Reversing the Loss of Science and Engineering Careers 375
walterbyrd writes "In response to the alleged shortages of qualified American engineers and technology professionals, numerous initiatives have been launched to boost interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers and to strengthen STEM education in the United States. Unfortunately, these programs have not proven successful, and many blame the laziness of modern students, the ineptitude of their teachers, poor parenting or, when there are no other excuses remaining, they may even jump to moral decay as a causative agent. However, the failure of STEM is because the very policies that created the shortages continue unabated. This is not a uniquely American problem. The best way to increase interest in STEM degrees is by making certain that STEM careers are actually viable."
Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:4, Informative)
this...
The only way to get a raise these days is to company jump. Oh and watch out for the age barrier.
If there were a real shortage wages would be increasing to make it more attractive and many older workers would not be passed over.
Its not the late 90s anymore folks. You will have to make yourself stand out to be hired.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not the late 90s anymore folks. You will have to make yourself stand out to be hired.
Or, you can just do what today's smart kids are doing, and avoid the field altogether.
It's actually a pretty good field if you're a people person, and really like schmoozing and sitting in meetings all day. You just have to struggle through all the hard engineering classes, get an MBA to go with it, then struggle your way through the first few years of work experience as an engineer while you develop your contacts and work your way into management, then work your way up the management ladder. The sky's the limit there; you can go all the way up to CEO if you're a really good schmoozer (though to be CEO of a really big company, you'll probably need a degree from a more prestigious university, but for the lesser companies this isn't necessary, any old MBA will do).
But if you're a technical person, are not that great at chit-chatting and bullshitting with people while playing golf, don't like sitting in meetings all day, and actually like doing technical work, engineering's not a very good field.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez, go work for a small company. I have about 1 hr of meetings per week and work with my hands (not just typing keys) daily.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to miss the point. You're never going to get, working as an engineer at a small company, the kind of pay that you'd get as a middle manager at a large corporation. Plus, your career is over when you're 40; managers don't have to worry about that.
Of course, the downside is that you do little of value and you sit in meetings all day when you're a manager, but so what? Bring your laptop/smartphone and play games and claim you're answering emails, and then enjoy the cash after work is over (while the engineers you supervise are still hard at work into the evening hours to meet the unrealistic deadlines you set).
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Informative)
I am on a team with 9 software engineers, not counting QE. 4 of the team members are definitely older than 40 (I believe one is now in his late 50s/early 60s even), and two others are in our mid-30s. No one is under 30.
Then again, all the managers I've had here have been badasses who make huge contributions to getting good stuff out the door, too.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the parent comment's point in saying "your career is over when you're 40" is that at 40, you have reached the top of your career ladder unless you move into management (in a large corporation).
I'm in science role, and at 38, have reached this point myself. I am in a large corporation, and have started the shift into management, though it isn't something I'm particularly good at or particularly enjoy. In the context of a large organisation, a 45 year old who has avoided management roles is likely to be perceived in some quarters as a failure, and may be first in line for redundancy when the next downturn hits.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you can just do what today's smart kids are doing, and avoid the field altogether.
and
Way to miss the point. You're never going to get, working as an engineer at a small company, the kind of pay that you'd get as a middle manager at a large corporation. Plus, your career is over when you're 40; managers don't have to worry about that.
Of course, the downside is that you do little of value and you sit in meetings all day when you're a manager, but so what? Bring your laptop/smartphone and play games and claim you're answering emails, and then enjoy the cash after work is over (while the engineers you supervise are still hard at work into the evening hours to meet the unrealistic deadlines you set).
make me feel like you are an engineer who has somehow become embittered with the profession. I'm sure you have a reason you feel the way you do but I work as an engineer at a small company with around 20 other engineers and none of any age are nearly this cynical about it. As previous posts have mentioned, engineering classes are hard, there's no girls, and you probably will never get the respect you deserve from the rest of society, but we do it because we love it. To be successful as an engineer requires that you enjoy what you're doing. Once you stop enjoying it, then it's time to move on. Keep in mind here that "successful" does not necessarily equal "high pay" or "upper management" position; many would define it as having a job where they don't actually feel like they are going to work.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Way to miss the point. You're never going to get, working as an engineer at a small company, the kind of pay that you'd get as a middle manager at a large corporation. Plus, your career is over when you're 40
Err what the? Actually all the engineers over 40 I know are private contractors, many have their own contracting firms with just one employee, themselves. Those guys are absolutely rolling in the cash. 25+ years experience in an industry, as long as your a chartered engineer or otherwise certified that's when you have literally limitless opportunities. You're a specialist? Even more so.
Re: (Score:3)
While I agree with your point about wage differences between management and engineers (or in my case, programmers) I think you're just being bitter here.
Without proper management, most engineers would be inventing the wheel each and every day again. Or dreaming up solutions independantly that do not match up in the larger picture. Or would just be slacking off themselves because no one is applauding their work.
Management does have a legitimate role, you know. Your failure to recognize this is probably your
Re: (Score:3)
It probably wasn't a lie when he was told that; he was just at the tail end of when it remained true. A generation from now, maybe STEM jobs will be better careers, but there's no way to know that now, and young people choosing a profession always look at what that profession is like currently, so even if the situation changes, it takes a long time for the workforce to catch up.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Clients"? If you have clients, then you're probably not an engineer, but a businessman (who does engineering). There's a bit of a difference. It also means you're a talker; you can't get clients without talking to them at some point, instead of sitting in a cubicle or in a manufacturing facility and doing engineering work and only interacting with coworker engineers and your manager; dealing with customers is a whole different animal.
There's nothing in engineering school that prepares you for going into business; you have to go take some business courses on the side for that. And by running a business, you have much less time to do actual engineering work. Nothing wrong with that, but you can't really call yourself a full-time engineer if you're not engineering full-time. More importantly, all these businesses and politicians screaming for more engineers aren't looking for people who want to start their own small business ASAP, they're looking for people to be workers in big corporations.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
"Customers"? If you have customers, then you're probably not a [plumber|tailor|baker], but a businessman (who does [plumbing|tailoring|baking]).
