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Electrical Engineering Labor Pool Shrinking
dcblogs writes "The number of electrical engineers in the workforce has declined over the last decade. It's not a steady decline, and it moves up and down, but the overall trend is not positive. In 2002 the U.S. had 385,000 employed electrical engineers; in 2004, post dot.com bubble, it was at 343,000. It reached 382,000 in 2006, but has not risen above 350,000 since then, according to U.S. Labor Data. In 2012, there were 335,000 electrical engineers in the workforce. Of the situation, one unemployed electrical engineer said: 'I am getting interviews but, they have numerous candidates to choose from. The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.'"
Employers don't want to develop talent in-house because that's expensive -- and will get more so as the employee becomes more attractive to the company's competitors. Employers also don't want to hire people to increase their talent pool; rather, they want to hire "super talent" in order to fire one or more lesser engineers.
Those hundreds of positions you see advertised? They aren't a sign of growth, but of stagnation, and a nearly total absence of investment (even from the profits that a company is supposed to be making).
Serious question, as I suspect there are quiet a few EE / CE folks here...
If your background (or degree) is in computer architecture / computer engineering, are you a "double E"?
Reason I ask: my degree is B.S.E.E., I'm an electrical engineer. In my studies, my concentration / specialization was "Computer Architecture" (one of a handful of specialties with our EE dept.) All EEs had to choose one specialization (signals & systems, power, etc.)
But at many schools, there are standalone "Computer Engineering" curriculums and even degrees. Upon discussion, I've realized they're essentially to what I did as a "double E" (including the other coursework such as circuit analysis, signals, etc.)
I guess my question is this: what do we consider to be an "electrical engineer"? (Please no snarky remarks about "what does your degree say?" or whatever - I'm working with a bunch of young engineers - mixture of EE, CE and CS, and this discussion got pretty lively within the group...) Would a "computer engineer" be an electrical engineer?
More proof there is a STEM shortage! Uh, shortage of demand that is. Of course academia and the cheap labor lobby will spin this as a supply shortage, insist on more money and students to keep EE departments open, and even more importantly insist on more H-1B's.
I am an EE, and like every other EE I know, I advise my children to stay the hell out of engineering.
No, it sounds like that unemployed EE was complaining about a lack of demand, not a dearth of supply. In theory the two are supposed to follow each other. In practice, demand for EEs is higher than ever - just not in America.
What's that, electronics isn't obsolete? Are you sure?
I am an EE, but suffer from the severe handicap of being an American.
In the '90s, EEs at the company I worked for were being "reskilled" to do software development. The positions they occupied weren't being refilled (at least, not in the USA). There has been no surge in demand and a high unemployment rate, so why would students choose to pursue it as a degree?
. . . . I'm a security geek. I see more and more gigs that want you to be a Win + Linux Admin, Cisco guru, Security Guru on several different firewalls and IDS/IPS systems, run the Helpdesk (which turns out to BE the Helpdesk), have multiple certs including PMP, and have 10+ years experience,. . . and do it all for not much over entry-level wages. . .
say.. so they were looking for a robot designer?
just saying, combining jobs is sometimes useful. otherwise to make a pocketwatch you'll need an ee, a materials engineer, an usability engineer, an ergonomics specialist, mechanical engineer, a sw architecht, a software programmer, a database engineer(the gizmo holds some data), a mathematician....
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Full stop
and market interventions (right down to war) don't artificially reduce the price of oil
How much do you really think that's going to change the price of oil? I think the last time I checked such things, even if we tossed the entire US military complex as a tax on gasoline, that would mean a few dollars per gallon tax. AGW costs in Europe are priced at a few dollars per ton of CO2 emitted (which is on the order of cents per gallon of gasoline).
Of course, the opposite will happen: the West will race to the bottom on labour conditions and freedoms.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line is that currently there's vastly more supply of labor available to the Western markets than there was decades ago - hence, the price of labor is going to decline no matter how much you complain. It's basic supply and demand.
Rather than find ways to make your country's labor more competitive (merely reducing wages is one way, but not the only way), the developed world collectively seems to be about how to restrict Western labor markets and adding even more costs to Western labor to encourage even more business flight to the developing world.
While I agree it's difficult to find work after graduating at the moment, is an employer looking for a graduate with a mechatronics degree (which does cover a combination of mechanical and electrical engineering) really so bizarre?
The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.
Read between the lines: "We can replace all of them with immigrants, but only if we can prove there's nobody who can fill the position. I know! Let's draft the requirements so they're impossible to fill, then hire the same person we would have anyway at half the price because we had to 'settle'. Brilliant!"
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
combining jobs is sometimes useful. otherwise to make a pocketwatch you'll need an ee, a materials engineer, an usability engineer, an ergonomics specialist, mechanical engineer, a sw architecht, a software programmer, a database engineer(the gizmo holds some data), a mathematician....
Well, no. To make a pocketwatch all you need to do is to copy an old pocketwatch whose design is in the public domain.
In order to make a fancy new electronic device that replaces a pocketwatch, you'll need all of those people. And rightly so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The H1B war has succeeded and much champagne will be spilled. STEM majors are giving up as the field simply isn't worth going into in this country. Meanwhile I hear that McJobs are hiring and if you work really hard for a long time you might move from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week where you get really, really bad benefits!
I worked at a University for a few years and I saw bright US students routinely drop out of STEM and choose other fields because of outsourcing. Meanwhile the bright international students happily came over, took our STEM classes and are heading back to create the next great thing. We've engineered a future without ourselves, our founding fathers would be ashamed.
Mod parent up, there is so much truth to this. I am an EE in the US (CompE actually), but between the real-world experience and painful interviewing process, it became clear that supply outpaced demand and competition for even the least appealing EE jobs was high. And of course, over time talent supply flows to where the demand (and pay) is higher. Personally I left the field, got my MBA and joined the ranks of evil in the corporate world where there was more demand and money...
"I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer" This employer is looking for an experimental physicist and does not know it.
On another note, I see the same thing in the semiconductor industry for process and integration roles. Everyone wants a perfect match, when the real perfect match is someone that can learn quickly because things are going to change a lot on as quick as a 2 year time scale. I had a recruiter call about an internal position I applied for and he was trying to ask how many years I have in some exact skill when, at the end of the day, that stat is not nearly as important as being able to learn. It makes it even more frustrating when the req is at the level of a new PhD grad and I already have 4.5 years industry experience.
Employers want to make as much money as possible without having to pay people.
Its been said before:
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output.
personally I think Marx's criticism of capitalism is pretty accurate. Its only where he assumes that uprising and revolution will lead to some utopian ideal that he goes wrong.
The pay isn't on parity with the level of schooling required, you would be better off becoming a doctor or even just a joe blow IT guy or something else. Unless you're putting all the patents in your name, It doesn't pay to be an engineer. Do it only if you enjoy it.
This is not about how many engineering hours are used, just about what kind of hours are used.
You still have to have hardware to run on, but most of the features are software.
Project starts with a hardware design, testing, and getting ready for production,
But that's only 10-20% of the engineering hours.
The rest is software.
Broaden your horizons. Computers and embedded processors are far from the be all and end all of EE. I'm an EE who for many years has spent about 50% of his time writing software, so I'm hardly anti-software. However, I've found many programmers are very egocentric about this. Not all EE is designing in processors to run software on!
Power systems are hot these days, after many years of being a backwater. Ever get involved in antenna design (which is more important than ever), or any kind of RF or microwave? Do you have any idea how much work goes onto designing those chips you see scattered all over the board?
