For the 50,000 engineers who met in Manhattan last week at the annual convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 800 expensive exhibits had been carefully set up. But the convention's most popular exhibition—before which engineers daily stood two or three deep—was a makeshift affair; it was a 15-ft. display of hundreds of white cards tacked on a wall beneath the sign "Job Opportunities."
For many engineers the convention was less a chance to study new developments than an opportunity to get new jobs. For their part, engineering firms, hard-pressed by a steadily increasing shortage of engineers (TIME, May 30),...