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Electrical Engineering Lost 35,000 Jobs Last Year In the US
dcblogs writes "Despite an expanding use of electronics in products, the number of people working as electrical engineers in U.S. declined by 10.4% last year. The decline amounted to a loss of 35,000 jobs and increased the unemployment rate for electrical engineers from 3.4% in 2012 to 4.8% last year, an unusually high rate of job losses for this occupation. There are 300,000 people working as electrical engineers, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by the IEEE-USA. In 2002, there were 385,000 electrical engineers in the U.S. Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, called the electrical engineering employment trend 'truly disturbing,' and said, 'just like America's manufacturing has been hollowed out by offshoring and globalization, it appears that electrical and electronics engineering is heading that way.'"
Is it possible that companies are afraid of US-bugged hardware, or is it automation invalidating jobs for the moment?
A lot of EEs used to be needed to design discrete circuits. Nowadays most of that probably gets implemented in SW. So maybe not so many are needed any more?
There are still jobs out there for power engineers - I have a friend that works at a construction engineering firm and they have trouble finding qualified and experienced electrical engineers to fill some positions.
I'd imagine that a lot of electronics design work has been outsourced to the same companies that are building the electronics, and probably a lot of the tricky electrical design work has been replaced by digital electronics. Using a 16Mhz microcontroller might be overkill to read at a few analog inputs to generate some outputs, but your offshore manufacturer can likely use an off-the-shelf design to implement it for less than the cost of using discrete chips.
Pure speculation, but it could very well be a knock-on effect from off-shoring manufacturing. You want at least some of your engineers to be close to the manufacturing line to debug when things go wrong. The designers might stay in the US, but manufacturing, test, packaging, etc., will shift towards the factories. And then, some years later, you'll want the designers to be near the mfg/tst/pkg guys to allow easier communication.
Does anyone have any speculation about why this is happening?
Yes. Because it's cheaper and frankly, better to have a product designed where it will be manufactured. Asia (Taiwan, and China mostly) have product design and engineering mills (called ODMs) where one can go have a set of technical meetings, and within a few weeks/months have a prototype. They are not great at the firmware... but if all you want is a chip vendor support version of Android/Linux with pre-built applications on it, they can do that too.
Quality, Better, Unique.... don't blather on about that. Real products have to hit market windows, on time and within budget. Taiwan does this, every day, and with scale, at shops all across the country.
Does anyone have any speculation about why this is happening?
Well from all the electrical engineers I know, they like to collect stuff and as a result of the clutter they invariably lose stuff. So for them to collectively lose 35,000 jobs is frankly unsurprising.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Brain Drain and woefully inadequate expenditures on infrastructure.
For whatever reasons, electrical engineering is done by foreign companies. Many engineers received education in the US and then fled back to their countries to work in companies servicing us. I don't really blame them either. America has to compete fairly as a place people want to desire to live. If we were so damn good they would stay.
This is just a side effect of all of the brain drain going on for decades. Less electrical engineers needed to support research, and less shops in the US needing those engineers, to provide high tech products to the rest.
The rest of the world isn't stupid. Other countries have the engineering capability to do these things and the economies to compete with ourselves.
With respect to electrical engineering in particular, the US simply does not spend enough on infrastructure to stimulate that part of the economy. Which is sad. We need to not just create new transportation and material sciences, but implement them on a wide scale.
Not doing that, so the engineers shouldn't hold their breath waiting for a game changing high tech rail system being deployed across the US.
Because outsourcing is moving up the chain. First the unskilled labour, then the skilled professionals, and finally the rest of the company (aside from sales and the CXX's).
It's on America's tortured brow, That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Here's some data points, and a question for the economists:
1) Productivity has been rising for decades. US productivity per capita is about $51,000 this year. That's $50,000 per person, including kids and non-working spouses.
2) Human needs follow a "priority queue"; meaning, that once a level of need is satisfied there is no further demand. Population needs will plateau and become steady - there is no "infinite demand" for more goods. If you have all the food you need, you don't consume more even if it's free &c.
2a) And population is stabilizing in all industrialized nations. Birth rate less than 2.0 per woman in the US, our population only grows due to immigration. Similar in other industrialized nations.
