Electrical Engineer Unemployment Soars; Software Developers' Rate Drops to 2.2%

dcblogs writes "The unemployment rate for people at the heart of many tech innovations — electrical engineers — soared in the first quarter of this year to 6.5%. That's nearly double the unemployment rate from last year. The reasons for the spike aren't clear, but the IEEE-USA says the increase is alarming. At the same time, U.S. Labor Dept. data showed that jobs for software developers are on the rise. The unemployment rate for software engineers was 2.2% in the first quarter, down from 2.8% last year. This professional group warns that unemployment rates for engineers could get worse if H-1B visas are increased. The increase in engineering unemployment comes at the same time demand for H-1B visas is up."

Comments

One cause

[Z00L00K]

One cause for the lack of demand of electrical engineers is that the hardware design and manufacturing is located to cheaper countries. However this also means that the competence level of the existing engineers declines slowly since they lack the experience from production.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs experience from production when patent trolls can innovate through the creation of patents.

Re:One cause

[yope]

I am an electrical engineer, and work in Europe. What I see here, is that the quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate. The knowledge-level about basic subjects is embarrassing to say the least. If this trend is comparable in the US, I can fully understand why US companies prefer to look elsewhere for good engineers. The decline in quality here seems due to the lack of students really interested in electrical engineering and "complicated" studies becoming less popular. Colleges and universities here need to lower the level of "difficulty" to make the curriculum more attractive and gain more students. The result is catastrophic.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is more likely: every year past university you've gotten more experienced and knowledgeable and those kids fresh out of uni look worse and worse in comparison to you, or that the kids really aren't as good as they were ten years ago?

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actually the later. Universities have literrally been lowering their entry requirements as they have not gotten enough applicants, the result is a subpar crop of students, yes there is still some good ones, but the overall average quality has dropped significantly.

Re:One cause

[ShanghaiBill]

One cause for the lack of demand of electrical engineers is that the hardware design and manufacturing is located to cheaper countries.

My experience is that outsourcing software doesn't work well because it takes more effort to understand and integrate the work than to just do it yourself. But hardware engineering is different. Hand routing a circuit board, tuning an RF antenna, or designing a gearbox can be very time consuming, but once the work is done the results can be verified very quickly. So I am not surprised that hardware work is moving overseas much more quickly than software.

Re:One cause

[servognome]

One cause for the lack of demand of electrical engineers is that the hardware design and manufacturing is located to cheaper countries

I wonder if it's an indication that the skill requirement of domestic engineers are changing. I haven't seen many issues with design or layout engineering jobs going overseas. I have seen the jobs for engineers responsible for field engineering, implementation, and test are going to where the production is happening.
It doesn't cost anything to send layout files overseas for building and testing, but it can be expensive to send boards built in another country to the US to test/debug.

Re:One cause

[ShanghaiBill]

the quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate.

Throughout history, every generation has believed their kids were dumber than they were. If you read editorial pages from ten, twenty, fifty years ago, you see the same rants about the world going to hell. Yet all the empirical evidence points to the opposite. Kids are getting smarter. Engineering GRE and EIT scores are rising. There is no evidence that engineering graduates are getting worse, and plenty of evidence that they are getting better.

Re:One cause

[crispytwo]

The education level across the board seems to be in steady decline here as well (Canada). It was, at one time too, my opinion that the training was the problem, but every so often there has been amazing people come through it as well. Thinking back to when I was in University, there were plenty of 1/2 quality people then too. And to be fair, we had a lot less to work with back then.

Now that I hire people, I'm looking for those 'gems', which tend to be rare. Then there are the 'experienced' people that don't have the current skills required to do the demanded work, and many have the attitude that they do not have things to learn, or are not going to bother. And they still expect top dollar. Then there are the young ones who don't have a clue and think they do. And expect 'roll-your-eyes' top dollar.

This brings me to a different but effectively similar conclusion:
1) The education system has always been mediocre, so when you are looking, it shows
2) Society has shifted toward people feeling more entitled than ever... Maybe it skipped a generation. Yes, that's actually it.
3) My perspective has changed, therefore scrutinizing others' abilities to a degree I've never done before. (This is major)

Since there are more people now (physical numbers, not ratio) that can't/won't do anything worth while, it is both daunting and depressing.

To touch on the idea that classes "lower the level of difficulty" is probably true in a way. I've heard that parents confront university and college professors regularly about their child's performance in classes and demand higher grades from them for their adult children. This is anecdotal evidence, but it would be interesting to find out if this is common-place. I can't imagine my parents becoming involved in my incompetence at that age... but, perhaps that's another story.

I think that it would be a better education system where students are permitted to enter and continue based on merit, not money. It is increasingly the other way around, it seems.

Re:One cause

[Casandro]

Yes, but it's not like there is any demand for good engineers. Companies have learned that it's good enough to just re-package old technology.
Certain US companies have shown that innovation is not necessary for success.

Particularly in Germany there's now also a problem of horribly bad management. This leads into anybody who can leave leaving, the rest that stays behind is sub standard and makes even worse decisions increasing the problem.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^ This. The US has largely ceased to be relevant for any kind of electronics manufacturing beyond small-scale highly customized design. The problem is, getting from "working prototype" to "profitable finished product that can be profitably mass-produced" is rarely a small leap, and the farther you get away from the actual manufacturing process, the harder, slower, and more expensive it becomes to get to that point in the first place. In some ways, real-world electrical engineering of consumer goods subject to variable supply-chain quality is a lot like building construction... if you pretend that what's on the datasheet is guaranteed truth instead of a rough guesstimate with enough disclaimers to render it mostly worthless if it ever came down to a lawsuit, you're going to get burned... sooner, later, and multiple points in between. You HAVE to have EEs who intimately understand the product right there next to the assembly line who can notice when something seems to be drifting beyond what they'd planed on and yell 'stop' before 10,000 items with $660,000 worth of parts end up in a landfill.

No, that's not a hypothetical example. I was involved with a project where that's exactly what happened. We got what appeared to be an insanely good deal on RGB LEDs (~60 cents apiece, back when they used to cost almost two bucks apiece in thousand quantities), pre-tested every last one of them to confirm they actually worked, and didn't realize until after they were all assembled that about 15% of them had their blue and green pins swapped (or more likely, someone at the factory misloaded a bin of elements when the modules were assembled). It never even OCCURRED to us that something like that could actually happen, so when we tested them, we just checked all 3 pins to make sure we got 3 different colors. Fortunately, I was able to rewrite the firmware to swap the blue and green pin bits and came up with a way to retroactively reflash the microcontrollers in-situ (the original plan was to flash the MCUs before soldering, so the boards themselves had no test points or provisions for connecting them to a programmer), but it was pretty scary for a few days.

Now, imagine that you're a large-ish American company with American designers that tries to outsource the actual manufacturing to a company in China, only to discover that the prime-quality Japanese capacitors you built the prototype with aren't quite the same as the cheap-shit Chinese capacitors that it was actually built with (the Japanese caps might have allegedly been marked for 10% tolerance, but were probably more like 0.7%... the Chinese caps might have been 10% off on their best day in history, and if the circuit really needs better than 20% tolerance... well...the fun has only begun.

The farther manufacturing moves away from the design team, the more handicapped the design team is going to be in the real world when it comes to actual manufacturing. If they never get to SEE people trying to build the circuits they designed, they're likely to do things that someone who might have even been required to spend a week or two working on the assembly line would realize are likely to compromise its manufacturability. Under the best conditions, if the designers are in the US and the assembly line is in China, just about any problem is going to end up taking at least 2-3 days to resolve due to time differences alone.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I visited my engineering math prof. from 20+ years ago and that's also what he said. Students don't want to learn from a chalk board anymore - they want to be entertained. They don't have the ability to focus ( or are too challenged by the internet and gaming ). When I asked for a more concrete example he stated that he used to give my class three exam problems to solve and the class today can barely do two of those same problems in an equal amount of time.

Re:One cause

[servognome]

Fixed it for you
Universities have literally been lowering their entry requirements as they have found they can get more money from more applicants

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. This happened to Mechanical Engineers in the 90's. Probably to Manufacturing Engineers the decade before that.

In general, if you're NOT in some sort of personal service or protected by a substantial regulatory barrier (law), your job will be subject to "global averaging" at some point.

It's not all that complicated. The world won't get really interesting until everyone's been exploited evenly. :)

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

IQ has nothing to do with the knowledge specific to an electrical engineering degree.
Even in the few years I was in university I noticed them cutting subjects that had been taught for years,
and I myself did not have to complete certain courses that were mandatory before.

Re:One cause

[servognome]

Don't forget many classes grade on a curve. So the more idiots there are in the class, the better a mediocre student will appear.

I was an engineering major and there were a couple of people who most felt probably didn't belong, but we didn't care because the majority in class were very intelligent.
Then one semester I took an introductory astronomy class just out of curiosity. The class average after the first test (multiple choice even), was 55% - and those students would get a "C" because they represented average. I received 115% on that test. After that I realized how low the bar was to get into college.
So if you think your fellow engineering students are lacking in performance, just imagine how inept those sociology, anthropology, and other non-tech students are.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my day everybody was a lot smarter!

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

there's now also a problem of horribly bad management. This leads into anybody who can leave leaving, the rest that stays behind is sub standard and makes even worse decisions increasing the problem.

Kinda like the people of the USA

Re:One cause

[nametaken]

It makes me wonder why this still works for companies like Apple.

Meanwhile, I price out a few PCB's at four shops, all ten minutes from me in one of the largest industrial parks in the US. It's nearly ten times more expensive to order them from next door, even if I drove over there and picked them up. I mean, that includes the cost for the Chinese to pack them, put them on a cargo ship traveling across the pacific, and delivery from the west coast to the midwest by air, truck, and foot.

I understand that things are very different in large quantities, but it sure doesn't seem like manufacturing is going to come back here any time soon.

Re:One cause

[TopSpin]

One cause for the lack of demand of electrical engineers is that the hardware design and manufacturing is located to cheaper countries.

Can't be. Those are the jobs we're keeping here in the US because we all have $75k degrees. The low skill jerbs go to Asia and we keep all the high paying jobs because the Chinese are magically incapable of EE.

Right?

Remember: Education. It's the future.

Re:One cause

[Opportunist]

You might want to look at applicants coming from universities that cannot turn them away. My university is notoriously overcrowded the first few semesters (with ~4000 students battling over ~500 places), and due to laws they can't turn them away (if you want to study and have a university-entrance diploma (which is really not that hard to get if you have more than a handful brain cells left), you may study here). And of course that also attracts students from abroad where universities have additional requirements for studying and/or insane financial requirements.

So what they do is simply to put the bar on levels that border on insanity while at the same time putting "important" classes at the beginning of the curriculum where possible. At my university, one of the profs was notorious for "testing you out" (of the classroom, that is). It's not unheard of math labs that start with 30 people and end with fewer than 10. Within a single semester, that is. Some claim that you should have a math doctorate to start studying CS. It's possible without (I'm proof), but it's anything but easy.

What's left by 4th semester is people that you can actually use. The waste was washed away. Usually, these people then also manage to finish, if they don't get hired away. So if I see someone with a degree from my university, I usually have a pretty good feeling. Usually, it's justified.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

And who are they going to troll? Good luck trying to enforce invalid patents in a nation with sane patent laws.

Re:One cause

[Opportunist]

Sadly very true.

I help friends' kids with math in my spare time, and it boggles the mind. The demands get lower with every year, it seems. I don't know, back when I was a kid trigonometry was a standard requirement in a math classroom of our senior high school equivalent (i.e. what you learn when you're about 15 or so). We built on that. Curve sketching was also a precursor for more complex matters. Today, they are about the "end" of math ed. It's not the foundation, it's the absolute top that an A student might want to know about but we needn't bother students with such things if all they want to do is pass the class somehow. Not to mention that knowing WHAT you are actually calculating there doesn't matter anymore, it seems. Math is reduced to pre-chewed problems where students are looking for identifiers so they know what formula to use and what values to put where.

Looking towards 2050, I guess a high school student's answer to 6+8 might be "low battery". After all, that's what his calculator said.

Re:One cause

[Opportunist]

Odd. I would have guessed management should be the easiest to outsource. After all, the former East Bloc countries should be full with unemployed managers who can drive companies into the ground.

Think of the money that could be saved!

Re:One cause

[Chrisq]

One cause for the lack of demand of electrical engineers is that the hardware design and manufacturing is located to cheaper countries. However this also means that the competence level of the existing engineers declines slowly since they lack the experience from production.

Don't worry - they'll run some "special visa" progarm when the problem gets too bad. The investors don't mind it if US engineering graduates had to work in McDonalds and have no experience as long as they can get the experienced experts from somewhere

Re:One cause

[Chrisq]

And who are they going to troll? Good luck trying to enforce invalid patents in a nation with sane patent laws.

They do it when they want to sell in the US. Ask Sony, Sanyo, or Nokia about it. In the long run a paternt-troll based economy won't generate enough to keep the USA as a major market, but this is a tragedy of the commons, while some people can make a fortune they will carry on.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

If universities are lowering the bar, it's likely going to skew such results that kids are getting smarter.

Re:One cause

[thegarbz]

I disagree. I'm living proof you can graduate electrical engineering with honours using copious amounts of Wikipedia. I came out of University knowing nothing and it has been an uphill battle getting where I am now. Most of my colleagues are the same. University is no longer about learning and it's all about getting a piece of paper, then we rely on learning on the job.

This works well in some cases but I look back at some of the people I studied with and they are unable to get registered professional engineering status as they lack the skills required even several years out of uni.

That is not the sort of mediocrity our universities should be churning out.

Re:One cause

[captainpanic]

But there IS evidence that students are able to graduate quicker from universities, because the curriculum became easier.

Average students in the Netherlands (at a polytech university) used to need about 6-7 years to graduate. This was fine, since studying wasn't expensive. Now, our government doesn't want to pay for those "lazy" students anymore, and they need to graduate in 5 years. Also, the universities are paid for each diploma they hand out, so they have an incentive to make sure everybody graduates. Finally, it is also financially interesting to attract Asian students, but these want to be able to graduate from their Masters in 2 years, which only 10 years ago was practically impossible. The masters was officially 2 years, but almost always took longer to finish.

The result is really that it became easier to get a technical diploma. People enter the job market with less experience. Companies need to invest more to train their technical people.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in Europe where education is free

Re:One cause

[_KiTA_]

Fixed it for you

Universities have literally been lowering their entry requirements as they have found they can get more money from more applicants

Not every country has semi and literal for-profit secondary education systems backed up by a predatory student loan system.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

The scores are rising, because the Universities are forced to adjust the scores to meet the requirements on the number of successful graduates. Here in the UK this phenomenon is called "grade inflation" and it is very real and very unfair towards the students. Both, the worst, and the best students have a distorted perception of what is being considered satisfactory by the University standards, for the grade they're after.

Re:One cause

[TheLink]

What happens to the people you can't use?

Also waiting for the "technology will create more new jobs" crowd to chime in ;). There may indeed be more new jobs, but the last I checked dogs can't do those jobs no matter how much training you give them. Would that apply to humans one day?

Re:One cause

[TheRaven64]

It's not free, it's taxpayer funded. The lecturers don't work for free and the universities don't run for free. They are paid, by the government, in proportion to the number of students that they have plus their research grants. Depending on the university, the research grants pay somewhere between 20 and 100% of any given lecturer's salary. For universities without such a strong research reputation, the money from tuition can be a significant amount of a department's total budget. If your choice is either lower standards of make a lecturer redundant (which weakens your ability to get research grants and lowers your teaching quality, which makes it harder to attract students), what do you do?

Re:One cause

[solidraven]

As a fairly recent graduate I can say the following about this. Many of my class mates were idiots. Very very big idiots.
So why do they make it to the last year? Well quite simple, else they're going to shut down the program due to it not having a sufficient quantity of students. There were 8 students planning to finish their EE degree. Another problem is that governments demand a certain quantity of girls. Frankly a lot of girls that started in the first year weren't fit for it but got through anyway simply to avoid punishment due to gender equality laws. Combined with complaints from industry that they don't have enough engineers some schools lower standards sometimes. Luckily I know a couple of professors were (and hopefully still are) fighting that trend. Every time a subject was made easier they made a mandatory subject harder in an attempt to filter out idiots. It worked pretty well, I've seen people get caught on the same subject for years.

So what have I observed amongst my brethren? Many of them didn't grasp basic analog design at all, they were useless at HDL, and lets not even get started on DSP. Many subjects were scrapped due to lack of funding or interest. It's now automatically assumed by the schools that nobody will ever have to do any integrated analog design. They assume hitting the synthesize button in a random Cadence program will do it all for you. I got really annoyed by that one and after some minor campaigning it did sort of get considered for the next few years. So yeah, things we didn't get include: integrated design (though I followed a few seminars on that subject), SCADA systems, (de)modulator design (was discussed in a theoretical fashion in the assumption that they were smart enough to translate it into a circuit themselves), etc. Of people that graduated in my year it's safe to safe to say that only 2 of us deserved the legal title of engineer. This is also why the other 6 ended up as glorified sales people. That's also the main category where you'll find these guys/girls. It's mainly these people who can't find jobs. There's not much point in hiring an EE, having to pay him/her an EE's paycheck (which I must admit isn't small), and then concluding that they don't know a thing about electronics.

PS: I know one of my class mates in a masters program had trouble hooking up LEDs to a power supply.

Re:One cause

[solidraven]

Yeah, the skill level in Asian countries for things like "large scale" RF design (antennas, power amplifiers, etc.) is sub par. In fact I've heard only European universities still seem to teach that consistently. It's not an easy subject, a lot of very expensive equipment is necessary and you can't even begin to imagine the amount of time you need to work on the subject to gain some feeling for it. EM waves don't always behave as your brain would expect them to.

Re:One cause

[DrLang21]

How is this any different than it has always been? At the end of the day, only cold hard real world experience is going to make anything you learned in college make any sense. Even when and experienced person changes jobs, it usually takes a good year before they really become useful. This is why I always tell people to take a co-op if they want to go into industry. It annoys me to no end that employers claim they can't find people with with the skills they need. However, this was never really a problem until the Silicon Valley startup trend of hiring only people who have the exact background that they need. Before that, companies had to invest in their workforce. Not only did they expect to train new hires, they also had to keep their veterans current.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because designing and building hardware is too expensive. Until FPGA's become competitive, very few people can afford a minimum of $5 million for a tape out. And if you didn't design the chip correctly or (what usually happens) TSMC made a mistake, you just lost $5 million and your first batch of chips will cost you $10 million. It's very simple math, has nothing to do with quality of education. It's just money.

Re:One cause

[Taco Cowboy]

One cause for the lack of demand of electrical engineers is that the hardware design and manufacturing is located to cheaper countries

What I see here, is that the quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate

Both of you are right, partially.
 
The main cause of rising unemployment among the hardware designers (electrical engineers) is that there are _less_ need for new devices
 
Compared to the decades pasts (1990's, 2000's) the 2010 decade we see less hardware development
 
From circuits to chips to system/devices, there seems to be a decline in new product designs - even in Asia.
 
I've been in many Asian countries, from Japan to Taiwan to Korea to Singapore to India to China, the pace of new hardware development have slowed to a crawl

Re:One cause

[drinkypoo]

Engineering GRE and EIT scores are rising.

So?

There is no evidence that engineering graduates are getting worse, and plenty of evidence that they are getting better.

You haven't provided any, though. Scores improving doesn't tell us anything on its own.

Re:One cause

[drinkypoo]

What happens to the people you can't use?

The issue of what we do with our excess population is far outside the scope of a discussion on what is wrong with education today. Education can't solve that problem.

Re:One cause

[rally2xs]

Yes, and "cheaper countries" means more that their income taxes aren't the highest on the planet, by far, and less about the engineers getting a fraction of the salary of those in the US. The income taxes are the real enemy, and are destroying the USA from the inside out. Repeal the income taxes and tax something else, and especially do not re-institute any kind of corporate tax, and watch the US economy boom in biblical proportions. But until we start building things here other than just buildings and bridges, we're not going to need so many EE's.

Re:One cause

[drinkypoo]

So if you think your fellow engineering students are lacking in performance, just imagine how inept those sociology, anthropology, and other non-tech students are.

Lacking at what, skills needed for engineering? If you think those sociology, anthropology, and other non-tech students are inept, just see what happens if engineering students try to do their jobs. Your arrogance is trite and tedious. You fit right in around these parts, though.

Re:One cause

[drinkypoo]

It's not the foundation, it's the absolute top that an A student might want to know about but we needn't bother students with such things if all they want to do is pass the class somehow. Not to mention that knowing WHAT you are actually calculating there doesn't matter anymore, it seems.

When wasn't that true? When was math theory taught before mathematics? The guys who worked this stuff out weren't using numbers, they were using lines. Then we jump straight into numbers. The only difference is that TPTB have declared that most of us don't need to do complex things with numbers.

Re:One cause

[DrLang21]

To be fair, trigonometry is largely pointless for the vast majority of people. Algebra and geometry sure, but trig doesn't even make sense until you learn about phasors.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need to design circuits with resilience to 20% variation in component values in order to manufacture electronics, I'm scared...

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. I'm living proof you can graduate electrical engineering with honours using copious amounts of Wikipedia. I came out of University knowing nothing and it has been an uphill battle getting where I am now. Most of my colleagues are the same. University is no longer about learning and it's all about getting a piece of paper, then we rely on learning on the job.

You assume it was ever really different. It wasn't. University, even in engineering, has always taught relatively esoteric theory that is rarely used in that form in business. Why? because university is more about the process by which you get the answer and because commercial engineering has always been more about getting the answer. Commercial/professional engineering uses a lot of crutches: tables, guidelines, specific design software, Wikipedia. No company, anywhere, ever, has hired a kid fresh out of college and put him in charge of a flagship product, because no classroom has ever given the student the tools necessary to step into a real job. There is almost always an on-the-job training period, with the junior engineers mentored by the established engineers. This is one of the reasons that internship and co-op programs (used to be) so popular: spend fall and spring getting the theory; spend summer seeing how it "really" works.

GP is right: the main reason kids these days seem like idiots is because us old farts can't remember just exactly how dumb we were at that age. The secondary reason is that we've expanded the college-pool from 20% of the population to 30% of the population, and that happens mostly by lowering the bar.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think those sociology, anthropology, and other non-tech students are inept, just see what happens if engineering students try to do their jobs. Your arrogance is trite and tedious.

What "jobs" are you talking about? An undergrad in sociology or anthropology will land one a job an engineer cannot perform? Bullshit. Not all engineers lack people skills. In addition, most social sciences rely heavily on statistics and the people majoring in them seeming cannot design a decent experiment; it's all 'hand wavy' type shit with loads of confounding variables involved.

Re:One cause

[hrvatska]

What evidence do you have that more people are applying for entry to engineering programs? It seems to me that your premise is likely only true if universities could be shown to enrolling significantly more engineering students over the years. If the number of people getting engineering degrees is any indication, the information in this article would indicate that universities have not significantly increased their engineering school enrollments. If anything they may be enrolling fewer engineering students overall.

Re:One cause

[AmiMoJo]

It's called being flexible and it's what employers want.

I used to work with an older EE in his 50s who was really, really good at his job. His stuff was robust and worked as advertised. He tested it properly and understood it fully. Unfortunately it was also 20 years out of date because that is what he learned and stuck to. In some cases it didn't really make any difference - many of the op-amps in use today date back well over 20 or 30 years - but in some cases it really did. He would do complex and expensive analogue stuff where we could just process it digitally now. He didn't make use of the features of newer microcontrollers, duplicating them with custom hardware. His radio systems were antiquated and low bandwidth.

Eventually he left and a few of us were tasked with designing a new product to replace one of his old ones that was basically too expensive to manufacture and still make a profit. We did a lot of research and learning, but our minds were flexible and open so we were able to find an elegant, low cost and well performing solution that has helped us catch up and even overtake our competitors (who of course have been doing similar stuff). Obviously we needed a strong base to start from, but it was better to then read up and learn than rely on existing intimate knowledge.

Re:One cause

[hrvatska]

If I had mod points I'd give you one. Back in the '80s and '90s that was the official line. All the creative jobs would remain in the US while we shipped all the boring and dangerous jobs overseas. Companies like Apple are the exception that prove the rule. From what I've seen, engineering jobs eventually follow manufacturing overseas when a company decides to offshore manufacturing. Maybe not all the engineering jobs, but certainly a large part of them. The decline in engineering employment in the US is related to the decline in its manufacturing capacity.

Re:One cause

[trout007]

I graduated with an ME 20 years ago. Every time there is a new problem I have to relearn the material. Where the education helps is I at least know how to attack the problem even if I have to look up and relearn how to do the analysis.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

that includes the cost for the Chinese to pack them ...

No knock against you, but the Chinese [government] have a different cultural displacement on the
value of human life that isn't talked about in U.S. politics or even in the educational system; human
life is not considered in the equation by some of the political systems, and the U.S. Congress
fervently supports these ideologies because they gain personal financial wealth from these ideas.

Essentially, it amounts to slave labor by children -- (documented) young girls in internment camps.
When it's exposed, it's quickly covered up because, you know, nobody want any dirt on their iApple
products (I know other manufacturers do the same thing).

CAPTCHA = 'begins' /. irony

Re:One cause

[aaarrrgggh]

We hired a "superstar" candidate out of one of the top schools in our field with a few years of experience. He operates on a level of someone with less than two years of experience, but expects to be paid on a level of someone with five years of experience. His classmate whom we also hired is more of an "average" candidate, and it surprises me that he can tie his shoes without constant direct supervision sometimes.

So, we can do one of two things: we can search out that top talent and pay them what they are worth, or we can hire swarms of engineers that can't tie their shoes, but we can bill out at a very low profit margin and hope our clients don't complain because they are cheap. Neither approach is sustainable, but why the hell would you hire people only to lose more money on them long term?

Don't really believe IEEE stats though. Two recent job postings only garnered three electrical candidates while we got 10 mechanical engineers.

For any electrical engineers out of work though... Building power systems is a good industry to go into.

