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Big Ten announcing Delanys successor tomorrow.


https://twitter.com/ramzy/status/1135671251371012097?s=19

Big Ten will have a new commissioner in 2020. No real policy statement put out here. Kevin Warren, attorney, but not a practicing attorney. Seems like an accomplished guy. Minnesota Vikings chief operating officer Kevin Warren is expected to be introduced Tuesday as the next commissioner of the Big Ten Conference

There is no shortage of engineering jobs.

Heavy equipment operators make a good amount of coin. If they are in a year-round, right-to-work area, even better.

There are a lot of jobs out there right now, period. Need people to fill them all. I'm mostly interested in engineers though, selfishly, and I'm not at all interested $15/hour for HS kid jobs.

Big Ten will have a new commissioner in 2020. No real policy statement put out here. Kevin Warren, attorney, but not a practicing attorney. Seems like an accomplished guy. Minnesota Vikings chief operating officer Kevin Warren is expected to be introduced Tuesday as the next commissioner of the Big Ten Conference

A GREAT hire! I feel fortunate to have gotten to know Kevin pretty well over the last couple years, working on a couple of regional business relationships with him and the Vikings. He is a very cerebral workhorse who has nearly universal respect from all those that cross paths with him.

His journey to this point has been pretty amazing. His son is currently playing for an evil SEC school. 

I actually don't think there's a shortage of engineering jobs overall. Maybe my perspective is skewed on this, but a substantial number of people I've met who have engineering degrees either went directly into a different field, be it finance, healthcare, technology & software development, or some other lucrative career, but part of that is that it was apparently easier to get a job in those fields.

This exacerbates the fact that, unlike most careers, you basically have to get an engineering degree in college to even consider pursuing it as a career. I have a MS in Engineering Management but that's basically similar to an MBA with a more technical focus (courses like Project Management and Lean Six Sigma) so it doesn't qualify me for any kind of engineering role.

Conversely, in my world of clean energy, there are substantially more people with even less of a technical background than I have than there are engineers, even for analytical roles like I've had (though a decent number of jobs in this space are not technical, to be sure).

badge and I are stating that there's actually a surplus of engineering jobs, at least domestically.  That's why so many companies are having to fill those gaps with foreign labor.  And because it's more difficult and more costly for companies to do that, with the additional political red tape, they'd much rather hire American citizens where possible.  But the labor simply isn't there.  This gap seems to be especially large in my electrical engineering world, in semiconductors, computer hardware, and other hard high tech industries.

I totally agree with you that lots of folks with engineering degrees move on to other things. I worked as an actual electrical engineer in the semiconductor industry for just under a decade, before going back for an MBA.  Now my recent jobs have all been in Operations, Marketing, and management.  So I'm one of those people.

Engineering in high tech can be a bit of a meat grinder.  Relatively long hours, often poor chances for advancement for individual contributors, so the only path for advancement (and consequently salary increase and prestige increase) becomes moving into management or tangentially related fields like product marketing.  Engineers with good interpersonal skills are somewhat rare and so excel in those roles, but that leaves holes in the labor force that aren't being filled with American citizens.

I was joking about engineering being undesirable, but honestly it seems like for more and more people that COULD do it, they'd really rather not to.  

I've found that my technical background as a practicing engineer has helped me quite a bit when moving over to the product and marketing sides.

In new product development, for example, when I set up some new feature requirements based on my expectations for the market or actual customer requests, and the engineering team pushes back (which they ALWAYS do), I'm able to challenge them in an informed way.  Sometimes they have good reasons, other times they're simply being lazy.  I've done their job and I know the differences, because sometimes I was just lazy too.

Not really lazy, to be fair.  It tends to be a result of an engineering mindset that you know better than the customer, and so taking on new work is pointless.  When in reality, the customer wants what the customer wants.  It may or may not be deliverable in a timely or profitable manner for my own company, but pushing back simply for the sake of pushing back occurs pretty regularly.   And it's MY job to determine the profitability, not the engineers', because honestly they have no idea.

My technical background has given me the skills to understand when that's happening, and it's also given me the credibility with the engineering teams that they know I'm not just busting their balls for no reason.  Then we can work collaboratively to find a solution.  Works out pretty well, ultimately.