Japan "Running Out of Engineers"

bfwebster writes "A story in the New York Times reports that Japan, a country that rebuilt itself as a technological power after World War II, now faces an increasing shortage of college graduates with degrees in science and engineering. Says the article: 'By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.' The article goes on to point out that the overall trend of waning interest in science and technology has been going on for 'almost two decades' and that the shortage is made worse by the traditional reluctance of Japanese companies to hire and use foreign workers. The US has had a similar trend for quite some time: 'Undergraduate engineering enrollment declined through most of the 1980s and 1990s, rose from 2000 through 2003, and declined slightly in recent years.'"

Regular degrees are simpler

[Swizec (978239)]

Let's face it. People are lazy and getting a bogus humanistic degree is much easier than an engineering one.

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[Z00L00K (682162)]

It's always easy to talk a lot of bull*t.

But to really do things is a different issue.

The difference is that an engineer does the things needed, may it be building a bridge or designing a new chip while the humanists just talk and make social theories.

However the persons that are endangering development the most are the economists (actually just bean-counters). They are only calculating cents on and off and tries to shave off costs by forcing the engineers to under-design solutions - and at the same time providing suspicious evidence about "successful" savings which in turn gives them a huge salary bonus.

Just beware of bonus systems for management and CFO:s, they indicate a sick model, but even worse - they also attract persons that tries to gain an advantage while suppressing the quality of life for the average Joe on the workplace.

Unfortunately a solution of only engineers doesn't work either, but mostly because the engineers tends to want their solution to be "perfect".

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[LaskoVortex (1153471)]

However the persons that are endangering development the most are the economists (actually just bean-counters).

An economist is not a "bean counter". An accountant is a bean counter. An economist studies how people and collections of people make choices. The most famous example is the choice of "guns versus butter"--that's an economics issue. Bean counters try to balance the equity and make sure that the change in equity equals the difference between positive and negative cash flow.

Probably the people you are thinking of are "managers". Managers make short-sided decisions to make themselves look good and temporarily improve cash flow. They are different from accountants and economists. Managers change jobs frequently to avoid dealing with the problems their short sided decisions create.

"Manager" is a title, not a profession

[mangu (126918)]

Probably the people you are thinking of are "managers"

I don't know of any undergraduate course called "management". Managers have degrees, often in economy or accountancy, but also, in many cases, engineering as well. The problems caused by short-sided decisions do not come from one single profession in particular, but from a general system where managers make all the decisions without much supervision.

I believe the root of this problem comes from the current capitalist system where large corporations are never owned by a single person. If a company is owned by one individual, or a family, who depends on that company's profits for the foreseeable future, they care more for the long view. With modern corporations, if the profits are likely to drop in the near future, you sell the shares. Since most companies today behave in the same way, no shareholder cares for anything more remote than the next quarter.

And, still worse, is that too often corporations own other corporations. All their respective managers have to do is take care of each other. Cronyism at its worst.

Re:"Manager" is a title, not a profession

[lewp (95638)]

I don't know of any undergraduate course called "management".

Georgia Tech has a "Management" major. It's where all the folks who couldn't cut it in their engineering programs wind up.

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[gbjbaanb (229885)]

An economist is not a "bean counter". An accountant is a bean counter

exactly his point, at least a bean counter can count beans! Economists...

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let's build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."

Also a matter of rewards, I guess

[Moraelin (679338)]

It's also a matter of

A) rewards. If you're going to put 10x more work into something, then you'd expect the rewards to be worth it. That doesn't mean only salaries (though that sure helps too), but also stuff like overall job quality, social recognition of your efforts, etc. I'd say that in the west, for various reasons and to various degrees, all of those gradually declined.

We went for example from a culture which put its intellectual elites on pedestals, to a culture where being technically illiterate or even outright stupid, is cool and fashionable. In fact, if you show any intelectual interests or aptitudes, it's kinda mean of you and insensitive to your below-average neighbours/classmates/etc.

