Future of Engineers

Tom Gillis writes a post on his blog on Forbes today called The End of the Engineer. It's sort of like reverse STEM recruiting we typically see everywhere else. Which would be refreshing if it wasn't so ignorant. He first posits that post industrial revolution the need for better machines and manufacturing has been outsourced (not going to argue manufacturing has been outsourced). Then he talks about how the slight differences in performance that engineers generally strive for are no longer as crucial. He cites Apple as moving away from the engineering model towards one of marketing and customer understanding. Saying instead that that is what makes Apple successful.

 

He may be right that incremental improvements no longer please consumers. But I think that's always been the case. I think music industry people were surprised when MP3s gained such popularity. Their quality was a lot lower than CDs. However their portability and ease of use with a variety of devices was what had the mass appeal. And the same with cell phones and smart phones. We use them for convenience not because the sound quality is fantastic (anyone remember the old hear a pin drop Sprint commercials?) Now industry executives are surprised that the mainstream way to watch music videos is YouTube. Watch what you want when you want at your own convenience and for free. That's what consumers want rather than the high quality that executives might have assumed consumers would always be demanding. However, these incremental changes are still appreciated when your smartphone or your LCD TV gets slimmer or the next model of car gets a little lighter and a little better fuel economy.

 

So none of this means engineering is no longer crucial. He mentions the hoardes of engineering graduates from India and China. But for now, whether its societal or level of education, these high numbers have not meant Chinese and Indian companies are always able to compete with equal fervor with western companies. Part of Apple's success is certainly marketing based. But a lot of it is a core product that required a lot of fantastic engineering. And just because Chinese companies have no qualms about stealing IP and churning out cheaper products later doesn't mean they actually have the independent engineering knowledge to make another Apple. And as the sole commenter on his blog alludes to, not every American company that relies on engineering talent is a consumer electronics company.

 

True we're no longer innovating as much in agricultural machines, but we are in power generation plants, offshore drilling, mining applications, solar and wind energy, automotive design, aerospace, weapons, military technology and medical and biomedical breakthroughs. I think Mr. Gillis has really been sheltered too long in the bubble that is Silicon Valley. Apparently he is a VP at Cisco and his Forbes profile includes such excellent buzz words as "social networking", "new security paradigm", "leverage today's tools", "strategic" and he goes on to claim credit for making Cisco strong in the security market. I hope none of the engineers on his team who helped him position Cisco as a strong security leader read this article and realize their head honcho doesn't appreciate their technological contributions. For all his flattery of Steve Jobs and Apple one can only assume he's trying to get a job there. I hope Cisco recognizes this and lets him go so he can make his move. If I want marketing and social media BS I'll go talk about it on Twitter. If I want a company that makes reliable hardware and services because I know they have a good engineering core I will continue to go to companies like Cisco. When a VP doesn't see what's right beneath his nose he doesn't deserve the job.

 

Gillis goes on to recommend that people get Liberal Arts degrees and that he will give that advice to his own children. I sincerely hope he's kidding. As a highly paid executive I'm sure he'd have no problems placing his children with jobs after they get their Art History or Communications BA but he's not only living within the soft bubble of Silicon Valley then he's living within the privileged bubble of upper class if he thinks liberal arts degrees are a viable path to a solid middle class lifestyle. Engineering isn't as respected as it used to be (as evidenced by this article) but I wouldn't tell an intelligent young person who had strong math or science skills not to major in it any sooner than I'd suggest a broad liberal arts degree is a good path either. People should follow their passions certainly as success tends to be elusive no matter what path you take. But underestimating the need for some percentage of the population to be engineers is complete ignorance. Just because we aren't always putting these minds to the best use is a limitation of our policies and a focus on short term growth. If we were thinking Apollo Program big again we'd be able to achieve things way beyond what Gillis could imagine. And we'll need engineers to get us there.

What do you do for a living?

I was curious what the most common occupations were in the states and as I started to dig through BLS data I discovered they produced the table already. I'm not surprised to see retail at number 1 and food prep and food service at number 4 and waiters at number 6. I guess I'm surprised elementary school teachers even made the list (this is from 2010, I wonder if it will drop for the current year) and very surprised any management type occupation made the list at all: operations managers at number 12. Given the disparity in mean annual salary between that and everything else it seems like not a bad job to get into.