Given this data, here's a hypothetical question: Suppose efficiency grows so that the infrastructure could produce all the needs of the population using only 90% of the current workforce.
Q: What happens to the unneeded 10% workforce?
For a follow-on, consider Google's self-driving car. There are currently around 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, which is about 2% of the total work force. This doesn't count delivery vehicles such as FedEx, UPS, or USPS. Very soon this ~3% of the workforce will no longer be needed.
Q2: Are we already in this "10% is unneeded" situation?
Corporate America is making a very clear statement. They will not hire Americans under these rules and we can't make them.
We need to really do a gut check on a lot of our labor policies, taxes, and regulations that effect labor prices in the US and... then ask ourselves if we'd rather keep the laws as they are and accept high levels of permanent structural unemployment... or if we're willing to compromise to get people into careers.
The whole issue is very politically charged. A gaggle of people might well respond to this post calling me names for suggesting compromise here. But the thing is labor policies are irrelevant to you if you don't have a job and can't get one.
So the labor policies are doing NOTHING for those people. Consider changing the laws so it actually helps them get and keep a job... and we'll actually be moving in a more positive direction.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
According to the BLS report from 2012, there were 295k electrical & electronic engineers, and an additional 80k computer hardware engineers, who aren't counted in the total for whatever reason.
According to the BLS report from 2002, there were 272k EEs and an additional 67k computer hardware engineers.
So that's a total of 375k in 2012 and 339k in 2002. If my math is right, that's a growth rate of 1% per year. The US population growth rate averaged over the last ten years is around 0.9%.
So what am I missing? Where is TFA getting their startling decline from?
The thing is, that touch screen is damn cheap. Replacing it with discrete components would be expensive. And a screen needs,a,computer to drive it.
And then,the whole thing about talking to server, it's,done over IP or similar complex network, and needs a computer. Cheapest and most scalable place to put that part in is right there in the ATM machine.
And software glitches have the nice property of staying fixed once fixed, and fixes being easy to distribute (at least if system is well designed). Once software works in a given environment, it will keep working, until there is a mechanical or electrical glitch... So it's natural to want to minimize mechanical and purely electrical parts.
Seriously, if there is hard to find work in your field, why not move? I don't mean move to Texas or Oregon, but move to Germany or the UK.
There are loads of engineering openings here in Germany and not enough Germans to fill them. If you are coming from the US to a German company, it is really easy to get a VISA.
Yes, I know not everyone can do so because of this or that reason, but a lot of people can.
Do not follow cheap manufacturing. Instead look to countries who spend loads of money on educating their young. Like Germany. It seems like such a basic concept that American politicians and much of the public do not understand; If you do not properly educate your population then eventually the country will collapse. No purely consumer based society is sustainable.
Great question.
I heard in one of the presidential speeches that the need for foot solders is waning and more highly trained technical personnel is waxing.
So, to take your hypothetical question even further . . . what happens when 20% or even 50% of the workforce is no longer needed to produce what we all need to survive or even thrive? How do the economics work out then?
There are plenty of "R" in the USA. The "D", on the other hand, is losing ground to places like Singapore, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China, and yes, India.
If you go to south of the border, yes, that country famous for the "la cucaracha" song, they have a lot of "D" lab, while in the USA, many of the "D" guys are either retired, or are actively looking for jobs in Mexico or China.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Thirty five years ago, there were at least 50,000 workers employed in electronics manufacturing in the RTP area of NC. I was one of them. I started as an assembler, then as a technician and later as a design engineer. During the 90s, most of these jobs quickly disappeared. Today, there a few small niche players left employing perhaps a few hundred workers. That's it.
I retrained as a software developer and successfully changed careers. It was difficult.
I'm not surprised to see reality check stories like this, particularly after being treated to incessant propaganda about shortages of STEM students over the past couple years. This shortage talk has been going on for decades. Yet, no actual shortages of engineers have materialized.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Being in a place where we design in the US, I don't see this. An off shore design just won't work except for bits and pieces. Sending your product out overseas to be designed means it will be cloned and copied, and in a lot of industries that is not acceptable at all. As well trying to give your local design requirements to someone who doesn't communicate in your language very well is frustrating. And not all of EE is about design either, there's a lot of hardware testing to be done, environmental testing for outdoor products, safety testing, regulatory testing, RF localization to other countries, signal analysis, and so forth. Some of that can be offshored much more easily than design, and some of that must be done locally.