What part of the world? Was it more of a "EE = computer programming" degree? It just depends on the school. So many of the folks I know who graduated recently with legit EE's from good schools in the Southeastern US are working for power companies, for GE, Siemens, or some of them for the large semiconductor companies like TI/National. It was the rare exception that went into software development because that's not what we were taught as EE's. Many of them had multiple offers on the table, which leads me to believe that there is a "quality-gap" between the EE's churned out from most schools versus schools that have solid reputations and long-term co-op programs (like a Georgia Tech, for example).
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
I have been having a hard time deciding between these 2 disciplines lately. Being fond of math, physics and computers I'm really sure I want to do computer science with pure math but ECE seems to be tempting. Now this topic makes me believe that ECE is not really the way to go after all. So what do you guys think about the future of Computer Science (assuming I want to go to a top 10 grad school) and then move on to the job market. Is it better to double major in Cs and Pure math, applied math or physics? Does it have a better career choice?
In reality management follows this reasoning:
Management: We have more work then we can handle, training is boring so we need to hire someone who is a good match for what we need, some experience with tool chain we use.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We have far more work then we can handle, there is no room for training so we need to hire someone who is a very good match for what we need, 2 year experience with the exact tool chain we use down to version number.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We are drowning in work, we never heard of the word training, the recruitment costs are sky high so we will be offering peanuts for wages and we need someone who is an exact clone of an employee who escaped years ago.
Reality: They can't find anyone.
Management: We outsource/hire immigrants and blame the total collapse of our business on the local work ethic.
Management: We deserve a bonus!
CEO: Me too!
Board of directors: Agreed, if you agree to raise our compensation.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In the recent years the productivity of electrical engineering tools have gone up several fold due to the ubiquitous cheap multi core workstations. The companies buying ECAD tools have demanded, and got, better use of these multi-core machines from the vendors of the ECAD tools. It has become cheap enough and easy enough to do electrical engineering simulations of hundreds or even thousands of variations of a basic design to refine it. Companies like Ansys have taken serving the high performance computing market as a priority. They are dishing out products that allow a single engineering work station to launch and analyze hundreds of simulations. This high productivity coincided with global economic downturn due to the financial systemic collapse of 2008, followed by tsunami in Japan, floods in Taiwan, economic turmoil in Europe and large scale civil uprisings in the middle east. So there are more electrical engineers than jobs in some parts of the field and some parts of the country. But this situation is temporary and the electrical engineers are going to see very good pay rise and job opportunities soon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I am not sure anyone could argue that point. Marx was one of the best critics of capitalism ever, but his guesses at the future completely ignore all of human history.
I have a BSc. EE (2000).
Since then I've worked in embedded programming, software development, hardware development, brought up bare metal hardware in linux, done custom FPGAs, worked with software defined radio, you name it. I've worked for others, I've run a company. I've done ok.
I'm a 5-digit UID member and I've read this blog long before that.
If I had to do it over again, I've had taken my Dad's advice - left the electronics to a hobby - and done medicine or another actual profession. Electrical Engineers do not have protection of law for their work and is not a "real" profession in the nature of Law or Medicine.
Even in the elite fields, salaries top out. I now work in technical business development and take home three times what I did in a technical role.
In short, if you're smart enough to be an EE, go do something else, and if you're smart about it, you can be financially independant in ~10 years and do whatever you want after.
Engineering is for suckers. the gig is up, though - people have to build things. Hopefully the salaries will rise to make it worth it again.
In the meantime.. don't let your kids grow up to be engineers. Teach them about compound interest instead.
Would take the comments here with a grain of salt. The sample size of unemployed to employed engineers on slashdot during the day is very high!
You generally start out with a pretty high salary right out of college, and then in just a few years, you quickly top out and can't seem to earn much more.
People *do* work to make money as a bottom line, and this kind of thing hurts a career choice.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Marx's economics is just plain stupid. In particular, you don't need to own something to control it. (It is possible to drive a rented or stolen car.)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
My training is in software, but in my recent job I have worked issues involving manufacturing processes, concrete spall, the dynamics of new grease in generator bearings, and thermal stresses on electronic components.
WRT the hobby thing, a lot of my current responsibilities involve networking, both long-haul and local, and I learned what I know wiring up my house. No courses, no certs...
It's good to learn a particular engineering discipline early on, but if you want to really show value to employers while continuing to do interesting things, my experience is that it's more about demonstrating logical, data-driven thinking than coding or soldering or somesuch...
The big money is often in the high current stuff... Large mining operations and the like. Electronics, not so much. Why design a controller when the off-the-shelf one just works? Someone somewhere is making lots of money designing those, but it all depends where you are, I suppose...
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
I think his complaint is that to stay in the field he needs to develop his skills, but without seeing the 'rake in the cash' part - no matter how superhumanly skilled he may be, his wages won't reflect the effort put in.
You'll often find EEs developing PLC code and control software. They tend to be better at it than any clown with a programming degree...
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
There are fields with worse job prospects, yes, like much of the humanities. But the kind of person who can do well in an EE program has better alternatives these days. Hell, you have better prospects making websites in Ruby.
Whether the U.S. having a bunch of web-devs and no hard engineering talent is good long-term is another story. But today, if you want a well-paying job, pick up a web technology, not EE.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The entire H1B program is bullshit.
There is supply in the US. Companies prefer cheap imported labor - young, family-less, unlikely to complain labor instead of more expensive domestic labor.
"In 2010, there were nearly half a million workers on H1B visas in the United States, 18 percent higher than in 2001."
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/are-americans-losing-high-skilled-jobs-to-foreigners/
Shitcan the H1B program and not only will the engineers we already have be able to find work but we'll have more engineers in the future to fill the need that will exist.
Assuming engineering work isn't all outsourced overseas, of course.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
That's not the only thing he gets wrong.
He also thought that economic exchange occurred with things of equal value. Even economists of his time knew this wasn't true.
Economic exchange occurs when things are valued unequally, otherwise, why bother exchanging at all? Transaction costs make an exchange a poor decision. If on the other hand I value what you have more than what I have, and you value what I have more then what you have, we trade. This could be a barter or money might be involved.
That is put perfectly, and matches my own experience.
I'm out of school for 12-13 years and my salary is just barely 50-60% higher than starting, which was exceptional at the time. If you don't make the move to marketing, sales or management you will stagnate. The exception of course is for anyone who is above average and performing company critical functions (but then you need to constantly apply pressure to see increases).
I'm not complaining, I like the work and I still get paid very well compared to the average person...
This is a pretty common thing. They aren't always looking for someone who is both, but someone who understands both.
There are a lot of EEs who can't figure out how a combustion engine even functions. There are a lot of MEs who can't understand basic circuit theory.
Considering how many times we use dynamos(generators) and electric motors, a complete lack of knowledge of one field or the other is a disaster.
This wasn't an odd requirement. I know several EEs who are self-taught MEs. Typically they are greasemonkeys who like to work on cars. They do very well because of their knowledge. I would bet that the company who had the dual requirement was an Industrial of some type.
Employers want to make as much money as possible without having to pay people.
And employees would rather make money and not work for it so what's your point?
Equal value doesn't mean identical. I have 5 dollars of bread, you've got 5 dollars of cucumbers, we each sell each other 2.5 dollars of material and have sandwiches.
For approx 6 months, a sr-level analog designer. Salary is better than average for this area (>150k). So far, applicants fall into these categories
1. People under 35 that do not understand what a senior-level engineer should be able to do.
2. Generic IE Wannabe-types that have no control-loop or magnetics experience.
3. delusional software-types that do not understand PCB layout for EMC compliance and DFM/DFT.
