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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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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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China has a thieving industry of original design manufacturers (ODMs)
Fixed that for you.
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.
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.
Mostly from what I've seen, custom hardware is being replaced by off the shelf components with customizable software.
Which is why this EE major from 25 years ago is now a programmer.... Actually the writing has been on the wall for decades and I realized early in my career that engineering hardware like in the 50, 60, and 70 was quickly going to die out. Bailed out into Software Engineering to beat the mad rush.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Honestly, that's bullshit unless you mean that US IDMs are paying Chinese ODMs (which really would have to be Chinese IDMs acting as ODMs, right?)
And then why would US IDMs be called IDMs?
Let's look at where stuff is designed and made:
- Many many US companies are fabless manufacturers (design + sale.) No Chinese company comes close to Qualcomm or Broadcom revenue in that area.
- Countries that make equipment to manufacture semiconductors? The Netherlands, USA, and Japan. No Chinese company in the top 15 by revenue.
- In terms of pure foundries you'll find that Taiwan is the leader and China is barely represented (but the US is still ahead in pure foundry revenue compared to China.)
- Companies that design and manufacture and sell (IDMs)? Giants like Intel and Samsung. USA/South Korea/Europe/Japan/Taiwan but again China is not in the top 20 by revenue.
So, in the semiconductor field China is still just the country that assembles stuff. Sure, China is investing heavily and trying to break into design and manufacture.
Tsinghua Unigroup (China) was rumored to be interested in buying Micron (USA) but, let's be honest, regulators are never going to allow that.
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.
Mostly from what I've seen, custom hardware is being replaced by off the shelf components with customizable software.
Yes, I have this trend over the last ten years and accentuated over the last five years.
The 1990's was the golden age of the IC startup. Many many companies were designing their own chips as a result of new tools and the new decoupling of design and manufacturing.
But as we moved through the 2000's, the cost of a developing a new chip rose astronomically. This is due to a combination of the need to make much more complex chips to be competitive and greatly increasing cost to gear up manufacturing at smaller geometries.
Thus chip startups needed a lot more money. This was a hard sell because it became clear in the mid 2000's that overall venture investment in chip startups produced negative returns.
It got worse in more recent times. Quick turn Internet startups could turn an idea into revenue very quickly with small teams and negligible investment in infrastructure. This is very attractive to investors. Why spend tens of millions and wait years for a hardware idea to bring in revenue when software could turn around so much faster and cheaper?
Thus, the way to survive in hardware to do as little hardware as possible (no chips!) and push the secret sauce to software, ideally not even in your device.
Meanwhile, the established companies are no longer pressured by startups to do many new designs. Further they have to front the enormous cost when they do make new chips.
Instead of expansion, we are seeing a wave of consolidation in the chip world.
There are articles in the paper every day about service job destruction.
A year ago when I went to chilli's there was a waitperson per 5 tables.
Last month when I went to chilli's there was a waitperson per 13 tables and a 1 "food delivery" person. An automated kiosk at the table took our order and allowed us to pay our bill. The waitperson basically refilled our drinks 3 times and checked if we had any special needs. The food delivery person actually brought our food and confirmed the order matched what we had ordered.
A few years ago, I got cold sales calls exclusively from humans trying to cold sell me items.
This year, I'm starting to get automated sales calls in the mix.
A few years ago, my doctor gave me my test results.
Today, I get an automated call that tells me my test results are available on the web page.
And yup-- entry level jobs are going away as automation gets less expensive.
Best buy, target and walmart staffing levels are lower than in the early 00's. (Walmart by an average of 1/7th).
I frequently check myself out at walmart, kroger, and lowes.
So yea, broad categories of service jobs are going away. I don't see new ones replacing them. I do see the young kids struggling to get started on the job path. It was easy for me when I was a kid. Even during recessions.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.