Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertG
It seems that a large goal of FIRST is to increase the supply of engineers; however, few people seem to realize the basic economic principle that an increase in the supply of labor without an increase in the demand for labor will lead to lower wages. While a few more engineers will be employed, they will be making less money. Young mentors are, in effect, training their future competition.
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This is true if extensive competition for wages is allowed. If there's a huge supply of engineers, they will not be paid a high amount of money if someone is able to work for less. It was my understanding that generally unions, etc. try and prevent wage competition.
Employees are a bit different than other commodities in that aspect.
Most of the reason for FIRST is that there is always a huge demand for engineers, and not even always in directly engineering-related disciplines. One career I've always considered, for example, is collectible and tabletop game design; these fields look for people with engineering backgrounds to design game mechanics and components. There are more places for engineers than you might initially suspect.