Had a private reply to my juxtaposed comments last week about the Detroit guy who thought Michigan should bring in finance companies and the Qcomp machine I saw at the ABB tech days that could be set up by the sales guy. His question was whether the U.S. would become a nation of bankers and sales people and we wouldn't build anything.
It's a legitimate concern. Of course, if we don't build anything, then we don't need as many sales people. If we aren't making money, we don't need bankers. We can all go back to the farm, I guess.
But, the point is Qcomp didn't do away with engineers--it took good engineers to design the machine. Let's face it, one of the end user's problems over the past 20 years has been the need to have people to set up, commission and ramp up production on machines. It's costly in terms of personnel and lost production. One thing that's happened is the movement of engineers from end users to OEMs and systems integrators. End users want engineers who have domain expertise in their product area--not machines and system design. They can hire that. There has been a loss of engineering positions at big companies where maybe they had lots of engineers that may have been overkill for the position. But some of the jobs just went to integrators where customers just pay for services rendered--not for full time salary plus benefits.
On the other hand, I've seen some short-sighted management that thinks advanced process control, for example, once installed never needs to be touched again. And they are right--if it's not tuned and updated occasionally it won't be touched because it's turned off. Every company is watching expense. Good management knows when to invest in talent--and when not to overinvest.
I think we'll still have engineers, because lots of people want to design new things. But the person who wants the easy job with high pay--those days are over.
3:44:24 PM 
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