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US Predicts Zero Job Growth For Electrical Engineers (bls.gov)
dcblogs writes: An occupation long associated with innovation, electrical and electronics engineering, has stopped growing, according to the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an update of its occupational outlook released Friday, said that the number of people employed as electrical and electronics engineers is now at 316,000, and will remain mostly unchanged for the next decade. The government put the 10-year job outlook for electronic and electrical engineers at "0% — little or no change." The IEEE-USA said the BLS estimates "are probably correct."
The jobs here are stolen from us and given to immigrants and the companies are outsourcing everything else to China and India.
Everything else is being exported to the third world, but EEs won't all be?
Of course, I also expect this to be way optimistic. China's started to develop its own interesting shit rather than just do what American companies tell it.
Love his claim that there is no talent in the US- a self fulfilling prophecy isn't it?
love is just extroverted narcissism
It really isn't surprising, at least on the computer/networking side of things. Tech in general has been stagnant for about 10 years, particularly in network hardware. What new innovations on the hardware side have there been? An iPad with a slightly larger screen? A curved LED television? On the network side Juniper and Cisco see no need to innovate.
I don't understand your fixation on transgendered people. You should probably talk to a psychologist about it.
Can someone dig up the information about how the BLS (nice acronym) has been performing in job-market predictions?
Can't tell if this is actual research or some BulLShit.
I have no idea what the turnover rate is for EEs. Some fraction of those in the profession will retire, die or otherwise leave the profession leaving room for new graduates in these fields even if its population is constant. And of course if the age distribution is such that an increasing number are nearing retirement age during the next 10 years the opportunities for new grads will increase. The original article doesn't say anything about that.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
He is a psychologist...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Why would you suggest that a fixation on transgendered people requires talking to a psychologist?
Since we're not bothering with making things in the USA anymore, and we're not improving our country's infrastructure, this was to be expected, no?
Still think the direction this country is going in is the one it should be taking?
I'm having doubts about it, myself.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
The excess EE grads can then become "Software Engineers" at Facebook, Microsoft or Etsy.
After all, they both have "Engineer" in the title so it's interchangeable, right?
Actually, he's commenting on society's fixation.
Most EEs I know are quite antisocial and unfriendly.. or pathologically psychotic.. guess we can add paranoid to that list too
Obviously it is growning, just not in the U.S. But hey, we're still the world's top producer of selfies, and the rate of selfie production is growing my leaps and bounds! Sarcasm aside, perhaps people should be a little less self-absorbed and a little more committed to making the world a better place. Even Apple sucks for innovation now; Samsung, LG, and several Chinese firms are doing much better.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A lot of boomer EEs are retiring soon. So don't think there are no jobs.
as people retire I'm seeing companies replace them with outsourcing. This way they can quietly outsource the jobs without the bad press from the layoffs. I'm guessing that's a big part of this 0% job growth. That and our lack of manufacturing. We make a lot of stuff but we don't use very many people to do it. A lot of EEs and engineers in general used to work at factories, but you just don't need that many of them. It's part of the general increases of productivity that we're seeing everywhere. That plus the shift away from 40 hour work weeks that started with classifying white collar folks as exempt...
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Well, I did not really read the report. I thought it would be quite funny if zero growth is the best among *all* engg majors ;-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
step 1 - cancel all EE H1B holder's VISA.
problem solved.
comment directly in my journal
Sure, there is zero percent growth. But rest assured companies will argue that they still can't find any qualified workers and require H1B Visa holders to be imported and paid a meager $65K a year, rather than the $110K/year of the U.S. engineer they just let go.
I do robotics development in Silicon Valley for both new startups and with large established companies. Our small team is a mix of software and electrical engineers (we team up with other firms doing mechanical and industrial design) and we're finding it difficult to keep up with all the opportunities in the burgeoning robotics field. The nice thing is it seems we're just at the infancy of robotics so growth should be sustainable for quite a while.