In programming alone we went from being those wizards doing high tech stuff, to being outright disconsidered. Nowadays for the average outsider it's not "I don't know how to do the things he does", it's more like "I have a life, I don't have time for that crap" or "yeah, the neighbour's 12 year old can do that kind of stuff." The idea from the 90's that you can just retrain an unemployed pizza-delivery-guy or burger flipper off the street, and he'll be just as good as those snotty CS and engineering graduates anyway, also didn't do much for recognition. It was hammered in everyone's head that you _are_ no better than him, and he could have had your job too if only he could be arsed to take one of those two-week java courses.

Now not all countries are at the same point, and not all went in that direction as fast, but that was the general direction all went slowly.

That's one reason to put in the extra effort, that went down the drain right there. For a lot of people that criterion is now actually a disincentive, since all that extra effort might actually _lower_ their prestige in the community instead of raising it.

B) Rampant age-ism also doesn't help. Back then, sure, I was young, I thought I'd never get old. When 15 years is your entire life so far, and you probably remember only 10, living another 45 years to 60 seems like a bloody eternity. No point worrying about something _that_ far in the future. Now I see perfectly competent programmers pushed aside or into a corner, because some PHB learned the mantra that only the smart young kids are any good.

If I had a kid, I'd tell him to stay well away of that field. Chances are you _will_ live to _at_ _least_ your 40's, even if you chain-smoke and get to twice your idea weight and go alcoholic too. If you want a job where you start being discriminated against as early as the 30's, heck, go into prostitution or porn instead. (And considering some bosses I've occasionally seen, prostitution might even be the more dignified job.)

C) It's also a matter of, well, excitement.

In all science or engineering domains, there was a time where it looked like there's so much interesting stuff to do or discover, and only the sky is the limit. (Or in aerospace not even the sky.)

In programming, for example, when I looked at some primitive games or programs on the old ZX-81 or later ZX-Spectrum, I thought, "I can do better." Often I actually could. Heck, I could even paint my own sprites by hand, although I'm no graphics artist, and they still looked good enough at that resolution.

Nowadays, if I look at a modern game, well, there's just not the same sensation. Duly noted, nowadays about half can be modded, so you can still tempt someone to programming that way. But for a while even that wasn't the case.

Ok, so that's only games, but the same applies to any other programming domain. At some point you could have been the guy who created the next big language, wrote the OS for some underpowered mini, or did the next great maths thing with a computer, or designed the next computer itself, or whatever. Nowadays you'll be a cog in a 20-people team writing the front-end to some database app.

Or if we move away from programming, as I was saying, the same applies to any other engineering domain. At one point we

Re:Also a matter of rewards, I guess

[Hazelnut (660467)]

Excellent post. So many people miss the effect of societies respect for a profession - it's huge. One of the reasons that UK schools find it hard to get good teachers... our society has respected them less and less over the past several decades.

Re:Also a matter of rewards, I guess

[mikael (484)]

New Labour didn't help things either - parents of children with behavour problems demanded that their children be sent to mainstream schools in order to avoid the stigma of being sent to "special schools" [bbc.co.uk]. Teachers have to deal with students who will constantly hit other students or hide under their desk the minute there is a loud noise. Teaching Assistants were introduced, but that was seen as a tn attempt to recruit teachers on a reduced salary.

Then there was also the attempt to stop schools from telling off, expelling or suspending disruptive students as this would be a violation of their fundamental human rights. Then there was the requirement that schools should provide breakfast to students who don't have time to have breakfast in the morning [bbc.co.uk].

Exam systems have been tinkered with. Previous governments introduced the concept of Foundation, Standard and Credit 'O' Grades so that everyone could say that they got an 'A' in their subject. Then there was switch to using coursework for assessment rather than exams, and the merger of Biology/Chemistry/Physics into General Science or the removal of various topics from Mathematics (permnutations and combinations, trigonometric equations and Physics.

As the same time, providing sanctuary to large numbers of asylum seekers who couldn't speak English as a first language, overloaded schools in London, which forced the government to "share the burden" across cities all across the UK. The side-effect of this was that the local parents pulled their children out of the popular state schools and send them to private schools instead. Now, the state schools are being forced to close due to lack of demand.

Then if there is a fight between students, the teachers can't intervene for fear of being injured, or being accused of being a pedophile for touching one of the students.

Well, it does depend on the domain

[Moraelin (679338)]

Oh, I didn't say that the only "golden age" was the 1800. I'm more like saying that each domain has its own "golden age", somewhere near the beginning of it. Then it becomes mostly salary work.

