EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: Rick Law on September 27, 2017, 01:36:42 am
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If you don't mind sharing your experience...
For recent college grads with EE degree in the USA, how is the job market these days? Also, how does that compares against your expectation when you selected EE as your major?
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Automation's rise could eventually lead to strange situations where people paid to work rather than the other way around.
What this has to do with OP's question?
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You're right,, it is of only peripheral relevance. I suspect electrical engineering is perhaps one of the professions least afflicted by that kind of thing.
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https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm)
Job prospects don't look good. OTOH, BLS doesn't separate electrical from electronic. There is another category for computer hardware engineers.
You can drill down and see where all the money is.
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Their definitions of occupations are vague and sort of useless. If you look at at this https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/computer-hardware-engineers.htm (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/computer-hardware-engineers.htm) , your outlook will be much better. Yet it is essentially the same area of expertise. And there are lots of examples like this.
Combined, you are in much better positions than social studies major, don't worry about that :)
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They shouldn't graduate computer engineers who don't understand electronics. I hope they aren't doing that.
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Basically, ordinary, non controlled jobs are taken mostly by Chinese and Indian, asking for $7000/mo or less, with a master's degree, in return to get H1B or green card.
If you are a good/decent engineer, then this actually comes in handy, since it is ridiculously easy to be better than cheap labor. Even the most stubborn employers eventually realize that they are wasting a lot of money on "cheap" labor. The only way cheap works, if you actually outsource the whole job to India, where you pay way less than this.
Also, there are consultant outsourcing companies like Tata (aka Indian H1B/green card factory), they basically offer cheap (comparable or only slightly higher than permanent employee)
I have never heard of body shops providing services in EE/HW design area. They are mostly focused on Web applications, databases and similar stuff.
Hardware is typically too risky for them.
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It works both ways, if an American company wants to set up a presence in India, bringing their workforce from the US and paying them US wages, they could do that. Also, if Americans leave the country once they leave the US they can work for less. The minimum wage rules no longer apply.
Defense will be the place to be. People will want to put surveillance in everything if it means decent jobs that cant be offsourced or outshored. (joke)
To their credit the Indian companies in the Indian press make a lot of noise about how many Americans they are being forced to hire. Basically, their whole business model depends on the US and expansion thats not creating new companies or new value, its just what you described. And they don't see how or why that might be seen as "wrong" by Americans, They argue it "saves us a lot of money" on wages and educating our young people. Why own when you can rent.. is their logic. (See http://web.archive.org/web/20090410103914/http://commerce.nic.in/wto_sub/Invest/sub_invest-W39.htm (http://web.archive.org/web/20090410103914/http://commerce.nic.in/wto_sub/Invest/sub_invest-W39.htm) )
Not good unless you apply for a defense company. Basically, ordinary, non controlled jobs are taken mostly by Chinese and Indian, asking for $7000/mo or less, with a master's degree, in return to get H1B or green card.
Also, there are consultant outsourcing companies like Tata (aka Indian H1B/green card factory), they basically offer cheap (comparable or only slightly higher than permanent employee) labor on a fly-in-fly-out fashion, so companies can hire consultants on the fly, use them, and fire them, without legal consequences. This makes companies less favor to hire employees.
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From my experience, American students
Ok, I kind of forgot the student part. Absolutely without experience it may be rough in the beginning.
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Computer engineer could mean anything. Being able to connect a couple of wires up is enough to qualify for the name.
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Also, there are consultant outsourcing companies like Tata (aka Indian H1B/green card factory), they basically offer cheap (comparable or only slightly higher than permanent employee)
I have never heard of body shops providing services in EE/HW design area. They are mostly focused on Web applications, databases and similar stuff.
Hardware is typically too risky for them.
Web apps and database must be a small part of the body shop business. Its widespread across most kinds of software and silicon development. I see less of it for hardware equipment development, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20080313195303/http://www.afsc.org/trade-matters/issues/LaborMobility.pdf (https://web.archive.org/web/20080313195303/http://www.afsc.org/trade-matters/issues/LaborMobility.pdf)
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Basically, ordinary, non controlled jobs are taken mostly by Chinese and Indian, asking for $7000/mo or less, with a master's degree, in return to get H1B or green card.
If you are a good/decent engineer, then this actually comes in handy, since it is ridiculously easy to be better than cheap labor. Even the most stubborn employers eventually realize that they are wasting a lot of money on "cheap" labor. The only way cheap works, if you actually outsource the whole job to India, where you pay way less than this.
