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fundamentals
Very well put Mr Watkins.
RWatkins
I take issue with the statement "The emergence of the nomadic engineer is a ...
2010 EE Times Global Salary and Opinion Survey
George Leopold
11/28/2010 4:13 AM EST
The willingness of engineers to relocate could partly explain the increase. Higher pay was listed as the top reason for relocating by more than two-thirds of North American and European respondents. Of those, 24 percent of the North American respondents and 30 percent in Europe said they would be willing to relocate in exchange for a pay increase.
The emergence of the nomadic engineer is a likely consequence of accelerating globalization, rising interconnectedness and the diffusion of advanced technologies. While recent engineering graduates tend to stay closer to home, those with more work experience and employment savvy appear from our survey results to be more willing to pull up stakes in search of professional challenges and bigger checks.
Restlessness is also an issue, especially for engineers in China. That nation recently surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy and is methodically building up a 21st century engineering infrastructure that Beijing hopes will one day challenge the West. Fully 41 percent of the Chinese respondents to our survey, however, said they were seeking a career change.
The emerging economic superpower clearly has the resources and the will to become a technology R&D juggernaut. The question is whether China’s technology push will translate into higher social standing—and, with it, higher pay—for Chinese engineers.
In the course of compiling this year’s salary survey, we asked readers why they thought U.S. technology companies flush with cash had generally not resumed hiring. Many readers said they suspected tech companies were remaining on the sidelines because of lingering economic uncertainty.
One respondent, however, dismissed our premise altogether. “We’re hiring like crazy . . . with around 100 new positions on our books as we grow the company as fast as we can,” said a spokesman for Imagination Technologies, a U.K. developer of semiconductor intellectual property for multimedia and communications applications.
While the Imagination example certainly is not typical of hiring across the global industry, particularly for semiconductor design and manufacturing, it does underscore how the industry is evolving and which engineering skills are in demand.
“With the IP model now making more and more sense to semiconductor companies, R&D hiring has moved from the [semiconductor] to IP companies,” Imagination’s spokesman said. “IP companies are now where a more significant proportion of overall R&D job growth is happening.”
Perhaps, but our survey found that the primary engineering skills across all regions surveyed focused on design skills for embedded systems and for hardware/software co-design. Despite growing emphasis on software development as a key product differentiator, most of our respondents reported being involved primarily with hardware development. That said, to be sure, IP development and licensing play an increasing role in the engineering profession as emerging companies experiment with new business models.
The survey also found unexpectedly low demand for engineering skills in emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology, photovoltaics and even nuts-and-bolts semiconductor advancements like 3-D chip packaging. That trend could continue in areas such as solar technology, for which enthusiasm in the United States has been diminished by the failure of politicians to forge a coherent energy policy.
Despite the prevailing sentiment among U.S. tech professionals that technology companies are balking at hiring more engineers, more than half of all those surveyed said their companies were short on engineering staff. The reasons, many said, include corporate acquisitions and subsequent downsizing, along with the addition of company divisions that are stretching engineering staffs.
Certainly, the tenor of this year’s survey was more upbeat than it’s been in several cycles. Nonetheless, it’s clear from reader feedback that many engineers, especially in the United States, remain concerned about the impact of globalization on their profession. Political standoffs at home and continuing economic uncertainty abroad could make it hard to sustain a nascent recovery in the engineering sector.
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| Despite economic uncertainty, more than half of all the respondents in our global survey said they had received a bonus in the past 12 months. |
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fundamentals
11/29/2010 4:32 PM EST
I would like to comment on the maxim “the principal function of a business is to make money for its owners and stockholders, and the people who find this objectionable are against capitalism.”
I fully agree with this maxim, but a clarification is in order: the purpose should be to make the most amount of money in the next ten years (or depending on the product type you can substitute 10 years by X years, where X is larger than 3.) The sad fact is that most CEOs and CFOs are not at all interested in maximizing the total delivered value to the stockholders in a period of 10 years or so. They are interested in maximizing the profits in the next six months, or maybe a year. They are happy to do that even if they know they are running the business to the ground in the long term. In the short term, they collect huge stock awards and bonuses. In the long term, when things get sour, they blame our government and all other governments, they blame cheap foreign competition, and so on, and move on to another position. Then the vicious cycle repeats.
