Engineering Shortage Persists

India still holds sway in software

Rick Merritt, CTO, Radfan
6/8/2015 05:09 PM EDT

Lower engineering salaries means managers should brace themselves for the revolving door, especially when 3-7-year itch kicks in.

“Engineers are impossible to find,” says Frank Kern. He should know, as chief executive of product engineering firm Aricent he employs 11,000 software developers.

To make his case, Kern uses an example from a recent trip to Rensselaer Polytechnic to attend the graduation of his nephew. The young engineer had nine job offers; he accepted one from Tesla.

One of his nephew’s fellow grads at RPI was a student from Chennai, India who had ten offers and took one from Exxon. Both grads will start off making something north of $70,000 a year. That’s a far cry from the $6,000-$10,000 starting salaries for engineers working in India, Kern notes.

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