Re:One cause

[Lawrence_Bird]

My understanding is that those tests have been dumbed down as well. In the US it is no secret that college freshman are taking many "remedial" courses because they are unprepared from high school. This is, of course, not the perfect solution and still leaves many on a poor footing for more advanced courses. Rather than start failing a significant number of students, courses are made less rigorous.

I have seen this personally while getting a graduate degree nearly 15 years after my undergrad. Specifically, the courses were math related and were targeted at senior undergrad/early graduate students. Seniors in technical programs had less of a grasp on the basic calc and linear methods needed than I did and as a result the classes were slowed and material not covered which should have been. My "skills" had not been used since failing to complete the science side of a business/science double major as undergrad and I wasn't exactly the brightest in those subjects at that time.

So while kids may not be dumber out of the box than their predecessors, they are after completing their schooling. Standards have declined.

Re:One cause

[JoeMerchant]

>quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate

In the U.S. we are far ahead of Europe, the quality of engineers graduating from Universities has been dismal for at least 30 years now. In an average class of 20-30 engineers, there were typically only 1 or 2 that "got it" back in the late 1980s, the rest were skating by on minimal effort.

Re:One cause

[drinkypoo]

Not all engineers lack people skills.

I was not even coming close to talking about people skills, but your insecurity is showing, and it is also hilarious.

In addition, most social sciences rely heavily on statistics and the people majoring in them seeming cannot design a decent experiment; it's all 'hand wavy' type shit with loads of confounding variables involved.

The people paying don't want a decent experiment.

Re:One cause

[gander666]

It's now automatically assumed by the schools that nobody will ever have to do any integrated analog design.

And that is a damn shame, because finding a decent analog savvy EE is damned hard these days. Alas, it is the dinosaurs, nearing retirement age, that can whip out a high slew rate clean HV amp system (for use in an AFM). And they are becoming as scarce as hen's teeth.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree, I was able to launch straight into my engineering career and take off. The difference might be I participated in a lot of research as an undergrad so I had some hands on experience when I left.

For the most part the classes are only going to teach you the theories and how to figure out the problems. Sometimes you get lucky and you get some hands on experience in class. You have to do internships, undergrad research/assistant-ships, something to get some hands on experience. And there are many universities that I see that happening from. Unfortunately I can see trends, some Universities turn out a lower quality while others turn out higher qualities (and this is not based on them being Ivy league or a cost averaging around 40k a year).

Re:One cause

[servognome]

Lacking at what, skills needed for engineering?

The skills to understand and logically analyze data. There was a significant gap between what was an acceptable conclusion in my engineering design classes, and in my humanities classes. The former required methodical problem solving backed up with a statistically valid solution; the latter just needed a persuasive interpretation of the facts presented.

I don't mock the importance of social fields, because there is important research done in those areas. There was a psychology professor that I admired because he was doing brain mapping of children to try and understand at what age and how memories start to form. His experiment examined the relationship of special awareness and memory formation
But there's also a reason athletes, undecideds, and barely qualified students go into those undergraduate programs. I'm guessing the graduate programs are much more intense and I doubt I'd have the motivation to work hard enough to get through them.

Re:One cause

[usuallylost]

Throughout history, every generation has believed their kids were dumber than they were. If you read editorial pages from ten, twenty, fifty years ago, you see the same rants about the world going to hell. Yet all the empirical evidence points to the opposite. Kids are getting smarter. Engineering GRE and EIT scores are rising. There is no evidence that engineering graduates are getting worse, and plenty of evidence that they are getting better.

My theory as to what is happening is that most Universities are becoming less generalized in their education and are instead becoming more narrowly focused. So if you judge whether a newly graduated engineer is "better" or "worse" based on general knowledge over a wide section of the discipline they might seem worse. If on the other hand you judge them based on their knowledge of whatever their specific area of study is they may seem better.

I do think there is some truth to the idea that Universities are just easier now. I know that I have compared notes with various relatives about what we studied in college. My sister's husband, just to pick an example, was a liberal arts major in the early 70's. Graduated 71 or 72. At my school Liberal Arts was a bunch of fluff courses for people who couldn't decide upon "a real major". Back when he took it Liberal Arts wasn't like that. As part of that degree he had to learn Latin, Ancient Greek, a modern foreign language, a surprising amount of mathematics, logic, rhetoric, history, economics, chemistry, biology, physics and various literature courses in English as well in his chosen foreign language. Frankly I am not at all sure I could have graduated from his Liberal Arts program.

Now where I don't know the answer is which is better? Are we better off with much harder schools that turn out fewer students, after all hardness of the program is essentially a barrier to entry, or easier schools that turn out more students? Are we better off with graduates who have broad general knowledge of their area of study or narrower more focused knowledge? I can see arguments both ways and it isn't clear to me what the right answers are.

Re:One cause

[Prof.Phreak]

True. Also, most EE I know work in the software industry... They may not know EE, but they're often better programmers than computer science grads! :-)

Re:One cause

[i kan reed]

Forget a fortune, as long as they think they'll make any profit at all, they'll continue. The really sucky thing about the tragedy of the commons is that it's not even necessarily all that good comparatively for the participants.

Re:One cause

[tompaulco]

I believe it is up to you what you are going to get out of University. I'm sure there are people who skate through and get a diploma, but if you look at what electives a person took, then you can get an idea what their motivation was. Did they take Basket Weaving or did they take Advanced Signal Theory?
When I came out of university, I had not learned many trade skills (other than what I learned working my way through university), but what I did learn helped me to adapt to new situations and learn new things much more quickly. It never took me a year to become useful as one of your other repliers mentioned. If I didn't contribute the first week I felt like a slacker. In some cases, I was making improvements on day 1.

Re:One cause

[servognome]

There are more students enrolling, but most of them drop out or change majors. That's why in the EE article you linked there is almost no change in the number of degrees awarded.

Re:One cause

[Z00L00K]

I used to think that the US was the leading tech country, but after a few visits I have realized that there percentage of people actually working with and knowing some high tech stuff are very small compared to the population and that the volume of the US population are living almost from day to day due to property taxes and low income.

Re:One cause

[OakDragon]

And who are they going to troll? Good luck trying to enforce invalid patents in a nation with sane patent laws.

That's the next guy's problem.

Re:One cause

[hrvatska]

Students have changed majors since there have been majors. What's the evidence that schools are enrolling more engineering majors recently than they have in years gone by?

Re:One cause

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's also the nasty practice of accepting a lot of freshmen, and then weeding out the worst students before they have to start working with the really expensive lab gadgets (in, say, the third year or so). This way, you can pay for the really expensive lab gadgets with the state funds paid for the education of people who never get to use said gadgets in the first place.

Re:One cause

[Miamicanes]

People might *say* taxes and labor are huge factors, but if you look at the real world, things like environmental laws, lawsuit-risk, and legal compliance costs are bigger issues.

If your factory is in Texas and a federal court in the US determines that your product infringes upon somebody's patent, they'll get an injunction shutting down your production line and ordering you to surrender or destroy the goods. If your factory is in China and a federal court in the US determines that your product infringes upon somebody's patent, you can still probably save the day by shipping them to some other country that doesn't automatically follow the decisions of American patent lawsuits.

If your factory is in California or the EU, and your design depends upon some older component that isn't available/reliable/affordable in RoHS-compliant form, you won't just be prohibited from selling it there... they won't even allow you to MANUFACTURE it there for export to other states/countries.

Put another way, if you do your assembly work in the US, your risk is higher because there are more things that can disrupt your ability to manufacture, sell, or export your products... and more things that can go wrong to disrupt your supply chain.

That's not to say that China doesn't have its own problems (especially in the "sustained quality" department), and that's why countries with significantly higher labor costs and taxes than China, but looser regulatory climates (like Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia) have their manufacturing growing by leaps and bounds. It's why India has lots of call centers and software companies, but struggles to grow its manufacturing -- it has almost as much bureaucracy and legal risk as the US.

The most successful industry in India -- pharmaceuticals -- flourishes mainly because India has appropriate regulations to monitor safety and quality, but nevertheless doesn't blindly buy into American IP laws, so you can make drugs there that Americans would feel safe buying, but lawyers wouldn't allow you to manufacture in the US due to patents. India doesn't recognize "use" patents, only manufacturing-process patents; if somebody in the US gets a new use patent for some old drug in a new dosage, India says, 'that's nice, we'll be selling it next week because it's the same drug.' Ditto, for drugs that are still under patent, but somebody can find a significantly different way to manufacture. In America, you can patent the existence of a molecule. India only allows you to patent the steps that get you from some raw material TO that molecule.

In theory, Florida is a low tax state that should be the land of golden American opportunity for American manufacturing. In reality, our state infrastructure is shit, and the closest thing we have to an industry not related to tourism is limestone and phosphate mining. That's because industry requires infrastructure, and when a state or country doesn't have enough of the right kind of infrastructure to attract factories, the best it can hope for is a low-paying service economy whose only manufacturing comes from low-tech mining and export of the raw materials to somewhere else.

Re:One cause

[Reality Man]

Yes, what's left in North America in EE (and I'm making sweeping generalisations here) is power engineering and telecomms. Power is needed to keep our infrastructure going, and also to support what industry is left here. Power engineering in the sense of large devices to control huge currents and voltages. Telecomms is basically what hardware design is these days, simulating VHDL or Verilog to see what can fit into what FPGA. The old-school electronics of the '60s, '70s and '80s has died. No one designs audio or video hardware anymore. Or repairs anything. There are countless hacker spaces and hobbyists, but that ain't a paying job.

Re:One cause

[Schwhat]

I am an electrical engineer, and work in Europe. What I see here, is that the quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate. The knowledge-level about basic subjects is embarrassing to say the least. If this trend is comparable in the US, I can fully understand why US companies prefer to look elsewhere for good engineers. The decline in quality here seems due to the lack of students really interested in electrical engineering and "complicated" studies becoming less popular. Colleges and universities here need to lower the level of "difficulty" to make the curriculum more attractive and gain more students. The result is catastrophic.

Well blame could fall to usage of the engineer simulator software that the universities use. I for one never understood the Dead Space series.

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

Don't really believe IEEE stats though. Two recent job postings only garnered three electrical candidates

Right. Why believe IEEE statistical analysis when we can rely on your anecdote.

Furthermore, what EE specialty was being looked for, what level of experience, and what part of the country? Without at least that minimal level of information your anecdote is even more meaningless than most anecdotes.

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

'experienced' people that don't have the current skills required to do the demanded work, and many have the attitude that they do not have things to learn, or are not going to bother

My experience is that such an attitude amongst older EE's is rare. You can always trot out an anecdote or two to bolster the "old farts don't keep up" excuse, but that doesn't make it the norm. EE's who don't want to update their knowledge usually move into other areas like management or marketing, or get away from tech altogether. With the rare exception of those who hit it big on stock options, you're not going to get rich being an EE. Hence the field tends to retain die-hard techies who want to learn new things.

Re:One cause

[Reality Man]

I can't find a better endorsement for life extension technology than this. Youth is better than oldth. Can we PLEASE just get on with it and start understanding aging so we can reverse it?

Re:One cause

[hackula]

I majored in Philosophy and now design/write predictive analytics and modelling software. Most of my CS friends from uni churn out dinky websites or build CRUD apps for businesses now. I am a few years in now, and maybe I just got lucky, but I doubt many of them would have the technical chops to function in the field I am in now (biiig data, performance sensitive, realtime web, etc.). Majoring in something has very little effect on people outside of the mediocre range of skill. I am not some sort of genius or anything, but over the last few years I have made it a point to challenge myself as much as possible, where a lot of my friends focused on other things... like weed and video games. No judgement, but everyone picks their own priorities.

TLDR: EQ and passion mean way more than IQ and classes taken. (wow, that rhymed)

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

trig doesn't even make sense until you learn about phasors

Star Trek weapons are the key to understanding trig?

Seriously, you're being very EE-centric. Trig is directly applicable to many "mechanical" issues. My grandfather was a machinist with little formal education, and taught himself trig because it was useful in his work. Trig was the first area of math that interested me because it was directly applicable to practical problems. I was interested in photography and wanted to know what portion of the frame would be occupied by a given size object at a given distance with a certain focal length lens. Trig is even handy for carpentry, if you want moldings to fit nicely in a room that isn't terribly square.

Re:One cause

[hackula]

101 humanities courses bear very little resemblance to the upper level courses. I would keep that in mind when evaluating another major's difficulty (not saying they are all created equally or anything). Try taking a few Philosophy of Logic classes and you might form a different opinion. I did CS and Philosophy and I learned far more about the software patterns I use today in my Philosophy of Mind class than I ever did in any of my CS courses. Neural networks, machine learning, logic fundamentals, etc. seemed like they were just breezed over in my CS classes, where as in my Philosophy classes we went over things in much greater detail.

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

And that is a damn shame, because finding a decent analog savvy EE is damned hard these days. Alas, it is the dinosaurs, nearing retirement age, that can whip out a high slew rate clean HV amp system (for use in an AFM). And they are becoming as scarce as hen's teeth.

That's very true, but it doesn't mean the dinosaurs can get jobs. They don't fit many employer's prejudices. Maybe in SV, but there are lots of smaller tech centers in the US. Employers scream "shortage" but won't look beyond their prejudices.

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

And many, like myself, have a foot in both worlds. I call myself an EE, and that's what my diplomas say, but I spend at least half my time programming. Writing primitives for embedded systems is a lot smoother if you do both sides yourself. Same with signal processing, where there are analog/digital and hardware/software tradeoffs. Best of all, when I choose to implement something in software, I don't have a programmer whining that I should have done it in hardware.

However, I doubt that if in the last year 40,000 EE's suddenly decided to start calling themselves programmers.

Re:One cause

[hackula]

Not particularly surprising. Most of the innovation is coming from software these days, since it is so much cheaper to develop.

Re:One cause

[hackula]

I guess they learned the REAL fundamentals!

Re:One cause

[czth]

I live in Florida (for about another week) - in the St. Petersburg/Tampa area. Perhaps I haven't driven around the state enough - I've been down to the Everglades and Keys and up through Jacksonville but not much to the interior. Can you tell me more about Florida's infrastructure problems? Perhaps I'm biased by the area I'm in, but it seems reasonable enough. What's missing/substandard?

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

I price out a few PCB's at four shops, all ten minutes from me in one of the largest industrial parks in the US. It's nearly ten times more expensive to order them from next door

I've been in this business long enough to remember when a lot of electronics was US made. It seems like American manufacturers have stopped even trying to offer reasonable prices - just the opposite of what you might think would happen with cutthroat competition. It may make sense, because they know everybody is going to ship the work to China unless there is another very strong reason to do it in the US.

As a country we've slit our own throats with so-called free trade (meaning we eliminate our tariffs while China keeps theirs, offers government subsidies, manipulates their currency, poisons their own country and practically enslaves their workers). Of course we can't compete with Chinese labor prices, but the (tongue-in-cheek) free trade has guaranteed we can't compete on any manufacturing. Seems like things are going according to plan.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. I'm living proof you can graduate electrical engineering with honours using copious amounts of Wikipedia. I came out of University knowing nothing and it has been an uphill battle getting where I am now.

Well, this is both your own damned fault, and the fault of the university for graduating people who don't know a damned thing. A graduate in electrical engineering who doesn't know anything? Pathetic.

University is no longer about learning and it's all about getting a piece of paper, then we rely on learning on the job.

If this is the case, then this is exactly why companies are using H1Bs -- if the university graduates don't know anything, there's no point in hiring them.

This works well in some cases but I look back at some of the people I studied with and they are unable to get registered professional engineering status as they lack the skills required even several years out of uni.

Then you went to a shitty university that people would be good to avoid graduates from -- what was it so we can bin any resumes from there?

Thanks for confirming my opinion that all 7 digit ids on Slashdot are held by idiots.

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

they'll run some "special visa" progarm when the problem gets too bad

Future tense? They've been doing it for over 20 years. They're called H-1B and L-1 visas. And now in the name of "immigration reform", and in the midst of a sudden decline in EE employment, and overall the worse job market since the Great Depression, our government is planning to increase the H-1B quota from 65,000 to 300,00/year. And of course the pundits will tell everyone it's because we have a perpetual STEM shortage. Of course we do. It's hard to find students who are bright enough for EE but dumb enough to believe it has any job prospects.

Re:One cause

[tompaulco]

My father has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and worked all of his career at Bell Laboratories until they basically did a "retire or else" so they could get rid of all of their experienced people and successfully destroy this countries greatest single source of invention and technological innovation EVER. As you say, it was not actually possible for someone his age to find a job, so he has basically been doing freelance circuit design through my consulting company. In case anyone is looking for that sort of thing, he does have some free time.

Re:One cause

[ebno-10db]

Back in the '80s and '90s that was the official line.

And some people were dumb enough to believe it. I gather you weren't one of them. But the pundits repeated the party line because they're such wonderfully critical and insightful thinkers. Does "pundit" mean "parrot" in some other language, or only in English?

From what I've seen, engineering jobs eventually follow manufacturing overseas when a company decides to offshore manufacturing.

I was saying that 30 years ago. It's not that I have such amazing insight either. It's obvious to any real world engineer.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I've experienced the opposite problem. My small university had a very rigorous engineering program and things like "curving" or "bonus points" just weren't done. Most of the professors were very old-school (not to mention, older white males nearing retirement age for the most part.) We have a very high quality of graduates, but alos have non-inflated GPAs. Many businesses in the surrounding metro areas know this; I had one interviewer tell me years ago that he "mentally added 0.5 to the GPA" of any graduate of our school even before sitting down to talk to them, and preferred to hire our graduates over any of the state schools.

Unfortunately, outside of our region, our reputation isn't as well-known. It was sad when an HR department would discard my application because I didn't have a 3.5 GPA as requested on their job posting (I had a 3.15) when I knew I had both a stronger grasp of the field and more practical knowledge (we were very big on hands-on lab work). With the glut of graduates, I never really found anything in my field (EE) and eventually gave up and changed careers.

Re:One cause

[slew]

The result is really that it became easier to get a technical diploma. People enter the job market with less experience. Companies need to invest more to train their technical people.

Non sequitor. Either the government is responsible for training the citizen workforce (and are free to tax corporations to do so), or they give some of that money back to companies to invest more to train their own technical people (many large companies already budget for this).

The problem is that students often aren't very discriminating when purchasing education resources (especially if subsidized by the government). That is why universities are able to get away with lowering standards to attract more people. If students were more discriminating, they would see through this and direct their purchase of educational resources towards more potentially valuable educations. Of course if the goverenment has a monopoly on education, they can probably just get away with this w/o any consequences, but in the USA at least, there are quite a few private options that will generally keep the public universities honest (in the engineering and hard sciences anyhow).

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Any teacher that grades on a curve is doing a disservice to their students in one form or another.

Re:One cause

[gander666]

Again true, but they can pick and choose among the easy to find consulting gigs. However, once this group retires, I fear that the drought will be long until some young'uns decide that Analog is a profitable career path. There remains many things that can't be done better in digital.

Re:One cause

[ajlitt]

Then your company is guilty of letting this engineer work in a bubble. He wasn't being held accountable for his process and designs (which while maybe robust they don't sound marketable). How did he get that far without a design review?

Re:One cause

[tlhIngan]

My theory as to what is happening is that most Universities are becoming less generalized in their education and are instead becoming more narrowly focused. So if you judge whether a newly graduated engineer is "better" or "worse" based on general knowledge over a wide section of the discipline they might seem worse. If on the other hand you judge them based on their knowledge of whatever their specific area of study is they may seem better.

I do think there is some truth to the idea that Universities are just easier now. I know that I have compared notes with various relatives about what we studied in college. My sister's husband, just to pick an example, was a liberal arts major in the early 70's. Graduated 71 or 72. At my school Liberal Arts was a bunch of fluff courses for people who couldn't decide upon "a real major". Back when he took it Liberal Arts wasn't like that. As part of that degree he had to learn Latin, Ancient Greek, a modern foreign language, a surprising amount of mathematics, logic, rhetoric, history, economics, chemistry, biology, physics and various literature courses in English as well in his chosen foreign language. Frankly I am not at all sure I could have graduated from his Liberal Arts program.

It's partly because of demand - engineering course loads are extremely heavy - easily 50-100% more than the liberal arts or business degrees (especially when you include labs). The sciences didn't have as heavy course loads either.

So the engineering requirements for "generalized courses" (aka "complementary studies" and the like) have gotten lower and lower - when I was there, it was only 2 were required to be taken to graduate. Yes, 2.

And if you poll /., you'll find a LOT of people hate these courses - because it distracts them from narrow goals of what they want to learn.

Personally, I didn't like it either, but felt it was important (just as liberal arts and business are forced to also take science and engineering courses to graduate), because it helps round out the student to become more aware of greater issues in the world. Or to gather viewpoints outside the field or even how to express your viewpoint in ways others can relate. (Effective communication is quite lacking - sure there are courses on technical writing, but only the liberal arts ones force one to realize what others see as important).

Perhaps the goal is to figure out a better balance - sure engineering schools like MIT can turn out great grads in their field, but perhaps are a bit out of touch with the rest of the world's population and what matters to them. Of course, people will complain because it's crap they don't feel they need, and perhaps its true - if they only intend to ever communicate with their peers.

Re:One cause

[oh_my_080980980]

RTFA: "increase in engineering unemployment comes at the same time demand for H-1B visas is up."

Re:One cause

[Austerity Empowers]

I would argue the other way: most kids coming out of colleges with EE degrees are overqualified for the careers they will go in to, and will quickly get bored, angry and burnt out.

Why spend 4+ years studying hard math and physics, and having to actually work for your degree when your job leaving school is going to consist of:
- Project management
- People management
- Ensuring cheap, less qualified foreign labor isn't obviously screwing up
- Flying to some of the worst, most godforsaken cities in some of the worst, most godforsaken countries

Re:One cause

[scamper_22]

Both cases.

1. During university, we used to try and do old exams. The further back we went, the harder the exams got. Trying to do an exam from like 10 years ago was ridiculously hard. Fast forward today as I deal with coop students and see their topics of study... and no doubt they have it easier as well.

2. Years of experience makes a huge deal. Also the current stock of 'older' workers grew up in the ATT, Bells, Xerox, Nortels... companies which used to have real engineer departments. The amount of overall training a new engineer gets today in terms of mentorship and real management and career management is ridiculously low.

3. The off shore effect. The best of today's youth in the western world are not going into electrical engineering. Whereas many of the best in India/China... are as it is a good career option for them. Our best would rather do finance, medicine, law, government... So you have our mid tier competing against their much more hungry top tier.

Re:One cause

[PlusFiveTroll]

But Soylent Green can!

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

The only place that I saw a curve were in:
(a) liberal arts courses(a few)

and

(b) Organic Chemistry (Yes, I took this, and yes the curve turned out to be pretty much your normal straight grading scale, i.e. no skimming by doing anything less than 70 overall average unless you wanted a D or less...)

everything else(enginerering, comp sci, mathematics, physics, etc.) were all straight scale grade based upon exam, assignment, and lab grades. e.g. I think: 70-79 C, 80-89 B, 90-100 A (+/- grades would be baked in there, and we didn't have A+ at our uni at least for engineering and I was actually later surprised to learn that a D was actually a passing grade of sorts whereas I always considered D/E fail... the percentage ranges might have been tweaked a bit higher, e.g. 73 starting Cs, it's been a while...)

I despised labs. They took so much more time than the course itself, represented a credit hour value and made up a miserly small proportion of the overall class grade. Yes my engineering courses that required labs, you had to sign up for at the same time as the lecture and received a combined grade for the lab/lecture. The only course that I knew of at my university that had the lab actually separated out from the lecture were for some of the higher level chemistry courses, e.g. organic, etc. IIRC even in physics the lab "course" was pseudo-combined into the lecture "course" where you just received a combined overall grade.

Also when we had original orientation for the school of engineering, they basically stated right off the bat that they planned to eliminate 2/3 of those enrolled to either switching majors or dropping out altogether.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think those sociology, anthropology, and other non-tech students are inept, just see what happens if engineering students try to do their jobs.

This is clearly a trick question!
99%* of people with those degrees can never find a job in that field - they end up being generic managerial types or politicians.

*The other 1% teach the next crop of dreamers.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a mechanical engineer.

Trig is one of the first things I use to teach kids that the high school math is actually useful. Stuff like angle of a chain coming off a gear, stuff like slope of an inclined plane.

Re:One cause

[c_sd_m]

At least an education system designed to mould good factory workers certainly can't.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we PLEASE just get on with it and start understanding aging so we can reverse it?

I think you've got it backwards - flushing of the old ways is exactly what aging (and ultimately leaving) provides. If you could reverse aging, the old ways would stay deeply entrenched, since the oldest would never move on.

Re:One cause

[c_sd_m]

Back when they actually had shop class, it was pretty clear where trig could be useful. My high school actually introduced trig earlier to the remedial math stream than the advanced math stream since it was understood that trades people would have more use for it.

Re:One cause

[thoth]

Why? because university is more about the process by which you get the answer and because commercial engineering has always been more about getting the answer.

But isn't is also the case that the body of knowledge needed to contribute is so much larger? To paraphrase the famous quote, if you advance by standing on the shoulders of giants, then the next generation of contributors needs to learn that much more in order to advance the state of the art.

That's all fine, but expecting universities to provide everything (i.e. an advancing amount of "base knowledge") means the 4 year degree starts to become 5, 6, 7, etc. Corporations need to hold up their end of this relationship and mentor/train instead of offshore to other countries. They need to expand intern/coop programs (I know my employer actively seeks interns/coops, not sure what industry-wide averages are).

Re:One cause

[zequav]

I'm a professor in a Computer Engineering faculty. It's the second.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Does higher grades mean smarter children or just less requirements to learn? I look at what the kids are coming out of high school with and it is downright scary. Can't balance a checkbook, can't do simple algebra, can't spell, no grammer knowledge, and on and on....

Re:One cause

[Kwyj1b0]

Math is reduced to pre-chewed problems where students are looking for identifiers so they know what formula to use and what values to put where.

Tell me when this wasn't true? I think you are nostalgic for an era that never was. Mathematics in Engineering has always been about number crunching. Students in engineering have always been taught "mathematics" as if it is a tool to solve a problem, no more and no less. I suggest you read Lockhart's Lament to get a better understanding of what mathematics is like, and how it is taught..