So for most mechanical stuff, yeah, the time where it was "exciting" was in the 1800's. For aerospace it was in the 20'th century. For computing stuff, it lasted more or less into the 90's.

So yes, some new thing will eventually come along, and for a while it will be all exciting to be in it. Then it will become just peon work too.

Basically I'm not saying that progress has stopped, or anything. I'm saying that the motivation to go to university in that domain looks a bit like a gauss curve, sorta. The "excitement" factor of it is high in the beginning, when there's so much to do, and it looks like you too could make your own contraption or just do things better. Then that excitement dies down, most (but obviously not all) stuff in that domain has been discovered, the industry has consolidated into a few dominant players, salaries went down, and what's left is whole teams doing tweaks to already refined designs. And to the guy looking at the question, "do I pick X as a major?" it already looks a lot less exciting than in the early years. He might choose it because the salaries are still good, but not because he actually thinks any more that he'll be the next big inventor of that domain.

Take, say, airplane building. In the beginning it looked so much like everyone's game, that we even had kids building a glider in the barn without telling their father. The feeling was there that you too can make your own flying contraption, and maybe even get it better than the ones that tried before you. There's a certain "excitement" factor in being at such a beginning. Then roll forward a century or so, and you have only a handful of big players who pushed everyone else out, and you're reduced to tweaking turbine blades in a CAD program and testing them in a wind tunnel. There's about as much excitement in it as in accountancy. And unsurprisingly a lot less kids dream of having that as their future job. (Just as well, because pay and number of jobs went down too in that domain.)

Or to better explain what I'm trying to say, that last point in my original message, well, was merely about why less people rush to enroll in a mature domain. I'm not saying that progress stopped. I'm just saying that eventually it just becomes less "exciting" a job. The same people who 100 years ago might have thought "OMG, if I only could work in aeronautics, it would be sooo cool and exciting" now look at it as, meh, just another possible desk job.

Re:Also a matter of rewards, I guess

[SageMusings (463344)]

As someone who lived 9 years in Japan, allow to amplify that comment. You can speak the language embrace the culture, and breathe local community activites. However, you will always be an outsider and something less than a valuable memeber of any organization in the way that people need to copier machine but never praise it nor think about it after hours.

I love Japan. But do not expect that love to come back to you. God help you if you are of Korean descent, too. They treat them like trash.

Bullshit

[kaiwai (765866)]

That isn't the case; I'm doing a 'humanistic degree' right now - Bachelor of Arts majoring in Religious Studies and Philophy (going to become a teacher in the area of history/social studies etc).

Before going to the university I attempted for 2 years to get into the IT sector; I just gave up in the end and got myself a job as a department manager. It is the industry itself which treats engineers (and other qualified people) like shit, then turn around pissing and moaning because there aren't enough people with the said qualification.

Sorry, but when you have engineers (and others) who have gone through the mincer and spat out the other side - many of them bitter, they tell kids what their experience within the engineering area is like, most kids end up saying, "fuck that for a joke" and look for a job elsewhere. That is the cold hard reality of the situation.

When you have wankers have recruiters, wankers as bosses, and the pay is just one big giant wank - one can't help by feel one is just one big giant bitch for the system to have its way with.

Would I ever go back to IT? no way. Many engineers who get out of the field never want to go back - unless they trip over an idea in their garage and they can be their own boss.

Re:Bullshit

[moosesocks (264553)]

Engineering and IT are two very distinct areas.

Some would argue that they barely overlap at all.

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[professionalfurryele (877225)]

I'm getting real tired of people who want to employ engineers (and their sock puppet politicians) continually screaming "Shortage!".

Japan has (by and large) a market economy. There is no such thing as a shortage in a market economy. If they want more people to do engineering, pay engineers more. You can bet the bank if engineers and scientists were paid football players or rock stars wages, then you wouldn't be able to move for people clamouring to be engineers and scientists.

What people mean when they say "there is a shortage of engineers" is "there is shortage of engineers prepared to do amazing work while being paid less than the idiot with the history of art major in middle management". Big surprise there.

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[professionalfurryele (877225)]

People going to college pick their major based on a number of different things. Are you seriously saying that if engineers earned six or seven figure salaries that smart people doing law degrees wouldn't switch to engineering?

