CALLING ALL ENGINEERS

Years ago I couldn’t even spell Engineer…now I are one.

Heck I’ve been a Quality Engineer for years in the automotive realm…demand..yep…good pay yep.

Those stats tell a story, but we are still graduating more STEM students than STEM jobs available. Especially when you consider the sheer number of H1-B visa grads that are flooding in (and have been, every month, every year, since 2000). I’ve heard that from Dow Chemical, to Microsoft & Google, not to mention every big hospital and college, the numbers of non-accented workers continues to go decrease as worldwide accents become the norm.

Here is a great article on the reality of our STEM employment, http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
you can also visit cis.org, an immigration impact group that does in depth research – with many sources cited – as it tries to wake up people to the new reality of our technology “thinking” jobs and the real impact of unnecessary immigration. Immigration that has helped create stagnation of wages as non-indebted foreigners, whom are coming from the nearly third world to our modern shores, and can live much cheaper than we with our loan payments, fancy car leases and our big screen tv credit cards, sign up for thousands and thousands of dollars less in salary.

Coming out of college with debt, and no clear cut way to pay it off as fast as possible, is a recipe for disaster.

And millions keep signing up for the disaster wagon. Voluntarily and with grandiose ideas of future greatness.

If my child was pursuing a degree using debt, I would very strongly suggest they plan on working two, or three jobs for the first five years out of school. One to gain experience and try to subsist on, and the others to put 100% toward that bitch, the student loan.

I know this isn’t happening, I see the new grads, and drop outs, and their current McJobs and McPaychecks, and they don’t have enough to pay more, but are, by and large, refusing to do MORE to get out from under it. But they do have the latest and greatest phone, and they do have car leases and the associated expensive car insurance sitting in the drive.

That I will never understand. As long as they have those debts, even if they are only having to pay $5 a month, their plate of shit will grow larger (thanks math!) and it will cost them everywhere they turn.

We, as a nation, have sat back for the past 70 years and laughed as kid after kid gets ass-raped and lied to by academia, and the gubment, and the banksters. Any of us that went through it knows the waste, stupidity, and insanity (and theory) over reality and results, that college, taxes or compound interest, actually is/was. And now we are sending kids that have been judged incapable of drinking a beer into hundreds of thousands in debt. You can judge a people, or a person, by the way they treat the children, seniors, and invalids. Based on that we ‘murkins are true pieces of shit.

We went off the rails a long time ago, now it is just the sickeningly amusing ride of watching things implode one-by-one.

I, for one, can’t wait until these “ivory” towers implode into a dung-heap of worthless teachers that truly can’t teach, and definitely can’t do, struggling. Then, maybe, things can start to change.

Until then, good luck, think outside the norm, hunker down and enjoy life. It’s all we’ve ever had.

I say this, having degrees in Engineering and Comp Sci (Penn State 1972).

A tech degree will serve you well – for a while.

However there has been (starting around 1995) an assault with H1-B visas. These people are literally indentured servants, at low pay for a couple of years. Most of them know very little, rely on wrote memorization, and lie like hell.

Once the ‘dot heads’ get into an organization – they load it up with more ‘dot heads’.

But let’s get past the dot heads.

The sad part is that management will probably ‘throw you away’ by the time you are 45 – cause you are too expensive – and they figure new grads – can build on what you have done.

I was fortunate – they didn’t throw me away till I was 60. Now I do support for crappy MRP / ERP packages.

My advice is have an alternative lined up by the time you’re 45 – 50.

Dutchman – your personal observations do not match the posted facts, so sorry.

Gubmint – I gather you don’t own the patents. Your point re teachers is very good, but your personal experience is a very small sample size.

@Buckhed,

I is impressed bye you’re progression! Good yob!

BSME, Gatorland, 1962.

Comparative difficulty in curricula: Guys in danger of flunking out of engineering would transfer their major to education, and then brag a bit about making the dean’s list.

Sure, many good teachers out there, but it’s a much easier deal for the sheepskin.

