Featured Sandy Munro and China proof

Getting an MBA degree sadly does more to encourage white collar criminals than it does to actually benefit society in the way people with an engineering degree can do... And the US has been declining a long time in that regard:

A 2005 New York Times story reported that more than 600,000 engineers graduated from Chinese institutions compared to 70,000 in the United States — that's the number that got widely circulated a decade-plus ago. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5478159

China now graduates roughly 1.3 million engineers per year versus about 130,000 in the United States — a roughly 10-to-1 gap. Some analysts put it even higher, at 1.38 million Chinese engineering graduates annually, about seven times the U.S. figure. China graduates 1.3 million engineers per year, versus just 130,000 in the U.S. We need AI to bridge the gap | Fortune

 

I hope they can all find jobs

 

How often has an engineer told you that they can't find work?

 

At the rate I'm going, I certainly hope I'm still employable at 76 because I'm going to have to still be working by then.

One thing that affects the job market is the same principal of supply and demand that affects everything else. If the number of engineers suddenly doubled then the average salary of an engineer would go down. And keep in mind that this is a global market, so while governments can try to implement protectionism to keep their workers with the same salaries, in the end the cost-effectiveness of having a glut of skilled workers elsewhere eventually filters in and makes such skills less lucrative in all countries.

The exception is unless it's the type of skilled job that has to be done locally, then it's dependent only on the local job market. Basically, if you want a lucrative career, you need to find something that is desperately needed that no one else can do or wants to do.

 

^ Yep; talked my nieces and nephews into healthcare careers. They're all doing great and have a job waiting for them. Great portability too and chances of getting outsourced is slim to null. There are many facids to a healthcare vocation - NOT just nurses and doctors; also support staff, PT, facilities to support the infrastructure.

I've seen the outsourcing thing; up close and personnel - but most staff are too stupid to realize that they're basically giving away their own jobs. I've had department managers and facility directors invite me to lunch at very fancy restaurants; after I've retired. They would ask me how to resolve issues of inflated cost and lower equipment up-time trends in their spreadsheets that didn't exists, before I retired. Told them to sign maintenance contracts with minimum up-time guarantees and penalties for the critical equipment - That's what I would do to ensure operational readiness. Tell that department(s) that they have 3 years to clean house or effectively be replaced with contractors that can actually do the job on-budget and on-time. The cost of those maintenance contracts would be the yard-stick that they should easily beat - otherwise, they're just a parasite on the facilities operating budget. The spreadsheet already shows the pattern of mismanagement.

YMMV

 

Behind a paywall.

 

when us boomers die off, there will be a glut of medical people.

or maybe there won't be a shortage

 

I wouldn't worry about it; because AI is suppose to solve everything and Skynet will have it's way with us.

 

As a grad student, I was offered a year of an interdisciplinary venture with the university's business school, where the idea was to bring grad students in the sciences together with MBA students from the b-school, so the geeks could learn about marketing and financing and stuff, and the MBAs could learn about practices and ethics of research and so on.

Anyway, we had a special session one day when the CEO of a tech startup was brought in to talk to us all for that hour. He told us a lot about how profitable the opportunity would be because (a) it would be really hard for competitors to figure out how they did it, and (b) it had been granted a patent.

So I raised my hand and asked "if the patent's been granted, how can it still be hard for competitors to figure out? Don't they just read your patent disclosure?"

And the dude smiled and said good lawyers can find lots of ways to write something that looks enough like a disclosure to get past the patent examiners, but still doesn't really disclose how the idea works.

So I followed up with something like "so, you come to the table with the American people to make a deal, and you trade briefcases at the table, and you get home and open the briefcase from the American people and there's the genuine 20-year monopoly they promised you, and when the American people open the briefcase from you, they find rocks?"

Dude's jaw muscles were working like no one had ever dared speak to him like that before, but all the MBAs in the room were rolling their eyes like "what kind of hippie geek even thinks of a question like that?".

 

That's how our drug industry works. They tweak a branch molecule - new and improved extended patent for another 20 years. Part of the reason drugs here are 2x-10x more expensive than anywhere else in the world.

 

A patent application and description is one thing. (Been there, done that, got it.) But the item that might be duplicated may be far more complex. (Ours was the product of around 100 staff years.)

So duplicating may be a challenge.

And the patented portion has to fit with lots of other bits of design for the thing to work in the real world.