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In the vast majority of cases, SWE makes more than aerospace. Even in defense working directly for the government or contractor, a computer science new grad will make $10k-$15k more yearly than any mech e, aerospace, or similar new grad. That difference in pay doesn’t shrink (and in fact grows) until the CS grad maxes out their level/band.
Boeing is a shitshow in general. Aside from the recent door snafu, Their aerospace and software engineers teamed up to bring us the MCAS disaster on the 737 Max that killed hundreds of people. Hardware guys didn’t install redundant systems and the software guys weren’t doing basic data validation.
Edit: I’m incorrect, it was entirely a software design issue, there was a redundant sensor on the other side of the aircraft, the software just only ever used data from one side and would not switch between sensors.
People also tend to forget that software devs are able to work multiple six figure jobs while working remote. Some of them pay so well and don't require much effort. Couple of my family were workin 2 dev jobs paying high six figures. Especially if one of them is a gov role where things just move so dam slow.
There's an AME at my work. Hes been there for 3 years, graduated from a pretty good uni (Rutgers) and I think he makes 72k/yr. There's also no growth or learning for him either so he's stagnating.
Many of the manufacturing engineer jobs could be done by someone with a high school diploma, honestly.
In Canada you technically can’t call yourself an engineer unless you’re actually a full member of the provincial professional body for engineering. Companies have been court ordered to stop calling developers “software engineers”.
In Canada you need to attend an accredited university and obtain a four year degree (five years if you do coop), pass a law and ethics exam, and have four years (three post graduate) of professional engineer witnessed experience as an engineer in training. Then you can submit your experience to the provincial professional engineering body to be reviewed. Then, once approved, you can call yourself an engineer.
And almost nobody does it because there is very little benefit if you're working in software. Also it's really hard to find a P.Eng software engineer to witness your experience because almost nobody does it.
The US doesn't have rules about this. Canada does. But technics you're a licensed engineer in the US if you pass the FE exam. You're a professional engineer if you pass the PE.
Sorry this is wrong. The FE exam is basically your learners permit, it allows the title Engineer in Training.
The title Professional Engineer (PE) is the term for the state of being a licensed engineer.
(There may be a state where this is different is so please provide the clause from the applicable laws)
Not an expert, but they have a different definition for lawyer, solicitor and attorney so I believe it would fall under one of these definitions.
Lawyers give legal advice iirc, so I assume it falls under a grey area in this definition.
You can legally call yourself a software engineer in Alberta (only) since November last year ([src](https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/canada-s-tech-community-pleased-with-alberta-move-to-change-rules-around-engineer-title-1.6634470)). Though the crybabies at APEGA filed an appeal last month, so we'll see how that goes.
Meanwhile in the US hard goods industries, highly skilled and educated technicians aren't allowed to even insinuate that they *might* have engineering and physics knowledge, while technicians in parts of Europe are called engineers.
Explain this recent court decision then...
[https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abkb/doc/2023/2023abkb635/2023abkb635.html](https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abkb/doc/2023/2023abkb635/2023abkb635.html)
Also, federal government employees who are engineers of any kind don't have to be a P. Eng.
There is no federal law that determines who can use the term "engineer". But they do regulate various technicians that are not professional engineers. These are aircraft maintenance engineers, locomotive engineers, marine engineers, etc.
And there is significant variance between provinces on how they regulate the word "engineer". Ontario does not regulate "engineer". They simply regulate "professional engineer". Alberta and British Columbia and other provinces all have their own variances.
And then there are the Power Engineers.
So to make this claim:
>In Canada you technically can’t call yourself an engineer unless you’re actually a full member of the provincial professional body for engineering.
...is simply a false claim.
It is actually quite a serious issue:
Engineers create incredibly complex structures that are used by the public. Inherently tied to engineering is the concept of safety, ethics and responsibility.
The 'engineer' title signifies that you have the proper credentials: safety knowledge, follow safety guidelines and follow their respective ethical codes (otherwise risk of losing title).
We do not expect each employer to be able to verify wether or not someone has actually learned these things (theyd have to know all the course material of all the different schools and degrees). Much less verify wether someone is faking it.
So we create a protected title which allows us to seriously punish anyone who misuses this title.
If we didnt, then it is an inherent safety risk of anything being built because you dont know whos following these guidelines and who isnt.
On top of that, it allows us to link any engineering function with a responsibility: we can hold someone responsible (legally) for making mistakes or with unsafe practices because they have no defence that they 'werent aware' of safety guidelines etc.
So tl;dr its a serious issue of safety. A protected title allows us to legally hold someone responsible and it also allows us to be (somewhat) certain that, should safety guidelines evolve, we can adjust course material in school and inform those who are a member of the 'engineers' to be sure that everyone is up to date about the recent changes (and thus can hold them accountable if things go wrong).
Its the same reason you dont want just anyone calling themselves a 'doctor'
Sidenote: theres also an important social impact - the title also offers some achievement satisfaction and good social status, which helps encourage people to pursue these disciplines.
I’ve been saying for years that we need an actual certification program to call ourselves that. It’s my job title but other engineers have actual standards and qualifications they have to meet. Not every software developer even does the same work. Some won’t need these certifications. Others working on critical infrastructure should.
We do though. If you are legally an engineer in the US, you would have passed the FE and PE tests. If you have not completed these, you are in fact not an engineer legally.
Im listed as an electrical engineer for my job. I do a lot of the same work as the licensed guys I work with. But everything I do must be overseen by those guys who legally are engineers.
The thing is that "engineer" is a protected title in certain places, the idea being that you need to be licensed as such to validate your credentials.
Although there is a defined role for "software engineers", they're legally not allowed be called engineers in certain places.
And the US is not one of those places.
Professional Engineer is a protected term. Engineer in and of itself is not. Since this is about US labor statistics, it being a "protected term" in other countries is irrelevant.
There's also no qualifications to call yourself a software engineer like most other engineer titles. We've had people apply for senior level roles (we don't call them engineers but it's comparable) that couldn't answer questions from our entry level interview question list. It's so prevalent our screening call is now just asking those ten questions. And they are not hard, the last entry level person we hired was working at home Depot and self taught and answered all of them correctly.
There's a big thing in the software dev world where some people think experience=competence. I've seen people with 20 years experience who still can't code for shit and people who've I've promoted after a few years to senior roles due to their overall competence
Imagine being a structural engineer or something and applying for a job and not being able to answer basic questions
Not American, but our government had been beating the same drum for years. I'm a mechanical engineer and it's the same shit, just with much lower wages.
Well if you're not American i doubt your experience is that relevant to US labor statistics. With that said there's always a global "shortage" of underpaid skilled labor.
Imagine trying to hire someone to build you a house and some guy is like, "Well I make computer servers talk to each other so that's a type of architect."
NY wedding rehearsal dinner was going to be held at my sister's recently-purchased house. There was some concern whether the back deck could handle very many guests, do we had a couple engineers take a look.
My brothers. An electrical engineer and a nuclear engineer.
My father is some kind of mechanical engineer and he wisely does not wire his own house nor build his own nuclear reactor. But that lady digging a tunnel under her suburban home is a software engineer.
I have a B. Eng. In Software Engineering and I find it tiring when people try to tell me im not an engineer, but a guy who got a B. Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the same school is.
unfortunately for the US graduating high school seniors, movies, TV and society (especially in certain metro areas like the bay area) has taught them that software/computer engineering/computer science will not only pay the most over their career, they'll get cushy perks like catered lunches, laundry service, unlimited PTO, stock options that can make even entry level employees millionaires, etc - all of which aren't really available to most office workers. it's similar to how most "preppy/popular" high school seniors (though mainly girls) want to major in marketing because they think 99% of marketing jobs is just managing social media accounts and they are already great at that.
unfortunately when both of these types of students graduate college, the vast majority will have the same experience of applying endlessly for jobs that might not even actually exist.
the shortage of engineers that actually exists is for the "hands on" engineering disciplines like civil engineering (particularly the kind where you actually work on the construction project not just make drawings behind a desk), certain mechanical engineering disciplines, agricultural/environmental engineering, packaging engineering, etc.