I don't know if growth in robotics can compensate for overall declines elsewhere, but it's at least one promising area of growth for electrical engineer over the coming decade and beyond. Currently, pretty much every robot is a unique design built from the ground up so the opportunities are very similar to what was available in the Valley during the early days of computing when pretty much every computer design was unique and created from the ground up. Certainly this will eventually change, but for now it makes for fun and interesting work that is in demand.
Given that we are in need of ever-better automotive electronics, solar energy devices, wind turbines, battery technology, smart buildings, power transmission, quantum computing, plus mechatronic and optoelectronic technologies yet to be developed, I suspect electrical and electronic engineering (EEE) knowledge and skills will remain important. The SEC in the US will soon be allowing folks who engage in crowdsourcing to also buy shares of stock in projects. Maker fairs are popping up everywhere. Sounding the death knell for growth in EEE jobs given the interest in EEE seems counterintuitive -- technolust for all, and all for technolust!
I thought ALL electrical engineers went into it because they wanted to work with robots! I mean, isn't that the best part of being one?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
C'mon, what are you doing? Don't you know we have a talent shortage? You can't publish posts like this that contradict the narrative! /sarc
More reasons for people to abandon STEM.
That would explain it.
Ironically, the one industry that will reduce jobs in all others.
(Well, I'm all for a jobless world. If it's Star Trek like and not Mad Max.)
Tell Data I said 'Hi'.
Both: It will be Trek-like for the 1% inside the gated communities, and Mad-Max-like for the 99% on the outside.
Table-ized A.I.
^^ This, and also the whole electric car explosion. Um... NOT pun intended, but apropos considering what would happen if we really started to increase our electrical power infrastructure to support this without more knowledgable EEs adept at transforming and inverting and conducting higher-energy electrical components around the increasingly distributed power grid.
Umm the report predicts 8% decline in Computer Programmers and 17% increase in Software Developers. What the what?!?
The fixation as presented in the subject might suggest some kind of paranoid delusion combined with willful ignorance. I don't know. Posts like that (GP here) bother me.
Yes, as the other AC pointed out, there does seem to be a strange fixation on trans women (never men) in the media. Apparently taking one's meds and putting on a dress deserves an award. Where's mine?
Yes, occasionally the SJWs include trans women in their insanity. I remember Canonical's We Need Women Programmers! initiative couldn't just be for women, but it also had to be for trans women, and then since that might have excluded some very rare demographic somewhere, they had to throw around the term genderqueer as well. Of course, this all goes back to why we even have the term cisgendered: trans-exclusionary radical feminism (which is apparently still quite popular in flyover country).
I don't know if these are still a thing, but it used to be you could go to pages that would list successful trans women. Sysadmin, programmer, sysadmin, EE, engineer, programmer, sysadmin, engineer, you get the idea. SJWs know this. The SJWs ignore this or else view them as mentally ill people who are "really" men anyway. Instead, the SJWs make the lack of women programmers some kind of power dynamic where all us evil misogynerds are keeping women out of programming. Substitute engineering for programming if you want. Well, obviously those trans women didn't have a problem getting programming and engineering jobs! (Ah, but then the SJW would remind us that they still, somehow, have male privilege.)
Can anyone give me a single anecdote of a trans woman who is an affirmative action hire? I'm betting you can't. Now let me make myself absolutely clear. Look at Brianna Wu. Incompetent assholes come in all genders.
If whoever is posting those comments wants to get a persecution complex on (and a zero growth rate in a profession that's part of this "you pro rape misogynerd!" insanity is perhaps somewhere to be legitimately worried), I can assure you that you have nothing to worry about unless flyover country has become bizarro world. Asshole managers do not want trans employees. If an asshole manager is going to replace your job with an affirmative action hire, she won't be trans.
The reason I would suggest GGP talk to a psychologist is because somehow GGP has the delusion that there's anybody who would rather have a trans woman as an employee. GGP probably sees the media fixation (and has probably also deluded her/himself into thinking that Crocodile Dundee and Silence of the Lambs are documentaries about trans women) and combined with her/his own hatred has decided that the trans women are out to get her/him and the SJWs are on our side!
