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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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:Stop spreading FUD

[Skapare]

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

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"

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.

[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?

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.

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: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: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.