Crackdown on Science!

[Kitsune]

Originally Posted by MrVisible

Blaming people for not being engineers seems kind of strange to me. The reality of the situation is that foreign-educated engineers come with lower pricetags due to lower cost of education in their countries. We can't compete with them. Why would we want to try?

No one wants to be an engineer, anymore. The big one avoided right now may not ever recover from its tarnished reputation. Really, why would anyone even think of stepping into a major like computer science after what has happened in the previous years? 9 out of 10 developers that work for the company I do have been offshored. I know I wouldn't return to the major I originally started in because of what I've seen.

"People are loath to do computer science because they think, Well, gosh, my job will just get outsourced," says Kevin W. Decker, president of the computer-science club at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. Mr. Decker is a junior majoring in computer science. The number of students pursuing bachelor's degrees in computer science at the university has dropped to 146, from 161 a year ago.

It doesn't help when the media pulls crap like this, either:

In fact, about half of what China calls “engineers” would be called “technicians” at best in the United States, with the equivalent of a vocational certificate or an associate degree. In addition, the McKinsey study of nine occupations, including engineering, concluded that “fewer than 10 percent of Chinese job candidates, on average, would be suitable for work (in a multinational company) in the nine occupations we studied.”

[9th Engineer]

More and more of our newer engineering grads are being lured away by the promise of a respectible paycheck and the chance to do some real work without being suppressed by the anti-science nutjobs in this country. Even though I won't be that position for at least another 6-8 years (we bioengineers basically have a manditory masters degree) I'm going to need to become familiar with at least one or two extra languages in the meantime.

[Spexxvet]

What is evrybody doing these days? Doctors are fleeing th medical field because of low insurance reimbursements and high malpractice fees, students are not even considering engineering. Is everybody becoming a lawyer or middle manager?

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Is everybody becoming a lawyer or middle manager?

Or an entrepeneur.

I hear opticians are in demand...

[MrVisible]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

What is evrybody doing these days? Doctors are fleeing th medical field because of low insurance reimbursements and high malpractice fees, students are not even considering engineering. Is everybody becoming a lawyer or middle manager?

Personally, after over a decade as a computer tech, I'm back in college studying to teach English as a second language. It's interesting, I think I'll enjoy it, and it can be practiced both here and in other countries.

You've really hit the nail solidly, though. There really aren't any good jobs left in the US anymore.

Partly it's outsourcing, and globalization averaging all the first, second and third world countries to the second world level. But mostly it's a hundred years' worth of the Industrial Revolution coming home to roost.

The population of the US has grown from about 80 million in 1900 to almost 300 million today. Meanwhile, we've been assiduously creating new and better ways to do everything needed to support society using fewer workers to do so. The more we automate, the less people we need.

Computer usage has accelerated the process in the past couple of decades. As things were, every middle manager needed a secretary to manage their correspondence, type up reports, keep their schedule, and do basic bookkeeping. Now a thousand dollar box on their desk does all that, and lets them watch their favorite porn too.

Any fan of old movies remembers black and white scenes of dozens of workers in insurance companies and banks, sitting in huge rooms in neat rows of desks, punching numbers into adding machines. Now, it's a database on a mainframe. Even the little bookkeeping firm that used to do the paperwork for small businesses has been nudged out by Peachtree and Quickbooks.

We're a lot more efficient at doing most anything these days, and efficient means that one person can now do the work of three, or five, or ten from just a decade ago. It's no surprise that there are no decent jobs left; we've been working our butts off trying to get rid of them.

[Kitsune]

Originally Posted by MrVisible

The more we automate, the less people we need.

Remember all the movies from the 1950-1980s that depicted a relaxed society thanks to atuomation? While we no longer depict robots doing our work, we still have those lofty, false dreams. Ever see the IBM/HP commercials where they show the system admin relaxing at his desk, content that he has no work to do because his attention is no longer needed? His job is easy and he can thank technology!

They don't show the part where they fire the other shifts of admins that were once needed to fix problems, slap a pager on the day guy's belt, and tell him he can't take vacations "very far from town", anymore, "just in case he's needed". With intelligent hardware and software, they only need one guy, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

A recent Xerox commercial goes something like this:

"How can we save money?"
"What about all this? All these reports, all this paper? How much money did this take? It probably took a dozen of people and thousands of dollars."

The head guy smiles as they realize they can buy an intelligent office document management system and get rid of the paper waste. I always saw a bit of cruelty in the smile, knowing that they're happy that they get to save a buck by laying off those 12 people.

Eh, I'm not arguing how they do it, I just find it really ironic that automation was supposed to free humans from work when, instead, it drives many into the poor house.

[tw]

Why be a liberal arts major? They are the ones who get top jobs - who are now being rewarded with bonuses in excess of what is authorized by the Boards - a recent news story. Let look at what engineers deal with. This from "End of the Line" written by Leslie Cauley:

Medin went to Atlanta to meet with AT&T's network engineers. @Home traffic was growing rapidly, and Medin hopes to secure long-term capacity from AT&T. A few minutes into the meeting, Medin inquired about the status of AT&T's vaunted fiber network ... AT&T rarely talked about how many miles of fiber it had installed, or even where they were. On AT&T's Web site, there was only a very general description. And no map.

Pressed by Medin, one of the AT&T engineers reluctantly put up a slide that showed AT&T's entire fiber deployment. According to the map, AT&T had a staggering amount of fiber installed - around 35,000 miles. Qwest, which had one of the biggest fiber networks in the country, had only 18,000 miles. The engineer proudly point out that AT&T has the largest fiber network of any carrier in the United States.

Medin was puzzled, and promptly asked why AT&T had never bothered to advertise that fact. The AT&T engineers had no idea ...

Moving on, Medin quickly deduced that AT&T has 16 'channels,' signified by a different color on a single fiber, installed at key points throughout the United States. But he could also see that fully half of the network was sitting idle.

"Great," Medin told the group, zeroing on the eight idle channels, "we'll take these."

Silence all around the table.

"What's wrong?" Medin asked. "The channels don't work?"

"No, they work."

"Stone silence.

"They're not available?"

"No, they're available."

More silence.

"So what's the problem?"

After some gentle prodding, one of the AT&T engineers finally spilled the beans; AT&T customer service systems had never been upgraded to handle "trouble tickets' - customer complaints - on those eight channels. As a result, they simply weren't being used - by anybody.

Medin was aghast. For want of a simple software upgrade, quite literally, half of AT&T's fiber capacity was sitting idle, robbing the company, potentially, of tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues.

For the want of someone in management with minimal technical grasp - remember engineers are rarely promoted in a MBA dominated company - engineers suffer under incompetence.

Let's look at who ran some of AT&T's hope for the future. AT&T Broadband was run by the Chief Financial Officer - an accountant. AT&T Wireless was run by the General Consul - a lawyer. As a result, both divisions vastly underperformed while engineers were stifled - and not promoted.

Why do so many companies outsource overseas? MBAs don't have a clue who is and who is not a good engineer. Instead they cut costs - innovation be damned. AT&T MBAs could not even correct software so that AT&T could double the size of its fiber network - this being too complex to explain to people without technical grasp. Same type people murdered seven astronauts on Challenger. Why would anyone want to be an engineer? Let immigrants do it. We blame them for everything else.