 

What do you think, does this look like what you thought it would?

Man Woman Job Recession

The Pew Research Center put together an interesting report on how the recession and subsequent "recovery" has affected men and women disproportionately. You probably heard all of the media crying about how this was a mancession or some such BS that made it sound like it was women's fault for men losing jobs at the early part of the recesssion.

The story you won't be hearing is that men have been recovering quickly since the end of the recession while women's employment is staying flat or dropping. If men took the brunt of job losses early on maybe it's to be expected they'd be picking up faster. But the report goes into talking about how layoffs in state employment might be contributing overwhelmingly to the loss of jobs for women. And while we hope construction and manufacturing will recover in this country it seems like state employees are the new favorite punching bag of free market junkies. So I wonder if this recession will be more permanently painful to women than it was to men. And probably an ignored storyline.

Engineering Employment Over Time

How has engineering fared as a career during this recession? How has it been doing over time? Must be jobs week here at Design. Build. Play. Since I was so hard on software "engineers" before I made a separate category from today's Bureau of Labor Statistics data. I'm including programmers separately (but still there) from computer/software engineers (which here includes both systems software and applications). So how do we engineers do?

As you can see computer and software engineers have done particularly well. I'd grant the decline to programmers as being employers are ever more demanding specific degrees from their programmers so it's more just a transfer between categories. The recession has only continued the downward trend from before.

In comparison, civil, electrical and mechanical look almost flat. Of course they aren't really. So maybe you went into engineering for the money, how's that been doing? Here's some not adjusted for inflation salaries over time.

Again it's the same breakdown by discipline and again you see the obvious levelling off of the programmers' salaries. Mechanical and civil seem tied like in the previous graph and now electrical has a definitely higher salary. Is this because it has lower employment compared to the other disciplines as seen in the first graph? Does scarcity drive electrical engineering salaries up?

Engineering Jobs by Discipline

I talked before about what states are hiring engineers and where all the engineering jobs are. Best estimate there are something like 44,000 engineering jobs open nationally right now. The census says that in 2008 84,000 people graduated with engineering degrees. Engineering shortage? I think not. Probably my 44,000 search was not broad enough to include the kinds of jobs engineering graduates might go into. But still, that's nowhere near a shortage, is it Corporate America?

So what kind of engineers are being hired right now? Software engineers.

Making up almost half of open jobs software engineers have it made. If we have a shortage of engineers, maybe it's that kind of engineer. The problem is we're recruiting people into a very diverse field without specifying what we really want or really need. I was curious how this stacked up to major choice and pulled a some numbers from a local university to give a breakdown:

You can tell mechanical and civil/structural majors are heavily overrepresented. People are probably going into these fields and finding the jobs aren't there. This is all magnified when certain geographic areas (Detroit vs Silicon Valley) have very different focuses even when colleges might be more diverse. Chemical and electrical engineering majors are a little closer to the national average of open jobs and software/computer engineering heavily underrepresented.

I'm a bit torn by including software engineers here. There's a big difference between "computer engineer" and a programmer. Many job openings ask for a degreed engineer when what they really need is a programmer. But if they're asking for an engineering degree that becomes a part of the requirement that job seekers have to meet even when it's unlike other engineering disciplines. Given the low numbers though it's possible those with other degrees, or no degrees at all, are filling the gap for these open software jobs. That is if anyone is even hiring.

Appendix A: Where are the engineering jobs?

Ask and ye shall receive! A full version of the list available for your ranking/competing pleasure. I only hope this means arguments about whether South Dakota is better than North Dakota (it's not) start erupting. Sorry for the jpg, while I am an excel pseudo-wizard my blogger skills are lacking.

Yes I know Washington DC isn't a "state" and I left out some exciting US territories. Sorry!

Where are the engineering jobs?

So who's hiring engineers? It's no surprise in raw numbers that the top five states with engineering jobs open* include some of the most populace states with large metro areas and of course the center of automotive engineering in the states.

But how does that compare to the population of those states? Washington DC tops the list at the most engineering jobs per capita. Illinois is still doing pretty good and though it's not the list Michigan pulls in at #6. As for bottom of the list Montana comes in last but no region is left alone here with southern states and northeast also represented. The big population states of California and Texas fell in the middle of the list.

