Newsgroup: it.discussioni.ingegneria
Titolo: Student's dilemma

Ma come fa l'occidente a non capire che follia strategica e' cedere il 
mercato della tecnologia all'asia? Ma si sono dimenticati di cosa e' 
successo con il giappone che negli anni 80 ha spopolato con loro che non 
riuscivano a vendere piu' un tubo perche' producevano merce di qualita' 
inferiore? 
Evidente l'arrancare tipico degli anni 80 a suon di deficit spending 
(proprio con Reagan l'america inizia a gonfiarsi di debiti invece di 
essere una nazione creditrice) come sta gia' accadendo ora e' una bella 
prospettiva per questi fenomeni ...
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=46200734
Student's dilemma 
By Brian Fuller 
EE Times 
September 06, 2004 (9:00 AM EDT)    
 
You worry about your design job-your very rewarding design job-being 
shipped off to Bangalore and your career being turned upside down. It's 
a real concern. But imagine today's students, for whom the question is 
whether to go into engineering at all. Indeed, why would they choose to 
do so, if they can only expect to work a few years, get a few raises and 
then watch the job move away? Or, worse, study hard, get good grades and 
then take off the cap and gown in a few years, only to discover that 
there are no local jobs at all?
These questions loom as school reopens this fall.
K.C. Smith, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of 
Toronto, has noted that the offshoring of jobs in other big university 
disciplines, such as medicine and law, is a nonstarter. The "ultimate 
product" of the medical school is the surgeon. The surgeon works where 
the patients are, and the patients are usually local. In the discipline 
of law, the ultimate product is what the English call a barrister-and a 
barrister, too, works locally, near the local courts and with the local 
laws.
 
 
Even among the trades, Smith has quipped, the plumber's job can't be 
offshored, because "the you-know-what stops here."
For engineering schools, however, the ultimate product is the designer-
and the designer can be located anywhere. (In a cruel irony, Smith 
argues that sales engineering jobs are the hardest to offshore, so 
perhaps you're now ruing the day you scoffed at that intracompany 
transfer offer).
Smith doesn't really have a solid answer for the engineering student's 
dilemma. But he has some advice: Get multidisciplinary. Too many 
engineering students come to class thinking inside the box-the PC box 
and all it entails. The old "radio hobbyists" who went into engineering 
were totally different from today's "PC hobbyists" because the former 
dealt with many more real-world engineering issues (analog) than the 
latter (digital), Smith argues.
But the solution needs to come earlier in the educational process. 
Schools need to spend more time teaching high schoolers how to solve 
problems creatively and less time on how to pass tests. That might keep 
innovation alive at home and avoid the need for night classes to learn 
the business end of a pipe wrench.
-- 
What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

Semplice, gli imprenditori ci guadagnano, la collettività no.
Qui ci vuole un pò meno libertà e più soldi per tutti...