Shortage of Engineers or a Glut? No Simple Answer | Hacker News Reader

Shortage of Engineers or a Glut? No Simple Answer

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42 pointscwan27 comments

Definitely a shortage. To be specific, there is a massive shortage of engineers with extensive qualifications in very specific sets of frameworks used by a given company and expertise in their specialized domain, who are willing to work for less than market rate and/or relocate to some backwoods town at their own expense.

There is also a shortage of new 2010 Porsche 911 Speedsters in chartreuse with candy apple red leather interiors available for the reasonable and normal new car price of $15,000.

There is also a massive shortage of qualified licensed plumbers who will come out to my house for less than $150.

I am also terribly unhappy about the shortage of reasonably priced fresh strawberries in winter.

No, I am not the unreasonable one. The government must supply me with the engineers, plumbers, cars and strawberries of any quality I wish at whatever price I name. Help me gubmint, help me with the shortage.

You mentioned quality, location and price for each product/service, but not the times and ages? The engineer must be willing to leave a cellphone beside their bed every night, to be woken up at any hour to fix a problem which may or may not be related to the computer systems they work on during office hours. They must be over 25 yrs old, i.e. "mature enough", but under 34, i.e. with plenty of energy to work 12-hr days, "still not cynical", etc. Their track record must be in 2-yr blocks of uninterrupted service.

As Pardo says, "There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." - Piaw Na

Might I add: on uninteresting problems under terrible working conditions.

If you're interested in looking at some hard data on this, you might look at a recent RAND study.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241/index.html

This study is mainly focused on PhD level degree recipients and compares salary and career prospects with "the professions" (jd, mba, md, dds, etc). By this standard, the study concludes that there is no shortage.

Mr Wadwha is segmenting the "engineer" population differently - including all degree and experience levels, but also treating different micro-slices of the STEM workforce differently. This makes sense, and I think he's right - it does show that the issue is very complex.

If you've read my posts in the past, you'll know that one thing I find exasperating about Mr Wadwha is that he almost always includes the word "xenophobia" when describing people who look askance on visa programs designed to bring more engineers and scientists to the US. I respect Mr Wadwha's point of view (since I agree with him to some extent that we need to be open to global talent), but I don't think he gives enough credit to the people who oppose these programs. When a RAND study finds that there is no shortage of engineers or scientists, and that poor wage and job prospects are the main contributor to low levels of interest among US students, then it is immensely reasonable to question whether we should hand craft an immigration policy designed to bring more scientists and engineers here, as opposed to a more general, profession neutral system. Accusing people who hold this point of view of xenophobia adds nothing to this discussion, and drags it into the mud, as far as I'm concerned.

Very simple answer: there is a shortage of good engineers, but a glut of crappy ones.

I've ran into a few people out of work who were "in IT." They are almost always some kind of one-trick pony who has spent the last 20 years writing SQL for Crystal Reports or administering Novell servers or maintaining VB 6.0 applications. They didn't bother to modernize their skills and now they're stuck. I hope I never get like this.

In most companies, that's what IT is: doing the necessary stuffs to support business.

On the other hand, it's their decision to specialize in such technology. Perhaps they have the necessary business knowledge and they just need to compliment that with enough IT skills.

Please don't act like a jerk by calling them one-trick pony. There are reasons before one came to make a decision, be it quality time with family, or piece of mind, or just to get by in life and do other things outside work.

I met tons of super-ego developers who always try to keep up with the latest greatest ORM tools in different languages praising the latest technology as the "best one out there" every 2 years. They did this for their on satisfaction, not for delivering any meaningful values.

I also met "one-language per year" developers who don't know low-level OS, or how computer networks work.

I met developers who know how to write code but don't know how to perform capacity planning, security audit, or heck, even write proper unit-testing, integration-testing, and acceptance testing.

I met developers who write code according to his/her "raw talent" (you know them developers, they're smart, but they can't work well with other people. Don't even bother touching their complex code).

People come in various experience and background. Don't make generalize judgement.

Some people decided to improve their skills once every 2 years, be it learning a new programming languages or a new web-me-too-framework. To others, that's like a rat-race. By the time these developers reached 40 years old, they have learned 20 different programming languages yet they don't understand the business inside-out. They deliver great architecture yet it's not what the business need.

What's that called? one-trick pony?