The minute SJWs actually do something helpful, for any demographic for that matter, I'll shut up. As far as I can tell, the SJWs have done nothing more than amplify the hatred of trans women. These days I hear "religious objection!" I hear "only trannies will have jobs." As if! If that were the case, why is the most talented programmer I know out of a job? (Hint: not me. I haven't maintained my skills, and firm believer in "there is always somebody better.") It's not because her co-workers didn't like her. It's not because she didn't have talent. It's not because she didn't work hard to constantly learn new technologies. It's because she's trans and some asshole manager decided that was more important than her talent. Plain and simple.
tl;dr GGP is afraid of a bogeywoman s/he's completely invented out of whole cloth and would probably have a paranoid breakdown if s/he ever met somebody like Harisoo IRL. And I'm bored enough to post this comment.
Keep in mind that these may be called Electrical engineers, but while the discussion here is around electronics product design,many EEs work outside outside of designing electronics. The article statistics represent a broad line of sub-specialties. Many EEs are employed as PEs working with buildings/architectural firms, manufacturing engineering, industrial controls (such as water treatment plant controls) and transmission lines. Many older embedded software engineers have EE degrees, but many of the up and coming embedded software engineers I see are not out of pure EE programs. Even for electronic design there is a lot of work writing verilog code that feels more like SW coding than biasing transistors and measuring with an O-scope. For that matter, MEs end-up with a much broader range of different subspecialties and not just drawing HVAC vents.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
The granddaddy of them all, computing inflation the wya it used to be done, and comparring it to the "new" methods.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_SM1KhHDwfYJ:www.chapwoodindex.com/+&cd=32&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
a new metric based on wide spread collection of actual consumer data in many cities. I had to use this cached version, as the main site is not loading.
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/07/18/lies-damned-lies-statistics/
Some nice data on rents and food
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=37
postal inflation as an example
But use your own experience...are prices rising faster than your wages?
Most people find this to be true.
rather than the $110K/year of the U.S. engineer they just let go.
You're off by about 15% - median pay for EEs is ca. 93K.
The article is based on projections from the Department of Labor which are in the Bureau of Labor Handbook. In that you'll find that Programmers, Software Developers and Electrical engineers are all different. Programmers will decline 8%, while Software Developers will grow 17%. In truth, the part of the industry that's building hardware is becoming a smaller part of the IT industry while Software becomes larger. From the BLS Handbook, SD is the creative part behind programming. I think this derives from the time when you'd have someone describe the code and someone translating that down to a lower level. Now a days, that distinction is of course confusing. I suspect SD now means a high quality programmer and a programmer is less creative. If that's true then it's not surprising programmers are going away because someone building code by composing things doesn't need that help. Our industry is going through a transition. Some parts will shrink and others grow. That some parts are shrinking doesn't mean labor demand overall is down. (Of course that some parts are growing doesn't mean demand is up either).
I thought ALL electrical engineers went into it because they wanted to work with robots!
Nah. I just want to be able to repair my Amiga when it breaks down. (And I run out of spares.)
Luckily there's this:
"The government splits this job category between electrical engineers, which is expected to rise 1% over the next decade, and electronics engineers as declining by 1%."
Even better, I'm technically a computer engineer. ;)
http://www.mybudget360.com/cost-of-living-1938-to-2015-inflation-history-cost-of-goods-inflation/
All are showing more like 5-10% inflation.
Some go for the great sparks of lightning from giant vann de graaff generators. ... The Tesla effect.
At least in my industry (power), there is still a demand for good young engineers, in pretty well paying positions. A good part of that is retirement, but there is a bit of growth as well. You might not start at six figures, but you will get there in 4-5 years if you are solid.
Considering how much easier it is to get good performance out of electric cars it wouldn't surprise me if a modern regular car has more electronics in it.