*Total job openings per state were pulled from CareerBuilder as a basis of estimate. Total state populations pulled from Wikipedia.

Looking for trends in all the wrong places

I found the above graph here. It's not so important that it doesn't include the last five years or so for my purposes.

 

I was looking at MegaCorp's new hires and discovered that in the last three months of intense intern hiring (it's the season for interns!) 24% of them have been female. I wondered how this compared to engineers hired. Turns out in the first 5+ months of this year, 10% of our new hire engineers have been female.

 

Now, my local university says that about 18.5% of engineering degrees are conferred to women. So the intern numbers seem to be, if anything, on the high side.

 

Compare the new hire numbers to the historical chart at the top and you'd see that we'd have to be averaging 30 years of experience for the engineers we hire for 10% to be a reasonable number. It's unlikely our average new hire engineer is 50 years old or more.

 

What does this mean? Why is the effort being made on the intern level to bring in more women but we don't see it when it comes down to hiring full-timers? It's possible, I suppose, that women are graduating with degrees, and working internships, but then somehow not going into engineer at all. If they are going into completely different fields after getting an engineering degree, and in high numbers, that could explain it.

 

Or is it part of the general trend that women tend to work in lower paying occupations so it's easier for a woman to get hired on as an intern than it will be for her to get hired as an engineer. Or maybe HR is trying to push diversity but can only manage to do so as a part of its intern hiring program but can't convince managers to hire more experienced women.

 

This might make a lot of sense if both numbers were on the low side or on the high side. Then you could draw some conclusion about MegaCorp's particular industry or maybe locality differences. As it is it looks a little strange.

More on the superiority of engineering

Today on Engineer Blogs I talked about interdisciplinary engineering which is the theme over there this week. (See posts by Cherish, GEARS, and Paul Clarke as well). There's other engineering in the news today though, again from the NY Times Economix blog college majors that do best in this job market.

 

A month and a half ago I had a post on some economic news that included the mention of an article about engineering being the best paying college major. You'll notice some discrepancies. The CNNMoney article touting high salaries for engineers says they all had a higher starting salary than $60,000. However the Economix chart is based on earned income in the last 12 months so the median income for someone with an engineering degree employed in a job that requires that degree is...$35,548. Now probably some dinosaur engineers will show up and say that this was quite normal for them and kids these days are too demanding. Probably haven't read any of my numerous posts on inflation.

 

Hopefully the low number is due to people starting their job more recently than 12 months and only having a partial years earnings to report along with maybe some people who are working part time. Still, the percentage of engineering graduates who are employed in a job that requires their degree is 69.4%. That's the second highest after teaching at 71.1%. Higher than the oft praised "business" degree, health, or physical science (which will surprise no one in the sciences). Communications, humanities and "area studies" (whatever that it is) make up the bottom of the list. So while you shouldn't always hunt the money, hunting a degree that leads to more full employment might be useful. Though even the numbers of employed grads in the top fields are abysmally low. More victims of this brutal job market.

Home is where...

So I was listening to the radio this morning and then this story came on NPR about a brother and sister, both of whom had had to drop out of college and move into their family home. Their mother had passed away when they were both in high school and the eldest racked up some debt in college before they both decided they'd move home and try to get jobs in order to save the family home and keep up with mortgage payments.

 

The sister, Natalie, came back and was working as a secretary until she got laid off at the start of the recession.

 

They both need that one job — the one that will get their plans back on track. But neither of them can find it.

Chris is selling TVs right now, but it's part time. Natalie got laid off again. They pool what income they have, allocating it on a triage — to the credit cards, to Chris's dental work, to the house.

"Natalie and her brother, they don't want to sell the house, or they can't sell the house — if they do, they take a major loss," Rogers says. "So in a way, they're limiting their search options."

But while a lot of people out of work are stuck where the jobs aren't...

So I was thinking about them stuck in their house, in an area where maybe it's difficult to find a job even if you have a college degree. A lot of people are there right now, barely making it on part time income or a lower paying job than they wanted and unable to move to find a job because their underwater in the house. Seems like it's only the upper middle class schemers who are walking away from their homes, maybe the rest are scared about the problems with filing for bankruptcy or hear the stories about banks coming after those who short sold telling them they still owe extra money. Or maybe they don't want to throw away their investment, or maybe they want to do the right thing, or maybe they just want to keep their home.

