One of my kids recently started a contract position at Apple. She is foreign-born, but was adopted as an infant, so she's a US-citizen. Completed her Computer Science degree in 3.5 years with a 3.78 GPA. Super-talented. I am hoping that Apple offers her a regular, full-time position before her contract expires next February...
I think the fundamental problem is that education in the US is a privilege rather than a right. Schools are too expensive, many people don't want to end up with a huge debt after graduating. Tim Cook says it all the time, the amount of talent and expertise is concentrated in China, that why they manufacture everything there.
US has to change their ways if they want to catch up with emerging markets.
Public and private schools have gone from a non-profit educational system to a high profit business all because of greedy administrators and federally guaranteed (and non-bankruptable) student loans. When I went college in the early 90's my family (solidly middle class and only my father worked) had no problem paying tuition and room/board without loans. Not so much anymore.
American does not lack talented engineers. What every industry need is a leader that has a vision of what a new product to be. The world was lucky to have such a person. When such a leader lays out what a new product to be, the talented engineers will make it happen. The iPhone is such a remarkable example. Without such leader most talented engineers are simply wasting their time on useless updates.
I doubt the opening line of this piece: "no one" is training engineers any more? So MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Cal-Tech, Purdue, etc., have just dropped engineering from their curricula? I doubt it. I expect those schools have minted more engineers in the past 10 years than during any prior decade. Now how many of those students are American is another question.
This is a story about demographics and little else. There are fewer talented people to choose from in every industry.
I have to run and might not gt back to this thread but just had to add this point, something is really shitty with modern management!!! I work in a different technical field, lets call it medical related for now, and need to train a new generation of automation technicians. It is perhaps the most frustrating experience in my work life that started in 1978 and farm work before that. I can not get management to grasp that you need training far beyond what a college degree offers up. All they care about is the cost and deflect the fact that they spend millions every year on "executive training". I literally can not even do the minimal that I got when entering industry in the small business world. For whatever reason mega corporations can't seem to allocate a penny for decnet training for anybody below the executive level. It isn't for a lack of money either. Mostly it is just plain stupidity.
You can say that again. We live in an era where the MBA is glorified.
I work for an engineering company, and they must get the cream of the crop of interns. The "Millenials" we get are inquisitive, self-starters, and I've helped a few file to get patents on the work they do here. They don't "go and get coffee" for the senior engineers, but they are given a project to accomplish, leveraging the knowledge of the senior engineers, and have to present their findings to the leadership (VP level). Their biggest complaint was that they wanted to work more time than was budgeted for them, as feature creep was happening on their projects, or they said in a meeting, "Oh, I know how to fix that," and they'd get another project to contribute to.
In fact, last year we had a high school intern whose work was so good, he was offered a scholarship to go into engineering by our company. I spent 3 hours with him, and while touring the factory and watching the manufacturing process, he was asking intelligent, germane questions, and I could tell he was absorbing the information.
I have high hopes after seeing these All-American kids... errr... young engineers.
Most of the characterization of millennials as lazy, uninterested, self absorbed, and depressive crybabies is undeserved. I work with many of them and they are doing quite well, given the bad hand their elders dealt them.
I work for an engineering company, and they must get the cream of the crop of interns. The "Millenials" we get are inquisitive, self-starters, and I've helped a few file to get patents on the work they do here. They don't "go and get coffee" for the senior engineers, but they are given a project to accomplish, leveraging the knowledge of the senior engineers, and have to present their findings to the leadership (VP level). Their biggest complaint was that they wanted to work more time than was budgeted for them, as feature creep was happening on their projects, or they said in a meeting, "Oh, I know how to fix that," and they'd get another project to contribute to.
In fact, last year we had a high school intern whose work was so good, he was offered a scholarship to go into engineering by our company. I spent 3 hours with him, and while touring the factory and watching the manufacturing process, he was asking intelligent, germane questions, and I could tell he was absorbing the information.
I have high hopes after seeing these All-American kids... errr... young engineers.
Most of the characterization of millennials as lazy, uninterested, self absorbed, and depressive crybabies is undeserved. I work with many of them and they are doing quite well, given the bad hand their elders dealt them.