I went to undergraduate (and graduate) school in Electrical Engineering. You would be shocked at the number of students (even Ph.D. level) who think of complex numbers like vectors (complex numbers are scalars, and form a field). You don't need measure theory to be a good engineer. Real analysis, functional analysis, etc. are never offered in the Engineering department - only in the Mathematics dept.

Most engineers don't take Mathematics - they take a dumbed-down "here is how you use the math as a tool" version without rigor, proofs, and analysis.This has always been true - and for a good reason. Do you need to understand Hilbert spaces and Banach spaces to design a filter? Not really (it helps to get a deeper understanding, but you don't really need it)..

Re:One cause

[AmazingRuss]

I dropped of college for 7 years. Upon my return, I found the curriculum MUCH easier. I don't think I got any smarter, so I suspect the curriculum was dumbed down.

Re:One cause

[dubbreak]

We hired a "superstar" candidate out of one of the top schools in our field with a few years of experience. He operates on a level of someone with less than two years of experience, but expects to be paid on a level of someone with five years of experience. His classmate whom we also hired is more of an "average" candidate, and it surprises me that he can tie his shoes without constant direct supervision sometimes.

And what does that speak to other than your company's ability to hire? Obviously your superstar wasn't a superstar (hence the quotes you added).

I haven't been involved in hiring EEs (last company we only needed a few, and the ones we had were doing fine and had a few decades left in them before retirement), but have been involved in hiring engineering (computer, mech) and compsci grads. My anecdotal experience shows a "top school" doesn't mean much. A student has to be motivated and take what they want from school. A top school may have more to offer, but an unmotivated student at a top school (who gets good grades by jumping through the hoops of tests and papers) is not half the employee someone from a less prestige school who actually took real interest in the subject. I had a co-op student (compsci/math double major) who could code circles around developers with 20+ years experience. He understood software and had a drive to improve himself and his knowledge of the subject. Exceedingly smart as well, but smart on its own is nearly useless. As a company you want smart people that get stuff done. Grunts (get stuff done) are ok for particular roles (with plenty of supervision) but smart people who can't get stuff done are truly useless. This all comes down to motivation, which can't be taught.

I'd argue that there are a lack of self motivated people in the upcoming generation. My grandfather's generation was people that worked hard for what little they had, my father's generation worked hard and were often loyal to their place of employment (but had quite a lot for how hard they worked). My generation jumps jobs more frequently (searching their "right" fit) and has high expectations as far as "work life balance". The upcoming generation has even higher monetary expectations (want everything now) and is even more fickle with their loyalty. To me the issue isn't education but rather attitude towards work. This is seen across the board, from educated to retail clerks. Walk into a store and see how many employees are browsing social media on their phones. We have trained each generation to be better and better consumers of entertainment with little to no attention span.

What's the solution? I don't think there is one other than time. Basically Darwinism in an intellectual age. The smart self motivated people will start their own companies with their cohorts and be successful, the lazy leaches will eventually end up being the technology era equivalents of janitors and garbage men. In the mean time we have some people that should be picking up garbage in a higher role than they deserve (due to labor market conditions). It'll all even out in time. In the meantime, expect to hire some useless people into roles they can barely fulfill.

Re:One cause

[greg1104]

Greater than 20% variation is the expected situation with capacitors. That's not a funny data point--that's the day to day reality of the job involved to go from lab prototype to large scale manufacturing of electronics.

Re:One cause

[yope]

I get your point, but trust me: I am comparing things that I (and some of my class-mates) did while still at the university with the capabilities of students that finish college or university today. There is a BIG difference, and most of my current colleagues agree with me. We have interns here regularly, so we can keep track of their accomplishments easily.

Re:One cause

[morgauxo]

So? Every time I 'hear' that complaint I wonder why the focus on ENTRY requirements.

If a University lowers their entry requirements w/o lowering the content of their classes and difficulty of their tests then that just means incoming students will have to work harder to catch up or they will come out with lower grades which would be apparent in their transcripts.

Now, if universities are lowering the content of their classes and/or exams then that is another thing. This year's graduates with similar transcripts might not be as prepared as past ones. But that wasn't A/C's statement.

I don't understand why an employer would want to focus on a potential new hire's performance 4+ years ago in high school when they could be focussing on recent performance in college.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

He was probably in charge of the design reviews too!

Re:One cause

[yope]

You are mixing two different things: I did not say kids in general where getting dumber. I only said that electrical engineers graduating from college and universities nowadays are of much worse (professional) quality than, say 10 or 15 years ago. This also is not the typical sort of cliche-rant that every adult seems to have against kids of newer generations. There really is a measurable and substantial difference. We receive interns regularly at my job, and all of my colleagues agree with this fact: basic electric (electronic-) engineering skills have declined dramatically.

Re:One cause

[morgauxo]

Why shouldn't Universities do that? In a perfect world, where University seats are plentiful I would like to see 100% admission for everyone who applies. That's not the same as 100% graduation nor does it mean everyone gets a good grade! It just means that anybody who wants to 'turn over a new leaf' and study harder has a chance.

Sure, past high performers are going to statistically be more likely to make it and vice versa but this will not determine the fate of every individual student. Who's to say one particular student for whatever reason just didn't thrive in a high school environment, or at one particular high shool but might do great at a university. Or maybe he/she has had an epiphany and will apply his/her self like never before. Likewise an over-achiever might finally burn out or may have done well before because mommy and daddy where there to force it but has no motivation when alone.

I say.. if they have the seats.. FILL THEM! Anything less is just academic snobbery.

That being said, it might be nice in such a hypothetical 'perfect world' a guidance councelor could speak frankly and tell the students "It's your time and money to 'waste' but I don't think you will make it". Maybe even ask the question "why DO you think you will do better here than you did previously?" Selling them ideas that they will be rich and succesful when they will likely not even graduate would be kind of low.

Re:One cause

[orgelspieler]

I'm an EE in the US. I'd have to agree that the quality of engineers is declining. Part of the problem is that there is just so many more topics to learn. You could spend an entire career doing something that there's only enough time in an undergrad curriculum to devote a week or two to. I mean, hell, at my school you could get a EE degree without taking any advanced power systems classes. This was 13 years ago. I imagine it's even worse now.

It didn't much matter for me, I still learned enough on the job to be the generator protection expert in a matter of months. But you'd think that a nice engineering program would at least offer a one hour course in something like that. I got to take a 3 hour research class where I played with Lego Mindstorms and wrote a NSF proposal. You'd think a primer in transmission lines wouldn't be too hard to come by. But you spend so much time on electronics, Fourier transforms, wavelets, etc., that you don't have time to learn about PLCs and lightning arrestors.

Let's not overlook continuing education, though. I don't think I would have made it in the power world without my IEEE CED seminars. Most people were there just to get their PE hours checked off, but I was green and actually there to learn.

Re:One cause

[morgauxo]

That sounds like the software industry. When I was looking on the job I saw job postings that listed requirements with more years experience with various programming languages and other items than the software in question even existed! Were they looking for time travelers? I suppose people just lied on there resumes to get the jobs. I didn't want to do that. I eventually found a good employer. We are a small company, not a lot of room to go up but I have no interest whatsoever in dealing with that job market again! I intend to stay.

Re:One cause

[orgelspieler]

Well said! My university's program also focused more on how to attack problems. They seemed to know that in 20 years the things you'd be attacking would be different. But the basic methodology of problem solving hasn't changed in hundreds if not thousands of years. Sure DOE is a little more rigorous and refined, but the scientific method is still the scientific method.

The other part of that equation is how to interpret and communicate results. This is something too many schools leave out. I have seen too many EEs who have no idea how to write a paragraph. We even had classes on technical writing and engineering economics. Those classes have come in more useful than I expected. (as has mass/energy transfer and drafting, who knew?)

Re:One cause

[morgauxo]

Used to be popular? Don't EE degrees usually require some sort of internship to even graduate? I was thinking about going back for a new degree but decided not to in part because the universities around me require internships. I'm past my student years. I have a family now and quitting a perfectly good, well-paying job to go work for free is a non-option.

Re:One cause

[morgauxo]

Bah, all that these kids have no work ethic today stuff is just crap.

In my grandparent's generation one parent stayed home and took care of all the many things that needed done. The other worked 40 hours. They may not have had as much to spend on toys but at the end of the day the work was done, they could spend time together and relax or have fun.

In my parent's generation people were obsessed with overtime. Not only would one parent be at work most waking hours, often both would. They were paid well for it but that just made them greedy. The money poured in but who can say where it all went? They certainly didn't have much time or energy to enjoy it.

In my generation it would seem that we are expected to work like our parents for the pay of our grandparents and far too many of us seem to feel it is a privilege to do so.

What is the point?
Why work so many hours when you will not have the time or energy to enjoy the money?
Why should most of one parent's pay go to paying a stranger to raise the kids just so both parents can come home tired at night ot a dirty house full of unfinished chores? (I'm not being sexist here, I don't care which parent stays home)

Note, I am not necessarily talking about myself, my wife, my parents or grandparents. Some of it fits us, some of it doesn't. Rather, I am making generalizations about 3 generations based on my own anecdotal observations. Take it for what it is worth.

Oh, and about loyalty? Yeah our parent's generation were more loyal. Where did it get them? How many were laid off short of retirement age when large companies moved their manufacturing to developing nations where they didn't have to pay a real living wage? How many lost their pensions when their corporations declared bankruptcy yet the executives took home large bonuses? We watched this happen to our parents. We don't want to sit back and watch it happen to ourselves.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

> I do think there is some truth to the idea that Universities are just easier now.

One of my favorite things to do in the university library is to compare textbooks from 50-100 years ago to the ones we use today. It becomes obvious how dumbed-down our college-level materials have become. It seems you can't expect students to read at a mature level anymore. You have to present everything in neat little packages with cute illustrations and large doses of hand-holding.

I'm a big fan of Dover reprints, by the way. :)

Re:One cause

[Darinbob]

The kids aren't as good as they were ten or twenty years ago.

I also notice there is a migration about what the fields are. Computer Science now seems to be mostly programming. A lot of electrical engineers are know are doing activities traditionally associated with computer science rather than traditional EE. Ie, EE people doing network protocol design, FPGA programming, and even microcontroller assembler seem to be more common than CS people doing those jobs. I think the definitions have changed since I was in school.

I suspect maybe some reason kids aren't as good in CS as they once were is that it's become more mainstream. It's not a nerdy major anymore (although "nerd" has changed meaning too), instead it's seen as a solid career path even for cool people and students aren't embarrassed to admit that they're in CS. The goals of CS students however are not necessarily to learn as much as possible about computing arcana but to get a nice paying programming job. Meanwhile the nerdy types who like math and figuring out how things work under the hood are leaning towards EE. CS programs are under intense pressure from corporations (and parents) to produce more job-ready graduates (less theory, more programming); ie, pressure to be like tech schools.

So as a result the sorts of jobs that require doing low level CS style activities end up often being done by people with an EE degree and those skills are being taught more in EE programs. Jobs doing currently popular stuff (web sites, phone apps) are being filled by cookie cutter CS grads and the CS programs are focusing much more on higher level languages and emphasis on programming.

This is not to say that there are not smart and nerdy CS students anymore, it's just that they're vastly outnumbered.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I cowardly submit, more H1-B Visa's only ensures the work stays on US soil. It does not reduce the number of jobs or the amount of work. Now less H1-B Visa's just sends more work to be done overseas. That bids down wages to what is needed to leave in those other countries.
I say let them come here and pay the US cost of living. Let foreigners come here and spend $10 on lunch, $20 on a haircut, $4 a gallon on gas. Salaries won't be underbid then.

Re:One cause

[Miamicanes]

A robust power transmission network, for one thing. Half the time, even a little baby Category 1 hurricane can take down the power grid in a quarter of the state for days. Backup power is expensive to maintain on your own for something like a datacenter, and would be utterly prohibitive to try and maintain on your own to keep a factory open without commercial power.

There's also the matter of fuel for those generators... most of Florida has no natural gas service, and if we get two hurricanes a week apart (as happened in 2005 with Katrina and Rita), ships can't dock to resupply fuel depots, and gas stations start running out of gas sometime between days 5 and 8. And when a quarter of the residents are buying gas for both their own cars AND another 10-20 gallons per day for their generator at home, depleted gas supplies might start running out EVEN IF there isn't a second hurricane.

We have other problems, but reliable electricity is the big one. Florida has the power grid of a remote rural village in a poor third-world country.

Re:One cause

[Miamicanes]

^^^ Oh, and I forgot the other detail about gas shortages. Trucking gas in from more distant fuel depots isn't feasible, because hurricanes tend to hit in the middle of summer, when we're stuck with EPA-mandated fuel blends that differ between different metro areas. If BP or Shell sent tanker trucks from Tampa down to Miami or Fort Lauderdale the week after a hurricane with fuel intended for the Tampa-Orlando area, it would be a federal crime for gas stations in Miami or Fort Lauderdale to sell it (this was in the Miami Herald the week after Katrina, when a local journalist wanted to know why, exactly, every gas station south of West Palm Beach was sold out, and tanker trucks were parked at Port Everglades & sitting idle instead of driving up to Tampa or Jacksonville to fill up. The answer was, "It would be against the law". So, instead, individuals had to load up their own pickup trucks with empty gas cans & drive to Fort Pierce (the southernmost metro area where "Central Florida Blend" gas could legally be sold), then drive home with the equivalent of a 5-kiloton liquid bomb.

Re:One cause

[czth]

Ah, well, that explains it - I haven't been here long enough for a big hurricane (nor will I be), and haven't had any serious power outages. Thanks for the info.

Re:One cause

[Opportunist]

Sorry, but people who don't have the brains to do it don't belong in a university. It's neither my job nor my goal to push everyone through university and get them a degree. Actually, far from it. Personally, I think a degree should mean something other than "I spent 4 more years in school and racked up a debt". The sad news is that we're pretty much there today. Many colleges and even universities are lowering the bar so more people would come to them, so the degree you get from there has no more meaning than the aforementioned 4 years and a debt.

That's not a solution to the problem. Nobody is entitled to get a degree just 'cause he spends time for it. This isn't an MMO where you throw time at it and you'll be rewarded, no matter how stupid you are or how useless your activities may be.

Technology will not create new jobs. That's about the same myth as the invisible hand. But that's not the point here, the point is that simply cranking out more people to compete on the job market is not going to cut it either. And companies will not be too happy about it either if yes, they can hire from a bigger pool but the amount of people who can actually be used remains the same. It only means that they instead of the universities are burdened with the screening process.

A piece of paper doesn't turn you into an engineer if you don't have the knowledge.

Re:One cause

[Opportunist]

In a school that supposedly teaches you technology and even has it in its name, I'd say that trig should play some rather important part. They're learning how to make casting molds for plastic manufacturing for crying out loud, how the hell do you want to calculate them correctly without trig? The moment they are even remotely curved in any way you're fucked without.

Re:One cause

[solidraven]

I know most of my class mates hated analog quite badly; I never quite got why they hated it so much. Analog circuits can be very elegant compared to digital. Nothing is brute forced, the component parameters can vary so much so care has to be taken to ensure stability. Probably why I ended up liking RF electronics more than most of my class mates.

But yeah, people often forget that digital gates are still based on analog amplifiers.

Re:One cause

[Opportunist]

I'm not talking about math theory here. This isn't about whether students should learn how to define rings and groups. What I mean is that I was in math presented with a problem that resembles a real life problem and then I had to find out how to solve it with the knowledge I have. There was no "suggestive" text that told me subtly what formulas to use and usually a bit of additional "useless" information was thrown in to check whether students understood the problem. Here's a very simple example:

Your goal is to put three communication satellites into an orbit around Earth, above the equator. The Earth has a radius of 6,378,100 meters, a mass of 5.9736×10^24 kilograms and a rotation period of 0.99726968 days. Your satellites are spherical with a radius of 2.5 meters and a mass of 225 kilograms. Your goal is to put them into an orbit around the equator at the lowest altitude necessary to enable them to communicate with each other (the Earth may be assume to have a mean altitude of the sea level for this example). In what altitude do you put them and what distance do they have from each other?

Today, what you get in a text example is pretty much a text representation of the formula, usually even the order of the variables is correct so you just have to find out what formula to use (that is, if it isn't provided as well), put in the numbers and press buttons on a calculator. The same example of above today:

Three satellites form an equilateral triangle. They are in an orbit around Earth in such a way that lines drawn from each satellite to the next one just touch the surface of the Earth (insert a drawing here with a circle inside an equilateral triangle, complete with an axis labeling the student will recognize). The Earth has a radius of 6,378,100 meters (indicated as "inscribed circle radius" on the drawing). Calculate the height the satellites are on (note: they are at points A, B and C (again, on the drawing, these are the corners of the triangle)), and their distance to each other (the lengths of the sides of the triangle). Hint: When calculating height, do not forget to subtract the radius of Earth).

I wish I was kidding...

Re:One cause

[NickGnome]

"University, even in engineering, has always taught relatively esoteric theory"
...

I recall thinking that a lot of the freakie theoretical academic CS material was not very interesting, just something we had to slog through... but, even when I was working at the U, and then later in various jobs, I found I was using every bit of it*.

And every few years someone comes up with more that gets published in some obscure journal that turns out to be useful on the job, and after 5 years or so makes its way into the text-books and such.

* Well, OK, I never did actually find a use for the various GCD algorithm examples and "proofs"/"validations" that Wirth and Knuth seemed to wax so enthusiastic over, but my mathematician friend assured me, just a few months back, that uses exist.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes me wonder why this still works for companies like Apple.

In a word, lawyers.

Apple is a big fish with a lot of clout to throw around. I have no doubt that in their contracts with Foxconn, etc. they have a clause that basically says "If you ship us shit, we're not paying for it. What's more, you will fix the problem for free. Furthermore, *you* will pay *us* handsomely for any delay and hassle we endure with regards to you shipping us shit. Oh, yeah, one more thing - we're the sole arbiter of what gets classified as "shit" and what isn't."

Enough lawyers behind it (including ones to pretty the language), and you don't need to be too concerned with issues that pop up. Good enough contract lawyers, and even a 50% error rate is workable. Foxconn simply makes twice as many (on their dime) and dumps the half that doesn't pass QC - it'd still be cheaper than pissing off Apple.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

At the risk of defending the indefensible, it's not a case of China's government forcing kids to work in sweatshops, as much as it's a case of China's government standing back and looking the other way when parents decide to pimp their kids to factories for cash, and give employers carte blanche to do whatever it takes to keep their kids working so the metaphorical checks won't quit coming in the mail.

Notice the large percentage of child factory workers who are girls, and remember that in China, girls have traditionally been viewed by parents as a long-term burden. For rural parents who still hold that view, sending their daughters to work in some factory (with paychecks sent straight to the parents) is a way to recoup some of the cash they spent raising their daughter before she goes off and gets married.

It's wrong, but that's the way it is. In the US and Britain (among other places), our great-grandparents and great-.*?-great-grandparents did more or less the same thing to their daughters, until it was finally restricted, then (mostly) outlawed.

Re: One cause

[VTBlue]

I did a personal experiment in college. I bought a vintage engineering calculus text book from the 1940s to see if I could learn from it and apply I learned in class. My hypothesis was correct.

I failed miserably. Those Manhattan project boys were one of a kind.

Re:One cause

[nametaken]

I'm sure that's exactly the situation... there's only enough money in doing the job if the customer is willing to pay through the nose to have something done and in their hands right now.

You'd think these local shops would fill the queue with nearly competitive options with long turn-around... but they don't seem interested in doing that. I assume there's just no margin in it.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: his circuits didn't spontaneously reboot due to brownouts or transients, cause more RFI than a 1970s redneck with an illegal CB amplifier, or fry the first time line voltage surged above 140VAC. They might be obsolete, but if somebody plugs them in 10 years from now, they'll almost certainly still work... which is more than you can say about 99% of the stuff that gets sold today.

99.9% of the circuits that make it into modern consumer electronics gear would have gotten a freshman engineering student kicked out of school in 1970. Digital electronics might hide 99.9% of your design sins and cost-cutting, but the remaining 0.1% is a real bitch. Back in 1985, I got my first CD player for Christmas. It cost my parents around $700. It still works flawlessly. It's built like a tank. It has a flywheel-stabilized motor, and the metal rings that comprise its feet aren't symbolic splashes of metallic paint on a plastic bezel... they're mini-weights buffered by rubber grommets and shock absorbers designed to keep it from vibrating. Admittedly, it's no longer necessary to achieve that kind of mechanical precision thanks to modern DSPs and oversampling, but it would be nice if I could at least buy a goddamn Blu-Ray player now that isn't going to die before the free AAA batteries that came with the remote control do.

Re:One cause

[DrLang21]

I did say most people and there have already been a few fair rebutals to my original comment. I am not aware of many 15 year old kids going to schools with "technology" in the name. I believe it would be fair to teach the basics of calculating angles and side lengths on a triangle at the tail end of a geometry class. I don't think most high school students need a whole year of it. I definitely don't think most high school students need to worry about plastic injection molding!

Re:One cause

[DrLang21]

How is any of that useful to the average person? I found solving inclined plane problems and the like to be interesting. But I'm also an engineer and long ago realized that most people are baffled at what I find interesting.

Re:One cause

[servognome]

I took upper division philosophy classes - Ethical Theory and Induction and Probability which I found extremely insightful. The professors were also much more approachable and interesting than the ones in my engineering classes.
Like I said there are some really brilliant people in those fields, but I've also seen too many dimwits who take those classes.

Re:One cause

[DrLang21]

The problem is that you just have to accept/memorize it. The repeating sine wave never made any sense until it was explained as a vector spining around the origin.

Re: One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. I think the more obvious explanation is that your schooling didn't prepare you for learning the old-fashioned way.

Re:One cause

[usuallylost]

That makes a lot of sense. You could represent that as a scale. With say education (representing general studies like the traditional Liberal Arts Degree) on end and Training (representing studies directly focused on whatever discipline you are looking to master) on the other end. It seems like a lot of schools, and often specific majors, are tending more and more toward the "training" end of that scale.

I suspect that a big part of that is how people rate their college experience. Just look at the press reports for an example. People don't rate their education on whether they are a well rounded educated person who can function in society. They rate it on whether it helped them find a job after graduation and whether that job was sufficiently better than what they could have gotten without the degree to justify the cost.

It could be that people are less willing to take a more general course load due to the costs involved. Education has become fabulously expensive. I can see where students make a value judgement and say "you know I wouldn't mind knowing more about history or being a better writer but the cost is just to high". After all if you are actually taking on debt to pay for your education every semester extra you spend at school equals a deeper hole you are going to have to excavate yourself from once you graduate. Under that paradigm is isn't surprising to me that there is ever greater pressure to focus the curriculum so as to get me the training I need and get me out working and paying down my debt as rapidly as possible.

What might begin to provide some pressure the other way is that so many graduates now basically can't effectively communicate their ideas in writing. I know where I am they have started making new applicants, mostly engineers and various scientists, present writing samples as part of their interview. Actually they also make them present in front of a group of people as well. Just to make sure that they have the skills to communicate what they know to others. It has been a big enough problem that for the existing staff they actually taught a writing course for the existing staff last year. Basically just to help those whose writing wasn't up to snuff improve. Assuming we aren't the only company that cares about this it could provide a bit of push back toward people taking more general education type courses. If only enough that they learn to write properly.

Re:One cause

[benhattman]

It's actually more than that. In order to learn something, you have to already basically know it.

University education teaches you the subject once. When you reach a point in your career (perhaps 15 years) later where you need to use that subject material, you already mostly know it. You just don't fully know it. Suddenly, a subject that took you 1 hour a day 5 days a week for 3 months to learn is something you can (mostly) relearn in perhaps one 8 hour day.

Even when you don't remember something...you do.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I like companies that do this because they are easier to compete against with "real" innovation.

Re:One cause

[Gen_Music]

The US and UK have.

Re: One cause

[VTBlue]

I totally agree. They should start Socratic method I high school if they want more critical thinking.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated with an ME 20 years ago. Every time there is a new problem I have to relearn the material. Where the education helps is I at least know how to attack the problem even if I have to look up and relearn how to do the analysis.

===
There is a big difference between what we had to do to learn in my youth, as to what you have today. For example, we did not have the web, so we had to crack the books, and learn / memorize the material. I for one and many of my classmates worked in teams, to do the assignments, and to explain the solution to each other. I graduated tied for first place in Maths, and with an honors degree. We sweated our 55-60 hours per week. And then we did an internship.

Today, google, bing, or whatever search engine you have, and you find the solution. You dont undersand it, but it looks like the correct solution to use. You either take the time now to learn it, or you find a peer who can do the work for you and explain to you what you really had to know when you were back in school.
And the oldtimer also knows search engines, but he does not have to learn the subject the first time, he just uses his knowledge to determine if the electronic document is appropriate.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's the only reason. I graduated magna cumme laude and I worked at the university as a teacher assistant even before graduating, but I still can't find a job after one year of graduation. Even though I completely agree with your point regarding the curve, I blame companies and universities for not being able to find a job. I couldn't find a co-op opportunity even though I offered to do it for free. Also, most professor at our university have been working at the university for over 30 years. They are tired and have no business teaching or updating the curriculum to match the needs of the industry. I asked the associate chairman at our college if they monitor job announcements to see what companies are looking for so the university can offer classes that the student can benefit from when applying for jobs. He said that is the student responsibility to find out what skill they need to get hired. I told him that the students are forced to take the classes the university offer so they can graduate. The courses offered are limited, and usually they are the same each semester and are outdated. All he said is that each professor suggest the courses they want to offer from their fields and I don't need to worry about that, because I will get on the job training to get the skill I need. Well I can't get a job and I don't think the university care. They got paid and gave me that piece of paper that I is useless without any experience.

Re:One cause

[Anonymous Coward]

During university, we used to try and do old exams. The further back we went, the harder the exams got. Trying to do an exam from like 10 years ago was ridiculously hard.

Have you considered that as time goes by the field becomes broader. Yes I probably wouldn't ace an exam from the 1980s because the subject matter would be much more in depth in the parts of the subject that class covered in common with me. I am sure though that in most cases the student from the 1980s would fail my exams if given with their curriculum.

