With the auto industry in the midst of wrenching change, the most valuable resource is brainpower. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study says that the U.S. could face a shortfall of 160k engineers by 2016, but JCI-Saft CEO Mary Ann Wright thinks the situation could become even worse than that. Arguing that the BLS number doesn't take retirements into account, Wright tells MLive.com "I think that's too low. Today the United States is not producing the right skill sets." Part of the problem could be the efforts to educate engineers to be better communicators rather than technical geniuses. John Fuhs of the auto supplier firm Swoboda says "We try to hire engineering people for our company, but typically they come up way short in basic skills. They made a very big point of switching 25 years ago for more rounded engineers, and that's what we got. They all want to be project managers now, but they don't know the science or what's going on to get the job done." But the problem doesn't end there, as too few American engineers are graduating to fill demand in other industries as well. So the industry has to either inspire newly-graduated engineers or hire away talented engineers from other countries. Or simply continue the trend of outsourcing product development abroad.
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Damn, back in college I knew I should have stuck with engineering and not changed my major to geology… Oh well, Dynamics was really kicking my ass.
As they always say, follow the money.
In the USA, only a dedicated gearhead will stick with engineering.
A talented student will be far better compensated in law or medicine or finance.
In some respects engineers are more SOL than line workers. All it takes is an internet connection export a car design (from India or South Korea), while a lot of expensive oil guzzling ships are necessary to export an actual car.
Hyundai builds cars here. They don’t engineer any here. GM is trying to heavily leverage Daewoo’s engineering resources.
Not that the line workers of the future will have anything like UAW benefits.
Still, engineering and science degrees do command a lot of respect in outside fields like finance, and are the basis for lucrative (for now) careers like IP law, so it will be a long time before I recommend some liberal arts B.S. (the wrong kind) degree over degrees in engineering and science.
Well, we could raise the retirement age.
Or we could make it easier for foreigners to come here and become engineers. Encourage them to stay, become citizens, etc.
If it weren’t for my failures at lettering in drafting and my total inability to learn calculus, perhaps I could have been an engineer. Oh well.
As a graduate of Ga Tech 1988, BME, I can tell you that many in my class of almost 20 years ago never went into pure engineering. Many went into process engineering, management, the military (like me), and pre-med, med school, law school, etc.
In my case it was because I was on a NROTC 4 year scholarship and had to go in either Navy or USMC and serve 4 years active duty and 4 yrs in the reserves.
When I got out of the USMC, I worked in plastics manufacturing for 4 years as a shift supervisor, quality manager implementing many programs under ISO 9000 and as a process engineer for a very short while.
I ended up going to an ab initio flight school and flew for a regional air carrier for 8 years before flying air ambulance like I am doing today. So I am far removed from engineering.
IMO why do many Ga Tech grads choose something besides engineering to work in?
It’s boring to many people. You either love engineering or you hate it.
Part of it is the culture in modern day America. The stereotype is that it’s not cool to be smart. Stereotypical smart kids are nerds, dweebs, social losers, and don’t get laid. The athletes are cool – I mean look at the olympics. The jocks (male and female) are admired. The nerds, like Bill Gates, may be rich and end up running the world, but are still nerds with bad haircuts and mismatched clothes.
It seems that all I see on TV these days are ads for lawyer companies to sue drunk drivers and for medical/dental schools (lawyers and doctors and such…). When was the last time a commercial played for Ga Tech or MIT or any other engineering school?
Until and unless this society, from educators to government, etc. get involved and openly push engineering as an admirable and worthy goal in this country, engineering slots will continue to be filled with foreigners. Hell, most of the TAs at Ga Tech were from Asia or India/Pakistan.
OK, enough one dimensional stereotyping and ranting.
I can think of two classes that could have been skipped:
1)Engineering Ethics – this could be covered by professors in other classes (this class caused Statics & Dynamics to be combined into a single class)
and 2) Engineering Seminar – we listened to speakers in the field of engineering each week and each student was required to do two technical presentations during the semester.
I think I got a good technical education at Texas A&M.
EDIT: Another problem is that almost every company I interviewed with coming out of school had no “real engineering” jobs. By that I mean technical analysis and experimentation. I have rarely used any engineering analysis since I graduated in 2005.
Most of what I do is processing changes in bills of materials and drawings. We “design” parts now and then, but that just means we create a new drawing. In the last year, I have only done a couple of FEAs. It’s boring, but it pays the bills and I don’t have to work weekends…
The U.S. isn’t the only country that’s facing a shortage of engineers:
http://tinyurl.com/6pgp6q
TexasAg03-
You make a great point how little engineering R&D actually takes place these days. My “engineering” job also involves doing a lot of electronic redlining and BOM changes.
I also do a lot of ankle-biting to get other people in other departments to do their jobs. Most of the time it feels like swimming in a sea of red tape.
Also agree that I use very little of the skillset that I was taught during my undergrad and graduate engineering programs. I’ve looked at switching jobs, but I haven’t seen many positions that would begin to take advantage of my skills.
I’d rant about salaries, but this topic has been done to death by more effective commenters than myself.
Well said point on the issue dastanley, I noticed the same thing when I went to R.P.I. most of the good dedicated engineers were coming from over seas.
I often kick myself for going into architecture rather than getting the mechanical engineering degree I was thinking about persuing at the time. My problem was that there just ddn’t seam to be enough actual design in engineering.
Doing my best primping my 2 kids to go to MIT in the far future, hopefully I wont lose the battle to them becoming lawyers and brokers.