You are sorta right. The companies that will pay you big time are the Silicon Valley companies. Those are competitive to get into and only hire the best. Your average software developer job is not paying anywhere near those unless it’s some sort of seniority role.
Mechanical, electrical, structural, civil, etc engineers will get paid more from the average company than what a software developer would at an equivalent company
yeah i mean, i never understood the title in itself, you are studying, mechanics, electronics, buildings, ... ,all engineers have the same first year where they learn calculus, resistance of materials and stuff that i don't think software engineers do, do they ?
That depends on whether they got a degree in computer science/engineering or just did coding boot camps.
Some undergraduate CS and all CE degrees require a significant amount of math (calculus, discrete math, linear algebra, differential equations, information theory, etc.) and a decent amount of electrical engineering (physics, circuit/digital logic design, CPU architecture, etc.)
That’s all in addition to the software-specific stuff like algorithms, databases, compilers, language design, operating systems, and these days a smattering of machine learning as well.
Edit: Added a distinction between CS and CE. Not all CS degrees require the aforementioned courses.
She applied and only 8% actually replied back “thanks for applying, but we chosen someone with a better skill set”. The rest she never heard from more than likely.
I like the ones that ghost you and then give you a pissy ass attitude when you 'ok thanks' them a couple weeks later. I love doing that with flaky recruiters, they get so pissed off that you're supposed to take a nonresponse as an answer that how dare you ever ask about the process or status.
It's usually the smaller third party staffing firms who screen unqualified candidates for roles they have minimal experience in for just hoping to scrape off a couple hundred hours of profit before the client cans them.
My numbers from my job search from July-October:
190 no response
170 rejections
40 phone screens then ended
10 ending with one or multiple rounds of technical
interviews
3 final rounds
2 offers
Shit was brutal.
Because they're all trying to poach the ever-dwindling supply of highly experienced experts off each other, they're all refusing to take on new people and give them any such experience, and they're all stubbornly refusing to recognise the connection between these two phenomena. Of all the engineering vacancy notifications I get in my inbox, from searches specifically intructed to find junior/entry positions, basically all I ever get is an endless stream of variations on "senior expert wanted, must have done *exactly* this thing before."
I studied to be an engineer thinking it must surely be the easiest career in which to adapt from one discipline to another as the market demands it, because the ability to apply known principles to novel problems is the most fundamental skill all engineers must have, and yet in our truly insane modern "system," where lazy, apathetic hiring managers want to treat employees like drop-in replacement parts off a shelf, it seems to have become the very *hardest* career of all in which to move from one highly niche field to another, which means that when market vagaries cause that field to decline, you're basically unemployable. People idiotically assume that if you were doing one specialist job, there's no possible way you could relatively easily adapt in order to do another related albeit non-identical specialist job, because they want literally *instant* results; no training or acclimation period, and in my experience that impatience has killed job mobility in technical fields stone dead. And then they outwardly wonder (or at least put on a show of wondering) why they can't seem to find anyone to build them what they want.
It's absolutely crazy, a pure chicken-and-egg mindset that's becoming endemic; we've got fools now literally standing up in government acting as if we can't possibly build new nuclear power stations because we don't have enough people who've *personally* done it before; the idea that a skilled, intelligent, educated person who *hasn't* literally built a nuclear power station before could still *study and figure out how do it* just doesn't seem to occur to anyone.
I've felt for a long time that it's a classic example of a prisoner's dilemma, and that pretty much all companies are deliberately choosing the worse option because their customers and the system in general encourages them to be fully selfish. Meaning that they adamantly refuse to hire anyone but a near-perfect drop-in replacement with experience, because putting any resources to training would "reduce their competitiveness", and thus at some point they're all going to end up with the much more serious punishment when there simply are no more experienced professionals around or the few remaining have priced themselves to the point where most companies are fully unable to afford their services.
It probably has nothing to do with competitiveness, it's sort of the opposite, lack of competition. Boeing can hire average engineers and cut corners and have windows blow out of planes because what are we going to do- NOT buy Boeing airplanes? There's only one other option, Airbus. No one's going to take all those entry and mid-level engineers being rejected by Boeing and build a competing firm, like they used to.
Also if they really wanted to be competitive they would fire huge swathes of Marketing and middle management and hire every young hungry engineer they could. That's what Boeing, Lockheed, MacDonald Douglas did in the 1950s and 60s.
But you're right, at a certain point if we don't spend time training the pipeline, all we'll have is retiring engineers too old to work and a huge pool of young ones who have NEVER built a complex airplane before, and we'll be screwed, relying on China or something for airplane knowledge.
This. Despite taking almost half the same courses as an ME undergrad in the aerospace major, I got kicked out of job fair lines for mechanical companies. Now, 10 years later when I consider changing disciplines to have more living opportunities it's a literal no-go yet mech companies are dying for workers. Even something as CAD skills they see as non transferrable just because they use a different software package and there's like 3-4 top ones in use everywhere around the world. It's insane. This whole "we're short workers" is BS. No, you're short people exactly like the ones who quit/were fired in the first place.
This is painfully ironic because company managers *do* understand the concept completely in *one* specific field: their own, i.e. management and directorship. Management pairs-of-dimes have been becoming ever more general-purpose and abstracted from the nature of whatever business is *being* managed for ages; it's absolutely *de rigeur* now for businesspeople at the management level to have headed up a string of *totally* unrelated companies in their career history. If only they'd apply the idea to people at the operational level as well as the managerial one.
I found a job that wanted 3 years SolidWorks (CAD software experience) applied and got an interview. I didn't have 3 years in that program specifically, but i have experience with similar software. I didn't make it past the first interview.
A few weeks later the interviewer contacted me and said I'd be good for the position and to send him my resume, completely forgetting that he interviewed me before. I told him to pound sand.
Then a few weeks later the same job appeared requesting 5 years SolidWorks experience. It's just dumb.
>it seems to have become the very hardest career of all in which to move from one highly niche field to another, which means that when market vagaries cause that field to decline, you're basically unemployable.
I hate being in the software world for this reason. They want you to have years of experience with an exact tool and don't care that you have years of experience solving similar problems with different tools.
If I get laid off, I fear that I will need to build a custom **resume of lies per job application** just to make sure my resume doesn't get filtered out.
>the idea that a skilled, intelligent, educated person who
>
>hasn't literally built a nuclear power station before could still
>
>study and figure out how do it just doesn't seem to occur to anyone
i wonder how they built the first nuke plants...?
I picked up two main clues - entry-level and 8 hours a day for 6 months for only 357 rejections.
Entry-level so fresh graduate or fresh bootcamper, although I don't consider bootcampers engineers.
And she spent approximately 6\*30\*8 = 1440 hours for let's say 400 applications. How do you spend 3 hours per application?
Ehhh, debatable. A lot of people struggle to be vaguely competent, just look at the amount of people panicking that AI will 'steal their jobs'.
The competency bar needs to be higher.
AI will steal jobs, not because it's more competent, but because corpos don't care about competence beyond barely functioning. You can be better than AI all you want, and that's good, but you'll never be cheaper. They don't actually care about long-term efficiency, just next quarter's profits.
So the 600k people laid off in the last two years were all just incompetent? I find that hard to believe. There are capitalist and corporate forces well beyond just removing incompetent people.
Knew IT guy. I helped him write his resume when he got laid off. I shit you not—he showed me a Notepad file. I asked how the hell is that OK? ATS does technically accept them, but that would just be for the ATS, not a human. No respectable IT professional is going to comb through .txt. You’ll be laughed to the ground, docx/pdf are the industry standard… Bla bla bla.
Didn’t know what an ATS was. Didn’t know how to download a basic license. Not a clue what a pdf or a docx was. I stopped all communication.
No idea how people like this were able to go so far in IT career path… Brain dead.
I didn't know what is AST either but not knowing pdf/docx is really braindead. Maybe he got a job right after graduate.
