i've heard from managers, engineers and scientists in new york, los angeles, austin, and san francisco that the quality of american engineers & scientists was severely lacking.
i took the fact that they would only say this in private to a friendly group of people in a non-professional setting and, even then, never in english to be nothing more than anecdotal; but i hearing it for the first time in chicago this past weekend and reading this article is making me see that there's truth to it.
There's a problem in engineering education from anywhere in my opinion. The main issue is teaching knowledge, not understanding. This is then backed up with technology being so impenetrable these days that it's next to impossible to self teach by ripping stuff apart to see how it works.
This combination is producing people at the end of their education having very little idea how to work on anything.
It's cause we can't fucking fund research. Physicists, for example, are one of the most unemployed while being one of the smartest people of our time, are barely scraping by.
Engineering? Engineering is mostly in defense creating weapons. Imagine if NASA had the amount of money of defense. The world would be transformed so much.
We cannot allow a research gap!