 

I stepped outside and scared the bird that's decided to nest above our patio. It's right across from the door so every time we come and go it's a game of trying to not disturb the bird enough that it freaks out and flies away to the trees out front. It probably looked like a good place to settle down. The patio makes it relatively protected against the cats but mostly crows that go after small birds' nests. It might have been setting up on a day we were mostly out for a long day at work, it didn't necessarily know two bipedal mammals would be disturbing it a couple times a day.

 

So it's a lot like a lot of the homeowners right now. Probably just laid its eggs and can't just move the nest. Not always easy or possible to pick up and move where the jobs are. Sometimes you make the best decision you can at the time and can't predict how things will change. Sometimes it's still a good home and worth keeping even if there are problems.

Highest Paid Jobs For Women

There's an article today in Forbes discussing the highest paid careers for women in 2011. I condensed their very graphical gallery into a clean little graph. You'll notice some of the higher numbers for percentage of earnings as compared to men are also in the same careers where the percentage of women employed is a much lower position. This is a man's world, to quote James Brown. I guess I'm a little surprised some of the more people oriented careers don't have better equality and surprised there's only 31% of doctors and surgeons that are women. I mean we've been hearing for years now about how more women than men go to college and medical school and how that spells the end of dudes. The article quotes one dude who dismisses the pay gap with some great mansplaining:

 

"We may be witnessing an aging factor," speculates behavioral psychologist Matt Wallaert, lead scientist at compensation website GetRaised. "The highest paid doctors are the oldest doctors. With more women in the field, they may be aging up and earning more."

 

Right, we also may be witnessing a bullshit factor in which monkeys fly out of your ass. Women programmers make up 22% of the profession and earn a much better 95% salary compared to their male peers. So don't tell me we just need more women or time or some such crap.

 

They talk a little about "engineers" by which they mean software engineers coming in at #5 on the list:

 

"Engineers are generally employed by younger tech companies with less entrenched male-dominated cultures," says Wallaert, pointing to Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg as a female leader in the field. "Women need to embrace tech. It's a growing industry, and gender doesn't apply."

Technical occupations may be particularly promising for women because they are high-paying and require clear, objective qualifications. "You can program or not," says Blau.

 

Yes, technical positions are so clear that's why women kick ass at them. Oh wait, we don't. Any working engineer has known several douchebaggy coworkers who kissed ass and moved up in title and pay despite having no marketable technical skills or even a good understanding of the product they're on. So don't tell me this is a job position that doesn't allow for forms of discrimination. And secondly, looking at software engineers as working only at brightly decorated flip-flop wearing Web 2.0 companies is probably a very small piece of the pie. Some of us are working for dinosaurs who won't be satisfied until we've all sold our souls and self-respect for health care benefits and a 6x6x6 cube (notice a numbers trend?) to spend 80 hours a week in.

 

Not sure what I'd recommend women go into based off this list. Programming or software engineering where the pay discrepancy is lower but they have to deal with overwhelming numbers and possible dominant and established male culture or maybe healthcare where the earnings are decent though not fair but they'll have more female allies and mentors and superiors. Tough call.

The folks driving this bus

So I'm job searching in this terrible economy and I definitely wouldn't mind working for the feds. True they have a two year pay freeze on but they also get to work with some pretty cool equipment. You may wonder past the terribly long hiring time and low pay why the feds have trouble recruiting good people. You may think it's all the veterans taking your jobs. You'd be wrong.

 

GS-5:  To qualify for GS-5 entry-level engineering positions in the Federal government, you must meet specific education requirements or possess a combination of qualifying education and experience.

 

SPECIALIZED EXPERIENCE: GS-07 ONLY:   In addition to meeting the Basic Requirement, applicants must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-05 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience is experience such as: assisting to resolve technical issues on ship system design, installation, alteration, repair, inspection, maintenance, safety, and life cycle management; assisting to develop and monitor shipboard planned, preventive, and predictive maintenance systems.   Only experience acquired after graduation is creditable.   

