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

Posted by Soulskill on from the guess-they-built-a-few-too-many-robots dept.

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."

13 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. One cause by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    1. Re:One cause by yope · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:One cause by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    3. Re:One cause by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ^^^ 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.

    4. Re:One cause by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:One cause by DrLang21 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
  2. The current bubble is a software bubble by erice · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Be carful what you read in this article. by ErstO · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. I'm tired of H1B politics by Ion+Berkley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I'm tired of H1B politics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. Companies don't want to take the time/$$ to train by asm2750 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Reads like a press release by Sentrion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  7. Re:Companies don't want to take the time/$$ to tra by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.