They all want to be project managers now, but they don’t know the science or what’s going on to get the job done.”
I believe the root cause of the problem can be identified within the above statement. Today the vast majority of Americans equate the quality of their education with how much they have paid for it. Hence forth schools are now simply jerking folks off with half-a$$ degree programs that are incorrectly geared to what a students wants or believes his/her income potential is,. as if just getting a degree from univeristy X is all that matters and that it is your birth-right ot be high paid.
Im in NYC and I must admit that the Chinese, Indians, Nigerians, and Russians are kicking-a$$ big time in the technical fields and jobs in this area of the country. The truth of the matter is they ARE more focused and dedicated to their professions than the average American with the same degree.
One of the biggest differences between the foriegn trained professionals and their American counterparts is that they spend far more time outside of school and work focusing on their profession or field of study. They generally come from enviornments and childhoods were the amount of leisure activities available to them are far less than their USA counterparts. They appear to need less outlets and do not believe two days a week away form a profession that they have been training for just about their entire life is a birth-right or even necessary.
As a structural engineer (masters’ in 2005) I don’t recommend it to anybody. Those of us who really fit into it (myself included) do it despite all our peers’ warnings, so I don’t feel bad about telling people to get out. College sucks as an engineering student (in some programs), then in the working world you don’t get credit for anything besides the failures. Compensation works along the same lines.
Fortunately there are a few of us fools who actually enjoy it, and we import any engineers we need to fill in the gaps.
A friend of mine graduated a mechanical engineer. He took a job at Ford but before his start day, they gave him a bunch of money and said “Sorry, we don’t need you anymore.”
Asian cultures have a tendency to encourage and nourish doing a singular task very well, hence the criticisms of the West towards Japan and China’s school systems creating graduates who think little in the way of creativity as well, while we’re focused on creating a “well rounded” student.
carlisimo : I think you got the reality of it. Sometimes I think I should have stayed the course as a mechanical engineering student at my school, seeing some of my friends go through to become engineers. HOwever, my school’s program was very demanding and dour, with no room for a social life. I washed out into Sociology and had some of the greatest years of my life.
Articles about engineering shortages bother me because let’s face it, if there’s a shortage its gotta be for a reason. Some that I can think of include:
1) We’re in a recession – demand or no, the fact that we’re in a recession makes HR managers even choosier than normal. What this article should have said was there’s a shortage of engineers *with 5 years+ exp and willing to accept sub-50k* I graduated from Michigan a few years ago with a degree in Comp. Eng. and the only thing I saw a shortage of were engineering recruiters.
2) Cost – engineering school is even more ungodly expensive than liberal arts tuition.
3) Offshoring – at this rate the only thing America will create anymore will be Wall Street speculators. More and more of our GDP is from financials and services and less from manufacturing and things that create value.
I am a scientist who works with numerous scientists and engineers. At the top we have management who are mostly non-technical management types (MBA’s, lawyers, or financial, business school and marketing types). The mindset of management is that R&D is just a burden cost, scientists and engineers cost money, and management makes the world go ’round. The scientists and engineers see this ideology in action and soon realize that the best salaries and job security aren’t in the lab or prototype shop, they’re behind a desk in an office guarded by a secretary. So the scientists and engineers all aspire to become management. When achieved, the management-think quickly takes over and all their technical knowledge steadily evaporates. My company isn’t atypical. We in the USA value paper-pushing managers much more than R&D people who actually come up with products to sell. Colleges and college students know this, and thus succumb to this skewed way of thinking. And, add in the fact that good science and technology teachers are hard to find at the high school level to spur interest in science. Too many of our kids just don’t see why anybody would want to bust their balls in college taking incredibly hard classes like quantum mechanics or fluid dynamics and burning the midnight oil in labs when they could be hitting on chicks in a global marketing class and buying their organizational management thesis papers online. And, ultimately make more money when they graduate.
To counter AG’s comment a bit. Engineering has been one of the top 10 demanded professions (and climbing) since I started paying attention to it in the mid 90’s, so this is isn’t a *new* position. Although, its interesting that someone actually put a number on it. I graduated with a ME degree not too long ago, so a shortage ultimately means more money for me, right, or did I waste my time with my economics minor?
I agree that there is a shortage even currently. Some of the engineers I have to deal with are not the brightest bulbs in the bunch, so a shortage is obvious if these guys (not many women engineers) are being hired as engineers. IF you are good at what you do, you can easily reach 6 figures annually within 5 years of graduating, so I don’t understand where the lack of income statement comes from. The best engineering schools are expensive, but many state schools have good engineering programs also. In essence, an engineering degree (BS) costs just as much as any 4 year degree. I honestly don’t understand why more are not pursuing engineering degrees, but then again, math and physics always came pretty easy to me.
There’s always a “shortage” of engineers, as long as it results in increased H1B quotas.
I’m 25 years into a mechanical engineering career. It’s been pretty good to me. I have never been unemployed except when I chose to be; I have a house in California and a house in France, both paid off; I’m respected by my peers. What’s not to like?
Of course, I never went into one of those enormous companies where they try to make engineering a process instead of a creative pursuit. By the time a company has a thousand people it’s too big and not worth working for. Those places have idiots who create corporate initiatives to process-ize everything. They would really like their creative engine to have interchangeable parts, and it won’t happen, ever. The more you try to control the engineering ‘process’ the more drones you get, and they get bored to the point that selling real estate begins looking like an interesting pursuit. I think many more engineers are made bad than start out bad, precisely by means of this soul-sucking attempt to control creativity.