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One would hope that is the case, but do you really think most C-level bosses really know which employees know their stuff and which ones don't?
I don't have hard data other than personal experiences. My experience would lead me to believe: most C-Level bosses would be so far from the action that they have minimum idea about those doing actual production work. So, C-level bosses make decisions on a macro scale averaging out a department or even averaging an entire division of a company - and on average, cost and staff-quality included, it is hard to beat someone who is 1/3 cost or lower.
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Also, there are consultant outsourcing companies like Tata (aka Indian H1B/green card factory), they basically offer cheap (comparable or only slightly higher than permanent employee)
I have never heard of body shops providing services in EE/HW design area. They are mostly focused on Web applications, databases and similar stuff.
Hardware is typically too risky for them.
You are right about those outsourcing companies. I think that software is lower risk is just a perception and not true. Software could be life-blood of their company - just turn SAP (or name your ERP) off for a day and see how many companies can keep their operation going.
Even if it is high risk to outsource, I don't think it bother most C-Level bosses. Some C-Level bosses make big bets -and- they don't fall on their sword when it fails. They moved on while the failure is not yet visible - then, 6 month after they moved on to a bigger fatter job, the whole house of card came down like a pile of quick sand.
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One would hope that is the case, but do you really think most C-level bosses really know which employees know their stuff and which ones don't?
They do when things escalate. And things escalate a lot when people have no clue what they are doing. Whether those manager are in a position to hire better people is a different question.
You are right about those outsourcing companies. I think that software is lower risk is just a perception and not true.
The software is easy to "fix" when it breaks. It is harder to fix 10000 assembled boards with some hardware mistake.
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The WTO Working Party on Domestic Regulation (WPDR) is developing the "disciplines on domestic regulation" that will likely govern globalization of professional services and cross licensing issues.
Currently its my understanding that most of them are still incomplete, except for accounting.
No doubt this (and other services related issues) will be on the agenda for discussion by at Buenos Aires in December.
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How much do engineers have to interact with an ERP such as SAP? I have quite a bit of experience with SAP, on the logistics side, using its Warehouse Module, Material Module, Inventory Module, Light Billing. Basically, a customer would place a purchase order, in turn a sales order would be generated, from there is where I took over, until the invoice was created and EDI sent. At which point it was billing & 3rd party carriers responsibility.
I worked in a distribution center.
I always thought it was going to be useless information. I learned quite a bit about it. I actually wrote an ~200 page pdf for that job before I left. It was like a big picture kind of thing, like what transactions in the software represented in the process of the company. How I did the processes, and some that I implemented. Also some software "hacks" like using multiple unrelated transaction to obtain information for another. Quite a bit of it was a result of me being lazy, and believing that it was complete bull crap that there wasn't faster methods.
Could this actually be useful?
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How much do engineers have to interact with an ERP such as SAP?
Hopefully not at all.
Could this actually be useful?
Not really.
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How much do engineers have to interact with an ERP such as SAP?
Hopefully not at all.
Could this actually be useful?
Not really.
:'(
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Work on actual projects. Having good stuff on GitHub is more important than education in a lot of cases. If you did some projects for the university - put them all out.
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Computer engineer could mean anything. Being able to connect a couple of wires up is enough to qualify for the name.
The wire hooker-uppers are in the IT category or technician categories.
To me, computer engineers would be the CPU guys - FPGA experts - those kinds of engineers. Serious hardware folks - the kind the .gov would love to hire.
It's regrettable that BLS doesn't clean up their job descriptions. Maybe even use the same codes that employers use.
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How much do engineers have to interact with an ERP such as SAP? I have quite a bit of experience with SAP, on the logistics side, using its Warehouse Module, Material Module, Inventory Module, Light Billing. Basically, a customer would place a purchase order, in turn a sales order would be generated, from there is where I took over, until the invoice was created and EDI sent. At which point it was billing & 3rd party carriers responsibility.
I worked in a distribution center.
I always thought it was going to be useless information. I learned quite a bit about it. I actually wrote an ~200 page pdf for that job before I left. It was like a big picture kind of thing, like what transactions in the software represented in the process of the company. How I did the processes, and some that I implemented. Also some software "hacks" like using multiple unrelated transaction to obtain information for another. Quite a bit of it was a result of me being lazy, and believing that it was complete bull crap that there wasn't faster methods.
Could this actually be useful?
re: "Could this actually be useful?"
For EE engineers, it probably is not very useful. For the operational folks that ERP targets, the usefulness depends on what you mean by the word "this".