I sincerely believe that the fundamental problem is not the globalization. The detrimental problem is the very narrow short term focus in terms of results. Today, many CEOs prefer to acquire successful small start-up companies by spending hundreds of millions of Dollars, instead of having taken the long term view several years back and having done the work in house for a tenth of the price. The financial markets reward this behavior.
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george.leopold
11/30/2010 5:28 PM EST
I tend to agree with "fundamentals" about myopic CEOs focusing only on short-term gain at the expense of long-term stability. While interviewing a semiconductor CEO several years ago, he checked his company's stock price at least twice in an hour. I quickly realized he was more interested in tracking the value of his stock options than discussing his company's strategies for growth and innovation. This is no way to run a railroad.
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Charles.Desassure
11/30/2010 6:46 PM EST
Thanks for your article. Baseon the information in this article, and talking to engineers in my area, this report is about right…(take or give a few points). The job market is improving and many businesses will start hiring engineers. That is good news for everyone.
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Frank Eory
11/30/2010 8:20 PM EST
I wonder if EE Times readers perceive a difference in short-term vs. long-term focus in CEO and senior management focus in private companies vs. public companies?
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Neo1
12/2/2010 12:07 AM EST
So all this recession did come up with a something bright in the end, the Nobel in economics for those profs.
Knock, Knock, who's hiring?
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GREAT-Terry
12/2/2010 10:47 AM EST
Long article but good information and nice analysis.
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wn
12/5/2010 9:26 PM EST
Andy Grove almost said it last month. The US economy was big enough during the past 50 years to permit Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to develop huge balance of trade in their favor. NAFTA was basically an extension of the same thing apparently. The US is no longer big enough to survive in tech if we continue doing business the same old way.
The demize of US high tech actually was clear during the past 10 years, but the free wheeling easy money of the past decade blindfolded us as to the problem.
As Intel and others can now see, if we are going to compete directly against the Chinese government party PLA, the US Congress must wake up to the fact that some clearcut national high policies are not only important, but indeed critical for the survival of the US as a first world nation.
Somehow it was ok to let the Pacific rim nations under strong government leadership develop the huge trade surpluses existing today. But not with China playing the same game except even more overtly and covertly, our government cannot continue to simply sit by and say "let IBM and Texas Instruments fight it out with the Pacific Rim". We are failing miserably and will continue to do so unless the US government gets into the act with some clear high tech policies that are based on wisdom and concern for tomorrow.
Respectfully submitted,
William
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Yamaha
12/13/2010 11:09 AM EST
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daughters from entering the profession."
I agree and feel the same. If I could do it again I would stay far away from this field. Engineering is hard, thankless work. The pay scale is just not worth the burden of long nights, personal responsibility, stress and meeting demanding expectations from management. I've met personal trainers and strippers who make more than I do, and they're not designing components for the latest greatest jet engines. Problem solving is fun and challenges the mind - but in this field, it means dealing with problems every minute of every workday.
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RWatkins
3/11/2011 4:44 PM EST
I take issue with the statement "The emergence of the nomadic engineer is a likely consequence of accelerating globalization, rising interconnectedness and the diffusion of advanced technologies." In fact the nomadic engineer is the consequence of the severely diminished mutual respect and value between the middle to upper management of companies and the engineering staff. A large portion of this change has occurred during the last 50 years, accelerated since the mid 1990's. A portion of engineers' readiness to move on is due to the elimination of the lifetime career expectation at a single company, that has been caused by severe layoffs of skilled technical personnel done comparably to layoffs of non-skilled and non-technical personnel. Time was when the people who were retained at all costs were the engineers, even to the point of temporarily using engineers as secretaries and non-technical staff in needed positions during economic down-turns. The change to equality in layoffs has cost short-sighted businesses, who even now "off-shore" their design projects only to get poor quality results that damage corporate bottom lines and quality reputations.
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fundamentals
3/11/2011 5:26 PM EST
Very well put Mr Watkins.
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