I think many more engineers are made bad than start out bad, precisely by means of this soul-sucking attempt to control creativity.
I have only been out of school for three years (although I am now almost 38, so I’ve been around a bit), but I agree with you. Unfourtunately, I don’t know that there are many small engineering firms near where I live…
In the last twenty years, software engineering has probably supplanted mechanical engineering as the default choice for science minded school kids. The chance to come out of college and jump into a stock-optioned job at Google sounds a lot more enticing than earning an apprenticeship designing wiper blades for GM.
If there is one area to NOT go into, Civil. The lowest pay of engineering fields, and I am now on my 3rd lay-off in 8 years.
Friends don’t let friends be Civil Engineers.
Off to my interview at Best Buy and Fast Freddies Tanning.
fisher72 I have no idea where you live but chances are you should move to the southeast. Civil engineers are in short supply here and we have to beg to get work from them 3 weeks late because they are so back logged and understaffed. Just stay away from places that work too closely with developers, they are blood sucking vampires.
The money is better than the sh*t salaries we make in Architecture.
I think many more engineers are made bad than start out bad, precisely by means of this soul-sucking attempt to control creativity.
I see that same thing happening in Architecture also, mostly caused by developers and owners who just want to copy the building to either side of them.
I’ve seen so many engineers treated like dirt in automotive that I totally understand why they tell their kids to go into anything other than engineering.
I’ve seen them treated with derision by HR, finance, and management – more recently as an unnecessary burden that could be farmed out to India and China.
Sometimes I think our country has become a flag of convenience for corporations, rather than a nation of citizens, their families and communities.
Lee Teschler at Machine Design Magazine reports a different outlook for engineers:
http://community.machinedesign.com/forums/thread/29273.aspx
1973 AB-ScB Engineering Mechanics grad from Brown. Worked for a professor’s company for 3 1/2 years and then went out on my own, with two great business partners, focusing on computer aided engineering, R&D and product development. No regrets.
Engineering isn’t perceived as a prestigious profession and for the degree of difficulty, the career rewards don’t look that great. However, I think law has to be one of the most overrated careers. For every top 20 tier, top 10% of class grad who gets a $160K start salary plus a big signing bonus, there are many sad sacks begging for accident victims on cable. And there are drudges on hourly contracts who don’t even reach that level. About law, John Edwards is right – there are two Americas. As to financial sector guys, many of them are brave with other people’s money assets, like the Big 2.5 executives. Unless they are all in with their own money too, I’m unimpressed. Plus many less successful in the field are in that different America, too. What amazes me about some the most successful(?) of them is that their success largely benefits them with golden parachutes and other soft landing provisions. Anyone remember the Nobel Prize winning pinheads who upset the apple cart several years back with the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund? They aren’t selling encyclopedias door to door. Nobody learned because there was very little downside risk, unless you were an investor. And today we have sub-prime and liar loans…..
Its fun to bitch about whatever you do, but if you don’t like it, change it. I couldn’t have worked on more than a fraction of what I have in fact worked on, if I’d been in corporate America. If you get no respect, no opportunity, no encouragement and chafe under stupid policies and procedures, move on, probably to someplace smaller.
They made a very big point of switching 25 years ago for more rounded engineers, and that’s what we got. They all want to be project managers now, but they don’t know the science or what’s going on to get the job done.”
As a former Project Manager and ME student, its obvious that savvy engineers know where their gravy train begins. Can you blame them?
This isn’t Germany: engineers aren’t respected like they are elsewhere.
RedBarchetta-
I almost wound up going into architecture myself and I didn’t for a variety of reasons. One of the major reasons was that the instruction felt too close to a purely artistic discipline with little concern for technical knowledge about buildings.
My father was an architect, and his business partner is bummed that his daughter is currently attempting to enter an architecture program. This is because, and I agree, that the partner considers architecture a dying profession.
IC Turbo-
I would love to know the industry where an engineer can make 6 figures after only 5 years out of school.
Some good reasons there is a shortage of engineers:
1. The effort required to excel in school is not matched by the compensation in the real world. The effort expended would be better served in law or the medical field.
2. Engineers are not held to the same level of prestige that the education should command.
3. Salaries are undercut by a ready and willing supply of young foreign engineers that will work for substantially less in order to gain experience.
4. Engineering school is hard; many of today’s kids aren’t interested in such a rigorous course of study.
Lastly, there is such a negative image associated with math and science in this country. Almost all of the best students in my engineering coursework were foreign born. Until the nerd image goes away and engineers get paid what we deserve, there will be a continual shortage of engineers in America. I certainly will not be encouraging my kids to enter the engineering field.
I was a control engineer. Very good at my trade and made a lot of money working contract in the auto business. Since I am a white male I was always the bottom of the barrel. Never again will I work in the Big 2.8 plants where the young unexperienced over promoted and coddled diversity candidates make the bad decisions which you must live with. Saved my money and I don’t need to deal with the stupidity any more. An intelligent young white male would be a fool to work for the big 2.8.
The problem with R&D type engineering jobs is that they don’t really exist except in the computer and electronics industries. I graduated a few years ago and thought about going to grad school but that didn’t turn out because of a lack of research funding. Best thing that ever happened to me. Instead I design commerical developments. Sounds kind of boring, sometimes it is, but I enjoy it. I don’t really care about doing research anymore, but yet I can be somewhat creative in my design. I consider real engineering to be taking what you have and making it work, not the pure research aspect which is really more based in the sciences.