This estimate assumes that the world remains exactly same as today - no space missions, no solar and wind farms, no electric cars and buses. We already know that we have to do a lot of those things because of global warming, and countless things we don't know about will be invented during the next decade. A lot of them will require plenty of electrical design, construction and service.
Are you the first AC or the second one?
If growth is zero, then virtually all H1Bs displace local labor.
It sounds to me like a job market that is about to be slammed by scientific innovation. I would say invest now and fast!
Sneak into your co-workers computers and you'll see how many transfans there are out there.
<bad pun>If you're not careful, some of them can be a real pain in the ...</bad pun>
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
per-se. It's only a problem if you let it be. The solution the bean counters are using is to break tasks down into something simple enough to train in a matter of weeks. It means you need a _lot_ more people, but when people are cheap that's not a problem either. The advantages that come with not having a single truly indispensable employee are huge. You can switch to contractors and stop paying benefits, unemployment insurance and all the other routine costs that go with happy employees. From there you can start gradually ratcheting up the hours worked. Hell hourly employees are often happy to work the extra hours for the extra pay; they don't put it together that they've had their wages slashed and that's why they're working those hours :(...
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Can we assume there is no need for H1B visa for EEs then?
Hey, quick question.
I have a degree in EE and did some grad work in CS. Did a robotics internship with NASA many years ago and have been working as a software developer ever since. Some DoD contracting, now working in cybersecurity, but I don't find any of this stuff too fulfilling. I'm a huge 12-year-old at heart -- I want to be working on robots or spaceships!
That being said, based on my experience, those jobs don't exist [here]. I closest thing I could find was working for a contract manufacturer of medical devices, and that gig would've come with a 30% pay cut. I'd take a 30% pay cut to work on something truly inspiring, but diabetes test gear just doesn't have that same 'wow' factor for me.
So, since you seem to have better insight into the industry, what gives? Is everything out in California? Is NYC especially terrible for robotics? Am I just terrible at life?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
The reason I would suggest GGP talk to a psychologist is because somehow GGP has the delusion that there's anybody who would rather have a trans woman as an employee.
Employers actively discriminate against male-to-female transsexuals. Female-to-male transsexuals reported no loss of earnings, and increased respect.
Before that sex change think about your next paycheck
You might expect that anybody who has had a sex change, or even just cross-dresses on occasion, would suffer a wage cut because of social stigmatization. Wrong, or at least partly wrong. Turns out it depends on the direction of the change: the study found that earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fell by nearly one-third after their gender transitions, but earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increased slightly.
and
Ben Barres, a female-to-male transgender neuroscientist at Stanford, found that his work was more highly valued after his gender transition. “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today,” a colleague of his reportedly said, “but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”
Dr. Barres, of course, doesn’t have a sister in academia.
poverty, etc
3) Poverty is a massive problem in the trans community.
Transgender respondents were nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000, compared to the general population, Injustice at Every Turn found. They were unemployed at twice the rate of the general population, or roughly between 10 percent and 14 percent throughout 2008, the year the survey was conducted.
Trans Americans 4 times more likely to be living in poverty
In one of its most striking findings, MAP and CAP report that trans people are nearly four times more likely to have a yearly household income below $10,000 (15 percent vs. 4 percent of the nontrans population). The numbers go up if a trans individual is a person of color, with Asian American/Pacific Islander and Latino trans folks nearly six times as likely to be living in poverty as their API or Latino cisgender counterparts.
Maybe they see us as a threat because many of us are forced to either work for (much) lower wages or work the streets.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There will be plenty of programming work for all the EE's who can't find jobs doing EE.
Why would those robot design firms require lots of EEs? Couldn't they just use existing FPGAs or smartphone CPUs to control things?
Don't go into electrical engineering
Not comparing apples to apples. A 1938 house is nowhere equivalent to a 2015 house. In fact yesterday I was looking at a house built in 1939 and was estimating the costs bring it up to modern codes. Even when this was done, it would be a crappy tiny house that few would want in a nt too bad of area.