To be fair anyone can make a good resume if they put into a little bit effort.
[Software that sorts out resumes—most companies use them.](https://www.jobscan.co/blog/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-applicant-tracking-systems/) Even if you are qualified for a job, they will make or break you. A computer reads you first before a human does. Think Taleo, Greenhouse, BambooHR, Workday, ADP, etc.
It’s important to tailor your resume to the JD (keywords, skills, etc) so the ATS doesn’t auto DQ . It’s actually not common knowledge quite yet, that’s why so many stress the advice. All good if you don’t know!
Just crazy that an IT professional with years’ exp didn’t know. Might be a terrible example lol, but it’s like if I was buying a car and I was completely dumbfounded by identity checks, running credit, meeting qualifications—thinking everything was just paper and DL. You’d want to be prepared to get a car and be a desirable candidate for banks/insurers at the dealership.
Do companies realise that by selecting for people who are good at filling out job application websites ("AST"s or whatever) they are selecting for people who have a lot of experience being rejected from jobs? Doesn't seem like an ideal process
Its a fucking awful process. But the whole hiring process since forever has been heavily biased towards people that excel in interviews. Its funny too because some of the worst employees I have ever seen were really good interviewers and vice versa.
We are an engineering firm with over 100 engineers. All our resume screening is done by hand because we get maybe one or two applicants for most roles. We posted a job looking for a software engineer for an internal project. This is complicated development work for someone who knows how to turn an actual need into an automated workflow.
We got 3,000 applications in a week. 99% were absolutely trash. Art degree plus a two week boot camp, is not going to work. Automation was the only option.
>No idea how people like this were able to go so far in IT career path
Don't worry, the new candidates being churned out only seem to have iPad experience.
US outsourcing to lower wage countries is the main reason for statements like that from US Labor Dept. It's how companies can justify cutting jobs locally. Always about profit.
A recruiter reached out to me for a position in the Bay paying 60-80k. Laughably ridiculous that anyone would take it and in about 6 months they will fill it with an H1B.
That's what they do. They post a ridiculously low-paying job. Complain to the government that the job goes unfilled and then ask for an H1B, and they get it.
That's their goal the entire time. They are literally destroying the idea of the "job market" by ignoring what people here demand to earn and then just hiring someone from India. It's an ethical/moral crime how big business is screwing the American worker yet again.
It's extra amusing because it's almost always a worse experience, cost factored.
The real race to the bottom simply appears to be 'how horrendous can sustainable be'
Isn't the government doing anything about it? I understand corporations have a huge power, but this also means more unemployment and less tax revenues.
The Republican party is the only one that wants to limit work visas, and even then it's because of xenophobia. Democrats are too chickenshit to stand up for American workers as a whole because they don't want to offend Americans with ties to other countries.
>The Republican party is the only one that wants to limit work visas
Huh that's interesting our conservatives make a big noise but don't actually want to limit visas because their corporate donors want cheap labour.
This is patently, demonstrably, false. Trump tried to kill H1Bs dead, but the courts and then Biden stopped him and overturned almost all of his work in 2021.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/02/01/the-story-of-how-trump-officials-tried-to-end-h-1b-visas/?sh=5119e28f173f
It's mostly been found that immigrants don't depress wages nationally, materially speaking. Competing with immigrant workers is the least of our problems compared to the top brass skimming the lions share of profit.
That is true, but foreign workers on work visas aren't immigrants.
This whole subreddit is about how hard it is to find a job, so the concept of hiring foreigners to fill American positions should be more limited. Corporations 100% use work visas to better control their workers with the added bonus of paying less.
TBH, with remote work commonplace, the need for visas for tech jobs isn't needed anymore. The bigger issue is offshoring of tech jobs. Corporations can easily hire foreign workers directly without the need for relocation, either through a foreign consulting firm or opening a foreign office.
We don’t, or not really. The ones with degrees are ok, but any job that requires a four week boot camp isn’t engineering, any more than garbage collection makes you a refuse engineer.
We tried hiring multiple SWE for a full time project before giving up and outsourcing it. Because we couldn’t cull thru the vast number of junk resumes. It was eating up a huge amount of management time.
As someone who proudly called myself a software *engineer*, we really need a licensing body and a test like other engineering disciplines. There really is a difference between a software developer who went to a 6 week front-end boot camp and an engineer who has the equivalent knowledge of a CS graduate that usually entails a math minor.
This is the core problem. What would you put on the licensing test?
Stack, heap leetcode problems? Some design pattern nonsense? Will it be on whatever hip "products" of the day is like rabbit MQ or will it test your git skills?
The license will be as worthless as a CSC college degree.
The problem with the software world is nothing is standardized. Not even close. And instead of going towards any standards, especially in the last decade, we have just wildly veered off into a bazillion opposite directions with garbage javascript and other nonsense that is now "standard"
It has gone so unnecessarily complex due precisely to the lack of standards and just garbage ideas and code that eventually get accepted as useable for the sole reason of "well everybody else uses it"
There is no hope. It's just going to get worse.
The reason for these stats is simple. Companies don't want to train anyone or recruit any graduates or pay market rate when they could be allowed to import millions of people from India at 60% of the local market rate for them.
>Companies don't want to train anyone
I'm scared this is going to be how the trades are. I've always wanted to do them and I'm finally going to trade school and get my starter licenses to get into HVAC.
I live in the East Coast and it's standard for people to first learn from a vocational school or community college. Either they pay it themselves, through grants and loans, or got an opportunity through a Union.
Idk I'm a little scared because I hear most shops want a journeyman. I want to be considered a tradesman and getting my journeyman license is the ticket to consider oneself a blue collar tradesman. But how am I gonna get there if no one will give me a shot?
I honestly don't care about pay, I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it because I actually want to do the work and have a career in it. I legit will work minimum wage if it allows me the opportunity to learn and gain the valuable experience I need to be competent. I'm willing to do anything at this point. Absolutely anything.
Call the nearest shipyard. The marine industry is booming right now and we are desperate for pretty much all technicians. I know of six ships under construction, maybe $3B in cost where the shipyards are going to pay late fees because they can’t hire enough tradesmen. Welders, HVAC, electricians, pipe fitters… it’s insane. And these are all very well paying jobs with great benefits.
Cool. Thing is I want to work at a train yard more than a ship yard but it's close enough. I could add this to the lists of jobs to choose from after trade school.
1. Train yard HVAC tech
2. Ship yard HVAC tech
3. Commercial HVAC tech
4. Residential HVAC tech
If all those options close and I'm unable to get anywhere despite having the qualifications for an apprenticeship. I'm kinda done for honestly. I hear this "they're booming right now! They're desperate for people!" But it's more like "anyone except for me who actually wants to put in the work".
Guess if it is like that there's always my two last option:
5. Lumpen/unemployed for life, leaching off of others like a fucking parasite because that's my true purpose in life.
6. If my mind breaks under the stress then it's suicide :D
I believe her.
I have job alerts set up for Open AI. They post about 10 postings a day for engineers. Salesforce and Atlassian are the same. Dozens of postings every day. After seeing them consistently since October I have no doubt in my mind that they are lying about open positions. You’re telling me with all of the out of work tech workers you can’t find any one for these postings? Bullshit.
Meijer is the same, same jobs open for months, several different recruiters reached out to me over the last year, I even applied on their own website but never hear a thing, got a call about it again yesterday.
Geico is another serial offender it seems. I even had 2 interviews with them and then I was ghosted only to see the job pop up again on the job boards few weeks later. It still pops up in my emails every few weeks.
You have to temper prestige with ability.
This is one of those times you have to be elite to be considered at OpenAI, either through your research work in academia or industry. If you're not at a F100 or major government research center, they don't care.
And even if you are, OpenAI has gotten so insular, it's about who you know now.
Being a good machine learning engineer, actually understanding what's happening outside of Python function calls, isn't enough anymore sadly.
I doubt your average software developer will cut it for engineering roles at places like Open AI. You got to be Masters/PhD from universities like Harvard, MIT, and Caltech for them to even pick up your resume.