Sounds even more stupid when you put it like that, doesn't it?
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
3) No girls in companies you will end up working at
4) Facebook friends list is 80% men, most of friends are men. Great if you are networking, crappy if you are trying to network to find the perfect gf/wife. Other majors make balanced set of friends naturally through classes. Their networking, as a result, is exponentially easier.
5) You end up working at a multinational company that pays you less (much less) than finance, law, BUSINESS. Argh. Note that business, finance, and law types went through the OPPOSITE of #1-#4, meaning they end up knowing way more girls, earning more, and having had a better life.
6) Yet, you feel as if you contribute way more to society than money movers, patent leeching lawyers, and smoothtalking male/female bimbos/bimbettes.
You tell ME how f*** up engineering is.
You ask why I do it? Because I love analysis, creating, designing, and doing.
Re: (Score:3)
You forgot the work is boring. Who wants to do a boring job? Good thing I can stream RT.com or radio or audiobooks to take my mind off the mind-numbingly dull work. I tell my family the more boring the job, the more you get paid, because few others want to do it.
By the way my pay has gone up. It's about 2.3 times larger than in 2001, though it requires moving around the country (no settling-down and raising a family). I'm surprised to hear people say their pay has stagnated.
>>>Facebook friends
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:4, Informative)
By the way my pay has gone up. It's about 2.3 times larger than in 2001, though it requires moving around the country (no settling-down and raising a family). I'm surprised to hear people say their pay has stagnated.
It has stagnated. After about 10 years of experience, a typical engineer's pay is frozen. You managed to mitigate that to a certain extent by making certain sacrifices, namely probably being a contractor and moving around a lot. Companies, with their shitty management, are constantly becoming desperate to build headcount for some project or another, so they'll hire a bunch of contractors for 6-12 months to work on that project and then get rid of them. The pay can be very good, plus you don't have that problem where you're pushed to work unpaid overtime to meet unrealistic deadlines (or, if you do work overtime, you get 1.5x pay, so you can really make bank), but the downside is that you're a hired gun with no real roots anywhere and you can't have a family, as you said. The managers you work for don't have this problem; they get to go home at 5PM to their nice house (which you could afford with your pay, but you'd be stupid to buy because you probably won't be living in that city in 2 years) and their family, while you go back to your efficiency apartment or residence inn and play with yourself.
Aside - Someone actually *criticized* me because most of my facebook friends are girls.
There's freaks and mental cases anywhere you go. You have to learn to ignore them.
Stagnation begats stagnations (Score:3)
By the way my pay has gone up. It's about 2.3 times larger than in 2001, though it requires moving around the country (no settling-down and raising a family). I'm surprised to hear people say their pay has stagnated
It has stagnated. After about 10 years of experience, a typical engineer's pay is frozen
If your income has stagnated after 10 years of experience, the root cause is that you have stagnated your own career
In Engineering, as well as in Computing (and most other fields of Science) every single day there are new developments, new things, new discoveries
If one works in 2012 but still having the knowledge and skill-set of 2002, please tell us how you expect others to pay you salary increases?
my liberal arts college had 2 girls for every guy (Score:4, Funny)
You went to Surf City Tech?
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
3) No girls in companies you will end up working at
This isn't true. It depends on the company of course, but in my experience, at the large companies (like Intel), there's tons of women.
However, 1) all the women in engineering are married, and most of those in arranged marriages (i.e., if you're a white male, you're not even eligible to date them even if they were single; big culture barrier). 2) the rest of the women are in HR, marketing, finance, etc. So you'll see them occasionally in the hallway, or in the company cafeteria, but you won't see them much in your work areas or even your wing of the building. Heck, they might all be in a separate building.
At the small companies, there might be a few women, but they'll be older and married, and working as the HR person or receptionist or the owner's wife (yes, this was a real position at my first company; I'm not sure what her official title was). That's if you're lucky, lots of small companies don't have any women at all.
4) Facebook friends list is 80% men, most of friends are men. Great if you are networking, crappy if you are trying to network to find the perfect gf/wife.
Exactly right. IME, if you're an engineering major, you better make some time in your busy college schedule to find a wife before you graduate. It's just like how people used to say women went to college to get their "MRS degree", except these days it's reversed as there's more girls in college these days than boys. Make sure you pick well and don't get stuck with a girlfriend you end up breaking up with after you've left college and entered the workforce, because suddenly your choices of available single women has dried up.
6) Yet, you feel as if you contribute way more to society than money movers, patent leeching lawyers, and smoothtalking male/female bimbos/bimbettes.
Totally disagree. This one completely depends on luck, and maybe a little on your own choices. If you go to a big multinational (since the pay is generally better), chances are very good that whatever project you're working on will be shitcanned because it was a crappy copy of a competitor's product, or it wasn't well planned, or they screwed up execution and "missed the market window", or there was a competing project within the company that got chosen instead, etc. Even if it does get out the door, how well it succeeds in the market is anyone's guess; it might be the next iPhone or Facebook, or it might be the next OS/2, or it might be the next Pontiac Aztek. If you end up working on some revolutionary product that becomes a giant hit and changes the world, count yourself lucky. It's quite likely you'll waste your entire career doing nothing of real note, and nothing you worked on will be remembered by anyone.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+1 Cathartic
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but when your girlfriend is as much an engineer as you, LIFE ROCKS!
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Some people value science and engineering more than girls.
It's quite more fulfilling to engineer something than to have sex with a shallow woman.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can, you know, have sex with an awesome interesting woman instead.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your #1-4 do certainly match my experience. Your point #5 though doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts.
The notion that engineering majors make less than finance and business majors isn't borne out by the statistics. Law is an unfair comparison since that's an additional 3 years of expensive professional degree tuition, although their new-graduate employment numbers aren't doing that great.
Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs (pay close attention to the mean base salary and % employment numbers):
http://dyson.cornell.edu/undergrad/careers.php#placement [cornell.edu]
Here we have an undergraduate engineering program, also hyped as being highly ranked, at the same university, for the same year:
Computer Science: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=78827 [cornell.edu]
Electrical Engineering: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=78828 [cornell.edu]
Now, the business degree majors do have their data updated for 2011, the engineers are only at 2010, but take a look at the 8 year trend reports to satisfy yourself that the numbers are relatively stable:
http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/postgrad_reports.cfm [cornell.edu]
Undergrad CS majors are making 28% more than the undergrad business majors. Electrical engineers are not doing as well as the CS majors, but still better than the business majors.
The majority of business majors end up in just as boring and dead-end jobs as the majority of other majors. You can't look at the high-flying business and finance guys on Wall Street and think that those guys are "typical" for business majors any more than you can look at Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, or any of a whole range of tech company CEOs and execs, and think that they are typical engineers.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is really a symptom of our monetary system. With the federal reserve and fiat fractional reserve banking system you can make more money in finance because you can literally create money. It's no wonder the people given the privilege of making money by flipping bits on a computer are rich. In a hard money 100% reserve system the miners and mints would create the money. These are engineers and techs.
The system we have now is designed to steal wealth from productive people and transfer it to the privilege
Re: (Score:3)
"They will always be rich."
Historically, this is not what happens. The differences between rich and poor increase over time. When the differences are big enough, the majority of poor rebels and kills the minority of rich (which have paid armies on their side, so it is usually a bloodbath).
Then the few people that remain says "we'll do it better this time!" and they start the cycle again.
Re: (Score:3)
A major problem with non-fiat currencies is that there simply is more wealth than precious metals, so you can't represent all of the world's wealth in precious metals. The result is necessarily deflationary. Also, you get people wasting their time mining which has no intrinsic value (at least Wall St. is creating liquidity and market signals... just poorly).
I disagree with this statement, but I would argue that this is closer to the truth. The main issue with using precious metals as a currency base is that you can put those metals to work with another currency system that doesn't use precious metals more efficiently (aka use copper, silver, and gold as industrial materials rather than as a currency) and on the whole allows those materials to float based on real supply and demand rather than merely because it is the currency itself.
What I completely disagree
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need a commodity based currency.
You just need to tell the Federal Reserve to stop loaning out money altogether. The only thing they should be doing is 1:1 exchanges of US currencies (dollars to cents), and only printing to replace damaged currency. There shouldn't be more units of money in existence now than there was 100 years ago. The extra is going into the Federal Reserve's rich friends (sometimes called "investors", often overseas) pockets, a little bit at a time to a few people.
We could at least start with auditing the Federal Reserve.
What I completely disagree with though is the notion that deflation is necessarily a bad thing. It is bad for some bankers and the presumption that you must borrow money from some central organization in order to grow your business or finance a home, but for ordinary consumers and businesses which aren't in the financial services sector it really isn't necessarily a bad thing. The worst part right now is that the economies and financial structures of the world are geared to the presumption that inflation is inevitable.
Regardless, if gold-backed currencies came back into vogue, the value of those metals would rise to reflect true wealth from around the world.
I see deflation as a result of a more efficient economy. When technology makes it cheaper to create bread, the value of currency should deflate in relation to that. It's like you had 100 loafs of bread stored in the bank, and now you have 200 because better technology makes it possible for the same time investment of work. In the short term, most technology improvements are difficult to cope with, they require people to change their outlook on things. This is what is reflected in most "deflation is bad" arguments. But those who only see short term results will suffer long term consequences.
All in all, with the technology improvements we've had in the last hundred years, our currency should have deflated tremendously, maybe even 100 or 1000 times. The interesting question then becomes, "where did all the extra money go?"
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why study engineering?
1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).
Yep, I enjoyed the challenge. Actually took quite a few extra honors options that I didn't technically need to, and enrolled in a bunch of pretty difficult electives for the heck of it. Yes, I also failed / withdrew / incompleted some of them... over a few rough semesters I managed to collect one of every possible grade... but really, where else can you explore your limits? I didn't get into a hard school just to try to skirt by with the bare minimum easy classes and avoid all the challenging courses and professors. Besides, no one has ever asked for a transcript (maybe if I went the academic route grades would be important)
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
Wish this would increase... but at least the girls that are there can be super nerdy++, which is a turn-on for some of us . Besides, this is a plus if you already have a gf from HS like I did. Can be tricky, since you can't really count on girls and relationships to mature until after college. I suppose I lucked out (esp. since my gf/wife ended up financing my last semester of college).
But yeah, unless you get lucky with project teams, chances of finding love on the engineering quad are slim. However, a lot of our professional engineering societies were pretty much run almost exclusively by women... even the Society of Women Engineers wasn't sexist about letting guys join in if you get really desperate. Also, there are usually plenty of girls in classes / clubs like ballroom dancing who dig science / engineering types (particularly the foreign girls)... because face it, you don't really want to be talking to your gf about problem sets all the time.
3) No girls in companies you will end up working at
Given how much trouble people get into for shitting where they eat, this is probably a plus.
4) Facebook friends list is 80% men, most of friends are men. Great if you are networking, crappy if you are trying to network to find the perfect gf/wife. Other majors make balanced set of friends naturally through classes. Their networking, as a result, is exponentially easier.
Get a gf/wife in education, then their social sphere is the exact opposite, and you have achieved balance. Plus then your SO can have all her hot teacher friends over and you can impress them with your... whatever. (Teacher friends are easily impressed, or at least do a great job being super friendly about it even if they aren't.) Also you get to constantly play hookup master with all of your respective friends. (not recommended with friends you want to keep, but entertaining nonetheless)
5) You end up working at a multinational company that pays you less (much less) than finance, law, BUSINESS. Argh. Note that business, finance, and law types went through the OPPOSITE of #1-#4, meaning they end up knowing way more girls, earning more, and having had a better life.
Yeah, but those people are sleazy looking. Also you feel better when you find out they're all indirect overhead and the first on the chopping block when it's time to tighten belts.