If "this" refers to ERP/SAP, definitely. SAP doesn't get to be one of the largest software firm if most manufacturers see ERP as a waste of time. But if "this" refers to the "hack", it would depends on what that SAP owner use it for.
I don't think ERP in general is a big picture thing. It is operational data: how much do I sell so far? What is my margin? Which product(s) are in my warehouse and how long?
(If not set to order automatically) What raw material do I need to order? So forth. It aims to automate all that stuff. Without a good ERP, "just in time" inventory management is darn near impossible. ERP data also is a good source for data-mining to see if one can find any information about sales, admin cost, product cost, etc. etc.
Main problem with ERP is really flexibility. One COO from a major firm once said of ERP (sorry, too far back for me to remember who), "It is like casting your operating procedure in concrete." Once you get all your procedures automated in code, changing any part of it often is a lot of work.
EDI is another matter. I don't know how the recent web related impact to EDI and I assume there would be many. My knowledge is 10 years old so likely out of date to some extend. ~10 yrs ago, world wide for many ports, you can't even dock your ship without getting an EDI manifest to the port authorities. Some ports, EDI is absolutely required, some ports, EDI merely avoid delay. An extra day in a major port costs a lot of money.
Besides shipment/order, EDI's cousin EDIFACT deals with admin/financial part of it and that is also very useful. ERP's direct connect to EDI is therefore very useful.
I think I said too much - ERP is way too far off topic. I brought it up to show a counter example that software failure could be as expensive as hardware failure and that the end user would hardly care whether it is hardware or software when the darn thing fail.
May be I am wrong, but ERP has so little to do with EE I can't see how it would affects new EE college grad's job market. So lets get back to discuss EE - new grad job market.
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Documenting business processes- breaking each business process down into its component pieces so they can each be optimized for maximum profit is super important in this era of global value chains. That goes for everything, services as well as products. Many businesses are virtual now, it may not make much sense having a physical office if it can be done cheaper by companies that specialize in providing services, for example, design services, over the Internet. If 90% of value is added by the firm in the high cost country, which may consist of only one or two people but done by the back office people in the low cost country thats now framed as more efficient and "frees up a great many people to do more interesting work".
We could see Amazon-like companies that literally hire thousands of engineers from all over the world that act as the clearinghouse for their work, paying them based on bidding. They would bid for the work. Its a system that would favor people in countries with a low cost of education and living.
The key to this is mutual recognition of credentials and cross licensing which is being worked on now. The reason this is already happening in software has more to do with the lack of formal licensing in software design, so its just ahead of the curve time wise, with other professions likely to follow it in the near future as they are harmonised.
Like the Borg, the cult of neoliberalism tries to present this shift as natural and 'resistance as futile' but the fact is its quite contrived and its goal is increasing inequality in society and eliminating the ladders upward out of poverty by a frontal assault on middle class jobs. Public services in particular are under attack.
This totally shifts the direction society had been going in-reversing progress in a system that should become more equal by framing all the things that governments have traditionally helped people achieve as interference and regulation as thefts from corporations. Laws become subject to a veto based on a concept called indirect expropriation that attacks the right to regulate, basically eliminating democracy's ability to fix policy mistakes, by turning every shift in the corporate direction as irreversible and a property right whose loss must suddenly be compensated for.. This ignores the fact that people, also are "investors" in society whose interests should be respected and given a value. But now they are not, unless it can be tied to a corporate profit in some way (for example, peoples lives are valued by their earning potential and so it becomes cost effective to pollute shamelessly in poor areas or in a manner which mostly effects children and/or older people if liability is based on their lost incomes, costs to pay off people who somehow could afford to pay a lawyer to sue, would be very low or nil. Subrogation clauses in insurance adds to the inequality.)
So, there are choices we need to make but they are being hidden from us.Very powerful well funded, and amoral interests are trying to deprive the planet of many choices it needs to make by pre-deciding them against the best interests of almost everybody, and hiding them in tehse international agreements and anti-democratic obligations.
The boosters of this agenda are more like a cult than we would expect given their positions in society. They meet Robert J. Lifton's cult criteria.
Lowers costs and increases the profitability for business owners, is not the same as lowering costs for people, especially if the change is accomplished by shifts that eliminate large numbers of jobs as they are expected to. The shifts will hurt most businesses and benefit the largest multinational corporations.
High skill professions of all kinds are being targeted for commoditization and cross border trading in engineering services via all four of the WTO GATS defined "four modes of supply" is likely to become a rapidly growing permanent part of the services landscape..
