Too few engineers to meet Boeing's need

[Blue_Tires]

Source: AP

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) - Adam Bruckner has noticed a disturbing trend during his 38 years as a University of Washington professor of aeronautics engineering.

His tests are less rigorous. His students, less prepared. Even the format of classes is changing, morphing into something that requires less manpower and smaller amounts of state money.

Bruckner, the chair of the only aeronautical engineering program in the Pacific Northwest, is facing a crisis: a malnourished budget and a bad case of student unpreparedness.

The best students are as good as they ever were, Bruckner said. But the rest aren't keeping pace with technological innovation in the industry.

Add this to the mix: The state's aerospace industry is in dire need of engineers. Demand consistently exceeds the state's production at a two-to-one ratio, and that supply gap is expected to widen as the industry's aging work force retires in droves.

"There aren't enough seats in the university here to be able to generate that many students," Bruckner said. "We don't want to just crank people out for the sake of cranking people out. We want to produce good engineers."

Read more: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/94696599.html

[liberal N proud]

1. They are not looking far enough

I know where there are several who need jobs.

[Skittles]

3. this is the crap they say when they want to justify pimping jobs offshore

[elzenmahn]

7. I've heard this before...

...when the hi-tech industry in Silicon Valley was saying the same thing, and then voila - the H1B visa grants increased.

This has never been about a shortage of a type of worker as much as it is about a shortage of worker willing to work for wages American companies are willing to pay. It's labor market manipulation, once again.

[Skittles]

11. ELZENMAHN KNOWS THE SCORE

YES INDEED :hi:

[4_TN_TITANS]

22. I agree...

This is just the prelude and excuse to go shopping overseas.

[defendandprotect]

23. Agree. . . and they've been doing that with engineers since 80's . . .

First they produced more engineers than needed here --

flooding market, reducing salaries -- then brought in foreign engineers

who would accept lower salaries.

It's what capitalism is always about . . . exploiting labor --

harvesting slave labor!

[tabatha]

2. They're cranking them out in India and China.

[Lasher]

4. Funny how we can't afford the schools and they can.

I guess that's partly because they're not spending their money on schools in Iraq.

[OHdem10]

5. Watch DC and you will see H-1B Visas being given.

Are people in other states notified of openings. No, they
'want to hire people from other countries at lower salary.

[golfguru]

6. Why would any really intelligent American born student

would want to go into Engineering when much more money can be made
in Wall street, Law, Medicine & Politics?

[Lucky Luciano]

8. In fact a lot of the top engineers go to wall street. nt

[golfguru]

9. Yes, and I personally know some who went into law

after giving up engineering field and became wealthy.

[scentopine]

10. As an engineer who worked in a difficullt undergrad and grad

program while

- my MBA collegues got rich on wall street

- MBAs crammed for exams between beer benders using frat houses filled with every past exam going back 20+ years

- jobs hemoraging to Inda and china - they aren't smarter, some havent seen a real computer until age 20, they work for $7/hr

- watching benefits and pension plans and salary go to shit

- after beign treated as shit by MBA manager assholes, many engineers decided to join them rather than fight them and became MBAs themselves.

I still am involved in core engineering and have had some modest success in my field. It is mostly luck that I worked for a few companies that held on to older engineering and corporate values.

I attribute a crisis in engineering to publish or perish - IEEE specifically has a purist attitude that demands "research cash" and bullshit journal articles over solid focus on fundamentals and skill.

Pick up an IRE journal from 40 years ago and you will see real engineering at work - important and accessible. These days, R&D journals are a mess of academic theories and mathmatical oddities, some tiny abstract corner of the world that used to occupy mathmatics and physics - intellectually challanging but rarely interesting or relevant to real world problem solving.

So two problems - engineering has lost its way and engineers don't want to work for $7 an hour without benefits.

Trust me - India and China are not better than us, they simply work for a fraction of the wage without benefits. What they lack in quallity they make up for in quantity. If they get sick, they get fired and another person takes their place.

Engineers are generally conservative republicans. They have no self preservation skills. So we stand back and watch another national treasure being outourced over seas without a complaint and marvel at the magic of the free market while trying figuring out how much it costs to get an MBA.

Intel used to complain about the same Engineering problem. Then they fired thousands of engineers and moved to India where loaded labor costs in a loosely regulated labor market allowed them to increase their profits while local communities were flattened with high unemployment of highly skilled people.

[Skittles]

12. you don't have to tell me that the India and China folk are not better

I know first hand how not only are they NOT better, in too many cases they completely SUCK.

[scentopine]

13. I hate to admit it but part of my job is fixing their shit, it really sucks

But over time that willl change and we will depend on India and China like the govt. depends on BPP and Goldman Sachs. We will "manage" everything while being incapable of doing anything. I have watched my industry move from hands-on R&D with exciting important projects to slave tinkering with bullshit because corp execs don't want to spend a dime on ANYTHING that actually costs money and can't deliver a profit in 3 months!

I haven't worked on a prject in last 8 years that didn;t have like at most 6 month deadline for delivery. There is no time for R&D its all re-inventing the same shit over and over, just little tweaks, near zero nre.

[Skittles]

16. I hear you

absolutely :(

funny, I watched Office Space recently - I did that exact same work in 1999 and it sucked but in retrospect, they, and I, had it so easy - it should be remade with offshore fucks factored into the picture - they make me want to off myself on a regular basis

[scentopine]

14. Ha - I should also add when it comes to layoffs - boeing is king!

They literally decimated puget sound area. Boeing could hire them back. There are also tens of thousands of engineers out of work - or rather they are selling real estate of insurance or working at home depot. Hire them.

[zenprole]

19. Can I get an "Amen!"

Sweet post, dude. Engineers have taken serious hits over the last 30 years.

[Sherman A1]

20. +1, Agreed & Well Said!

Precisely!:toast:

[Loudmxr]

15. That is the Republican plan. Make US a second world country.

My question of late is "How far back do you want to take us to a low tax, semi-agarian nation with bad roads?"

[pnwmom]

17. What a crock. Boeing's laying off more skilled engineers than it's hiring.

This guy wants more money for his department. Over the long run, that probably makes sense. But the state's aerospace industry is NOT in dire need of engineers.

[scentopine]

18. I know - I watched the lay-offs in that area - they could just hire them back -nt

[zenprole]

21. KOMO's a joke

Yeah. Uh-huh. No engineers after laying off thousands? Micro$oft used the same dodge to ramp up the H-1B visas. Stay tuned for part II.

My bet is, sometime down the road, the huge assembly buildings at Boeing will be used for hydroponic farming. They've already got vegetables in the executive suites, so it should be a smooth transition.

(related note: the Seattle area can be nice, but the scams run there are wicked provincial - transparent as a windowpane. Not that it keeps them from working, mind you.)