On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:47 PM, James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > A position with a consulting engineering firm is not the same as a job with > the Fortune 500 -- and it is no surprise that otherwise unemployable older > engineers are ending up in consulting engineering firms that may service the > Fortune 500. It is an obvious market niche and it is good to hear it is > providing some relief but the economic rent seekers gravitate to ensconced > positions -- full benefits, etc -- in the Fortune 500 which have the > resources to pursue public sector rent seeking as well as private sector > rent seeking. One acquaintance of mine from the PLATO days was with the > Open Source Development Labs and doing consulting, recently died due to no > health insurance.
I have full benefits. All of us do. We're not contract consultants. We are employed by consulting firms who farm us out on a project by project basis. I have been 100% billable for the past 23 years. One of the more difficult tasks as a consulting engineer is lining up your projects. Or, in my case, finding engineers for my projects. There is a market out there for a software package which will automatically align project requirements with engineering talents. Right now, it is done pretty much by humint networking. I'm talking about a database which would connect 50,000 engineers with, say, 10,000 projects. I have seen a few such software packages, but they are less than perfect. Most are.