4. delusional software-types that think their ability to enter a schematic in SPICE and run a simulation makes them qualified.
5. project manager types that would not know a scope probe if it was shoved up their ass.
Not looking for a full-up Bob Pease, just a competent analog engineer. Too many mid-level people have left the field.
Exactly. INSTEAD of having a Cisco Guy AND a Sysadmin AND a Security guy and some Helldesk folks, they seem to want to combine all the positions into one. . . with the original workload NOT shrinking that supported 3-4 jobs, many companies now only want to fund one position. . .
EE's are more hardware oriented. They tend to understand the physical systems they are controlling. This means they are familiar with not only what is "inside" the computer but also what is outside (I/O). Software developers are only concerned with what is happening inside the computer.
I once worked with a software guy who had majored in CS and minored in EE. He was the in-house automation specialist where he worked and let me tell you, he was terrible. His code was horrendous, giant blocks and whole functions commented out along with sparse and cryptic comments (imagine a clump of 50 globals with half of them randomly commented out). And his physical work with wiring was anateur hour stuff. I once replaced a cabinet full of spaghetti that controlled a critical machine with DIN rail and wire duct. Numerous failures proved difficult to repair because of almost non existent schematics and documentation with pencil corrections all over. He squeaked by at his job but finally gave up and left for a software job. I replaced him and did a better job but they didn't want to raise my pay to his level when he quit (he was family and nepotism afforded him a nice salary) so I left.
Software geeks belong in a job where interacting with hardware outside the machine is not part of the job.
In particular, you don't need to own something to control it.
Are you arguing that, say, an owner of a factory doesn't have fairly direct control what happens in that factory? Yes, that sort of thing is only true because it's enforced by the legal system and government, but once you start throwing that out the window you're talking about a revolt of the industrial proletariat.
I am officially gone from
I see very large numbers of smart and highly motivated students coming through my classes, both domestic and international. There is no shortage of students getting degrees in STEM fields. I believe the complaints stem from employers who don't want to pay a premium for better skilled engineers. There are in fact far more STEM job applicants than there are jobs. Graduates have to apply to hundreds of positions, and employers have to sift through thousands of resumes. Applications are so numerous, in fact, that HR departments are reduced to superficial checklists of buzzwords to efficiently sift through all the options. Employers want cheap laborors who nevertheless do a good job, while students who want to get paid appropriately to their skill level are getting Masters and Doctoral degrees in the hopes of being more "qualified." (In fact, they're often culled first for being OVER qualified and therefore too expensive.)
So, what companies are doing is a spin game. They report to federal funding agencies that there's a shortage, when in fact what they want is to increase the probability of identifying more skilled applicants that they can dupe into taking lower paying jobs. The end result is that there are too many people getting STEM degrees (when they would be better off doing other things), not enough job openings, and rising unemployment. We need plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, and they can earn a good living, but nobody seems to care about them.
I'm an electrical engineer and manager of the same. It has been obvious to me for years what is going on.
When you offshore your manufacturing, you soon find that you need engineers on site to support production. They become the experts, while your need for American engineers decreases. That building expertise leads to the opening of offshore design centers and eventually new companies spring up that become your competitors and they employ no Americans at all.
Isn't it sad that the engineers are the ones who actually do the work, while managers are just overhead, yet the managers are the ones who get the money?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Look, if you keep a nice resume, don't act like a freak in the interview process, and are willing to move to get a job, there is no excuse for not finding work in America. None.
So any increase in unemployment must be due to people suddenly forgetting how to write resumes, starting to act like freaks, and being less willing to move despite greater desperation.
Really? That's why Nike's profits have gone down huh? No, sorry. Supply and demand dictates profit margins, which generally hovers around 5%. For a group of people that like to point at history, Marx is historically wrong. The labor theory of value has been discredited for decades.
True, I've never understood his assertions that only labour can create value and not automated or natural processes. In a way it is the opposite of the (equally wrong) feudal ideas that value can only come from things that are grown or mined, and that labour doesn't add to this. -- ~~~
Because one of those is criminal and the other is merely unethical.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Equal value doesn't mean identical. I have 5 dollars of bread, you've got 5 dollars of cucumbers, we each sell each other 2.5 dollars of material and have sandwiches.
Market dollar value is far from the only measure of value to an individual. If you were stranded in the Mojave and dying of thirst but your pocket had $500 in it, how much of that would you spend on a bottle of water that, in a store, sells for $1? Would you gladly procure 2.5 dollars in cucumbers if you weren't planning on eating a sandwich for a few weeks? Equal value doesn't mean identical just like identical doesn't mean equal value. Exchanges between individuals are based on many more criteria than that.
What major in engineering are you?
Electronics, power systems, instrument, controls, biomedical?
The only electrical engineers I've heard of who are out of a job are the ones who studied a dead art in their country. I.e. micro-electronics is most definitely not very in demand in the USA with only really a handful of big companies who are desirable to work for. Biomedical companies do micro-electronics but often require some part of biomedical as your major. I've never come across a power systems or instrument engineer out of work. There seems to be endless demand for them in the resources sector.
But value is subjective and has only a tenuous relationship to price. If you valued your bread as much as the cucumbers there would be no incentive to trade. That a trade occurs suggests that you both value 1/2 bread+1/2 cucumbers > all of what started with. Hence by trading you have both increased the value of your possessions - that is the entire basis of an economy.
For a clearer example of price != value: let us say I'm stuck in the desert with a million dollars worth of gold and no water, while you have $100 worth of water. Odds are I'll be willing to pay a *lot* more than $50 for half of your water since it's value to me (survival) is much greater to me than the value of the gold. Now if there were a free market the price would reflect the incremental value of the last drop of water (which tends to be *far* lower than the value of the first drop) but I don't believe such a thing has ever truly existed in the history of the world.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Most security gigs are tailored around having a military background. You might not have noticed yet but give it another 10 years and you'll start to get the picture. (Sort of like being ex-military is an unwritten prerequisite for a lot of police forces now.) That's why the TLA agencies (and cops for that matter) all have that "kill dem all, let gwad sort 'em out" attitude. (see sig below)
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
"I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.' That's called mechatronics and its quite an interesting field. Even tho electrical and electronics engineers would love to live in their nice white and black schematic world, reality is that any electrical equipment has shape and size - therefore any electronics or electrical specialist should know a bit about mechanics. At least enough to get the requierements about their electrical equipment over to mech engineer or to figure out the layout of components in principle.
Uh, you are supposed to invent something and start your own company after you gain some seniority. Obviously you will get paid the same if all you are going to do 10 years after being hired is the same thing you were doing the day your were hired.
What is it about CS that seems to totally disconnect people from reality? The only good CS person I ever ran into implemented low level serial protocols for a living. But he was old-school. I maintain his massive C++ code base, and the only reason I'm chucking it out is that it is 32 bit, relies heavily on a broken 3rd party library, and had so many features tacked on that weren't intended to be there. Not his fault really. There was no functional spec for what he did. Everyone else seems to love spaghetti code, global variables and variables named "done" or "M34_I" without any context.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
The pool is plenty big, it's the employers not wanting to hire and train EEs that's the problem. They'll all say there aren't enough US engineers, but that's a crock. What they really mean is, as one of the posters above said, it's easier to "maximize shareholder value" by hiring H1Bs, who work long hours because they have to go home if they're laid off. Employers love this situation.
I've been doing EE for over 30 years, and my secret (aside from loving what I do) is to keep learning and try not to get pigeonholed. If I had taken a well-paying job in the 90s doing gate array verification, I'd probably be out of work right now. Instead, I worked for a networking company, designing intelligent controllers, knowledge I could use when I was laid off and hired by a consulting firm to do embedded design.