6) Yet, you feel as if you contribute way more to society than money movers, patent leeching lawyers, and smoothtalking male/female bimbos/bimbettes.
Heh, yeah, people who make money out of money are in it just as long as other people buy into their bluff. But when it hits the fan, the resourceful ones with the ability will still be... working. Woo. At least it's something that will always have value, and not just evaporate.
You tell ME how f*** up engineering is.
You ask why I do it? Because I love analysis, creating, designing, and doing.
And some people's life goal is to be able to go shopping on som
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there really was a shortage then wages would rise.
Rising wages mean more people try to get into that field.
We're still hearing about the "shortage" but wages aren't going up.
Instead, there are a lot of companies lobbying Congress for changes in the H-1B visa program to get more cheap engineers from overseas.
It's about profits. Not a shortage of engineers.
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's certainly a shortage of engineers that are US citizens. If your small company can't afford the lawyering for H1-B, greencard, etc, it can really suck to find anyone remotely qualified.
And at least in software, once you have 5+ years of experience, the field does pay pretty nicely (as long as you keep your skills up to date!). But junior engineers are so much easier to hire abroad for next to nothing, so it sucks to be a US college grad unless you're in the top few % of talent such that the top few % of companies will hire you (Google et al have the budget to overpay for new college grads, and can keep them long enough to benefit from training them - not true of most companies.)
Back in the days when people actually stayed at companies for a long time (and loyalty went both ways), it was an easy sell to management to take the loss in hiring a junior engineer and training them up, because both the company and the employee would be around long enough to recoup that loss. But now neither is true - unless you have a name like Google, a junior engineer will likely leave as soon as he's not junior, and even if he doesn't there's a good chance the company will go under or be acquired.
I know it's fashionable to blame the evil corporations for everything, but realistically there's been a structural change in the industry that it hasn't adapted to yet - there's not a model to follow yet! It has always been the successful leading companies in the field that took the hit in training the majority of junior engineers, but today those leaders only do that for a very small slice of top talent, and no one has filled that gap.
And the fair result may be that being a junior engineer just pays crap, because you're competing in a global market. I think a lot of engineers would be OK with that if US companies would actually make low-wage job offers to US citizens, instead of just blindly looking abroad. Heck, my first development job paid significantly less than a "fresher" in India makes, and I got by! But companies don't seem to do that.
Even so, you're still much more likely to find employment with a degree with "engineer" in its name than a degree with "studies" in its name.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Where in the bay area do they pay engineers $40k/yr? Where I work, we start our juniors at twice that and we aren't even considered a particularly well paying organization...
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than the richest 0.1% of the population who is seeing wage increases these days? It's called the wage productivity gap and basically, everyone who isn't running companies is getting screwed, it's not just engineers. The wealthiest 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% are getting wage increases sure (though more the top 0.1% than 1%, but anyway)
http://currydemocrats.org/in_perspective/american_pie.html from 2007 and obviously slightly biased but it has a couple of good figures on it. Pay since about 1988 has been significantly decoupling from productivity, and where has it been going? Right, not to the people at the bottom.
Therein lies the crux of all of the problem for people who aren't in the upper class in the US (and to a lesser extent everywhere else). If you worked more productively you would get more money, but not so much anymore, since someone else will work for less.
Engineering, and CS are still good programmes (yes, english spelling) to be in, since you still get more money than other fields generally. The other sciences are sort of a crap shoot, if you can't get a PhD, or can't get a technician job they're really bad to have done, but otherwise they can work out ok. The problem is that a construction worker with no education past highschool will make as much as a degree in biology or physics will during say, a post doc, and the scientists will have needed 10 years to get to that point, where the construction worker starts out close to that.
There's a shortage (Score:3)
Re:Engineering shortage? (Score:4, Insightful)
sure I'm gonna burn some karma here, but I'm always entertained by the fact that when articles mention science and engineering, the majority of the comments are about computers, software and IT. That is but a small subset of engineering (well, if you consider IT part of it at all). The majority of engineering deals in some way with the physical world. And they've generally fared much better in the economic downturn (I've seen numbers ranging from a third to a half of the general unemployment rate), mainly because of the 'shortage'. or, at least, lack of excess.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You should check out the Hays salary guide for Australian engineers. An Senior Engineer commands a $200K salary over here, and as you can guess we have record numbers of engineers at university.
Of course nobody is interested in STEM. (Score:4, Funny)
SEED is similarly not of interest to the average college student.
Once we start programs promoting BUD, then we'll see some results.
Re: (Score:3)
"Besides"?
Looking back... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't the booms in STEM careers seem to come around times when the regular person finds more interest in them? Make them interesting again and people will flock to them. Glorify worthless endeavors and people will flock to those. How many children chose to go into engineering fields because of the space race? I'm betting a lot. How many today are instead following in the footsteps of modern celebrities and other people and groups that the media puts on a pedestal?
Maybe STEM just needs to be cool to Regular Joe again.
</mini soap box>
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've always been fascinated by that time in the mid-20th Century known as the Space Age. The public was excited about "atomic power" as it was known then, breaking the sound barrier, the moon race, and all that. That, and certain strands of modern art combined to make architectural elements echoing the themes of space and atomic/nuclear physics - orbits, star shapes, etc. These memes escaped their birthnests and could be found all over - restaurants, gas stations, signage, furniture, etc. Regular Joes
STEM's Weakness in today's economy (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with STEM jobs is that they involve actually doing things rather than directing them to be done: the lowest rung on the ladder. Nevermind that the skills required to perform these tasks are far more specialized and difficult to attain than those required by their managers. US students may have sensed that STEM careers are for suckers and are best outsourced; you need only compare the financial state of two equally intelligent 50-year-olds--a scientist and a businessman--to see why.
Most STEM careers are not worth the effort in the US. The ones that are combine technical skills with entrepreneurship or pure luck.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with STEM jobs is that they involve actually doing things rather than directing them to be done: the lowest rung on the ladder. Nevermind that the skills required to perform these tasks are far more specialized and difficult to attain than those required by their managers.
