Too Many Engineers

February 06, 2009

I got an email from a good friend of mine a few days ago. He said he had been offered, and accepted, an early retirement package from Texas Instruments, where we both used to work together. I was shocked. My friend is not much older than me, and he's not anywhere near retirement age. In fact, he and two other senior engineers who had all kind of served as mentors to me, were retiring the same day.

A day or so later, I was watching TV and I heard Obama speaking on how we needed to improve our education and get more kids into math and science to be ready for the jobs of the future.

It hit me how ironic this was. Here we want to spend 10's and 100's of thousands of dollars to educate a single kid in math and science to fill one of these "jobs of the future", while at the same time we push our best and brightest out the door.

Here's what's happening. Companies are going into survival mode. They are gathering and hoarding all of their food and cutting off everything that's not necessary to sustain life. They're not dreaming and aspiring to achieve what can be, but rather they're digging in as they brace themselves for what might be.

Why did companies like Apple and Google spring up here rather than in the Soviet Union? Because we ran our system in a smart way, and they didn't. Why is our system all out of whack now, and instead of moving forward going backward? Someone drove the bus off a cliff.

-- Greg