Keep learning, and if you're young with no experience, look for small companies who are trying to make it. Ask for a job as an intern and work your way up. To some extent, you're paying (by taking a lower salary) the experience you get, but that experience will get you your next job. If you really love engineering, you'll have a workshop at home and play with stuff on your own as well. It's all grist for the mill. A small company loves multi talented employees, a huge corporation could care less. I wish I had been brave enough to start small when I got my first job.
If the purpose of the people was to serve the economy, that would be well and good, but in fact, the economy is a construct that is supposed to serve the people. If it doesn't do that adequately, it must be changed.
Reducing wages is not really a viable option unless we can also reduce rent and mortgages, food, etc.
Perhaps we need to outsource the overpriced management so there's more money for wages and the stockholders can still get a reasonable return on their investment. There's plenty of competent CEOs out there who are accustomed to salaries and bonuses of under a million a year.
Really? All the criticisms that haven't come to pass? Zero profit margin? No. Eternal monopolies everywhere? No.
Name one of Marx's accurate criticisms of capitalism? Marx was simply wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You're making a joke, but you've come the closest to the real issue of any comments I've seen here. There are certainly basic infrastructural issues as the rest of the world comes online with technological capabilities, I don't deny that. But I don't believe that's what's really going on in the US now.
We've put economic rapists at the top of the US economy.
For the most part, if they were to be evaluated at their jobs the way we are evaluated at outs, the should be fired. For the most part, they're one-trick ponies - cut costs, and they're generally only doing so in the most brutish ways, nothing subtle, clever, or truly transformative. The only imaginative thing about the job that they're doing is that they imagine the compensation they're receiving for it.
(I said "For the most part" because there are notable exceptions, like Elon Musk and the late Steve Jobs. (though there were other problems with Jobs...))
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If you want Americans to study engineering, provide secure jobs for them.
"What can you say about tinker toys?"
I can say that they make much better "Transformers" than Lego blocks.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
should be apprenticeship with mixed trades school and apprenticeships. Not just an 4 year school with an apprenticeships after that.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line is that currently there's vastly more supply of labor available to the Western markets
You second statement disproves your first. Most of the increase in labor is coming from China and other rising countries. Those countries do not answer to America or those who attempt to preserve Western labor privilege. Those attempts do not speed up (nor slow down) that increase in the labor pool.
Where's the contradiction? To disprove, you have to show that the one statement somehow runs against the other. It doesn't happen here. Note that I explain how the attempts fail to improve the situation by raising the cost of developed world labor not by increasing the overall size of the global labor pool.
Or put it another way: it's not your (West) fault that China is becoming better than you, much like how it's not Europe's fault that America became better than them in prior centuries.
If that were only true. It's not though. There's no inherent advantage to being Chinese any more than there was an inherent advantage to being American back in the day. Where was the economic opportunity for all those ethnic groups of Europe who fled to the US in the 19th century? It was in the US. The profound injustice, lack of economic opportunity, and sometimes just the need to survive drove many people out of Europe.
Obviously, the developed world is a better place than it was then. The failures of today are not those of yesterday.
Then feel free to suggest that other way. Better yet, implement it yourself (convince some investors to help you if you must). You could become a second coming of Henry Ford and become rich as a result.
Ok, end most entitlements, be they social welfare or business. End minimum wage. Greatly reduce regulation of businesses and people and for that regulation which you keep work on finding ways to make it less onerous for those that to comply.
I find your "Henry Ford" comment telling. It's not a innovation matter or something that can be fixed with a business. It's a matter, as I wrote, of getting rid of the societal and political attempts to preserve an ideal of privilege that is no longer sustainable.
The develop world collectively values capital over labor
Because capital hasn't increased in supply like labor has.
Indeed - but you have to remember that he was a victim of his time, when most folks figured that human culture (and ability to discharge their vices/failings/etc) would progress at the same pace as science was moving at the time. It was, to put to charitably, an overly-optimistic era. It also spawned a lot of other naive-but-useless things ranging from harmless (phrenology) to damnably dangerous (eugenics).
--
As for TFA? I pulled the D-ring on the EE field back in the early 1990's. Funny thing is, back then the cheaper employers tried to combine the EE and ME fields as well (I designed, built, and ran industrial control systems for a large poultry company - I lost track of the amount of instances they tried to get me to design equipment mods right along with new controls for them). Fortunately, they needed a sysadmin in a hurry (the last one flunked his drug test), so I got pressed into that, fell in love with it, and stuck with it ever since. Haven't so much as drawn a circuit or touched a soldering iron even semi-professionally in at least a decade.
I guess the biggest reason for leaving the field was that I didn't see all that much of a future in it. It only came in handy when I did a stint at a certain large semiconductor firm, where I got semi-shoved into a liaison role between the EEs and developers (it's what I got for settling a fight between the two groups during my first week there).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Honestly, I don't think pay is really that big an issue for engineers. It's an issue, but not that big of an issue. Most of us make a pretty good living in North America (70-100k) I'd say is there for a decent person. Top stars make more. Some grunts make less. Yet, that is a pretty good upper middle class job.
But I do think the pay has an impact on the top of the line. The field is definitely not attracting top of the line engineering leaders. We're basically running off the last people properly trained in the old companies. In Canada, it's the Nortels, Bells... The result is a total lack of leadership. Everything from management to executive people on the engineering side.
I'm certainly not thinking of leaving the field due to pay. It is more the working conditions.
Combining and getting rid of of jobs has most places I've worked at just barely getting things done. Very little in the way of quality or anything you can stand by.
Due to outsourcing, no job security, and decline in prestige, the quality of work and people has declined in most places to the point where I feel I am running around with a fire extinguisher all day. Like a home renovator whose whole job it is to fix botched home repair jobs. Yes, it's fine once in a while. But it's a huge frustration most of the time.
This is engineering. Things should work and run well. Sure, there have always been period of transitions, uncertainty, frustration, new things, bad management... but these days it seems that is all there is apart from a few hyper innovation places which is great for the few hyper innovators in those areas, but that is simply not the vast majority of the work out there.
So yes, I'm definitely thinking of leaving as most of the people I graduated with have. Probably more into the business side.
Yes, that sort of thing is only true because it's enforced by the legal system and government, but once you start throwing that out the window you're talking about a revolt of the industrial proletariat.
Actually, it's also enforced by logistics (if you don't have the raw materials, you can't make the stuff), economics (no credit/cash, no new tools, BoM, payroll, etc), competition (if someone makes a better widget than you do, you lose sales, etc), talent (no talented employees, no product/sales/management/etc) and a shitload of other external factors that the owner often has no control over.
Problem that Marx had is that he never took any of this into account, simply assuming that the proletariat would magically smooth over these troubles. The result? Google for "Bread lines".
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
In the 90's, more Universities started Computer Engineering majors, which combined the digital half of a standard EE degree with the less theoretical half of a standard CS degree. (I know -- I was a year or two too early for CE, so I got an EE instead.) I would bet that any EE job that has a significant embedded software component is called something else now.
His criticisms were still pretty solid - just that he had a bad habit of extrapolation to the point of absurdity, then worked from that absurd point.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
BSEE here, never engineered a circuit professionally in my entire life. I probably never will.