I went the Navy route and graduated with an economics degree from Arizona State. Unfortunately growing up in a lower class family makes breaking into the investment analyst field very difficult as I have no connections. There are kids from my graduating class in their big dog associate jobs just because they knew someone, not to mention those same clowns wouldn’t have passed if I didn’t carry them through half the upper level course work. I’ll keep busting my ass towards obtaining my CFA Level 1 and working at my mcjob and helping my parents out.

Your personal experiences are a smaller sample than LL’s. It’s funny how over achievers believe their own bull shit.

There have been some very astute observations made on this post, Gayle, TE, et al.

LL, eight or so independent observations are not a small sample size, and Dman has a point, who stands to gain from this press release? The higher education system. Your life sucks, if it does, because you majored in the wrong area in college. No, it doesn’t, it sucks because our federal government is sucking the life out of you, and allowing the corporate sector to do the same.

Up until 2000, software engineers owned 80% of the most expensive homes in Hawaii, the most expensive vacation homes in the world. Since 2000, those homes are owned by Hedge Fund managers. Where are they represented in those stats?

I’m calling bullshit on the post and going with Dman on this one.

Thanks to the guys who reminded me about the 45 and out, tf you aren’t upper management by then you are heading toward the door. Your boss appreciates you, gives you raises, then is forced to can you because you cost too much. Then they promote the guy you trained to take your job and hire a heavily-accented new grad for his job.

Which saves the company tons of money, thus making your boss, and his boss, bigger bonuses as salaries drop and profits rise.

I saw this time and again when the dotcom/Y2K economy started to fade. I was inundated with highly qualified, highly skilled, middle aged people with very high salary requirements. Sad thing was they needed jobs at the same time the jobs were going dark. Enter the Clinton/Gingrich H1-B increases (which, btw, did not really get big until AFTER the jobs were gone, no media on that shit) War on Terrorism and the new grads got those replacement jobs. Middle aged continued to get the shaft. I personally know guys that were making over $200k in ’99, highly skilled and highly praised that are now working Geek Squad for $11 an hour, part time.

Yes, with a STEM degree you have a better chance of getting a real job. If you have connections you might be able to get a paid-for-life gubment job. But increasingly those are going to contract houses, and the heavy accents.

Continuing to believe that the world is working the way it “always” has is a fool’s errand. And setting up many for failure. No wonder suicide rates are climbing.

BUT, this is what I do know, if you go above and beyond your competition, look at finding a job as a job, continuously hone and grow your skills/specialty, AND leave enough jobs with great references (whom will actually talk about you), and you will work when others don’t. I have to believe that this has always been true, just dismissed by the majority as “too hard,” “too crazy,” or not worth it.

So it goes…

TPC, thanks for that too!

You are onto something with the INTJ too. The dominant personality type of those that the sciences/engineering/math appeal too tend to be the quietest and easiest-going. They just want to be left alone to do their jobs. So, when they are eliminated they have few friends in the more vocal, and listened to, parts of the company, thus no voice in validating their experiences to the outside world and common man.

When I was talking to hundreds and hundreds of IT/Engineering types, I learned of all sorts of crap dished upon their heads. Training their own replacements – both foreigners that were taking the knowledge outside the country, and foreigners that were H1-B’d in, being docked when the laws of physics/coding limitations wouldn’t let some new product exist, being fired because the boss had to cut expenses, and as the most learned and accomplished, you got axed first because the savings were the most significant.

Somebody mentioned tool and die. That I know about too. Michigan lost over 50% of its tool and die companies as the big three and lots of smaller manufactured, offshored or closed down. The ones that are left are generally doing ok, for now, as the reality of cheap prices from China meets quality and duration of the tools provided. My brother is a General Manager of a decent sized tooling company. The biggest problem he has is that ‘murkins are no longer motivated by doing a good job, nor earning more money through more hours. It isn’t that he can’t find skilled workers, it is that finding people that actually work enough to cover their own salaries is getting harder. And a continuously changing and shrinking customer base.

Conflagration of events. The hard working have to work harder, the lazy are being bailed out by cheap credit and the gubment (for now), the playing field is intentionally being skewed against our middle class, and we sit around and argue about blaming the victim or not.

Yet another corrupted, polluted, over-regulated, gubment down, nightmare.

Learn to grow food in hidden places and find alternative/natural products for community health, I get the feeling those will be the most important “degrees” in the next couple decades.