Excess Engineer. EE has been dead in the West for at least a decade, and anyone going into EE now needs a long chat with a psychological professional.
Thanks for the links! Too bad the original paper for the first link is paywalled (apparently with trial access though). I'm still trying to decide whose data to trust when it comes to gender pay gap. I've seen data linked to by a dubious source that indicates that for people with a four year degree it's a rounding error and the two-thirds number only shows up for people who only have a high school diploma. I've heard a lot of different anecdotes when it comes to transition. I'll come back to this post when I'm in a number crunching mood. Sample size (64) could be problematic, but I'm only an armchair statistician.
If I had to guess, homophobia probably plays a large part, which is why I would lol if I actually did succeed at getting some of our ACs and other users who always seem to obsessively misgender Brianna Wu and Chelsea Manning in particular to become paranoid that an attractive woman could very well "be a man." I've noticed a deep-seated conflation of sexuality, gender, gender roles, and individual identity that transcends all reason.
What's interesting is that nobody seems particularly concerned when we add a virtual layer on top and that's where the gender mismatch happens. What I mean is, lots of guys regularly report using female avatars. Nobody except complete wackos seems to have a problem with this.
I'll have to add this to the mentat computer (from 1st link):
"My transition went extremely smoothly," one female-to-male, blue-collar worker told the researchers. "I was shocked at how smooth. No one even talks about it and it had no effect on my pay. If anything, I have been better accepted at work because people don't see me as a [slur for a lesbian] like before."
Second one. GP and GGGP here. (I think I counted that right.)
Most DSP/Computer Vision training is grad school EE majors. Some CS/CE majors, but mostly EE.
I'm in a similar boat, only on the IC side of things...
Maybe the answer is California (doesn't seem to be anywhere in the Midwest or West). To me, though, that environment seems to have a lot of people "crushing it" who are really just crushing whatever financially independent future they might have had. I wonder how many truly succeed there (and for how long), and how many end up attempting to set up shop with some organic fusion bar or whatever... not that there's anything wrong with organic fusion bars.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Look at it more broadly...
Facts:
Women make less than men.
Ugly people make less than pretty people.
There's also a large degree of STD/prostitution associated with the M2F group, which are negative social flags and will negatively impact earnings.
All else being equal, M2F will make less on all of those counts. No explicit homophobia required (though I'm sure that also factors in, but is #3 or #4 of the examples cited.
M2F have no/few problems because you basically have better looking but not masculinity challenging men at work unless you point it out yourself. If I see a F2M in normal clothes... I'm not going to expect them to be F2M, just an androgynous sort of guy, maybe a bit shot. M2F is usually not done well. You can't really take a 6'4 230 guy and make him a cute girl - certainly not without a budget much bigger than most trans have. Everyone is going to see an ugly woman who is trying to "trick" the instincts we are evolved to have as mammals.
That is called capitalism and the free market.
If someone can produce something and sell it at a cheaper cost, then they should do so.
What does it mater if its a computer or a person (labour).
"Peak USA" was in the 1970s, and in real terms US wages have been slowly falling since then and will continue to fall.
Since you asked, I'll describe a bit what lead me down the path to my current career in robotics: Graduating with a degree in Computer Engineering in the late 80's my career has since been all over the map. I've done real-time embedded system design on phone switches, moved to application development on held devices back when they were called "pen computers", then multimedia applications for the web, then Internet search engine development when the .com boom was in full swing and finally Linux application development. Having an interest in robotics since childhood and facing a mid-life career crisis, I finally resolved to break into the robotics field. Like you, I'm very much a 12-year old at heart and it was long past time to satisfy my desire to play and tinker rather than "work" work.
