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]

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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[_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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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]

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

[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

[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

[_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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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:Stop spreading FUD

[Skapare]

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

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/

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: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

[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?

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: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.

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.

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.

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.