As others have noted, we often become developers. That was my path, between long phases of un or under-employment. On the one hand, I lacked knowledge of some algorithms that CS majors might have had. On the other, I think I may have been more attuned to low-level issues. There were some CS courses in our curriculum. Most of my programming was taken up "on the side" though. Strangely, my parents said that I'd have to attend a local community college if I wanted to major in CS. They were usually not heavy-handed about things like that. It was an unusual exception most likely brought about by the story that the son of a friend graduated and made $50k/yr right away (1980s, consider inflation). Later when I asked about this they said, "you could have switched majors". I'm not sure if I could have done that without them finding out. I always figured EE wouldn't hurt me. When I graduated, there were a lot of very traditional companies interviewing us--companies that might have mentored EEs; but it became obvious at the time that I wouldn't fit the mold.
LOL, yeah. I'm going to work for the power company??? At an aerospace plant??? Not happening. The strangest interview was with a tobacco company. Apparently they had a fairly sophisticated system for blending tobacco and making cigarettes. Very sophisticated electro-mechanical automation, probably computer controlled. I came away thinking "I drive myself crazy the past 4 years to come up with a slightly more efficient way of poisoning people". I think they wanted the guy with the master's degree anyway. It was a small group interview actually. There were 3 of us in one room hearing the guy talk about these "hoppers" full of tobacco, and how good the benefits would be if we were hired. Funny the things your remember.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Seriously, I am a EE of 15 years and I have given that advice to several shocked STEM wannabe's finishing up high school. It runs so counter to all the cheer leading they get.
The only way to make it is to get specialized in an already niche field. You then become a technical nomad, trekking across the country (or globe) from one dying or mismanaged company to the next for a few more years. The work is damn hard, the pay only OK, and your co-workers are an interesting story (sausage fest, lots of imports with language issues, almost all lacking a full deck of social skills). Expect that other than your basics, that your knowledge's value will have a half life of about 5 years, meaning you have to constantly build up new skills, often without your present company's support. If you thrive on hard technical challenges you can find your reward there, but that is about it.
Yeah, go into business or accounting or some such.
Marx wasn't the best at predicting things. For example he completely missed the idea that labor could withhold itself to bargain for better pay and conditions.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Of course he had (past tense, Marx has been dead for over 100 years), you think licensing is a recent invention?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
If the purpose of the people was to serve the economy, that would be well and good, but in fact, the economy is a construct that is supposed to serve the people.
That's irrelevant. Developed world labor just isn't as valuable as it used to be. Trying and failing to force the economy to change that valuation hasn't worked yet nor will it.
Reducing wages is not really a viable option unless we can also reduce rent and mortgages, food, etc.
I wasn't saying that reducing wages was an option. I said it was happening.
Perhaps we need to outsource the overpriced management so there's more money for wages and the stockholders can still get a reasonable return on their investment. There's plenty of competent CEOs out there who are accustomed to salaries and bonuses of under a million a year.
The very same forces who try to insist that not reducing wages are an "option" are the same ones creating this sort of dynamic. The shareholders don't control most of their shares. Institutions do. And they're quite satisfied with the current state of affairs. Many of those institutions are public pension funds or state sanctioned investment funds. In the US, 401k plans and IRA funds, which have tax subsidies of various sorts, are mostly sunk into mutual funds. These don't directly contribute to wage inflation, but they do encourage the passive investing that leads to your CEO complaint.
Marx's ideas have some merit, but he didn't take into account how greedy and brutal people would turn out to be.
Of course he did! What he missed was the idea that labor could withhold itself as a bargaining tool. Das Kapital isn't a treatise on the human condition, its a book about money. Hence the title. Don't make Marx into something he wasn't. And he wasn't a humanist, he was an economist. Communism just glommed on to him as a rallying symbol. You know his dying words were "I am not a communist" right?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
also over focus on college over trades / people who learned on there own in IT
Any increase in unemployment in engineering, yes. There are still plenty of engineering jobs.
Even if you had 20% unemployment there would still be 80% employed, which means "plenty of engineering jobs". What's your point?
If you're claiming you can't find one, the first step would be to get off Slashdot, you won't find any jobs here.
Already got one thanks (and I should get back to it now). In the last 30 years I've never been unemployed long. Yes, I'm good at what I do, but I know other folks just as good who had much worse luck than me. Don't act cocky just because you got your first job - I got my first job before I even graduated. Go around the block a few times and then let me know how your perspective has changed.
I graduated in the recession of 2002. I struggled finding that first job. As mentioned above, absolute catch 22. Very few want to hire a recent graduate, everyone wants an EE with 2-4 years of experience. I got my lucky break and started with a decent salary; nothing mind blowing, but decent. It's now 11 years later, I carry a Senior EE title and make a little more than double my initial pay and am pretty topped out salary wise as far as I can see. Management is unfortunately the only way up. I've worked at large companies who simply do not even consider hiring an EE (or software developer for that matter) over 50. We were building a team for a new product within an organization and weren't able to consider older candidates. 50 is the end of the rope for anyone with a tech title and without management anything. Jobs can probably be found but pay is not going to be high. I'm forcing myself to highlight my management experience (be it project, personnel, etc.) as I look for my next position as this is the best way I see to stay relevant and continue the career progressing upward. Good luck to all EEs out there!
Why do you expect your real salary to increase without bound? If your labor produces value X you will be compensated in relation to that. You don't magically become more and more productive with time. After 15 years, more experience just doesn't increase productivity that much.
Preferably unpaid interns. Second in preference are outsourced $2/hour engineers in Sumwaristan. Absolutely dead last are competent, well paid native English-speaking engineers who can be brought up to speed in a month or two.
Competence and actual productivity of new hires are irrelevant. Neither quality shows up on a spreadsheet. If they do, they can't easily be traced back to the division head who made the hiring policies. If some troublemaker points out the problem, the division head will have moved on to another company or division before it becomes a problem.
An MBA is now the last resort for psychopaths who are just functional enough and smart enough to avoid jail.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You have just summarized why we must make a fundamental change in the economy. It can be relatively conservative such as basic income or it can be much more extreme.
It may or may not involve people sacking Wall Street in the process.
These fields have not somehow become less valuable than they ever were or we wouldn't see billionaires ripping out their hair demanding more graduates in these fields. What has changed is the amount of effort they are willing to put into underpaying for the value of these fields.
What is relevant is how we can efficiently raise the standard of living for all. Since the economy IS a construct that is to serve us, that is the most relevant metric for it's success or failure.
Well, these days, job hopping is pretty much required if you want to advance your salary...the days of one job for life have been over for a looooong time.
Especially when young, you need to be jumping jobs at about 3yr intervals at least.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Spoken like a young person new to the market.
A lot of it depends on the field you're in tho....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Mechatronics Engineering is an accredited program at some universities.
sigs are for suckers
Worldwide? Maybe. In the US? Not so certain.
The US has a $4 trillion manufacturing sector. The need for engineers isn't going to go away at all. The need for specific types of engineers will fluctuate but there will always be jobs for engineers.
Accounting. Skilled trades. Nursing, or possibly MD. Lawyer. Maybe even an MBA if I can stomach having one in the family.
A MBA is a degree, not a profession. A cheap shot like that might get a laugh but it also makes you sound a bit ignorant. People get a MBA to learn how to manage a business but their primary professions vary wildly. People with MBA degrees work in finance, accounting, engineering, sales, marketing, IT and of course general management. It's not a single profession and never will be. People get the degree to learn certain skills that are outside the scope of their primary profession. Just because you are a smart engineer or a doctor or a lawyer doesn't mean you know the first thing about how to make a budget or to calculate a net present value or how to market your company. One way to learn these skills is through formal schooling and a MBA is one way to do that.