Redbarchetta
I moved to the southeast (Asheville NC) from Traverse City, MI to work for a top 200 ENR firm only to be LO’d again.
You can only move so many times to see the same pattern. I am done with engineering.
No, there is NO SHORTAGE of engineers in the U.S. One engineer I know was laid-off three times and though he was able to find another engineering job, it took him more than 6 months each time. He finally went back to school and became a medical doctor. Another engineer I know has managed by to remain gainfully employed in the field by getting both a doctorate in the field of engineering and an MBA which allowed her to move into management.
Just a few days ago there was story about the so-called shortage in Newsweek at the following link:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/154355
Another example of the so-called shortage is available at the following link.
http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Business1&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=49895
There isn’t so much as shortage of engineers as there is a lot of pickiness and an unwillingness to provide any training on the part of those who would employ them.
There’s a lot of good engineers available around Kokomo, Indiana, after this week at Delphi. Thankfully, I was not one of them. This is the 4th downsizing/closure/site relocation in the past 11 years for me. It’s true about the project managers….most of the real engineering is done overseas….most engineers here in the states are just coordinating projects and poking at people to do their jobs. Didn’t have to go to school for that. Thankfully, I have stayed technical and have been able to learn some new skills that I can take to other industries if Delphi goes belly-up.
“Today the US is not producing the right skill sets”, or “typically they come up way short in basic skills”.
Guess what? Any number of employers in any number of industries could say that. And its been coming on for decades.
“It” starts with the failure to adopt the metric system. Many sectors have, but to truly compete globally, we have to stop teaching our kids and immigrants our dumass system of inches and ounces. There is no bigger waste of time, energy and brainspace. More “shop” classes wouldnt hurt either.
All of the “shortage” talk for engineering parallels the bluster about a shortage of truck drivers.
What it really means is that we can’t find anyone who will do the job at what we offer pay wise. Improve the working conditions and/or offer more pay and the problem disappears.
I’m an ME grad student at GA Tech right now, and here, as well as in my undergraduate institution, I’ve seen a couple of trends that could explain why this trend exists, and I do believe that it does.
1) As mentioned, there is this belief that engineers have to be better communicators, which results in technical writing classes and liberal arts courses and the like. I have no problem with this, indeed, it should be encouraged. However, since engineering students, even at proper universities with proper arts depts. (sadly something that Tech lacks) tend to look down on their liberal arts requirements. Something that could have fostered a curiosity, a love of learning, and all that is treated as nothing more than a distraction. End result: less time spent on hard sciences, little liberal arts broadening taking place.
2) I totally agree with Sajeev and ChuckR – engineering is low prestige, and while the out-of-school salary’s a decent, the long term growth is on the poor side, especially if one remains in the technical side of whatever company they get into. We know where the cash is, and it’s drilled into us that we can get nice cushy finance jobs…that won’t really help advance the state of humanity and all that [but that’s another rant].
3) Almost every engineer I’ve talked to, even a large number of PhD candidates both here at Tech and back in Ithaca expect to be leaders – not 5 years down the line – as soon as they graduate. And many of these individuals make that leap relatively soon. There’s no period of apprenticeship, there’s relatively little time spent on the cutting edge of what they’re doing before they want to order people around. This is a personal gripe, but it seems to me that the time down in the trenches collecting data, running experiments, refining your designs the blood-and-elbow-grease way is perhaps the best way to get acquainted with the broad strokes of what needs to be done in order to lead effectively.
A good friend of mine, a bright lad with good grades, was involved in a half-dozen leadership positions, couldn’t solve a simple separable ODE (you technical folk will know what I’m talking about). In his junior year. After 2 courses discussing ODEs. And he wants an R&D leadership position. It’s just a bit sad…
4) Finally, I hate to admit this, but grunt engineering work is dull. The low-level Bachelor’s degree stuff is largely automated thanks to CFD, CAD, FEA, and other software tools. You often find yourself spending more time fighting with the computer to figure out relatively minor concerns like the packaging of a component in an assembly, and less on the interesting stuff such as “will it do the job?”, because the software’s already spat out the stress-strain figures and the like. A lot of us, myself included, go into graduate school because we figure the really interesting stuff is only open to folks with MSs and PhDs. Has anyone here gone into an advanced degree, just to try to secure more interesting work? If so, how did it pan out?
25% of my MBA class was engineers fleeing enginering. They all wanted to go to Wall Street after maxing out salaries in engineering. By and large they were quite successful.
The othe successful positon, IMO, was going into Oilfield engineering.
The dirty little secret is that engineering is a blue collar job. It requires lots of hard work in college, a degree of affinity to the subject matter, comfort levels with math, and a degree of intelligence.
But at a social and business organizational level it is regarded as blue collar. White collar work, such as administration and management, sort of look down on those who get their hands (and brains) dirty. Plus, it’s even worse when those we look down on are smarter than us.
Salary caps reflect this. Social mores for those over 35 still calling themselves engineers reflect this.
Trapped between the real mechanics and the decision makers, MEs face some hard decisions in their chosen fields.
ronin – engineering always was a blue collar job. It used to be a way forward when this country was being built. 19th and early 20th century attitudes towards doers and creators was much different than it is today.