Reads like a press release

[NitWit005]

This reads like a press release from IEEE-USA. It doesn't sound like they have any clue why the employment numbers have changed, but they want to complain about visas.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Waffle Iron]

but they want to complain about visas.

Well, who doesn't?

But seriously, why do they always want to single out engineering to artificially stuff the talent supply with imports? For example, it's obvious from the quality of our current congress that this country has a severe shortage of qualified candidates for public office. If they weren't flagrant hypocrites, they'd pass a law to issue visas to thousands of foreign politicians so that they could come here and compete for their seats, and in the process strengthen America's competitiveness and increase the quality of its laws.

Re:Reads like a press release

[sjames]

Meanwhile, CEO salaries are off the charts. We need to bring in some highly qualified CEOs from other countries where they're used to working for less than $1 million a year.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

I often wonder if those who rant about excessive CEO salaries wouldn't gladly accept the same salary if they were in a position to receive it. I suspect 99-99.9% would and gladly, too.

So what if it's supposedly greedy to take what the marketplace will pay for your talents. More power to 'em.

Re:Reads like a press release

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I often wonder why the hell they rant about what a CEO earns at all. Usually they make that much because they did something pretty damn original that sets them apart. Take Larry Page for example.

I think if people spent more time thinking about what they could do to increase their pay rather than worry about what somebody else makes, they'd probably earn more.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Libertarian capitalist bullshit. Not everyone can be a CEO, so your solution doesn't work. You are advocating that people game the system and get paid stupid amounts of money for doing fuck all. And then you wonder why the economy is fucked.

Re:Reads like a press release

[sjames]

It could be the way that CEO's board hop and grant their buddies outrageous salaries in return for the same. It could be that they keep getting offered increasingly stupid amounts of money while everyone else's pay is stagnant. Perhaps it's the way they get a 'performance bonus' even when they have clearly steered the company onto the rocks. It could be the corporate raider types who deliberately pump up the stock just long enough to cash out before the inevitable crash and STILL get offers for another job when they deploy the golden parachute. Perhaps it's because just a single year's salary would be enough to support a middle class lifestyle for a lifetime. It could be the way that when a company is struggling, they tell everyine they must tighten their belt, then they go have a lunch on the company that costs enough to feed a family of 4 for a month.

Take your pick.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

This might explain a little.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/258985-microsoft-lack-of-tech-workers-approaching-genuine-crisis

seems that the big software companies are trying to push thier costs lower.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite likely. But everyone can't make more. While there is growth, the pie at any given moment has to be divided among the actors in the market.

The US goes the route of everyone carving off as much as they can and fuck the other suckers who starve to death. Some less savory countries care off large slices of the pie and give to people for services rendered under the table. Europe in general takes the position that while good ideas and hard work should entitle you to larger slices of the pie, you don't get to grab so much of it that there's nothing left for anyone else.

The latter position is the best one. That way, we tend to get a larger pie next year so long as the fucking bakeries (ie. banks) don't run off with the whole pie first.

Re: Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble s that lots of CEOs are from OS and none of them care about USA or its workers. We need more CEOs that have worked their way up through the ranks in the industry and knows the true value of locally trained staff.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure there are CEOs who got there through doing "something pretty damn original that sets them apart". But so many of them are just charismatic business school alums who are well-connected and really good at schmoozing and giving speeches. For every big tech company with a star CEO who "gets it", there are at least 100 tech companies with CEOs whose knowledge of the company doesn't go much deeper than the stock price and which sales guys are the best to talk to about their favorite sports teams.

Re:Reads like a press release

[servognome]

CEO salaries track the S&P 500 pretty well, which is their primary job duty. They aren't all evil, they are just the ones who benefit the most from a broken system.

The biggest problem in the world is that there exists a certain class of "people" called corporations that don't need to worry about national borders. Humans have a large number of restrictions on where they can live and work, corporations do not.
Companies are making record profits, and thus rewarding CEOs, because they can get money from anywhere on Earth. In fact many US companies generate more revenue from outside the United states. Humans are shackled to their own nation and can't reap the rewards of an expanding global economy the way multi-nationals can.
A few of my engineering friends who have been lucky enough to find ex-pat jobs live like kings. Foreign countries place a high value on their qualifications and experience. Unfortunately, those opportunities are limited because no country wants foreigners to come in and take away their jobs.

Re:Reads like a press release

[mhh91]

Larry Page is going to drive Google to the ground, IMHO.

Talent is leaving the company because they found themselves being forced to work on a product they weren't passionate about. (Hello, G+!)

So no, I don't think he knows how to be a good CEO like Eric Schmidt who made Google what it is today, which makes him unworthy of both the title and money.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Sentrion]

You really can't compare CEO pay to the pay of workers and professionals. A key difference is that the CEO decides how resources are allocated. Say a startup company has a CEO and one employee. The company brings in $2mil in revenue its first year and the only expense is the employee salary. If the CEO offers the employee $100k per year and the employee agrees that this is a good salary to accept an offer and remain employed then the CEO can choose to do with the remaining $1.9mil whatever he sees fit. Now let's say that there is a minority shareholder who expects a return on his investment. Suppose he originally invested 40% of $200k in startup capital. And let's say that the CEO wants the stock price to remain stable and competitive with similar companies in his industry. If most similar companies are paying investors a 5% dividend each year as the stock price increases by 12% each year, then the CEO can do likewise, even though the young startup company has just earned a massive windfall in its first year. Such a windfall may (or may not based on various factors) drive up the price of the company stock. If the CEO wants to keep the price increase of the company stock at a stable level matching the growth of similar companies in his industry he can pay himself huge bonuses, increased salary, and enjoy a few tax write-offs such as a company car and a timeshare in a corporate jet. The end result is that the investor is paid the "market rate" in the form of dividends and capital gains while the employee is paid the "market rate" for his services, without any regard for the fact that the profits generated are far and above the market rates paid to either. The CEO in literally raking it all in simply because he's in the position to plunder the corporate funds however he chooses and his only risks are that the minority shareholders might grumble if they get less than the market rate for their investment, and similar concerns for employees who will only grumble if they earn less than their peers.

Now, expand this system to hundreds of types of employees, managers, and classes of investors. The CEO can only borrow so much cash to maintain position as majority shareholder, so he teams up with his buddy who is a CEO at another firm. They decide to swap shares with each other, sit on each other's board of directors, convince retailer investors (aka their employees of their own and their buddy's firms) to put their savings into their companies, perpetuate the myth of independent corporate governance, perpetuate the myth of free markets and the effectiveness of anti-trust legislation, direct the funds of their corporations to pass laws that strengthen the position of their class in society, pay exponentially higher compensation to managers depending on level of authority to perpetuate the myth that executive pay is a product of the free market, and while sitting on each other's boards of directors vote each other exhorbitant pay increases, bonuses, and perks. Then when the system comes crashing down, call up the government that they bought and paid for to borrow excessively by selling bonds to China, print currency that reducses the value of the US dollar earned and held by the middle class, and give it to them to "bail" them out, then vote each other bonuses for accomplishing the goal. Go back to the government to reduce their taxes while making sure there is little or no tax cuts for the middle class, "reform" bankruptcy, manipulate the labor market by paying low wages while making sure that underpaid workers receive food stamps, social security and medicaid that is subsidized by the middle class. Remind corporate stooge politicians to keep taxes for social security and medicare only on the first $100k of income so this burden is placed mostly on the middle class. Hire astro-turfers to convince the working class voters that giving bailouts and tax breaks to the wealthy will make the rich richer and that this is a good thing since ONLY the mega-rich create jobs, but make sure not to mention that those jo

Re:Reads like a press release

[Otiluke]

The US goes the route of everyone carving off as much as they can and fuck the other suckers who starve to death. Some less savory countries care off large slices of the pie and give to people for services rendered under the table. Europe in general takes the position that while good ideas and hard work should entitle you to larger slices of the pie, you don't get to grab so much of it that there's nothing left for anyone else.

The latter position is the best one. That way, we tend to get a larger pie next year so long as the fucking bakeries (ie. banks) don't run off with the whole pie first.

That's an insanely complex issue here in Brazil. Like everywhere else, bankers are making mad money.and that sucks, because when you consider the opportunity cost, you need a REALLY great idea to beat the earnings from the interest rates.

But what also happens here, is that in some areas, the unemployment compensation is so high - taking into account the local living costs - that some people are just satisfied with that, and actively refuse to work. Of course, that same amount of money can barely pay for food in the urban areas, so just lowering it won't work.

My point is... just making sure that the pie is justly divided between everyone is no small feat. Specially when you need to share justly among ants and elephants - just dividing evenly won't work.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Opportunist]

That's exactly why I don't get those insane wages. Why are they not subject to supply and demand? Hell, I can drive a bank into the ground and beg the government for some bailouts, and given the fringe benefits like shits and giggles about how these idiots are fully dependent on me and can't even refuse me 'cause else I sic my depositors who now lost everything after them, I'd probably even do it for free. Ok, not for free. But you needn't pay me a few millions a week.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Opportunist]

I'm not complaining about people like Larry Page. Not even about people like Zuckerberg. People who had an idea, risked something and it turned out to be a hit. No problem with them now turning profits that I couldn't dream of. They're the kind of CEOs I can dig, and I don't envy them a cent of their fortune. They did something great (ok, it's debatable whether FB should be considered "great", but it's successful), they had an idea, and they had the drive to make it come true.

Who I have a problem with is CEOs that move from company to company, milk them for a few years, kick out a few workers to boost stock value briefly to pump up their bonus, then when the company is driven into the ground they march on to ruin the next one. I neither understand how they get hired again and again, and neither do I have any kind of respect for them.

Re: Reads like a press release

[Opportunist]

No such luck. CEOs are nobility, they don't let just anyone join their ranks. Sure, occasionally you'll find someone who gets "knighted" by virtues of hard work and luck, who manages to build his own company and actually be a big success, but such changes on the social ladder are few and far between.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall from mid-2000s (non-US country) that the government banned any collective labour agreements that had an increase in salary over the inflation. By the end of the year, it turned out that the folks with high salaries (the top 10% of salaries if memory serves) had had a net increase in salary (ie. on top of inflation) that year of 13%.

I don't know any way to get the government to legitimize money-making for me while making the same illegal for you. Any suggestions?

Re:Reads like a press release

[Chrisq]

I often wonder if those who rant about excessive CEO salaries wouldn't gladly accept the same salary if they were in a position to receive it. I suspect 99-99.9% would and gladly, too.

So what if it's supposedly greedy to take what the marketplace will pay for your talents. More power to 'em.

This is a strange argument. If you say it is wrong to complain about unfairness unless you would choose to be a victim then nobody in the West should complain about starving children unless they chose to starve themselves!

Re:Reads like a press release

[sjames]

If everyone else in a company doesn't do their best, a company won't do very well in the S&P either. Ultimately, it's their job too, but their salaries don't track the S&P, the GDP/capita or even the CPI.

I keep hearing about how critical outsourcing is to corporate profits and wellbeing, except for the CxOs. I have never heard of management being offshored, particularly at the board level, even though giving just 1 job the axe there is as good as 100 engineers or several hundred lower paying jobs.

I notice that CEO performance bonuses don't seem to take a hit when the company fails to track the S&P or even when it tanks. Not even when the problem is obviously foolish decisions made at the top.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a rant. I could throw a fucking mountain of evidence at you that the CEO culture is corrupt, and oftentimes they hire a CEO from one company (and vastly different business model) to turn things around at another company. This usually ends in disaster, because the guy doesn't know how to run that particular industry. Examples: Brad Anderson (former Best Buy CEO) fucking up Sam Goody chain (trying to apply the same concepts that worked at Best Buy). Ron Johnson (former Apple Retail CEO) got hired by JC Penney to turn around their jewelry business, problem was, he knew jack and shit about how the jewelry business works (and as of yesterday, has resigned). Plenty more examples abound, but I'd need to write a book to tell them all. On CEO pay, take a look at this OLD article (before Bernie Ebbers was found to be the crook he is, no less!): http://progressive.org/media_1789. Take a look at a more recent article as well: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/story/CEO-pay-2010/45634384/1. I could throw another mountain of evidence against your line of thinking, but I've already written too much.

Re:Reads like a press release

[_KiTA_]

Talent is leaving the company because they found themselves being forced to work on a product they weren't passionate about. (Hello, G+!)

Oh NO, people are expected to work at a job that they are being paid outrageous sums for. The horror.

Welcome to the real world, Google devs. The DotCom era has been over for quite some time.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people if asked "would you want to have all the money in the world in your possession" would say "yes" because they are oblivious to the fact that money has no intrinsic value and only gains value when it's in circulation. Does that make them hypocrites? I don't think so. I think it makes them victims of a system fuelled by greed.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

But why would I want to waste my life working 16 hours a day, if I can survive working 20 hours a week, and spend the reminder doing what I love? The CEO's are doing what they love - making money, so why shouldn't I? The problem is they are being overtly gratified for their pursuits - they have large houses, expensive vacations and so on, and I don't, simply because the system we live in gratifies only those who set out to make money and not the ones who just want to do what they love, unless it means making money, which essentially makes CEOs and bankers the only winners in this entire set up.

And it's even worse - the system punishes everyone else with starvation. Because of what? Because they are not productive members of society? Wake up! Most of the production is done by slave labour in one form or another, and it has been for ages...

Re:Reads like a press release

[DrLang21]

I worked at a company that had 3 CEOs in the course of a single year. All had golden parachutes, all had stupid high salaries, all of them were from the same social club (IMPORTANT!), and all of them ran the company further into the ground.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not hung up on the fairness issue when it comes to CEO pay. So one guy in the company won the lottery, so to speak, that has no effect on me. The problem is that it changes the direction of how large corporations are run. CEO is not a safe job - far from it. Boards demands stellar financial numbers quarter after quarter, by the standards of whatever industry the company happens to be in. This makes CEOs financially focused and short-term focused, rather than trying to build a world class organization for the long haul. HP is a classic example.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Phoenix666]

fantastic summary of our society's modern dilemma. thank you for writing this.

Re:Reads like a press release

[czth]

But you probably didn't go to b-school with the government regulator in charge of allocating bailout money, and your fathers don't sit on the same boards nor your mothers on the same charities; so when you put your hat out for bailout money, by the time they get to you there's none left. There's your difference.

Re:Reads like a press release

[ebno-10db]

This reads like a press release from IEEE-USA. It doesn't sound like they have any clue why the employment numbers have changed, but they want to complain about visas.

Such a lack of critical analysis from the IEEE-USA. It's like saying that you don't know why your house is on fire, yet you still think it's a bad idea to throw gasoline on it.

Re:Reads like a press release

[ebno-10db]

I often wonder why the hell they rant about what a CEO earns at all. Usually they make that much because they did something pretty damn original that sets them apart. Take Larry Page for example.

Larry Page is not rich because he's a CEO, he's rich because he's a founder and major stock holder of Google. Brin isn't CEO, yet he's just as rich. Gates stepped down years ago, and I've heard he's not poor either.

Most large company CEO's run companies that were established and very profitable long before they worked there. They're executives, not owners (except to the extent they've gotten sweetheart stock options). As such they're part of the hired help. The reason they're paid so ridiculously much is because the owners (aka stockholders) are in a system where they don't exercise enough control, and/or have been bamboozled by the myth of the superstar CEO. Remember, all success is due to their efforts, and all failures are due to circumstances outside of their control.

To the extent that the stockholders can't exercise control, it's standing capitalism on its head. Either that or they're just suckers. US Fortune-500 CEO's make about 400x what the average employee does. In the UK its about 45x. In Canada and most of Europe it's 20x. In Japan it's 10x. Perhaps you've heard, but there are some successful companies in those countries. Do you think their CEO's are getting paid slave wages? Should we start a fund to help them out?

Re:Reads like a press release

[ebno-10db]

You really can't compare CEO pay to the pay of workers and professionals.

Why? A CEO is just a manager hired to handle affairs on behalf of the owners. Hence he's part of the hired help. It's called capitalism.

Re:Reads like a press release

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

We need more engineering-type CEOs. The problem is not many engineers are interested in getting an executive MBA.

Re:Reads like a press release

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Never use an minority example to represent the majority population. Majority of CEOs I know are fat a$$ sitting on a chair on top of the building scratching their feet and collecting their checks.

Re:Reads like a press release

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

When I got promoted in the management at my work a year ago, I volunteered to have my salary lowered in exchanged of hiring a couple more fresh college grads.

I know if I get those CEO-type salary I would do the same thing again.

I will take lower pay in exchange for higher morale at work. Always.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Copy/Paste/Saved.

Well said good sir.

Re:Reads like a press release

[snadrus]

"they .. benefit the most from a broken system"
So they will defend attempts to change it. And they'll be able to fund such defense.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Sentrion]

The CEO as hired manager subject to fair market theory is largely a myth in actual practice. Communism also touts amazing theories that if worked properly would not have left us with we know today as modern China, Russia, North Korea, and Cuba. Sure, if the CEO royally screws up he either destroys the company, therefore losing his job, or he gets fired by the board of directors and blacklisted.

But there are serious repurcussions of "firing" a CEO. To some degree it shows the public that the board of directors failed at hiring the right CEO in the first place. Just look at the controversy this week regarding the firing of the CEO at JC Penny. Of course, in reality it's not so much of a firing as a job change, because executives can just walk into another companies executive team by just mentioning their previous title and the prestigious names they have worked for, regardless of whether or not their own talents were what made the difference.

Investors fear change and the unknown, so at large public companies there is powerful internal pressure to make sure the CEO succeeds and do everything possible to avoid rocking the boat. The CEO in this case is not that different from the Queen of England - just smile, wave, look the part, deliver speeches the way they are written for you, and don't screw up doing something totally bizarre. But the management skill of a CEO earning mega millions is not much different than the department head of a medium sized company earning $300k (which is still probably bloated for the value provided - but again pay for managers is a gimmick to distribute the wealth upward away from employees but also away from investors, mostly retail investors with 401k plans, as the better opportunities for investment lie within the private equity realm where only "qualified" investors are allowed to play).

Even Warren Buffet has acknowledged that there are many companies that are run today to strengthen the position of management at the detriment of shareholders. Low compensation for workers is an automatic given.

Fundamentally our economy is not a free market of relatively equal participants, but rather an oligarchy of wealthy executives and hedge fund managers that work hard to keep the lion's share within the hands of a chosen few. Compensation for workers is based on meeting their bare essential needs, with talented and professional staff compensated just a little more to offset the cost of their education plus a tiny pitance more to keep them motivated to stay within the system.

This becomes a problem for engineers and developers when we presume that the free market is taking care of us and that we should be happy to work for the company the provides just enough pay at a location we prefer doing a job we are good at or sometimes even enjoy. It is a shame that human progress has to be shelved so that those who are delivering that progress can actually take for themselves a proper share of the cash stream flowing from their endeavors. It's a problem that is growing more perverse in every aspect or our society. You can't even join a gym without reading through a 20 page "policy" mostly regarding safety rules with archaic contract provisions and cancellation fees buried on page 16. Imagine how much work would NOT get done and the cost if we all sat down with a highlighter and an attorney to go over every single EULA for every program we install or every single Terms of Use disclosure on every website we visit. The fast paced skimming I give such documents takes too much time already, but I can't just allow myself to "agree" to so many contracts during the course of a day without at least hoping I can catch some of the scams and "gotcha"s out there. Profits today are in the taking, not in the producing.

But as long as technical professionals are happy being 10% better off than their less educated peers in spite of the extra time, effort, and risk of pursuing their own education and career development, and as long as they believe that unions are only for bl

Re:Reads like a press release

[Opportunist]

Sucks to be of peasant stock. It would be so much better to be nobility.

Re:Reads like a press release

[ebno-10db]

That's an interesting essay, and I did read the whole thing. However I hope you realize my point was that CEO pay is obviously not market driven, but under capitalist theory it should be. Hence anybody saying they believe in capitalism while claiming that our current system is capitalist, or trying to justify CEO pay on any other basis, is talking out of the wrong end of their body.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have an example of that type of CEO or is that just your imagination?

Are you thinking of private equity? That's different.

Re: Reads like a press release

[VTBlue]

Succinctly put...

Re:Reads like a press release

[servognome]

If everyone else in a company doesn't do their best, a company won't do very well in the S&P either

For operational level workers, poor performance causes a delay or a slight increase in costs, they have very little power over the bottom line. That's why it's important for workers to have the option to unionize, because collectively they can have a significant impact, and therefore influence corporate decisions.

I have never heard of management being offshored, particularly at the board level, even though giving just 1 job the axe there is as good as 100 engineers or several hundred lower paying jobs.

If cutting 1 CEO can create several hundred lower paying jobs, then why stop there. Cut engineers, and you can get 10 more lower paid worker; for each technician you cut you can hire twice as many unskilled employees. Businesses don't run on quantity of employees.
Contrary to what you believe, American companies haven't hesitated to hire foreign CEOs. For example Pepsi, Dow, Gap, MasterCard, and Adobe, not to mention the former heads of Intel, Coke, McDonald's, Citigroup, Eli Lilly and Alcoa didn't come from the US. I'm sure there are many other foreign born CEOs holding jobs that an American could do.

I notice that CEO performance bonuses don't seem to take a hit when the company fails to track the S&P or even when it tanks. Not even when the problem is obviously foolish decisions made at the top.

Total CEO compensation tracks stock performance, but you are correct that bonuses do not correlate. But this discrepancy occurs whether the company is doing well or not. They get their bonus if the company tanks, but if the company does amazing, their bonus do not come close to reflecting their positive influence.

The problem we have today is the imbalance of power on the influence of government. CEOs and corporations will always look out for their own interests, it's just the nature of the beast. But because of crazy campaign contribution and lobbying laws, the voice of the people is ignored by our government. Frankly, I don't care how much executives make, what I do care about is how our elected representatives refuse to address the discrepancy between the growth of corporate profits and the non-existent growth of worker salaries. The necessary social change isn't going to come from demonizing corporate managers, it has to come from change in our laws and government to prevent such exploitation.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, CEO pay *is* mostly market-driven... it's just that their market value has nothing whatsoever to do with running a company, and everything to do with their ability to appeal to institutional investors and raise capital when necessary. A CEO who knows how to let others beat him at golf without being obvious about it, raise lots of cash, and mostly stays out of the way when it comes to actually running the company is far more valuable than a CEO who's personally runs it like a well-oiled machine, but can't attract investors or capital.

Re:Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Bernie Ebbers wasn't a saint, and he pissed away a shitload of money, but someday he'll be remembered as the guy responsible for laying most of the fiber we depend upon today, 10 years before it had any hope of being cost-effective, let alone profitable.

Bernie's goal wasn't to simply lay "enough" fiber... he asked experts how much fiber Worldcom should lay, then multiplied it by 10 or 20. Or 100. Companies like AT&T held meetings to discuss whether they needed to have 4 or 6 fibers between New York and Chicago. Bernie said 'fuck it' and had the crews bury 500, on the theory that if we had it in unfathomable abundance, people would find new ways to use it (*cough* Netflix, Youtube, and realtime streaming pr0n) anyway.A hundred years from now, he won't be remembered for causing a huge financial scandal, he'll be remembered as the guy who made abundant fiber backhaul a reality.

Re:Reads like a press release

[sjames]

An individual worker may not have much influence over the bottom line, but collectively, they do. As for cutting engineers, CEOs already do that, it's called offshoring. Of course, they don't send that cash to the many lower paid workers, they cut them too and move all the cash up to the top.

I wouldn't care so much how much CEOs make if it wasn't for all the CEOs keeping everyone else's pay down claiming necessity while never cutting themselves or being cut by the board or the ever present stockholders who seem to want everyone's salary but the CEOs as a dividend.

I hold CEOs out separately because they hold themselves out separately. I'd like to see them subject to the same forces everyone else is so they'll think twice about it.

Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother hiring engineers over here when more and more of the design and fab work is being done on the other side of the Pacific?

The time of gadgets is gone.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not at a Maxim or Intel of the world, you're probably not doing chip design. If you're not one of the few engineers working on then you're probably not doing system level design (or not getting paid much). If you're strictly labeling yourself as an EE, then you're probably not doing robotics or anything else control/software heavy. And, most importantly, if you're not in China or India or from china or India, you might be unemployed!

But, it could be claimed that those bottom 7% really are the bottom 7% and just aren't that great at it. I've met many EE's that were entirely worthless, even management thought so.

Lol...captcha: cathode

Re:The time of gadgets is gone.

[Osgeld]

ee's do much more than computer chip design

Re:The time of gadgets is gone.

[ebno-10db]

If you're not at a Maxim or Intel of the world, you're probably not doing chip design.

Never heard of ASIC's? I've spent years doing chip design, but not a day at a "chip company".

If you're not one of the few engineers working on then you're probably not doing system level design

Huh? I've done more system level work when I haven't been doing chip design. Maybe you under the misimpression that computers are the alpha and the omega of EE. They're not. Just a sideline that became popular. I do embedded systems, and to me computers are just another component, like a power supply or an RF power amp.

If you're strictly labeling yourself as an EE, then you're probably not doing robotics or anything else control/software heavy.

To repeat myself, huh? What should they call themselves, robot wizard engineers? I'll tell my EE buddies in robotics to change their job titles.

But, it could be claimed that those bottom 7% really are the bottom 7% and just aren't that great at it.

Right, in less than a year all the incompetent EE's got canned but all the competent ones are still employed. If that happens in other fields the world may be a better place. BTW, wanna buy a bridge?

The current bubble is a software bubble

[erice]

All those startups writing mobile apps and creating cloud based services need software engineers.

They don't need electrical engineers.

Needing electrical engineers implies building hardware. Investers don't like hardware. It takes too long. It cost too much.

That leaves only established companies for the hardware engineerr and they are more interested in the profitablity of existing markets then in creating new ones. Hense, not a lot of hiring.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Okay, lets say there is an actual bubble, and places are hiring, how do I get a position? I've tried online job boards, and I'll find 300 technical recruiters who say they're thoroughly impressed with what I have on my resume, but I've only ever had three interviews in the past 10 years from these people. There has to be a better way. On paper, I should be in demand, I've programmed my entire life and can make Android and ios aps.

All I've figured I can do is try and write my own games and be entrepreneurial. Is now a good time to spam out resumes again?

My Resume if anyone is interested.