Engineering, both hardware and software will enjoy no exception from what will be happening to everybody else.
The campaign against "non tariff barriers" will lead to more inequality in society and shift profitability upward. Unlike the hype, these shifts wont help 99% of the people in the developing world - except for those who are already quite wealthy.
(they areguably will hurt them by gutting public services like higher education and health care in order to put them into play in what amounts to a global poker game with people's lives)
The changes will deprive whole generations of people of decent jobs and cut wages for high skill work to the bone which disrespects the huge efforts needed to know how to do that work and creates an unsustainable situation that helps nobody.
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The thing is, if you peruse the BLS site, you will find that software wienies have an equally high income as the EEs but the job market is booming.
We already have computers, we have chips, there's nothing much for CPU type EEs to do. Not enough work to keep the current herd employed while expanding to allow for entry level engineers. That's what BLS is trying to show. Although they appear to lump in electrical (power) engineers. You would think that even electrical engineering would be growing given the population growth and the need for utility companies to meet the demand (pun intended) but apparently they have all the engineers they need. If you want a job in that field, you need to wait for somebody to die off.
So, look up software engineer and drill down into Silicon Valley. There are tons of jobs, lots of money (and a cost of living to match) and great opportunity.
When I was in college, software was a small niche and hardware was everything. We wanted Fortran to run fast! COBOL too... CPU design wasn't a settled issue. Today it is - we have x64 and ARM and that's got hardware covered.
Things have changed in the last 40 years. Today, software engineering (not programming!) is a really big deal. There are jobs for programmers as well. Look it up! It doesn't pay as well as software engineering nor are the entry requirements as high.
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The thing is, if you peruse the BLS site, you will find that software wienies have an equally high income as the EEs but the job market is booming.
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software engineering (not programming!) is a really big deal. There are jobs for programmers as well. Look it up! It doesn't pay as well as software engineering nor are the entry requirements as high.
We have a definition issue to resolve...
What do you mean by software engineer and how is that different than programmer?
To me, the difference is like "hair styler" vs "berber". One pretends to make it a nice experience for you, and that they care. They make you pay for that pretense. The other one knows you just want your hair cut and get the hack out of there. They charge you less so you shut up and let the guy get it done.
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The thing is, if you peruse the BLS site, you will find that software wienies have an equally high income as the EEs but the job market is booming.
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software engineering (not programming!) is a really big deal. There are jobs for programmers as well. Look it up! It doesn't pay as well as software engineering nor are the entry requirements as high.
We have a definition issue to resolve...
What do you mean by software engineer and how is that different than programmer?
To me, the difference is like "hair styler" vs "berber". One pretends to make it a nice experience for you, and that they care. They make you pay for that pretense. The other one knows you just want your hair cut and get the hack out of there. They charge you less so you shut up and let the guy get it done.
There's a HUGE difference. A software engineer designs the algorithms, specifies the performance, whatever else is relevant to the engineering of the project.
A programmer writes the code to implement the design.
A software engineer will have a 4 year degree in (software) engineering with a BUNCH of math (up to and including Differential Equations) pretty much like any other engineer.
A programmer may need a 4 year degree but it won't necessarily be in engineering.
Here is the BLS definition
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm)
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Except that you hardly see this differentiation in a real life. There are programmers that know more of one or the other subject, that's it. Ant often knowledge of abstract math does not help much, you really need to know a specific topic, and corresponding math.
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Except that you hardly see this differentiation in a real life. There are programmers that know more of one or the other subject, that's it. Ant often knowledge of abstract math does not help much, you really need to know a specific topic, and corresponding math.
The same argument is usually applied to technicians versus engineers. Like technicians, there are some very bright programmers. But neither have the credentials to be classified as engineers or they would already be so classified and paid accordingly.
Knowing Differential Equations, for example, is probably a waste of time for many careers including software engineering (and certainly mine). But it does indicate an ability to learn the material. There will always be something new to learn and an engineering degree provides a nice foundation. I still feel that Physics is the key...
I'll concede that the difference between software engineer and programmer is murky until I think of people at the top of the game (Knuth, Wirth, CAR Hoare, Kernighan, Ritchie, Torvalds...). They are NOT programmers.
The distinction that the BLS makes seems appropriate. Programmers write code. Engineers design systems.
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The thing is, if you peruse the BLS site, you will find that software wienies have an equally high income as the EEs but the job market is booming.
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software engineering (not programming!) is a really big deal. There are jobs for programmers as well. Look it up! It doesn't pay as well as software engineering nor are the entry requirements as high.
