Slashdot Mirror
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.
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. . .
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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."
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.........
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.