The Engineering Shortage Made Simple - Op Ed by Ted Rall

[Tim in N FL]

An engineer buddy of mine forwarded this to me today...

Now, let it be known that I AM NOT supporting Her Rall's views here. I just know that
there are a good # of engineer-type folks here and might want to read and comment...blast away but
don't shoot the messenger...so to speak

There is no doubt in my mind that Rall has some "unresolved issues" with which he contends
and plays out in his column and political cartoons.

http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/

Now, I know some pretty liberal folks but this guy is way way way left of them.
RobbieR (1st post below)...you're right...he does go off on rants...

Best,
Tim

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20050615/c ... NlYwN0bWE-

WE'RE LOOKING FOR A FEW BORING DORKS By Ted Rall
Tue Jun 14, 8:05 PM ET

The Engineer Shortage Made Simple

NEW YORK--Have you ever noticed (to paraphrase a famously vulgar George Carlin joke) that the people who want you to become a scientist are the last ones who'd want to work as one themselves? New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has lately been pimping a book that bemoans the decreasing influence of the United States in the hard sciences. "For the first time in our history," Friedman quotes Harvard president Lawrence Summers as telling him, "we are going to face competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia." Friedman riffs: "We can't rely on importing the talent we need anymore--not in a flat world where people can now innovate without having to emigrate...There is a real sense of urgency in India and China about 'catching up' in talent-building. America, by contrast, has become rather complacent."

Don't mistake Friedman's trash talk for genuine alarmism. If he worried about Indians and Chinese kicking our butt in the computer programming and particle physics games, he could quit his cushy gig at the Times and apply to M.I.T. But that's the book biz.

What's lamentable about this latest why-do-our-kids-suck-at-math hand-wringing is that too many Americans are coming away from the conversation with the message that we're losing an intellectual arms race because our young men and women are lazy, stupid or both. As a recent study of high school kids in 26 states showed, 22 percent of entering college freshmen are required to take remedial math classes. Math and science have become lower priorities in the secondary educational system. But as I can personally attest, there's a good reason that fewer young Americans are pursuing careers in the sciences: the jobs suck.

Pressured by my parents to choose a major "that trains you for a job," I spent the first three of my undergraduate years at Columbia University as an applied physics major at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I considered switching to civil engineering until several professors helpfully pointed out that there hasn't been much work for civil engineers since our country essentially stopped building dams, bridges and other large-scale projects decades ago.

Columbia's liberal arts requirements exceed those of tech dork mills like CalTech and M.I.T. but their typical engineering student's ignorance of such essentials of American citizenship as politics, history and literature was staggering nonetheless. A disproportionate percent of the student body was composed of foreign nationals, but they weren't the only ones allowed to graduate without enough knowledge of English to compose a cover letter. My classmates' single-minded dedication to their studies came at the expense of reading the newspaper, listening to music and campus activism. Engineering students were widely--and accurately--regarded as boring careerists. Who'd want such geeks as coworkers?

Visits to the Career Services office reinforced the grim picture of life as a scientist. I knew I'd need a high-paying job to pay off my student loans after graduation. Dow Chemical, Monsanto, General Electric--all the decent offerings required spilling brain cells on the machinery of mass death on behalf defense contractors. An ex-girlfriend who'd graduated a couple of years before me worked as a physicist for a company that was secretly developing genetically modified organisms for use in internationally banned biological weapons. She was assigned to a team trying to perfect long-range lasers to incinerate cities and towns from the sky. "We're all sinners," I remember lecturing her over beers one night, "and we all do things we regret. But if there's a hell I'm positive that anyone who does what you do will be on the express elevator, going down."

Not much has changed. "But it's not just defense contractors that are hiring engineers," promises GraduatingEngineer.com. "The military...is also looking for a few good engineers and computer science grads to hire." Check your conscience when you clock in.

Just after I learned enough about nuclear fission to make me someone Saddam would have liked to meet, I got myself thrown out of college. My engineering classes were too boring to keep my interest and too hard besides. But I've come to believe that I sabotaged my studies because I was depressed by the thought of working for those monsters alongside idiots. Wall Street, which cared less about my B.A. than my I.Q., paid my rent until I returned to Columbia a few years later as a history major.

Since then I've heard from my former engineering school classmates. None were close to starving, but even those who went on to obtain masters degrees and doctorates were laid off when government contracts expired and projects were canceled. My brilliant ex-girlfriend, pushed out the door when her fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent error caused an expensive defense satellite to reenter the atmosphere and burn up, had trouble finding work elsewhere. Employment security was haphazard across the spectrum but engineers were especially prone to bouncing from job to job separated by scary income gaps.

High school and college students considering their futures know that work as a scientist is morally nasty, brutally alienating and financially insecure. That's why nearly a million engineering-related job openings remain vacant in the United States. If the young men and women of Pakistan and Bangladesh want the work, let them have it.

Copyright 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

[Edit by Tim in N FL on [TIME]1118939720[/TIME]]

[RobbieR]

This guy is absolutely clueless when it comes to the engineering profession.

But it's not surprising coming from this wacko. I've read his previous rants about political issues. I've concluded long ago that his driveway does not go to the end of the street.

[Matt]

Hrmm.

