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A coming engineering shortage ? ---- Who agrees ? 86

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ScottyUK.
Whilst the situation regarding engineers may be improving in the UK these new graduates will be entering an industry where the critical path for distribution projects is dictated by the availability of cable jointers. The bigger skills shortage in my opinion is of craftsmen in trades which most people do not even know exist.
 
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I guess we are lucky in those respects, because we have a resource of people retiring from the military, and who are willing to be trained in additional skills.
Truck driving skills is not a problem.

It's the power engineers, INC tech's and relay tech's we have difficulty finding.
 
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Actually cranky108, I keep hearing about shortages of truck drivers - even a few years ago when unemployment was high. Seems to be mostly that the pay isn't that good, especially given the long hours away from 'home' for long distance drivers etc. Plus all the 'self employed' shenanigans of making the drivers own their rigs but be treated like employees in most ways...

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Shortages of long haul truck drivers. Have you heard of shortages of local truck drivers?

I suspect some trucking companies do play games with employees.

My comment was about the skills not the people willing to do the job. Besides utility trucks, in general, are not that big.
We do have special people for driving oil rigs, and other larger things. But in general the line trucks have to be able to go over city streets, and dirt roads.
 
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Andybro,

Yes, I agree there are chronic shortages of jointers, also protection engineers, TP141 commissioning techs... the list goes on.

Managers are ten-a-penny though! [wink]
 
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"Have you heard of shortages of local truck drivers?"

I believe so - even without being away from home for long periods of time some of the pay rates weren't impressive.

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There is some truth there. "You get what you pay for" is really true.

If you are hiring truck drivers at minimum wage, you are likely to have shortages.

Paying engineers more will increase the pool of engineers, but it will take time to train them, and weed out the bad ones.

So from that perspective, there should be no shortage of engineers. Just a shortage of companies who are willing to pay a reasonable rate.

Which brings to mind how so many companies are not willing to pay their in housh engineers more, but are willing to hire consultants at three times the rate, for second class work.
 
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"there should be no <long term> shortage of engineers <with the required expertise>. Just a shortage of companies who are willing to pay a reasonable rate."

You may be onto something there.



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cranky said:
Which brings to mind how so many companies are not willing to pay their in housh engineers more, but are willing to hire consultants at three times the rate, for second class work.
Click to expand...

Given the overhead multipliers in most large companies, paying only 3 times as much money for work which is only 2nd class would be seen as excellent value for money! [dazed]
 
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The fact that consulting engineers are available means that you don't have to continue to feed an expensive, in-house, qualified engineer. At a 3x multiple, that's still probably less than double the net cost per hour for an in-house engineer, and so long as you need the consultant less than 6 months per year, you're ahead

Having an in-house engineer means more than just the sheer cost, you have to feed that one guy stuff that he's interested in doing, and if you don't do that, at best, the guy gets rusty over time, and at worst, he bails after a couple of yrs of fixing stupid crap that the cheap engineer should be able to fix, but can't. This also means that your cost to maintain in-house capability goes up even further if you have to pay for acquisition of the next qualified engineer, in head-hunter fees, advertising, and down time to interview candidates.

There are certain disciplines that we've been completely unable to fill because of the reasons above.

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A 3x multiplier on salary is probably low on an employee of a large company burdened with lots of MBAs, VPs, PIPs, HR and other alphabet soup folks...
 
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Generally, smaller companies tend to have lower multipliers. A significant portion of our multiplier pays for facilities that smaller companies might not have, such as security officers, SCIFs, gobs of lab equipment, etc. 8% of our personnel are associated with security and IT. While IT does the usual PC problems, they also are constantly keeping the PCs updated and virus scanned. Every single classified computer has to be audited on a routine basis by IT. Even then, we are all still pretty highly paid, although not as well paid as what Facebook and Google interns are supposedly being paid this year (~8k/month)

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The topic of this thread has drifted to a related, but interesting one. Labor rate multipliers are a useful tool for establishing a profitable price to charge for small routine jobs or orders. These multipliers are very frequently misused by middle management and bean counters to show large cost savings by reducing head count. Reducing head count of those to whom the multiplier applies, does not reduce overhead and simply increases the multiplier for next year when a new multiplier is calculated. This leads to what I have called the "corporate death spiral", where companies price themselves out of business by constantly increasing the multiplier. The only way to decrease the multiplier is to increase sales and therefore headcount.
 
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I think in a nutshell, the engineering profession as a whole is shrinking in the western world while increasing in the developing countries due to a host of political and economic reasons, on the same token the number of professionals engaged changes accordingly. ( my view is that many engineers slip out of the profession as they mature, after 10 -15 years on average. On the opposite side there seems to be an inverse correlation with the number of accountants and lawyers getting into the market.

On multipliers; we charge junior staff at a higher x, than the senior one.
 
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IRStuff,

8k a month in San Francisco is like 4-5k a on a month in a lot of other places. If you look up BART salaries, there are plenty of "uneducated" people breaking 100k. I have a relative that worked closely with CEO Marissa Mayer at Yahoo and he still needed a lot of help from his parents to buy a house.
 
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Silicon Valley has been consistently expensive over the last 30+ years. When I was shopping for a house in 1982, a ramshackle "house" in the hills above Los Gatos that appeared to be patchworked with various colored corrugated sheet metal was listed at $130K; the road was an unpaved single lane, and it looks so bad I didn't even bother to look inside the house. I wound up buying a 1600 sq. ft. tract house for $138k, and that required parental help as well. That same house is guesstimated by Zillow to be $1.25M today. The main difference is that the multiple of salary went from about 4:1 to 10:1

But, bear in mind that the $8k for the intern is in ADDITION to:
> free housing, but shared with a couple of other interns
> 3 meals a day during work week
> free transpo to/from work to the free housing

For a junior in college, that's a exceptionally sweet deal, and, that's increased from 3 years ago when the intern salary was $6k/month.

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