As far as entrepreneurial things not listed on the resume, I'm currently at the tail end of a system to play Game Master Driven RPGs(GMDRPG) online with friends. I believe my system has a lot of critical features ROLL20 doesn't have. I think tomorrow or the next day I'll be recruiting people from reddit.com/r/rpg to play. I'm kind of wondering how a public RPG session is going to play out even though I have features to allow people to observe if I get over 8 players. It took me several hundred hours of coding to get this far.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[erice]

Okay, lets say there is an actual bubble, and places are hiring, how do I get a position? I've tried online job boards, and I'll find 300 technical recruiters who say they're thoroughly impressed with what I have on my resume, but I've only ever had three interviews in the past 10 years from these people. There has to be a better way. On paper, I should be in demand, I've programmed my entire life and can make Android and ios aps.

Come out to the Newtech Meetup and similar regular events. Specifically watch for the "Shout Outs" but also just talk to people. Backend database is actually in more demand than front end app development but both come up.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't hire you. Separate your bible thumping from your professional life. I wouldn't tolerate it.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

And with the open hardware movement, standards developed by orgs like IEEE, and standardized software frameworks (Windows, Linux, ARM, Android, the list goes on), the hardware is the becoming the easy part aside from the very basic core architectures (CPU, buses, communications).

S/W engineers are scare because there aren't many in this coming world of highly complex systems integrated with hardware. There's a lot of s/w developers, but that's another discussion.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[mooingyak]

I'm feeling randomly charitable, so....

your resume is not terribly good. I don't know if it's a plus in the gaming industry, but if you're looking for any other kind of software job, putting 'Professional Gamer' as your top skill isn't going to help you much.

But that's not nearly important as your vagueness.

Worked as main programmer

What does that mean? Did the rest of the team report to you? Were they only on the project part time? Were you the architect for the project?

Designed an elaborate back end tool to edit maps

elaborate how? All I know from reading that is that it edits maps. What makes it special?

The chunk of your resume to go into the most detail on is whatever you've done most recently, as that's usually what will be read first. Give specifics, and give something that you WANT to be asked about. All I can glean from what you wrote is that you were in some way involved in writing two games over the last three years.

Also, if you ever get the chance, be the interviewer (or one of the interviewers). My resume writing skills got much better once I started sitting on the other side of the table.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

I like your attitude that the hardware is the easy part. I've made a lot of money over the past two years cleaning up messes created by people who thought they had the hardware down because hacking something together with an arduino was easy.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[aztracker1]

I gave the same guy some advice on a similar posting... I think the guy just needs to put some time to polish his resume and website up... I just updated my own resume as I'm starting a new job hunt.. and was feeling bad about my 2010 jQueryUI based site.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Thank you for the resume advice. I know my resume is bad, but I am not a bad programmer, in fact, I'm exceptionally good at it with strengths in complexity of design and speed of development. I don't like the term Rockstar because it implies I have lots of bad habits and that I need special treatment, but I'm most definitely top talent who isn't asking for top talent salary.

What I gather from your resume advice is a key glimpse of insight. For the longest time I kept being told to keep the resume to one page, and I struggled to be able to fit all my information on one page. But what you taught me,"I must elaborate" brought me to thinking that I can fit hypertext links after almost everything in my resume, and have a website elaborate as much as I feel like! I thank you greatly for this as it is the #1 resume advice I've gotten in the past 10 years I've been seeking employment.

As lead programmer, I was the architect for the engine starting from absolute scratch. The only things I didn't program on that game(feel free to play it) were the menus and inventory. I even was co-game designer although as you see it is a tribute to Gauntlet. The game was mainly designed to be a tech demo which would spring board us into making a Flash MMO, but the people working with me got busy on other projects and didn't want to go forward with it.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[anyaristow]

It's apparent both from your resume and your post that any conversation with you turns into a discussion of gaming. If you're serious about this post and if this is a real resume, consider removing most references to gaming and see if you still have a page of useful info to write. Describe your experience in terms of technologies, skills, projects and business results.

Programming for someone else is about solving someone else's problems. If you've never done that, or if you don't even want to do that, then you have no real experience to offer.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

"Thank you for the resume advice. I know my resume is bad, but I am not a bad programmer, "

If you know your resume is bad, why haven't you fixed it? People can seriously spend less than 1 minute on a resume, if they read it and find something they don't like, they stop reading and go "next". Listing progamer right at the top there is going to put off almost anyone who isn't a game development house, and even then being a progamer isn't exactly something that is going to impress a lot of them.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to stuff a bunch of stuff in your resume and find its too long, you're doing it wrong. Your resume is a quick summary of your most relevant experience and abilities for the job in question. The purpose is to make you stand out in a stack of other candidates. Detail in a web link isn't going to do that. The resume needs to be compelling on its own before a hiring manager is going to even bother with your URLs.

You have all the wrong kinds of details on your resume already. For example
  * "Learning: Can pick up any high level programming language and be skillful rapidly." -- Self evaluations mean nothing to me.
  * "Unique puzzle game. It takes a moment to learn, but it is fun, and has strategies." -- Your evaluations of your own work don't mean much to me, especially when they're so subjective.
  * "Eagle Scout and Order of Arrow" -- As someone who worked my ass off to make Eagle, I agree that you're justifiably proud. But that was ~15 years ago. Surely you've accomplished something since then, no?
  * The Best Buy thing is irrelevant to any software engineering position. Not only is it noise, but I wonder why you left after three months.

Also, if you're applying to jobs outside the games industry, you use too much gaming jargon. I don't know what a "Tekken style" game is.

My advice is to scrap the whole thing and think about the kinds of jobs you're applying for. Build your resume around showing objectively and concisely how you're a good fit for those positions. Massage it a bit for each job. Ditch the objective and write a cover letter explaining what you would bring to the table at that particular job. Find someone who is good at this stuff to edit this all mercilessly.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[anyaristow]

I don't like the term Rockstar because it implies I have lots of bad habits and that I need special treatment, but I'm most definitely top talent who isn't asking for top talent salary.

It appears you have 11 months professional experience since graduating in 2003, and the rest is personal projects. Part of being able to get interviews, and turn them into job offers, is being able to realistically describe what you've done. "I'm too good even for the term rockstar" isn't reflected in your resume.

You've got about eight years of time to account for. Do your two bitly links realistically account for three of those years? Do you even have a name for the 2006-2009 project that supposedly accounts for four more? Did any of your independent experience result in a completed project? Anything marketable? Did you solve any problems for anyone? Was any of it purposefully designed? Did anyone earn any money? Did you work with anyone? Did you have to follow anyone else's spec, take direction from anyone, accept suggestions from users, work with someone else's code?

"I can write a game of my own design for an audience of me" isn't terribly impressive experience. You'll have to show you've worked with and for other people, and that what you've created is useful for someone other than yourself.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[jezwel]

Working for someone else is about solving someone else's problems. If you've never done that, or if you don't even want to do that, then you have nothing to offer.

Fixed that for me; this is a good reminder.

I looked at my last resume (2 years old) and it really needs some work. Time to update and consolidate the old experience. I'm not looking for a new job, but it's a good idea to review and document your achievements against your objectives every once in a while.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[mypalmike]

One major barrier between you and a job is your terrible resume. Take some time off from whatever the hell ROLL20 is and work on your resume. Use sentences. The one-page rule is a thing of the past. Just make a timeline, with consistent formatting, of what you have been working on, most recent first.

Company
Dates
Job title
1-2 paragraph description.

Use sentences in the description. Use active rather than passive language ("I did something." Not "Something was done.") If the company was just you or you-with-some-friends, use a company name and mention it was a sole proprietorship in the description. Use dry, objective language. "As lead programmer on "Foozy Whatzit", I implemented the core game logic, rendering, and audio code in ActionScript. I implemented a level editor for internal users in C++ on Windows."

Don't claim fame. Don't claim you're good at games. Nobody cares. Not even game companies really do (I've worked at three.) You have pride in those accomplishments, but as they were over a decade ago, they have little relevance on a current resume. If you must, put them at the bottom with the eagle scout stuff, and only when applying to game companies.

Don't use exclamation points ever on a resume. A resume is business writing, and it's a point-by-point list of things to discuss during a job interview.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[militiaMan]

Real developer don't talk to people. He is not a tech propaganda type. He is a developer. Morons think that a evangelist can code.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[militiaMan]

I believe in God to. So do me a favor and don't hire me either. He has a degree from a top Uni and you can't put up with him being religious. Just goes to show how bad the economy is.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, that is a shitty resume.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[goose-incarnated]

Okay, I'll try to help:

Keep bible thumping to a minimum - currently your online identity is inextricably tied to your religious evangelism. Religious evangelists don't really get hired, to be honest - no one likes them, nor wants to deal with them.

Take out your gaming achievements. If you must have them in, put them last under "Hobbies" or something. Right now your WoW achievements and starcraft whatevers are the first skill that employers see when they read your CV, when it really should be both last and optional.

A good idea is to host your own site and place all of your accomplishments there (links to software/reviews/whatever you've written, etc). A blog that is updated semi-regularly is good too, if you can ensure that you do technical or semi-technical postings.

So, good luck, hth

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[goose-incarnated]

It's not a question of being religious: he's more than that - he's an evangelist. A believer in god is okay - an evangelist is not.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[TheRaven64]

You put a version of your resume for Slashdot online as a Word document? First complaint: know your audience. Some recruiters will require Word documents (usually the shady ones, who want to edit it before passing it on), but if you're putting it here then use PDF. That also means that the formatting won't be screwed up when the person opening it has a different version of Word, different printer drivers, or different fonts installed. Oh, and using Word also means that when I open it with my locale set to English, I get red underlines for some US spellings - probably fine if you're applying to a US company, but just another thing that can prejudice a reviewer against you, and that's before I even start reading it.

The page limit thing is definitely a US thing. In the UK it's normally 3 pages, but with the important caveat that a lot of the time people will only read the first page. I'd recommend extending it, but do make sure that the most important stuff is on the first page.

Now let's start at the top:

Seeking Software Engineering position utilizing my computer programming and design skills

How about a full sentence? Seeking a software engineering position. Oh, and why do you capitalise Software Engineering? You don't capitalise Computer Programming. I'll cut you some slack here, because this sentence should be tailored to each application, so I'll assume it's a placeholder.

Now, on to General Skills. You're a Pro Gamer. So what? The competition part should go in the Accomplishments section, the fact you're a Pro Gamer means nothing unless you can say that it gives you some skills that might be transferable. Did you have to work as a team in this competition? The Learning part is self-assessed and therefore meaningless. How many languages have you picked up this way and written anything non-trivial in? With no evidence, this is just 'I think I'm great' and that's a waste of a line.

Computer Skills. The only one that you give any quantitative information about is C++, but 10,000 hours? Over what period of time? What is the context? Who were you working for then? Don't put these in isolation, put them in context. An HR drone will not bother to try to compare the 10,000 hours you quote to the 3 (or whatever) years the job requires, they'll just bin it. Someone more careful will look at the post and say

Next, Experience. URL shortener links? I'm going to assume that they're malicious and not click on them. People will either read CVs on screen (and so can click on proper links) or on paper (and so won't bother typing in any URLs). On the first pass, you get 1-3 minutes to impress someone. Links don't do that. Let's look at each part:

You worked on two games for a startup as 'main programmer' (what does this mean? Team leader? Or just most self-important person?). Lots of unsupported adjectives. What does 'Published on Shockwave' mean? The game was? You did? Why do I care, as a potential employer? I don't care how many levels the dungeon crawler has, I care what skills you had to use there. 'Unique puzzle game. It takes a moment to learn, but it is fun, and has strategies' is pretty appalling English ('and has strategies?'), is self-assessed, and is irrelevant. A (properly cited) quote from a review might be relevant if you are applying for a job as a game designer, but then only if it's relevant to your contribution.

Independent work shouldn't be a heading. If you were self-employed then, say that. If you started a company, say that. If you were consulting, say that. Again, I don't care what kind of game you wrote. I care what skills you developed, what your original contributions to the project were, and so on.

Geek Squad? Why were you working there in the middle of a career as a programmer and at the same time that you were independent? Your software wasn't selling? It was a requirement of your probation? You needed to make a bona fide effort to get a job to

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Ash Vince]

"I can write a game of my own design for an audience of me" isn't terribly impressive experience. You'll have to show you've worked with and for other people, and that what you've created is useful for someone other than yourself.

This is the most important task for any junior developer (they guy is not a team lead as he clearly has no experience leading a development team): Doing what other people tell them to do.

It is all very useful to have someone on the team who makes suggestions as to whether a project can be improved, but is far more important that if the suggestion is rejected that they do not argue and just get on with the task as it was given as sometimes the the person telling you not to do something a particular way really does know better and doesn't have time, or can't for other commercial reasons to explain exactly why they need it done that way.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[czth]

Would mod up if I had points - good analysis, came to say some of the same, and I hope he appreciates your time. Honestly, if I had a stack of 50 resumes and wasn't hiring for something like a game testing position, I'd be done at the "pro gamer" bit - not because of it per se, but because of its prominence.

I've also had recruiters modify a resume given in Word format, so will only send them PDFs (for now, since they're not usually competent to find it, I still have a Word format resume available on my site). One was a material change that claimed experience I did not have; I only heard about it because an interviewer read it to me over the phone, and I told them that was added by the recruiter.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[militiaMan]

They are pretty much the same thing at the end of the day. Lets say you have a preacher that makes claims to heal people, but is also the best developer in the world. Would you not hire them and ignore the what you obviously would believe to be false claims?

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

What is weird is that I got advice to remove all the "I did something". I was told if you have I's in your resume it is bad form by the Career Center at CMU. I like all this advice from everyone though even if it is conflicting advice gotten from other places. It is good to change things up when wasn't working.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[HeckRuler]

and ignore the what you obviously would believe to be false claims?

As a co-worker I would not ignore his false claims and I would call him out on it.

A believer in god is okay - an evangelist is not.

They are pretty much the same thing at the end of the day.

Yeah, I'm calling you out on that one. Either:
a) No True Scotsman fallacy, and according to you, the vast swath of Christianity aren't "real" Christians or
b) You don't understand what "evangelizing" means, or
c) You're unaware of the vast majority of Christian sects.

This isn't the sort of spirited debate that managers like to hear. It get's their liability all riled up.

Re:The current bubble is a software bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an example then. Rather than putting something like the following on your resume:

* I designed and developed a back-end to an invoicing system [blah, blah, blah...]

You would write something like:

* Designed and developed a back-end to an invoicing system [blah, blah, blah...]

Following is criticism that I hope is constructive. Please do not take it as an attempt to offend.

Your resume is unbelievably awful. It's so awful that I find it difficult to believe that you graduated from Carnegie Mellon and I suspect that many potential employers feel the same way I do. I've seen hundreds of resumes from people from all types of universities (from diploma mills to the most elite institutions) and I've never seen a resume from a top-tier institution as weak as yours, even from people for whom English is a second or third language and with absolutely no work experience.

Furthermore, I spent another 10 minutes looking for information about you on the Internet and found another resume that states that you graduated in December 2002 while the one you mention here on Slashdot says you graduated December 2003. Again, the very weak resume along with this discrepancy in graduation dates will lead many potential employers to think that you do not really have a degree from CMU.

Finally, I checked out your Facebook page where you state that you don't really like programming. While that might not preclude you from being an exceptionally productive worker, very few corporations, if any, would be interested in hiring you because your motivation to work and produce for the company would be in question.

The above are problems that I would flag and that's without even looking at the content/message of the resume. The biggest issue you have is the mess of a work history you've provided. You should be entering your tenth year as a college-educated, professional technologist and yet, from your resume, I would only give you credit for maybe three to five years of work that are applicable to a software development position. Questions that a hiring manager might ask himself are:

1. Why did you only work eight months at PIDI?
2. What have you been doing since October 2012?
3. When you were an independent from 2006-9, did you work for a company? If so, what is the name of the company? A hiring manager reading about your work experience in 2006-9 is really not interested in the features of the game. He's going to be more interested in the technologies you used and how you applied them to solve interesting problems while creating the product.

Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Engineers will be where the manufacturing is -- in China. Want a job as one? Easy -- learn Chinese, get a passport, move to China. Want to make money in the West? Get a degree in "business" or "marketing", do some aggressive self-promotion and, if lucky, get funding from the Internet.

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on your volumes. If you're putting out millions a year, yeah, you're stupid to not go to China. If you're doing something on the order of tens of thousands of units per year, manufacturing in the US is still pretty viable and probably preferable. There's plenty of interesting (and profitable) things being done at that scale, even if it's not the kind of thing that gets written up in Wired every issue.

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, yeah, we've all heard about Lady Aga and Sparkfan. However, they also manufacture in China, and their Chinese manufacturers sell their junk for a quarter of the cost and with free shipping. So, while there are some niches left still, these will erode, sooner than later. The long-term option for you is to move to Texas, study patent law and hope the US can still maintain enough military edge to help you collect your fees. Alternatively, start many startups and many blogs and hope one of them gets funding. Unfortunately, by the time you'll want to retire, you'll have only the hope left.

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

they dont design in china

the chineese couldnt make a grilled cheese sandwich without seeing one to copy from

the only thing the chineese is good for is to be a toxic wasteland, and disposable people that no one cares about, not even their own people

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not actually what I was talking about. Catering to the "maker" crowd at those volumes is all fine and well, but that's not the only thing in that volume range. A lot of government, defense, and industrial stuff is, though. And with the defense stuff, good luck outsourcing to people who can't even get security clearances.

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha, "they dont design in China". Don't make me laugh. "They" don't design -- they, as the whole US industry, market shit that has been developed by H1B visa holders in exchange for residence. Read the US patents of the past three decades. Most of the names that appear are those of Indians and Chinese. While the pay was good in the US (mostly on the account of abusing its post-WWII "superpower status", i.e. skewing the global economy so that US profited from it unfairly), the brain drain was US-ward, so the smart people were working there. Now that the world is changing, the "Americans" with Chinese and Indian names will remain in China, and in the US you'll have the lawyers. Which will gradually turn into ambulance chasers -- until the ambulances stop moving for lack of maintenance.

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[siddesu]

You think defense doesn't get outsourced? Apparently the MIC doesn't think like you do. According to almost everyone in the industry, outsourcing in defense is common, increasing and the scope is widening over the whole range -- from design to manufacturing. http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/January/Pages/OutsourcingUSDefenseNationalSecurityImplications.aspx http://www.defencetalk.com/outsourcing-services-helps-defense-aerospace-reduce-costs-27510/

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the H1-Bs that I've seen are representative of the whole, I wouldn't touch their designs: it's pure shit.

-- green led

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe, because with your established track record as certified by your impeccable credentials, you seem uniquely qualified to judge the quality of design. Wanker.

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[serbanp]

Read the US patents of the past three decades.
Most of the names that appear are those of Indians and Chinese

Pure Horse Manure. Very few electrical-design related patents are granted to all-Chinese (and virtually none to Indian-sounding names). Today, yesterday, last year, ten years ago etc.

Top-notch Electrical Engineering requires a certain kind of mindset incompatible with the fast-n-loose approach of certain Asian nations. You would find much more Software people coming from these areas than EEs.

Fact is, good EE skills continue to provide job security in US and partially in Europe. Freshmen have a double handicap to overcome: lack of experience and lower-quality training. The biggest threat to us is the insane race to the bottom..

Re:Who needs electrical engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure racist bullshit, without much basis in fact. Skills depend on education and resource availability. The West has had the "edge" over the rest of the world mostly because of a relative lack of scruples about murder, torture and plunder than any other quality.

Fact is, as education in Asia has improved, so have the intellectual labor output and quality, and a quick perusal of the patent databases will show you the other fact -- that there is a lot of EE skills and patents that come from all over Asia -- from Tokyo to Singapore. Your biased butthurt isn't going to change reality.

Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[AHuxley]

Come to Australia for a few months optical splicing work.
The locals need help with that.
Depending on the election outcome years of corroded copper maintenance work could open up if your skilled.
Cable slides out, cable slides in .... cable slides out, cable slides in... crushed duct.

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

"Cable slides out, cable slides in .... cable slides out, cable slides in... crushed duct."

Two strokes?

*runs to wife*

"See I told you it's normal!"

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[dohzer]

"Depending" on the election outcome? You make it sound like there is an alternative to the Liberals winning. How Strange.

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[Xacid]

Actually...I'm kind of interested in this. Know what regions, companies, etc are looking?

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

Cable slides out, cable slides in .... cable slides out, cable slides in... crushed duct.

Burma Shave?

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[AHuxley]

Happy to help:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/457047/nbn_fibre_splicers_strong_demand/
and the issues
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2013/4/2/nbn-buzz/nbn-co-contractor-relations-weaken-further
" largely blaming construction companies' inability to hire skilled labour quickly enough"
Australia has a closed system for tech - protecting a guild like union history and high pay for skilled locals.
Mining needs skills too - eg heavy diesel maintenance
Sadly Australia does not reach out to the USA, Canada, UK, South Africa for worlds best skills.
Pay for 'education' (then work), protection visa and family reunion visa needs seem to push out real tech needs.
What places are left get filled with wage lowering staff that know not to make trouble.... ;)
Now if the job is in need, time is tight and your skilled, no locals are around at the price-
Try a few days of google searching set to site:au and send out a "few" emails.
All the best.

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

All over the country.

Google the NBN (National Broadband Network).

It's currently being rolled out. We have an election later this year, if the existing party in power wins, then we continue the rollout (Lots of fiber work).

If the current party loses, Australia lose the NBN and become a 3rd world country in terms of IT as the opposition has promised to turn the NBN to threads and keep using the copper network. Meaning there will be a lot of work for people wanting to maintain that copper...

Still interested? Be aware, we have idiots in government... and drop bears.

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[Xacid]

Much thanks!

Re:Follow the Digital Harvest Trail

[Xacid]

And I was worried about drop koalas. Now I have to worry about drop bears?! ;)

I'm pretty sure the term "government" is synonymous with "idiots". Nature of the beast I suppose.

Thanks for the info! Good stuff.

Patent troll bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to make hardware (high cost high risk, easy to attack with patent trolls), outside the USA. You can always cut out the USA market if you get bogged down by the trolls.

It's about protecting investment. Whose going to invest in all that hardware and all the prototypes, if they can't even be sure they'll be allowed to sell the product at the end of it.

They sure deserve it

[Anonymous Coward]

Black in HOT in AC and GROUND in DC?!

Be carful what you read in this article.

[ErstO]

Although Electrical Engineers may include Electronic Engineers, they are really two different disciplines, Electrical Engineers typically work the construction trades, building and power transmissions. Most engineers involved in integrated circuits, digital circuits and most of the new tech innovations, are more Electronic Engineers then Electrical Engineers. The high employment rate in Electrical Engineers is mainly following the low employment rate for all the construction industries. Grads with a degree in the Electronic Engineering fields ... even with no work experience will have no problem finding work, at least here in CA.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[erice]

The high employment rate in Electrical Engineers is mainly following the low employment rate for all the construction industries. Grads with a degree in the Electronic Engineering fields ... even with no work experience will have no problem finding work, at least here in CA.

By "CA" you must mean Canada because in California, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area (including Silicon Valley) this is not remotely true. Engineerig jobs that don't require experience are nearly myth. Listings are few and require quite specific experience.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,

I graduated with a Bachelor of Electronic Engineering 3 years ago in the middle of the GFC. I studied, live and work in Melbourne, Australia. When I graduated there appeared to be very few Electronic Eng jobs about so I ended up in telecoms. I'm wondering if you could detail the sorts of jobs and tech firms that you are talking about in Electronic Eng? Unfortunately I am not in a position to move countries (family commitments) but I am looking to move jobs soon and I'd be very interested to see whether the same sorts of positions are available around here.

Thanks!

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not even close to being true. Currently working my way through a degree in EE and.. no. Each thing you listed is a subset of electrical engineering. Something you would get a minor in while getting your EE degree.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[aaarrrgggh]

It is in SoCal. An EE with a PE and OSHPD or CF experience should be able to get a job pretty quickly. Talk to a recruiter or check out Craigslist. For a new grad, you need to at least have some NEC and ACAD knowledge and passion, but there are jobs out there.

The dead spot in the industry is for designers that really were CAD operators. There just isn't enough room for them any more, unless they can perform above their title.

I would suggest trying to find out who an anonymous posting on Craigslist for a similar position comes from, and target them via linkedin, phone, and their website. Replying directly seems to go into the desperation hire bin; the goal should be to find your way into the strategic hire bin before the job is posted.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[aaarrrgggh]

Electronics engineering is less focused on the PE exam track than power systems engineering. Legally, only a licensed PE in the electrical discipline should be referred to as an Electrical Engineer. The GP's point was likely more that the jobless rate is in Electronics and not "Professional Electrical Engineers". The IEEE does a piss-poor job of representing our side of the industry, so there is a little animosity... at least from me.

I do agree that the academic label is more widely understood and accepted... and moreover most universities do a piss poor job of teaching power systems engineering.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[Lluc]

The Professional Engineering "license" is an archaic pile of junk that is only useful to electrical engineers who rubber stamp wiring diagrams on official blueprints.

I haven't looked at it in years, but I think it took until 2000 (or beyond) before they tested much digital electronics knowledge, but they did require all electrical engineers to answer questions in statics and thermodynamics. The PE exam made itself irrelevant for 95% of electrical engineers by maintaining a test for graduates of a 1980s engineering program rather than tracking how modern technology was changing the core requirements of the degree.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

As an "Electrical Engineer" graduate, I can assure you that both disciplines (electronics and power transmission) are taught in the classroom. In fact, they are very much related fundamentally.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Craigslist seems to be how hiring is going nowadays, as job boards are completely useless and get spammed by recruiting companies.
Just go to craigslist and avoid the meat market.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[X-Gamer]

Most universities these days do not distinguish between electrical and electronics engineering these days. These programmes are usually titled "Electrical Engineering" or "Electrical & Electronics Engineering", and have a fair mix of both electrical and electronics stuff in their foundational modules. The difference only occur in the senior years when students get to choose specializations such as signal processing, embedded systems, power engineering, controls and automation, microelectronics and etc. These specializations are distinct enough that graduates from the same course but in different specializations can have completely different skillsets. Were it not for the common set of foundational moddules, I think it might as well have been 6 or 7 disciplines instead. All of these are however considered to be "Electrical Engineering" by IEEE. The way the article uses the term "Electrical Engineers" probably along the lines of academic disciplines like you described. It isn't just referring to power systems related jobs but all of the above specializations, most of which are closely tied to hardware and manufacturing jobs.

