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<p>The irony is that I keep hearing numerous engineering firms complain that they can’t ‘find’ enough engineers, but on the other hand, they aren’t willing to take the next logical step, which is to simply pay more, and/or to offer better career paths (i.e. faster paths to management for those who want it, more training and career development, larger equity stakes in the companies, etc.) </p>
<p>Consider what would happen if companies paid $150k to start for all engineers. The number of engineers would jump for two reasons. Firstly many (probably most) of the engineering graduates who now decide to enter other careers rather than engineering, such as law, medicine, consulting, Ibanking, etc. - would stay in engineering. Hence, you would have an immediate jump in the supply of engineers. </p>
<p>The long-term supply effects would be even larger, as many more people would now be drawn to majoring in engineering in the first place. Many students who try out engineering but then switch to another major because they don’t find engineering to be interesting enough (but who were still receiving passing grades in engineering) would be incentivized to stick with it for big payout at the end. More importantly, you would be encouraging people to try to major in engineering who would otherwise never try at all and while surely some of them won’t be able to complete the engineering major (i.e. they get weeded out), some of them will be able to complete it. </p>
<p>I can see two possible objections which I will knock down right now. #1 - some of you may be thinking that it’s simply ridiculous to be paying people $150k right out of undergrad. My response to that is, well, that’s what the investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms are doing right now. They obviously didn’t get any memo admonishing them about ‘ridiculous’ starting pay. Coincidentally (actually, not coincidentally at all), these firms never seem to complain that they can’t ‘find’ enough qualified people. Heck, many of these firms, i.e. private equity firms, deliberately conceal themselves from the public (for example, not even publishing their real office addresses, having their employees remain quiet about who they work for) lest they become deluged by job-seekers. </p>
<p>The second objection is that by boosting pay, engineering firms would merely be attracting people who are only interested in the money but who aren’t interested in the job itself. My rebuttal to that is, first off, that’s happening already. Right now, there are people who are attracted to engineering just because of the relatively high starting pay. Furthermore, the ‘high pay’ lever is one that is being pulled by numerous other industries (i.e., again, law, consulting, banking, etc.), which means that those industries have evidently figured out a way to deal with the people who are only interested in the money. </p>
<p>But more importantly, pay is not the only lever you can pull. Like I said above, you can also improve working conditions. For example, why not offer reasonable, family-friendly work hours with flex-time, with excellent career development and training, with numerous opportunities to work on cool projects? That sort of environment not only increases the desirability of your firm to new graduates, but also increases the retention of existing employees which therefore reduces your need for hiring new graduates in the first place. In short, firms should be improving their work environments such that they can be named to, say, Fortune Magazine’s top 100 Best Companies to Work For, and other such indicators of desirability. Note that these firms are not always the highest-paying firms in their industry (for example, I know that Genentech is not even close to being the highest paying biotech/pharma), but they’ve created work environments that attract people.</p>
<p>[100</a> Best Companies to Work For 2008: Full list | FORTUNE](<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2008/full_list/index.html]100”>100 Best Companies to Work For 2008: Full list | FORTUNE)</p>
<p>The upshot is, whenever I hear companies say that they can’t find enough qualified people or that their positions are difficult to fill or whatnot, it just reminds me of the guys I know who complain that they can’t find a girlfriend; these are the same guys who are out of shape because they never go to the gym, who never bother to learn about activities that women enjoy (i.e. dancing, Broadway shows, fashion) and who never bothered to develop conversational skills about topics that women like to talk about (i.e. most women don’t want to hear you droning on about your fantasy football team or whether Ironman could beat Batman). If you want a girlfriend, you have to do things to improve yourself so that you are more interesting and more desirable to women. Similarly, if companies want better employee candidates, they have to do things to improve working conditions such that people become more interested in working there in the first place.</p>
<p>Otherwise, what you end up having - and which is what happens today - is that companies can’t find enough interested people given its current salaries and working conditions. In other words, the real culprit is the unwillingness to improve salaries/working conditions, and to that, I have no sympathy, just like I have no sympathy for those guys who don’t want to improve themselves and are then ‘shocked’ to find that they can’t get a date.</p>