Yes, those people are bad too, but it's not a dichotomy. People tend to overvalue their non-portable organization-specific skills.

It seems as if the good programmers are finally waking up to the actual value they bring to the table, as opposed to just taking a job getting paid about the same as the not superstars. This would explain why companies aren't happy with the level of applicants, and why most people have trouble getting a job.

That's funny, there are a lot of engineers! Mechanical engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, etc.

Oh wait, I think they meant Computer Scientists or Programmers.

or maybe even a software engineer...

When programmers can earn an accredited degree and must be granted a license before practicing, we will have earned the right to be called "engineer".

Until then, using the title "Software Engineer" is a bit like a man who plays Warcraft all day calling himself a "Raid Engineer".

In the US, maybe, but your statement is rather insulting for engineers in Quebec.

Here, software engineers must follow an engineering program at university, spend at least 2 years working under an Ordre des Ingénieurs member's supervision, and pass a test before they can use the title of (software) engineer. The mandatory courses cover things like ethics, sociology, physics, electrical and electronic circuits, computer architecture, differential equations and numerical methods, and vector calculus.

Even Microsoft's MSCEs can't use the word "engineer" here: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/learning/quebecmcse/default....

Now, it's true that "programmers" don't require certification. The Ordre des ingénieurs and Quebec are thinking about ways to make the programmer profession more regulated, but it's of course hard to implement without an international agreement on the matter.

It's true in many parts of the world, and indeed I went through a similar ordeal to have "Software Engineer" in my diploma. However, I find all this does nothing to improve the quality of the talent, and these credentials are useless as a predictor of future performance.

So if software engineering certification is institutionalized worldwide tomorrow, my bet is it won't change a thing in practice. The problem is with the discipline itself, not with what is written on the credentials.

I, for one, do not want any kind of regulation for our trade. People can wrangle over the term "engineer" if they'd like. I don't use it for myself, as I am quite content to be called a programmer. One could argue that a guild/regulatory body would put us in a stronger position to negotiate salaries, via a kind of artificial shortage (since some individuals won't get certified). But the last thing that I want, personally, is to have to answer to any kind of guild that tries to tell me that I am or am not a "proper" programmer.

When it comes to the use of the term "engineer" in the states, it's not about regulating the trade or determining what's "proper," it's about making sure that people who use a title have the minimum knowledge and qualifications implied by the title.

I understand what you're saying, but what will we consider an "engineer" to be, in the case of programmers?

A "programmer" can be someone who picked up PHP in their spare time, and may have a degree in art history, for all anyone knows. It can also be someone with a solid background in CS, with a degree to boot. Both of them can get jobs as "programmers" (though in this case, probably very different wage scales) if they are good enough to get hired.

The idea that one is not an engineer without state licensing is a presumption of the right of the state to determine one's vocation.

I believe the argument is not that those without certifications cannot be engineers, but that engineering professions are regulated by the state (via certifications) and thus professions that do not require a state licence must not be 'true' engineering.

What the hell does that even mean? Of course the state has the right to accredit professional bodies who can then accredit professionals. It's not some deterministic whim of the state deciding who can and can't be a "", it's simple quality assurance for people who are employing the services of said professional.

Libertarians, sheesh!

Most software developers aren't computer scientists for the same reason most accountants aren't mathematicians and most engineers aren't physicists.

Seems to me, 'engineer' no longer refers to any of those job classes. I pretty much have come to assume by default anymore that 'engineer' refers to software engineer, until informed otherwise.

To be honest, as an electrical/computer engineering student, I kind of resent it.

when a company is laying off good engineers while b!tching about no being able to fill the dev positions in another department (same technology, same domain) for which they are actively hiring - is the company experiencing a shortage or a glut? (disclaimer: i left on my own ;)

>Now, because of flawed U.S. immigration policies, most buy one-way tickets home.

I assume, since you are claiming that is a "flaw" that you want to hire a cheap engineer. On the other hand, if you were an engineer looking for a job, I would suspect you would think that was a good policy. On the gripping hand, and recognizing this is TechCrunch, you are probably just repeating liberal cant on immigration without thinking about it.

I think this highlights the importance of doing things outside of your uni work while obtaining a degree. While people don't want to have to train someone from scratch that's come out of a CS degree if you are able to say CS degree plus 3 years of contracting on the side it all becomes much easier.

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