STEMUP 2

[BUGGAR]

Over the next five years, with more and more engineers, I see movement towards a more advanced, yet practical avenue called STEMUP: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Unemployment Preparation.

 

[KENAT]

So GTTofAK you want more competition for the engineering jobs that aren't already being off-shored or H1B inshored?

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[GTTofAK]

So GTTofAK you want more competition for the engineering jobs that aren't already being off-shored or H1B inshored?

The H1B issue is its own issue. And there is a demographic shift coming. Boomers who hid from Vietnam in school are retiring. The glut of engineers is coming to an end.

 

[BUGGAR]

"Boomers who hid from Vietnam in school are retiring."

 

[GTTofAK]

I dont care if you like it or not but that is what happened. There was a huge influx into universities to avoid the draft. This created a professional glut of engineers. HR departments have been spoiled by this glut. For decades they have simply poached engineers from other companies rather than train their own. Now that the glut is ending there is a desire to keep the system in place. No one wants to pay the money to train new engineers. Hence the push for H1B. If companies cant hire US trained engineers anymore they will import them.

 

[moltenmetal]

Employers will import them if they are allowed.

That's what employers want: a steady supply of "flexible labour"- well trained entirely at the cost of others, willing to accept substandard conditions, remote locations, poor pay etc., to relocate at their own cost etc. etc. That's an employers' Shangri La. But it is a disaster for our profession- and isn't in the national economic interest either.

I've been hearing about this supposed "demographic shift" end-of-the-world shortage of engineers scenario for at least fifteen years. What is really happening is that people are delaying retirement because mandatory retirement was conveniently and silently disposed of. Young engineers are still screwed. In Canada, our eng grads still overwhelmingly want to work as engineers when they graduate (consistently, when surveyed, more than 90% of 4th year eng students indicate they either definitely or probably will work as engineers on graduation), and yet less than 50% of them end up in eng jobs- and on average (all eng grads local and foreign-educated) only about 30% of eng grads here work as engineers or engineering managers in our country. That number has been falling steadily for the past two decades with nary a hiccup in its steady decline. That's a result of an engineering supply glut so massive that no amount of "demographic shift" will ever meaningfully touch it, much less erase it.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I think it depends on what field. In power and oil & gas, there is going to be a huge turn over but neither has anything to do with people going to college to avoid vietnam. Oil&gas is very cyclical and the last major boom that brought a lot of people in happened in the late 70s, almost 40 years ago. Power has been hurting for a long time due to low wages and lack of sexiness when compared to other booming fields involving computer and communications.

 

[cranky108]

That is correct that power is hurting for engineers, and more so because the universities stopped teaching it at the BS level. The problem really is that it is the lack of sexiness, and that most utilities only hire when they have openings, which is when someone retires. And as you stated that is about every 40 years.

The other problem is many young engineers don't want to read the old text books, and would rather Google for the easy way to do things. I feel that will start to show up in more outages until the problems are learned into the younger engineers. But that will only make the NERC reporting worse, and will require even more engineers to do the paper work.

So as a power system engineer, I have to ask why my PC is so much less reliable than the computers we use in the substations, or in cars?
There is a big need for PC reliability engineers.

 

[someguy79]

Cranky108,

Who really WANTED to read textbooks, whether old or new? No one I know. Internet search has become the most efficient means of finding information quickly in many cases. You can't blame an engineer for wanting to use his/her time most effectively and arrive at a solution with minimal effort. That sounds like efficiency to me.

That said, I get it that hard won knowledge is remembered better than a bit of trivia you looked up once. I still don't think that fast access to information is going to make younger engineers less effective.

I think a much bigger problem is that too many engineers are kept chained to a desk in a cubicle with little field experience of the industry. A lot more of the old timers I've worked with had spent time with operations, maintenance, end users, construction, etc. giving them more perspective on the job.

