Corporations (most of them) are run by MBA's. Engineers are a line item in a spreadsheet.

New/growing corporations are run by their founders. To them, engineers are not a line item in a spreadsheet. But if they are successful, these companies eventually end up being run by MBA's -- or being bought by big conglomerates run by MBA's.

Ironically, the education and standards required to become an engineer (at least in this country) are far more rigorous than those required to become an MBA.

 

I work in a professional services (consulting/accounting) firm and they are really pushing the outsourcing of certain work that our first years used to complete. We are having this same problem. If the work is not something recurring that will benefit from streamlining down the road it almost always never works out to be cheaper from a budgetary standpoint. Add on the fact that working with the offshore teams is incredibly aggravating and it makes the trade-off worse for the team. But management has their metrics to push so we will be using as many off-shore hours as we can whether its a good idea or not.

 

In our case, there were two reasons. Or, at least, two products where I was involved.

The first involved the outsourcing of the manufacture of injection-molded rubber keypad membranes. This is a part that Harris uses in quantities of thousands per year, and for whatever reason it was just insanely cheap to buy them from China, whereas the US firms we dealt with (including the one that did all of the prototyping and first-lot work) were insanely expensive.

The second involved a unique aspect of Chinese law which I am surprised has never become an electoral issue in the US. In order for us to sell a certain product (which was previously 100% US-made including the PCBs) in China, we were required to perform a certain percentage of the manufacture of that product in China. So we had two separate assembly lines for that product. One in Quincy, IL to service the Americas and Europe, and one in China to produce for the Asian market. We shipped boxes of parts to China, and they assembled them into finished products.


Anyway, rounding the horn back into Ritalin Bay...

Are bad engineers worse than street criminals? (Assume that none of the bad engineers is the lead designer on a project to construct a new dam.)

 

^Yeah, you can't really streamline fixing redline drawings for instance.

I guess I can be thankful that foreign companies where the employees are ESL and don't have access to the physical product should keep me safe until retirement ~30 years.

For instance, today I'm interviewing with NORDAM as they want me to use my Tech Writing skills to document quality/problems on all inbound/outbound purchase parts and finished pieces.

 

Came across an interesting-looking sandwich shop today on GrubStreet. Called BEC, it's down on the lower-west side (which is inconvenient for me), but they offer a variety of bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches ranging from $8.50 to $13, which look insanely delicious.