Schwarzenegger announces plan for 20,000 more engineers

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kmguru

kmguru

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Schwarzenegger announces plan for 20,000 more engineers
Los Angeles Business from bizjournals - by Sacramento Business Journal


Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his plan on Wednesday to launch a program that would add 20,000 engineers to the state's workforce over the next decade.

The state Labor and Workforce Development Agency projects a shortfall of almost 40,000 engineers by 2014 unless immediate action is taken.

The governor's proposal would:

Establish programs at the University of California and California State University to expedite certification for veterans with engineering backgrounds. This will open up job opportunities to the approximately 3,000 service members discharged to California each year who hold engineering-related military jobs.

Direct $1 million in federal Workforce Investment Act funds to develop new apprenticeship programs that partner private industry and California Community Colleges.

Launch the Engineering Education Council to bring more private funds into "pipeline" programs at state universities and colleges and other engineering programs. These programs help move math and science students into the engineering field.

Expand the statewide charter of High Tech High, a California charter school organization, to build out engineering-focused charter schools.

"California needs more engineers to achieve the improvements to our roads, schools and other infrastructure that voters envisioned when they passed the Strategic Growth Plan Bonds last year," Schwarzenegger said.
 
One of the last places I would choose to work as an engineer is California. Engineers don't get paid much more in CA than they do anywhere else in the States - since the cost of housing is so high, your overall standard of living is very poor. Maybe out in the hinterlands, but around any CA cities the average engineer is just barely scraping by. Good luck finding decent engineers wanting to move into that situation.
 
Watcher said:
One of the last places I would choose to work as an engineer is California. Engineers don't get paid much more in CA than they do anywhere else in the States - since the cost of housing is so high, your overall standard of living is very poor. Maybe out in the hinterlands, but around any CA cities the average engineer is just barely scraping by. Good luck finding decent engineers wanting to move into that situation.
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You are correct. But there are two ways to get engineers in to California.

1. Get H-1B Visas who are usually singles that can cram in to an appartment like sardines and work. They can also stay in college campuses while doing MS or PhD and work - cheap labor

2. Get students whose parents already have nice homes. They can stay at their parents home until 40, before they can afford a new house or inherit the parents house.

That looks like basically the plan. Long ago, I had an opportunity to work at Bechtel in SF, but found out that I have to commute everyday and the money will barely pay for the living. That is why, now a days Bechtel outsources the work to India.
 
kmguru said:
You are correct. But there are two ways to get engineers in to California.

1. Get H-1B Visas who are usually singles that can cram in to an appartment like sardines and work. They can also stay in college campuses while doing MS or PhD and work - cheap labor

2. Get students whose parents already have nice homes. They can stay at their parents home until 40, before they can afford a new house or inherit the parents house.

That looks like basically the plan. Long ago, I had an opportunity to work at Bechtel in SF, but found out that I have to commute everyday and the money will barely pay for the living. That is why, now a days Bechtel outsources the work to India.
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That might be the only scheme they could use to get anyone to work there for engineer's wages. But they will be getting very little experience and the talent pool will be pretty shallow, so poor productivity out of them, don't you think? Maybe it doesn't matter for the sort of jobs Schwarzenegger is planning.
 
I have not heard anything lately from UCLA system on cutting edge engineering technologies. California which could easily be a country by itself by her GDP, does not have any new stuff to show. They do not even have a program to manage natural disasters like Earthquake or Tsunami. We talked to one city and the man in charge used to be a school teacher, had no understanding of traffic flow, water movement, earth movement etc...

At least there will be some jobs by those who understand complexities....
 
So maybe we'll have to start paying better salaries in California.

Also, before the Clown Prince of the Energy Industry sneaked into the White House, California was a leader in telecommuting. They'll start that up again in 2009. People living further from their jobs will take the pressure off of real estate prices so housing won't be so expensive even for people who do have to "go to work."

The article didn't mention specific kinds of engineering. Aren't most engineers like all the rest of us, doing most of their work on their computers? Do they have to live close enough to their jobs to "go to work"?
 
