Wall Street Journal

July 5, 2002 Friday

SCIENCE JOURNAL By SHARON BEGLEY

Angry Engineers Pin Shortage On Low Pay, Layoffs, Age Bias

Hundreds of readers wrote to comment about my June 7 column1 on the projected shortage of engineers -- most of them angry engineers.

While some lamented the uninspiring college curricula that turn off would-be engineers, the majority echoed Andy Moore, 47, who got his B.S. in mechanical engineering.

"I would not recommend the profession," he says. "Companies view engineers as labor to be discarded when times are tough. Industries such as aerospace want seasoned, innovative engineers during peak periods and then discard them when the contracts end. I am surprised they get anyone at all."

Among the engineers I heard from, gripes focused on salary stagnation, age discrimination and the infamous boom-and-bust cycle in the field.

Although I pointed to the high starting salary for engineers, few were impressed.

"My salary was only $1,000 or $2,000 more than a new graduate with a master's" after 11 years at IBM, one job-hunting engineer noted.

One civil engineer stuck with the field for only five years after graduate school. Fed up with minuscule pay increases and hitting a salary plateau, he now does equity research, a profession he says is full of engineering refugees. He and others cite the influx of foreign-born engineers as a reason for the stagnating salaries.

"If the captains of high tech are worried about the next generation of engineers, they have only themselves to blame," agrees Mark Mendlovitz, who taught engineering at Southern Methodist University. "They lobbied Congress for an endless supply of H-1B visa holders to work long hours at below-market wages, [with the result that] programmers and engineers saw their wage growth suppressed and careers shortened. Potential engineers are reading the writing on the wall and choosing more lucrative and stable careers in business, medicine and law."

Many believe engineers are often victims of age discrimination. Steve McMeekin, an electrical engineer who has done hardware and systems design for 24 years, calls predictions of an engineer shortage "a crock," citing his highly skilled, motivated engineer friends who can't find work. "Their only problem is they are over 40," he says.

"When CEOs lament the decline in engineering enrollment," says Michael Duffy, who has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and spent 16 years at it, "I always think of the older talent they've tossed aside."

The message: Too many firms treat 40-something engineers as obsolete. The smart engineers become patent lawyers. The periodic cry of "engineer shortage!" is a ploy to obtain talent on the cheap and replace middle-aged engineers with new grads trained in the latest techniques, hundreds of readers claimed.

Anyone trying to gin up student interest in engineering through role models should read my mail. Arnold Krell, a retired electrical engineer, says, "I refused to allow my two children to become engineers," citing salary ceilings and competition from younger, less-expensive workers.

James Jordan, a 20-year software vet, suspects that "today's youngsters have seen how their parents have been treated by high-tech industries, as disposable wage slaves who work long hours at high-stress jobs only to face forced early retirement sans pension."

The periodic layoffs of engineers, with thousands dumped in the aerospace-defense contraction of the late 1980s and now in the dot-com and telecom meltdowns, have left a sea of bitterness. As Ed Boakes, who holds an M.S. in electrical engineering and works at a telecom supplier, asks, "Why bother to go into engineering at all? If you get a job, you'll soon be laid off. I worry every day that today may be my last of work."

During his 25 years in engineering, Mark Miller saw 10 waves of layoffs. Now a stock analyst, he compares engineers to migrant workers: "In aerospace, defense and electronics, technical employment ebbs and flows with the economy and defense contracts."

One Lucent engineer told me he and his colleagues "watch in envy as the salesmen earn six-figure commissions and Hawaiian 'sales meetings' by taking orders for systems we designed that they don't even understand."

Jack Cummins, an aerospace engineer for 15 years, puts it this way: "Why design things when you can work fewer hours, make more money and have a better life by being a sales weasel? The dark side pays better."

Maybe the drop-off in engineering grads reflects a big no-confidence vote in large companies by some of our smartest students. All you CEOs worried about where tomorrow's engineers will come from: Are you listening?