It's a lot easier to analyze the past and present than to accurately predict the future. How many future predictions have come true, versus how many have been wildly wrong? The guy obviously did a pretty good job of analyzing the existing state of affairs and critiquing it, pointing out its problems and inequities. Lots of historians have done the same with various topics, such as the fall of the Roman Empire which many have written about, or the writings of Jared Diamond. Then he tried to singlehandedly devise a new system to replace it, and obviously failed completely as he failed to account for many variables.
Unfortunately, Marx's failed ideas about a new utopian system get all the attention, diminishing his much-better work in critiquing capitalist economic systems. Compare this to Jared Diamond: he's famous for his books like Guns, Germs and Steel, but imagine if he tried to devise some new social system that some country adopted, with terrible results. Then history would only remember that, and forget about his other works which were spot-on.
Sounds like you were underpaid to start. Expect to job hop ever 3-6 years or so (more often makes you look like a job hopper always looking and less means you fall behind the pay scale of your peers) and look into a managing/business postgrad degree. If you really want to move up, you're not going to be doing technical work for very long. Sad but true.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
LOL!!!
With the current "education" system, you would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to be degree'ed credentialed to get a position like that.
No way you would ever recover the costs of those degrees.
You would be a serf for the rest of your life.
But at least you would be an employed serf!
LOL!!!!
I personally can't wait for this whole institutionalized industrial college complex to crash and burn. Most of the rot with college degrees and other crap is all based around the current push for globalization which that too, will crash and burn.
Absolutely hilarious.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Engineers gain value from experience; if you are still doing the same thing in the same time then yes, but with experience comes order of magnitude speed up and cost avoidance; this should come with more money. Not below cost-of-living increases in perpetuity....
andy
I have an EE degree but rarely do any circuit design. I'm a system-level design type of person and I'd jump at a job that also allowed me opportunities to do some mechanical design work on top of EE work. The more varied skills I have the more employable I will be to my next employer and the more I can command. Sure, if the experience isn't relevant to them they may not like it but it denotes a certain level of trainability and adaptability that many other candidates won't have. Plus, I'm not looking for the same job I had before, when I'm looking for work. I want something new, something interesting, something different. Maybe it's just me.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I'm a EE who moved into the software field a decade ago, but moved back to start my own company.
From what I can tell, EE in the US is going two ways:
1) there's still a lot of EEs employed by companies like Intel. However, they don't deal with circuits or soldering irons or anything like that; they do nothing but design RTL code in Verilog, or write software to validate that RTL. Basically, EE degrees are mostly useless for these people, because the only thing they really need to know is digital logic and Verilog coding. They sure as hell don't need EM fields classes, control theory, analog electronics, heck they could probably do fine without even learning Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Laws.
2) For everything that doesn't involve Verilog, it's all moved to Asia. US companies don't design electronics any more, they outsource all the work to contract manufacturers and ODMs in Taiwan and China, and focus on parts of the software. At one company I worked at a few years ago, they designed an all-new product that had an embedded computer, touchscreen, etc.; the electronics design was all done by the CM/ODM, and much of the software was outsourced as well. The only stuff they kept in-house was some of the encryption software (this device had to be PCI compliant (that's Payment Card Industry, not the bus)). They had one EE on staff, only one, and he quit to start his own company; they didn't miss him at all, or bother to replace him. There was a bit of microcontroller code (for some security chip that was embedded into some of the products) that he was responsible for maintaining which was handed over to me as I was also a EE with some microcontroller experience, but then I never did anything with it. After I quit it was probably completely forgotten about.
"Real" EE work has all gone to Asia these days, because that's where all the manufacturing is. The only exception might be in the defense industry, but do you really want to work for an evil government that drone-bombs children, tortures people, and spies on citizens more than the Stasi? In private (non-defense-related) industry, you don't have to set aside your morals, but there's really not much work left there except at very small companies working in niche industries, and the pay at small companies usually isn't very good.
The airlines have been doing this forever.
Just cause we are not working (posting on /.) doesn't mean we are unemployed, just gold bricking.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output.
personally I think Marx's criticism of capitalism is pretty accurate.
Yes, it is accurate. But it is not criticism, it is praise. Competitive markets do indeed squeeze profits, but that is a good thing because it means more value goes to the consumer, and it forces capitalists to innovate to become more productive. Likewise, declining unit labor inputs are another good thing. This just another way to say productivity has improved, and it the main reason that living standards go up.
I make 100% more than when I started, and started before the dot boom. But i do job hop every 3-5 years, I am a squeaky wheel, I work 80-100 hrs a week and I drive a hard bargain. I am not afraid to leave an employer after a year if I believe they haven't held their end of the bargain or try to bait and switch me into a non-technical job (systems engineering, fae, project management, etc.). I believe the ceiling is perhaps 30% above where I am at, which at 36 is still somewhat disheartening considering that what I do directly impacts the bottom line, and 6 months of my work can provably produce tens of millions in revenue, of which I see a microscopic amount.
However I am also seeing opportunities dry up and go overseas, I'm seeing "quantity over quality" hiring practices particularly at abusive employers like Intel and AMD, and every job tries to push either more management or more offshore labor training on me as a requirement, which I refuse to do. It is unclear I will be able to realize that 30% in the time it takes for me to get it, versus the rate of market collapse. Intel's CEO (former or soon to be former) was fond of trying to lure people to EE saying something like "and you can make 25% over average". That's hardly worth the degree and the stress of diffeq and the labs, but that probably represents what Wall Street wants to see in labor costs, and what the industry is going to be doing over the next decade in terms of further wage stagnation/depression via labor choices and overseas development.
I really don't recommend EE as a career choice for anyone who is in college now. The day is going to come where it's either organize/unionize or let it go overseas, but engineers being engineers, I doubt we'll ever work together though and set a bar or board certification system and get it codified into law. Everyone thinks he's better, or everyone is a mini-entrepreneur who likes to pretend he's an investor or going to make it big, thus we all get poorer. Doctors and lawyers figured this out a long time go, but engineers, EE, ME and even CS, are fairly stupid and continue to empathize too much with management. You don't go to the bargaining table feeling sorry for your opponent, you go there and take every dollar you can, knowing full well there's no deal until the other party is getting enough to make their ends meet.
And if you think working the back end and having the government intercede on overseas and H1-B use is "unfair", then you're part of the problem. Take every dime you can get, by force. They will too, and won't respect you if you don't. All this talk about economic philosophies and principles is just pure bullshit. Capitalism is all about The Deal, and you are obligated to make the best deal for yourself as possible, however you can. We've learned from Wall Street this includes playing dirty pool and having absolutely no morals.
To invent a chip, depending on what it does and how big it is, requires $1M-$50M in investment, sometimes more. Tee second you ask for that kind of money, there is no "your own" company, at best you're a major shareholder.
Also innovation is weighed too heavily these days, nothing gets done without execution and an educated, trained workforce who can execute cleanly and flawlessly. Those people don't come cheap. Further, in the process of executing, you actually innovate quite a lot, as you discover new, hard problems you wouldn't have seen before. Innovation of this nature is not rewarded at all, except maybe your name on a patent, which with $.50 won't get you a cup of coffee.
You're talking about "getting rich", the rest of us are talking about "good paying jobs". You'll never get rich working a good paying job, neither as an engineer nor a doctor nor lawyer or any other profession, except maybe senior executive (for reasons I can't really understand). The "getting rich" is always for entrepreneurs and investors, of which the market can bear only a small amount.
A) Managers certainly can earn their money (though they most often don't). They just need to plan ahead, and remove roadblocks from your path to allow you to be more productive at your "actual work".
