Japan Running Out Of Engineers

Japan is running out of engineers.

After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[capitalismisntamoral]

yep, several posters on here have hit the proverbial nail on the head (of the potential engineer).

Surprised noone mentioned (by name) the tech companies lobbying for more H-1 visas to
import more low cost engineers from abroad.

Or the student loan component:
If you had a college age son or daughter, who needs to take out >$50,000 in loans just to
get a BS, you better make damn sure you're ending up with a career with potential to pay
that king's ransom back. Because you cant' default from student loans, even if you go
bankrupt.

Wouldn't you steer your child toward law, medicine, or wall street if you wanted to make
sure he or she would end up successful?

Then there's those who opted for an engineering education only to have their earning
potential (with advanced degrees) capped at $100k. That barely makes you middle
class - and it makes you unable to afford a house in a halfway decent area in Silicon
Valley or Boston without a comparable second income.

Compared to your (educational) peers who went on to become lawyers, doctors,
work in finance, etc, you're a financial failure. Salesmen for medical equipment
easily make >$100k with far less education, effort, intelligence or loans needed.

[bac]

America at one time attracted the best and brightest, both from home and abroad, to the engineering field. The many innovations here can be directly attributed to this. One of the reasons was that the compensation for engineers in US was quite good, specially in relation to other countries. But the 'greedy' US corporations, in the guise of competitiveness, have alter that scenario forever. To save a few dollars, they have been distributing engineering jobs pretty much anywhere. American students are now reluctant to enter a fairly rigorous field where they are quite uncertain of the payoff. Its become a vicious cycle now. Fewer American engineers to fill the jobs at lower salaries causes these jobs to be sent elsewhere, or to import engineers from other countries to fill them. The current breed of imported engineers are quite inferior to the ones that came to US in the earlier years, and are not generally treated quite the same. This creates a negative image for the engineering profession in the US, further discouraging new entrants here, creating more domestic shortages, and cycle goes on. Its just too bad. Not sure what can be done now. I suspect the same is beginning to happen in other industrialized nations.

[loki]

I guess if you had not brutally murdered thouands of the Chinese during the war and now refuse to even acknowledge it, you might be able to import all the engineers you need for pennys on the dollar like they do in the US.

[jsarets]

Why enter a productive career where the vast majority will never make six figures when you could enter the overhead services industries (finance, healthcare, marketing, etc.) and have a decent shot at affluence? The problem with production is that it's usually governed very tightly by supply and demand. Service providers, on the other hand, have a lot of leeway in setting prices and terms of service, and services are more resistant than products to commoditization.

It's clear that an economy cannot be healthy without a functional manufacturing sector, even in a global economic system. However, in market capitalism, the biggest profits and highest wages are to be found in the service sector. As more national economies embrace the winner-take-all philosophy of American capitalism, the people of these countries are going to shoot for the top, and there will be shortages in the middle tiers where jobs require considerable skill but don't pay a lot of money.

All of this, however, is trumped by my grand theory of excess labor: that there are several times more potential consumers in the world than the number of workers required to provide the goods and services they demand. In other words, full employment is impossible, not even close, because of the incredibly efficiency of the global economy. This hypothesis challenges the underlying basis for market fundamentalism, that everybody should work and pay their own way, and suggests that mechanisms for sharing both work and wealth are necessary and inevitable.

[capitalismisntamoral]

@jsarets, interesting comments (as I re-read, I see you're up a level of abstraction -
you talk/write like an economist). I agree that there never can be full employment, but
I would say that the 'global economy' has been designed/manipulated to be exactly
that way. There have to be lots of losers in order for there to be winners who take all (a lot).

What value to society does wall street provide? hedge funds? They're the ultimate
middlemen, stripping out value from everything they touch - which unfortunately is
everything - even food today (hence the number of blogs and article arguing that
speculator AREN'T responsible for high food prices).

My moniker is supposed to mean that I don't believe capitalism (as it's currently
practiced) is moral. There's nothing moral about greed and justifying your behavior
by saying "if I don't suck this money out of the economy, someone else will".

What we have is FAR from free market capitalism in almost all cases. No mention
of Iraq and no-bid contracts necessary.

It has occurred to me that my moniker could be misinterpreted by the true believer
in free market fundamentalism. Their twisted view would bethat any kind of regulation
or 'interference' (i.e. following the rules or the law) is an immoral corruption of the
sacred free market.

[Herrington]

Welcome aboard Japan. When the bottom dropped out of engineering salaries here, guess what, people stopped majoring in engineering. It is not that engineering is hard or that there is an easier path to riches. It is that engineering does not pay in a cost crushing business model. The Japanese student has made the same reckoning that his American peers have made. Finance and the arts are riskier paths, but paths that can lead somewhere. Engineering is a dead end career.

[FreedomCorpse]

How bout that? In America, corporations could care less about their engineers. If they're good, the company will work them to death and promote the incompetent. If executive management makes horrible business decisions and destroys the bottom line or morale in an organization, the finger always points somewhere else except at executive management.

[SouthJerseySteve]

Don't worry, I'm sure there's plenty of them in China and India.