Interesting, and I liked the segment.
I will say that, regarding the student who wrote about the future of EE -- I think that question could use a LOT more thought. It is this EE's opinion that electrical engineering employment is indeed in decline, at least in the USA, and I suspect, other development countries. It's not that EE skills are not helpful, or that understanding electronics, systems, signals, etc, are not useful. They are all useful and will continue to be. But I think more and more of the work, in particular, the high PAYING work, will migrate to software people who understand the hardware "well enough." Which is fine. The fact is that EEs make good firmware engineers.
I think someone smart, with a solid EE background and a willingness to adapt throughout your entire career, should always find employment, but over time I suspect it will be less and less directly related to EE.
I mostly know Silicon Valley. I can assure you, semiconductor employment is way down here. Mostly, it is through attrition, as people retire and move on, but nobody is hiring loads of young engineers to design chips anymore. It makes sense. Though volumes continue to grow, margins continue to shrink, and chip starts are way down, because "big" SOCs with lots of peripherals can fill many niches that used to require custom or semicustom parts.
I'm not really a board guy, but speaking of SOCs, I think the proliferation of very capable parts with lots of cool peripherals is also obviating a lot of would-have-been design work. It's gotten really easy to plop down a uC and hook up a few things over serial links and a few standard interfaces. In essence, a lot of board design work has been slurped into the chips, where one team designs it once rather than every board designer doing it again. There might be more boards being designed than ever, but the effort per board seems to be going down fast, and that's actually not great for employment. Like you, I take apart a lot of stuff, and I'm blown away lately not by how complex many modern high volume boards are, but how dead simple they are.
I do hold out some hope that as Moore's law sunsets -- and it really is sunseting this time -- there will be renewed interest in creative EE design, as natural evolution in performance and capacity won't solve problems "automatically." That will perhaps mean more novel architectures, use of FPGAs, close HW/SW codesign, etc.
Of course, SV is booming, but it's just not driven by electronics. I suspect that there is a lot of growth in Asia and in development countries.
Here is what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has to say about the 2014-2024 job outlook for EEs:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm#tab-6Note that over a 10 year period they are predicting essentially no growth for EE's at all. None. Compare this to employment overall, in which the predict 7% growth.
Finally, I think we all tend to think of EEs as the "model EE": clever, curious, and energetic -- and stays that way for 40+ years. But let's remind ourselves that 1/2 of EEs are below median. (not among the population generally, but among the population of EEs) If you know the student in question, you can make an informed assessment about that person's prospects, but when you are answering a generic question about prospects for generic EEs, I think the right picture to have in mind is that of the middling engineer, not a particularly good one. Will that person survive for a full career as an EE?
I'm not saying at all that EE is a bad career, and for all I know the number of people getting EE degrees is going down faster than employment, so that the prospects for an EE graduate are actually quite good, but it is important for students to know the state of affairs.
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