I work for a "large software company in the Redmond Washington Area that makes a lot of software, some of which is almost certainly on your computer"

I've interviewed candidates face to face for more than 10 different positions at this company.

It sucks how many people got past multiple levels of phone screening (from people who are tasked with nothing but figuring out if a person is smart enough to be worth "our" time to look at seriously) on to us and really we just couldn't hire even though the positions had been open for months.

Note that these were entry level, straight out-of-college positions.

Id say for these positions, we'd hire between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 of the people we saw. By the time a person "saw" us, it meant we thought they were promising enough that we flew them to redmond for a few days and paid 100% of their expenses.

The computer sector is real, real ugly right now. There are a lot of unqualified people that haven't figured out that they should be doing something else yet. They're clogging the system and keeping the few legitimately employable people (who are unemployed) out of the interviewing rooms. Smaller businesses and non-technology shops are really upset about getting bured so badly in the dot com days, by hiring shitheads that wanted the money but didn't have the passion or the talent. HR people are writing buzzword job descriptinos that want you to be able to do everything like a pro and then want to pay you crap money for it. Nevermind that they cant accurately judge if you can satisfy the "ask" to begin with during an interview.

This guy is kind of a wacko, based on this article. I actually worked at a defense contractor prior to this job, and they weren't paying enough to keep me. I told the hiring manager as much and she more or less said "i know, but i need to keep losing people before the upper guys figure out we need to up the pay a bit".

The "evil" aerospace industry is NOT where the money is right now.. and hasn't been in a long time. We out-spent russia and won the cold war, and the defense sector has been contracted bit by bit (overall) ever since.

I actually think the defense sector will greatly expand in the next 10-20 years because rooting out terrorists and shutting them down is a fundamentally different problem than what we got really good at doing over the last 50 years. There's a lot of tough work here and anything with "homeland security" in its name gets money, (except stuff like securing our borders, which is apparently political suicide

[Tim in N FL]

Hi Matt,
Wow...thanks for your thoughts. This is what I was hoping to do by posting up the Rall op ed piece. I think he's a bit off his
rocker in terms of his views but ya have to give it to him for speaking his mind in an uncensored manner....daily.

I actually think the defense sector will greatly expand in the next 10-20 years because rooting out terrorists and shutting them down is a fundamentally different problem than what we got really good at doing over the last 50 years. There's a lot of tough work here and anything with "homeland security" in its name gets money, (except stuff like securing our borders, which is apparently political suicide

The last paragraph (quoted above) in your post really resonated with some of my own thoughts about the state of the high-tech sector and the current political political climate domestically and worldwide.

Others have thoughts to share on these issues?

Best,
Tim

[bob knox]

I can't help but get a little more than riled up by jack@sses like that clown. How exactly will a journalist (or entertainer for that matter) make my life permantly better in any way? I've been doing engineering work (mechanical) for over 10 years now. Most of what I have done is auto industry related. Currently I am employed by one of the best Industrial Design/Product Development firms in the country (my opinion of course). We have found that the big $'s are in the medical industry. We are working to save peoples lives with less invasive procedures and shorter surgery times every day. With the baby boomers getting older and needing more medical care, medical companies are dumping unimaginable amounts of cash to make procedures quicker and more reliable. They also want to keep everything, including manufacturing, State side. Creative problem solving is NOT something you can outsource. This country would be a much lesser place without our engineers.

[Matt]

Bob -

yep. I'm pretty libertarian in world view but for food production, defense, and fundamental infrastructure engineering i think an interventionist government policy is in order from a national security perspective. i.e., we want to be self sufficient or on a self-sufficiency ready-alert in those sectors.

We can't afford to lose our edge in super computing, for instance, (although some would argue that we have, with the NEC SX series). We can't afford to become dependant on other nations for basic food items. We shouldn't need to rely on foreign engineering and manufacturing in order to be able to operate power plants, build highways, and build aircraft/tanks/firearms. Many police forces and special units are selecting foregin built firearms, which, while very good, concerns me somewhat about our native production capacity but more about our native firearm engineering.

When it comes right down to it, as long as we have the will and the capacity to feed ourselves and shoot our enemies, our country will do just fine. If we become dependant on anyone else for either of those, we're in bad shape.

[Shawn D.]

I've taken personal offense to Ted Rall's opinions/positions/logic (sic) ever since he came to my attention over Pat Tillman's death.

There's a good reason he doesn't understand engineering or its importance -- he's a liberal, and an ultra-liberal at that. There's something in the liberal mindset and/or way of thought that generally precludes them from understanding engineering, just as artists are generally not conservatives. You can have an opinion about art, but art cannot be objectively tested to be valid or not valid, and while you can have an opinion about a technical path to follow, engineering solutions can almost always be objectively tested for their validity. For example, an aircraft can be verified to be able to take payload A off from a runway of length B at C altitude and perform D, E, F, and G maneuvers in H environment, using I fuel over J range -- it's not about how you feel about the fairness of A-J, it's whether A-J are correct.

One of the things I always find amusing and frustrating about folks like Rall is that they denigrate the very folks who are providing the tools they use to disseminate their misguided opinions -- how far would the internet have gotten if a bunch of cartoonists had been in charge?