B) Managers have scale on their side. If you were a manager's only direct report, you could easily justify him earning much less than you do. But with 20 direct reports, he only needs to find a way to make each of you slightly more productive, and he's saved the company more money than any of those 20 individuals.
My big problem with the system is that it's too damn hard to get rid of a bad manager, while bad employees disappear quickly.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
...the days of one job for life have been over for a looooong time.
Nope. The days of "one job for life" were a myth that never existed in the first place. Average job tenure is actually higher today than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and about the same as 1980-2000.
Marx was right about the evils of capitalism but dead wrong about communism. Turns out that communism, at best, is just as evil as capitalism but is often much worse.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Forget supply-side economics, forget demand-side economics, we need more sandwich-side economics. Either that or I need lunch.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The simple fact of the matter is that the world is over populated. In order to have a chance at a non-menial career, people go to colleges and universities. But because so many people want a non-menial career, there is a vast oversupply of people from those programs.
As a result, companies have to sift through thousands of resumes looking for the wheat in the chaff. Often they'd rather go with the simpler/easier solution of outsourcing the problems of development and design to a company (usually overseas) that they can sue if there are any problems with the results. With an internal staff, the worst you can do is fire them. There is no option for recovering the monies spent or for the "damage" done by the flaws.
Globally, the world is in a tough place. Our whole social mentality is based on the idea that some people are more skilled than others, and therefore deserve more money. But when you look at the aggregate population, there just flat out aren't enough jobs that demand those high skill sets compared to the number of people being educated in those fields.
Consider this: How many people does it take to design something like a phone? On the bright side, it's a relatively large team -- probably a couple dozen to a hundred skilled and trained people. On the downside, that one small team is responsible for a product that (hopefully) sells in the millions of units around the globe. Compared to the market serviced, the efforts of the team are paltry and employ an extremely small number of people.
And the more we globalize and standardize products, the more that problem of "less talent needed" becomes. We're already at a point where the vast majority of the parts in something like a phone are standard components available from a very few vendors.
There is no solution to this problem. We need a mental shift to evolve into a socialist society rather than one that depends on money to determine wealth and reward. But how and when this shift will happen is anybody's guess. I hope it doesn't take the form of leaving millions of people on welfare and social assistance fomenting an eventual rebellion for us to realize that we just can't justify a world where CEOs make hundreds of times what their workers do. Hell, we can't even justify a world where someone makes ten times what someone else does.
At the same time, the critical shift has to happen personally. People need to realize that they need to have enough for a comfortable living, not a luxurious one. But greed is an inherent part of the human animal, so I don't foresee that happening any time soon.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm an EE, working for a small SI/contract house that's been in business since 1985.
We're innundated with work right now--the problem is NOT finding contracts. It's finding qualified engineers that don't already have a gig. Still, the Clients remember the "bad economy" prices and believe those should persist. Our rates have not gone up in years.
At some level of management, the perception is that engineers and skilled trades are interchangeable commodities.
The Client's argument seems to be that "There are 7 billion of us. Somewhere out there is a person with the exact skill set we need. We just have to find that person. Their services should cost no more than any other."
The Client must understand that if they want a specific skill set and aren't willing to "invest in people", they have to pay us to make the same investment. Most of us are permanent employees where I work. You don't pick up a random engineer on the street and find they're competent and have a good work ethic; those people have jobs already. Between gigs, you carry those folks so they're available when the next gig shows up. And when the work gets heavy, those people work a lot harder. To retain those folks, you have to pay them. This is "investing in people". At the end, the service we provide reflects that investment. Through a contract or as a direct employee, it still must be paid.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
At least if you are a college intern, you are actually paying to work (tuition for the class).
The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally.
I think this is a systemic problem in the marketplace these days, it seems to be the case for any job (especially in IT). And of course since the _perfect_ candidate, who is also willing to work for the salary you offer, is rare - companies then start moaning about 'lack of talent' and the need to import skilled workers.
It's even worse than that.
Not only do they not want to train or pay much, the don't want to hire you unless you are already have a job. Being currently unemployed is a stain on your resume. Also, you have to be willing to work for a wage that probably isn't worth leaving your present company for.
In some industries and companies, you also have to deal with lucking out in the HR screening. Even if you are a 100% fit, you might get screened out by HR screening software that is searching for one specific skill, but you happened to just use a different synonymous term to describe that skill than the software is looking for. Too bad.
American companies are completely clueless about the fact that they are complaining about a situation that they are causing...
There are about 3 antenna designers in the world. The rest use cookbook http://www.qsl.net/n1bwt/contents.htm methods. I exaggerate, but only a little.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We need plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, and they can earn a good living, but nobody seems to care about them.
So we can re-inflate the housing bubble with a lot of new homes that no one can really afford to buy?? The fact is all those who were in the construction/housing market are struggling themselves.
There was a day that as a nation we would take on national infrastructure projects to help stimulate the economy. But we have a congress much more willing to sit on their hands than account for themselves.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Nice to see in general things are consistent. I have EE, CS, and CE degrees, yet I couldn't get employed when I graduated 10 years ago in these fields. Therefore, my 'degrees' are no longer good enough to be employed. I apply for a passport and they talk of restricting it because of my needed talents, yet I can't get a job in the field I trained in. I work in the IT field because that is where my experience is.
What I did was show how by using your second statement, I created an explanation how there's no relation between Western actions and the speed of the race, thus disproving your claim that something the West did sped up the race.
Well, I don't see your point here. Lots of things are triggered by events outside of our control, here, the addition of billions of people to the international labor markets. But lot's of stuff are within our control, such as ineffective protectionism in response to this flood of labor.
Note that "fail to improve" is not the same as speeding up. The girl "failed to improve" the way she dresses herself and where she walks at night, alone. Now she's stuck with the unintended consequence of speed up her getting raped!
Ok, how about when countries just throw extra costs on the already expensive cost of employing people. For example, in the US for employers that employ more than 50 "full-time" people, they suddenly have a $2k per person marginal charge (excluding the first 30 employees). This is a result of Obamacare which is turning out to be one of the most counterproductive pieces of legislation the US has ever produced - this particular aspect is resulting in a massive shift from full time labor to part time labor.
Of course, and I don't disagree. I'm just saying this (this being the race to the bottom and its speed) is not a failure of the West, but a success of the East.
Why isn't it a failure of the West? It's an entirely predictable phenomenon, which remains so. Eventually, virtually all of the labor of the world is going to be tied in and the total population is going to hit somewhere around 10 billion people, maybe peak there. So perhaps 6-8 billion workers, depending on demographics of the time.
Either there will be a reason for developed world labor to command a large premium or its just not going to be very different in cost than the rest of the world, no matter what is tried.
No, it absolutely is something that must come businesses.
This is delusional. If developed world labor remains inordinately expensive, then any such innovation will move elsewhere just because it is cheaper and that's where the actual economy will move to over time.
It's a matter, as I wrote, of getting rid of the societal and political attempts to preserve an ideal of privilege that is no longer sustainable.
Who do you think can get rid of those things? Who's going to end all the welfare? Do you think the masses living on welfare or the government who feed them bread and circuses would vote to remove themselves from the system?
It has to come from private individuals and their private businesses. All too often people like you speak of "I'll pay for my [education/healthcare/insurance/retirement/etc]". The same applies here. You have to put up your own money, time, and even life for the solution you want, including the solution of dismantling what's present.
Edward Snowden put his life and freedom on the line, but I suppose if he "failed to improve" the situation, it'll be his fault for speeding up America's demise.
I pointed out what I think would fix things, and you complain that the voting populace wouldn't go with it? Too bad. Lose the free lunch or lose the society.
