By the time training is available all the important development work has already been done and the companies that did it have collected the profit. Companies need the type of engineers that can do the development work and create new things. These engineers are the ones that are hard to find and in short supply. Engineers that need training to work on a new technology will always be late to the party and a dime a dozen (read: not that valuable and not hard to find).

The problem is that people are talking past each other. There are different classes of engineers. Class A, are the type that invent new things that haven't been done before. For this class a great engineer is worth 10x, 100x, 1000x that of an average engineer. You cannot train someone to be this type of engineer, they are rare and hard to find. The second type (Class B) are the 'turn-the-crank' type of people that work processes that were developed by someone else, or create a product that is a copy of an existing product from a different company. There is no shortage of this type of engineer, they are easy to find, or can be acquired by training a new hire.

Pointing to a large number of Class B engineers is not a refutation of the claim that there is a shortage of Class A engineers.

More like "Companies need highly talented engineers of which there are just too few to be had in the world and having 50 engineers of average talent for every position does nothing to help with the shortage."

Engineers are not widgets. A great engineer is worth 50 mediocre engineers.

You misunderstand the situation. Everything installed in the ROW is paid for and maintained by the companies that install it (phone & power are only two of the many companies that use this infrastructure). The only thing provided by the government is access to the ROW. ROW is essentially just permission to cross land, and the government taxes it just like anything else. The utility companies pay for the ROW access through taxes that are levied specifically on ROW use. The only government expenses associated with the ROW are the expenses they incur from regulating and taxing it.

Perhaps if there were no taxes for crossing the land and the government paid for the actual infrastructure then your point of view would make sense.

This isn't true. Lots of companies have built out private networks in the ROW. In fact, I'm not sure what the point of the original question is. The ROW is just that, property that any telecommunications or utility company has access to use. Verizon still had to build and pay for their network and nothing stops other companies from doing the same in the ROW. In fact, federal law prohibits anyone from prohibiting other companies from doing the same. It is a lot of work, but in the end, if a company wants to build a network they can do so.

The big problem is that there just isn't any money in offering wired service to consumers (cable and phone company competition has brought the prices too low to payback to network costs). Private networks for other purposes still make sense and are built all the time.

No. DigSafe is just a group that takes calls and then distributes the request to all of the utilities (hint: there are far more then you know about). The utilities then each individually dig through their own maps (often paper) and check the specific location being requested.

There are no comprehensive electronic databases. DigSafe is not a help.

Some parts have shortages and others have a glut. Efforts to solve the shortages often exacerbate the glut leading to resentment and accusations that employers are being dishonest about the shortage.

The whole H1B visa thing always bothered me as an engineer because it seemed pretty obvious it was depressing my wages. Later on in my career I became a manager responsible for hiring and managing engineers. It turns out there is some truth to both sides of this argument. Partially because of immigration and H1B visas there are plenty of medium-skilled engineers to be had. For every opening I have looked to fill there have been plenty of medium-skilled candidates who can be had at just about any price you want to pay (thus they are depressing wages). Highly skilled candidates are very rare, even when you go into the search planning to spend well over 100k.

The problem is that when you manage engineers you quickly realize that a highly-skilled engineer is often worth 10 medium-skilled engineers, and more importantly, can accomplish the tasks that no amount of medium-skilled engineers could ever manage. That's not to say that there isn't a place for medium-skilled engineers. It often works well to have a few highly-skilled engineers on a team with a bunch of medium-skilled engineers. The highly-skilled ones figure out strategy, solve the really hard problems, and provide a skeleton structure for the project that provides the medium-skilled engineers with bite-sized tasks they can accomplish on their own. However, without the highly-skilled engineers you are doomed to failure. It is also imperative that the highly skilled engineers have subject matter expertise in whatever you are working on. There has to be a 'trainer' before you can do any training, and having a team where no one knows anything about what they need to work on is a recipe for failure.

Startups have a particular need for highly-skilled engineers. In a new company there is no structure and only the high-level plan of what needs to be done. In this environment you need almost all highly-skilled engineers with domain-specific knowledge on the team to get the first product ready. No amount of medium-skilled engineers will let you accomplish this. Likewise hiring a bunch of super bright engineers whose background experience is in designing long distance power lines is probably not going to be a winning combination if you are trying to build a revolutionary new scalable map-reduce mega server cluster. They will take years learning the skills needed and rediscovering the mistakes that someone with domain experience would already know to avoid.

It is very important to understand that "highly-skilled" is not closely correlated to schooling by the way - I have met plenty of medium-skilled engineers with master's degrees (and evenPhD's). I have also seen great engineers with only bachelors degrees. (It is worth noting here that there is still some correlation between schooling and skill - there is a greater concentration of highly-skilled engineers with PhDs that I have worked with then among those with only their B.S.). Experience is only loosely correlated as well. You can spot the really good engineers pretty early in their careers. This doesn't mean that an inexperienced but highly talented engineer is worth as much as one with experience and talent, but it does mean that within a few years out of school they are often worth more then the experienced medium-skilled engineer.