At my first job, a new-to-this-country Turkish coworker with a PhD struggled with the difference in prestige accorded engineering. When he took his college qual exams in Turkey, he was at the top of the heap and could go into prestigious engineering. His brother was not so fortunate and the best he could do was medical school. Both have been in the US for decades, both successful, and I think my friend’s position as a long time tenured MIT professor has been adequate consolation. Do what you love. Problem for Detroit is who the hell could love that? My hat is off to any who persist and get decent cars built. Thanks to their over compensated bosses, the claimed engineering shortage may resolve itself on its own.
Universities and other interest groups have been planting stories like this for decades. Google “NSF phony engineering shortage” to see the 1992 version.
rochskier : The schools don’t really teach the technical side of architecture and rely on your internship to tech you the other 90% of the business. The focus for the most part is on design principles and critcal thinking. All good except you use very little of that in the real world, they fail to tell you that 90% of what you will be doing is cookie cutter design and a lot of copy and paste, it’s really annoying. I worked my way through school working at a firm and could not stand seeing these unbuildable designs get praise when they had levitating roofs, 2×4’s holding up skyscrapers, and general incompitence to designs that work. Part of that problem is most professors have worked very little if any in the industry. I had many profs with less working experience than I did while I was in their class.
I am doing my best trying to stear my kids away from anything in the building industry, it is a dying proffesion. Just look at the built world outside, any monkey can do that, and more and more that is what they want, a non thinking draft monkey. Sadly it sure doesn’t look like this is isolated to what I do.
fisher72: Sorry to hear you are ditching the proffesion, but I can’t blame you I am about 12 months away from doing the same thing, it just isn’t worth my time anymore.
Ah memories. As a recent BS ChE grad, I remember all the long nights going to bed to try and catch a few hours of sleep as the sun was rising.
“Hey Matt, we’re going out. You coming?”
“Can’t. Gotta get back to the lab/do some work.”
I remember wanting to quit, but I stuck with it because I knew that it would be something that I’d always regret, wondering if I could have made it. Now that I have my degree, and a good job, I have no regrets from all the long stressful nights spent doing Fluid Mechanics and Reactor Design. Engineering is really something where you have to be really gifted or stubborn to make it out of.
I’m sure most of you know about those Newsweek polls where they average the starting salaries of all the major degrees. While Engineering still is found a lot on that list, you see Business Administration and all that other crap rising up there too. I think the real problem is that even though engineers are still needed, they aren’t compensated accordingly.
Everyone’s favorite motoring journalist (Jeremy Clarkson, sorry Robert) also has some strong feelings on the matter, with a decidedly British view, but I think it applies to the situation in America too.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/article3734663.ece
I’m a Civil Engineering graduate. I left the field years ago when we had a terrible slump in construction. Most of my friends did too. IT was the popular alternative then.
In my experience, when industry leaders proclaim there’s a shortage, what they mean is that young engineers have the cheek to demand a livable wage.
I’ve been an engineer for 30 years. I would not recommend it. At first, it was OK. Worked for IBM, but they’re pretty tough to get where u want. Then went to NASA. Great stuff to do but pay was pathetic. Back to industry for more $$$s and triedd some startups- which soon shut down.
Then, the H1Bs took over. Starting in early 90s. Used to be, I met many friends at work. Now? Cant even relate to anyone. Gotta learn Hindi or Chinese and a bit of Russian. American engineers now in Silicon Valley are few and far between. Engineering has become grunt work. Little to no respect. Product marketing is where the Americans go and they make a lot of money there and sales of course. Engineers? Expendable. Product done? See ya. Dont let the door hit u in the ass on the way out. Engineering school is HARD. Real Hard. Marketing? Games and role playing. Yet they make the $$$s and engineers take a hike and say hello to your cheaper imported replacement on the way out.
“Mommas dont send your babies to engineering school.”
I’m a professional civil engineer for a govt agency, and the money is so-so, and yes, school was very difficult. Just like in the private sector, we are pushed toward management if we are to get any promotions/more $. I enjoy my technical work and don’t care for management and administrative BS. But the day will come when my division heads retire or move on, and the choice will be me or bringing in someone from outside.
I actually do more database work/programming than actual engineering. Most civil design work is contracted out to private firms. I enjoy my job, and it’s relatively secure, but the salary isn’t huge. That being said, I’m still satisfied. The cost of living here is pretty low, so my salary provides a decent standard of living. I can retire in 13 years and have the option of pursuing contract work or going into another field entirely.
In the last twenty years, software engineering has probably supplanted mechanical engineering as the default choice for science minded school kids
I agree. I have 20+ years in the field in addition to an undergrad degree in computer science and a masters degree in software engineering. This field has definitely served me well.
I also work for a small engineering firm after leaving the mind-numbing corporate conglomerates, and I definitely prefer the smaller businesses…
My generation (I’m 47) went into law and finance.
Our kids are interested in engineering again. I offer as two examples the very bright children (sons – some thing don’t change, guess) of friends who are in the financial business. Both of these boys want to be engineers. One’s starting at RPI this fall. The other’s dreaming of MIT in his senior year of high school
I think engineering may again be becoming cool.
The overall theme I get from all these comments is very disheartening for someone like me going into engineering with no exceptional math/science skills but a stubbornness to graduate and not give up.
It’s like an obstacle course I plan to get through, but the appreciation and compensation of an engineer basically reinforces negative comments I hear on the rewards in the field.
My father graduated as a Mechanical Engineer and worked for 20 years for Colgate-Palmolive, the company was kind to him, as he was given resources and got to exercise his engineering skills, but he mentions how the new engineers coming in basically made it past him without doing any substantial engineering work, their mindset was on doing politics, and the company rewarded them for that.
