Electrical Engineering Labor Pool Shrinking 401
dcblogs writes "The number of electrical engineers in the workforce has declined over the last decade. It's not a steady decline, and it moves up and down, but the overall trend is not positive. In 2002 the U.S. had 385,000 employed electrical engineers; in 2004, post dot.com bubble, it was at 343,000. It reached 382,000 in 2006, but has not risen above 350,000 since then, according to U.S. Labor Data. In 2012, there were 335,000 electrical engineers in the workforce. Of the situation, one unemployed electrical engineer said: 'I am getting interviews but, they have numerous candidates to choose from. The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.'"
Quite so! (Score:4, Insightful)
Employers don't want to develop talent in-house because that's expensive -- and will get more so as the employee becomes more attractive to the company's competitors. Employers also don't want to hire people to increase their talent pool; rather, they want to hire "super talent" in order to fire one or more lesser engineers.
Those hundreds of positions you see advertised? They aren't a sign of growth, but of stagnation, and a nearly total absence of investment (even from the profits that a company is supposed to be making).
Re:Quite so! (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. As an bachelors with honours engineering graduate I find it almost impossible to get work. Companies are not willing to train people in-house. I'd like to know how many engineering graduates have passed through university and are now doing a job they are qualified to do, looking at 15, 10, 5 years and present day.
I can't get a job because I haven't got the experience. I can't get the experience because I can't get a job. Catch 22.
Re:Quite so! (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. As an bachelors with honours engineering graduate I find it almost impossible to get work. Companies are not willing to train people in-house. I'd like to know how many engineering graduates have passed through university and are now doing a job they are qualified to do, looking at 15, 10, 5 years and present day.
I can't get a job because I haven't got the experience. I can't get the experience because I can't get a job. Catch 22.
My experience from going around recruiting college graduate engineers, and interviewing tons of people, is that most places do not want to actually mentor them and help them get their PE's. I worked with a ton of EEs once (where ton ~= 30) and half of them did not have their PE (the younger half) and they were not being mentored such that they could get it.
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Re:Quite so! (Score:5, Interesting)
I had an argu^Hdiscussion with someone just yesterday (at an interview) where he tried to convince me that his company 'invests' in its employees and trains them. I almost laughed in his face. this is a bay area company and I KNOW that they, as a general trend, have stopped investing in people and now only look for exact matches. he really believed his bullshit.
I've been looking for work (taking contract jobs here and there as they are nearly the only ones you can find anymore; its 'great' to short change the employee and make him pay for national holidays and foot the bill for his own health insurance) and I have not seen a single instance where they would take you as a 'smart guy' and then give you the missing languages or frameworks that they want for the job. there just isn't the mentality for giving workers training anymore. thinking has shifted and not for the better, that's for sure!
keep repeating this, people: "race to the bottom". learn that phrase. we are living it right now even if you don't realize it or see it yourself, directly. this is our new national motto.
we are fucked. our children are in even worse state, once they graduate and try to find work. doesn't matter if you are old or young: if you are a US person with regular US bills and living expenses, you will be squeezed and forced to lower your living standard just to compete for a shit job that will be soul crushing, at best.
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I graduated in 2001, so I'm about 12 years out. My first job, which lasted 14 months, was a contractor for a semiconductor manufacturer. They eventually hired me full time (with a pay cut vs. the contracting pay).
The odd part is that for the past 10 years I've been doing work that represented very basic EE activity. Now I'm starting to get into the heavier stuff and realizing that I've forgotten most of what I learned in school... it just represents familiar words and concepts, but the details are missin
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I graduated with a BS in Computer Engineering with High Honors back in 2003. I found an EE job without much difficulty. In 2006, I quit Electrical Engineering and went to Software Engineering.
I'm very pleased. I earn more, enjoy it more, and I have no problems finding work. Last time I looked, I had 2 good offers in a little over a month.
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You ought to be required to work for free before you can get a job? Sounds a bit like bullshit protectionism to me.
Re: Quite so! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Quite so! (Score:4, Interesting)
the amount of useful knowledge and skills gained in such positions is pretty negligible
Don't underestimate the value of learning how to work in a professional environment, labs, etc... There is a difference between a grocery job and a professional job... there is a difference between a school lab and a professional lab. I think a 3-4 month job is an excellent length of time to help absorb both.
I also learned quite a lot about using different equipment as my school was using only HP equipment, at my first job I was using Tektronics and a few other brands... yes it doesn't take much to figure it out, but it does take time to get comfortable.