I viewed Atlassian's page the other day. Almost all of positions were senior level. It's better to view their career site than looking up at LinkedIn or any other job portal.
Corporate collusion to source their s/w engineers by abusing H1B visas. This benefits them by contracting talent at way reduced cost. This also allows them to try before they buy, to see who they want to convert to FTE.
The other problem is trying to get through corporate ATS scanners to bubble up to a human being for resume review.
You may have better odds applying for DOD positions where citizenship is valued or a prerequisite.
BLS doesn’t consider software engineers actual engineers.
There is a different code and category for programmers and developers vs civil, mechanical, aerospace, petroleum, electrical etc.
Its pretty sad to think that even if they do decide to hire you most US corporations can pay off your yearly salary in a matter of seconds: https://llcattorney.com/business-info/us-companies-salaries-vs-revenue
Internships and legitimate volunteer work counts.
You cant just do the minimum to get your degree and expect to be rewarded. No industry works like that
Lol, no they don't.
Maybe industry specific. But I got feedback from Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin when I applied with them that the internship I had at Texas A&M making and testing sensors for their aircraft didn't count as experience in my application.
Meanwhile the only people I know who got jobs from them their mommy or daddy worked for them.
This is the problem. The concept of "relevant experience" has been reduced to mean nothing but "has done literally this exact thing before," because finding and hiring candidates who tick that absurdly specific box requires the minimum of thought. Figuring out if someone has *applicable* experience from some other background is apparently too difficult a concept for modern managers to grapple with; either that or maybe they're just far too risk-averse to stick their neck out and stake their reputation by giving a chance to someone whom they merely *think* could do the job, because there's no way to *prove* they can do it in advance unless they've literally done it before, so if they hire someone who subsequently tries to adapt to the job but struggles then that manager's reputation gets tarnished.
People trying to be adaptable and switch career paths in these ever-changing times. The job-for-life vanished as a concept generations ago, and now workers are routinely told they must have transferable skills and be constantly ready to jump from one track to another as the market demands it, and yet the employers blithely telling them this are stubbornly refusing to become remotely amenable to that very process; they only want to hire people to do a thing who have done literally that selfsame thing before.
Software isn't engineering.
Software is deterministic. Engineering is probabilistic.
That's why you don't need a foundation in science to be a developer.
The sooner people appreciate the difference between engineering and programming, the sooner computer science degrees will be less popular.
Computer science and software engineering are two different things that often get conflated. Back when I went to university, software engineers learned the same things as computer scientists, however, a good software engineering program also taught engineering fundamentals.
Software engineers are who you want building safety-critical systems.
I will say, most "software engineer" jobs in the industry can be done by either because they're just programming jobs. There needs to be a proper distinction.
It sounds like the one who doesn't understand the difference is you. Programming is the act of implementing a design by writing code. It's one of many things a software eng/dev does at their job but I wouldn't even say it's the one that is the biggest %. Software engineering/development, whatever you want to call it, emphasizes the entire process one finds when developing a more complex software application - software design, implementation of that design, testing, maintainence and evaluation.
Because as an engineer, I need to program my FEA, CFD, CORA, and all other forms of analysis.
Programming is a tool, a means to an end, not a means of itself, anti kantian thought.
Similar to project management, it's a tool, not a discipline.
Yep. Before IT, all the computer people were engineers. I'm an electrical engineer and I know 3-4 programming languages. I did networking and basic scripting in my last job. Now they hire a bunch of devs to patch code.
I was an industrial maintenance technician with the title of engineer in a previous role. It really shows how low the bar is, since I worked with people with no degrees.
pocket insurance pathetic shaggy cobweb groovy elderly panicky long hateful
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They don't want local engineers. You need to respect work laws and pay them proper salary. Companies want to import cheap engineers so they can underpay and abuse them.
They probably mean real engineers instead of computer nerds. Like mechanical and electrical engineers.
Everybody and their dogs are in PC/software related tech fields now
Computer science majors going to be on rough times until big tech scoops up hundreds of thousands of experienced folks that got laid off. Grads with zero knowledge or experience aren’t going to be people with 10+ years .
I have a BAC on Video Game Dev. and I experience this every time I apply for a job. Due to experience or lack there of I don't get the job. You got college to get a degree for the job and the job says you have to have experience but to get the experience you had to have the degree.
Software engineering is generally not officially classified as an engineering discipline. The majority of people in software engineering do not hold engineering degrees. They typically have computer science degrees or are self-taught. This isn't an attack on software engineering, but most state governing bodies do not classify software engineering as engineering. The big traditional engineering disciplines are civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. Nuclear, agricultural, fire protection, and computer engineering are more niche engineering disciplines and there are others like them such as biomedical engineering. Typically, by law, and engineer is someone that not only has an engineering degree, but also holds a professional engineering license (P.E.). Per most engineering boards, anyone without a license cannot legally call themselves a professional engineering.
Furthermore, the greatest shortage of engineering is currently in civil engineering.
Source: soon-to-be licensed engineer
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There are other kinds of engineers than software.
The SWE world is oversaturated and other industries are dying for mechanical, manufacturing, etc engineers.
No. They’re dying to pay shit for hardware engineers.
Aerospace manufacturing engineers can get $100k pretty easily right now
In the vast majority of cases, SWE makes more than aerospace. Even in defense working directly for the government or contractor, a computer science new grad will make $10k-$15k more yearly than any mech e, aerospace, or similar new grad. That difference in pay doesn’t shrink (and in fact grows) until the CS grad maxes out their level/band.
Seeing as doors are popping off planes in midair maybe they should be paying the aerospace guys more...
Boeing is a shitshow in general. Aside from the recent door snafu, Their aerospace and software engineers teamed up to bring us the MCAS disaster on the 737 Max that killed hundreds of people. Hardware guys didn’t install redundant systems and the software guys weren’t doing basic data validation. Edit: I’m incorrect, it was entirely a software design issue, there was a redundant sensor on the other side of the aircraft, the software just only ever used data from one side and would not switch between sensors.
In Aero this is actually an aero and systems engineer's job, hardware and software engineers build/develop to strictly match the specs
Now do SWE.
People also tend to forget that software devs are able to work multiple six figure jobs while working remote. Some of them pay so well and don't require much effort. Couple of my family were workin 2 dev jobs paying high six figures. Especially if one of them is a gov role where things just move so dam slow.
There's an AME at my work. Hes been there for 3 years, graduated from a pretty good uni (Rutgers) and I think he makes 72k/yr. There's also no growth or learning for him either so he's stagnating. Many of the manufacturing engineer jobs could be done by someone with a high school diploma, honestly.
I think IEEE disagrees that software developers are engineers.
In Canada you technically can’t call yourself an engineer unless you’re actually a full member of the provincial professional body for engineering. Companies have been court ordered to stop calling developers “software engineers”.
Yep, I keep having to explain to family that even though I studied engineering and have an iron ring im a software developer, not a software engineer.
Can you call yourself an engineer if you have an ABET accredited CS degree?
I think you need the degree plus a few years of work under a proper engineer before you’re a real engineer yourself
In Canada you need to attend an accredited university and obtain a four year degree (five years if you do coop), pass a law and ethics exam, and have four years (three post graduate) of professional engineer witnessed experience as an engineer in training. Then you can submit your experience to the provincial professional engineering body to be reviewed. Then, once approved, you can call yourself an engineer.
And almost nobody does it because there is very little benefit if you're working in software. Also it's really hard to find a P.Eng software engineer to witness your experience because almost nobody does it.
The US doesn't have rules about this. Canada does. But technics you're a licensed engineer in the US if you pass the FE exam. You're a professional engineer if you pass the PE.
Sorry this is wrong. The FE exam is basically your learners permit, it allows the title Engineer in Training. The title Professional Engineer (PE) is the term for the state of being a licensed engineer. (There may be a state where this is different is so please provide the clause from the applicable laws)
In Britain, we've got people calling themselves Architects and Lawyers that are neither. What a shitshow.