To qualify at the GS-07 level based on Superior Academic Achievement you must have a bachelor's degree in engineering which meets one or more of the following areas listed below.   You may be appointed based on claimed academic achievement, pending verification of final grades.   However, if the required grades were not maintained through your senior year, you may not be able to retain the GS-07 grade level.

1.   A grade-point average of 3.0 or higher out of a possible 4.0 ("B" or better) based on 4 years of education, or based on courses completed during the final 2 years (60 semester hours minimum) of curriculum.

2.   A grade-point average of 3.5 or higher out of a possible 4.0 ("B" or better) based on the average of the required courses completed in the major field or the required courses in the major field completed during the final 2 years of curriculum (60 semester hours minimum).

That's right. Feds don't care what kind of internships you had while you were working on your degree. They only care what kind of GPA you got. In fact they're shooting their own vets in the foot. What about a vet who was an aircraft mechanic, reads and understands drawings, goes back to school on the GI bill, and graduates? He/she can not benefit from the experience of their stint in the military (true it does add to their total fed service time, but as the federal retirement benefits were obliterated and turned into a 401k-like system this is mostly useless).

 

So way to go federal government. Way to hand it to the guys who got the best GPA and didn't have to work while in college. I'm sure more silver spoon engineers is exactly what we need. They can also afford to take the appallingly low GS-7 pay for having an engineering degree.

At last, validation

I just received this exciting email. Looks like my job search is over, this sounds like the right opportunity for me.

 

Hello.
We have vacancy in ---- Inc.
We have reviewed your profile, and concluded you are the right person to become
our employee.

If you meet the requirements, please kindly send your respond.

Please NOTE: You must be US citizen
Best regards

 

Where do I sign up?! If they want my social security number straight away, that probably just means they're serious, right?

Robot Recruiters?

Despite the lagging economy and a serious lack of jobs for PhDs, even in science, there's still a push to get more people into STEM fields, especially science and engineering. Arizona State University is highlighting their FIRST Lego League as a way to use robots to hook kids on engineering at an earlier age.

 

I think this is sort of misleading. 99.9% of engineers will not get to work on robots for a living, or not the kind of robots they think. Sure you can work on your own projects in your spare time, but there's no pre-requisite you be an engineer to do so. I mean, working on robots through my engineering curriculum certainly exposed me to it but there are clubs and internet tutorials and books for motivated folks who have an interest. That is if your day job doesn't kill all the curiosity and creativity that you had for side projects. Not that I'd know anything about that.

 

Clearly these kids are too young to have seen the Terminator films and know the dangers of building robots, so I guess before they can see an R rated movie is probably a good time to trick them into trusting the machines.

 

So I don't know, is recruiting more and more people into a shrinking field unethical? Just because we as a society need more scientists, engineers and innovators does not mean we should necessarily encourage that if we don't actually support it with government funding or K-12 education or investment incentives. Getting more kids into STEM is not by itself going to keep companies from shipping more jobs overseas, professional jobs included as India and China start to catch up with a plethora of qualified engineers.

 

When I worked on my robot project in school one of my group mates asked if I could help him find a job where I work as he was still trying to feel out where he wanted to go. At the time he was working in an on campus lab making small scale electromechanical assemblies with PID controls and really enjoyed that. I had to tell him the opportunity to do such things anywhere else were severely limited. Start up companies in the '90s might have risked one time robot builds for specific applications but in general companies tend to go for the sure thing. And there's innovation, but not in a ground up building your own robot kind of way.

 

So there's two things I don't like here. One, that we let people believe that "robots" are a good storefront window display for engineering. Two, that bringing people into an industry that can't necessarily support their steady employment is premature until we fix the institutional problems at the top.

Grumpy Old Employees

Is an aging workforce a good thing in this economy? The Fiscal Times thinks so. They argue older employees delaying retirement is good for many reasons, one of which being less pressure on social security with workers not retiring all at once.

Over the past 16 years, labor force participation rates for men aged 62 to 74 climbed 39 percent, reversing three decades of decline. At the same time, participation for older women jumped 66 percent. In 2010, the government reported the highest number of 60-somethings in the work force since age-specific records began in 1948 — 12.9 million. 

