How Did We Get Here

We forget things.

Well, call me a primary source.

I was all set, once I'd left the Army, to be an aerospace engineer.

If you've been keeping notes, I got out of the Army just about the same time the Cold War ended.

With the massive contraction of the defense industry, there were lots of overqualified engineers on the job market.  Lots of engineer supply, low engineer demand.

So I changed majors.

In that job market it was difficult to find even drafting work because a company could hire an experienced engineer for what I'd ask.  Many of them just needed a small income to bide the time to when they could retire.  (Oh, and when they finally did start retiring, drafting had become so automated that you no longer needed a specialist to do the job.)

This situation created a disruption in the supply of new engineers.

That created an opportunity to import engineering talent from overseas.  We had engineering jobs sitting empty because of a lack of qualified candidates.

Back to back, glut of engineers and using a supply of engineers from the third world got companies used to the idea that engineers worked cheap and could be rode hard and put away wet.

When the American education system started cranking a few new ones these newly frocked kids wanted jobs that would pay the bills AND service their student loans.

Why would a company do that when they could get three H1B dudes from India.  Never mind that the person in charge of engineering is, now, from India and those three new guys know their place in the caste structure he still believes in.

Smart people entering college can see this.  They know what their chances of getting a good job as an engineer look like and see that it's very dependent on luck rather than merit.  So they chose a different major!

And here we are.

You say you want talented, creative, smart and driven American engineers?  Well you're going to have to create incentives so that creative, smart and driven Americans WANT to be engineers.

That will mean dumping the cheap labor model and getting protectionist.

Yes, that will be expensive.  But it's an investment.

Employers have to learn to think longer term and for that to happen we must look to changing the laws around the stock market.  There's no inducement to making a 20 year plan because you have to show the stockholders an increase every quarter.  The incentives are only for short term gains and the people who can do it for a couple of years get away rich after the things they did to get the short term returns collapse the company.