He now cautions me and basically reflects comments here that say that very little actual engineering is taking place, that his 20 years as an engineer showed him that his skill set as an engineer is not his most valuable asset if he wants to move up on a company.
Overall not very encouraging to hear, I’m currently looking for something of interest in the medical field.
I like Johnsters point. It seems that everyone wants to hire someone who has trained just for what they want them to do, but then when you really get down to it, the school never really prepared them for that anyway.
I have worked with engineers in more than one field. I find that the good ones are well rounded in the basics of engineering, and can likely move among different fields with a little training. Somehow, we need a system that lets engineers retrain more effectively. I can tell you that the oil companies are looking at hiring graduates in other specialties, but they don’t seem to look for folks with experience in other specialties. Why?
I stayed away from engineering because the year I went to school the petroleum engineers were being laid off all over, so everyone said not to become an engineer. Of course, when I got out of the army, they wanted engineering degrees for all the best jobs, even the non engineering ones. Go figure.
indi500fan
I agree that talent follows money… but disagree that medicine and law are paths comparable to finance in terms of compensation, or even engineering. It is an uncommon physician that, over his or her lifetime, will ring up compensation equivalent to the average engineer. Figure in compensation per hour worked, the delayed compensation that medical school debt-load and residency mandate, and you have a lot of physicians in their 20’s and 30’s wishing they’d had the will or ability to become engineers.
Not really car-talk, just saying that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence… for almost everyone.
To matt
Jeremy Clarkson: “The Americans? Pah. Left to their own devices, I doubt they could build a pencil”
Oow, that’s harsh. We all know how Packard built a better Rolls-Royce Merlin than thru British methods. I think its bad business management that make engineering and production look bad.
Engineering is still a good career – if you want to be one. If you want to do something creative or have more responsibility sooner, look to a start-up or small company where needs are greater than resources. Large companies don’t create jobs; they are in the business of managing jobs and acquiring ideas/concepts. Certainly there are big companies that do an excellent job of both managing and innovating – P&G and 3M come to mind. Apropos this blog, Detroit doesn’t come to mind. Detroit has some excellent engineers – but by all accounts they work handicapped by management.
Something alluded to (but not outright stated) about the difference between how engineers are respected within the US versus countries like Germany and Japan is that those countries lack the US’ huge military-industrial complex. It’s a great source of pride in Germany and Japan to have such well-engineered vehicles and products. Not so much in the US. Many of the best and the brightest gravitate to US defense contractors. There will always be engineering positions in the US to design and develop weapons systems.
Aside from the only other area in the US that excels in engineering, the computer industry (which in and of itself is an outgrowth of the need for warfare targeting number crunching), most engineering in the US is outsourced overseas where wages are a fraction of what they are in the US. Unless it’s computer-related or an advanced weapons system, ‘Made in the USA’ simply doesn’t have the caché it once had. The pinnacle of intellectual respect and prowess in the US was probably the fifties when people like that “Quiz Show” guy, Charles Van Doren, one of the first well-known and popular nerds on a national level, were at the height of their popularity.
This is the US economy collapse cancer DNA under microscope! Nice to read reviews from real engineering guys. Sure you are right, that US is lacking behind in educating engineers. But if manufacturing basis is contracting, so is the engineering amount of graduates. Funny, how US plans just to allow more H1B Visas and seemingly compensate the hole. Funny, you guys expect that while the toughest part of educating engineers should be done abroad and all education should be paid by pakistani or Russian government while you just scoop the cream and get ready-engineers. While most of american teachers, as far as I have observed tend to have fun with group works, games, discussions and marketing bla blas. For how long? (Especially women teachers.)Funnily enough these immigrant engineers don`t translate in cranking out high quality products. Somehow they get lost in groveling to their higher positioned american mouthpieces, who even don`t understand mostly the language of math or numbers. US as country approach very deep waters. I mean China. China was dependant on US market, that`s why they were eager to lend money that was then spent on their own goods. Today China has become stronger and their market bigger, while Us contracts. Meaning China will slowly understand that US is not that important, meaning 3bn a day allotment to US would become redundant.That would lead US to a total collapse. Once high tech factories are closed, there is no way you can reopen them. It ain`t growing yam or carrots. Schools should stop applying that silly communicative approach and start some real input. Sure kids like it, the same way they like coke and chips that later translates into diabetes and obesity.Don`t deliver kids what they like, but what will make them more competetive! And China doesn`t even need a trillion dollar army. All they need is a switch which logs off US companies from their charts. They click fingers and a ship with consumer electronics turns around. Who will be more desperate? Thanks for choosing this topic, this is as close as we could get to the very decay of US backbone, her manufacturing base and engineering. The cradle of middle class, and muscles of country. Services are residues in your butt,everyone has them , but noone brags about them.
rudiger-
I work in the US MI-complex. Don’t worry, engineers in this business are also treated like second class citizens.
ashtheengineer-
#3 is a good point, but I’ve been on the flipside of your argument. Some organizations will pigeonhole an engineer in the role of doing nothing but test and measurement. This happened to myself and a good friend for several years. Both of us asked for design work clearly and repeatedly in our development plans. All we got from management was prevarication.
Eventually my friend and I transferred out of that group for greener pastures. Management never seemed to fully grasp precisely why we left.
The other extremely frustrating aspect of our organization is how territorial the level 4, 5, and senior scientists are. No interest in mentoring younger engineers, just fighting turf wars and acquiring data b*tches to do their dirty work.
