In hindsight, the tone of my comment seems condescending to business and marketing types. This was not intended, and I apologize if any offense was taken.
Those are just as important to economic progress as the engineer type. Assuming there is a real global shortage of a given type of skill and an excess of others, we all benefit if appropriate reallocation is inspired.
No, they mean there is a greater lack of engineers compared to other occupations requiring similar levels of education and therefore we should put more effort into educating and importing engineers. Saying we shouldn't focus on getting more engineers in those cases is just dumb, the economy would greatly benefit, you just want to protect your currently privileged position at the cost of society as a whole.
So not teaching more people engineering is a good thing? Are you really advocating ignorance to artificially constrain the supply in the market of competent engineers? Non-competes, no-poaching, etc and illegal acts to constrain salaries are deplorable, yes, but are you going to be able to change the profit motive of business? Nope. What you can change is how you market yourself and seeking other opportunities for income be they freelancing or something similar. Think of a world that is much more educated now. There's untold industries and innovations that can be had and we markets for us to be employed in.
Thankfully, life is not a zero-sum game (I mean it is, but we are just converting energy into complexity).
Some of these engineers will open other types of businesses and employ these people. Or maybe these people will go back to trades, because you know, these are much needed skills.
Based on your logic, we should still be using horses.
Sure. Guess my actual point was the lead time- it takes years to attract potential students, train them into engineers, give them some experience under the belt. Years to build up an effective workforce to fill this gap. Decade? Perhaps decades to fill this somewhat specialized labor deficit?
I don’t think the specialization of engineers is accidental.
I’ve worked at a number of companies and engineers are ALWAYS the limiting factor. Simply put, there’s a chronic shortage of people who can build valuable stuff.
I believe companies have sought to offload this bottleneck. Have engineers just build, and hire people to do everything else.
the problem is that many companies don't have good interviewing process to distinguish such engineers during hiring, so they are lost in crowd and salaries may receive hit.
That would be people you'd need though, not people that get "produced" in larger numbers than desirable. A million more engineers will be great. A million more art history majors not so much.
And we should consider ourselves lucky as engineers that we work in an industry where we are so in demand that are able to do that. Workers in other industries (the article talks about a firm that re-sells beauty products) might not be so lucky.
Thanks for including "profitable" - it's a travesty how much engineering talent is wasted toiling on "businesses" that only make $4k a year after hundreds of hours.
> Making them all into skilled labor is absurd for many reasons, not least of which is, we don't need that many engineers.
I'm not sure "we don't need that many engineers" is defensible. Who's to say how many are "needed" or not? I see no reason why the world couldn't have many more engineers (and scientists) working and still doing useful work.
Seriously. How do people look around at the world today and think: Yup, everything is peachy. Let's just sustain this, folks, we're good.
As long as there's a third world, we're nowhere close to having enough of anything, including engineers. There's still a shit ton of work to be done just to get the world to an acceptable level for all people.
Those are just as important to economic progress as the engineer type. Assuming there is a real global shortage of a given type of skill and an excess of others, we all benefit if appropriate reallocation is inspired.
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