Necessity is also the mother of invention, I found that solving real world problems was more satisfying than solving artificial problems presented by a professor.
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At least for cheme I have NEVER seen an internship or coop that did not pay pretty darn well. I did not think that in the USA it was even legal anymore to do unpaid internships.
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Intern != Unpaid Intern
Re:Quite so! (Score:5, Insightful)
You ought to be required to work for free before you can get a job? Sounds a bit like bullshit protectionism to me.
He didn't say free, he said co-op and internship. In some majors an internship may be free, but in engineering it's often paid (unless you're working at a company where the payment is being able to say you worked for THAT company... i.e. making contacts and references).
My school required two 3-month co-op jobs, with a third optional job. The lowest offer I received during my search was for 2X minimum wage. The job I went with paid about 2.5-3X minimum wage. I was ultimately hired by them when I graduated and was earning about 3.5X minimum wage, which may not sound like much but I was being paid more than the majority of people I knew, including many adults, when at that level.
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What country? What part of the country? What university? What specialization?
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One must also pay one's bills.
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So flip burgers while you do it, if you've no other choice.
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I contest there is a choice, but it might require him to leave the relative safety of the country he is in. There is work in your field of choice if you broaden your horizons a touch...
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It all depends on exactly what your skill set it. I got laid off a couple of weeks ago. Here is my experience.
My experience is in ASIC and FPGA design. I can do pretty much any digital design work, and can code RTL, as well as do ASIC physical design (laying out gates on silicon). I can even design the board that the ASIC or FPGA will go on. I actually am finding some job openings but none in my geographical region, so I am having to look for contract work away from home to keep food on the table.
Now,
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It is not the technical skills and experience employees find lacking. It is teamwork and other soft skills, you're not going to get these from working in your basement on a open hardware project.
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THAT's bs! what is that person supposed to live on, while donating time to a PD project?
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England.
Electrical Engineer / Computer Engineer (Score:2)
Serious question, as I suspect there are quiet a few EE / CE folks here...
If your background (or degree) is in computer architecture / computer engineering, are you a "double E"?
Reason I ask: my degree is B.S.E.E., I'm an electrical engineer. In my studies, my concentration / specialization was "Computer Architecture" (one of a handful of specialties with our EE dept.) All EEs had to choose one specialization (signals & systems, power, etc.)
But at many schools, there are standalone
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My BS is a BSCmpE, but my MS is an MSEE with specialization in Computer Engineering. I have often wondered "Am I a EE?". I don't feel like one....I write embedded software, but I participate in schematic reviews, and debug hardware problems.
Re:Electrical Engineer / Computer Engineer (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a BS in CompE. At my school depending on what optional courses you took you end up as the equivalent of either a EE minor and CS major or a CS minor and EE major. Since I went the first route, I've never considered myself an EE. Since my jobs, by choice, have all been in the CS realm I don't feel I have any knowledge in the EE realm anymore- I just have a deeper understanding of how hardware works and how to use it effectively than the average CS degree holder.
I actually did want to go into processor design at one point, I liked designing digital circuits. Then my senior year I found out that all those things I had been told didn't matter in digital (capacitance, inductance) actually did when you were fast enough. That was enough to convince me to write software for a career.
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What sort of EE courses did you not take because EE was your minor instead of your major? As an EE I'm curious.
Re:Electrical Engineer / Computer Engineer (Score:4, Insightful)
Its been over 10 years, but it looks like the course list of requirements hasn't changed much.
I didn't take digital signal processing. I didn't take anything about power systems. I didn't take the advanced level courses of anything that had a I and a II. All of these were open to me as technical electives, but I chose not to take them.
I did take analog signal processing. I did take physics of semiconductors (how transistors work on an atomic level, it was a required course to graduate). I did take a course on fields and waves. And I took a couple of courses on digital circuit design and processor design.
From the CS course I missed the top level theory course on graphs that was required for a CS degree, but I took every other required course and more electives than most CS majors did. That was a personal choice though- I spent all of my electives in EE or CS.
Looking at the requirements for their EE minor, I took all the classes required to get one, with a few extra. Of course they didn't allow CompEs to get a CS minor or an EE minor officially. I look to be 2 classes off of what was required to get an EE major, but wouldn't have had nearly enough EE electives. And I took far more CS stuff than the EEs (EEs were only required to take the intro to CS class, CompEs were required to take data structures, an entry level discrete math class (part of a series of 3 for CS students), and an assembly course). CS majors only needed to take 2 classes on hardware- a watered down version of digital logic gates and architecture, and a watered down version of assembly (the hard version was taught by the EE department and for some reason only counted towards their requirement if they were transfers).