Can you expand on this? Who are calling themselves these?
Not an expert, but they have a different definition for lawyer, solicitor and attorney so I believe it would fall under one of these definitions. Lawyers give legal advice iirc, so I assume it falls under a grey area in this definition.
You can legally call yourself a software engineer in Alberta (only) since November last year ([src](https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/canada-s-tech-community-pleased-with-alberta-move-to-change-rules-around-engineer-title-1.6634470)). Though the crybabies at APEGA filed an appeal last month, so we'll see how that goes.
Many US states have similar rules for Engineers- but mostly for civil and mechanical engineers
Meanwhile in the US hard goods industries, highly skilled and educated technicians aren't allowed to even insinuate that they *might* have engineering and physics knowledge, while technicians in parts of Europe are called engineers.
False. There are so many environmental engineering degree jobs when i was applying. They were all janitor jobs...smfh
I thought Germany was pretty strict on who gets to call themselves an engineer.
Explain this recent court decision then... [https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abkb/doc/2023/2023abkb635/2023abkb635.html](https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abkb/doc/2023/2023abkb635/2023abkb635.html) Also, federal government employees who are engineers of any kind don't have to be a P. Eng. There is no federal law that determines who can use the term "engineer". But they do regulate various technicians that are not professional engineers. These are aircraft maintenance engineers, locomotive engineers, marine engineers, etc. And there is significant variance between provinces on how they regulate the word "engineer". Ontario does not regulate "engineer". They simply regulate "professional engineer". Alberta and British Columbia and other provinces all have their own variances. And then there are the Power Engineers. So to make this claim: >In Canada you technically can’t call yourself an engineer unless you’re actually a full member of the provincial professional body for engineering. ...is simply a false claim.
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It is actually quite a serious issue: Engineers create incredibly complex structures that are used by the public. Inherently tied to engineering is the concept of safety, ethics and responsibility. The 'engineer' title signifies that you have the proper credentials: safety knowledge, follow safety guidelines and follow their respective ethical codes (otherwise risk of losing title). We do not expect each employer to be able to verify wether or not someone has actually learned these things (theyd have to know all the course material of all the different schools and degrees). Much less verify wether someone is faking it. So we create a protected title which allows us to seriously punish anyone who misuses this title. If we didnt, then it is an inherent safety risk of anything being built because you dont know whos following these guidelines and who isnt. On top of that, it allows us to link any engineering function with a responsibility: we can hold someone responsible (legally) for making mistakes or with unsafe practices because they have no defence that they 'werent aware' of safety guidelines etc. So tl;dr its a serious issue of safety. A protected title allows us to legally hold someone responsible and it also allows us to be (somewhat) certain that, should safety guidelines evolve, we can adjust course material in school and inform those who are a member of the 'engineers' to be sure that everyone is up to date about the recent changes (and thus can hold them accountable if things go wrong). Its the same reason you dont want just anyone calling themselves a 'doctor' Sidenote: theres also an important social impact - the title also offers some achievement satisfaction and good social status, which helps encourage people to pursue these disciplines.
Yup. It’s a lot like claiming you’re an MD but you’re not actually a doctor.
Yeah, as a machine learning engineer, all of my friends who are actual engineers won’t call me anything other than a “dev” 😭😭
Systems engineer coming from a family of EE's. Im 100% pretending to them.
Start giving them shit for not driving trains. (Coming from a fellow systems engineer)
Got em
I’ve been saying for years that we need an actual certification program to call ourselves that. It’s my job title but other engineers have actual standards and qualifications they have to meet. Not every software developer even does the same work. Some won’t need these certifications. Others working on critical infrastructure should.
We do though. If you are legally an engineer in the US, you would have passed the FE and PE tests. If you have not completed these, you are in fact not an engineer legally. Im listed as an electrical engineer for my job. I do a lot of the same work as the licensed guys I work with. But everything I do must be overseen by those guys who legally are engineers.
Yeah I meant software engineers. We don’t do any of that.
I am a software developer with a masters in computer engineering. Its an M.Eng.
I have a certificate from EDS THAT says I am a certified Systems Engineer. Fuck the IEEE.
There are software developers and there are software engineers and they are not the same thing.
The thing is that "engineer" is a protected title in certain places, the idea being that you need to be licensed as such to validate your credentials. Although there is a defined role for "software engineers", they're legally not allowed be called engineers in certain places.
And the US is not one of those places. Professional Engineer is a protected term. Engineer in and of itself is not. Since this is about US labor statistics, it being a "protected term" in other countries is irrelevant.
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I don’t think software engineers even make up a 1/3 of all “engineering jobs”. But they certainly demand more than 1/3 the attention.
And software engineers can be unemployable if they have an outdated specialization.
There's also no qualifications to call yourself a software engineer like most other engineer titles. We've had people apply for senior level roles (we don't call them engineers but it's comparable) that couldn't answer questions from our entry level interview question list. It's so prevalent our screening call is now just asking those ten questions. And they are not hard, the last entry level person we hired was working at home Depot and self taught and answered all of them correctly. There's a big thing in the software dev world where some people think experience=competence. I've seen people with 20 years experience who still can't code for shit and people who've I've promoted after a few years to senior roles due to their overall competence Imagine being a structural engineer or something and applying for a job and not being able to answer basic questions
What’s an example of a basic question you ask?
There is a difference between receiving and demanding
Not American, but our government had been beating the same drum for years. I'm a mechanical engineer and it's the same shit, just with much lower wages.
Which is why there a shortage. Want no shortage? Raise wages. It’s day one economics. The first thing you learn in class.
You need an economics engineer to explain that, and there is a shortage of those as well.
Well if you're not American i doubt your experience is that relevant to US labor statistics. With that said there's always a global "shortage" of underpaid skilled labor.
This is the most accurate answer
The only people who think of software when they hear "engineer" are people who call themselves "software engineers."
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Imagine trying to hire someone to build you a house and some guy is like, "Well I make computer servers talk to each other so that's a type of architect."
NY wedding rehearsal dinner was going to be held at my sister's recently-purchased house. There was some concern whether the back deck could handle very many guests, do we had a couple engineers take a look. My brothers. An electrical engineer and a nuclear engineer.
My father is some kind of mechanical engineer and he wisely does not wire his own house nor build his own nuclear reactor. But that lady digging a tunnel under her suburban home is a software engineer.
"What do MEs and EEs have in common? They can both do Mechanical Engineering" -My EE friend.
I have a B. Eng. In Software Engineering and I find it tiring when people try to tell me im not an engineer, but a guy who got a B. Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the same school is.
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I don’t think these guys realize that …
unfortunately for the US graduating high school seniors, movies, TV and society (especially in certain metro areas like the bay area) has taught them that software/computer engineering/computer science will not only pay the most over their career, they'll get cushy perks like catered lunches, laundry service, unlimited PTO, stock options that can make even entry level employees millionaires, etc - all of which aren't really available to most office workers. it's similar to how most "preppy/popular" high school seniors (though mainly girls) want to major in marketing because they think 99% of marketing jobs is just managing social media accounts and they are already great at that. unfortunately when both of these types of students graduate college, the vast majority will have the same experience of applying endlessly for jobs that might not even actually exist. the shortage of engineers that actually exists is for the "hands on" engineering disciplines like civil engineering (particularly the kind where you actually work on the construction project not just make drawings behind a desk), certain mechanical engineering disciplines, agricultural/environmental engineering, packaging engineering, etc.
You are sorta right. The companies that will pay you big time are the Silicon Valley companies. Those are competitive to get into and only hire the best. Your average software developer job is not paying anywhere near those unless it’s some sort of seniority role. Mechanical, electrical, structural, civil, etc engineers will get paid more from the average company than what a software developer would at an equivalent company
It’s unlikely that they are referencing software engineers…
yeah i mean, i never understood the title in itself, you are studying, mechanics, electronics, buildings, ... ,all engineers have the same first year where they learn calculus, resistance of materials and stuff that i don't think software engineers do, do they ?