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[mikael (484)]

Spain has a law that entry-level Spanish engineers must be paid half the salary of an engineer with several years experience. As a a consequence many choose to work abroad for their first few years then return once their salaries are no longer capped by the government.

According to this article, students are choosing to take law school courses instead, and get paid a more rewarding salary which leads directly to management than a long route which only leads to becoming a wage-slave.

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[LaskoVortex (1153471)]

It's funny that you got modded troll for telling the truth.

Its not moderation, its censorship. Its not all that funny, either.

Re:Regular degrees are simpler

[Yetihehe (971185)]

I wanted to mod this, but I'll reply instead. It's not censorship, it's just moderation. Censorship would mean deleting his comment. You can still view his comment, you can also set your settings so that you can see all flamebaits and/or trolls. Most people (including me) just think GP post is flamebait, so when they have mod points, they help other people by marking it (and if you really like to read flamebaits, such moderation helps too).

It's probably not waning interest in engineering

[waferhead (557795)]

It's probably not really waning interest in engineering...

It's probably more like waning interest in working like a slave and being managed by incompetent managers with no little/no engineering background.

Or perhaps HR departments playing keyword roulette on resumes, requiring ~100% matches in skills vs requirements.

Re:It's probably not waning interest in engineerin

[dattaway (3088)]

I heard about the "lack of engineers" a lot in the late 1980's. I went to engineering school and found out schools were turning out engineers like a puppy mill. We graduated in a recession. Looking back, the shortage hype appears to have been "engineered" by educational institutions and sponsoring companies heavily advertising in the media. Don't fall for it, unless you make plans to settle for low paying jobs just to find something interesting.

Re:It's probably not waning interest in engineerin

[Smidge204 (605297)]

I don't know about you, but I went into Engineering for the chicks.

I consider it a long-term investment.
=Smidge=

(...any day now...)

Respect for those who are knowledgeable is low.

[Futurepower(R) (558542)]

Exactly. MOD PARENT UP.

At the same time that technology is giving more than ever to humankind, respect from management for those who are knowledgeable about technology is lower than ever.

Part of the problem at Microsoft is that it is run by someone with little or no interest in technology, Steve Ballmer [wikipedia.org].

Releasing products that are unfinished because programmers have not had time to finish them seems to be normal top management policy at Microsoft. Microsoft Windows Vista [nwsource.com] is just the latest example. Microsoft employees say things like, "even a piece of junk will qualify" [nwsource.com]. There's no joy in working at a place that doesn't allow you to do a good job.

Re:Respect for those who are knowledgeable is low.

[gunnk (463227)]

respect from management for those who are knowledgeable about technology is lower than ever

I think you can expand that from just management and include the population as a whole.

Read The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. He bemoaned the fact that so few of our population have the basic knowledge to understand the difference between science and all the crap stuff out there like astrology.

It's the same with technology: for most people we have already passed the point about which Arthur C Clarke spoke:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Most people don't respect/appreciate what engineers do because they don't even have a reference point from which to evaluate what they do. It's all magic to them.

How does a young person today get started? I built rockets, flying machines, and played with chemistry sets. I took apart old tube televisions. I tried concocting rocket fuel. Now we're a safety-is-paramount-consumer-only-don't-void-the-warranty society. No wonder it all seems like magic to most people! Most things these days are made not only not to be "user-serviceable" but to actively prevent anyone from nosing around under the hood.

When people have no idea whatsoever what it is engineers do they have no way of assessing how much respect it deserves.

Re:It's probably not waning interest in engineerin

[Capt James McCarthy (860294)]

Joe, is that you? I need you to come to my office and give a presentation on how many 'engines' you've been 'ering.' The Mid-Level Lower-Sector Managers would like it to be at least 30 slides and I want to ensure that you can re-write it by tomorrow.

Re:It's probably not waning interest in engineerin

[craagz (965952)]

No they are not. You can buy an engineering degree for ~$1000 in India.

I think I'm turning Japanese

[Dr. Cody (554864)]

Considering the overlap between techies and otaku is something like 4200%, I fear for the future of US-Japan relations after the first big wave of American emigration hits their shores.

