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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?
Seeing a massive movement of jobs to India, where, need I remind anyone, the government all but blackmailed Blackberry into handing over encryption keys, I'd say it's highly unlikely fears about bugged hardware are the smoking gun for companies conducting layoffs.
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?
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.
I've worked with degree'd EE types who seem to have gotten their degrees in protoboard tinkering and not much more. Technically they're EE's, but soft math skills and limited design capabilities beyond plugging IC's together. Maybe 10-20 years ago, there was a place for them to support the Real Engineers. Today, you buy a plug-and-play PLC-like device or Labview box for a few thousand, and suddenly a lot of the work that used to take one of those degree'd EE can be done fairly reasonably by a technician or an intern.
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]
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?
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?
There are tons of EE jobs out there. Its just that the one everyone wants - the ones related to computers and digital logic, are really popular and many places are churning them out. But, like supply and demand, well, those jobs are also moving offshore because they're portable, and offshore education is getting really good as well.
However, power engineers, a discipline who has seen the number of members drop steadily to the point where a graduating class may be counted on one hand (if at all! Sometimes there are years with zero graduates) can see good work. Their jobs generally aren't portable, and they deal with all matter of power - from generation, transmission, transformation, etc. Many electric utilities are paying handsomely for fresh graduates because they're hard to get (power engineering isn't very sexy).
Likewise, you have analog IC designers, a role that's also so short on people, fresh grads can demand 6 figure salaries. Analog IC design is not just stuff like opamps and all that, but mixed-signal ICs, and modern digital ICs often contain analog interfaces. Even "digital" communications often do a lot of analog design (the Ethernet PHY is a mixed-signal chip - the signal comes in as analog and you have to recover a digital signal from that). There's also CMOS sensors for cameras, and many others.
Then there's RF - which is in demand (think smartphones) - besides IC designs, there's antennas, communications, weak signal, etc.
Computer and software? Well, there are just too many of them and they're portable.
There's plenty of jobs out there. And because of shortage of supplies, damn the starting salaries can be double of a computer engineer.
If you're an analog IC designer with RF experience....
Is it possible that companies are afraid of US-bugged hardware, or is it automation invalidating jobs for the moment?
Seeing a massive movement of jobs to India, ...
The low end jobs which go to India are where engineers enter industry and learn their stuff so this does matter here and is a good trend (I am really hoping India manages to use this to take their country out of poverty). You need to ask why an Indian Engineer is a tax deductible expense whilst you are a taxable employee? Why are US companies allowed to effectively employ these people with absolutely no employment rights? This is certainly nothing to do with efficiency other than "tax efficiency".
The real thing that matters, though, is that manufacturing moved to China and now all the learning about how to actually make things is going direct to engineers in China who, if the trend doesn't reverse fast, will be better at all kinds of design that US engineers within a generation.
As long as Americans continue to elect politicians that worship companies and the "free market" over their own countries interests you are going to continue to lose out to, biggest irony of all, a planned economy of a country that calls its self "communist".
On the flip side in the real world I haven't used a single piece of advanced mathematics that I endured during my degree. We often joke about how everyone should brace themselves because one of the engineers is reaching for the square root button, but the reality is much of the maths has been replaced by advanced simulation software.
With simulation software able to calculate all things RF, analogue impedances, filters, interactions between different parts of a circuit due to inductive coupling etc. what is there left to do for an EE that actually requires the practical application of this maths? The only person I know who uses it works for a company which sells simulation software.
That said your complains are partially true except I think slightly misdirected. It's not core maths that many of the more useless EEs lack but it's a basic understanding and common sense approach to circuit design. They are the type which will pull out the typical application diagram from a datasheet and bolt it down to a circuit board and then complain that the parts have gone up in smoke because they don't understand concepts like stability, feedback, etc. Maths does not save them here. General EE understanding does.
I know of a perfect example of someone who went through university who got a got high distinction grades in every subject yet can't tell you the difference between a PNP or an NPN transistor. That said after I drew it for her she spat out the complete circuit equation and solved it in minutes. I blame her for my poor math skills :-)
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.
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
I speak 4 languages and English isn't the first I learnt.
I do know enough though to accurately convey the meaning in my message. So with that I will now call you an arsehat.
Arsehat.
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.
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.