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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.
Job creation at zero means there are no new jobs created. If someone replaces a worker in a job, that's still only one job, not a new job.
Technological innovation serves to reduce the labor required to produce a product. Jobs grow when we reduce scarcity: with 1,000,000 acres of land and hunter-gatherer society, you can only hunt so many deer and collect so many berries; go agrarian and you can get 10 times as much food; and bring it up to modern agricultural practices and genetically-modified crops and you can take that to 70 times as much. Don't believe me? The optimistic projection for hunter-gatherer society is a maximum of 135 million humans supported before exhausting all resources and incurring mass famine; our modern agricultural practice feeds over 7,000 million humans.
Reduce scarcity. If you have 1,000,000 acres of arable land, you'll expend the same amount of labor to farm each acre, the same amount of labor to feed each new person. When you run out of arable land, you have to expend extra labor to transport water for irrigation, to manufacture fertilizer, and to harvest smaller yields. That means instead of 10 hours to feed one person, you have to expend 20 hours. That's where scarcity comes from: we can continue to expand, but we'll have to pour in more human labor, meaning we have to pay these people, which means the cost of goods goes up, which means standard-of-living falls and some people just don't have anything to trade (notably, currency) to buy enough food to live.
In markets, reducing the labor that goes into a product reduces its cost, reducing its minimum price, enabling us to sell that product to more of the consumer market. As the price comes down, existing consumers end up with more money in their pockets, and can buy new goods. Producing more of a good and producing a new good both require labor, which creates new jobs for the ones we displace by lowering labor costs.
That only holds us at an equal number of jobs. When you become capable of scaling up further without incurring more than a proportional increase in labor, you create more jobs: you can make more units without increasing the cost-per-unit. That's often accompanied by an increase in population, which creates more jobs.
In politics, you look at unemployment rate when consumer markets recover from a rapid job depletion, pointing out the lowering of the marginal unemployment. You look at number of jobs created and pointedly avoid mentioning unemployment rate when scarcity decreases, creating more jobs but also creating more total unemployed, managing to not affect the unemployment rate in the process.
Given all that, a stagnation of job creation in EE doesn't necessarily mean we're not innovating; we may be innovating new analysis methods which require fewer EEs, thus shifting their labor away.
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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.
Except that the reality is that your assumption won't happen. There is a reason that outsourcing has failed in the long term for almost every project: the infrastructure and communication required to outsource a project successfully just does not exist in the countries the higher ups want to outsource them to. If it was possible, they would not bring in H1-B's for $65k when they could outsource it for $35k.
If you take away the $65k option, they are left with the $100k vs. the $35k option which they have already learned does not work. The reality is that the powers which exist will pay for the $100k version every time if given only that choice because the billions required to bring the infrastructure up to par is beyond even their means.
The real solution none of these people bring up is that most of the technology workers would have no problem with unlimited H1-B's if they were required to pay them in the 95th percentile for the job description in the region of employment. That would cause it to be used for what it should be used for: high end talent that adds value to the US, not low end talent that destroys value in the US.