Most management is actually an overhead, because they don't do anything productive. Some actually hinder the company from functioning properly. A few actually do the job productively, but not many, IMHO. If that was expressed in the company accounts, things would look very different.
Unless your one of the few (Score:3, Insightful)
who are truly passionate about it, whats your incentive? average pay? 40 18+ hour days with no days off? spending weeks at a time away from home and family while being anally examined by a customer?
who doesn't want a part of that?
all nationalism is utterly stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
every article written about 'the decline of american labor x' needs to wake up and realize that 'american labor x' ceased to have meaning when corporations became globalized. NYSE is not the New York Stock Exchange. it is NYSE-Euronext, with its tentacles in pies all over the world. They can have their headquarters anywhere. Companies like IBM are not 'American Companies'. They are companies that happen to have a lot of managers in the United States, but they really don't need to.
There is only one 'STEM labor supply', and it covers the face of the Earth, and that is where corporations and governments get their labor from. We are all in the same boat. The only way to 'save American labor X' is to save global labor x, and that means fighting against corrupt, repressive governments like China, where STEM people are thrown in prison if they criticize the system.
Re: (Score:3)
The NYSE is still the NYSE because the EU nixed the merger.
Re: (Score:3)
What has recently been canned is the acquisition of NYSE-Euronext by Deutsche Borse. In certain markets in the EU the resulting group would have had a too dominant position, so the EU competition authorities didn't authorize the deal.
Re:all nationalism is utterly stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Focusing on hiring Americans is as close to organized labor as we're going to get in my lifetime.
Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
It's simple supply and demand.
Anyone who is smart enough to do STEM is also smart enough to get an MBA for a lot less work, and have 10x the earnings potential.
When CEO's making tens of millions say they can't find engineers, they really mean they can't find engineers for what they want to pay them. If you start paying engineers like executives, management, or sales, you'll have plenty of people stepping up.
Re: (Score:3)
Shortage of students? (Score:5, Informative)
I have a 4 year physics degree, with 3 years experience working in a III-V semiconductor research lab, and I've been trying to find a job in science and engineering for the past 3 months. The problem here is that there is a shortage of entry-mid level jobs. Everyone is looking for 5-10 years experience.
Re: (Score:3)
That's only half true to be honest. I have geographic limitations, and if those vanished there are plenty of interesting jobs. Are you sure there aren't for you also?
Re:Shortage of students? (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of curiosity, what are your geographic limitations? For a lot of careers, you have to go where the jobs are, to a certain extent. Certain industries tend to congregate in certain geographic areas (not necessarily just one, many times there'll be several). So, for instance, if you want to be a petroleum engineer, there's certain places where there's a lot of those jobs available: Texas, Louisiana, Alaska, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, etc. So if you're dead-set on living in Maine because your family is there, you're simply not going to find a job, and you were stupid to choose that major. (I'm assuming there's no oil in Maine.)
Similarly, many engineering professions only have a good supply of jobs in major metro areas. So if you're dead-set on living in Bumpkinville, Wyoming, because all your family is there, again, you're stupid to choose that major or to even go into college for a professional degree. You should have just skipped college and gone to work at the local feed-n-seed store or Piggly Wiggly.
If you're dead-set on living in one specific place, you need to choose your profession around this limitation, and the industries available there. If that means working at the feed-n-seed because that's the only thing in that small town better than McDonald's, then you need to pursue that. But if you're really interested in working in a certain industry, you need to go where that industry is located, and give up on geographic limitations. Of course, there's middle ground; if the industry is only located in one place, then you either need to go there or find a different profession/major. But if the industry has many locations (like how electronics and software are big in Silicon Valley, RTP, Austin, Seattle, plus a bunch of other large metro areas), then even if you hate one of those places, you still have others to choose from and can afford to limit yourself to a certain extent.
Shortage of track record... (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, the problem you are observing with STEM career track is a systematic problem.
Often the folks that are coming into industry from graduate or post-graduate university are looking for a job where they can apply their newly minted skills (let's call that a mid-entry job for argument's sake). Most managers in industry are looking for people that can help them work out problems and are willing to hire smart people and throw them on the job to learn (let's call that an entry-level job for argument's sake), or folks that can help them that are already skilled in the industry who already have lots of experience (let's call that a job for an highly experienced person). Which is basically what you have observed.
Of course there are some jobs for folks that work on advanced projects that require more than entry level experience, but perhaps less than highly experience level. Maybe that is some type of "entry-mid" level job you might be interested in?
Here's the dillema. If you were a hiring manager, would you promote someone that you've seen working on an entry-level basis for a few years to that new advanced project, or hire what we like to call a new-college-grad++ for that position? Well, I can tell you that NCG++ had better knock my socks off before I'd take the risk to hire that person over promoting someone that I know is a smart and a hard worker. That's because hiring new folks is really a crap shoot (sometimes you win, sometimes you lose). Also, if I hire the NCG++ from outside, an inside person that I might have promoted might decide to take off to another company and we'd lose the institutional knowledge that came with that person as they walk out the door to a competitor. As a result, some of these positions just aren't open to outside folks.
Basically, it sounds like you are trying to "retrack" a STEM career from academia to industry. That's is one of the problems built into the system. Mid-career track in academia generally involves lots of publishing and research (which tends to be in one narrow area if you are only doing something for 3 years) where industry tends to value generalized knowledge or dotting "i's" and crossing "t's" on problems on its mid-career folks.
The only advice I have is that if you want to re-track your career at mid-track, you need to get data points on your resume where it shows you can dot i's and cross t's and have lots of general field knowledge (not 2-years of papers in a very narrow area). If you don't you probably have to wait it out until you get 5-10 years of experience at something specific where you can qualify for a highly experienced job in that more narrow area on its own merit, or you can take an entry level job and hope to wow someone. Sometimes that works too. In most successful companies, it doesn't often matter at what level you are hired in, as long as the company lets the good people bubble-up (and most successful companies have this attribute in common). Good luck.
Shortage of bona fide job offers (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot of dishonesty in the job market. Qualified job seekers are rejected all the time.