The big thing I didn't ever really understand in my EE coursework at the time is how to design an analog circuit to do something. That's partly my fault, partly lack of a high level follow on course, and partly my instructors fault- we never had a chance to design an analog circuit in our coursework, and they never really explained why we were doing what we did- it was just endless repetition of finding v and i at every point in a circuit using multiple methods.
Re:Electrical Engineer / Computer Engineer (Score:4, Insightful)
Would a "computer engineer" be an electrical engineer?
In my experience people (including me) don't distinguish between CE and EE, any more than they ever distinguished between electrical and electronic engineers. CE is a specialty in EE, but so are RF, antenna design, power systems, etc.
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In my experience, they do differentiate. An RF engineer might be able to figure out power systems relatively quickly. Sure, waveguide is not a cable, but their knowledge of how to calculate power just requires some quick adjustment of which formulas they are applying in which situations. Most power guys know some RF(because they have RF problems) and most RF guys know some power(they have to power their signal somehow).
A Computer Engineer(CE) typically just knows chip design or similar. How do you apply
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True story. Intel was stuck at 25MHz external bus speed for about a year back in 386 days. Eventually they got an engineer with ham radio experience to look at their boards...they had the bus making a 90 degree sharp turn. No amount of noise caps could fix the reflections and weird cross talk. By changing that to two 45 degree turns they made 33MHz. Pure digital thinking sucks.
Frankly I'm skeptical of that story (such things often get embellished). Even back in the 1960's you could get a copy of the MECL Design Handbook, which for years was the standard reference for high speed digital design. PCB transmission line formulas, proper layout and termination techniques, the works. Digital at up to a few hundred MHz back in the Stone Age, provided you had a small power station to run the ECL. Good way to cook breakfast though was on top of those chips.
Re:Electrical Engineer / Computer Engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
EE is such an incredibly broad field, you almost have to define yourself by the nature of the position you have/want.
I'm a rather old basic power guy by education, but I grew up with industrial automation and digitalization as it happened, and stay current on technology.
Thing is, I've been doing essentially the same thing for 35 years, and been classified as an Electrical Engineer, Controls Engineer, Automation Specialist, and Systems Integrator. Same work, different labels.
Don't worry about the label when what you're after is the goodies in the package.
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Agreed. If the paycheck clears it's a good job. In my current job my official position is MTS (member of the technical staff - old term borrowed from Bell Labs) which means it covers anything that requires the use of a slide rule.
More proof there is a STEM shortage! (Score:5, Interesting)
More proof there is a STEM shortage! Uh, shortage of demand that is. Of course academia and the cheap labor lobby will spin this as a supply shortage, insist on more money and students to keep EE departments open, and even more importantly insist on more H-1B's.
I am an EE, and like every other EE I know, I advise my children to stay the hell out of engineering.
Re:More proof there is a STEM shortage! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I certainly wouldn't discourage that. I also think skilled trades deserve respect (one grandfather was a cabinet maker and the other a tool and die maker). I should note though that in college the humanities aren't the only alternative to engineering.
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That's good advice. Student loans are a huge anchor around your neck for a lot of years. You're taking a BIG gamble that the gains from that degree will quickly offset the cost of that debt, plus interest payments, plus the 4 years you spent not earning any income. And what's more, most IT job descriptions I've seen that ask for a degree OR equivalent work exp
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I am an EE, and like every other EE I know, I advise my children to stay the hell out of engineering.
Out of curiosity, what is it that you are advising your children to get into? Automotive repair? Software non-engineering? Acting? Not trolling, genuinely curious. I wouldn't hesitate to encourage my kids to get into any aspect of engineering, but would obviously steer them toward the higher demand fields. Engineering as a whole isn't dead, is it?
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I'm not advising them to get into any specific field. It's more a matter of discouraging them from entering any field that's probably a dead end. Other than that I think they should make their own choice. Frankly the oldest starts HS next year, so there's still a few years to make a choice.
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physical things that can't be done remotely. could include plumber, carpenter, construction. trades-man stuff.
does not pay the same grade as software or hardware BUT work that you can GET and get paid for is worth more than the high paid job you CANNOT get.
the US is racing to the bottom and sacrificing the middle class. a higher education is almost a waste of time, now; it may be nearly impossible to find a job for 'educated people'.
thanks high tech companies and congress. you made deals to kill the mid
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Actually, samzenpus spun it as a supply shortage, too. The headline is backward. If the number of EEs in the workforce is shrinking while unemployment in the field is 6.5% (as TFA said), it's the labor *market* (demand) that is in decline, not the labor pool (supply).