Real cheap products have to hit market windows, on time and within budget.
TFTFY.
Real good products define their own market window and come out when they are ready and properly developed. You know...quality, better, unique.
Alas, so many people have absolutely no sense for quality and design anymore.
Cheap, cheap, cheap. Dreadful.
Does anyone have any speculation about why this is happening?
What I'm about to say is not speculation. It's the truth -
Certain companies have convinced themselves that not only can they move manufacturing to China, they can also move product development engineering (including, shockingly to me, electrical engineering).
A CEO of a company I worked for told a packed audience of software, electrical, and mechanical engineers (many of us in the industry for 20+ years) that China produces over a million "qualified", "well trained" engineers a year. He told us it'd be crazy for him not to move engineering overseas, since that's where the "talent" is. You could have heard a pin drop. That's how shocked we were.
Anyone who's studied China carefully will know that the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) is struggling for credibility. You will also know that the Chinese university system that pumps out thousands of "qualified", "well trained" PhD degreed engineers has a serious problem. 98 percent of the PhD thesis are either straight rip-offs of Western thesis, or contend things that are not reproducible by any known means.
The company I worked for generates north of 3 billion dollars a year and has a sky high stock valuation. They acquire high-tech companies, gut them, send the remaining manufacturing and engineering to China, and leave small staffs of engineers in the US to keep existing products alive.
In the case of the original company I worked for, pre-acquisition we numbered 4,500+ employees and 900+ engineers (mechanical, electrical, software) world wide and were number one in four market segments and successfully competed against two other equally sized US companies. We generated over a billion dollars a year in revenue. Four years after the acquisition, there are less than 800 employees with fewer than 150 engineers, and that's after a huge build-up in it's China engineering and manufacturing operations. Revenues in the original company have fallen by 50 percent, and the take-over company hides this fact through acquiring other companies and puts them under the original companies "umbrella" operations.
These kinds of take-over companies are called asset strippers, or in Wall Street parlance; roll-up companies. They can be worse than private equity firms.
Here is an example of how electrical engineering jobs are lost to China. The company later acquired a highly specialized electronics firm. Their products require a very careful manufacturing technique, overseen by electrical engineers, to meet very high product design specs. Within 6 months, the company had taken the process to China and tried to train four different Chinese companies before they found one that might eventually meet the specs. The US-based staff were immediately terminated and the Chinese built products, even today, can not meet the original design specifications. In "normal" times, this might be considered treasonous activity on the part of the company as defense contractors used to rely on the technologies to "keep America safe." Knowing that engineering and manufacturing were shifted to China, defense contractors had no choice but to buy from someone else. The irony was that the President of the company that moved these operations to China claimed on national media that defense contractor sales had dropped dramatically and, therefore, he needed to lay off even more engineers as a result.
In another case, the company moved certain electrical re-engineering functions to it's China operations. In the US it took only 5 employees to keep the operations functioning correctly. I recently learned that they had hired 37 Chinese to implement the electrical re-engineering function and were intending on hiring more. The reason? The Chinese could _not_ do the job. The 5 US-based engineers had been laid off and there is no "going back."
As to why a company would gut it's US engineering operations and hire in China when the Chinese are clearly i
When I studied EE, you'd learn about circuit and filters and such. You're taught about how lithographic processes work, and how quantum theory works. But it's not the everyday work of most EEs. You'd also be expected to do a lot of software type stuff. For instance, a lot of VLSI design is done in what is essentially a programming language. Unsurprisingly, this meant that EE folks could transition into software relatively easily.
At the moment there's a lot of hype about software, and not so much about hardware. Perhaps the EEs are simply moving to where demand is.
Pure speculation though.
I am/was an EE with a degree, coincidentally, from RIT. I switched careers about 5 years ago because I saw this coming even though I had a very senior design position at a major chip designer. I even presented about it at a meeting at RIT some years back with a presentation called "why electrical engineering is the next textile industry." I laid out 3 key reasons why this was going to happen.
