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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.
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
Obviously this article fails to take into account the tiniest of electrical engineers. If you're an engineer, and your body's aspect ratio is, say, 10 orders of magnitude smaller than the average, you've got job security like a mofo.
The best part about it is that because the regular engineers are so cheap now, you can buy a bunch of tiny ones and be ok with losing them around the office.
Right, and there's no way that software jobs can be outsourced!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
BLS projections are just one more knob &/or dial on the Keynesian economic control panel. By modifying young adult's opinions on the viability of a career they can temper enthusiasm for an over-hyped career path.
There was a short-term shortage in EEs when every electronics manufacturer was getting in to the smartphone/tablet business which required aggressive miniaturization. Now that all players in the Netbook/Smartphone/Laptop/Tablet markets have reached parity: the only innovation left is in "wearables", Bluetooth 3.0 IoT widgets, and Wearable displays.
Our Gyroscopes are good enough. Our WiFi/bluetooth adapters can't get any smaller. Our handheld web browsing/sms/camera devices don't need to get any smaller or thinner, display resolutions are already adequate with high enough refresh rates(flexible/3d/4d/volumetric/augmented reality being the last innovation left other than lower power consumption)/etc...
The "next big thing" is implantable's, and businesses leveraging the "near-Snowcrash-future" right around the corner to... "big data"/narrow-cast marketing Amazon Prime boxes harder?
Maybe I should have studied fashion! With all the electronic fantasies being realized: coming up with new ways to distinguish yourself in your clothing seems like the last refuge for conspicuous wealth displays.
A lot of boomer EEs are retiring soon. So don't think there are no jobs.
Generally only the worst of software jobs are outsourced. They tried it on a more massive scale and got hordes of very mediocre Java programmers in India which turned out to not be so much worth the hassle. I am not saying there aren't plenty of really good software people in other countries because there are. But I don't think any of our employment woes, to the extent they are real, are primarily due to outsourcing except for relatively less skilled labor and manufacturing.
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.
This must be why corporate America is actively working to make every development job one of the worst jobs available.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Not so fast. The issue is not where it's built, but where it is designed. Building stuff doesn't take all that much electrical engineering skill. DESIGNING it still does, although these days, with the layout and simulation tools we have doing design work is not that difficult unless you have to do something analog. Digital circuits are not all that complex to design and layout anymore. Analog though, can take a bit more effort if you depart from the part manufacturer's reference design by much.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
If growth is zero, then virtually all H1Bs displace local labor.
Yea, they are also conflating "Java Script" and "Java"
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
But, as GE found with its water heaters and dishwashers, if you do not build them, you also do not design them - the designing is done near where they are built.
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.
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.)
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.
You've described all we've been doing since the early 90s - draw it here, make it anywhere but here.
Do you really think there's no link between that mentality (design here, build anywhere but) and the decline of the Electric and Electronic Engineer?
I think there is, so does the government, and so does the guy who wrote TFA.
Why do you think where it's built doesn't matter? Is it because that's the status quo for the past third of century?
I think it does matter, and for reasons which have been obscured by various economic bubbles over the past 30 years.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
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.
Electronic parts (like pcbs and stuffing) haven't been close to each other since at least the 80's.
Yes
Semi-retired EE here. Where you reside in the US also has a lot to do with it. If you are in San Diego, CA, good luck finding a job if you are over 40. If you are in the bay area it is easier.
This apparent glut of EE's would go away very quickly if the US went to war with China or Russia as the talent pool would be split. Actually, this is a likely scenario, and instantly it would be a crisis for the US as we have outsourced much of our manufacturing base.
>> 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.
Engineering follows manufacturing. You keep them close to minimize design turnaround.
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.
Actually, right now the U.S. is about equal with China in manufacturing. You are just looking at the half that has gone bye-bye.
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.
Oh really? Is that based on how much money the US makes exporting?
I'm in the market for consumer-grade electronics, not jet airliners, space launch vehicles, locomotives or cars.
Please point out specific makes / models of consumer-grade electronics I can get in a typical big-box or online retailer that are made here.
Where is my US-made A/V receiver?
Where is my US-made phone?
Where is my US-made TV?
Nowhere. Ran out of the country decades ago in the race to the bottom.
The only thing I can think of in consumer-grade electronics are speakers. We still make speakers here.. well, some of them. Even the grand old names of speakers are making some of their lineup in China.
There are some things being made at the very high end of things. Like RGM watches. beautiful stuff and US-made, but hardly within grasp of most people.
So, other than airplanes, spacecraft and other heavy stuff -- where's this "half" that you speak of?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Great hobby now as tools are widely accessible
I did electronics as a kid and took introductory courses in college, but never got far with it as a career. Most employers were hiring only Filipinos workers for assembly work in Silicon Valley. I eventually went into vide game testing and I.T. support. Thirty years later I'm taking up electronics as a hobby. Now that I have time and money, I'm able to do a lot more than before. Every datasheet is available on the Internet, something that I had hard time finding as a youngster. I can buy parts in 100-count lot for the same price I paid for a package of five at Radio Shack in the day.
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.