They also argue that these workers contribute to the productivity and GDP of the nation being essential in this economy. But I'm not sure there's an evidence that employing these highly experienced workers longer actually helps with productivity. Even the reasons stated that people keep working seem pretty self-centered and not likely to contribute to engagement at work:

An AARP survey found that 69 percent of older workers plan to stay on the job into their golden years, but the majority would prefer part-time options. The top two reasons for wanting to keep working were for money and health insurance. The people who are already working past traditional retirement age tend to hold jobs that are structured differently: more flexible, fewer hours, less office politics and higher satisfaction, according to research by the Families and Work Institute.

And I have to admit the whole thing about them preferring to work part time is sort of ridiculous. I'm betting a huge chunk of the population would prefer to work part time, at least at different points in their lives. Would that we all had the pull and influence at work to make it so, not to mention retirement savings to dip from. But it's telling that this data reflects my own anecdotal experiences: that the older employees I know who keep working tend to do so because they think they can not afford to retire, or are concerned about health benefits (either because they are too young for medicare, think it will be too costly, or are neo-cons afraid that "obamacare" has somehow affected their precious entitlement benefits).

I am sympathetic. I think if you don't have the money that's a perfectly valid reason to keep working longer.

The financial crisis and recession have motivated some workers to delay retirement, as they struggle to recoup losses in their nest eggs. Even a two-year increase in the median retirement age could cut in half the share of households that are financially unprepared for old age, according to a McKinsey Global Institute study.

What with the magic of compound interest, it's no surprise that older workers can make up for retirement losses in a shorter timeframe. If their 401k was already substantially larger than younger workers, it's no wonder a few years could help to really turn it around. Not to mention the stock market's gone up more than 50% from its low in 2008. But here's where the article loses me. It's trying to convince me that all these people staying in the workforce longer is a good thing for the economy: of which I and most people I know care mostly about one thing, jobs.

Rather than seeing these people as crowding out younger workers from jobs, it's important to remember that as they stay in the work force longer, they generate more demand for goods and services — which creates jobs, Stevenson said.

Oh really?

Take the health care sector, where a shortage of nurses has forced employers to focus on retaining older workers, and to view flexibility as a strategic business tool rather than an accommodation, said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. Bon Secours, for instance, offers more flexible and part-time work in addition to facilitating transitions to less-physically demanding jobs. The company child care center is available to grandchildren of employees, not simply children. "They've done a lot of things to make the work force more appealing to older workers," Galinsky said.

The utility industry's engineers, executives and field technicians have an average age of 48, five years older than the median U.S. worker. At PSE&G in Newark, about a third of the energy company's 10,000 employees are already eligible to retire, said David Lyons, a PSE&G director. To keep skilled workers, the company implemented a phased retirement program three years ago that lets eligible employees work up to 24 hours a week for two years while receiving pension benefits, in addition to a program to rehire retirees for temporary engagements of up to 24 months.

Yeah I don't think all those brand new nursing graduates who can't find jobs are thanking you for your diligence in hanging on to nurses past retirement age. Like other industries in the past, there was all this talk about how there would be an extreme nursing shortage in this country once baby boomers started retiring. And young and motivated people flooded nursing schools. Last year the California Institute for Nursing and Healthcare was anticipating 40% of nursing graduates would be unable to find jobs. I get why companies would rather hang on to an older worker with much more experience rather than hire a fresh grad. But this to me is a win for the employer at best, and possibly the older worker, but a loss for GenY and GenX workers who have already dealt with the fact that many management positions would be out of their reach for much longer than previous generations and now are having the rug of education and hard work leading to a semi-stable job pulled out from under them.

Engineers also I think will not thank industries for offering juicier benefits to their oldtimers (who will already qualify for social security at much younger ages than successive generations, who do not know if it will even still be there for them). We already saw stability and pensions denied after the generation that retired before boomers and now we're seeing a desperate gamble to give some last, tasty benefits to boomers that no later generations will ever get a whif of. The national unemployment rate of engineers may not seem so bad, but the last career fair I was at included several hundred new graduates, many who had been unable to find their first job still after eight months since graduating and many more who were graduating soon and ten years ago might have already had a job offer but now had only the long unemployment of their peers to look forward to. Many of these bright young engineers would love to be wooed and coddled by utility companies. I agree a fresh engineer is not a decades experienced engineer but I wonder if comprehensive training programs are really much more expensive than increasing pension benefits or extending health insurance.

