[quote=CA renter]Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley just after the aerospace heyday, my family had a lot of friends in the aerospace industry who got absolutely slammed when everything was shut down. So many of them went from being very successful engineers on high-tech, super-secret projects to…selling Amway (not kidding) or teaching part time at the junior college, etc. for a tiny fraction of what they once made. Many of them had worked decades in the aerospace industry, and had no real options to change careers at that late stage in their lives. It was truly devastating. I guess the “engineering degree = success!” meme doesn’t really sit well with me.
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I think there are two issues here.
1)Generalizing the cyclical nature of Aerospace engineering with engineering in general. Aerospace for one thing depends significantly on government spending. Yes, it’s for profit, but it depends on government budgets. The big aerospace exodus (which my parents both survived) happened in Southern CA dude to shrinking government budgets, NOT outsourcing
2)Regarding
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Whenever I hear about ++millions++ of Chinese and Indian kids going into engineering or related fields, I can’t help but think that is the LAST major we should be pushing our kids into. Sounds like it’s going to be a very saturated field in coming years.
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This is where I have to disagree. I think it’s about time our kids wake up and face reality.This is global competition. It doesn’t really matter WHAT you do…You will have global competition in just about every profession, unless you want to be a government worker (and that arguably can be outsourced). Telling someone that the shouldn’t enter a profession because their is too much competition imho is a step in the wrong direction. They failed even before they tried.
I think of this, as someone once described this to me as, “learned helplessness”.
I don’t know. I think someone grad who invested 4-6 years in school in engineering in 2004/5 versus the equivalent of someone that did a bachelor in “business” would probably be looking pretty peachy right now, since the fear of outsourcing itself is doing a pretty good job creating a vacuum of good candidates domestically. Starting salaries of $80-90k for fresh grads/or folks with 1-2 years of experience isn’t exactly something to blow off these days imho. The problem I think is these millienium generation types want instant gratification, and expect to start making high six figures from day one, which sorry to say, only happens if you are the small percentage that end up on Wall Street…
