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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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
EE is such an incredibly broad field, you almost have to define yourself by the nature of the position you have/want.
I'm a rather old basic power guy by education, but I grew up with industrial automation and digitalization as it happened, and stay current on technology.
Thing is, I've been doing essentially the same thing for 35 years, and been classified as an Electrical Engineer, Controls Engineer, Automation Specialist, and Systems Integrator. Same work, different labels.
Don't worry about the label when what you're after is the goodies in the package.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
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.........
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...
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."