Over the course of a few years I brushed up on embedded system design, joined local robotics clubs and built a few well functioning hobby robots to demonstrate good problem solving abilities in this field. This got me rubbing shoulders and associating with people already in the industry doing what I wanted to do professionally. The final step was keeping my ears open opportunities to step in an solve some problems related to robotics on a modest budget and in a short amount of time -- something people are always looking for. People with big budgets and lots of time can afford to be picky, and generally are. Taking advantage of these opportunities opened the doors for me to turn my hobby into a career. I'm now doing the things I would be tinkering at home on, but now for a paying client -- something that satisfies my inner 12-year-old and keeps my wife happy.
Perhaps things are a bit easier in Silicon Valley or the Boston area for robotics careers, but I suspect that there are interesting opportunities in the NYC area or in any major metropolitan area in the U.S. The trick is to figure out where the local watering holes are where people who are doing things what you want to do are hanging out. Could be a robotics club, a hacker space, a university, a maker's faire, or whatever. Find those places and do something on your own time and effort that will generate interest and attention. Become friends with the people who might one day hire you and the rest will almost certainly take care of itself.
Personally, I've never had luck in my career applying for a job I wanted through traditional channels -- ie. giving my resume to an HR wonk and having it yield results. Either I don't know how to sell myself correctly on paper or I don't have the right credentials regardless of relevant experience. Rather, I find it much easier to establish personal relationships at a social level and then leverage those to get the jobs that interest me.
Finally, don't sell yourself short. Such negative thinking can permeate everything you do. I know because I've been there myself. Spend 80% of your time making sure you doing what is necessary to keep a roof over your head and taking care of your family, but spend the other 20% of your time following your passions. Just really make that 20% count and the other 80% won't be such a bother. Good luck.
When you eliminate the middle class through monetary policy, you eliminate the extra free time and extra wealth that have been the "fertile crescent" of innovation. With the debt-based monetary system that robs everyone of wealth (wages and savings) through inflation, the middle class becomes submerged to drown by the hand of the bankster/corporate class. It has been a parasitic relationship for the past hundred years, the past fifteen have been a rapid slide downward, and the next few years with the market crashes and stagnation forced upon Americans by the elite and the government WILL destroy this country.
But nevermind that all. We will never see an import tariff or sound money. The house of cards created by the Fed's false signals and lack of regulation (e.g. the existence futures markets and derivatives exposure) will fall long before the general M$NBC Cramer-brainwashed populace has a clue of what they have willfully accepted.
I think their prediction is innacurate.
Every company I work for has had trouble finding enough good EE's to fill positions. I have never had trouble finding a job, even after taking long breaks. If you have the skills, they NEED you. Even more than they want you. (Its kind of funny, some places resent the idea that they need a 'hardware guy' on the team, thinking they can solve everything with software).
and...I'm an ANALOG guy. I do digital as well, but have extensive analog experience and it is ALWAYS IN DEMAND. Because....(drumroll please).....the WORLD IS ANALOG. To have machines interact/interface with the real world requires analog skills. This will never completely disappear, and in fact I see it increasing a bit (it surprises even me, to be honest). Because we just need more and more and more of everything.
Will demand for Analog EE's grow faster than for Software Engineers? No, probably not.
Will demand for Digital EE's grow faster than for Software Engineers? Probably not.
Mixed Signal (Digital & Analog): growing faster than the other two, but not as fast as Software Eng
Embedded Programmers? Growing pretty good, but still not as much as pure Software Engineering.
I'm saying, if you're good, you will have no trouble finding a job in any of these categories.
the REAL tricky part is something you haven't asked: how easy is it to get a job where you want to live? And how about job-hopping?
aha! Here is what I've struggled with my entire career. EE jobs are more old-fashioned in their mindset, and they don't like job-hoppers much (they like stability, people who are in it for the long-term). And you are much more limited in WHERE you can find a job (though there are still several find, exciting, hip cities to choose from).
another thing: working from home, FORGET it if you are an EE. It is extremely rare that I can do an EE job from home, even one day a week, because I have to physically be wiring/testing/soldering prototypes all the time. I have to get my hands on the product PHYSICALLY. And most of them are too big, or too fragile, or too proprietary to lug home (and I don't have all the expensive lab equipment at home anyway). Occasionally I have been able to do some CAD for schematics/circuit boards at home (if I can get past the software licensing issues), but that has been maybe 12 times total in 18 years.
