standard. Middle class wages begin to climb again, but borrowing fuels the economy. New engineers get $55,000, experienced engineers make $100,000, but a Silicon Valley house now costs $700,000. In many parts of the country, it now takes two wages to chase the American Dream. Since the benefits of corporate loyalty have largely disappeared, many engineers job hop to chase dollars. H1Bs are used to control costs and employee mobility.</p>
<p>2002: The tech-bubble popped, 401k values disappeared. Many saw it coming and predicted it, but 9/11 becomes the standard excuse used. Layoffs proceed furiously; the days of shared misery are gone and replaced by “he didn’t work hard enough” so it is his own fault he’s not working. New graduates need to have connections or be on top of their game. Companies no longer see value in training employees, so they gripe about not being able to find enough “qualified people” even though 40% of tech graduates are not working in their fields.</p>
<p>2013: Profit is God and the world is run by bankers. Good luck to all.</p>
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<p>I don’t need an internship, I need a job. As do the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other STEM grads that have been displaced by the H-1B program.</p>
<p>The so-called ‘need’ for internships these days is largely an artifact of the labour glut. Internships are basically low-cost, if not sometimes free labour. If the engineering market wasn’t so glutted up with labour, nobody would care whether or not one had an internship.</p>