Wow.
This is depressing.
Hopefully some of you older folks can steer me in the right direction. Am I just a naive 18-year old with an unrealistic dream?
I’ve always loved cars, and always will. I also really like programming. I like languages. I like planning things. I like building things.
I figured I should major in mechanical engineering. I want to work on building new and innovative products. I would be a liar if I said money was not an important factor (how else to feed one’s automotive fetish?), but it’s still true that enjoying what I will be doing is more important.
Am I setting myself up to be disappointed? Say it isn’t so…
Michael,
First, an engineering degree will open a lot of doors to professional jobs that aren’t engineering jobs. It’s not going to limit you. When I first left the army, I had to start at the bottom for a couple years. Had I had an engineering degree, I could have been more than 3 years ahead towards my sales career.
Second, if you are in a competitive field of any sort, and you find that you are not getting the assignments that you desire, and that you know will further your career options then start looking for the next job immediately. There are plenty of engineers and other folks that got sidetracked and then had a hard time getting back on the proper career track. If you are a chemical engineer, but they keep working you as a technical support guy, then smile, ask for the assignment you want, and put out your resume’ the next day. If your employer won’t give you the jobs you need to get ahead, another one might. If no one will, then you may need to reassess your chances of making it in that field. It might be you, it might be fate, it might be the whole industry is filled with idiots all the way to the top.
Sorry folks, but this one strikes a nerve.
After 20 years as a product engineer, my outlook for the profession is not so good. it would seem that in our modern world, product engineers are no longer considered valuable in terms of keeping them. I have worked for companies big and small, new and old, international and domestic, and they all have one thing in common: product engineers don’t hang around very long.
Having been laid off 3 times in 6 years, it is no wonder I am still driving my truck, a ’94 GMC that now has 284,000 miles. Because in my 20 year career, I have only been continuously employed long enough to pay off a 5 year car loan one time, and that job ended when the plant closed 6 years ago.
I would like to think that our culture will return to the place where experience is valued, but everything I see is the opposite. The MBA geniuses who now run the world see product engineering as a commodity that can be purchased when needed.
@ Michael Ayoub:
Unfortunately, I do agree with most of the negative feelings expressed here. Having worked in the auto industry as a mechanical engineer, I can also say it wasn’t the creative “designing cars” type of work I expected when I was a bright eyed 18 year old heading into engineering school. The most frustrating thing for me was the bureaucracy that superceded any and all decision making. Now 8 years out I see my friends who went into finance pulling in big, big bucks while my engineering friends back in Detroit are being laid off left and right.
Still, it is what you make it. My engineering degree has helped me to have a pretty decent salary and is a good path to other more lucrative fields. I’ve learned alot about what goes into designing and producing something, which I probably wouldn’t have gotten through finance. And there are still technical engineering jobs in the auto industry for car guys, such as vehicle dynamics. Just realize that it isn’t going to be easy and you’ll likely never make the money as an engineer that you could as an investment banker.
I believe a lot of what has been said in this thread is due to good economic times of the last generation.
In good economic times those that “manage” and “sell” and otherwise self-aggrandize get the credit and the power.
In bad economic times it is those who actually do the thinking that get the credit and power because those who do not add value are quickly marginalized.
We see this in discussions of the Detroit auto companies in the idea that creative talent in the trenches can be unlocked as soon as the self-aggrandizing management is removed (as through bankruptcy).
The engineering shortage was a lie when I was earning my BSEE degree in the 1970s, and it’s still a lie today. If there were truly a shortage of engineers, the law of supply and demand would push the price (salary) up, thus attracting more university students to the profession until supply matched demand at a higher price point. I haven’t seen any evidence of this happening. The B-school types who are running the auto industry into the ground view engineers as a cheap commodity to be exploited and dumped when they’re no longer needed. The Detroit 3 are particularly adept at hiring good engineers; underutilizing them as project managers, BOM clerks and spec writers; and promoting the best of them to low-end management positions where they use even less of their engineering training and skill than they did as working-level engineers.
In retrospect, I should have earned an MBA and gone into marketing, finance, product planning or technical management rather than earning an MSEE from Stanford and staying in engineering. I’d be better paid and much happier with my career if I’d taken a different path. I am happy to say that my children have learned from my mistake and are pursuing careers in areas other than engineering.
I got a BS in Manufacturing at Tennessee Tech Univ. A small town state university of 10K students.
I paid my way through the Univ working for a company which built manufacturing equipment for the big three and their suppliers. Was a pretty decent place to work with about 100 people. I was working my way through the university program for a paycheck a fair bit less than an elementary school teacher. I graduated and my pay was bumped to slightly over an elementary school teacher’s pay. The next step up the food chain there would have been a bump in work hours from 45 to 65 per week and a pay jump of about $6K a year. It really wasn’t worth staying there for the effort expended. An engineer friend there grumbles that his pay averages out to $12 an hour after overtime and taxes.
I had several factors that shaped my choices: the pay did not even come close to my expectations, reading about the future of the big three did not paint a happy picture and they were our primary customers, and the company went through yet another 4 month stall-out where 4-5 people got laid off and I wondered when the doors would close. I started looking for jobs here in TN and found plenty of $45K options but we’d have to move two hours east or two hours west. Not a big deal for the right paycheck.
Got a job offer in East TN with an Asian parts company who would pay our rent for two months, pay to move my family and give me a $2K raise. Not even sure if my wife could have gotten a job there b/c the town was so small.