By contrast, software jobs can often be done at home, sometimes SEVERAL days a week. And short gigs, job hopping, etc, aren't looked down on quite as much. Be able to do short gigs would fit my lifestyle MUCH better than long gigs, but I don't have that option. So it is the biggest thing I don't like about EE, and I still might switch to software because of it.
Yes
>> What does it mater if its a computer or a person (labour).
Because if you outsource something for long enough your own population loses those skills and all you end up with is an entire population of project managers who can't compete in the world market for anything other than project management. Then your whole economy goes even more to shit.
I work at a research institute that does a lot of robotics research. About a fourth of the people in our unit are electrical engineers. Another fourth are mathematicians and statisticians with a strong computer science background. The remaining half are mechanical engineers with varying degrees of proficiency in traditional electrical engineering topics like control theory, circuit design/fabrication, and RF communications.
If you're designing and fabricating custom robotic platforms, you'll need electrical/computer engineers to design the PCBs. You may also need some ASIC/packing design work done, which would be handled by electrical engineers. Additionally, you'll also need plenty of people who are well versed in control theory and signal processing. Those will either be electrical engineers, computer engineers, or mechanical engineers, depending on where the individuals got their degrees.
Beyond that, you'll also need electrical engineers, computer engineers, computer scientists, and/or applied mathematicians to handle most of the coding-related and high-level algorithm design aspects. You may also have either electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, or both designing the actual platform, novel servos, etc.
The man designed the middle class by paying labor enough to buy its own product. A revolutionary idea at the time. The financial calculation of levitation by pulling your own hair up may be hard to explain mathematically, but that is what Henry Ford did. Had the shifted the labor offshore, how many cars would he have sold in the USA? Obviously the bubble cannot expand infinitely and will run out of customers and resources at some point. The capacity for China to expand is immense, and will keep the oil-barons and other happy for a long time.
Japan started out making cheap toys only to later become formidable, I'd expect China to do something similar. With locked down currency exchange rate they can obliterate the worlds economies. Float their currency and let it find its natural value. Stop subsidizing a repressive dictatorship.
Block H-1B visa for any job that has less than 1% growth. Just disallow immigrant preferred placement. And for any H-2B visa their sector must have less than 2% growth. And of course block both if unemployment in those sectors is higher than 5% ...
If it can do the job, it can do the job, no matter if man, women, transsexual, genetically modified dog...
Of course, that said, certain people try to force themselves in jobs etc not by their skills, but by other dirty means like appeasing to the race/gender/preference cards or having powerful contacts like rich parents etc.. and those obviously don't perform as well because they don't need to, so end not being well liked by his peers at the job and mostly paid less.
But not saying that ALL cases are like that, because obviously some employees will indeed be discriminatory assholes etc, but it's not the only scenario that happens.
I'd expect that the growth in skilled 'knowledge economy' jobs will be mostly in the far east and Europe. Why would anyone want to do design work in America? The workers are less well educated on average, they have higher costs (particularly healthcare, due to the third world private healthcare system), and it is located in an overly financialised and corrupt country, a huge distance away from the manufacturing facilties.
I suppose that this kind of un-fact-checked article would appear on /. The statistic might have a remote chance of being reasonably accurate. BUT! It makes no mention of the largest job creation in progress since WWII - Baby Boomer retirements.
This process is at full steam now and will only grow over the next 10 years or so. These retirements open up a vast opportunity for those who can do it.
The rub is that parents and schools have failed the last couple of generations of "engineers" such that most young graduates CAN'T do it. Oh there are lots of graduate technicians who think that stacking Arduino shields is engineering but I know exactly ONE young engineer who can take a specification and a blank CAD screen and implement that spec. He freely admits that college only gave him the opportunity to teach himself.
