Comments on: Engineering Crisis http://blog.sybreon.com/index.php/2008/05/engineering-crisis/ Disoriented musings of a technology romantic. Salt recommended with each reading. Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:25:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Sooth http://blog.sybreon.com/index.php/2008/05/engineering-crisis/comment-page-1/#comment-42 Sooth Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:28:20 +0000 http://blog.sybreon.com/?p=94#comment-42 I think the attitude of employers towards engineers have a big role in creating this situation. They are letting marketing drive engineering with unreasonable deadlines and functionality demands, leading to crazy schedules and burn out in engineers that really care about making good products and leaving the company filled with engineers that don't give a damn. This leads to a cycle where the good engineers drop out like flies and those that don't care about the job remain. Of course, productivity isn't as good as it was before, causing the company to start throwing more people at the job. You know, if it takes the 1 remaining engineer that we have 1 month to complete the task, then it'll just take 4 engineers 4 weeks to do it and if we go out and hire 30 guys, we can finish the job in 1 day! Brilliant! Now, where do we find 30 cheap engineers to fix this problem? Start bleating out at every opportunity that there's a lack of engineers! Maybe if universities churn out enough engineers it'll drive the price down and, if we're lucky, we'll get a few good ones that will stay around for a year or 2 before they burnout. But burnout's a good thing as we can hire some cheaper and younger ones to replace them. So, you see, there is a lack of engineers but it's not in the form that companies talk about. This month's embedded.com has a pretty good article about the pressures in engineering. I think the attitude of employers towards engineers have a big role in creating this situation. They are letting marketing drive engineering with unreasonable deadlines and functionality demands, leading to crazy schedules and burn out in engineers that really care about making good products and leaving the company filled with engineers that don’t give a damn.

This leads to a cycle where the good engineers drop out like flies and those that don’t care about the job remain. Of course, productivity isn’t as good as it was before, causing the company to start throwing more people at the job. You know, if it takes the 1 remaining engineer that we have 1 month to complete the task, then it’ll just take 4 engineers 4 weeks to do it and if we go out and hire 30 guys, we can finish the job in 1 day! Brilliant!

Now, where do we find 30 cheap engineers to fix this problem? Start bleating out at every opportunity that there’s a lack of engineers! Maybe if universities churn out enough engineers it’ll drive the price down and, if we’re lucky, we’ll get a few good ones that will stay around for a year or 2 before they burnout. But burnout’s a good thing as we can hire some cheaper and younger ones to replace them.

So, you see, there is a lack of engineers but it’s not in the form that companies talk about. This month’s embedded.com has a pretty good article about the pressures in engineering.

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