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Why? There's a lot of EE positions that are paying extremely well because there's no one tulfill the positions. Think fresh grads with near 6-digit salaries being hired at the ceremony type stuff.
EE is a HUGE field. If you narrowly consider EE to be software, then yeah, maybe you have a point. But there's a TON more stuff to EE. And a lot of it can't be outsourced, either.
Want such a field? Go into Power Eng
Re:More proof there is a STEM shortage! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, can we all drop the xenophobia
Seriously, can we all drop the assumption that xenophobia is why people hate the H-1B program? Can we all stop assuming that opposition to the US government's H-1B program is the same as having anything against the people who are H-1B visa holders?
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that it's a knee jerk assumption. In the case of serious H-1B cheerleaders it's a cheap tactic to suggest that anyone who opposes it must be a bigot. Can we also stop calling H-1B visa holders immigrants? It's a guest worker visa. The word "immigration" is used in conjunction w/ the H-1B as a propaganda tactic. "Immigration" is a word intimately intertwined with US history and mythology, so saying you oppose something that's associated (however inaccurately) with immigration is like saying you're opposed to motherhood and apple pie. Another disingenuous tactic.
I certainly didn't say it was the only reason for high unemployment, but it is something that's unnecessary, gratuitous, and completely under the control of the US government. There are limits to what we can do about foreign competition, but the H-1B program is something that's completely under the control of the US government. While we're at it, 65,000 people per year (soon to rise to 180,000) is more than a "few".
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No, because it IS xenophobia in most cases.
Asserting something twice doesn't make it any more true than asserting it once. Your argument that "people don't understand how the outsourcing industry works", even if it were true, has nothing to do with xenophobia.
most of those against H1Bs don't really understand how the outsourcing industry works
Then please enlighten us. It's always interesting to hear arguments about how getting screwed is good for us. Us being 99% of Americans.
it's just anecdotal evidence and pejoratives on how Indians are incapable of replacing American workers
As opposed to your, uh, speculative theories about why getting screwed is good for us?
Americans ... don't have a clue on what's going on outside the country
What a shame there are no regular sources of information about what's hap
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I don't think anyone with a brain doesn't think that America is less competitive these days. It's our reaction to the issue that's really the problem. The powers that be in the boardroom are under the impression that the way to become more competitive is to pay their workers less. Lowering salaries makes the field less attractive to graduates with enormous student loan debt, so the supp
Why Wouldn't It Be? (Score:3, Informative)
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Or why are universities not revalidating courses that are more software over EE.
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And it makes sense- a lot of electronics these days is plugging together parts off the shelf with well known standardized technologies. It takes a lot fewer people to do this. Compare this to the 70s, 80s, and prior where CPUs were not king and you still did a lot of proprietary design work. Heck, FPGAs alone probably knock out a big need for EE work- the software there will more or less design the hardware for you, and it needs a programmer to write the inputs not an EE (although an EE who can program
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High unemployment? What part of the country? Folks have to be willing to go where the jobs are. I moved to the DC area after grad school and don't know a single unemployed, moderately-qualified EE. Despite all the sequester madness we're still seeing older employees leave faster than we can replace them.
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Despite all the sequester madness we're still seeing older employees leave faster than we can replace them.
The nice thing about the DC area is that it's pork heaven. That's why it never saw the same sort unemployment as the rest of the country (and hence perhaps why so many in government were oblivious to it).
It's not JUST EE's. . . (Score:3)
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I think his complaint is that to stay in the field he needs to develop his skills, but without seeing the 'rake in the cash' part - no matter how superhumanly skilled he may be, his wages won't reflect the effort put in.
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combine mechanical and electrical engineer?robots? (Score:2)
say.. so they were looking for a robot designer?
just saying, combining jobs is sometimes useful. otherwise to make a pocketwatch you'll need an ee, a materials engineer, an usability engineer, an ergonomics specialist, mechanical engineer, a sw architecht, a software programmer, a database engineer(the gizmo holds some data), a mathematician....
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combining jobs is sometimes useful. otherwise to make a pocketwatch you'll need an ee, a materials engineer, an usability engineer, an ergonomics specialist, mechanical engineer, a sw architecht, a software programmer, a database engineer(the gizmo holds some data), a mathematician....
