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No rating yet Subject: Re: [OT] Why there are so few New Grads who want Author: Kamalesh Vasudeva Date: 2008-04-18 14:21:58Talking about disrespect to Engineers, I've heard one of the companies hiring unemployed commerce/ arts graduates for Finite Element meshing purposes giving the reason that they come cheaper (In India) than Engineers when it's routine meshing!!! Take that.
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Kamalesh Vasudeva FEM Analyst, Polymer Systems, Textron India Pvt. Ltd., Global village, RVCE post, Mylasandra, Off Mysore road, Bengaluru-560059 Phone: +91-80-6712-9252 Fax: +91-80-6712-9250
-----Original Message----- From: xansys-bounces_at_xansys.org [mailto:xansys-bounces_at_xansys.org] On Behalf Of Mally, Carl Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 7:28 PM To: ANSYS User Discussion List Subject: Re: [Xansys] [OT] Why there are so few New Grads who want todoSimulation
It goes beyond simulation. Engineering schools as a whole are seeing reductions in graduates. I will try to offer a few disjointed observations. First the pipeline was broken for many technical professions, including engineering, in the mid 1980's when much of the country had double digit unemployment, so few people were hired. We are paying a price now. Second wages are an issue. Engineering salaries are pretty good for a new grad compared to other professions but level out quickly. Benefit for the effort required is not there. Up to recently, real estate salespeople with a 90 training class for a license had a good shot at making as much or more than an experienced engineer. I recently had some people on the list call me out on comments I made about supply and demand but at least in this part of the country short supply coupled with high demand has not led to better wages. They are not keeping up with inflation. Amazingly one or two recruiters have told me that tight supply high demand will not bring higher wages! At the risk of offending some list members, American companies are using certain lower wage countries as a lever to keep a lid on wages here. It is backfiring by driving talented people away from the profession. Finally there is the serious issue of respect. In the last 15 years or so there is a fad in management saying that skills are unimportant. It is only important how you present yourself and interact with other people. Teams of low skill or no skill people supposedly can outperform trained, skilled, educated and talented people. The Green Belt and Kaizen approaches are riddled with this type of thinking. This is nonsense but there has been a concerted propaganda campaign on the part of the American Society for Quality, NAM and the HR associations to sell this point. I say that it is a campaign because I have seen identical workshops put on at different employers to ram this point home. After hearing this, people with no education or experience take it as a license to treat engineers with disrespect and often they get management support. All these things together along with job security issues as companies are bought out and closed make engineering a much less attractive profession than it was twenty five or thirty years ago. Sorry for being negative but that is what I have seen.
Carl Mally Senior Applications Engineer Centro Inc. 950 North Bend Drive North Liberty, IA 52317
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