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Okay, so my dad thinks that foreign engineers have a difficult time finding jobs in the American Engineering industry. I know that these companies have a policy to not discriminate, but my dad thinkst that those are false and do discriminate inside. I suppose that it would be a bit harder for me, a future korean engineer, to get a job than American engineers -- but I'm not even sure on this statement.
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<p>I don't think anybody is going to assert that discrimination never happens. Of course it can happen. </p>
<p>The real question is what else are you going to do? Obviously you can't change your own ethnicity, and looks like you don't want to go back to work in Korea either. So if you plan to work in the US, the question is, what is your best path forward? I would argue that being an engineer will mean that you will probably encounter LESS discrimination than if you followed any other path. At least Korean engineers have a history of visible success in engineering companies in the US. I would expect more discrimination if you tried to become, say, a salesman in the US. </p>
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Also, I don't know how engineers get recruited, but my dad thinks that if I go to in his mind "a no name engineering school" which in his mind is Rose-Hulman, Harvey Mudd or Renssalaer, that I wouldn't be able to find jobs. So instead, he's pushing me to Michigan or Cornell...and I really don't want a big campus feel like that.
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<p>If you're looking for ammunition against your father, then here are some salary figures. In 2003 (the year in which both HMC, Cornell and Michigan have data), the average starting salary for all HMC grads was about 54k, and the salary figures for Michigan and Cornell engineers are as shown in the link. You can actually see that the average HMC grad actually makes MORE than the average Michigan or Cornell bachelor's degree engineering grad does. </p>
<p>To be fair, some of the difference is geographic - SoCal is a more expensive place to live than is Michigan or upstate New York, so you would expect salaries from HMC to be a bit boosted. Nevertheless, the point is that HMC grads seem to compare well to other grads when you're talking about salary.</p>
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Unless you have something very unique about you, something that will not be found in an ameraican applicant, you should not be hired by a US company. I suggest you don't expect that you will be able to find work in the US, no matter where you attend college. (unless you already have a green card, in which case you will not be discriminated against.)
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<p>Careful with this. Many "US companies" are actually foreign companies who just happen to have large US operations. For example, Siemens is a German company that happens to employ 60,000 Americans. If foreigners should not be allowed to work for US companies, then fair enough, Americans should not be allowed to work for foreign companies, and all Americans who do so currently should immediately be fired because they are "stealing" jobs that should be going to foreigners. For example, one could say that all of those Americans working for Siemens are actually "stealing" jobs from Germans.</p>
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My major discontent with sending jobs overseas is that you do not know how the manufacturer is doing the job. You don't know if they mistreat or underpay their workers or if they don't give a s**t about the environment. I don't hate foreigners (heh, my last 3 gfs were Asian), but things don't get done for cheap "for free". Something, whether it be product quality, wage, or environment must give.
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<p>That sort of thing works both ways. For example, environmental regulations tend to be tougher in Western Europe than in the US, and compensation for regular line workers actually tends to be higher for Western Europeans than it is in the US, because of higher minimum wage laws there and also because of higher social security/social insurance taxes that companies have to pay for each worker. For example, the minimum wage in France is about 8.27 Euro (about $10.50 US) per hour. Furthermore, companies in Western Europe are generally mandated to provide much longer vacations and much stronger employment guarantees (i.e. much more difficult to fire somebody in Europe) than is the case in the US. The upshot of this is that manufacturing labor tends to be more expensive in Western Europe than in the US, so much so that in the old days before Eastern bloc collapsed which opened up new labor markets to the East, many European companies outsourced manufacturing jobs to the US where it was cheaper to hire workers and easier to pollute. And you had European labor unions talking about 'greedy' European companies who were talking about mistreating their foreign workers (in this case, the Americans were the 'foreigners') by paying low wages without benefits and laying them off anytime they felt like doing so, as well as harming the environment.</p>
<p>Yeah. Agreed, Some European policies are better...
I was more-so talking about Asia... Because here, in Southern California, many of the "foreigners" that we speak of are from Asia.</p>
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"That sort of thing works both ways."</p>
<p>Yeah. Agreed, Some European policies are better...
I was more-so talking about Asia... Because here, in Southern California, many of the "foreigners" that we speak of are from Asia
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<p>Well, "better" or "worse" - it's all in the eye of the beholder. I'm quite sure that for those people who got jobs because of outsourcing, whether it was Americans who got jobs at European companies, or Asians who got jobs at American companies, having less stringent employment laws would be 'better', because it allowed them to get that job. That's better than having no job at all.</p>
<p>this may sound funny, but of the various software shops i've worked in- the number of caucasians on the team tends to be directly proportional to how interesting or difficult the projects are.</p>
<p>no joke. the teams i've seen that do nothing, all white. teams that are hardcore, whites are a minority. (but still represented somewhat significantly)</p>