Since 1990, all my work (Electrical, Control, Computer and Chemical) has been on the Computer with face to face boring meetings every so often. I do not know why the leaderships do not encourage and publicize the work at home mantra openly while we do outsourcing by the droves to a foreign country!
 
kmguru said:
You are correct. But there are two ways to get engineers in to California.

1. Get H-1B Visas who are usually singles that can cram in to an appartment like sardines and work. They can also stay in college campuses while doing MS or PhD and work - cheap labor

2. Get students whose parents already have nice homes. They can stay at their parents home until 40, before they can afford a new house or inherit the parents house.

That looks like basically the plan. Long ago, I had an opportunity to work at Bechtel in SF, but found out that I have to commute everyday and the money will barely pay for the living. That is why, now a days Bechtel outsources the work to India.
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Bechtel does nuclear plants. Be VERY afraid.
 
kmguru said:
Because plants are designed and constructed by cheap and inexperienced labor? You get what you pay for....
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Quite regularly the quest for greater profits runs afoul of reality. I have heard of places that actually lost money because they cut employee salaries. Do you think that a worker at a meat packing plant is really going to care if the equipment is so incredibly clean if he makes barely above minimum wage instead of about three times that much like the worker he replaced did? Is he even going to understand what atomic radiation is if he works in or on a nuclear plant?
 
MetaKron said:
Quite regularly the quest for greater profits runs afoul of reality. I have heard of places that actually lost money because they cut employee salaries. Do you think that a worker at a meat packing plant is really going to care if the equipment is so incredibly clean if he makes barely above minimum wage instead of about three times that much like the worker he replaced did? Is he even going to understand what atomic radiation is if he works in or on a nuclear plant?
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You do not have to hear that, it is my personal experience. Several years ago, I was asked by my company to solve a revenue and profit nosedive of a major American Restaurant Chain. Due to other problems, they lost some revenue. Their answer was to cut cost which is reasonable. What they did was to lay off experienced hostesses and cooks and hired fresh set with little experience. Some managers chased after good looking young ones or otherwise sexually harassed them who quit. In the mean time, another group reduced the food portions exactly 10% thinking that no one will notice them (years ago the Peanut Plank by a major company was reduced 10%)

So, the revenue dived. But the upper mamangement did not have any mechanism to gather this knowledge (Knowledge is something that human beings put together from Data). We solved it...but they lost a lot of money over a 9 month period.

There is a book called "Our Emporer have no clothes" that has a lot of examples in it. Someday, I may blog my past experience with some of the Fortune 100 companies after I retire, otherwise, I will be blacklisted.

Thesedays, our President Bush Cabinet hired a lot of seminary people to solve our national issues who do not have any experience or never studied histrory (except the Holy Bible)
 
kmguru said:
I do not know why the leaderships do not encourage and publicize the work at home mantra openly while we do outsourcing by the droves to a foreign country!
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A lot of people believe that you can't get good work done if the workers aren't physically together. They think every job is like psychiatry and diplomacy, where you need body language and facial expressions to read subtle communication. I remind these people that my grandfather said the same thing about the telephone: "People will never be comfortable talking to a machine."

What bothers me much more, as a management consultant, is that so many managers don't know how to manage people they can't see. You're supposed to manage what people accomplish, not the number of hours they spend at their desks--surfing the internet and playing solitaire, since we've trained several generations of workers to be really good at LOOKING busy. The problem these managers have is that their employees don't have measurable goals because the goals of their projects themselves are not well defined.

In any case, a whole generation of Americans is growing up with chat rooms, MPRPGs and Blueteeth. They won't understand why people have to be in the same room to get something done. And they really won't understand why they can't live in Costa Rica and have a job in New York.
 
Many years ago, I did a data model for a data warehouse for a San Francisco Company. When I went there, the first week, they had to pay a lot of money to Hotel Intercontinental room charge. They politiely asked, if I can do it fom home. I said, it would be difficult, but I can do it (while jumping with joy inside).

LOOKING busy is an American disease. I know that very well....
 
kmguru said:
Thesedays, our President Bush Cabinet hired a lot of seminary people to solve our national issues who do not have any experience or never studied histrory (except the Holy Bible)
Click to expand...

No pun intended, but, Jesus Christ! The man has no idea what a Pharisee was.
 
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