Well, no. To make a pocketwatch all you need to do is to copy an old pocketwatch whose design is in the public domain.
In order to make a fancy new electronic device that replaces a pocketwatch, you'll need all of those people. And rightly so.
This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.
Read between the lines: "We can replace all of them with immigrants, but only if we can prove there's nobody who can fill the position. I know! Let's draft the requirements so they're impossible to fill, then hire the same person we would have anyway at half the price because we had to 'settle'. Brilliant!"
Far to intelligent (Score:5, Funny)
In reality management follows this reasoning:
Management: We have more work then we can handle, training is boring so we need to hire someone who is a good match for what we need, some experience with tool chain we use.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We have far more work then we can handle, there is no room for training so we need to hire someone who is a very good match for what we need, 2 year experience with the exact tool chain we use down to version number.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We are drowning in work, we never heard of the word training, the recruitment costs are sky high so we will be offering peanuts for wages and we need someone who is an exact clone of an employee who escaped years ago.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We outsource/hire immigrants and blame the total collapse of our business on the local work ethic.
Management: We deserve a bonus!
CEO: Me too!
Board of directors: Agreed, if you agree to raise our compensation.
The H1B onslaught has won (Score:5, Insightful)
The H1B war has succeeded and much champagne will be spilled. STEM majors are giving up as the field simply isn't worth going into in this country. Meanwhile I hear that McJobs are hiring and if you work really hard for a long time you might move from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week where you get really, really bad benefits!
I worked at a University for a few years and I saw bright US students routinely drop out of STEM and choose other fields because of outsourcing. Meanwhile the bright international students happily came over, took our STEM classes and are heading back to create the next great thing. We've engineered a future without ourselves, our founding fathers would be ashamed.
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We've engineered a future without ourselves, our founding fathers would be ashamed.
Our founding fathers wouldn't know what electrical engineering is. Educating people as engineers wasn't a thing that was done in 1790.
Hire a damn physicist (Score:3)
"I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer" This employer is looking for an experimental physicist and does not know it.
On another note, I see the same thing in the semiconductor industry for process and integration roles. Everyone wants a perfect match, when the real perfect match is someone that can learn quickly because things are going to change a lot on as quick as a 2 year time scale. I had a recruiter call about an internal position I applied for and he was trying to ask how many years I have in some exact skill when, at the end of the day, that stat is not nearly as important as being able to learn. It makes it even more frustrating when the req is at the level of a new PhD grad and I already have 4.5 years industry experience.
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No, they're looking for an electromechanical engineer. In fact, that's the exact definition of what they're looking for.
Physicists focus on the experimental, engineers focus on producing a product.
Bad pay. (Score:2, Interesting)
The pay isn't on parity with the level of schooling required, you would be better off becoming a doctor or even just a joe blow IT guy or something else. Unless you're putting all the patents in your name, It doesn't pay to be an engineer. Do it only if you enjoy it.
Computer Science Vs ECE (Score:2)
EE productivity is very high. (Score:3)
In the recent years the productivity of electrical engineering tools have gone up several fold due to the ubiquitous cheap multi core workstations. The companies buying ECAD tools have demanded, and got, better use of these multi-core machines from the vendors of the ECAD tools. It has become cheap enough and easy enough to do electrical engineering simulations of hundreds or even thousands of variations of a basic design to refine it. Companies like Ansys have taken serving the high performance computing market as a priority. They are dishing out products that allow a single engineering work station to launch and analyze hundreds of simulations. This high productivity coincided with global economic downturn due to the financial systemic collapse of 2008, followed by tsunami in Japan, floods in Taiwan, economic turmoil in Europe and large scale civil uprisings in the middle east. So there are more electrical engineers than jobs in some parts of the field and some parts of the country. But this situation is temporary and the electrical engineers are going to see very good pay rise and job opportunities soon.
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this situation is temporary and the electrical engineers are going to see very good pay rise and job opportunities soon
Are you an academician by chance? Because you talk like one when they're trying to find more suckers (err, students). Prosperity is just around the corner!
Did you look at the numbers in the article? Between 2002 and 2013 EE jobs dropped from 385k to 292k. That's a 24% decline! Plus the BLS expects EE jobs to grow at only half the rate of jobs overall. Not a bright future.
H1Bs (Score:4, Interesting)
The entire H1B program is bullshit.
There is supply in the US. Companies prefer cheap imported labor - young, family-less, unlikely to complain labor instead of more expensive domestic labor.
"In 2010, there were nearly half a million workers on H1B visas in the United States, 18 percent higher than in 2001."