We have a definition issue to resolve...
What do you mean by software engineer and how is that different than programmer?
To me, the difference is like "hair styler" vs "berber". One pretends to make it a nice experience for you, and that they care. They make you pay for that pretense. The other one knows you just want your hair cut and get the hack out of there. They charge you less so you shut up and let the guy get it done.
There's a HUGE difference. A software engineer designs the algorithms, specifies the performance, whatever else is relevant to the engineering of the project.
A programmer writes the code to implement the design.
A software engineer will have a 4 year degree in (software) engineering with a BUNCH of math (up to and including Differential Equations) pretty much like any other engineer.
A programmer may need a 4 year degree but it won't necessarily be in engineering.
Here is the BLS definition
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm)
Hmmm... you are citing a much larger difference than the one on line magazine Software Engineer Insider.com in their article here:
http://www.softwareengineerinsider.com/articles/computer-science-vs-software-engineering.html
(http://www.softwareengineerinsider.com/articles/computer-science-vs-software-engineering.html)
Their article led me to believe it is pretty much like it was: A distinction without a difference.
By "it was" I mean as it was in the days when I was in Univ. In the 70's when I graduated from Univ in the mid-west, some U's doesn't yet offer Computer Science and all things computer get rolled into either Mathematics (software) or EE (hardware).
Then, all software guys I know of were Programmers - from the one who code device drivers, to the one who design whole multi-million dollar software systems. And of course, you don't have PC's then - it wasn't invented yet. All the programmer titles such as "principal programmer", "system programmer", "junior programmer"... were distinctions in salary grades and levels of responsibility.
Then in the last 10 years or so, I see the title "software engineer" popped up. I take it to be just another $ distinction.
Perhaps the much larger difference you see is more within the industries in you your neck of the woods?
Edit: correction:
on line magazine, not one line magazine.
your neck of the woods, not you neck of the woods.
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Since I am using the Bureau of Labor Statistics to come with job growth, salary, demographics, etc. I pretty much have to use their job descriptions.
It's pretty easy to major in Phys Ed, take a couple of programming classes and get a job as a programmer. No serious math or science required. I would hope the bar is a bit higher for "Software Engineer". I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of job title creep.
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There's a HUGE difference. A software engineer designs the algorithms, specifies the performance, whatever else is relevant to the engineering of the project.
A programmer writes the code to implement the design.
A software engineer will have a 4 year degree in (software) engineering with a BUNCH of math (up to and including Differential Equations) pretty much like any other engineer.
A programmer may need a 4 year degree but it won't necessarily be in engineering.
Here is the BLS definition
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm)
You treat those job titles like they have a solid definition, but they don't. People love escalating job titles, to sound more important, so everyone wants to be called the title they consider most grand, but they can't usually agree which title that might be.
There is a huge different in ability and training between the typical code producer, and the kind of person who can deal with the complete chain from requirements definition to polished solution. This is especially true if the problem involves serious maths, and even more true if some genuine R&D is needed to figure out usable algorithms. What these people are called shows no consistency at all.
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A Software Engineer is what they call Programmers in California.
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Since I am using the Bureau of Labor Statistics to come with job growth, salary, demographics, etc. I pretty much have to use their job descriptions.
It's pretty easy to major in Phys Ed, take a couple of programming classes and get a job as a programmer. No serious math or science required. I would hope the bar is a bit higher for "Software Engineer". I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of job title creep.
I can go with that terminology. Now we are on the same page.
The software job market changed a lot too and I don't think jobs are aplenty anymore - at least not at similar level of compensation. When computer was worth millions (as in IBM360), it was worth while hiring someone worth $100,000 (at the high end) to make it do things properly/efficiently. Almost every Fortune 1000 firm would have their own programming staff back then even if they are not technology firms. Now most if not all non-tech firms are using just packaged products for their own operations. They have no need for real programming staff in their operational needs.
Comparing compensation of average non-tech firm software developers to say an auto mechanics, not from hard data but from merely what I can recall, in the 1980's, experienced software developers probably made 2x-3x of what auto-mechanics make. Now they are probably just a little over (1.1x to <= 1.5x) or around on par.
I am not near Silicon Valley. I used to travel there frequently on business so how know how it was like. My guess even there may not be a lot outside of the small tech firms who'es business is solely to support the few big boys (like Google, Facebook, etc).