 

There's a lot of good studies cited in this article but no proof to back up that keeping older workers in the labor force longer has any benefit whatsoever to the economy or the GDP in any real measure. Even if it's good for the GDP, we've already seen that though this recession is supposedly over and GDP starting to rise that does not necessarily trickle down to the average worker. Until then I'm going to see this for what it is: another trick by employers to preserve short term profits and not look ahead towards long term growth.

Welcome back to reality

I spent most of my long weekend reading science fiction novels of space travel and long dead alien civilizations or playing Fallout 3: a post-apocalyptic video game. (Appropriately, Wired released this all instant Thanksgiving Dinner, or all-canned as I like to think of it, in preparation for when turkeys don't exist in non-radiated form). Yes there was family too but all in all it was a weekend of escapism at its finest.

 

Coming back to the cold, hard (or perhaps soft) cubicle walls is like a shadow over my soul. As we have no television I only heard news second hand or when hearing NPR on the drive somewhere. So this morning was a bit of a downer to hear what was described as a cynical ploy by the GOP just a few weeks ago is now the modus operandi; Obama is freezing Federal employee pay for two years. Selfishly I had hoped Federal employment might be an escape from my corporate purgatory. Now it seems even less likely with pay freezes and cutbacks that I will be able to find a place there. On coming into work I was also informed of a major project that will be taking a hiatus due to funding until next year. It's not a big part of my workload but doesn't bode well in general.

 

The interesting thing with playing a post-apocalyptic game for four days in a row is how it changes your views on your world. In the game you can make unique items with random crap lying around, or trade those things in for the game's currency. It inspires one to become a packrat, and has me looking around wanting to pick things up and take them with me just in case I need them. Sort of the opposite effect I had after watching a whole season of Hoarders. And it makes the world seem so much more populated and crowded after the emptiness of the wasteland. And it makes being asked why I didn't call into some meeting that was two weeks ago while I'm still filling up my first cup of coffee seem like such a paltry concern.

 

But I must wake up from the dream. Much as every Friday I struggle to leave the concerns of work left undone or "hot" projects waiting on my desk behind me I must now put my work face back on, if only to last a little longer to the winter holidays. I must pretend to care about meetings and powerpoint and signature approval and release schedules once again. Maybe not everyone else is leaving behind a post-nuclear world, but I suspect we all have to struggle a little today to fit back in again.

Bombs for Jobs

US manufacturing has been a historical powerhouse. But as time goes on more and more of our products (ships, cars, computers, appliances) are getting sent offshore. Congress is too cowardly to impose any tax disincentives to slow this down. Then you have all these idealists who think we spend way too much on defense on not enough on what...corporate bailouts? Tax cuts? Outsourcing more jobs? Let's get real. Congress might be working on some $26 billion dollar aid program that will supposedly "save" 300,000 teacher jobs, but until Republicans listen to anybody but themselves and cautiously approach the idea of raising tax rates we won't get anywhere. Instead, middle and lower class conservatives have been conned into the idea that less taxes will somehow mean more money in their pockets. That if only greedy liberals could stop funding things like education, police and firefighters maybe they'd have an extra $2 in their pockets from those poor, poor corporations who are just taxed so hard.

 

One thing not difficult to get through this republican-controlled congress is defense spending. So when I tell you missile and arms manufacturer Raytheon won a $450 million dollar contract for a new bomb you'll know that's defense budget situation normal. The F-35 will be using this small/smart bomb as well as the F-15 at some point. Maybe you're a hippie and think the only places for bombs are in some dystopian future and that peace is the key to success. Well in theory you're probably right. But the truth is, defense spending creates domestic jobs. This new bomb plant will be in Alabama. I'm sure Alabama state representatives doctored a nice tax-advantaged plan to entice Raytheon there much as the same way the South is selling out its union employees for half the wages just to get a few auto plants. Raytheon's engineering is located primarily in Arizona, one of the major economic engines in that state. A few years back Raytheon bought Hughes Aerospace and is now 12,000 people strong in Tucson. They make a lot of our missiles and bombs. And for now, it all has to be done over here for security reasons. So Apple, Ford and GE can send plenty of their manufacturing (and engineering) overseas, but there's still at least one thing partisan greed can be counted on to keep domestic. For national security, of course.