I'm perfecting willing to forgo this. Nobody seems keen to call my bluff. I know there's some who echo these sentiments, but draw the line at their bit of squeeze (eg, we need to cut spending, but not my medicare/social security/education loan subsidies, etc). That never has worked. If you want others to sacrifice, you need to do the same.
And what of Snowden and his allegations of massive, prevalent spying on the public? The same government that has all that power to give me stuff happens to be the same one that is spying on me. What a coincidence! Cut the welfare and the a
This is also the kind of situation parent was referring to. Since we are both craving cucumber sandwiches, you value my half of a cucumber more than you value your half of a bread, and I value your half of a bread more than my half cucumber, and so we trade, either directly or by selling it to each other using money as you said. I love cucumber sandwiches.
Hrm. So let me get this straight. If you spend a year inventing something, and then do some backslapping in restaurants with people for nine years, you're supposed to make money of royalties, licensing, and perhaps celebrity, hand over fist for decades, but if you work for decades, you're supposed to just maybe keep pace with inflation.
Yup. I think that captures what's wrong with American business mentality and perverse motivations/drivers in the capitalist system pretty much exactly.
Someone had to do it.
There are about 3 antenna designers in the world.
Then it's a hell of a coincidence that I know all of them. Antenna design is no more cookbook that any other part of engineering, and possibly less. Sure there aren't many guys named Yagi coming up with completely new approaches, but there aren't many guys named Bob Widlar coming up with completely new analog ckt concepts either.
If anything antenna design has become more difficult because everybody wants to squish antennas into funny packages like cell phones. When was the last time you saw a rubber duckie? Tuning and optimizing such things is an amazing amount of work. I always sorta knew that, but didn't realize how involved it was until my current job, where I have the pleasure of working with some excellent antenna engineers. There's also an explosion of previously exotic (mostly mil) techniques into commercial work, like phased arrays.
Someone with 10 years of experience is a better worker than someone fresh out of college, and will work faster and make fewer mistakes. Someone with 20 years of experience will do much better than someone with 20 years, similarly. Engineering is just like any other craft: the more you do it, and the longer you do it for, the better you get at it. Also, when you're senior, you're additionally valuable because you can mentor the younger engineers and bring them up to speed faster.
That's what I did; I got tired of just spending all my time bug-fixing, so I started my own small business.
Wrong.
Corporations... US or otherwise never want to pay people because they're human beings and human beings would rather get something for nothing.
Right? If I were giving away free sandwiches wouldn't you take the free sandwich? Of course. Its free. So this "US corporation" garbage ignores that this feature is build into humanity itself and is not an artifact of American business culture.
Furthermore, we weren't always screwed up. So if this feature were the cause all along we NEVER would have had a better labor market. Since the labor market is worse now then it was before, you can't cite this as being the causal element.
You might not like my argument. But unlike your own it is logical. Your argument ignores known variables and is self contradictory.
I regret is that is ideologically painful for you. But you're basically mathematically wrong. Its not possible.
Furthermore, your argument would only hold true if all US corporations were a singular entity that was entirely uniform. They can't be. Companies and their policies vary from one to another and then industries vary.
What we are seeing today is an across the board issue throughout all industries and throughout all companies. There is no one company or group of companies that could have that effect.
The only organization capable of effecting every US industry in every state at the same time is the US federal government. Name another.
Look, I'm not saying I have all the answers. Maybe I've missed something. But do not cite things as being the cause when their scope is not sufficient to cause the observed result.
Again... Be logical.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
When America was founded markets were much more free than they are now. The reason this sort of worked was because natural resources were abundant whereas labor was scarce, which gave individuals more power. (I say "sort of" because even then, those on the bottom rung of the economy were bought and sold as property, with no possibilty of earning their way out). But almost as soon as the industrial revolution reached the US, monopolies took over vital industries including transportation (rail), energy (oil), and finance almost immediately (think Rockefeller and JP Morgan). The only reason they were broken up is because the American people decided collectively to abolish them through the political process.
Dire predictions (including Marx's) rarely come to pass because people are rarely dumb enough to continue on the same disastrous path to its final conclusion. (See also Malthusiasm). A sprinkling of socialism in the US (the New Deal) saved the US from failing, and ultimately reversed the more extreme tide - communism - that had been gathering some support around the world and even here in the US at the time. Because capitalism was counter-balanced with democracy our system was able to bend instead of breaking. I can tell you than Rockefeller did not vote for Teddy Roosevelt.
In my opinion, being a great performer and even putting in extra hours goes only so far. More and more I have realized that technical accomplishment is actually invisible to management. I cannot over-emphasize that. They truly have no way of knowing how much you have accomplised (or not), within say, a factor of 3. This is not golf where you can make 50 times as much as the next guy by consistently being 5% better.
To be fair, I suspect all this subjectivity also allows us to continue with inflated estimates of our own worth as well. But there are pretty convincing studies showing that the difference in productivity between the most and least effective engineers is vast, whereas the differnece in pay is demonstrably far smaller.
but you need an MBA for job security in the private sector, which are most likely C-levels.
If you can get an engineering degree, you are smart enough for a MBA.
New Economic Perspectives
bad managers can be get rid of if you can pass the evidence anonymously to the top level.
New Economic Perspectives
"What a coincidence! Cut the welfare and the associated, abusable power or say good bye to such freedoms."
To summarize:
Freedom or Free Beer. Choose one only.
New Economic Perspectives
Almost - demand (in an economic sense) sets the market price, value is subjective. (though I suppose you could say my demand sets the price I am willing to pay, independent of the market)
And if I value my X exactly as much as I value your Y, then there is a disincentive for me to trade, since transaction costs are non-zero (at a minimum it takes the time/energy for us to meet, agree on a price, and exchange goods/services). Trade only occurs when two people value their respective goods differently.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Take your EE background and rigor, and get a career in software. You'll have an edge over the hipsters and will find it easy to rise.
me:
BS Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech.
MS Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech
Some of the most talented programmers I work with are EE or physics guys.
Employers want to make as much money as possible without having to pay people.
Its been said before:
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output.
personally I think Marx's criticism of capitalism is pretty accurate. Its only where he assumes that uprising and revolution will lead to some utopian ideal that he goes wrong.
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Do you think that all business managers are heartless. Even they too may be "combined". And the company has to turn a profit, or close its doors.
So, when your competition is offering equal engineering skills, and the same or better quality of product, the company has no choice. Manufacture offshore, or squeeze salaries. That means, basically, hire someone who has done the work before. Save training costs, and be first to market, if you can,
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
pluto space port for spacebattleships
You are aware of Electrical engineering in the area of power plants, high tension transmission lines and complex commercial/industrial electrical installs right. These need to be evaluated by an Electrical Engineer and it's quite likely that they need to be signed and sealed by a Professional Engineer. Just because my school had microelectronics, telecom and general tracks does not mean that those are the only areas in EE.
For the PE these are the specific Electrical Engineering Exams Electrical and Computer: Computer Engineering Electrical and Computer: Electrical and Electronics Electrical and Computer: Power in addition a related area is Control Systems
Never mind that Industrial, Mining, Nuclear and Fire Protection incorporate electrical engineering
Perhaps less glorious, but there is a use for EEs in the Music Equipment biz. Hell, Randall Smith (while not an EE to my knowledge) still designs amplifier circuits by hand, without the aid of a computer.
Sandwich-side economics? Markets exists for the sole purpose of comparing apples and oranges. How's that?
This has been the case since the mid-90s, when many professional EEs were being laid off and not backfilled.
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.