When an employer asks for 10 years of experience in 20 different languages, systems, applications, and platforms, that could say they don't want to hire anyone. They actually want to hire a cheap foreigner, or the boss's nephew, and are just going through the motions to satisfy the letter of EEOA requirements. They've already found their man, and just copied his resume to the job posting. If the position goes unfilled, then they can complain that there aren't enough qualified applicants no matter the real reason it wasn't filled. In a bigger company, there could be internal politicking going on, with one department using the hordes of hapless job applicants to send a message to other departments. It could also say they have to ask for that much so they aren't buried under resumes. Which of course happens because contrary to what they claim, there is in fact no shortage of qualified job seekers.
To add to the fun, there are the head hunters throwing out bait, to harvest resumes.
And job seekers are pressured to spin and exaggerate to the max without quite lying (wink, wink). Quite common for a good programmer to pick up a programming language quick, then apply for a job that asks for 10 years experience in it, and if hired, pull it off because as we all know, programming ability is not language specific.
Another factor that shows there is no shortage of qualified people is that employers can demand that new hires "hit the ground running". In other words, applicants are expected to bone up on whatever specific technologies are wanted on their own time and dime, rather than spend a month training. Employers don't train people anymore. They've externalized that cost, and gotten away with it, demanding that schools and applicants do that. They complain bitterly that schools don't educate people right, which too often means they were educated instead of trained for a specific position. And they're quick to moan about the waste in spending money to train someone who is just going to leave them. Whether or not it's fair or appropriate, the job applicant is expected to come in already knowing many of the arcane specifics of whatever oddball setup they use.
Re: (Score:3)
This is especially true when the language has only been out for 6. I'm sure everyone who has been around long enough remembers jobs that required 10 years of Java in 2001.
change can only come from the top (Score:4, Insightful)
The decline of engineering as a career in this country is primarily because of two groups: a) top management and b) government policies. MBAs control top management, lawyers control government. Nothing will change until and unless those two groups understand that things need to change.
I'm not optimistic.
Re:change can only come from the top (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:change can only come from the top (Score:4, Insightful)
after a certain point more don't really do much (not criticizing engineering at all, that's how EVERY field works).
Except for the law. The more lawyers they make the more lawyers we end up needing to fight the lawyers they keep making. Its kinda like the Borg...
Re:change can only come from the top (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to respectfully disagree. People hire people because of market opportunities. Market opportunities exist because you can make a profit. The more capable engineers are of building more useful things in less time, the more demand there will be for your services.
I am seeing market opportunities for something new/better all the time; things I could even build on my own if I wasn't entirely too busy with work. Moreover, most times I've needed to hire someone in a situation where I was the hiring manager or if I was an engineer on a team in need, I can say that it has always been hard to find qualified people. I can only think of one time, ever, where there was a position and we passed on someone because of salary. (And I probably could have swung it to a hire, and I later regretted passing. I'd read too many articles like this and was convinced someone equally/nearly equally qualified would come along. Nope. Open position for 6+ months.)
Because there is no money in STEM... (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple answer. Almost all "hard science" is completely outsourced to other countries who can do code for pennies on the dollar compared to US hired. Need something done domestically? H-1Bs are easy to get with "secret requirements".
For people heading to college, there is really only one lucrative major if one doesn't want to be in a tent at some Occupy convention with some sign asking where one's job is, waiting for the next Pike to give them a faceful of pepper spray. That would be law. If you can do programming or IT, you can sit through the classes, get your JD, pass the bar, and have yourself an actual profession, not a job. Law isn't going to be outsourced anytime soon.
There are two ways to make money in the world: Make a bigger pie, or take a piece from someone else. The pie isn't getting any bigger in the US with zero technology advances, the fact that China kills any US industry that seems promising (solar? Hack the US companies, slurp up the trade secrets, then dump the panels for cheaper than they can be made. A PRC victory achieved), and the fact that the US politicians are more interested in "terrorists" and political infighting than actually doing anything to advance the countrey. So, might as well take your pie from others and make a living somehow, because we are in a phase of history of "everything has been invented", and this isn't going to change much for the next 20-30 years.
I know this isn't something /. people want to hear, but you have to go where the money is, and both government and industry have their back turned any US-based engineering. So, you have to change and go with what makes the cash, and that's law.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Because there is no money in STEM... (Score:5, Interesting)
Job availability is a big deal (Score:5, Informative)
Being only a few hundred kilometres from major oil deposits, I see tonnes of people graduating from my institution with Petroleum engineering degrees. Do the majority of these people have a undying passion for the subject? Nope. The jobs are available, and they pay excellently, without having to risk fingers as a rig-pig. It's a smart choice.
I would be curious though to see the employment rates across the US for degrees. Are there engineering degrees for which there is demand, and how does that break out of the overall statistics presented in the article.
Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't find someone who'll sell me a Corvette for $10. That must mean there's a Corvette shortage...
The MBA's, pols, and lobbyists that run our society can't seem to understand that supply and demand applies to other people as well. If the reward for several years of grad school were equal to the risk and cost, you'd see more people in STEM. That's why they went into finance, because that's where the money was.
When the scientists and engineers make more money than the MBA's running the company, I'll imaging you won't have any problem finding them. (And I have both a MBA from a top 25 school and 12 years in high-performance computer. Guess who makes more around here...)
When you say something is unimportant, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.
Re: (Score:3)
What makes you think they don't get it? They have all the incentive in the world to create a glut of engineers on the labor market, and who are personally on the hook for the costs of their training. (And there's even something for the bankers: student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy in the U.S.)
other industries are protected by the govt (Score:5, Insightful)
So, unless one's heart is really into it, why would anyone consider a career in engineering and science?
Re:other industries are protected by the govt (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is where the problem lies... most engineers (And IT people for that matter) are too isolated and only want to do their own thing. If they learn how to gang up and form unions and start lobbying you bet a lot of change will come this way.
Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:3)
I work for a major semi-conductor company in Silicon Valley (California USA), and we have been desperately looking for talented micro-controller firmware software developers and/or hardware engineers that are proficient with wired data-link protocols (UART, SPI, I2C, 1-wire, ISO7816-3, etc.) for nearly a year, and offering a 6 figure salary.
All of the applicants I came across, are either desktop/server developers that have no clue how to develop for a MCU with only a few kB of RAM and EEPROM, or an old school hardware engineer that is not familiar with the above mentioned wired data-link protocols.
If anyone is interested, please send me a PM.
Re:Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
In my youth companies would hire a talented engineer out of school and have him work with an experienced designer in the field to develop skills in a technical specialty such as this, and hang on to him for dear life once the skills were developed. Now the idea is that these specialists are just spring up to meet need and can be let go the instance such needs are fulfilled.
Well what happens is the skills don't get developed that way, and nobody is interested in going $100,000 in debt to get what amounts to be a temporary job.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than holding on for dear life, they could try giving the guy an unsolicited big raise when he's worth more money. Then he wouldn't be inclined to jump ship.
Re:Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
So find someone with a clue and maybe some experience in related areas (e.g. kernel or device driver development), and hire them. I've done microcontroller firmware and had to bit-bang both SPI and I2C, and neither one is rocket science; I learned on the job from the data sheets. Stop looking for the purple squirrel -- the candidate who has exactly the experience you need on the tools you use -- and start hiring people who have the basic skills. This is still difficult, but it's a lot less difficult than looking for the niche candidate who probably already has a job with your competition.
(I'm on the wrong coast and am currently employed doing something else, sorry)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
THIS. I am capable of writing just about any type of software or firmware you can put in front of me - any of assembler, C/C++, Java, Scala/Clojure, Haskell, Python, etc., and steer my way around oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG units, ICEs, and so forth. Not only that, within 2-3 weeks of starting at a company I can be completely productive - writing code, documentation, code reviews, etc
Re:Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
ad454 I believe you but think you are missing something. You, as the technical person, are not seeing any candidates because the generation who cut that technology with their own teeth are too old to get past HR.
My experience spans the development of those protocols; there is a veritable museum's worth of 7816 prototypes in my basement; there are ARM, PIC and MSP430 projects-in-process in front of me right now and I would very much like a job as you describe. You would never even see my resume because I am sixty-something. Anyone who is not sixty-something would not have my experience. Anyone trained in 'software' now would have started with GUI toolkits and unlimited memory. Hardware people are using UML design leading to implementation in astonishingly capable programmable logic devices.
Many of the posts above hit the nail on the head: the MBA managers deliberately under-value the contribution of engineering to their own wealth. They pretend that they somehow create wealth by having meetings. The same people use some of that money to buy politicians at all levels. They also write business textbooks to further solidify their dogma.
Meh. I'll get off your lawn now.
Re:Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:5, Informative)
Very true, at least in part. There are currently good reasons for HR to quietly dispose of the resumes from people over about the age of 55. One is that they are part of a protected group -- so in the event of a sizable layoff, there would be a bunch of extra hoops to jump through to demonstrate that there was no discrimination against older workers. Note that the case law on this is generally that there doesn't have to be intent to discriminate, you're guilty even if it just worked out that way. Second is if your firm has health insurance benefits. Through no fault of their own, 55 is about the dividing line where degenerative diseases -- heart disease, cancer, strokes -- quit being unusual. Particularly at small firms, group premiums will increase sharply as you add older workers.
For the second item, 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured out the answer -- single-payer health financing, or heavy regulation of the insurance companies so that the system functions as a virtual single-payer system. In that situation, hiring an older worker has the same effect on the firm's payments into the health care system as hiring a young worker. As a side effect -- US governments at all levels spend a bigger share of GDP on health care than almost all of the other OECD countries; but in the US that only pays for the elderly, the poor, and government employees (including the military and their dependents), while in the other 33 they manage to provide for the entire population.
Re:Some Niche Engineering Jobs Needed (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF? I2C and the like have been around for decades; I did I2C bit-banging on an MCU in college back in '95. The others aren't much different. The old-school HW engineers could easily figure that stuff out, these protocols are not complicated.
Maybe your problem is you're too cheap. 6 figures in Silicon Valley is peanut pay. If you were in Nebraska or Tennessee or wherever, that'd be a very good salary, but that's nothing in SV. Any employee making that will have to commute 1-2 hours each way to find an affordable place to live.
ugh (Score:3)
STEM grads don't have it nearly as bad as architects or lawyers these days but I'm sure they'll get there.
Top US college majors - a thought (Score:3)
Top US college majors are 1) Business 2) Social sciences and history 3) Health professions and related clinical sciences 4) Education 5) Psychology 6) Visual and performing arts.
How can one say that health fields are not a form of applied science? Business has a reasonable amount of math in terms of finance and there is plenty of statistics in business process management such as six-sigma. [wikipedia.org] Social sciences are of course a form of science, and even educators need to learn about the science of childhood development and scientific results about what works in the classroom.
The truth is that there is a large demand for professional businesspeople, health professionals, and educators in the US.
On the other hand, I think most people would not be studying social sciences, history, psychology, or art if these majors did not receive significant subsidy either directly from tax dollars in state schools or indirectly in government loans (that end up not getting paid off). If students had to pay the full way on these majors up front, they would pretty much vanish!
Passion (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of these solutions seem to be getting the cart before the horse.
Back in the early '70s, in Australia at least, you could get a university education almost for free. The result was that students studied what they had a passion for without worrying too much about what career they would end up with. The lucky ones got the careers they wanted, others with a real passion started businesses, and the rest ended up as teachers where they taught with that same passion.
Now a universtiy education is so expensive that it must be carefully tailored to where the good paying jobs already are. The passion has been lost, and along with it the good teachers and the innovative engineers - like those that started Sun, HP, etc.
Society has to put the investment back into education if it wants to get the rewards. Give the kids that education and they will go out and dream up new businesses that we cannot even begin to imagine.
Re:Passion (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Which one is preferable? You pay for that literature degree, or they pay for something "useful" and then join Lehman Brothers? Its a bit like how it would of been better for everybody if Hitler had of gone to arts school, even if someone had to pay for his education.