 

[IRstuff]

" I still don't think that fast access to information is going to make younger engineers less effective. "

Of course not. If that wasn't allowed, then everyone should go back to using slide rules, because you're more likely to understand the calculations when you do it manually. The adage about standing on the shoulders of giants holds true. Would engineers really want to burn their copies of Roark so that they can derive the deflection equations from scratch? Do we stop using simulation and FEA tools because we've lost the "feel" for the equations? No company cares that much whether you can derive the equations from scratch or look them up. What they do care about is productivity; how many beams can you design per week, etc.

These sentiments were probably expressed when slide rules replaced log tables, when calculators replaced slide rules, when simulation tools replaced hand calculations, etc., Every generation could and should benefit from the tools that make them more productive and able to design things that couldn't possibly be designed by hand. Can anyone imagine designing Taipei 101 by hand calculations or even with programmable calculators?

I've no intention on dumping Mathcad and doing unit conversions by hand; that's a very manual process that's very prone to errors. Just think of all the time we save by not having to recheck calculations because we know with 100% confidence that Mathcad or Excel is doing the algebra correctly and won't transpose digits or misplace a decimal place or not spending hours looking for a mistake that turned out to be an inverted unit conversion?

TTFN
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[cranky108]

My point is that the Google answer is not always correct, and so many of the books written of late are by professors who have never done the work.

I am also concerned by the easy answers that so many young engineers in my field come up with, and they don't understand the problems that are being created for what they are doing.

It's easy to take a number from the computer and plug it into a real time device, but what does it mean? Under what conditions will it not work correctly? How does this need to be tested in the field?

The old phrase that "it's unlikely to happen" is what gets people killed.

 

[IRstuff]

I do understand what you are saying, but my point is that this is nothing that hasn't been said in the 37 yrs I've been working, and the sky has not fallen yet.

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[Terratek]

How big of a problem is the international competition related to outsourcing and H1B Visas? I can definitely see where it could be a problem for some engineering disciplines more than others.

My experience is that foreigners have a very difficult time landing Civil Engineering jobs because the practice is so local and communication skills are VERY important - perhaps more important that technical ability in some cases. I have an H1B Visa holder on my staff, but she is particularly exceptional. Most I have seen are typically mediocre candidates at best, pHD or not.

What are other engineers in the civil sector (civil, struct, geo, etc.) seeing?

 

[HamburgerHelper]

Cranky,

I think that a lot of the old text are good for explaining why something was done. Understanding why something was done a certain way I think is more important than the final chosen solution. Googling how to carry out a very specific task probably works most of the time but it leads to a lot of unnecessary garbage that carries over from project to project and/or the engineering being overly conservative. From my experience, at large EPCs you hear comments like "I don't know why it was done this way but just copy it for this project" often. A lot of copy and paste engineering going on at some places.

 

[cranky108]

Copy and paste can only go so far, then that paste leaks over on your desk and makes a mess. This also leads some young engineers to copy the usual stuff and miss the unusual stuff that they were assigned to complete.
The excuse that this is how we did it on the last job, just dos not cut it with me. We hired an engineer, not a drafter.

I have a case now where an engineer wants to go from an overhead line, underground to a protective way switch, then back overhead to the transformer bushings. When asked why he wanted to do it that way, he said that is how we did the last job. He dosen't seem to understand the last job was with an underground line, and we just replaced the switch, not added a new one.

I thought we learned in first grade how to see the difference between two pictures, but he did not go to school in the US (Excuse me while I fume).

We as engineers should be able to think out side the box, and that means that not all boxes look alike.

 

[someguy79]

Cranky108, I totally agree that an internet search can't be the total of research into a solution.

I think a fundamental problem that contributes to the copy & paste operation is a lack of experience/perspective. If you've only ever seen it done one way, or never really been involved at all, how can you conceptualize a good solution without reinventing the wheel? It's a big ask if you want someone to go from basic science through code compliance and economic viability to reach a finished design.