1. Growth of skills external to the country.
2. Consolidation and standardization of technology.
3. Improvement in tools and processes.
1. Is pretty self explanatory it's outsourcing 101
2. Could be two items. In terms of consolidation a lot of the tech diversity we had 15 years ago is gone. In the processor space we had SGI, Sun, HP and others designing their own chips and that work is all gone because they all got out of those markets. Standardization was great for technology and great for consumers but bad for engineers. Again go back 15 years. You had so many different ways to connect peripherals to to the computer which has almost entirely been replaced by Bluetooth and USB. The same thing has been going on at the hardware integration level. Interconnect standardization has resulted in just using other peoples designs and hanging them off a bus rather then designing your own or at the very least designing your own bridge.
3. As tech standardized tools could as well, faster models and predesigned test packages as well as newer ways to find bugs and get better test coverage just meant the need for less people. On one of my last projects a new piece of software did in two hours what we had one or two people, depending on the project, working full time on. If we needed to tweak a test post fab it took just a couple minutes instead of a week. It got to the point that management really started treating testing a validation people as second class citizens. They were cut and never back filled or replaced with a non-engineer because the job was really just button pushing. You also saw what used to be 3, 4, or 5 chips merged into one which greatly simplified board level design and made that part of the board reusable because you were never going to mess with a mix of chips.
I still keep in touch with my old colleagues and I don't see it changing any time soon. I still keep hearing stories about how these people hot let go because of a new tool. These people got cut because that got moved to India. These people got cut because we just decided to use this standard interface or an off the shelf component instead.
If anything I'm sort of surprised it hasn't happened a little quicker.
We also leave the field because we have to eat. I've got 3 patents for neurological interfaces, but the pay for hopping to systems engineering jumped 50% my first day. I slso spent a lot of time cleaning up designs that had been offshored: I don't care if you have a little line on your chart that says "gorund" and "0 volts", when you actually make it out of wire or the thin sheet metal of a circuit board copper, it *will* have voltages on it from the big surface mount capacitor you mounted flat on top of it carrying high frequency power signals. And thee are *reasons* you scatter small capacity ceramic capacitors around your digital circuitry. You *cannot* replace them all with one big capacitor over near the edge of the board, even if it is cheaper.
Everyone say it with me: "tiny boards with components jammed in do not beat bigger boards with critical parts adjacent for short signal paths, even if they cost less".
As an EE who is a pack rat, I can tell you that's absolutely wrong. If I could hoard jobs the way I hoard junk, I'd have at least half-a-dozen in the basement.
those 35,000 lost jobs in America in 2013 turned into 70,000 jobs filled in China for one tenth the cost.
Such is the price of offshoring. Still a great idea?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
it seems that engineering is on a sharp decline in the US. I know there are a lot of very competent and skilled engineers in the US, but there are also a lot of very bad ones
And you think that's any different elsewhere, or in any other field?
engineering is on a sharp decline in the US ... seem to have been betrayed by the education system
No. We have some of the world's best engineering schools. I've also known some excellent EE's that graduated from Podunk Tech. I've known a few that never graduated. I don't mean to diminish the value of a good university education, but with the possible exception of a few very theory intensive specialties, it's not the most important thing. At least as valuable are an interest, an aptitude, and learning the craft from good mentors after you graduate.
As one of the 35,000 American electrical engineers who was laid off in 2013, I can tell you that my duties at IBM (Ethernet ASIC design) are now being done by two or three Chinese engineers who, combined, earn less than I did. I speculate that American companies do it to save money in the short-term.
I switched careers about 5 years ago
What did you switch to?
not requiring becoming an EIT to graduate and eventually a PE to practice. Had they followed law and medicine it would be a lot harder to offshore work, and salaries would be higher due to fewer engineers. In addition, like law or medicine engineering schools would have to be accredited so there would be fewer new graduates which also would dive up salaries. Licensing is not about ensuring quality as much as limiting supply and erecting barriers to entry.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Electrical engieneering is not the same as electronics engieneering
I've been an EE for decades, and never met anyone in the field who bothered with that distinction. There are so many specialties, why be obsessed with that one distinction?
