Posted on 04/29/2009 6:49:17 AM PDT by seatrout
Not all engineering jobs are getting outsourced, nor can they all be outsourced. Yes, a lot of the high-tech engineering does get outsourced, but if one is comfortable with other forms of engineering, such as environmental or consulting engineering, the rewards are there.
The nice thing about these fields, too, is that these are the types of engineering jobs that can't be outsourced because the need is for someone local to be able to do the job. For instance, if a building needs a boiler replacement, the owner can't call up a tech center in East Bumblefart, India and have them send out someone to do the fieldwork, produce the bid documents, monitor the installation and provide QA/QC on the job. Believe me, engineering jobs are out here, I should know - I are one. :)
No, the reality is, the globalist, we-don't-need-no-steenkin-regulation types have played a large role in alienating voters from the GOP, who can look at stagnant wages and corporations run-amok and see where a large part of the problem comes from - folks with your mindset.
That's akin to the path I've taken. I've gone from a mostly technical role to a business/technical/QA hybrid position. Very difficult to outsource - the outsourced staff ends up coming to me for help.
I have known too many American programmers who have fixed Indians work.
Some Americans I know have been asked by Indian/Pak/Bang/MEastern programmers for copies of the Americans code for school projects!
I actually have an idea to start my own consulting position in a couple of years, but I don't care to state the basics of the business model, for obvious reasons. For now, I'm sticking with my current role as the key employee for my account - the only person who fully understands who the entire process works.
It has everything to do with it! I’m an engineer in Silicon Valley with 30 years of experience. When I was in school (A Cal State..) 95% of my class were US citizens. Now it is likely 20-30%. So the pool of graduating US engineers is already mostly foreign born.
At the same time - for most of my career, I felt that the US was the main benefactor, i.e. we attracted the best and brightest from other countries here. I still feel that way.
So I’ve got mixed emotions about the H1B limits. At the same time, there are OTHER types of Visas (simply don’t remember the number) that ARE really abused by some employers. I had one employer that DID bring over Indian workers and farmed them out to US companies. They lived together in a company owned apartment and collected Indian level wages. The Visa they were on was suppose to be limited to training.
Those are the guys I object too!
My daughter is pursuing her Chemical Eng. degree and her first semester she struggled with Calculus. Her instructor's heavy accent was not the only issue, the huge size of her class prevented her from any personal instruction, the assistants were only interested in spending time with the 'pretty' girls, the study groups were only interested in their own homework issues and the math labs where no different.
I told her to start at the beginning of her text book and teach herself and never, ever trust your education to your instructor. I gave her suggestions on learning new concepts on her own and after only two months, she brought her D grade up to a B, and she finished her course with an 'A'. She called after her first perfect score on a Calc exam and exclaimed, "I taught myself Calculus!"
Being a consultant is a start, but you are limited in your wages by the amount of hours you can personally work.
Get a good partner (take your time), make a product.
Sell it. Hire some people.
I made my most money by buying, collecting, and building up small businesses, keeping the books clean, then becoming a major pain in the ass to large public companies who buy me to get rid of the competition.
Repeat.
I doubt I would take that approach, but the learned advice is appreciated. I don't aspire to have a plane, just want to have some control over how I work. My background is pretty unique among IT workers, and I'm not sure I can find many other folks that could fill the role I am envisioning.
Like most things, it looks like the answer is "It depends."
YMMV
The other advice I would make is there is more money to be made in smaller (but not tiny) communties than in cities.
Your company total take is miniscule compared to large companies, but larger personally.
To compare, my 2 roommate at MIT were both chem engineers. One is a top guy at DOW. Makes low-mid six figures, good stuff.
The other went to work for DOW, bailed after a couple of years, and bought into a dinky plastics companys that makes abotu 1% of what DOW makes. He owns the thing. Makes mid 7 figures, and may hire our buddy from DOW to run it while he goes drinks beer in Costa Rica.
Sounds familiar. I think part of this is affirmative action in Universities, hiring foreigners to look "diverse."
Tell your daughter I found Calc 1 to be the hardest of the calculus courses, because you have to learn an entirely new way of looking at math. Tell her if she keeps with it, in a few semesters after Calc 3 she'll be able to take Differential Equations, which is by far the funnest math course.
Also, if she's looking for an elective, Statistical Theory is really cool, and nothing like intro Stats courses.
I’m not a programmer, but I’m guessing part of the deal is that in the US, programming is looked at as an Art, while in India and elsewhere it is viewed as a Science.
Is your loyalty higher to your employer or to your nation? Are you an American or someone without a country? You are changing America in the direction of becoming a third world country, for a few pieces of silver. I don't understand the "citizen of the world" new tradition, why it caught on so fast and went so far. It's completely against human nature to sell out your own tribe. Most people that would have done this should have been killed off or ejected from their tribe long ago.
You'd think America would have learned a lesson by now: It's better long term to invent an automatic cotton gin or lettuce picker than it is to import cheap immigrant labor.
We don't have that many people coming over on H1-B visas and generally they are very sharp people, productive people who contribute a lot to our society, the kind we want to bring in. Some will end up getting green cards and some will end up becoming citizens eventually. I have no problem with that at all. Maybe we need some reform in the H1-B program, but on the whole it would be a bad idea to stop taking the best and the brightest from around the world.
Funny side note... The mother of my daughter is of Greek origin and was born in Alexandria, Egypt. I told my daughter, who happens to be as white as a sheet of paper, to check the 'African American' box on some of her forms. She has a certified birth certificate of her mother's African birth but she has never been qualified for any affirmative action programs based on that. We both know it isn't about the facts, but the 'feelings' and 'appearance', we do it just for fun and to point out the hypocrisy in the bureaucracy... and it is fun.
Or worst, report back to their motherland and teach their industries to compete against us, and upgrade their military to fight us. GOP embraced this and they wonder why they lost in 2006 and 2008. It will be a matter of time before the rank and file Dems will figure out that the DNC is doing the same, but more indirectly and behind the scenes. Third Party in 2012.
The sad fact is you don't get an engineering degree to be an engineer, it is only useful if you manage engineers, just being an "individual contributer" gets you outsourced.
The problem with H1-B’s is that that never know as much as is promised to you. After spending weeks re-training Indian H1-B programmers back in 1999 for a web project and then having them screw up the COM objects on the site, we have never hired anything but American kids.
A friend of mine got a degree in Construction Management from a very good southern university. In school, all of the engineering students made fun of the CM majors, because it was supposedly an easy curriculum.
Her mantra became, “In 5 years, engineers will be my b*tches!” It came true one year earlier. In 2005, she became a project manager for an aerospace company and has two mechanical engineers reporting to her.
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