If trying to think inside or outside the box, newbies don't really know where the boundaries of the box are. So, if you ask a newbie to design something, the smart ones are going to look for similar things to copy. If they're really good, they'll start asking for help and suggestions rather than just presenting a copy & paste as finished.

So how do you solve the desire to copy & paste? I think experience is going to be the best teacher. If people are retained for more than just the project duration they can learn more than just what it takes to find the answer/solution. Of course, this paragraph is just a wish. I don't have the power to change employee retention rates; at least not by much. A goal without a plan is a wish.

 

[IRstuff]

I don't necessarily see copy&paste as an altogether bad thing. I'd be worried about an engineer that treats everything as a brand new, never-been-done-before task, as that means they'll not be learning from the mistakes of the past, and therefore will be making at least the same mistakes plus possibly some new ones. We basically blew a $16M contract at a previous company because the engineer completely ignored the work that had been done, and decided they were smarter than the average bear and built up a system completely from scratch. Needless to say, it stank, and the more they tried to "fix" the problems, the worse the system got. What had first been tested turned out to be just flaky, but the final "fixed" system was completely inoperable. Our customer was pissed that we reneged on our proposed re-use, but since it was their funding profile problem that dropped all the systems engineering and monitoring from the program, they kindly cancelled for convenience, rather than for cause.

TTFN
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[BUGGAR]

I see where STEM is now STEAM. Seems someone forgot to include the Arts in this little fiasco.

 

[IRstuff]

?? I think we already have too many art majors with $200k student debt... ;-)

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[allgoodnamestaken]

Just want to add a few things, from a younger perspective:

1) Much of this thread reads like old people talking about the old days while they play shuffleboard. If you give a new grad a task and don't give them guidance, they're going to try to find something to learn from, and that's the "copy paste" that you're complaining about. But the problem occured before the copy paste - you gave a squeaky new grad a problem without enough guidance, and they're worried about asking you questions without making an attempt at it first. If they came to you with dozens of questions without trying first, you'd complain. When they make a go of it first, you complain too! No making old people happy, I guess.

Try having a little empathy from the perspective of the inexperienced, eager to please, scared to piss you off new grad.


2) Unemployment/Underemployment in engineering IS a big deal. And instead of snarking about it, the current generation of engineers should be doing something to solve it by establishing mentorships, promoting the hiring and training of new grads (getting a real engineering job as a new grad today is hugely difficult), etc . Instead, engineers are going to go the other way and make it more difficult for graduating engineers to become engineers by requiring masters level courses (not masters degrees, just masters level course ?!) just to disqualify those who want to work after getting their bachelors.

This is a huge failing of the existing engineering profession, and its going to get worse. You want to talk about bringing shame to the engineering profession? It's not from dumb graduates, its from the actions of the senior/experienced engineers who want to make the undergraduate engineering degree essentially useless.

3) With all that engineering graduates are pursuing and gaining employment in other fields because employers know that engineering graduates are willing to learn and work hard. I think I read that in canada (where I'm from) the % of graduates who get engineering jobs is only 30%. But engineering bodies are NOT doing anything about it. In the future what is a glut of engineers will turn into serious lack when enrollment falls due to undergraduate engineering being worthless ("oh you're going to need a masters, so you might as well see if there's anything else that interests you") and some of you older folks start retiring.

Maybe you guys can come up with some other things to discourage new grads from becoming engineers. Unpaid internships next? Increase EIT times to 10 years? Snark about it the whole time?

This is serious stuff to the younger generation. STEMUP? I can tell you up where the younger guys want you to put the joking about their future.

 

[cranky108]

I think you missed to point. There is a spark that we are looking for in engineering grads. A type of leap from the book world to the real world.

Some people just don't seem to have it. That's what seems to be missing in so many young engineers.

If you can't see what questions to ask, and must be given every step of the process, then I might as well do it myself. Why did I hire you?

The answer is to ask why, not how. The goal is think and develop the questions, then attempt to solve it, and along the way be asking is there a better way.

BTW: I have never played shuffleboard, nor do I know how to play, or do I have time.