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#1 | |
Bioengineer and aspiring lawer
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Pittsburgh
Posts: 872
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The most valuable renewable resource is stupidity. |
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#2 | |
May Ter Dee
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 26
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What's worse, being a liberal arts major practicing your enunciation skills on "Ya want fries with that?" or being an engineering major watching the H1B visa folks and the constant flow of jobs being internationally outsourced until entry-level tech jobs are as rewarding as working a fry-o-lator, pay less, and are much harder to find? Blaming people for not being engineers seems kind of strange to me. The reality of the situation is that foreign-educated engineers come with lower pricetags due to lower cost of education in their countries. We can't compete with them. Why would we want to try?
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#3 | |||
still eats dirt
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Tampa, FL
Posts: 3,031
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#4 |
Bioengineer and aspiring lawer
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Pittsburgh
Posts: 872
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More and more of our newer engineering grads are being lured away by the promise of a respectible paycheck and the chance to do some real work without being suppressed by the anti-science nutjobs in this country. Even though I won't be that position for at least another 6-8 years (we bioengineers basically have a manditory masters degree) I'm going to need to become familiar with at least one or two extra languages in the meantime.
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The most valuable renewable resource is stupidity. |
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#5 |
Makes some feel uncomfortable
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 10,346
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What is evrybody doing these days? Doctors are fleeing th medical field because of low insurance reimbursements and high malpractice fees, students are not even considering engineering. Is everybody becoming a lawyer or middle manager?
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#6 | |
Your Bartender
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Philly Burbs, PA
Posts: 7,651
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![]() I hear opticians are in demand... |
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#7 | |
May Ter Dee
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 26
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You've really hit the nail solidly, though. There really aren't any good jobs left in the US anymore. Partly it's outsourcing, and globalization averaging all the first, second and third world countries to the second world level. But mostly it's a hundred years' worth of the Industrial Revolution coming home to roost. The population of the US has grown from about 80 million in 1900 to almost 300 million today. Meanwhile, we've been assiduously creating new and better ways to do everything needed to support society using fewer workers to do so. The more we automate, the less people we need. Computer usage has accelerated the process in the past couple of decades. As things were, every middle manager needed a secretary to manage their correspondence, type up reports, keep their schedule, and do basic bookkeeping. Now a thousand dollar box on their desk does all that, and lets them watch their favorite porn too. Any fan of old movies remembers black and white scenes of dozens of workers in insurance companies and banks, sitting in huge rooms in neat rows of desks, punching numbers into adding machines. Now, it's a database on a mainframe. Even the little bookkeeping firm that used to do the paperwork for small businesses has been nudged out by Peachtree and Quickbooks. We're a lot more efficient at doing most anything these days, and efficient means that one person can now do the work of three, or five, or ten from just a decade ago. It's no surprise that there are no decent jobs left; we've been working our butts off trying to get rid of them.
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#8 | |
still eats dirt
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Tampa, FL
Posts: 3,031
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They don't show the part where they fire the other shifts of admins that were once needed to fix problems, slap a pager on the day guy's belt, and tell him he can't take vacations "very far from town", anymore, "just in case he's needed". With intelligent hardware and software, they only need one guy, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A recent Xerox commercial goes something like this: "How can we save money?" "What about all this? All these reports, all this paper? How much money did this take? It probably took a dozen of people and thousands of dollars." The head guy smiles as they realize they can buy an intelligent office document management system and get rid of the paper waste. I always saw a bit of cruelty in the smile, knowing that they're happy that they get to save a buck by laying off those 12 people. Eh, I'm not arguing how they do it, I just find it really ironic that automation was supposed to free humans from work when, instead, it drives many into the poor house. |
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