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/are-americans-losing-high-skilled-jobs-to-foreigners/ [go.com]
Shitcan the H1B program and not only will the engineers we already have be able to find work but we'll have more engineers in the future to fill the need that will exist.
Assuming engineering work isn't all outsourced overseas, of course.
Mechanical + Electrical (Score:2)
This is a pretty common thing. They aren't always looking for someone who is both, but someone who understands both.
There are a lot of EEs who can't figure out how a combustion engine even functions. There are a lot of MEs who can't understand basic circuit theory.
Considering how many times we use dynamos(generators) and electric motors, a complete lack of knowledge of one field or the other is a disaster.
This wasn't an odd requirement. I know several EEs who are self-taught MEs. Typically they are grea
The shortage is an intentionally perpetuated myth (Score:4)
I see very large numbers of smart and highly motivated students coming through my classes, both domestic and international. There is no shortage of students getting degrees in STEM fields. I believe the complaints stem from employers who don't want to pay a premium for better skilled engineers. There are in fact far more STEM job applicants than there are jobs. Graduates have to apply to hundreds of positions, and employers have to sift through thousands of resumes. Applications are so numerous, in fact, that HR departments are reduced to superficial checklists of buzzwords to efficiently sift through all the options. Employers want cheap laborors who nevertheless do a good job, while students who want to get paid appropriately to their skill level are getting Masters and Doctoral degrees in the hopes of being more "qualified." (In fact, they're often culled first for being OVER qualified and therefore too expensive.)
So, what companies are doing is a spin game. They report to federal funding agencies that there's a shortage, when in fact what they want is to increase the probability of identifying more skilled applicants that they can dupe into taking lower paying jobs. The end result is that there are too many people getting STEM degrees (when they would be better off doing other things), not enough job openings, and rising unemployment. We need plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, and they can earn a good living, but nobody seems to care about them.
I knew that. (Score:3)
I'm an electrical engineer and manager of the same. It has been obvious to me for years what is going on.
When you offshore your manufacturing, you soon find that you need engineers on site to support production. They become the experts, while your need for American engineers decreases. That building expertise leads to the opening of offshore design centers and eventually new companies spring up that become your competitors and they employ no Americans at all.
EE is a "good place to come from" (Score:3)
BSEE here, never engineered a circuit professionally in my entire life. I probably never will.
As others have noted, we often become developers. That was my path, between long phases of un or under-employment. On the one hand, I lacked knowledge of some algorithms that CS majors might have had. On the other, I think I may have been more attuned to low-level issues. There were some CS courses in our curriculum. Most of my programming was taken up "on the side" though. Strangely, my parents said that I'd have to attend a local community college if I wanted to major in CS. They were usually not heavy-handed about things like that. It was an unusual exception most likely brought about by the story that the son of a friend graduated and made $50k/yr right away (1980s, consider inflation). Later when I asked about this they said, "you could have switched majors". I'm not sure if I could have done that without them finding out. I always figured EE wouldn't hurt me. When I graduated, there were a lot of very traditional companies interviewing us--companies that might have mentored EEs; but it became obvious at the time that I wouldn't fit the mold.
LOL, yeah. I'm going to work for the power company??? At an aerospace plant??? Not happening. The strangest interview was with a tobacco company. Apparently they had a fairly sophisticated system for blending tobacco and making cigarettes. Very sophisticated electro-mechanical automation, probably computer controlled. I came away thinking "I drive myself crazy the past 4 years to come up with a slightly more efficient way of poisoning people". I think they wanted the guy with the master's degree anyway. It was a small group interview actually. There were 3 of us in one room hearing the guy talk about these "hoppers" full of tobacco, and how good the benefits would be if we were hired. Funny the things your remember.
Don't be an engineer (Score:3)
Seriously, I am a EE of 15 years and I have given that advice to several shocked STEM wannabe's finishing up high school. It runs so counter to all the cheer leading they get.
The only way to make it is to get specialized in an already niche field. You then become a technical nomad, trekking across the country (or globe) from one dying or mismanaged company to the next for a few more years. The work is damn hard, the pay only OK, and your co-workers are an interesting story (sausage fest, lots of imports with language issues, almost all lacking a full deck of social skills). Expect that other than your basics, that your knowledge's value will have a half life of about 5 years, meaning you have to constantly build up new skills, often without your present company's support. If you thrive on hard technical challenges you can find your reward there, but that is about it.
Yeah, go into business or accounting or some such.