Boys will be boys..

[iserlohn (49556)]

It's not about the shortage of engineers, it's about the shortage of cheap engineers. If Engineering is to survive as a profession, we should be demanding to be treated as such.

I've had many a friend doing engineering (in mechanical and civil) in school end up in an accountancy firm or bank because nowadays junior engineers get peanuts. Whereas these financial and professional services firms love people with an engineering degrees because they are normally better adept to deal with the quantitative issues, even though they man not have the exemptions from the chartering institutions if you come out with a degree in accounting for example.

This is 100% a money issue in Japan

[patio11 (857072)]

Japanese corporations typically pay based on seniority, not based on job classification, at least within a given rank. As a result, at my company, if you're a new graduate with a degree in English literature and you get a job as entry level sales staff, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. If you have a degree in computer science and get a job as an entry level programmer, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. (Yeah, really, in a major Japanese metropolitan area. My fellow graduates from a US engineering institution think I'm flipping insane, and indeed in strictly dollars per hour terms I must be. Luckily I started with a few years of seniority baked in.)

You'll also regularly be expected to put in heroic hours (difference with America: we actually do get overtime pay) when something breaks, which is not typically required of sales staff, although approximately nobody on Slashdot would think our sales staff puts in slacker hours.

Given that you're not compensated extra for being an engineer, and engineering is a more difficult course of study in college (you actually have to, you know, work -- most majors treat college as a 4 year reprieve between murderously difficult high school and murderously difficult life), and that most of your training is going to be on the job anyhow, why bother studying engineering unless you have a particular passion for it?

I should note that I'm in charge of managing our new team of Indians because the suits here are as in thrall of the "Why pay a senior engineer $40k when we could pay him $20k?" logic that American suits are. Not to disparage my Indian coworkers at all -- like my Japanese coworkers, we get the usual mix of engineering supermen and people who could not be taught to make peanut butter sandwitches if they were issued a subordinate to butter the bread.

Re:This is 100% a money issue in Japan

[kklein (900361)]

I teach at a foreign language university in the Tokyo area. My students get hired to become software engineers pretty regularly. No experience. No interest. They just scored right on the company aptitude test.

See, that's the thing that every single person on this thread is misunderstanding: In Japan, university is just a kind of finishing school. You work your ass off to get in, then play guitar in a band or play American football or some other club activity for 3 years, then spend your last year of university going to cattle-call interviews for all the companies you're interested in. You should probably have your job--the job you will have until you retire, I might add--worked out by about the beginning of your last semester.

Companies do not look at your GPA. They don't look at your transcripts. All they really care about is the name of your school and how you interviewed and how you did on the aptitude test. If they want you, they'll make an offer, and if you take it, they will take care of the rest.

For the rest of your life.

All you have to give in return is, well, the rest of your life. All of it. Every waking hour (and by the time they're done with you, that might be 20 a day). Until you're a hollowed out shell of a human who hates life and chainsmokes through rotten teeth in a stained suit at a barbecued chicken place, slamming back beer and shochu until you've worked up enough of a drunk to stumble back to your home and crash, avoiding all contact with the family you barely know, but despise nonetheless.

Okay, that's a bit of satire, but there's some truth in it, to be sure.

If I were a Japanese kid today, I'd be one of these supposed "dropouts" (called "freeters," for some reason) who just run from temp job to temp job and moonlight at a bar. They make enough money to be happy, not enough to have to pay that much in taxes or health insurance, and they can have a life anytime they want.

Who the hell would want to be a salaryman in Japan?

The likely problem, I think, is that Japanese corporate culture has finally been rejected by the generation of kids who have grown up knowing nothing but the rich Japan and don't have the fearful, hard-headed, overworking mentality of their parents.

That's my reading of the situation, anyway.

free timers (not freeters)

[reiisi (1211052)]

Convert it to Romaji: furii-taimaazu ... furiitaimaazu ... furiita-imazu ... furiita

Got it?

By the way, your description is neither satire nor exaggeration. The security side of it is no longer reality, but other than that, you're better than 90% accurate.

I'm one of those who have bailed.