Re:Be carful what you read in this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, there isn't a difference. Electrical engineers are primarily "Electronic Engineers" in ABET-certified schools. The market for power has always been tiny compared to electronics over the last, say, 90 years.

Hardware costs too much to make

[Spy Handler]

so nobody makes custom hardware for in-house use. You buy off-the-shelf hardware.

Software is a lot cheaper to make so a lot of companies hire developers and make their own.

Re:Hardware costs too much to make

[Osgeld]

"You buy off-the-shelf hardware"

which just appears with unicorn farts and magic right?

I'm tired of H1B politics

[Ion Berkley]

As a 25 year chip/hardware engineer, the last 18 of which mostly as a hiring manager in Silicon valley at bleeding edge small and medium sized companies I can say categorically that it's never been easy to find engineers as I good as I wanted to find, and I don't recall it ever being worse than it is right now...I have people asking me left and right for IC and H/W people and I have non to recommend to them. My experience with H1B's is at odds with much I've read on here and elsewhere...and it leads be to the conclusion that there is abuse of the H1B system in roles such as the IT service industry, but in R&D taking the pick of the worlds best people is the life blood of US innovation, it always has been and it continues to be. I don't know what the IEEE's agenda is, but I can say absolutely that there are incredible opportunities available and apparently no-one who can legally work in the US who have have what it takes to hold them down.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the problem is that everyone wants experienced engineers at a good price, but nobody wants to train them. They sit through four years of terrible college curriculum that will be lucky to have them design and produce even one project (that might not even be genuinely practical or profitable) and then we all wonder why there just aren't any good X, or Y, or Z left in the field. As the older ones retire, there's no younger blood to take their place, because training the next generation has never been a priority in industry, and the colleges sure as hell aren't replacing that kind of bond.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[phantomfive]

I'm just waiting for salaries to rise, them I'm looking for a new job.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[asm2750]

Great comment AC, you echo my thoughts exactly.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's a long term solution, but how about companies actually start to pay their top engineers? Nothing sparks interest in engineering studies like the engineer next door driving his new ferrari. Now it's the lawyers and MBAs that drive nice cars, guess which career looks better from the viewpoint of someone pondering what to study? They will get disappointed in reality, because there will be way too many of them eventually. But that's what it looks like right now.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[wienerschnizzel]

Maybe the whole concept of colleges in engineering is broken. I've met with people with a CS masters degree who didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.

I'm not saying that every graduate is bad but that even the reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have no business having them.

If I look at the (CS/SW related) degree from the employers perspective, all that it grants is that the holder knows how to use variables, loops and branching in programming and that he/she has a rudimentary idea about what a compiler, an OS and a file system is. Is that really worth the 4-5 years and $100K (and more) spent on a something a high school kid could learn in half a year?

That produces a disconnect between the graduates expectations and the company's requirements - the graduate has invested time and money into his degree and expects a salary of a professional and the company doesn't want to pay that much for somebody with so little training. I believe the really good graduates do actually get god jobs out of school - it's just the average and below average people who cannot get employed.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Average]

Perhaps the problem is that everyone wants experienced engineers at a good price, but nobody wants to train them. They sit through four years of terrible college curriculum that will be lucky to have them design and produce even one project (that might not even be genuinely practical or profitable) and then we all wonder why there just aren't any good X, or Y, or Z left in the field.

Hint... the college curriculum was *always terrible* in that sense. Do you think your typical 1967 ME/EE grad from Oklahoma State was designing or producing something practical or profitable in school? 'Project-based learning' wasn't even a thing.

He got hired anyway by Honeywell or General Dynamics or Bendix or TI or whoever. And, not uncommonly, retired from them (or their successor firms) a few years ago.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the really good graduates do actually get god jobs out of school - it's just the average and below average people who cannot get employed.

They can't all be dieties.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like it's time we nix the college system and bring back the tried and true apprenticeship system.

Nothing like learning your trade than learning it under the supervision of a proven master. You might argue such a system would discourage innovation and hold back new blood, but to that I can only say: as opposed to what?

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[dwpro]

...all that it grants is that the holder knows how to use variables, loops and branching in programming and that he/she has a rudimentary idea about what a compiler, an OS and a file system is. Is that really worth the 4-5 years and $100K (and more) spent on a something a high school kid could learn in half a year?

Not to defend poor CS curriculum that has weak programming, but programming expertise is not what a college degree represents. A degree represents a broad based knowledge (more than rudimentary, but certainly not extensive ) of many different fields to have a well rounded individual fit for molding. One should expect some gaps in knowledge of specifics in the different technologies. It's not a certification of ability to do specific work, that's why we have apprenticeships, certifications, trade schools, and internships.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

The H1-B's are considered temp help.

I haven't gone out of my way much to educate them and most colleagues I know feel about the same.

Training priority for the next generation of H1-B's gets the priority it deserves for temp help.

They won't get the same bond with senior staff that a new US EE with potential will receive.

Engineering staff cares about them about as much as Management cares about us.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the history books you can see many great Engineers start as apprentices in their field. Higher education has become a badge for the wealthy and connected to flaunt and say look how smart I am. Unfortunately there is some poor kid somewhere had he been given the opportunity he would have changed the world, but because badge wearing pricks fill the ranks that will never happen.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[wienerschnizzel]

Sure. So let's look at the examples I've given (real problems I've encountered):

didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.

Meaning - knowing how the concept of exceptions work, knowing how file system works conceptually and have a basic idea of what relational databases are.

Are you saying these are too specific and not in the scope of CS/SW Engineering degrees? I don't buy that. I KNOW these things are in software and CS related curriculi. I'm just irritated by the fact that people who don't grasp these basic things still get the degree.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can remember, what were your interviews like and adjusted starting pay? Thanks,

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[dwpro]

I will admit those specific examples cannot be defended for anyone with a modicum of programming experience, and the universities should be ashamed at endorsing such. I've largely not had that level of ignorance in my hiring experience, and don't expect that it's all that widespread.

However, I find that good number of folks who _do_ understand programming basics and can recite all the database normal forms often don't turn out very good code. I blame the lack of programming apprenticeships, personally.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

more like we are crunched now, as well as this meme started going around american biz that training the next generation of engineers is bad

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

What does watching your weight on a diet have to do with deities, God, and the divinity?

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[ebno-10db]

As a 25 year chip/hardware engineer, the last 18 of which mostly as a hiring manager ...

As someone who spent a short time 18 years ago as a real engineer, but since 1995 has been a hiring manager ...

There. Fixed it for ya.

bleeding edge small and medium sized companies ... never been easy to find engineers as I good as I wanted to find ... don't recall it ever being worse than it is right now...I have people asking me left and right for IC and H/W people ... in R&D taking the pick of the worlds best people is the life blood of US innovation ... I can say absolutely that there are incredible opportunities available ... no-one who can legally work in the US who have have what it takes to hold them down

That's the standard cut-and-paste used by every hiring manager, headhunter, etc. Given the remarkable uniformity of such remarks, I must conclude that it's taken from some newsletter you guys get or something. Please though, if you're going to shovel this bovine manure, couldn't you at least have the courtesy to pretend it's in your own words? It'd only take a few minutes.

Out of curiosity, do you think any actual practicing engineer would believe a word of what you wrote? And if they were dumb enough to believe some of it, would you be dumb enough to hire them?

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[ebno-10db]

Hey, I like my '97 Saturn. I used to drive a Ferrari but my cousin liked it so much I gave it to him.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[wienerschnizzel]

I blame the lack of programming apprenticeships, personally.

I wholly agree on that. But in addition, the deeper problem seems to be that the incentive for the colleges is to have as many graduates as possible - that's where the cash flow comes from. I think that's the reason why they've become a bit loose on the requirements.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Some truth to this BUT the financial realities of Wall Street afflict engineering companies: their time constant to profitable product revenues are far shorter than the time constant for training and mentoring to this level.

To use an EE analog: businesses have a high pass filter applied by Wall Street, government and the rest of the economy: they have to fast profitability or they go out of business or replace managers through out the hierarchy. Training is a low frequency phenomena with long time constants. You have to apply training continually for years before you can get experience and talent out the other side. So like any high pass filter, the low frequency efforts necessary get filtered out while the high frequency efforts are passed/rewarded.

Back when life was slower, the time constants for training were favored and rewarded.

If the current regime short-sighted and possible dooming the US and its ability to innovate, sustain innovation and be rewarded economically for innovation? Abso-fucking-lutely. I've been bitching about the "obvious" problem for 20 years when outsourcing was kicking up in Silicon Valley. Nobody listened. I reached the point now where I just can't worry about it - it is what it will be. The future is in Asia right now. Sad. But this is what the US has become.

Re:I'm tired of H1B politics

[EmagGeek]

It has never been worse than it is now because about 10 years ago, CEOs started making the rounds informing their engineers that they were unwanted and too expensive. The President of the company I was with at the time actually came to our little R&D lab and said flat out he wanted to eliminate 60% of our jobs and move them overseas because it "made sense" to do "low value engineering work" where it was cheapest.

Students saw that writing on the wall and started bailing from STEM degree programs in droves. STEM enrollment at my alma mater is down 25% or so in the last decade, and I am sure it is like that in most places. They're having to expand their liberal arts programs to keep enrollment numbers big enough to pay for all of those tech buildings they built, that are now being used for Psychology, Sociology, and other humanities.

Learn to code

[fragMasterFlash]

If you have done the work to become an EE you should know how to code fairly well already and given the current need for skilled software developers you can probably get hired doing embedded systems work in any of the North American technology hubs quite easily. It may not be your preferred line of work but its a living wage until and work experience to tide you over until the wave of change sweeps across the industry.

Re:Learn to code

[Solid StaTe_1]

It's always been my standpoint that in order to be a competent EE, you need to have intermediate coding skills. Unfortunately it seems that most graduates pick one side or the other. An EE graduate with no SW skills is no better than a technologist and will have a pretty tough time finding work.

Re:Learn to code

[servognome]

Hmmm, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to code the stuff I learned in: Microwave Measurements, Photovoltaic Solar Energy Systems, Optoelectronics, Antenna Theory and Design, Semiconductor Processing, and Microelectronics Packaging.
I guess I could always fall back on my first year C programming class. I'm sure there are plenty of companies who need somebody to make their embedded device say "Hello World"

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

You could code a good, opensource web-based EE CAD system. I need something that would accept a couple of numbers and produce a good, working design of a miniature EMP gun capable at least of knocking out the stereo of the coffee shop across the street. I'm sure you'll pick a boatload of marketable skills doing just that.

Re:Learn to code

[thegarbz]

If you have done the work to become an EE you should know how to code fairly well already.

Funny you should say that. I saw an engineer explode at a lecturer saying he was an EE and "coding" was purely in the domain of IT and didn't belong in his degree. He spent 15 minute having a shouting match saying that this should be a core subject for the degree if people aren't interested in it.

Anyway the subject was advanced engineering mathematics and the lecturer was describing how to do FDTD analysis. The student had trouble with the concept of a "for" loop in Matlab.

Guess who failed (and yet most likely graduated anyway) without any coding knowledge.

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

The kid was right... But that's just my opinion.

I understand where the mindset of "combining fields' aspects" comes from in higher education, but there's a certain line you just don't cross where you stop, stand back, and after looking at the "reasonable perspective", say to yourself, "Okay, I understand that basket weaving requires reeds, but do I really have to take 'Phragmites Australis Engineering 302' to take Basket Weaving 101?"

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

I too have my degree in things Electronics, RF, Mechanical, and less so S/W. I can't think of a project with more that a dozen part I've done since the 70's that didn't have a significant amount of S/W somehow involved. If you are an RF guy, look inside your test equipment. Sure, there has to be real engineered H/W to make it work, but a lot of the performance is from the S/W.

This is because real products require a level of complexity that we can only do with S/W.

If you look at an Iphone, there is a lot of great H/W engineering in the design.
      (Making things small, low power, high feature, and economically producable is a really hard, high tech problem.)
          In spite of this, the major enginnnering work in the product is the software.

I am perplexed at how a good hardware engineer can not do software. The incremental learning to be able to work on moderately sized S/W is minimal for any engineer. (The experience to be able to even do not harm on larger projects is a nother matter which many S/W engineers don't do as well.)

To make good trade offs in how to design a system one has to understand the components available to him. S/W is one of the main components. If you ignore, you are not a good H/W Engineer.

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a BS in EE, but have been working as a software developer since I graduated.
If your focus in school was on a variety of niche specialties, then indeed, you might be fucked.

captcha: gainful

Re:Learn to code

[RevWaldo]

For everyone that bombed out of getting their EE degree and switched to CS, can I get a WHOOOP WHOOOP!!

.

Re:Learn to code

[ebno-10db]

[rant] Most programmers think that in the beginning God created software, and saw that it was good, but needed hardware to actually do anything useful. So he took a GOTO statement from the programmer and created an EE from it. Still trying to figure out how to work the snake and the apple into this story.

Most programmers think that computers and peripherals are the be-all and end-all of EE. To the extent they've heard of antennas, or analog circuits or power systems or whatever, they think of them as just some kind of peripheral. You can amaze them with historical tales of how there was EE long before there were computers (though they may not believe you) and how there will be EE long after we realize that computers were a mistake - a technological dead end like oil lamps.

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried whipping together a GUI in Visual Basic to trace their IP address?

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdotal evidence from a dropout is worthless. Try again.

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, as an engineer, you need to conduct some analysis. Using a numerical method greatly speeds up the process if you need to change a variable and repeat the process. If the kid wasn't willing to learn stuff like a "for" loop to speed up his workflow, then I don't know what else I can say.

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

UofA?

Re:Learn to code

[c 0xFF]

Speaking as someone with EE and Computer Engineering degrees, and who currently works as a Software Engineer ... I'd never let any EE anywhere near my code. Not unless I saw some evidence that they can think in terms of software instead of hardware.

I'm not sure what it is yet, but in my experience most don't have the mindset for software. Yes, they usually had to do some programming for their degree, but experience is minimal. As one colleague once pointed out, most EE's writing software use the "Monte Carlo" method of debugging -- if something doesn't work, randomly change one factor in the code and try again, hoping that solved the problem. You'd think they'd know better (that's not how you debug a circuit, for example), but it's a matter of mindset and experience more than anything.

Re: Learn to code

[VTBlue]

Haha so true. At USC, they didn't event really teach VLSI or Verilog in the senior courses for the BSEE. But i luckily got an internship at intel where i quickly learned both. The tooling and software side of EE was totally unrepresented in the curriculum. It was sad.

Re: Learn to code

[servognome]

But i luckily got an internship at intel

Ahh Intel, where the most difficult engineering problem you'd have to solve is finding your cubicle ;) jk

Re: Learn to code

[tarpara]

My code went into a production chip. At the time I thought they were crazy for clearing my code. I told my boss that the code I was replacing looked like it had been written by an idiot. My boss goes, "it was." I wrote it 5 years ago when I got hired. Good 'ole XScale.

Re: Learn to code

[servognome]

Awesome! :)

Re:Learn to code

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying that coding's the be-all and the end all... but surely, you can develop a computer model on MATLAB, for changing parameters and testing various things. There's a reason the etymology for coding as a language sticks. We (as EEs) may rant all we want about it not being in our domain... but EVERYONE's coding now. It's a LANGUAGE. If you can't develop something to test out design ideas, and get some rough numbers on it, and you're reliant on someone else to do it for you - then you're effectively twice as expensive, regardless of the range of brilliant ideas you may have.

I don't think you need to LEARN how to code - in terms of knowing the syntax associate with all the different languages. You just need to be able to tinker with code. Simply reading and writing data from files, as well as from peripherals and instruments that hook up to a computer, and being able to manipulate them. That's it. It's not like you're in charge of coding up a stable release of a commercial software package. There are so many templates and wizards for all the platforms that you'd likely use. And even if not, there's a previous program in the company that someone wrote up, which you need to understand.

As regards a resume, I think it's important to mention working knowledge of various programs - and convince employers that you won't treat anything to do with such 'coding' as foreign and something you can't tackle. You can follow algorithms and logic. That's good enough. If you run into problems, there's the internet! Way too many EEs leave out mentioning their ability to deal and tinker with software models, and THAT hits them more than not knowing how they should implement garbage-collection.

At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[greg_barton]

At an unemployment rate of 2.2% we could use the competition of H-1Bs. (I'm a software engineer myself, so I have a stake in this.) With that low of an unemployment rate we'll start getting unqualified people entering the field just to get jobs, much like what happened during the late 90's tech boom. Yes, the H-1B program can be abused, I've seen it myself many times. But these are actually the conditions where it works.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Skapare]

Then join me in pushing for the H-1B program to be made less abusable by allowing the visa holder to change job any time they want and work for anyone they want, who is willing to hire them. They would have to pay back the visa costs that were paid by their previous employer, prorated for the remaining visa period, plus statutory interest. Their new employer could cover that.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[greg_barton]

That sounds reasonable.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Join you where? On an internet forum?

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are a fucking idiot. You probably think because the unemployment rate went down last month that more people are working.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[aztracker1]

I'm also in favor of a $100K/year USD salary floor for H-1B visas. If there's really a need, then the salary should be that hi... we're talking trained, technical employees.. if you're offering that much, and can't find local workers, so be it... hire foreign.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[GenieGenieGenie]

You'll bankrupt the entire biomed research arm of the universities, which is already moribund anyway. Professors would actually have to do experiments, you know. Get their hands dirty instead of hiring el-cheapo $39,000 post-docs to do the work they should be doing. That would be a catastrophe.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Ash Vince]

I'm also in favor of a $100K/year USD salary floor for H-1B visas. If there's really a need, then the salary should be that hi... we're talking trained, technical employees.. if you're offering that much, and can't find local workers, so be it... hire foreign.

As a british software developer with 3 years experience as a technical lead doing MVC (in Zend Framework) PHP Web Development and 5 or 6 years similar full time experience before that exactly how much is $100/year? To get some perspective can someone tell me what an equivalent role in the US to mine would pay?

Please don't just posta link to one of these salary calculator sites as I think they always come out slightly high as they generally produced by recruitment companies who want you to switch jobs.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also in favor of a $100K/year USD salary floor for H-1B visas. If there's really a need, then the salary should be that hi... we're talking trained, technical employees.. if you're offering that much, and can't find local workers, so be it... hire foreign.

Wouldn't hurt the big companies in the slightest; the kind of talent they need H1-Bs for already gets paid more than that.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hired out of college five years ago as h1b at 80k, today they are probably coming in over 100.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[Bigby]

We'll start getting unqualified people? That ship has sailed. And unqualified people are coming at a higher rate from H1B than citizens...although both rates are crazy high.

Re:At 2.2% rate we need more competition

[aztracker1]

PHP Dev ranges from $45-85K USD/year from what I've seen. GBP around $30-65K/year. .Net dev seems to be $80-110K for the most part, but is increasing a bit, looking to get to $120K again... on coastal cities will be more towards $140-180 for experienced senior software devs. PHP jobs pay a bit less.

So $100K/year is a pretty good break towards an experienced position, with a demand that can't be filled locally.

Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Osgeld]

Its hard to get talent.

I work for a small electronics company doing mid sized work for stupid large companies, I work in the engineering department, I do not have a degree in EE, I am a computer science guy with 4 years of EE in high school, and nearly 2 decades of hobby experience, I have professionally written for 2 websites in hobby electronics, and I was hired after 2 interviews (age 34 btw).

Its taken a couple months and dozens of interviews to find another teammate that can at least keep up, let alone bring new and interesing designs to the table... and when your self thought tech can stump a 4 year EE graduate with a simple constant current 317 question (which is commonplace in our applications), that also doesn't know shit about a spreadsheet in order to present his ideas in a mathematical form, then yes, the chances of you landing a job dramatically decreases.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

"Its hard to get talent."

No it's not, it's just that the LM317 is not as central to the rest of the world as it is to your corner of it.

Crazy people think that they are the only ones that are sane. Never forget that.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

Its hard to get talent.

Wrong. It may be hard to get talent with the salary you offer, but if you're willing to pay the price you can get it.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

heh when a graduate cant exercise a skill provided to them from a 2 year GE degree then they should not be asking for high wages

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Osgeld]

there are plenty of analog applications in the world, not everything is ran from an i5 and fiber optics

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

Righ. I might not be able to answer your simple 317 constant current question right of the bat. I do remember 317 is a super simple adjustable regulator, i've used them somewhere, but if I have to use them again I'm going to need to look at a datasheet. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure you'd have hard time answering a simple question about atmel FPGA pins. I mean, how hard can it be to name the power pins on it, there are only a couple of hundred pins, you could even guess.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you. But that doesn't mean I remember how the hell to use a LM317 without looking at the spec sheet. If I dealt with them every day, perhaps. The voltage regulators are the LEAST interesting part on the board as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't deny that there may be a shortage of qualified people out there, it is completely unrealistic to expect a recent grad to know anything beyond theory. You really need to work on a training program for them to get that theory grounded in whatever real world applications you intend to do.

If you want someone with more hands on experience, perhaps you should try recruiting a Ham rather than a college grad.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you understand how a typical voltage regulator works and what the ground pin does (provides a reference voltage that the output voltage is measured against), you should be able to come up with a scheme to put it in constant current mode without prior knowledge - all you need to know is that it's a voltage regulator.

The idea that this is something you learn by rote is terrifying. In my experience EE is a combination of intelligence, basic knowledge from EE courses, and learning by osmosis. Doing hobby projects is phenomenal for this.

A propos FPGA power pins - anyone who can understand why they're placed the way they are is probably a better engineer than someone who does not. They might even be able to get decoupling caps right.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

I just looked at the datasheet for the 317 and noticed how to operate it for constant-current in a few minutes. Why would a reasonable employer care if I knew that offhand when it takes a couple minutes for me to find out?

I hate to break it to you, but EE students these days don't typically use 317s. But moreover, using this as a central question for hiring is like asking a programmer some obscure question about the C++ standard library in an interview. Oh, and he can't consult the documentation.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

You ever think about actually doing "On the job training".

I know it is a completely foreign concept, never before used in any business at all, not even when they were booming but I hear it can help wonders. If you are having trouble finding people who know how, try and find peopling willing to learn how and teach them.....

Of course, I am one of them people who honestly believes the saying "Show me a job that can't find qualified employees and I will show you a job that isn't paying enough to attract qualified employees".

If these jobs paid a decent amount, you would have people suffering through the years of college to get them, but no ones going to put up with a job where the pay is so low that after all the time and money wasted in college, you make only marginally more over the course of your life due to the debt you accumulated trying to learn it.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

I know where you're going wrong with the constant current 317 question. This is the kind of question that very few EE graduates would be able to answer under interview pressure. Unless, of course, they have seen that particular circuit somewhere recently.

Basically, you think you're testing for skill and intelligence, but you're actually testing for familiarity. A dumb EE who has used that particular circuit in the past will know the answer immediately, while a smart EE who has never needed it will get stumped.

That's the problem with all trick questions: the main factor in you knowing the answer is whether you've seen the question before, not whether you're good.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

...using this as a central question for hiring is like asking a programmer some obscure question about the C++ standard library in an interview. Oh, and he can't consult the documentation.

And that's precisely what companies are doing in interviews. The fact that I knew std::map is implemented as a red-black tree under the hood was undoubtedly instrumental in landing me my current job. Which is ridiculous. I shouldn't need to know or care. The performance characteristics of the container are documented independently of the implementation. Isn't that what object oriented is for? But I got a lot of questions like that this interview cycle.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[humblepie]

Congradulations -- you've found a niche for yourself, where you can make a living or even shine. Your example is equivalent to a software engineer, being an expert in the C implementation of bubble sort, who persists in asking everyone who comes in the door, to demonstrate they know it as well. Why not give the community an example complex design you built, where you used your in-depth understanding of the theory of analog design, by describing it's corresponding differential model? Your equations will fit in this space. Bertrand Russell once said, "There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." Socrates is reported to have said, "The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing." These are only two minor observerations, from which we might learn.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you asking someone about questions specific to an IC in an interview when they could learn it in 10 minutes by looking at the datasheet? No disrespect or anything, but that's fucking stupid. You should be asking more general questions to test their knowledge of analog electronics instead of the details of some specific IC. Are candidates supposed to know inside and out the datasheet of every chip you commonly use? Seriously, that's just insane.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[EmagGeek]

With all due respect, you're an idiot, and don't know how to approach the talent acquisition process.

Re:Well, Just Like Many Fields of Employment

[Osgeld]

good thing I am not in charge of hiring then

ps:with all due respect you are a rude little twat

An alternative hypothesis is...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people who were trained in Electrical or Electrical and Computer Engineering are going into software instead.

I started my career in embedded systems and then shifted to software and we have 2 other ECEs at my company who used to do embedded systems who now do mobile software engineering.

Re:Stop spreading FUD

[Skapare]

You are really making the name of Anonymous Coward look bad.

Technology is a rocky career

[Tablizer]

The bottom line is that technology is volatile and that makes related careers volatile. I remember after the Dot-Com crash things were rough for unemployed computer programmers on the west coast.

I took up rag-tag consulting jobs for a while to pay the bills. My experience with legacy programming languages saved my ass. Newer programmers didn't have such to fall back on and many turned to other fields. (Ironically, I was often turned away from "dot com" jobs before the crash because I was seen as a bit too old. I didn't look the part of a "dot-comer", having a bit of a square IBM/accountant style to me.)

Save up during the good times because they may not last. Boom and bust is the new normal.

Re:Technology is a rocky career

[Xest]

"The bottom line is that technology is volatile and that makes related careers volatile. I remember after the Dot-Com crash things were rough for unemployed computer programmers on the west coast."

Only shit ones, and therein lies the problem, in every field you get two types of people, you get the people who are in that field because they love it and are passionate about it, and invest in learning more about it in their spare time, and then you get the other type of people who are in the field because they couldn't be bothered to think too hard about what they wanted to do with their life and heard that field x was profitable right now, so jumped on the bandwagon, doing the bare minimum they needed to get a job during the boom.

