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THE PRESENT ERA: MANAGING CHANGE IN THE INFORMATION AGE 47 fieldsâparticularly in the high-tech electronics, aerospace, and biotechnology industries. Whether there are shortages of engineers in these fields or not, the sense of shortage persists. The problem is compounded by engineers in these disciplines frequently switching jobs to obtain higher salaries. This practice imparts a "free lance" quality to contemporary engineering employment in many fields: the emphasis is strongly on the engineer's personal advantage and advancement, often at the expense of company welfare. The loss of company identification that results from this mobility complements the loss of team identification that may result from project staffing practices. Another important aspect of engineering work life in the contemporary corporate environment is the tension that many engineers feel between their professional role and their role as an employee. This tension has been present to some extent since the late nineteenth century, when corporate employment of engineers became widespread; but it has acquired new forms with the intensification of business competition and the development of potentially harmful commercial and consumer products. The most common form is the emergence of ethical dilemmas such as the question of "whistle-blowing." These situations often involve instances of blatant wrongdoing, where one's duty as a citizen as well as a professional is clear-cut. But there are also more subtle ethical questions that a professional must sometimes confront, relating perhaps to a basic conflict between one's values and the nature of one's work on a particular project. Engineer as Government Employee. The engineer as civil servant is not a new phenomenon, or even a phenomenon strictly of this century. One of the earliest examples of the engineer as employee on a large-scale was the Army Corps of Engineers, and planners of development on the municipal, state, regional, and national level have often been engineers. However, it was not until the 1930s, and particularly from World War II on, that government began to employ civilian engineers in large numbers from every discipline. In the postwar period the formation of the various federal agencies dedicated to planning, directing, and regulating development in nearly every area of social and economic life prompted a virtual boom in engineering employment opportunities. By 1980, government employees at every level of government accounted for 15 percent of the 1.4 million engineers then in the U.S. work force (unpublished NSF data). Table 1 shows the distribution of these engineers in the federal government, the military, and state and local governments. Apart from direct employment, government supports many more
THE PRESENT ERA: MANAGING CHANGE IN THE INFORMATION AGE 48 engineers indirectly, through contract funding. At the level of prime contractor, the federal government supports an additional 24 percent of all U.S. engineers; subcontracting adds another 8 percent to the total (based on estimates provided by Dr. Aaron Gellman). TABLE 1 Engineers in Government, 1980 Category Number Employed % of Total Federal 101,600 7.3 Military 22,300 1.6 State & local 84,300 6.1 All government 208,200 15.0 Total U.S. 1,387,000 100.0 Source: NSF, unpublished data. Engineering in government is different in a number of significant ways from private-sector engineering employment. The primary difference has to do with the nature of the employer. Because government is noncommercial and nonprofit, many of the features of work life that predominate in competitive industry are absent, or at least not as prominent, in government engineering employment. The number of government engineers who perform design and development work is relatively small, according to estimates given to the panel by personnel officers of various mission agencies. Usually these "engineering" engineers are associated with testing and standards-setting activitiesâexcept in the military, where a considerable amount of systems development is done by (usually civilian) engineers in the different services. Instead, the majority of engineers across all categories of government are involved to a great extent in the planning and management of contractor services. Thus, the managing of budgets and schedules and the competition for fiscal resources form a considerable and distinctive part of engineering work in government. This contrast between engineering in government and in industry stems from a basic difference in the objectives of the private and public sector organizations: profit-making on the one hand, and the performance of public functions and services on the other. An oft-cited aspect of engineering in government is the perception that salaries are lower than for comparable positions in industry. Research and development facilities are also often believed to be less advanced and less complete than in industry; office space and support services are another area in which government engineering work is often considered to compare poorly with engineering in the private