I've seen some companies that have tried to do the right thing by their engineers, but they just get eaten by the next wave of college grads at the next startup willing to burn themselves out for the mirage of a permanent posh position. Only to get their company killed by the wave after next, two years down the road, about the time they've all hit the wall and simply can't compete any more. Those who stay in the industry go into management or go back after taking a break as free-timers to recuperate (never getting married), or do something equally self-destructive.

I place the blame squarely on Microsfot for setting the role model: selling broken dreams.

"Average engineer"

[harvey the nerd (582806)]

Graduate at or near top of high school. Go to a higher ranked university, take more hours, get ca ~0.5 GPA point less. Get treated like dirt by some politicos that had difficulty with trig in hs or were the bottom fish in a lower tier engineering school but managed to always get kicked upstairs instead of fired. Watch the admins take credit for that which they violently opposed, but you cleaned up after the major damage, thereby saving the company, again. Great career magnet, only for those who are hopelessly addicted to the thrill of the unknown and progress, or really are planning to get the MBA, too. Japanese kids are becoming more cognizant, as US and European kids did, are of the current engineering reward structure. Face it, marketing and PR are currently far better investments, with more and better slack time in college.

autodidacts should not be discriminated against

[wikinerd (809585)]

A shortage in degree holders does not imply a shortage in people able to contribute in scientific or engineering teams. I bet there are many autodidacts and amateurs around with no degree, but who have all or most of the knowledge necessary to undertake scientific or engineering work, or in many cases they may even possess more knowledge than the degree holders. Perhaps a shortage in degree holders will force lazy companies to start thinking of more effective ways of hiring talent. I think employers should stop taking pieces of paper seriously and start actually testing the real skills of wanna-be employees or associates. Prospective members of staff should be *tested* instead of being hired solely on them possessing stupid pieces of papers and answering stupid irrelevant questions during interviews. If you want to hire a programmer, have the candidate actually write down a program instead of asking for a piece of paper. If a candidate can program, there is no need for the paper (except if your clients demand degree-holding staff or if you need degree holders for marketing purposes). Some employers think degrees equip candidates with skills necessary to survive in a bureaucracy, but that's not true because school already provides such skills, like meeting deadlines etc, and in any way you can always get rid of unproductive employees easily (except if you are incorporated in a socialist or European country, where employment at will is seen as too radical).

Will correct itself?

[SlashTon (871960)]

This issue has been brought up many times in the past and is certainly not specific for Japan. It has always made me feel like it is a complaint made by companies in general, that resent having to pay engineers higher salaries and instead try to put a spin on it of 'our education system is lacking'. It has been my experience that many companies somehow cannot bring themselves to pay their engineers more than the managers that oversee these engineers. My experience being project managers versus their software developers, but I guess it would be similar in other fields. I always thought this is something that will correct itself, but it will have a significant lag time. Once good engineers regularly start getting the pay that reflects their 'rarity', the interest in these fields will pick up.

But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine

Not trying to troll, but I suppose legislation must be added to finance and medicine as a 'better-paying field' for young Americans? Does anyone have any figures that compare numbers of 'science and engineering' students to law students? It would also be interesting to see what those numbers are for Japan (or Europe, for that matter).

A personal experience

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm a PhD student in engineering at a pretty good university in the UK. I've recently been an undergraduate, taught undergraduates, and looked at engineering jobs.

If you take your engineering degree and go to work at an engineering company, they will offer you maybe £22,000 a year as a starting salary.

If you take the same qualification, and take a job as a programmer for a London financial institution, they offer more in the region of £40,000 a year (including bonuses) as a starting salary.

I'd like to get an engineering job when I finish my PhD - it sounds more interesting than programming for a bank. However, it is also my ambition to some day own a house (marriage, children, you know the drill). I know this will involve a mortgage of about a quarter of a million pounds, and with interest factored in, about half a million pounds.

To put it bluntly, I would like an interesting job, but that may be a luxury my family cannot afford, so I'm willing to compromise. And apparently the free market values my engineering degree more in non-engineering roles than in engineering roles.

You don't "run out" of engineers or janitors

[Colin Smith (2679)]

Engineering is simply unattractive compared to other professions, the pay is too low, therefore the social status derived is too low. Employers are simply not paying enough for engineers to make it an attractive profession, therefore people do something more rewarding.

 

What took you so long?