On the other hand, if we let people study what they are passionate about, we get passionate engineers, teachers, etc. who will cause a much greater benefit for society than those who only study to get the Beamer.
Can't Have your Pi and Eat it Too (Score:5, Insightful)
K-12 schools can't afford to give their teachers cost-of-living raises or even hire new, competent teachers in some cases. Colleges are raising tuition year after year despite overcrowding because attendance is up but funding is down. Schools in general have trouble keeping their labs and equipment up to date due to budget cuts as well. Less money for science and math teachers leads to fewer students pursing science and math in college. This leads to fewer science/math professionals, including fewer good teachers. And so on . . .
When a government begins attacking education - banning printing presses, burning books, defunding schools, demonizing teachers' unions - its because they want a stupid, docile populace. If you're raising sheep, don't expect to get anything more than wool out of them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Tax money spent on government education has more than doubled on a per pupil basis in the last 30 years.
In K-12 education, no results have been seen since the customer, guardians, have no involvement in the pricing, i.e. tuition, pay. This leads to a lack of quality, since the customer is told to take the product, education, as is or pay an exorbitant amount of money, private schooling.
Colleges are a mess due to the ridiculous subsidizing that occurs with their customer. The more customers the college gets
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Teacher unions? Give me a break!
Let me rant In the 1960's when my father got a big promotion and then could afford to take me out of the public school system and send me to a private elementary school, I experience first hand how much I was missing and how far behind I was in math and science courses. Thank God, for my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Barbara Lewis - who I hated at the time, but now I love - made me work every math problem until I got it correct – even if I had to miss recess. Now I am a Mech
STEM careers (Score:5, Funny)
To revive STEM graduates here in the USA, Tell American Businesses to stop fucking around and re-hire all the 35 to 55 year old engineers they have been laying off.
How about we take the CEO of each company that is complaining about not having enough engineering talent, stake them out spread eagled on the ground, and for every engineering position they have open, or for every engineering position they filled with an H1-B hire, we have an un-employed USA engineer who could have filled that position get a pair of steel toed boots and one free shot at that CEO's nuts?
I realize that the unemployed engineers are getting the bad end of this deal, but it's the best I could do.
You see, at the end of this the CEO may be terribly injured, but he's still rich. All the unemployed engineers will have is - still nothing. You want people to take the STEM path in college here in the USA? Show them that they will have a career path longer than 13 years!
The link between manufacturing and STEM careers (Score:5, Informative)
The market works (Score:3)
This is yet another attempt to talk up engineering careers. There ain't many young people buying it because they see what it takes and what they will make. They've been watching large companies laying off engineers by the tens of thousands in mid-career. They know wages have been stagnant for the past 2 decades. They're doing a cost benefit analysis and concluding that there is too much stick and not enough carrot.
Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of giving 700 billion to keep bank and finance types from going bankrupt and losing their jobs ( and creating a huge incentive to enter those fields), let them go belly up.
Then those careers will not attract the smart people.
For bonus points, have pure engineering and science programs to the tune of 100 billion per year.
Lack of motivation (Score:3, Interesting)
When I started my studies, the entry requirements were pretty high. You needed to bring very good grades from high school to get accepted, and lots of students applied lured by good job perspectives. Of course, a great number of the ones who got accepted fell out in the first years because they couldn't cope or simply because they realized they didn't like what they were doing, but the ones who finished did get pretty good jobs for local standards.
However, in the last 15 years everything has turned upside down. Nowadays, an engineer barely makes more than a policeman or a regular public servant for example, funding for R&D (the thing which people are willing to do without thinking so much about the money) is being cut by every government that comes and young people simply don't see any benefit in spending so many years at University, specially when it's becoming more and more expensive to study and people have less and less money.
In the last course, an old colleague who now works as an associate professor told me that only 25% of the places offered in our course were filled, so now virtually anyone who applies gets accepted. And a great number of the engineers who study in Spanish universities emigrate to other countries (now especially to Germany) desperate to get a decent job.
I don't know it this has anything to do with what is happening in the US but I do know in other European countries the situation is similar. Right now, there are still a few good havens for engineers in Northern Europe (Germany, Holland, Scandinavian countries), but who knows what will happen in another 15 years.
Re: (Score:3)
In short, you say people suck, governments suck and corporations suck. Where do you go from there?
Re:Real Reason (Score:5, Informative)
So its either race with the rest of the rats in a rigged maze or you are "lazy"?
Personally, I think that America has devalued intelligence, knowledge and hard work to the point that I can hardly blame someone who opts out. The "problem" that the powers that be are struggling with is that they want well-educated, well-trained (on someone else's dime, thanks) employees to work for returns that people of these qualities can figure out don't justify the effort.
So they futz around and do other things, some productive, some not, but that at least match rewards to effort.
Make engineering (or teaching etc.) a job worthy of a quality person's time and you will get an abundance of quality people. Make these careers a drag that requires a tremendous amount of risk and personal investment with the near guarantee that you will be screwed over within 5 years and you will only get people who think they can game the system.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
People aren't interested in shows like Cosmos. It's not like the TV networks are forcing people to watch Desperate Housewives; they show that junk because people like it and the ratings are high. PBS shows educational shows all the time, yet their ratings are lousy and they're constantly begging for money. Discovery Channel used to have lots of great educational programming, but then they found that people preferred to watch shows about moronic people building shitty motorcycles and arguing with each other constantly, so that's what they show now.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe, but engineers graduating from the most elite engineering schools aren't going to ever make $1-50 million, unless they start their own company (which means they're no longer an engineer, but an entrepreneur, which is rather different and engineering school doesn't train you for this).
Re: (Score:3)
LOL.
While there are a lot of Doctors from around the world in the UK, you clearly have no idea how much they can and do make. Six figures (in pounds) is really not uncommon. Surgeons and specialists make very good money by working both private and public sectors.
Yes, you can make more in the US, it's true. That's about the only truth in your post.