The problem is that the bare minimum you need to get the job during a boom, generally translates to "completely unemployable due to being far too inept when not in a boom". These are always the people who suffer but it's not a bad thing because it means that when an industry returns to post-boom health it's filled by people who know what they're doing. Even if you were a new programmer when the bubble popped as long as you'd spent your teenage years sat behind a computer programming in your own time simply because you fucking loved it then there was no problem getting a job.

You don't need to save up if you've bothered to find a field you love, and you work hard to stay ahead in that field because you love it, because that way you can guarantee your employability. The only exception is in genuinely dying industries (like British coal mine workers under Thatcher to cite an example relevant to recent media stories) and at that point you need to find another industry. IT isn't going anywhere though any time soon - ultimately if unemployment reaches even 10% in a particular field, all that means pretty much is that you need to make sure you're in the top 90% (well, maybe top 80% when you consider that at least some of the lower 10% will be fortunate enough to keep their jobs), which really isn't that hard.

Re:Technology is a rocky career

[ebno-10db]

because that way you can guarantee your employability

Keep telling yourself that. Remember, everything is under your control (except when it's not).

Seriously, you're being very naive. I've had 30+ years in this business and the longest I was ever out of work was 6 months. The runner-up was 3 days. Yes, I'm good at what I do, I keep up (more because I love the work than because I'm so self-disciplined), and I have a good network. Those things certainly help. I've also been very lucky so far. I know other people at least as good as me who can't find a job these days to save their lives.

Re:Technology is a rocky career

[ebno-10db]

Boom and bust is the new normal.

It's the old normal too. In the 1840's the hot thing for a West Point grad to do was enter the Army Corps of Engineers, get a few years of experience, then resign his commission for a lucrative civilian engineering job. When asked why he was not interest in pursuing that path, recent graduate William Tecumseh Sherman replied that "engineers are either overworked or out of work".

What has changed is that, rather than accepting that it's an inherently boom and bust field, the parrots (oops, I mean pundits) and politicians echo the tech CEO line that we have a perpetual STEM shortage. Even if things are bad now they'll be a real STEM shortage in a year or two. Honest. That's obviously true, because according to the pundits and politicians it's always been true. Honest.

Re:Technology is a rocky career

[Xest]

You need to look at why they can't find a job, if unemployment is at 2.2%, 6%, 10% or whatever in their sector then why can't they compete when it comes to getting interviews or in interviews?

People are pretty much never willing to accept when they are in the bottom 2.2%, 6%, 10% or whatever, and that's the fundamental problem they face.

If we're still talking about software development here and your friends still can't find a job even when unemployment in that sector is down to 2.2% then you need to simply start to accept that your friends aren't as competent or have skills as relevant as you or they think.

Re:Technology is a rocky career

[Tablizer]

"Be the very best in your field and you'll never have career problems" doesn't scale as general advice. It's impossible for everybody to be in the top quartile by definition. Besides somebody may not know how they'll rank when first choosing a career. (Also, interviews are mostly about BS-ing skills in my opinion because PHB's have more hiring say than techies.)

Companies don't want to take the time/$$ to train

[asm2750]

If you look at most entry level jobs for EE's, and Computer Engineers they want applicants to have 3 to 5 years of actual experience on products like VxWorks, Synopsys, ActiveHDL, Cadence, etc. No company wants to take a fledgling American EE graduate and help give them the skills/training needed to do their job well and build loyalty. They expect their hires to be laying gold eggs from day one with no help, have 3 or 4 internships under their belt.

I got my MSEE last year, and all I am getting offers for are contract jobs that only last 3 to 18 months.
Sure the pay is okay, but what happens when that pool dries up? Would you like moving from job to job always stressing out if you are going to get another contract when the current one ends?
What if you get sick? You have to buy your own health insurance plan when you work under a contract. That might, or might not be expensive, and might not cover everything.
How about additional training to make yourself marketable, and able to do the job faster/better? With how companies act today, don't count on it. Most contractors also expect you to be an expert in the area you will be working in.

I would be happy to take a pay reduction for the first year or two just to get into an actual design job that has job security, and offers a constructive environment. R&D would be even better but, even I know the limits of my skills.

Maybe it's time for engineers to start their own small side companies or, maybe it's time to encourage a tradesman program where experienced EE's show new EE's how things are done, and train the skills needed to do the job.

Re:Stop spreading FUD

[aztracker1]

I really can't tell if that's a joke or not... I don't think these are lies.. the news about software devs definitely isn't bad news... as for Unemployment, it's been pretty level (not good) for over a year now.. and honestly has as much to do with congress as anything.

Being critical of *anyone* in a government office is pretty common, and if it offends you, then you are either too sensitive, or too stupid to care. It didn't bother me any more when GW was president as it is now that the big O is in office. Hell, probably the top two presidents in the past 40 years have been Reagan and Clinton, both of which got plenty of criticism.

Stop making senseless statements and comments without the nerve to even login first.. it makes the country look bad.. look, you've made our entire country look bad.. it's really sad that you did that. (/sarcasm)

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[humblepie]

I have over 30 years working on the cutting edge of software development, at some the the leading companies in the field, in Silicon Valley. I have difficulty in restraining myself from challenging your credibility, so I'll focus on what you said. It is economics 101 that if there is a shortage of engineers, salaries should be increasing, until supply meets demand. There should be a lot of movement of engineers from company to company as the competion and salaries increase -- this isn't happening -- salaries remain flat. As you've read here, and elsewhere companies like Google and Apple have agreed not to seek to hire engineers from each other, eliminating competion in engineers and salaries. I know H1B software engineers working 60 to 70 hours a week, just so they can keep their jobs. Senior engineers, like myself and others I know, who have modern and even cutting edge skills, are sitting out, because we won't take the low salaries. I'm offered salaries in the neighborhood of the same salary I was making 20 years ago. I code and do research everyday, because it's what I love to do, not because I'm getting payed any longer. What's needed in not more H1B's but for the industry to stop manipulating the market for engineers and set the market free to work. I've been at this long enough to realize it won't happen -- the industry leaders will continue to manipulate the market, hold down salaries, abuse H1B's, and demand an increasing supply -- because they can. I and others I know, aren't employed, and aren't counted in the 2.2%, so the rate is higher. In my long career, I've never collected unemployment, so how would I ever be counted as unemployed, by the Labor Department?

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[greg_barton]

I'm approaching my 20th year in the tech industry, so I've been around the block a few times. Tech workers are abused because we allow ourselves to be. Unfortunately that will probably not change for a generation or more, maybe never. We give employers the power to abuse us. The industry manipulates because it can, because we let them. They will not stop out of the goodness of their hearts. Maybe a bit more abuse will be necessary to wake us up. Maybe nothing will be enough. Who knows?

Same situation here in Brazil

[Otiluke]

I am an electrical engineer, and work in Europe. What I see here, is that the quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate.

(Non native english speaker here, so cut me some slack on my awful grammar).

The same situation also applies here in Brazil. Worse of all, it applies both to engineering and computer science. I've been trying to recruit three junior java developers for over two months, but so far, haven't found a single soul that could:
* Knows what a Hash Set / Hash Table / Dictionary is.
* Knows how to use a LEFT JOIN properly.
* Knows how to explain what Model-view-controller is.

The salary? About US$ 30000/year, and yes - this is quite good for a starting position around here.

Re:Same situation here in Brazil

[chancep]

Como posso enviar meu CV?

Re:Same situation here in Brazil

[ebno-10db]

Non native english speaker here, so cut me some slack on my awful grammar

Forget it - your English is pretty good, and a helluva lot better than my Portuguese. Besides, it's mostly Americans here, so we don't really care about that foreign English grammar (or don't really know it).

More to the point, why are you looking for Java developers instead of good programmers? When you say they don't understand "Hash Set / Hash Table / Dictionary", do you mean the Java specific aspect of it or the concept? The Java specific part any decent programmer can learn in short order. The concept though is something every CS grad should understand. And "Model-view-controller" is a buzzword. Do you mean they don't know the buzzword, or they don't understand the architecture?

Re:Same situation here in Brazil

[hackula]

MVC is probably a bit implementation specific for a student straight out of uni. Most .Net developers tend to not really know it, since MVVM (Model View View-Model) is much more common in M$ land. True though, everyone should know what a join and a dictionary are. Honestly though, I would not care if a fresh newbie did not know any of those, provided they could demonstrate the ability to solve problems and get shit done. Maybe the last year of uni they did nothing but build test harnesses for compilers? They would have no need for LEFT JOIN or MVC. Uni gives you a very broad overview of everything and does not optimize for building CRUD apps or anything else, so it is very easy to forget some of the things that you were taught along the way. I would be willing to bet that they learned a few tricks that would stump you as well, so it might even go both ways.

Re:Same situation here in Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say that your first question is rather obscure. I have been programming java professionally for a year and I didn't knew what a Hash Table or Dictionary was, I just never had the use one of those. In College they don't even teach that kind of stuff, they teach theory, if you described each one of those to your applicants and asked them to implement it by hand you would find the ones that can actually program instead of knowing trivia collection objects specific of Java.
Most graduates learn data structures in C so the good ones know how to implement a class equivalent to HashSet in Java.

Not knowing what a LEFT JOIN is not ok though.

They don't teach MVC at USP (the college I graduated in), I did learn it but it was an optional discipline. Again Colleges don't like teaching real world stuff, they prefer to teach theory.

But then again a _senior_ java developer should know those differences.

Demand for H1b programmers reasonable

[locater16]

There's a notion in most sane economists theories that there's a "good" level of unemployment, that if the supply of employees dries up to much things will start to slow down. After all, why work hard when you know someone else will hire you once you get out?

The target most often cited as "good" is around 5% unemployment (actual, counted unemployment without people "giving up"). While that's still too high and probably says something about a bias of economists, it's still a good notion fundamentally. And 2.2% may be starting to push the limits for a single category. Even if you disagree, it's no wonder that Google and MS and et al. want more H1-B visas and are collaborating against you, they need to stop paying you so much so they can save more for the poor CEOs!

Re:Stop spreading FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know that these lies are being spread in an attempt to make Obama look bad. Your agenda is obvious.

Unemployment has gone down significantly since he has occupied the Oval Office, and any "statistics" that say otherwise are just falsified documents that have made up numbers that were produced by the GOP. The very suggestion that President Obama might be the cause of this alleged problem offends me, and it should offend all of you.

Slashdot is no longer "news for nerds", but rather, it is "news for racist conservatives".

Stop trying to make Barack look bad. It only makes Slashdot look bad.

I can't believe you guys would even allow this to show up on this site. Obama is the best President. I'm going to take some aripiprazole and go to sleep now. I can't deal with this nonsense.

Unemployment has only gone "down" if you neglect to look at the labor force participation rate, which quite plainly shows that as people have dropped off unemployment (you are only considered "unemployed" if you are collecting unemployment - after that 99 weeks, or what its getting reduced to now, in many states, you aren't "officially" unemployed anymore), they've given up looking. Labor force participation is at it's lowest now since the 1970's. This also doesn't count the growing number of people on disability (SSDI), who applied for and got it *after* getting laid off and not being able to find a job. Right now in the US there are ~100million working age people who do not have jobs (but only ~10million of those are "unemployed" according to the BLS) - there's something like 320million people in this country, including children & retired adults... my math skills may be a bit old, but if 31% of the population is jobless, which includes those that are too young to work or retired, it stands to reason that the unemployment rate is... 7.6%??? (Must be that "new math" I used to hear about all the time).

Saying unemployment has improved is like believing that CPI is an accurate measure of inflation since they "fixed" it to not count things like food & energy - so that it looks low because you can buy a better TV than 20 years ago, cheaper... but the gasoline you need daily to get to work that increased in price 30% doesn't count as 'inflation'. Calculate inflation like it was back in the 1970's (before it was changed *twice* since), and you'll find that *real* inflation is more like 6-8% today, not the "2%" CPI claims. (This was done to "fix" Social Security, since the SS increases are based on CPI - rigging CPI to be lower kept it solvent longer).

Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[roman_mir]

People are envious, jealous and the ruling class (politicians) are capitalising on class war-fare-mongering (that word is likely not in a dictionary).

There is a legitimate problem with some people getting artificial advantage from the money that is created out of thin air by the Fed, money which shouldn't exist and it's given to the banks that shouldn't exist anymore. That money props up the Treasury (which doesn't exist, there is no treasure, only debt).

All of this allows the banks to give themselves a pat on the back, to give the politicians themselves a pat on the back and everybody gets paid with that fake money.

That's a problem, because it is inflation and it causes drop in real value of the money for EVERYBODY else who is not involved in this giant counterfeiting and laundering machine.

This free money for decades has been flowing into the system destroying it.

This story is on Electrical Engineers unemployment and simultaneously there are complains that there is no talent among EEs. It's obvious to me that the inflation and all the taxes and regulations have crushed investment opportunities in USA (at the least since 1971) and that's why manufacturing was and is leaving, because investment was leaving, running away from the anti-business, anti-saver, anti-investor climate.

The fall of the manufacturing sector eventually causes the fall of the employment among EEs and other professionals needed for manufacturing and eventually this causes reduction in quality of the available professionals.

At the same time the inflation, taxes (income and especially death tax) and regulations make it impossible for the companies that are still in USA to think long term. They are forced to find ways to beat inflation and to make 5-6% return on the investment and that's hard, try to make a return of 11-21% a year, you are going to fail, so MOST companies will fail in this environment.

Those who will not fail immediately will be the biggest entities and there because of death taxes the companies no longer have real owners, the kids of the original founders are not there, the companies were sold to liquidate to pay the taxes, the companies turn public.

A public company is like a public property, nobody owns it really, so whoever succeeds in becoming the management just works for their own benefit and it's short term benefit because of high inflation and taxes.

So this entire system is set to destroy private business, private property while doing it with spectacular amounts of fake money and in that climate average people are getting poorer and easier to manipulate by the politicians who in fact created this problem in the first place (well, the mob let them, the mob cheered for them while they turned the Republic into this quasi-socialist-fascist state).

So the inflation and lack of owners due to taxes and lack of competition due to regulations and taxes create all of these problems and part of it is that some people manage to get huge compensation where in a free market they couldn't, competitive forces would take care of inefficiencies like that.

Again, it's stupidity, envy, jealousy, class warfare and those are symptoms of a dying economy.

Re:Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[some old guy]

If I had points I'd mod this up to the Moon.

However, there is a better name for our state than "quasi-socialist-fascist".

It's called this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Re: Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[VTBlue]

Facts:
Tax revenue as a percentage as a % of GDP is the lowest in US history. So taxes aren't killing innovation.

If by inflation you mean CPI, this has gone up but only marginally. Inflation on the other hand is targeted at 2% which is the norm for most OECD countries. The risk-free rate in finance is the lowest it's ever been. Even the 10-year treasury note is at an all time low.

Investors don't invest is early stage companies if the return is only 15-20%. You can get shitty returns like that in the stock market with much less risk. Try 500% returns or more.

Intensive Labor utilizing Manufacturing will never return to America again, nor should it. Manufacturing as an industry to lower unemployment is a fantasy. People should get over it.

Regulations aren't killing jobs. The lack of demand in the economy is killing jobs.

Income inequality is killing jobs.

$32 Trillion locked up in overseas tax havens is killing jobs.

The effective corporate tax rates in USA is about 12%, even though the statutory rate is 35%.

The US tax code is killing jobs.

The current global economy values capital over labor. This is killing jobs.

Myths:
Taxes are killing jobs
Regulations are killing jobs.

Re: Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[roman_mir]

Unfortunately for you, your understanding of the issues is upside down, inside out, completely perverted by the system and media obviously. Every single sentence, it's tiring.

Tax revenue as a percentage as a % of GDP is the lowest in US history. So taxes aren't killing innovation.

- first of all how do you come up with 2 disjoint statements like that and think they complement each other?

1. Effective taxes in USA on the very people who are crucial to the development of the economy are highest in history of USA. The people I am speaking of are the ones who have savings that can be used as investment. This concerns people that run businesses as well as individual savers and even the retired with fixed incomes who have savings. The real interest rates are negative, that's partially why businesses get out of USA, to protect the savings, but that's not the only reason. The big reason is the high tax environment and regulations are taxes.

2. GDP is a meaningless number that doesn't have any value, its structure is meaningless, even the number itself is misleading simply due to the much higher real inflation rate that what is used as a deflator. In real terms productivity and productive output has been falling since the seventies, that's why the once large trade surpluses have been turned into trade deficits that grew larger and larger since about mid-eighties (as a response to the industry that started leaving since 1971 default on the dollar and the inevitable growth of inflation).

3. Taxes are absolutely killing innovation, the only innovation that is happening is the innovation in the financial sector figuring out ways to attempt to avoid, minimise the taxes. The real innovation is taking place where the real manufacturing is happening, guess what, the trade deficit proves that manufacturing isn't happening in USA.

If by inflation you mean CPI, this has gone up but only marginally.

-

By inflation I mean expansion of the monetary supply, nothing else. The redefinition of inflation as CPI (or chained CPI or any other gov't manufactured number) or as rise in prices is a consequence of inflation, not the cause of it. The cause is the expansion of monetary supply, which is happening all the time now thanks Fed.

Inflation on the other hand is targeted at 2% which is the norm for most OECD countries.

- the propaganda is targeted at 2%, real inflation is many times that, that's why USA economy is shrinking, not growing regardless of the meaningless GDP, which again, is a manufactured number.

Real inflation and GDP are not in gov't numbers, the economy that relies on imports more and more and cannot export to pay for imports (trade deficit), the economy where the only way to 'reduce unemployment rate' is to stop counting people that are not 'actively searching for work' and people on 'disabilities' and people who are under-employed (part time, many part time jobs), the never-ending students that don't leave school until they are almost in their thirties, living on gov't debt, all of this shows that the real productivity is falling.

The risk-free rate in finance is the lowest it's ever been. Even the 10-year treasury note is at an all time low.

- 'risk free', it's a funny term. Maybe the Fed used to provide "risk free return", today it's "return free risk".

The entire ponzi scam of the USA economy relies on the Fed propping it up. The moment Fed stops, US economy goes through the necessary restructuring. To avoid that (which will be extremely painful), the gov't does what it can to push that inevitable day of reckoning into some indefinite future.

But that future is not too far away from now. The only question is: will the American gov't prevent the hyper inflation by allowing the interest rates to achieve their real rate and stop the printing presses, or will the US politicians just go off that cliff because they will nev

Re:Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[Miamicanes]

If you think it's hard to attract investment and develop industry amidst inflation, try doing it amidst even mild deflation. The moment currency begins deflating, investment grinds to a halt, because it ends up being safer and more profitable to just lock your cash in a vault and forget about it for a year. What, exactly, do you manufacture for sale when the ultimate retail value of whatever you make is likely to end up being less than the cost of manufacturing it in the first place? You can't spend $30,000 building cars that sell for $25,000 and expect to remain in business for long.

With deflation, any investment with a timeframe longer than "buy hot dogs and buns from Sam's club in the morning, and make sure they're all sold before the prices drop again" becomes extremely risky. Deflation makes long-term capital-intense investments nearly impossible to justify.

High inflation is bad, but it could be argued that sustained (but mild, stable, and predictable) inflation is required for an economy to work, and for currency to function as a medium of exchange rather than end up getting hoarded as a store of value in itself. Just look at Bitcoins... when the value was relatively stable around $10 or so per bitcoin, people began to actually use it as money. The moment its value began skyrocketing up to $100 and beyond, nobody spent them anymore because they didn't want to end up buying a $180,000 pizza like Adolph did ;-) ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alc0gG0u48M )

Re:Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[roman_mir]

If you think it's hard to attract investment and develop industry amidst inflation, try doing it amidst even mild deflation.

- you mean like the time when USA actually grew to be the biggest industrial nation on the planet Earth in history of humanity? That mild deflation? Where the US dollar started the 19th century at half the value that it ended the 19th century at? Curious definition of 'hard'. Give me that type of difficulty any time.

The entire globe, all national governments on this planet are currently destroying the value of their respective currencies, which is a crime AFAIC. They are destroying the value of the work of their citizens, they are destroying the competitive advantage that the stronger currency gives them to buy materials and goods from other countries. Having an appreciating currency is godsend, it's like being the first student in class, getting straight A++s, the some idiots tell you that you should be getting Fs, because that's what is really valuable, utter and total nonsense.

The productive nations, the nations of producers, savers and low government spending are able to achieve this, that's why there are so few of them on this planet where even Switzerland committed a huge idiotic move to hard link their currency to Euro. What a complete failure of understanding of economics.

The moment currency begins deflating, investment grinds to a halt, because it ends up being safer and more profitable to just lock your cash in a vault and forget about it for a year.

- pure nonsense. It is absolutely the opposite of what happens (and happened), as INPUT COSTS FALL, the ability of a manufacturer or any other business to lower their prices and simultaneous rise in purchasing power of the customers leads to more real term profit. Of-course it's also completely false from POV of consumers, who do not wait for prices to rise to go shopping however any time there is a sale and prices drop they run to the stores.

What, exactly, do you manufacture for sale when the ultimate retail value of whatever you make is likely to end up being less than the cost of manufacturing it in the first place? You can't spend $30,000 building cars that sell for $25,000 and expect to remain in business for long.

- more faulty logic. If your car costs 30,000 to manufacture, it's a pretty expensive freaking car! But that's not the point, as all input costs fall in price (because your exchange rate is improving and so you can buy energy and materials for less) you can build your products for less money.

Obviously if you manufacture cars at 30,000 and sell them at 50,000 and then all of a sudden your cars cost 25,000 and you have a large stock, you will take a hit in nominal terms while your costs of input are going down, however that 25,000 is now buying more than 50,000 used to buy, that's the only way it drop that way (and that's NOT exactly "mild deflation", I'd say that's a case of serious deflation and when serious things like that happen everybody gets shocked for a little while, however deflation is absolutely better than inflation, you can lower everybody's pay and they are still ahead).

With deflation, any investment with a timeframe longer than "buy hot dogs and buns from Sam's club in the morning, and make sure they're all sold before the prices drop again" becomes extremely risky. Deflation makes long-term capital-intense investments nearly impossible to justify.

- except that this completely false, every company that was built in USA before about 1917 was built during deflation era.

Rockefeller and Standard Oil didn't stop, they grew the business and produced more every year and the prices fell partially because of deflation too, but mostly because of investment. That company grew to become one of the largest in history and that's just one company in one industry.

Never mind how much was done in every other industry in USA, never

Re:Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

- you mean like the time when USA actually grew to be the biggest industrial nation on the planet Earth in history of humanity? That mild deflation? Where the US dollar started the 19th century at half the value that it ended the 19th century at? Curious definition of 'hard'. Give me that type of difficulty any time.

Investment didn't grow because of deflation. It grew because of imperialism. A rising empire almost always see tremendous growth, because new empires tend to have more undeveloped resources than they have people to develop them. People who want those resources will have to get on the Empire's good side, and thus they invest in the Empire. The Empire in return offers protection and favors, creating a positive feedback loop that expands the Empire.

Those who refuse the Empire or got on their bad side? Well, just look at the South and the Reconstruction Era. Look at the Asians who were coerced into unequal treaties (they felt so ashamed that later on Japan turned Imperialist itself, and China turned communist)

Re:Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[roman_mir]

Silly absent-minded AC, I didn't say that investments grew because of deflation, I said that deflation didn't prevent investments. I pointed out that USA economy was the strongest during a period of slight deflation, you dummy.

As to imperialism, if you consider the federal gov't being the empire over the United States, then you can score a point, but I don't believe that is what you talk about. Then you mix everything with 'undeveloped resources'. More nonsense, to develop the resources it takes a tremendous amount of capital. If you don't think that and don't understand it, how about you try to develop the basically pristine, untouched resources that are hiding on the floors of the oceans or maybe in space, you'll quickly learn that you can do nothing without a substantial capital and supply chain being developed around you due to a booming economy, which was booming only for one reason: individual freedom.

The USA economy was not booming because of imperialism, USA wasn't an empire.

The USA economy was not booming because of deflation, the booming economy caused the deflation.

The USA economy was not booming because of raw untouched resources, those resources needed massive amount of investment and development, so it took a growing economy to achieve that result.

The USA economy was booming due to one thing: freedom of the individuals to try and improve their life and the government was negligible, no income or payroll or Medicare taxes, no paper money (except for a short experiment, which ended in a disaster and number of bank runs and a depression, well, that's the expression: not worth a Continental... soon to be replaced with: not worth a Federal)

Good luck to you with your magical thinking.

Re:Envy, jealousy, socialistic class warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly roman_mir, I didn't say you said investments grew because of of deflation. I pointed out that the USA grew because of imperialism, dummy.

More nonsense, to develop the resources it takes a tremendous amount of capital.

Again, silly roman_mir, I didn't say it doesn't take capital to develop. I only said a growing empire would acquire itself a ton of those resources, dummy. I pointed out that people gained access to develop those resources (with their capital, I never said they didn't have capital, dummy) because they were on the government's - the Empire's - good side, not because they had "individual freedom"

USA wasn't an empire.

Nonsense. The USA was very much an empire (still is in many respects). Imperialism is about exploitation of other peoples to enrich a small privileged class, and that is exactly what the USA did. Indians weren't the privileged class. They were driven out of their ancestral lands. Blacks weren't the privileged class. To cotton farms they go. Chinese immigrants? You have years of experience and capital in farming and fishing that you acquired in China, and you want to move to the US, "land of the free", and seek a better life? Sorry, but we'll make some laws targeted to keep you from owning land or even use your Chinese nets and boats, cuz boy oh boy we can't have competition with the privileged Caucasian fishermen and farmers. You'll only get the lowest paying most dangerous jobs (like carrying nitroglycerin to help build the highly-government backed transcontinental railroad)

As I said and you conveniently ignored, the USA empire also joined in with all the other Imperialist European countries to coerce one sided deals with China, Japan, Korea, etc. Those dirty foreigners are just savages after all, they aren't the privileged citizens of the empire, so it's ok to be all protectionist and give them unequal treatment. As a nice finish to that 19th century, the US was able to annex Hawaii and won of bunch of colonies through the American-Spanish war

That is the true reason the USA boomed. It boomed like all empires did: by exploiting people other than the chosen ones in the empire.