[mapkinase (958129)]

What surprises me is that Japan has started to experience it only now. (I guess we can call it "national character"). It has been quite wealthy for a while, and wealth and love of education (which is the root of the problem here) does not go together very well...

Economics

[Viv (54519)]

Dear Mister Manager with an MBA,

If the paper your degree was printed on is good for more than wiping your posterior, you took a basic course in microeconomics.

As such, you should know that increasing profits (in this case, wages) tend to have a stimulative effect on supply. Decreasing real wages -- which are what we are experiencing what with flat wages and an inflationary economy -- tend to have the opposite effect.

Please apply the education you spent tens of thousands of dollars, and recognize the truth: If you can't find enough engineers at the price you want to pay, it's most likely because the price you want to pay is too low.

Sincerely,

An engineer who recently took a microeconomics course in his MBA program.

PPS: On a related note, Americans DO want to do those jobs, just not at the wages you want to pay. Economics, yes? kthnxbye.

Total BS Article

[LaskoVortex (1153471)]

I've been in science for 15 years. On my present salary, I can barely afford the same standard of living as when I started science, even after a PhD and an exemplary career so far. If a "shortage" actually existed, then pay would increase concomitantly. Since pay hasn't increased, the shortage, by definition, does not exist. It boggles my mind to see obvious BS like this.

Engineering visa requirements are insane

[by Anonymous Coward]

The process of getting an engineering visa in Japan is absurdly complex. I've personally gone through the interview process and gotten 3 different job offers as a network engineer at Japanese companies earlier this year, only to be turned down flat at the visa office because my current visa wasn't of the correct variety. To get the requisite engineering visa:

1)You need to have graduated in engineering from a 4-year university somewhere, preferably somewhere famous
2)You need no less than 10 years of experience in the field.
3)You have to pass some funky test that the visa office administers.
4)The guy in the visa office who approves all the visas is subject to mood swings, and will approve or reject a given application based on a) the position of the moon the previous night and b) whether there was any Pocari Sweat left in the vending machine at lunch time, among other things.

You won't even get close to 4) unless you clear 1~3).

This "shortage of foreign workers" is artificially imposed at a far-higher level than what is implied in the article.

Take a look at slide 9

[linhares (1241614)]

http://www.slideshare.net/linhares/outline-of-globalization-course-at-fgvebape [slideshare.net] Check out slide 9, which compares the explosion of engineering degrees in China, India (& to a certain extent the EU) to the US and Japan. I use it on my classes, and people think it must be bogus. Data from Morgan Stanley, by the way.

No longer attractive

[jandersen (462034)]

It is no longer attractive to take a technical education. I think there are many factors involved - first of all, it isn't 'cool', engineers, scientists etc are seen as geeks, and who wants be a social misfit? Up until the sixties at least, scientists and engineers were seen as almost demi-gods who were fearlessly exploring worlds unfathomable by normal human beings - just think of the many scientists that are almost cult-figures: they are mostly from the beginning of the 20th century.

Secondly, there is a clear, anti-intellectual trend in many Western societies. Most people have never understood that scientists are not there to find The Answer; that the most important thing in science is the question. So, they have become disillusioned and don't feel they get what they want from scientific research.

And of course, the money. You study hard - sometimes even extremely hard - for many years, you borrow money to survive and to pay for your education, and then you find that you don't actually earn much afterwards. In many countries an academic earns less than the average tradesman, whose education was 3 - 5 years of salaried apprenticeship; as an academic, you will normally be in debt when you are newly educated, whereas a newly educated welder, builder or whatever is likely to have no debt.

All in all, the only reason why anybody would choose an academic career is because they feel a deep calling.

Outsourcing to Japan

[dido (9125)]

Funny, I just got back from the SODEC trade show in Tokyo last week promoting our company's outsourcing services... As someone whose company which is engaged in providing software outsourcing services to Japanese companies, I can personally attest to the barriers to entry involved in doing this. Language is a serious one: while we would like to think that we are motivated enough to try to learn, it is a very tough language to try to master, and misunderstandings can be costly. We were humbled when we were handed a Japanese software specification which took us a month to reasonably understand but a only week to implement and test. Japanese also seem to have an entrenched attitude of looking down on foreigners, and having more than a little skepticism that the people in companies such as ours will be able to adapt to their ways of thinking and doing things. So far, we haven't seriously disappointed our existing customers, but still, even a brick-headed software engineer like me can sense their skepticism. They are also a lot less flexible than other outsourcing markets that we have had the experience of working with. These are some of the problems that we've encountered, but still, we do think that going into the market for the long haul will be profitable. They really have few choices to remedy their situation with the way things are going.