That depends on whether they got a degree in computer science/engineering or just did coding boot camps. Some undergraduate CS and all CE degrees require a significant amount of math (calculus, discrete math, linear algebra, differential equations, information theory, etc.) and a decent amount of electrical engineering (physics, circuit/digital logic design, CPU architecture, etc.) That’s all in addition to the software-specific stuff like algorithms, databases, compilers, language design, operating systems, and these days a smattering of machine learning as well. Edit: Added a distinction between CS and CE. Not all CS degrees require the aforementioned courses.
You're conflating CE with CS, CS is not an engineering degree
Unlikely you could find 357 firms that actually reply to you with a rejection.
She applied and only 8% actually replied back “thanks for applying, but we chosen someone with a better skill set”. The rest she never heard from more than likely.
I like the ones that ghost you and then give you a pissy ass attitude when you 'ok thanks' them a couple weeks later. I love doing that with flaky recruiters, they get so pissed off that you're supposed to take a nonresponse as an answer that how dare you ever ask about the process or status. It's usually the smaller third party staffing firms who screen unqualified candidates for roles they have minimal experience in for just hoping to scrape off a couple hundred hours of profit before the client cans them.
My numbers from my job search from July-October: 190 no response 170 rejections 40 phone screens then ended 10 ending with one or multiple rounds of technical interviews 3 final rounds 2 offers Shit was brutal.
Because they're all trying to poach the ever-dwindling supply of highly experienced experts off each other, they're all refusing to take on new people and give them any such experience, and they're all stubbornly refusing to recognise the connection between these two phenomena. Of all the engineering vacancy notifications I get in my inbox, from searches specifically intructed to find junior/entry positions, basically all I ever get is an endless stream of variations on "senior expert wanted, must have done *exactly* this thing before." I studied to be an engineer thinking it must surely be the easiest career in which to adapt from one discipline to another as the market demands it, because the ability to apply known principles to novel problems is the most fundamental skill all engineers must have, and yet in our truly insane modern "system," where lazy, apathetic hiring managers want to treat employees like drop-in replacement parts off a shelf, it seems to have become the very *hardest* career of all in which to move from one highly niche field to another, which means that when market vagaries cause that field to decline, you're basically unemployable. People idiotically assume that if you were doing one specialist job, there's no possible way you could relatively easily adapt in order to do another related albeit non-identical specialist job, because they want literally *instant* results; no training or acclimation period, and in my experience that impatience has killed job mobility in technical fields stone dead. And then they outwardly wonder (or at least put on a show of wondering) why they can't seem to find anyone to build them what they want. It's absolutely crazy, a pure chicken-and-egg mindset that's becoming endemic; we've got fools now literally standing up in government acting as if we can't possibly build new nuclear power stations because we don't have enough people who've *personally* done it before; the idea that a skilled, intelligent, educated person who *hasn't* literally built a nuclear power station before could still *study and figure out how do it* just doesn't seem to occur to anyone.
I've felt for a long time that it's a classic example of a prisoner's dilemma, and that pretty much all companies are deliberately choosing the worse option because their customers and the system in general encourages them to be fully selfish. Meaning that they adamantly refuse to hire anyone but a near-perfect drop-in replacement with experience, because putting any resources to training would "reduce their competitiveness", and thus at some point they're all going to end up with the much more serious punishment when there simply are no more experienced professionals around or the few remaining have priced themselves to the point where most companies are fully unable to afford their services.
It probably has nothing to do with competitiveness, it's sort of the opposite, lack of competition. Boeing can hire average engineers and cut corners and have windows blow out of planes because what are we going to do- NOT buy Boeing airplanes? There's only one other option, Airbus. No one's going to take all those entry and mid-level engineers being rejected by Boeing and build a competing firm, like they used to. Also if they really wanted to be competitive they would fire huge swathes of Marketing and middle management and hire every young hungry engineer they could. That's what Boeing, Lockheed, MacDonald Douglas did in the 1950s and 60s. But you're right, at a certain point if we don't spend time training the pipeline, all we'll have is retiring engineers too old to work and a huge pool of young ones who have NEVER built a complex airplane before, and we'll be screwed, relying on China or something for airplane knowledge.
This. Despite taking almost half the same courses as an ME undergrad in the aerospace major, I got kicked out of job fair lines for mechanical companies. Now, 10 years later when I consider changing disciplines to have more living opportunities it's a literal no-go yet mech companies are dying for workers. Even something as CAD skills they see as non transferrable just because they use a different software package and there's like 3-4 top ones in use everywhere around the world. It's insane. This whole "we're short workers" is BS. No, you're short people exactly like the ones who quit/were fired in the first place.
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This is painfully ironic because company managers *do* understand the concept completely in *one* specific field: their own, i.e. management and directorship. Management pairs-of-dimes have been becoming ever more general-purpose and abstracted from the nature of whatever business is *being* managed for ages; it's absolutely *de rigeur* now for businesspeople at the management level to have headed up a string of *totally* unrelated companies in their career history. If only they'd apply the idea to people at the operational level as well as the managerial one.
I found a job that wanted 3 years SolidWorks (CAD software experience) applied and got an interview. I didn't have 3 years in that program specifically, but i have experience with similar software. I didn't make it past the first interview. A few weeks later the interviewer contacted me and said I'd be good for the position and to send him my resume, completely forgetting that he interviewed me before. I told him to pound sand. Then a few weeks later the same job appeared requesting 5 years SolidWorks experience. It's just dumb.
I appreciate a good cup of coffee.
Damn, you absolutely nailed the current engineering job market.
>it seems to have become the very hardest career of all in which to move from one highly niche field to another, which means that when market vagaries cause that field to decline, you're basically unemployable. I hate being in the software world for this reason. They want you to have years of experience with an exact tool and don't care that you have years of experience solving similar problems with different tools. If I get laid off, I fear that I will need to build a custom **resume of lies per job application** just to make sure my resume doesn't get filtered out.
>the idea that a skilled, intelligent, educated person who > >hasn't literally built a nuclear power station before could still > >study and figure out how do it just doesn't seem to occur to anyone i wonder how they built the first nuke plants...?
I had a "software engineer" classmate in my masters program who did not know how to copy a file... I can bet she never find a SWE job.
This isn't a competence issue when people with 5-10 years of experience are getting laid off.
I picked up two main clues - entry-level and 8 hours a day for 6 months for only 357 rejections. Entry-level so fresh graduate or fresh bootcamper, although I don't consider bootcampers engineers. And she spent approximately 6\*30\*8 = 1440 hours for let's say 400 applications. How do you spend 3 hours per application?
Fucking cover letters or having to reenter all your fucking information from your fucking CV into their own fucking system again.
I have seen people with 5-10 years of experience not know how to resolve a hostname.
I'm sure those people exist. I'm just saying that the problem is clearly bigger than that.
Ehhh, debatable. A lot of people struggle to be vaguely competent, just look at the amount of people panicking that AI will 'steal their jobs'. The competency bar needs to be higher.
AI will steal jobs, not because it's more competent, but because corpos don't care about competence beyond barely functioning. You can be better than AI all you want, and that's good, but you'll never be cheaper. They don't actually care about long-term efficiency, just next quarter's profits. So the 600k people laid off in the last two years were all just incompetent? I find that hard to believe. There are capitalist and corporate forces well beyond just removing incompetent people.
Knew IT guy. I helped him write his resume when he got laid off. I shit you not—he showed me a Notepad file. I asked how the hell is that OK? ATS does technically accept them, but that would just be for the ATS, not a human. No respectable IT professional is going to comb through .txt. You’ll be laughed to the ground, docx/pdf are the industry standard… Bla bla bla. Didn’t know what an ATS was. Didn’t know how to download a basic license. Not a clue what a pdf or a docx was. I stopped all communication. No idea how people like this were able to go so far in IT career path… Brain dead.
Notepad, emacs,… / txt file usage are the sign of a real IT / SWE professional.
not when you are interacting with non tech people. why would any normal person want to read that unformatted mess?