Re:Companies don't want to take the time/$$ to tra

[Anonymous Coward]

The first job is by far the hardest to get. After that first job though, if you're good, you'll be sought after by former bosses and colleagues as they move around in the industry. But if you're not good, you'll be the guy on Slashdot complaining that he doesn't understand why unemployment is so low but he gets passed over time and again.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I've got an engineering degree and have never practiced engineering. 14 years out of college, this is the first job I've had close to engineering (I've been flying for a living until recently). My understanding of basic EE concepts exceeds those of the folks with 3-4 years of experience working for me. Simple shit like "more watts means it will get hotter" and shit like that.

H1B in the focus

[slidersv]

America is the place for the best, so if you're missing talent - bring them in. That's how project Manhattan was accomplished. And that's how all the reolutionary progress is made. You don't look at where they are from, but what they can do. Once the protectionism and nationalism starts, the you're no longer the best, and just become one of the European Middleweights. So sure, if you want to fail in the long run, ban all workforce and intelligence imports.

My Theory: Risk Aversion

[vtTom]

I have a theory.... Corporations are becoming more and more averse to risk. They expect every product they develop to be successful to justify the expense. So instead of developing products and talent internally, they're letting newbies take on all the risk of starting up new companies and new technologies, and then they swoop in and cherry-pick the ones that are successful.

Maybe people are now following the Apple model?

[horza]

Why bother doing actual technical innovation? You can just do like Apple and look through other people's old software and patent the stuff others thought were way too obvious to take out a patent on. Hey, a billion dollar settlement can't be wrong...

Phillip.

Software developer!=Software engineer!=Engineer

[tehcyder]

Just saying.

Re:Software developer!=Software engineer!=Engineer

[lpq]

Mark the above guy up!!!

When have you been able to order a stock size "ISO-sized" algorithm to combine some standardized Unicode Data and process it to yield any meaningful or useful standard output?

Engineering is about fitting well established parts and concepts together, allow for standard tolerances in the specs of those parts, and combining them into a unified whole.

While that is close to what Software Design is, I don't think anyone has ever attempted to quantify nor deal with software parts "standard deviation" from some standard, nor is such usually even quantized, because at the digital level, it is believed that all is 0 or 1, therefore the program as a whole must fail or pass as a reflection of the smallest part.

To design software to be "redundant" or "fault tolerant" of the component pieces it is made up from would be considered the height of folly. The last time such redundancy was in vogue, we went to the moon and back, and look where that got us... ;-|

we need more apprenticeships and less universitie

[Joe_Dragon]

we need more apprenticeships and less university.

The college for all idea is falling and it's also pushing up loan rates as well.

Re:Stop spreading FUD

[moeinvt]

The 7.x% "unemployment" number is the manipulated statistic. It's a fallacy because the BLS arbitrarily adjusts the size of the "work force". Did 600k people REALLY leave the work force in March?

Look up "Employment Rate of the Population" instead

This is a simple ratio between the number of employed people vs. the whole population. It can't be manipulated by arbitrary estimates of who is or isn't in the work force. This data show that there has been no material improvement in the employment picture since 2008.

I'm not trying to make any particular individual look bad. However, I think it's clear that the government's policy of massive deficit spending and Ben Bernanke's "Quantitative Easing" policies are making things worse, not better.

H1B Visas are abused to artificially lower wages

[__aailob1448]

I personally worked for a company that almost exclusively hired H1B visa software engineers. The company does it because they can be paid less and they can't quit, if they lose their job, their visa is revoked immediately and they have less than 2 weeks to pack their stuff and leave the US! It doesn't make me proud to be an american. How about giving them a year to look for another job or to start their own business?

If the company they work for wants to, it can sponsor them for a green card, which will take 7 years to be processed (!!). Ridiculous, if your yearly visa is renewed more than once, it means you have proven yourself twice already, by being hired and by being renewed and you should be able to get a green card right away or accept any competing employment offers without needing the new company to sponsor you and pay thousands of dollars. This would make you less desirable and stifle competition.

Finally, the salary of an H1B holder should exceed the average salary for the position by a significant percentage to discourage employers from underpaying workers. H1B holders are supposed to be the best and brightest we can get, and they should be paid what they deserve.

Re:Companies don't want to take the time/$$ to tra

[TerraFrost]

If they're wanting experience with specific products seems to me like they should be looking for people who went to a community college or other associates program - not a four-year university. In theory, four-year universities.are trying to prepare you for tomorrow - not for today. They're supposed to be more about the theory behind EE and not the immediately practical application of it.

The problem with CEO salaries is

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with CEO salaries is not with the amount but how it is not bound to how well a company does over twenty five or even fifty years. SHORT TERM THINKING is prevelent everywhere, the politicians think about two year election cycles for there parties, CEOs think about their big payouts, investors concern themselves with getting rich quick, students think about quick graduation, healthcare thinks about short tem cost cutting, developers think about the next release and don't give a crap about security and quality,. People don't worry about the long term welfare of the planet and throw everything away filling the worlds dumps with 500,000,000 tons of trash each year. Its impossible to get anyone to make a five or god forbid a ten year investment that might change things. What our society needs is for people to live for a few hundred years, then they might start thinking about tomorrow. What amazes me is that making babies is so easy but thinking about the long term care and welfare of our younger generation doesn't exist. http://rawcell.com.

Re:The problem with CEO salaries is

[sjames]

They also seem not to be bound by supply and demand in a free market. There's a metric assload of people ready to be a CEO for a fraction of the going rate, many of whom would do at least as well as the current CEO class.

might i suggest

[Phoenix666]

electrical engineers have incredibly valuable and useful skills. might I suggest that those who have those skills and yet find themselves unemployed apply their energies to as many disruptive technologies as they can? we all know what the problem is: rich, talentless parasites are destroying democracy, humanity, and the world. electrical engineers have unique insights into ways to solve that problem. now, go do so. we software engineers shall do likewise.

Re:might i suggest

[Reality Man]

Yes, that's hilarious for about six hours. What happens in six hours? You are very hungry and need to eat.

the new ObamaCare law fixes the health insurance p

[Anonymous Coward]

the new ObamaCare law fixes the health insurance plan issues and all is coved

H1B visa?

[Anonymous Coward]

H1B?? Sounds like a virus... that's exactly what these people ARE that are granted these visas! They multiply in their own countries like mad and then come HERE to work, while Americans are out of work. There are so many f**king Indians where I work, the whole building smells like curry and BO! This should be ILLEGAL!

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[dehole]

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing instead of software development?

Re:we need more apprenticeships and less universit

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I was fortunate enough to have summer jobs doing firmware and hardware design/debug during college, much in the style of an apprenticeship. A majority percentage of what I use day-to-day I picked up there. That's not to say education isn't necessary, since that experience needs to be grounded in the fundamentals too. I wish engineering programs had mandatory internships...

Okay, put up.

[Okian Warrior]

I'm like you - computer science theory in college and a couple of decades of hobbyist work in electronics.

I know how to make a constant current source from a 317 and knew what you were talking about and how to do it without looking it up. ...and I'm looking for a job. Contact me from my Slashdot profile if you were serious.

Re:Okay, put up.

[Osgeld]

A) its not my choice
B) We have already found a guy
C) random post on slashdot is not a good way to start

Engineering isn't a profession anymore, it's a job

[xtal]

Maybe it's time for engineers to start their own small side companies or, maybe it's time to encourage a tradesman program where experienced EE's show new EE's how things are done, and train the skills needed to do the job.

Engineering was once upon a time a profession, like Law, or Medicine. Then engineers sold their souls to the business folk, watered down their legal protections and right to certifiy work - specifically applicable to software and electrical engineers, who never really had that right codified in law. Oops.

From there, the MBAs do what MBAs do, and the skill has been commoditized. There is nothing special about what has been done to engineers; it could be done to Law or Medicine; both are under pressure, but both fields manage their legal and legislative footing and credentialling much more effectively.

My advice to anyone who is an engineer; you're obviously smart, learn how business works very, very fast, use your skills to start or move up the corporate ladder, or frankly, get out. Leverage your skills to get into the medical space.

If you're in the top tier you will never have a problem finding work. This is true of the top tier in ANY profession, though! Maintaining that top tier is something you do because of an overwhelming passion or working very, very hard. There is no shortage of firms who will hire people with solid FPGA and embedded skills. I am not sure why TFA broke that out; being able to code is critical to hardware design, even just for scripting synthesis, and you just can't do embedded design without C. If you want to learn, the tools are all there, and cheap, cheap, cheap.

You need to network. You need to hustle. If nobody will give you experience, go work at McDonalds and buy a GNU Radio setup and a FPGA kit and make something cool.

The easy days are over, and sadly, IMO, engineers have nobody to blame but themselves.

Disclaimer: I am an EE with ~15 or so years of experience, most of it hands on, in the trenches.

and another alternaive hypothesis is

[iggymanz]

that which we used to do with hard wiring and circuits is more and more being done in software on commodity computing chips. So the number of needed "hardware EEs" is going down, while the number of needed software development, engineering, QA & testing, and IT infrastructure people is going up.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[humblepie]

You may ask -- software development is has always been my muse, and continues to be -- I've saved enough money to be financially independent, and live simply.

Re:H1B Visas are abused to artificially lower wage

[danlip]

I don't agree with your comment on salary, but H1B visas should be converted to green cards after 1 year with minimal paperwork and cost and a streamlined approval process. The indentured servitude aspect of H1B is bad for us all, and we should try to bring in and keep as much talent as possible.

Climb to Idiocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Slowly but surely America is being pulled into the abyss of Idiocracy

A Big Old Serving of Slashdot Fascism

[fascismforthepeople]

As usual, you are selling fascism under the guise of "libertarianism", and as usual you are getting moderated up by your fellow cult members. No surprise there, but still worth pointing out how many places you lied or got it wrong:

People are envious, jealous and the ruling class (politicians) are capitalising on class war-fare-mongering (that word is likely not in a dictionary).

Wow, you were even disingenuous in your first line. You sir, are actively involved in class warfare, even though you try to bury it in nonsense. You are actively engaged in warfare on behalf of the wealthiest, as your church has led you to believe that those people will - even though you give them no incentive to - come to your aid after you complete rigging the world for them.

There is a legitimate problem with some people getting artificial advantage from the money that is created out of thin air by the Fed, money which shouldn't exist and it's given to the banks that shouldn't exist anymore. That money props up the Treasury (which doesn't exist, there is no treasure, only debt).

Actually, very few people receive money "created out of thin air by the Fed", as much as you claim otherwise. Money that is collected in taxes is still money, it is not "created out of thin air". Expenditures that are reduced by tax clauses still are savings, not "money created out of thin air". In other words, your premise is beyond flawed, it is utter bullshit.

This story is on Electrical Engineers unemployment and simultaneously there are complains that there is no talent among EEs. It's obvious to me that the inflation and all the taxes and regulations have crushed investment opportunities in USA (at the least since 1971) and that's why manufacturing was and is leaving, because investment was leaving, running away from the anti-business, anti-saver, anti-investor climate.

What you are conveniently overlooking here is that if a country focuses on getting its people only into manufacturing - and not engineering - you actually end up stifling innovation. You are proposing a situation where fewer people will go into engineering or get any kind of education beyond 6th grade. While such a scenario helps the bottom line of the wealthiest - who don't need to give a flying fuck about how the rest of the country gets by economically - it is devastating towards the actual growth and progress of the nation.

The fall of the manufacturing sector eventually causes the fall of the employment among EEs and other professionals needed for manufacturing and eventually this causes reduction in quality of the available professionals.

Unsurprisingly you don't seem to understand how design, prototyping, and production work.

At the same time the inflation, taxes (income and especially death tax) and regulations make it impossible for the companies that are still in USA to think long term. They are forced to find ways to beat inflation and to make 5-6% return on the investment and that's hard, try to make a return of 11-21% a year, you are going to fail, so MOST companies will fail in this environment.

If that were true then there would be no production of anything in this country. There are millions of employed people in this country who will tell you that you are, as usual, dead fucking wrong.

the companies no longer have real owners, the kids of the original founders are not there

So you want wealth to just be passed down through rich families. Not a surprise coming from a fascist like you with no understanding of math, science, or economics. Suppressing the middle class has been a clear objective of yours for some time.

So this entire system is set to destroy private business, private property while doing it with spectacular amounts of fake money and in that climate average people are getting poorer and easier

Have an auction for H1b visas, will be revealing

[echtertyp]

It was someone else's idea but a good one: U.S. companies should bid for H1b visas in an auction. That would tend to make very clear who really needs what and how badly. It would also, of course, be extremely unflattering to corporate America so it will never happen. Alas, it's easy to see that technical workers will soon be in the position of nursing students in the U.S. What was once a "severe shortage" has become a glut. Whatever is a potential good job for Americans will be washed away by a flood of cheap labor in response to whatever large companies tell the U.S. Congress to do.

Bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Electrical Engineering employment seems improving in SE Asia, India, South America, west Africa & the many parts of the middle east? Ah... I forget the internet is American... north american

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[humblepie]

Taking your response at face value, then why not stop encouraging the abuse of the H1B system, as a first step -- you're not helping.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[greg_barton]

Methinks you consider any use of H-1B as abuse.

UR for SW devs twice as bad as at full employment

[NickGnome]

The unemployment rate in times of full employment runs about 0.5% for electrical engineers.
...

The unemployment rate in times of full employment runs about 1% for software product developers, according to the BLS data.

They should have included graphs, with markers for times of full employment in the past, and markers for times of worst unemployment.

Re: quality of engineering ed declining

[NickGnome]

"I am an electrical engineer, and work in Europe. What I see here, is that the quality of engineers coming out of college or universities is declining at an alarming rate. The knowledge-level about basic subjects is embarrassing to say the least."
...

Please, tell us more. What "basic subjects" are they failing to teach?

Go to work in Brazil

[tcheleao]

Brazil doesn't have enough Engineers
They need specially Electric or Software (real time) Engineers.
I just got a 3 year contract with everything included (lodging, car, expenses....)
Check http://washington.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/

Good Luck.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[humblepie]

Methinks you've been brainwashed by the corporate line, and have taken it up, at best, and are disingenuous at worst. As is said in Matthew 25:32-33 "They will train an old goat, appropriately called a "Judas," to lead sheep to the pens for slaughter. A well-trained Judas will lead group after group of sheep to the slaughter all day long."

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[greg_barton]

So do you see any legitimate use for the H-1B program?

Re: STEM degrees earned

[NickGnome]

"almost no change in the number of degrees awarded"
...

I'm not seeing that, looking at
http://nces.ed.gov/
the Digest of Education Statistics.

In academic year 1959-1960, US citizens earned about 45,624 engineering degrees, and some 80,566 STEM degrees altogether.

That rose to 71,795 engineering degrees, and 162,190 STEM degrees in AY1971-1972; 95,044 engineering degrees and 230,129 STEM degrees in AY1989-1990, when the H-1B visa program started and the Cold War supposedly ended, after which US citizen STEM degrees dipped.

In AY2001-2002, US citizens earned 71,492 engineering degrees and 240,592 STEM degrees. In AY2009-2010, US citizens earned 91,430 engineering degrees and 310,586 STEM degrees.

From AY1969-1970 to AY2009-2010, US citizens earned over 1.3 million CS degrees, 3.1M engineering degrees, and 91M STEM degrees.

Studies by Michael Teitelbaum, Hal Salzman, and B. Lindsay Lowell suggest that only about a third to a half of new STEM grads have been landing STEM jobs.

But degrees with particular majors don't equal the ceiling on the talent pool for competent software developers, engineers or other kinds of STEM professionals. NSF reports suggest that, from AY1969-1970 to AY2009-2010, over 2.3M US citizens developed skills and knowledge in software development, 4M in engineering, and 11.9M in all STEM fields -- many by minoring or otherwise taking significant university course-work in those fields. Additional US citizens developed the necessary knowledge and skills by taking only 1 or 2 classes or employer-provided training combined with additional self-directed study and work experience.

According to Samuel C. Florman, past president of ASCE, in his book, in 1916, half of America's practicing engineers had never been to college. I would add that Nicolaus Otto, developer of the internal combustion engine, was a grade-school drop-out due to the death of his father and never attended a university.

Re: difficulty of curriculum

[NickGnome]

"for 7 years. Upon my return, I found the curriculum MUCH easier."
...

I've gone back several times for refreshers. I also try to keep in touch with relatives attending university, and some professor friends. Some things are much easier and others more difficult, and some of the differences vary from prof to prof rather than a reflection of general standards. One consistent trend has been that universities engage in far more privacy violation.

Some profs like to tax/test students' ability to make creative leaps from incomplete information. Some refuse to retrogress to re-explain things students have forgotten from disuse or whatever, or to explain them in different ways. Others spoon-feed every little thing. Both can convey the same amount of info when all is said and done, and each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

When I started, the only deadlines we had for programming assignments and term papers was the end of the term. Now, there's a much more rigid system of due dates and penalties which doesn't let you juggle priorities as much amongst work and other classes as we used to do. Part of that is because very few students plan to work their ways through university, now, it having been made virtually impossible. Instead, everyone takes out loans and pay the piper later.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[humblepie]

You made any empty accusation, to which I humbly disagreed. Of course I see not only legitimate, but good purpose in the H-1B program, but what I strongly object to is corporate giants using it, and other methods to surpress wages. As I said in my first response, it's economics 101 that in a free market, where demand exceeds supply, the price will rise until demand is met. This isn't happening, because of the manipulation of the market, with the H-1B program and other methods. I would add, another indication of market manipulation, is productivity has risen as indicated by the following, "Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago," while salaries remain flat. The share of the wealth created, by the work of the engineer, has decreased proportionately -- that is 200 to 400 perrcent. If there was competition in the marketplace, there would be high levels of movement of engineers, from company to company, but there is not. There is corporate abuse of the H-1B program, in at least three respects, artificially increasing supply, paying lower wages, and overworking the H-1B engineer. When companies stop manipulating the market, letting salaries rise, then revisit the question of increasing the H-1B quota. I've never advocated eliminating it, or even reducing it, just eliminating the manipulation of it by corporations, to keep salaries low.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[greg_barton]

In a free market companies are free to do whatever they want, so they manipulate. I think what you desire is a well regulated market, or at least one where the power of the companies is balanced out by the power of employees, i.e. unionization.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem will go away when all the fucking nerds go into fields other than technology.

I've been in tech for 20 years myself, and I HATE fucking computer nerds. The most obtuse arrogant little fucks I've known. And this site is crawling with them.

Re:we need more competition -- Naive at best.

[humblepie]

Your definition of free market is literally, "free to do whatever they want." You do not exclude, bribery, fraud, extortion, child labor and slavery, as corporate freedoms, which have been practiced in the recent past, as well as currently. It is interesting to note how you feel free to speculate about what I think or desire, instead of asking. When you have asked, instead of questioning my motives, I've responded, in some detail, in answer. As it happens, to put it simply, I do mean a FREE, well REGULATED market, but not necessasarily unionization. Here is my thinking, in some detail. I agree with the following two quotes. "From Smith to Ricardo and Mill, classical liberalism was a revolutionary doctrine that attacked the privileges of the great landlords and the mercantile interests. Today, we see vulgar libertarians perverting ‘free market’ rhetoric to defend the contemporary institution that most closely resembles, in terms of power and privilege, the landed oligarchies and mercantilists of the Old Regime: the giant corporation." "While its supporters argue that only a free market can create healthy competition and therefore more business and reasonable prices, opponents say that a free market in its purest form may result in the opposite." I agree most with the view of Adam Smith. "Critics of laissez-faire capitolism since Adam Smith variously sees the unregulated market as an impractical ideal or as a rhetorical device that puts the concepts of freedom and anti-protectionism at the service of vested wealthy interests, allowing them to attack labor laws and other protections of the working classes." Unionization is a response to the government allowing vested wealthy interests to attack the working classes. I prefer unions not be necessary.

Re:H1B Visas are abused to artificially lower wage

[NickGnome]

"H1B visas should be converted to green cards after 1 year with minimal paperwork and cost and a streamlined approval process."
...

Sure... about 5 years after they start running (and charging reasonable costs for) proper background investigations on every visa applicant.

Then, after the initial term of 8-10 months, when/if they ask for a renewal, only an incremental investigation need be conducted or charged for, and they can have a nice sabbatical of a couple months back home, before starting another guest-work term of 8-10 months. Then, after 10 years, they can apply for green cards and only have to go through another incremental investigation.

And, since we'd only be approving the genuinely "best" or "brightest" with "high skill levels" it shouldn't be more than 1K or 2K new guest-work visas (H-1B, H-2B, L, J work) per year. Except that it should respond to unemployment rates such that when unemployment rates rise, the numbers decrease to 100 or 200 per year.

Re: Execs don't want to invest time+$ to train

[NickGnome]

"The first job is by far the hardest to get. After that first job though, if you're good, you'll be sought after by former bosses and colleagues as they move around in the industry."
...

That works fine... until you reach the ripe old age of 35 or 40, depending on your specialty. Then, the "candidate management systems" will guarantee no human hiring manager ever learns of your existence, because the software and configuration by the HR clones designate you as too expensive regardless of your intelligence, knowledge, productivity, industry, etc. That's what the data suggest, anyway.

Re: STEM enrollments

[NickGnome]

Once again, from http://nces.ed.gov/ which does not report by race/ethnicity/citizenship and major (unlike the degrees earned data)
...

AY1992-1993 (earliest enrollment figures I could find)
CS 927K
engineering 1.229M
physical sciences 254K

AY2007-2008 (latest I could find by field)
CS 702K
engineering 690K
physical sciences 180K

So, yes, it appears enrollments are down, quite reasonably enough considering the dysfunctional US job markets for STEM fields.

Watts a VAR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Betcha that most newbie "electrical engineers" are totally clueless about how the energy used to run all that fancy whiz-bang digitally sampling non-linear technology is converted from chemical to electrical. Betcha that most newbie "mechanical engineers" are totally clueless about the importance of the square roots of 2 and 3 to how the motors run. Betcha that most "computer engineers" are totally clueless that all those chips are made in factories run by chemical and ceramic engineers who could not care less about how 'elegant' that macro-scale equipment being controlled by the chips is, or is not. PLEASE, if you do NOT want to do the grunt work, stay the heck OUT of the "field", thank you.
Betcha, as a third-generation registered industry applications Professional Engineer grunting at keeping water, light, and power "flowing", that I am NOT clueless about the scope of work outside my own expertise.

Do. Start your own side company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take the contracts with the biggest names. Be sure to do a HELL of a job.

Ten years down the road, you'll have a laundry list of reputable clients and a company with a brand.

That's what I did, by accident—I initially had the same feelings as you about contract work. But partly by dumb luck and partly as a matter of ego, I refused to take contract work with nobodies, and I did a bang-up job and was personable and exceptional where I did take work—and one day I woke up and realized that I was in demand.

Companies were cold-calling me after hearing about me "through the grapevine" and my consulting business now has more work than I can handle. I tell everyone that calls that they have to (1) be interesting to me, (2) out-offer my current contracts, and (3) that I expect a minimum contract length since in order to fit them in I'll have to drop someone else.

I've thought about expanding, but then I'd be in management, which I've never wanted to be. I just want to do the kinds of work I'm good at, not spend most of my time "growing a business" and playing MBA.

It's actually turned out well—but yes, it was stressful for a while not to have security and to have to buy things like health insurance at retail rates.

not internships apprenticeships that are real work

[Joe_Dragon]

not internships apprenticeships that are real work not a take out the trash internships.

Re: STEM degrees earned

[servognome]

I was just referencing recent data
From the publication you linked to:

2000-2010, the increase in engineering degrees earned was 24% compared to 33% for all university majors. Which demonstrates the lag engineering is experiencing in graduating students.
Data for 2005-2010 shows the number of enrolled engineering seniors rose 19% but during that time frame there was only an increase of 8.7% for degrees awarded.
The US has increased the number of students in the pipeline, but there are issues getting them to graduate.

Whoosh...

[Okian Warrior]

Whoosh...

Re:Whoosh...

[Osgeld]

now I know why you are jobless, retarded and arrogant at the same time

Change

[NewYork]

Electrical Engineers should become Nuclear Engineers so that they can build cool stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

Re: STEM degrees earned

[NickGnome]

The data show that enrollments and degrees earned are responsive to job market conditions.

Something for Companies to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have unfilled job vacancies and unemployment, then bringing in people who can do the job from abroad won't really affect the unemployment numbers, and will, instead increase economic activity.

There's definitely an economic case to be made for companies to get involved in sponsoring apprenticeships and internships. It doesn't cost you much to hire an assistant or someone who can work shadow one of your engineers and knows enough of clerical coding, powerpoint presentations, and report writing - for a summer, while they're still in school. They get to know what kind of work you're doing, and they can go back to college, and select the relevant courses, if they know that there's a job waiting for them at the end of the degree - provided they understand and are able to master what they've seen their internship-supervisors doing. Why have a secretary who is not learning on their job, instead of a undergrad - who can very well do the work the secretary is doing, but is learning the technical stuff while at it as well? Not to mention the advantage of fresh-perspective and new ideas that the students bring.

Heck, you don't even need to pay them more than subsistence - although you should (given that they're increasing the true productivity of your employees, by removing mundane tasks from their agendas) In fact, I'm sure loads of people will do unpaid internships - even if they've to pay for the work commute, and a house for the summer. We'll find ways - we'll sublet our school time accommodation, and move into someone else's place who's done the same thing. You might end up being out of pocket another grand, but heck.. you're known to the company, and drastically increase your chances of employment. Even if you don't get it in the end... how much more of a difference is $1k or even $2k going to make to the $75k you've already racked up? People just have to get over 'oh-the-injustice-of-intern-slave-labour'.

Electrical Engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people are caught up that Electrical = Electronic Engineers? I dont design computer chips or radios or anything. I deal purely with Power Distribution, Transmission, Protection, and occasionally I will do some instrumentation installs and design.

As for "coding", Just no. I am sure most EE's could try but I did a CS degree before my EE and the level between the two is quite a lot. The most programming I would do on the job is occasionally some PLC (very rarely) programming and that is nothing more than if alarm = on , trip motor.

A lot of people appear unclear on this.