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.'"

It's probably not waning interest in engineering

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

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.

Respect for those who are knowledgeable is low.

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:It's probably not waning interest in engineerin

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.

I think I'm turning Japanese

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..

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

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.

"Average engineer"

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

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?

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

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

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.

 

Economics

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

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.

Take a look at slide 9

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Also a matter of rewards, I guess

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:Regular degrees are simpler

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.

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

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

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).

Re:Mr. Fukuda, tear down this wall!

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:Can't fight demographics...

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