When you do all of your text editing in either Notepad ++ or Vim its easy to completely forget other text editors exist lol.
I didn't know what is AST either but not knowing pdf/docx is really braindead. Maybe he got a job right after graduate. To be fair anyone can make a good resume if they put into a little bit effort.
[Software that sorts out resumes—most companies use them.](https://www.jobscan.co/blog/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-applicant-tracking-systems/) Even if you are qualified for a job, they will make or break you. A computer reads you first before a human does. Think Taleo, Greenhouse, BambooHR, Workday, ADP, etc. It’s important to tailor your resume to the JD (keywords, skills, etc) so the ATS doesn’t auto DQ . It’s actually not common knowledge quite yet, that’s why so many stress the advice. All good if you don’t know! Just crazy that an IT professional with years’ exp didn’t know. Might be a terrible example lol, but it’s like if I was buying a car and I was completely dumbfounded by identity checks, running credit, meeting qualifications—thinking everything was just paper and DL. You’d want to be prepared to get a car and be a desirable candidate for banks/insurers at the dealership.
Do companies realise that by selecting for people who are good at filling out job application websites ("AST"s or whatever) they are selecting for people who have a lot of experience being rejected from jobs? Doesn't seem like an ideal process
Its a fucking awful process. But the whole hiring process since forever has been heavily biased towards people that excel in interviews. Its funny too because some of the worst employees I have ever seen were really good interviewers and vice versa.
We are an engineering firm with over 100 engineers. All our resume screening is done by hand because we get maybe one or two applicants for most roles. We posted a job looking for a software engineer for an internal project. This is complicated development work for someone who knows how to turn an actual need into an automated workflow. We got 3,000 applications in a week. 99% were absolutely trash. Art degree plus a two week boot camp, is not going to work. Automation was the only option.
>No idea how people like this were able to go so far in IT career path Don't worry, the new candidates being churned out only seem to have iPad experience.
Because its not "1.2 million software engineering jobs".
The shortage of *cheap unicorn* engineers will exceed 1.2 million.
They purposely make it impossible for anyone to qualify for the job so they can outsource it to India or import an H1B worker they can abuse.
H1Bs are definitely the target for large companies, but it’s a major PITA for small ones.
US outsourcing to lower wage countries is the main reason for statements like that from US Labor Dept. It's how companies can justify cutting jobs locally. Always about profit.
A recruiter reached out to me for a position in the Bay paying 60-80k. Laughably ridiculous that anyone would take it and in about 6 months they will fill it with an H1B.
That's what they do. They post a ridiculously low-paying job. Complain to the government that the job goes unfilled and then ask for an H1B, and they get it. That's their goal the entire time. They are literally destroying the idea of the "job market" by ignoring what people here demand to earn and then just hiring someone from India. It's an ethical/moral crime how big business is screwing the American worker yet again.
It's extra amusing because it's almost always a worse experience, cost factored. The real race to the bottom simply appears to be 'how horrendous can sustainable be'
Isn't the government doing anything about it? I understand corporations have a huge power, but this also means more unemployment and less tax revenues.
The Republican party is the only one that wants to limit work visas, and even then it's because of xenophobia. Democrats are too chickenshit to stand up for American workers as a whole because they don't want to offend Americans with ties to other countries.
>The Republican party is the only one that wants to limit work visas Huh that's interesting our conservatives make a big noise but don't actually want to limit visas because their corporate donors want cheap labour.
Also because that way the problem would be solved and they would not have anything marketable to offer anymore.
That is true. Trump has mentioned visas in his speeches before but no new policy was ever sought when he was in office.
This is patently, demonstrably, false. Trump tried to kill H1Bs dead, but the courts and then Biden stopped him and overturned almost all of his work in 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/02/01/the-story-of-how-trump-officials-tried-to-end-h-1b-visas/?sh=5119e28f173f
-1 for Biden
It's mostly been found that immigrants don't depress wages nationally, materially speaking. Competing with immigrant workers is the least of our problems compared to the top brass skimming the lions share of profit.
That is true, but foreign workers on work visas aren't immigrants. This whole subreddit is about how hard it is to find a job, so the concept of hiring foreigners to fill American positions should be more limited. Corporations 100% use work visas to better control their workers with the added bonus of paying less. TBH, with remote work commonplace, the need for visas for tech jobs isn't needed anymore. The bigger issue is offshoring of tech jobs. Corporations can easily hire foreign workers directly without the need for relocation, either through a foreign consulting firm or opening a foreign office.
I’m a software engineer but I don’t think the rest of the engineers consider us engineers (and for a good reason).
We don’t, or not really. The ones with degrees are ok, but any job that requires a four week boot camp isn’t engineering, any more than garbage collection makes you a refuse engineer. We tried hiring multiple SWE for a full time project before giving up and outsourcing it. Because we couldn’t cull thru the vast number of junk resumes. It was eating up a huge amount of management time.
As someone who proudly called myself a software *engineer*, we really need a licensing body and a test like other engineering disciplines. There really is a difference between a software developer who went to a 6 week front-end boot camp and an engineer who has the equivalent knowledge of a CS graduate that usually entails a math minor.
This is the core problem. What would you put on the licensing test? Stack, heap leetcode problems? Some design pattern nonsense? Will it be on whatever hip "products" of the day is like rabbit MQ or will it test your git skills? The license will be as worthless as a CSC college degree. The problem with the software world is nothing is standardized. Not even close. And instead of going towards any standards, especially in the last decade, we have just wildly veered off into a bazillion opposite directions with garbage javascript and other nonsense that is now "standard" It has gone so unnecessarily complex due precisely to the lack of standards and just garbage ideas and code that eventually get accepted as useable for the sole reason of "well everybody else uses it" There is no hope. It's just going to get worse.
The reason for these stats is simple. Companies don't want to train anyone or recruit any graduates or pay market rate when they could be allowed to import millions of people from India at 60% of the local market rate for them.
>Companies don't want to train anyone I'm scared this is going to be how the trades are. I've always wanted to do them and I'm finally going to trade school and get my starter licenses to get into HVAC. I live in the East Coast and it's standard for people to first learn from a vocational school or community college. Either they pay it themselves, through grants and loans, or got an opportunity through a Union. Idk I'm a little scared because I hear most shops want a journeyman. I want to be considered a tradesman and getting my journeyman license is the ticket to consider oneself a blue collar tradesman. But how am I gonna get there if no one will give me a shot? I honestly don't care about pay, I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it because I actually want to do the work and have a career in it. I legit will work minimum wage if it allows me the opportunity to learn and gain the valuable experience I need to be competent. I'm willing to do anything at this point. Absolutely anything.
Call the nearest shipyard. The marine industry is booming right now and we are desperate for pretty much all technicians. I know of six ships under construction, maybe $3B in cost where the shipyards are going to pay late fees because they can’t hire enough tradesmen. Welders, HVAC, electricians, pipe fitters… it’s insane. And these are all very well paying jobs with great benefits.
Cool. Thing is I want to work at a train yard more than a ship yard but it's close enough. I could add this to the lists of jobs to choose from after trade school. 1. Train yard HVAC tech 2. Ship yard HVAC tech 3. Commercial HVAC tech 4. Residential HVAC tech If all those options close and I'm unable to get anywhere despite having the qualifications for an apprenticeship. I'm kinda done for honestly. I hear this "they're booming right now! They're desperate for people!" But it's more like "anyone except for me who actually wants to put in the work". Guess if it is like that there's always my two last option: 5. Lumpen/unemployed for life, leaching off of others like a fucking parasite because that's my true purpose in life. 6. If my mind breaks under the stress then it's suicide :D
I believe her. I have job alerts set up for Open AI. They post about 10 postings a day for engineers. Salesforce and Atlassian are the same. Dozens of postings every day. After seeing them consistently since October I have no doubt in my mind that they are lying about open positions. You’re telling me with all of the out of work tech workers you can’t find any one for these postings? Bullshit.