The prior generation (“Generation X”) had similar criticisms, yet somehow the world kept turning.
I work for an engineering company, and they must get the cream of the crop of interns. The "Millenials" we get are inquisitive, self-starters, and I've helped a few file to get patents on the work they do here. They don't "go and get coffee" for the senior engineers, but they are given a project to accomplish, leveraging the knowledge of the senior engineers, and have to present their findings to the leadership (VP level). Their biggest complaint was that they wanted to work more time than was budgeted for them, as feature creep was happening on their projects, or they said in a meeting, "Oh, I know how to fix that," and they'd get another project to contribute to.
In fact, last year we had a high school intern whose work was so good, he was offered a scholarship to go into engineering by our company. I spent 3 hours with him, and while touring the factory and watching the manufacturing process, he was asking intelligent, germane questions, and I could tell he was absorbing the information.
I have high hopes after seeing these All-American kids... errr... young engineers.
Most of the characterization of millennials as lazy, uninterested, self absorbed, and depressive crybabies is undeserved. I work with many of them and they are doing quite well, given the bad hand their elders dealt them.
The prior generation (“Generation X”) had similar criticisms, yet somehow the world kept turning.
That's because they were facing the same S*** Show left to them by us Boomers. The Greatest Generation saved the world. Mine F-ed up everything they came in contact with and continue to work hard to make repair impossible.
First, great article (and well written). Second this is a massively important topic, and not written about enough. In my own field, urban planning and design, design drawing, model building, live projects, field camps, etc. were taken out of the courses in the 1990's. Sometimes, there is a requirement to produce a rough sketch (and I mean 'rough') by hand and sometimes then a requirement to produce plans and perspectives using CAD software, but often little more than a Keynote presentation is required. In real life we have specialist CAD operators and what they need as their input are hand drawn plans and elevations with all of the main issues resolved (which might be a couple of days work for the competent planner-designer) so that they can turn it into a detailed plan (which might be a week's work or more) for serious discussion with the community, the engineers who will have to build it and the politicians who have to approve it. Too often I see graduate planners sitting next to the CAD operator and trying to direct them where to put lines. So very inefficient (literally weeks of wasted effort) and always produces plans with more holes than a Swiss cheese. I sometimes show them images of Jony's design sketch book to try to get them to understand - it rarely works.
I think kids today have less motivation, just overall less interest in doing real world builds and repairs. The information resources available today are absolutely incredible, is there a shortage of 'labs' as this article claims - possibly, I don't know. Creativity as a whole is dying - and I do blame the smartphone for that. Kids have little interest in the hobbies that I grew up with, R/C, models, rocketrey, music composition with real instruments, building a PC, even programming computers using BASIC. They live in a virtual world - more interested in seeing something on a screen than experiencing it in real life. Most American colleges prepare kids for service oriented jobs, the few colleges that do have excellent STEM programs are filled with foreign students!
I disagree with one point in the article, personally I think "Googling it" has allowed me to learn and fix even more stuff - I never would have taken the entire front fender off my car - if I didn't have a video showing me how. Or install my own bathroom sink, complete with welding copper pipes. During lockdown, there are so many kids that don't know what to do with themselves ... besides play Fortnite and watch idiotic Youtube videos for hours on end.
Hi Fatman. This is Mike, from the Information's article. With any write-up you need to consider context, but I'm really happy to hear there are people like you are using search engines to learn and fix and make stuff. My original quote to Wayne was part of a discussion that people these days don't seem as motivated to get into "hands-on" technical schooling. Do they even have metal shop, or wood shop, or build cars in high school anymore? I suggested that when kids these days get curious, they seem content to just wiki or Google or do a quick, top-level look at something. When I was a kid, it was more like you get off your ass, get on a bus, head down to the library downtown, pull some books, read and maybe make some copies, take some notes. It was a day-long investment and you spent more time getting the hard facts instead of glossing over an anonymous person's wiki summary. Then, if we wanted to work on our own car, we bought a Chilton's or Haynes manual and sprawled under the hood or dash or wheel wells with that as we wrenched and ultimately learned how every little part went together. Thanks for your comments, Fatman. I especially liked your rocketry note: ah kids, can you still get those Estes rockets? lol, the stories
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