Bottom line: the US would be far better off if we could get more highly-skilled engineers. There are so many opportunities (and potential new jobs for all the supporting staff and medium-skilled engineers) that companies (including mine right now) simply cannot pursue because there are not enough of these individuals to staff the efforts. The problem is that there is really no effective way to get these individuals without letting in a lot of additional medium-skilled engineers into the country.

Another way to think of it is this: if you could put all of the people in the world who fell into the top 5% of intelligence into a stadium how many of them would be American?

Answer: not that many (if they were equally distributed it would be only 300m / 7b = 4.2%). If very intelligent people are disproportionately located in America due to some self-selection process it might be as high as 8%. In either case there is much to be gained from letting more of the 96% of people in the top bracket of intelligence into the country.

First off, I highly recommend you read the book "Becoming a Manager" by Linda Hill. It follows the first year experiences of a group of star individual contributors that are promoted to managers and discusses the transformation process they undergo to become managers. Becoming a good manager requires that you change as a person in ways that are hard. Those who do not change end up being bad managers.

What you do not understand, and no one really understands until they do it, is that being a good manager is very hard. Management is like multi-dimensional chess. As a spectator you almost never understand what is going on. You can see the results, and recognize that one person did a decent job while another person did a poor job, but you have no idea what it took to make it happen (even if you had a front-row seat as an employee). As an engineer I was generally critical of management when it was bad and indifferent to it when it was good. Now I look at my company's senior and executive leadership and am in awe of how they manage to do what they do. The difference is that I now know a little of what it takes to achieve results and recognize how much skill it takes.

Management is also like running a machine with a million switches and levers where none of them give the same result twice. The fact that you have so little awareness of this is a bad omen for your chances of becoming a good manager. Project management experience is good, but is really only about 10% of what is needed to be good at management.

Oh, and the reason that people who have been managers are worth more is pretty simple once you realize how hard it is: People that have a track record of doing a half-way decent job at management have already learned far more then you can imagine even needing to know.

Nice calculations, but they ignore two facts: 1 - the LightSquared frequency is actually pretty far from the GPS frequency (10s of MHz), so the filtering challenge is not as bad as you make it out to be. 2 - Military spec GPS devices have no problems nor do they suffer reduced sensitivity, if someone is already doing it then it definitely can be done.

More like 15x to 30x expensive. Aerial fiber runs $3 to $7 a foot, underground is $80 to $150 a foot. Renting existing duct is somewhere in between but generally closer to the underground cost. Underground ducts tend to be in bad shape and require lots of repair work. By the time you complete it your total cost ends up less then digging new but much more than an aerial run.

I have done work installing fiber plant. It isn't easy, seldom quick, and very expensive. You soon discover that there are dozens of petty city bureaucrats who want you to grovel before their awesomeness before they will let you proceed. Even the most beneficial projects garner objections from NIMBYs who are convinced that having a pencil-thick fiber optic cable pass their house will be the End of Civilization. I could go on, but to say the least my experience has greatly reduced my annoyance at the high cost of cable. Every government agency has their proboscis in the wallet of a fixed plant operator looking to suck up funds for their department.

This calculation ignores the curvature of the earth even though UTM is in meters. The poster still needs to implement the 'Great Circle' formula. I would think this would be relatively straightforward to add it as a stored proceedure in PostgreSQL.

There have not been any significant cuts in funding at any level. The issue is that the funding has not risen as fast as college expenditures so that a much smaller percentage of the cost is born by students in the form of tuition. See this link for more details (http://www.highereducation.org/reports/losing_ground/ar2.shtml). It is very common to hear people decrying 'cuts' when there is no such thing going on. The issue is purely one of uncontrolled rising costs full stop.

You are perfectly correct that the extra money is not spent on faculty salary costs. In fact, overall costs for faculty have been slightly declining due to the widespread use of adjunct professors who make very little and have no benefits. So if prices are rising much faster then inflation and the money isn't going to the average professor where is it going?

My guess is campus upgrades (somewhat offset by donations), administration salaries, sports - all of which have been growing like gangbusters at nearly any university you observe. At big universities the sports programs may actually be money-makers, but smaller universities loose money on them. It is also worth noting the rise of 'superstar' professors that make salaries well into the six figures (200k to 400k) and are especially prevalent in law schools.

If you follow the wireless industry for a while you see this is a repeat pattern: "Hmm, no one is using the spectrum near what my device will use so I can save a few cents by leaving out the receive filter!"

Garmin has been caught with their pants down and has been desperately trying to spin this as being LightSquared's fault.

Mod this comment up. Even if HTC became the dominate Android manufacturer Google would still be cherry picking the profits through their control of the Android app store.

WebOS is a very nice platform with an reasonable selection of *good* apps (1,500 apps might not sound like much compared to 50,000 but if the 1,500 include most of the very popular options you can still have a great experience). The Palm hardware was terrible - always a year behind what the rest of the industry was selling. HTC makes solid cutting edge hardware. I would love to run WebOS on a phone as well built as my EVO 3D.