Need I remind people that NASA itself is laying off their engineers by the thousands. Is anyone going to hire them in the math and science fields? Unlikely as most at either retiring or changing careers. One such engineer posted this on another blog that really shed light on rapidly deteriorating field that America once dominated.
Why in the world would anyone want to be an engineer in this county?
I've been an engineer for 20 years, it was the worst decision I ever made. Sadly, at 18 years old I bought the lies of how good engineers are treated and how well paid they are, it made sense too, the hardest work gets good pay. What a joke, the reality is engineers are treated like dirt in this country, if you aren’t now you will be soon enough. Engineering is just viewed as an expense to be minimized. I would NEVER, EVER recommend someone to become an engineer, even if it really appealed to you, as it did me.
There is no doubt the school work is much, much harder, and requires much more time. In my first weed out class the prof said you can forget about having a life for four years—and those left that graduated could confirm that. Taking five years is common.
Doing a business major is so much easier in relation, and you can end up with much higher pay, easy work with low stress, in relation. In most fields you can hide or blame shift mistakes, but in engineering the smallest mistake in a system with a million connecting complex items can not be escaped and will cause a problem that you may work round the clock to fix.
I have dozens of US patents and have helped designed multi-billion dollar sale products, but I always hear about how much better some MBA is making it, often twice my pay for work that is really easy in relation.
If you want to make money in this country get a job that manages money, or work for the oil business. I got so tired of hearing about flunkies in the oil business making huge salaries that I bought a Prius. A nice piece of engineering… the Japanese and Germans beat us hands down in making quality products and don’t expect that to change with the culture ingrained in corporate American.
Engineers were almost in high demand in the early 90's, and would have then been treated well, but corporate America avoided paying market rates by bringing floods of low paying H1B visas in from overseas who had to be slaves to the company, or have to leave the country. This kept wages flat. Scams were used to work around H1B limitations, on youtube watch video ID TCbFEgFajGU called “PERM Fake Job Ads defraud Americans”, it’s sickening.
Now, every developing country has invested heavily in producing engineers who will work long and hard for little pay, India, China, and on... So just like all the manufacturing jobs left the US for low paying Chinese factories, engineers will be gone too. It’s just a matter of time. Some of my co-workers have visited some up and coming Chinese engineering firms, they were blown away by the scale of the operation. Estimates were they’ll have 20 Chinese engineers to compete against one American one.
Yes, it’s really that bad… and why would you want to get into engineering?
The reality is now there is a lot of great engineering talent in the world where one foreign engineer can be paid less than what it would cost one American to pay property tax, income tax, sales tax, unemployment tax, social security and other taxes. So long term it will be impossible to compete in the global market due to the high taxes in this country. Got that? It’s about the taxes. Taxes and mindless regulations distort the market on a global level.
Going to work for an oil company should be a good option, unless you have a brain and a conscious as the corruption is so blatant.
Want more Engineers in America. Raise the pay scale and the market will provide.