I remember in the 90's they told EE's in school at the time about how there was going to be huge shortages of engineers in the field because of the boomers retiring.
Interesting to note how that did not come to be.
Now our politicians need to shut the hell up about needing to encourage millions to go into STEM fields.
Fool me once, shame on you.
So, to take your hypothetical question even further . . . what happens when 20% or even 50% of the workforce is no longer needed to produce what we all need to survive or even thrive?
Compulsory military conscription.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You know what I've seen, as a "millennial" (or whatever they call us these days)? All my friends who majored in EE (actually CompE) couldn't get a job in their field. They ended up in IT instead.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you're in college now and majoring in EE, you'd have to be an idiot to not change majors. This profession is totally dead.
Utter hogwash.
Anybody working in Data Center Operations or Data Center Construction can tell you that good, capable EE's are not easy to come by at all. If you're smart, you'll stay the course, and with as many Data Centers (and for that matter any other Critical Facilities) being built each year, you will have a long and prosperous career. Opportunity abounds.
Anybody... can tell you that good, capable EE's are not easy to come by at all.
Here's the problem, to get to the level of good capable EE's, someone somewhere has to teach and train them. That generally happens as a novice. Those jobs are also considered to be the first to be outsourced. So if you don't hire the novices, within a generation the good capable ones are gone. That business can't think beyond the next quarter is a huge part of the problem.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Pure speculation, but it could very well be a knock-on effect from off-shoring manufacturing. You want at least some of your engineers to be close to the manufacturing line to debug when things go wrong. The designers might stay in the US, but manufacturing, test, packaging, etc., will shift towards the factories. And then, some years later, you'll want the designers to be near the mfg/tst/pkg guys to allow easier communication.
It's exactly this. You want your chip designers to be working right next to the mask layout people because layout needs designers to correctly optimize the layout. You want your test people to be able to walk through the whole test program design with the designers, who will be involved throughout the test hardware and program design, because test engineers know how testers work, and designers know how the chip works, and matching those is tricky. And you don't really want to be shipping tested wafers overseas for packaging and then waiting for them to come back to test packaged parts, and the product engineers need tester access and parts access to characterize the parts and produce the datasheet info, so at that point you have the whole silicon design team, from conception to finished parts, in one place. It can be done remotely but with a significant time adder or lots of evening/midnight phone meetings. It's easier to separate applications and project engineering from the design/manufacture group, but there's still some value in having them colocated. At that point, all that's left is middle management... and that's even easier to outsource.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Please, you could take that post and put pretty much put the name of any major engineering firm in the US and it would be true.
This is a widespread phenomenon that won't go away until all business is finally gone from the US or every CXX in America happens to disappear overnight.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I'm not convinced this is the case at all. I got my MSEE and have been gainfully employed doing design and test work here in the states. My company has its current gen of product made in China and the quality is absolute shit, we're actually shifting production back to the states for next gen, because we quality and communication is better. We gave outsourcing a shot and it sucked. Don't listen to this garbage, being a good EE will probably be a safe job for a long time.
Any recent graduate in virtually any discipline is going to have to take a job where they are able to "prove themselves". Yes, this job is going to be a few rungs down the corporate ladder than you'd probably like, but suck it up, that's life.
I can assure you that there's a point where you'll take any job, rungs be damned. That's usually the point where you start taking things outside your chosen profession. When that happens, EE in this case has 1 less potential employee.
There are lots of jobs like this that simply can't be outsourced overseas because you have to have a body standing right in front of the equipment to be able to work on it. You just can't outsource a guy to come work on your Generator Paralleling Switchgear or your Automatic Transfer Switch. You need a guy in the area, with the tools and skills necessary to be able to get the job done. So yeah, you might have to start as a Preventive Maintenance tech or maybe a Project Manager or something, but if you stay the course, there is absolutely opportunity.
Working as a maintenance tech is not an EE job. It also generally won't lead to an EE type job, much as emptying trashcans in a headquarters office won't generally lead to the CEO position. What your experience might lead to is managing other techs, or even that division, but that's about all. If it were otherwise, there would be little use for college degrees.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.