Huh? Are they kidding? For $50K I’d consider it. Heck for $45K I might have considered it. Most of my classmates were seeing $50K only if they moved to one of the state’s largest cities along with the higher costs of living, longer driving distances, and the social problems that the big city can present like crime.
This job was an hour out into the boonies. Rural describes it well. I also knew that $40K would likely only be $45K after five years. It would be a reliable job at least offering good experiences. Not a bad situation but not a great one either. It would have put the drive to Grandma’s house at 3 hours.
We could move back to Chattanooga where our families live but we know the quality of the school system there and would really need to be in the best neighborhoods to use the public schools. Like any city there are good schools and schools whose parents don’t value education or raise their children very well. These kids impact everyone’s children’s safety, quality of education, and so on. Even some of the schools we attended are now undesireable.
Am not seeing opportunities that I could pursue there – need the correct degree, companies want candidates to already have the necessary experience, 5+ years of that experience, etc. Understand that I am a 38 male with six years experience in the Navy (electrician, military police), not a 22 year old graduate with no work experience.
Ended up moving to a university engineering job that is challenging, which will train me for new skills at no cost, and my pay has surpassed that of my peers for a while – but not that of some of my non-college friends. Some of them are doing much better in blue-collar jobs, non-degree advertising, and non-degree project management.
Where is the motivation to be an engineer? Admittedly I’ve gone up the income ladder much faster than my non-univ friends but the average pay is about the same as a non-college office worker after 15 years.
FWIW I take everything in five year chunks. I’ll reconsider my situation in five years. I’m content for now.
I have a friend who is taking an $80K a year job right out of college in CA. Cost of living adjustments indicate that’s about $50K here. Not sure whether they will be able to afford a house or to be in a decent neighborhood. Nothing to indicate where his pay will be in ten years (would it be $60K or $160K?). The challenge of living in CA without any pay advantages…
Could I imagine being anything other than an engineer? Not at all.
To Michael Ayoub:
I hear you. Your reasoning for following engineering is identical to the one I had fifteen years ago. I’m glad I fought my way through school, and am happy to be working in the automotive field. That said, it is a struggle, and when times are tough, like nowadays, things can get a bit scary. Many comments prior to this one are right on – engineering at large corporations has become glorified project management. That said, the work pays the bills, and allows enough for me to pursue my own amusement at home.
My advice to anyone willing to put in the effort to pursue engineering: Stick with it, and get an internship or co-op that is field-related, even if it pushes out your grad date. Pre-grad work experience is invaluable. Thankfully, most internships/co-ops pay.
For those who will whine about how dull school is, join or start an orgainzation, Formula SAE, for example. Even EE and Computer Engineering expertise is needed. And you don’t necessarily have to be a gearhead.
You guys complaining about layoffs and such should search on usajobs for engineering positions, there are almost 10k positions open.
The Gov’t can’t hire foreign nationals or offshore the engineering…
z31 :
You guys complaining about layoffs and such should search on usajobs for engineering positions, there are almost 10k positions open.
The Gov’t can’t hire foreign nationals or offshore the engineering…
Take a close look at the pay rates for the non-NASA and non-managerial positions. Apparently the government can’t even match the low engineering pay scales in the private sector, which may explain why those thousands of positions are still open. Financially, it makes more sense for a laid-off engineer to load up on student loans, earn a law degree and make his living chasing ambulances than to take a job in his field at an abysmally low salary. If engineers were paid commensurate with their training and skills, there would be no talk of shortages.
Questions for the house:
1) how many engineers do Toyota or BMW outsource?
2) same question for the Detroit 3?
I don’t mean for integrable sub-assemblies like seats or whole interiors. I mean the things that make a car distinct like the body, suspension and engine/drivetrain and related electronics. The rest, while important, are not nearly as fundamental.
And….
“Financially, it makes more sense for a laid-off engineer to load up on student loans, earn a law degree and make his living chasing ambulances than to take a job in his field at an abysmally low salary.” No, unless the engineer is able to get into a top tier school (possibly hard) and graduate in the top tenth (easier – an engineer with work/life experience should be able to rip through the 23 year old liberal arts pukes). This should get you attention and hopefully a generous offer from BigLaw. Otherwise, you’ve added $100K to $150K in debt and avoided making a living for three years to boot, all to start at the bottom of the law food chain. Thats a $250K to $400K total difference to make up. And what if you don’t love it, and you probably won’t? And don’t chase ambulances, use your technical skills more productively in IP or another specialty.
I posted that last night and have been looking forward to read your responses all day. Thank you for the insight.
I suppose what I might do is still get my undergraduate degree as a mechanical engineer, but then pursue an MBA program after. That’s essentially what my father did (though substitute political science for engineering) and, well, you could say he does pretty well…
I have my BSME from Kettering U. I’m working my first full time job. I’m making about 30% more than the average starting salary for ME’s. I don’t work in the auto industry. They don’t compensate enough, even though I have a great love for cars.
The only industry you’ll make 6 figures in 5 years at is petro-chem. I didn’t go into that, but I’m still getting paid competetively with them. I’ll probably be one of the top 5 earners at my 5 year HS reunion. If I stay in engineering, that will not be the case at my 10 year reunion. I’m to smart to see myself get left behind like that.
If I’m hanging out with my buddy in law school, and my buddy in dental school, I will be gettin no lovin from the ladies. Not a very prestigious profession in the US apparently. An MBA or patent law degree is a certainty.