Pretty close to what my experience shows (Score:3, Interesting)
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No, it sounds like that unemployed EE was complaining about a lack of demand, not a dearth of supply. In theory the two are supposed to follow each other. In practice, demand for EEs is higher than ever - just not in America.
What's that, electronics isn't obsolete? Are you sure?
I am an EE, but suffer from the severe handicap of being an American.
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The big money is often in the high current stuff... Large mining operations and the like. Electronics, not so much. Why design a controller when the off-the-shelf one just works? Someone somewhere is making lots of money designing those, but it all depends where you are, I suppose...
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and market interventions (right down to war) don't artificially reduce the price of oil
How much do you really think that's going to change the price of oil? I think the last time I checked such things, even if we tossed the entire US military complex as a tax on gasoline, that would mean a few dollars per gallon tax. AGW costs in Europe are priced at a few dollars per ton of CO2 emitted (which is on the order of cents per gallon of gasoline).
Of course, the opposite will happen: the West will race to the bottom on labour conditions and freedoms.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line
Re:"Of the situation" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Of the situation" (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it sad that the engineers are the ones who actually do the work, while managers are just overhead, yet the managers are the ones who get the money?
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
Employers want to make as much money as possible without having to pay people.
Its been said before [marxists.org]:
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output.
personally I think Marx's criticism of capitalism is pretty accurate. Its only where he assumes that uprising and revolution will lead to some utopian ideal that he goes wrong.
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I am not sure anyone could argue that point. Marx was one of the best critics of capitalism ever, but his guesses at the future completely ignore all of human history.
Re:This just in... (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed - but you have to remember that he was a victim of his time, when most folks figured that human culture (and ability to discharge their vices/failings/etc) would progress at the same pace as science was moving at the time. It was, to put to charitably, an overly-optimistic era. It also spawned a lot of other naive-but-useless things ranging from harmless (phrenology) to damnably dangerous (eugenics).
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As for TFA? I pulled the D-ring on the EE field back in the early 1990's. Funny thing is, back then the cheaper employers tried to combine the EE and ME fields as well (I designed, built, and ran industrial control systems for a large poultry company - I lost track of the amount of instances they tried to get me to design equipment mods right along with new controls for them). Fortunately, they needed a sysadmin in a hurry (the last one flunked his drug test), so I got pressed into that, fell in love with it, and stuck with it ever since. Haven't so much as drawn a circuit or touched a soldering iron even semi-professionally in at least a decade.
I guess the biggest reason for leaving the field was that I didn't see all that much of a future in it. It only came in handy when I did a stint at a certain large semiconductor firm, where I got semi-shoved into a liaison role between the EEs and developers (it's what I got for settling a fight between the two groups during my first week there).
Re:This just in... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a EE who moved into the software field a decade ago, but moved back to start my own company.
From what I can tell, EE in the US is going two ways:
1) there's still a lot of EEs employed by companies like Intel. However, they don't deal with circuits or soldering irons or anything like that; they do nothing but design RTL code in Verilog, or write software to validate that RTL. Basically, EE degrees are mostly useless for these people, because the only thing they really need to know is digital logic and Verilog coding. They sure as hell don't need EM fields classes, control theory, analog electronics, heck they could probably do fine without even learning Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Laws.
2) For everything that doesn't involve Verilog, it's all moved to Asia. US companies don't design electronics any more, they outsource all the work to contract manufacturers and ODMs in Taiwan and China, and focus on parts of the software. At one company I worked at a few years ago, they designed an all-new product that had an embedded computer, touchscreen, etc.; the electronics design was all done by the CM/ODM, and much of the software was outsourced as well. The only stuff they kept in-house was some of the encryption software (this device had to be PCI compliant (that's Payment Card Industry, not the bus)). They had one EE on staff, only one, and he quit to start his own company; they didn't miss him at all, or bother to replace him. There was a bit of microcontroller code (for some security chip that was embedded into some of the products) that he was responsible for maintaining which was handed over to me as I was also a EE with some microcontroller experience, but then I never did anything with it. After I quit it was probably completely forgotten about.
"Real" EE work has all gone to Asia these days, because that's where all the manufacturing is. The only exception might be in the defense industry, but do you really want to work for an evil government that drone-bombs children, tortures people, and spies on citizens more than the Stasi? In private (non-defense-related) industry, you don't have to set aside your morals, but there's really not much work left there except at very small companies working in niche industries, and the pay at small companies usually isn't very good.
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In particular, you don't need to own something to control it.