Me? I came out of retirement a few years ago to manage the engineering group of a medium-sized start-up. I'm desperate for competent young people who speak English as their first language. I won't go the H1B route on principle but the temptation is huge.
So maybe those of you complaining about the tight job market should turn off those video games and fire up your soldering iron and compiler and DO something!
I'm an EE.. I work in finance now after 15 odd years in the trenches.
Salary is not proportional to effort, there is little upward mobility, and ultimately, much of this work is done elsewhere in the world now - demand for engineers is much higher in China. If you're keen on the field and want to build a successful career, consider that. If you're smart enough to do complex multivariable calculus for EM, then you're smart enough to figure out how to do almost anything else..
Great hobby now as tools are widely accessible but not a career I'd recommend; it does, however, form an excellent base for something else, like finance, medicine, or law.
Maybe Elon Musk will change this in the future.. I hope so.
products like the hoverboards burst into flames. American Innovation in general is all at risk. It's time for us to make our voices heard!
My latest home project is applying technology I learned while working... Rocket propelled drone defense shield. I can actually lock onto my drone via LIDAR, aim a large model rocket with a solid rocket booster deploy a net around the drone.. props get tangled, quadcopter falls, .. parachute/streamer deployed.
As far as the semi retired dude that claims you can't find a job if your are over 40, you are wrong. Our generation writes better FPGA code, designs more efficient circuits, makes better use of discrete components. I found newbies don't think about adding transorbs for lightning protection or even simple power conditioning. I think if you don't keep up with technology, don't want to learn new technology, or no drive then sure you are better off raising free range chickens.
When circuits became too easy to design due to all the ASIC chips out there that do everything I decided to learn how to write kick ass VHDL code to simulate a lot of circuitry.. and also learn good old school vacuum tube engineering. There's still nothing like vacuum tubes when it comes to power.
My mp3 player sounds great through my 65wpc vacuum tube amplifier.
Unless they have a juicy pension or are rich, they're going to work until they drop dead. Few can afford to retire.
Let's try looking at this another way. What you're saying is:
Seems the whole "don't judge a book by its cover" thing just doesn't work, and employers are missing out on many applicants, including those who are more qualified than the ones they eventually hire.
Now to deal with your "piece de resistance", or more appropriately "piece de merdre":
M2F is usually not done well. You can't really take a 6'4 230 guy and make him a cute girl - certainly not without a budget much bigger than most trans have. Everyone is going to see an ugly woman who is trying to "trick" the instincts we are evolved to have as mammals.
According to the CDC, the average height of males is 5'9". A 95 percentile height is 6'1. 97th percentile height is 6'2. Your 6'4" example is under 1% of the male population.
The "ideal heights" for both sexes, according to the opposite sex, women want men at 5''11, and men want women at 5'6. That 5'6 is a couple of inches higher than the average woman. Now throw in the range that men find acceptable in a woman:
a partner becomes too short at 4’11” and too tall at 6’.
The vast majority of male-to-female transsexuals meet those criteria easily when we start transitioning. Now throw in the effects of hormone replacement therapy over a few years, which can result in a loss of height and smaller foot size. For example, I started out as just under 5'9", and I'm now 5'6". My shoe size went from a men's size 9 to a woman's size 8.5 to 9, depending on the shoe, which is equivalent to a men's size 7 to 7-1/2. That's a difference of 4 cm or more.
Heck, after a few years on hormones, I stopped using makeup because I no longer needed it. It's called "passing privilege", so most of us will not be, in your words, " an ugly woman who is trying to "trick" the instincts we are evolved to have as mammals." You've almost certainly run unto us without knowing it.
In other words, the discrimination against trans women is at least partially due to a combination of being a woman and, in many cases, either not being able to use our former job history and qualifications without outing ourselves, or documentation that hasn't had the gender marker updated, because of transphobia among potential employers and co-workers.
How do you think you would do if you couldn't point to your previous work experience and credentials?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.