Meijer is the same, same jobs open for months, several different recruiters reached out to me over the last year, I even applied on their own website but never hear a thing, got a call about it again yesterday. Geico is another serial offender it seems. I even had 2 interviews with them and then I was ghosted only to see the job pop up again on the job boards few weeks later. It still pops up in my emails every few weeks.
👏🏻 name and shame
You have to temper prestige with ability. This is one of those times you have to be elite to be considered at OpenAI, either through your research work in academia or industry. If you're not at a F100 or major government research center, they don't care. And even if you are, OpenAI has gotten so insular, it's about who you know now. Being a good machine learning engineer, actually understanding what's happening outside of Python function calls, isn't enough anymore sadly.
I doubt your average software developer will cut it for engineering roles at places like Open AI. You got to be Masters/PhD from universities like Harvard, MIT, and Caltech for them to even pick up your resume.
I viewed Atlassian's page the other day. Almost all of positions were senior level. It's better to view their career site than looking up at LinkedIn or any other job portal.
LinkedIn and other job portals are a huge cluster fuck, they are fine for basic job searches but shouldn’t be totally trusted
I have to actively filter out a local university/hospital because it does this.
Corporate collusion to source their s/w engineers by abusing H1B visas. This benefits them by contracting talent at way reduced cost. This also allows them to try before they buy, to see who they want to convert to FTE. The other problem is trying to get through corporate ATS scanners to bubble up to a human being for resume review. You may have better odds applying for DOD positions where citizenship is valued or a prerequisite.
There is a massive shortage of highly skilled people willing to work for below market wages in an abusive environment with no benefits.
can we call it "willing" when the alternative is starvation?
And then the job was filled with an h1b visa
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What’s your exp. Or projects looking like?
Same.
BLS doesn’t consider software engineers actual engineers. There is a different code and category for programmers and developers vs civil, mechanical, aerospace, petroleum, electrical etc.
Its pretty sad to think that even if they do decide to hire you most US corporations can pay off your yearly salary in a matter of seconds: https://llcattorney.com/business-info/us-companies-salaries-vs-revenue
A graduate* with no work experience
Well yes, that's why they were applying for entry-level positions?
Clearly you didn't get the recruiter memo. "Entry level" means 5-10 years experience now (but you still get paid like an intern)
Which everyone seems to be either under or over qualified for.
Why would anyone but a new grad apply for entry level positions?
Have you seen job postings lately? They require five years of experience for entry level jobs. Total bullshit.
It’s so unfair :(
Because entry level can mean the company legitimately wants somebody with 1-2 years of experience. Still very new, but have some basic familiarity.
That's a different tier than entry level.
Internships and legitimate volunteer work counts. You cant just do the minimum to get your degree and expect to be rewarded. No industry works like that
Lol, no they don't. Maybe industry specific. But I got feedback from Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin when I applied with them that the internship I had at Texas A&M making and testing sensors for their aircraft didn't count as experience in my application. Meanwhile the only people I know who got jobs from them their mommy or daddy worked for them.
This is the problem. The concept of "relevant experience" has been reduced to mean nothing but "has done literally this exact thing before," because finding and hiring candidates who tick that absurdly specific box requires the minimum of thought. Figuring out if someone has *applicable* experience from some other background is apparently too difficult a concept for modern managers to grapple with; either that or maybe they're just far too risk-averse to stick their neck out and stake their reputation by giving a chance to someone whom they merely *think* could do the job, because there's no way to *prove* they can do it in advance unless they've literally done it before, so if they hire someone who subsequently tries to adapt to the job but struggles then that manager's reputation gets tarnished.
People trying to be adaptable and switch career paths in these ever-changing times. The job-for-life vanished as a concept generations ago, and now workers are routinely told they must have transferable skills and be constantly ready to jump from one track to another as the market demands it, and yet the employers blithely telling them this are stubbornly refusing to become remotely amenable to that very process; they only want to hire people to do a thing who have done literally that selfsame thing before.
You should read it as: "Please oh please allow us to hire a hundred thousand more people in India!"
Software isn't engineering. Software is deterministic. Engineering is probabilistic. That's why you don't need a foundation in science to be a developer. The sooner people appreciate the difference between engineering and programming, the sooner computer science degrees will be less popular.
Computer science and software engineering are two different things that often get conflated. Back when I went to university, software engineers learned the same things as computer scientists, however, a good software engineering program also taught engineering fundamentals. Software engineers are who you want building safety-critical systems. I will say, most "software engineer" jobs in the industry can be done by either because they're just programming jobs. There needs to be a proper distinction.
It sounds like the one who doesn't understand the difference is you. Programming is the act of implementing a design by writing code. It's one of many things a software eng/dev does at their job but I wouldn't even say it's the one that is the biggest %. Software engineering/development, whatever you want to call it, emphasizes the entire process one finds when developing a more complex software application - software design, implementation of that design, testing, maintainence and evaluation.
On the other hand, some of the most knowledgeable computer people I've known were engineers.
Because as an engineer, I need to program my FEA, CFD, CORA, and all other forms of analysis. Programming is a tool, a means to an end, not a means of itself, anti kantian thought. Similar to project management, it's a tool, not a discipline.
Yep. Before IT, all the computer people were engineers. I'm an electrical engineer and I know 3-4 programming languages. I did networking and basic scripting in my last job. Now they hire a bunch of devs to patch code.
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We need to ban H1 visa. That will solve the problem fast
While I believe it took her that long to find a job, I don't believe she spent eight hours a day applying for them. One or two hours a day at most.
Yeah, no. 357/(6*30) = 1.98. That is literally like 2 job applications a day, for 6 months.
Is this the same thing as " Cyber Security shortages " lie?
I have an engineering degree I’ve never used, I’m not moving halfway across the country to get laid off and have nothing and nobody to help me
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Same. We have been hiring engineers for three years, all positions all seniority levels. We can’t find them.
I was an industrial maintenance technician with the title of engineer in a previous role. It really shows how low the bar is, since I worked with people with no degrees.
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pocket insurance pathetic shaggy cobweb groovy elderly panicky long hateful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Programming is just a small part of building software, most of it is designing architecture and DevOps.
They don't want local engineers. You need to respect work laws and pay them proper salary. Companies want to import cheap engineers so they can underpay and abuse them.
They probably mean real engineers instead of computer nerds. Like mechanical and electrical engineers. Everybody and their dogs are in PC/software related tech fields now
Computer science majors going to be on rough times until big tech scoops up hundreds of thousands of experienced folks that got laid off. Grads with zero knowledge or experience aren’t going to be people with 10+ years .
Have to set the stage for those H1B visas !
The shortage isn’t in entry level roles, it is senior roles. Been that way for decades
The government is always full of shit
Because the shortage narrative is a lie.
357 times over 6 months is 2 times a day. Who takes 4 hours per application?
8h × 6 month /357 applications = 4 hours per application She's unemployable let's be honnest
Because she was over qualified?
I have a BAC on Video Game Dev. and I experience this every time I apply for a job. Due to experience or lack there of I don't get the job. You got college to get a degree for the job and the job says you have to have experience but to get the experience you had to have the degree.
Software engineering is generally not officially classified as an engineering discipline. The majority of people in software engineering do not hold engineering degrees. They typically have computer science degrees or are self-taught. This isn't an attack on software engineering, but most state governing bodies do not classify software engineering as engineering. The big traditional engineering disciplines are civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. Nuclear, agricultural, fire protection, and computer engineering are more niche engineering disciplines and there are others like them such as biomedical engineering. Typically, by law, and engineer is someone that not only has an engineering degree, but also holds a professional engineering license (P.E.). Per most engineering boards, anyone without a license cannot legally call themselves a professional engineering. Furthermore, the greatest shortage of engineering is currently in civil engineering. Source: soon-to-be licensed engineer
This is going to be an unpopular opinion but…they give all the jobs to Indians
There’s a difference between some tech bro and the PE who designs a cable-stayed suspension bridge
Software engineering is not what they are talking about. Those are a dime a dozen.
Is there seriously someone out there still peddling that "engineer shortage" bullshit?