Are you arguing that, say, an owner of a factory doesn't have fairly direct control what happens in that factory? Yes, that sort of thing is only true because it's enforced by the legal system and government, but once you start throwing that out the window you're talking about a revolt of the industrial proletariat.
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the only thing he gets wrong.
He also thought that economic exchange occurred with things of equal value. Even economists of his time knew this wasn't true.
Economic exchange occurs when things are valued unequally, otherwise, why bother exchanging at all? Transaction costs make an exchange a poor decision. If on the other hand I value what you have more than what I have, and you value what I have more then what you have, we trade. This could be a barter or money might be involved.
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Equal value doesn't mean identical. I have 5 dollars of bread, you've got 5 dollars of cucumbers, we each sell each other 2.5 dollars of material and have sandwiches.
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Really? All the criticisms that haven't come to pass? Zero profit margin? No. Eternal monopolies everywhere? No.
Name one of Marx's accurate criticisms of capitalism? Marx was simply wrong.
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His criticisms were still pretty solid - just that he had a bad habit of extrapolation to the point of absurdity, then worked from that absurd point.
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Informative)
You generally start out with a pretty high salary right out of college, and then in just a few years, you quickly top out and can't seem to earn much more.
People *do* work to make money as a bottom line, and this kind of thing hurts a career choice.
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is put perfectly, and matches my own experience.
I'm out of school for 12-13 years and my salary is just barely 50-60% higher than starting, which was exceptional at the time. If you don't make the move to marketing, sales or management you will stagnate. The exception of course is for anyone who is above average and performing company critical functions (but then you need to constantly apply pressure to see increases).
I'm not complaining, I like the work and I still get paid very well compared to the average person...
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Uh, you are supposed to invent something and start your own company after you gain some seniority. Obviously you will get paid the same if all you are going to do 10 years after being hired is the same thing you were doing the day your were hired.
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Honestly, I don't think pay is really that big an issue for engineers. It's an issue, but not that big of an issue. Most of us make a pretty good living in North America (70-100k) I'd say is there for a decent person. Top stars make more. Some grunts make less. Yet, that is a pretty good upper middle class job.
But I do think the pay has an impact on the top of the line. The field is definitely not attracting top of the line engineering leaders. We're basically running off the last people properly trained
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Spoken like a young person new to the market.
A lot of it depends on the field you're in tho....
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This is not about how many engineering hours are used, just about what kind of hours are used.
You still have to have hardware to run on, but most of the features are software.
Project starts with a hardware design, testing, and getting ready for production,
But that's only 10-20% of the engineering hours.
The rest is software.
Broaden your horizons. Computers and embedded processors are far from the be all and end all of EE. I'm an EE who for many years has spent about 50% of his time writing software, so I'm hardly anti-software. However, I've found many programmers are very egocentric about this. Not all EE is designing in processors to run software on!
Power systems are hot these days, after many years of being a backwater. Ever get involved in antenna design (which is more important than ever), or any kind of RF or microwave?
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What part of the world? Was it more of a "EE = computer programming" degree? It just depends on the school. So many of the folks I know who graduated recently with legit EE's from good schools in the Southeastern US are working for power companies, for GE, Siemens, or some of them for the large semiconductor companies like TI/National. It was the rare exception that went into software development because that's not what we were taught as EE's. Many of them had multiple offers on the table, which leads me to
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You'll often find EEs developing PLC code and control software. They tend to be better at it than any clown with a programming degree...
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EE's are more hardware oriented. They tend to understand the physical systems they are controlling. This means they are familiar with not only what is "inside" the computer but also what is outside (I/O). Software developers are only concerned with what is happening inside the computer.
I once worked with a software guy who had majored in CS and minored in EE. He was the in-house automation specialist where he worked and let me tell you, he was terrible. His code was horrendous, giant blocks and whole functi
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Yes I didn't really get that.
I would imagine the electromechanical engineering field has a need for electromechanical engineers no?
Sounds like the real problem is the guy applied to an electromechanical engineering role whilst only having experience as an electrical engineer.
By definition, if they want someone who can do both, they're looking for an electromechanical engineer, not simply an electrical engineer so he went for a job he's not qualified for then decided to complain about not being fit for it.
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There are fields with worse job prospects, yes, like much of the humanities. But the kind of person who can do well in an EE program has better alternatives these days. Hell, you have better prospects making websites in Ruby.
Whether the U.S. having a bunch of web-devs and no hard engineering talent is good long-term is another story. But today, if you want a well-paying job, pick up a web technology, not EE.