Make it prestigious.

[blind biker (1066130)]

Seriously: when being a scientist or an engineer will mean high salary and social status (in other words: when girls will want to fellate scientists and engineers), is when more young men and women will take up that career choice.

Simple as that.

Rubbish. I don't buy it.

[Qbertino (265505)]

I've been hearing this litany in Germany for quite some time now. Not enough expert workers, no engineers, no IT people, Jada-Jada-Jada. Every 5 years or so the industry goes through the same bullshiting ritual.
How else is it then that I'm struggling to survive as a freelance Software Developer with 8 years of experience under my belt? Why is it that I'm not even considered because I don't have a grade - allthough I can easyly out-develop any graduate I've met?

This whining is nothing but a salary lowering measure. The best that will happen for true experts is that salaries and benefits will reach the old levels.

Not as simple as it seems.

[v(*_*)vvvv (233078)]

Comp sci has been an achilles heel in Japanese education.

Not even at the college level will you find decent computer courses that can mass produce decent programmers. Japanese is naturally a less abstraction oriented language, and in school, they get attached to the details and technicalities, making the courses boring, difficult, and alienating, not to mention unproductive. What they really need to teach is how to abstract those details away and how to be constructive. This is done creatively, not logically.

Then there is the whole video game situation. These programmers don't mix with other industries, so it acts like a huge black hole for programming talent by not sharing their talent pool with the software industry.

Overpriced and incompetent, software houses in Japan have wrecked havok on Japanese businesses since day one, and now pretty much everyone is just scared to try anything.

Shortage at what price?

[Wansu (846)]

When the word shortage is used, the price at which the shortage exists
should be specified. I'm correct when I say there's a shortage of gasoline
at $1/gallon. But I can find plenty of gas around here at $3.80/gallon.

Robots can't fix everything I guess

[Cathoderoytube (1088737)]

Not too long ago Slashdot was posting articles about how Japan was replacing it's laborers with robots because of it's low birth rates. Now Japan's running out of people who actually build the frigging robots?

Look Japan if you need help with impregnating your women I'd be happy to help.

Re:Mr. Fukuda, tear down this wall!

[CrackedButter (646746)]

Funny because the last I heard, Japanese universities were going to have to start enrolling foreign students otherwise they would stop certain classes due to lack of students. On top of that with the aging population, Japan is on its way to being a first world country to have a higher death rate than birth rate. Overcrowding won't be an issue. http://www.kairos-inc.com/Investing/IB%20on%20Japan.7.16.pdf [kairos-inc.com] (projected information) http://www.worldpress.org/profiles/japan.cfm [worldpress.org] (current since 2001) To suggest that the natives will starve as well is an over exaggeration, there is plenty of food and as with anything in life, people will adapt.

Re:Germany has been there for more than a decade..

[alexgieg (948359)]

The Japanese aren't interested in bringing foreigners into the country. They prefer Japan to have its culture preserved no matter what the price. Thus, to compensate for the shortage of people due to the population becoming old and having less and less children, they prefer to invest strongly in robotics. Nowadays there are personal robots over there to do things, such as house cleaning and other unpleasant jobs, that in countries which opt for immigration are left to immigrants.

I'm not saying they're right or wrong, it's just the way they want it to be, and it's different from the way chosen by Europe or the USA. But one thing is certain: by pursuing this policy Japan has no "risk" of becoming "less Japanese" over time, while Europe is slowly becoming more Slavic, Arabic, Latin etc. each day. Whether "going international" is ultimately good or bad for Europe on the long term, or whether "going ethnic" is ultimately good or bad for Japan on the long term, is something we'll only discover when that long term is over.

Re:Can't fight demographics...

[Martian_Kyo (1161137)]

Maybe I should go to Japan, I am an engineer and I could help with the dropping birthrates.