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I am not near Silicon Valley. I used to travel there frequently on business so how know how it was like. My guess even there may not be a lot outside of the small tech firms who'es business is solely to support the few big boys (like Google, Facebook, etc).
But you can drill down through the BLS page by job title and find out exactly how much the average <whatever> is getting paid specifically in Silicon Gulch. The map will also shows regions of the country where the demand (and salary) is higher or lower.
For Software Developer, Systems:
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151133.htm#st (https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151133.htm#st)
If you scroll down far enough you will find that in Silicon Gulch, the Annual Mean Wage is $146,630. Some make more, some make less but the Mean is pretty sweet!
For anybody picking a major, the BLS site is a really good reference. The headcount should increase by 186,600 (17%) between 2014 and 2024. It should be pretty easy to be one of them!
Bottom line: Compare the salaries, areas of the country, job growth, etc. before selecting a major. The way I see it, I should have ditched EE when I went to grad school and majored in CS. Fact is, the University asked me just before graduation whether I wanted my diploma in CS or EE and I picked EE. Today, that might be a mistake.
I have no complaints, the electrical (not electronic) field kept me well fed for my entire career. No regrets...
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Services export firms like the aforementioned "body shops" are not targeting the best and the brightest jobs, they are targeting the bottom 80% rather than the top 20%.
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Bottom line: Compare the salaries, areas of the country, job growth, etc. before selecting a major. The way I see it, I should have ditched EE when I went to grad school and majored in CS. Fact is, the University asked me just before graduation whether I wanted my diploma in CS or EE and I picked EE. Today, that might be a mistake.
I have no complaints, the electrical (not electronic) field kept me well fed for my entire career. No regrets...
That ending paragraph is what I fear.
I've seen a lot of young EE students of late (along my way, good location for bathroom/break when traffic is bad). BLS numbers from last year had it that average college grads have less than 50/50 chance of finding a job needing or using their college education. So, as I sat and sip my coffee, I often wonder about these future EE'er job prospects.
Coincidentally, rstofer, I was hoping their prospects would be better than some CS majors I know. So I was rather surprised that you think CS guys are doing much better.
Judging from the responses here, there is a hollowing out of the industry here and future is not good unless things change. If there is not enough EE jobs, the University training will start to decline - both due to decline in actual industrial experience and the lack of students. Foreign students are only here because we still have a good education system and good faculties.
Lacking a real industry as the back bone, that line of knowledge will start to decline, recede, and eventually wither away.
May be we all should stop buying the most popular and instead shop for something that isn't the most popular brand - spread the money around to foster innovation and growth, so to speak.
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This paper is quite good for explaining a complex subject. These same issues are applicable to all professional fields to varying degrees.. Much more so now than in 2004.
Disciplining domestic regulation: the World Trade Organization and the market for professional services
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.471.9900&rep=rep1&type=pdf (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.471.9900&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
Patricia J. Arnold
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PJ Arnold is a forensic accountant, and she is also a co-author of a very good report on the BCCI scandal of several years back.. which is on the (ABBA?) web site.. very interesting reading..
Basically, the wolves are 'guarding' their henhouse.
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University enrollment may already be taking a hit. A friend of mine works in Admin at a local University and he has told me that enrollment is down about 10%. That won't apply to the elite universities, of course, but some of the smaller private universities may be feeling a pinch.
It's the BLS that thinks the CS jobs will grow at a faster rate than EE, not me! They have real numbers while I only have opinions and, worse, although I lived and worked in Silicon Gulch for over 30 years, I never worked in electronics or computer science.
You can use a lot of CS folks on a single server that was designed by a team of EEs 10 years ago. The hardware is important, sure, but it's code that makes it play. EE work can be done offshore, CS work tends to be done in-house because it involves IP and competitive secrets. My OPINION...
Somebody had to create the hundreds of millions of web pages.
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Do embedded programming fall under EE?
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Web applications should be designed to run themselves. Most web pages are generated by templating languages serving a combination of structure and content. The structure usually is coded and modified by templates of various kinds and the content is often user written but it lives in a database.
So the number of jobs which those activities create is not infinite. Figure the work of one person coding could replace the work of thousands of store clerks, etc. in brick and mortar stores. This is why we shouldnt look to computing for large scale employment. We shouldnt look to anything for large scale employment. Experts agree we're heading into a future of much economic uncertainty.
To put it mildly. Its the end of one era and the beginning of another that we live in now.
You can use a lot of CS folks on a single server that was designed by a team of EEs 10 years ago. The hardware is important, sure, but it's code that makes it play. EE work can be done offshore, CS work tends to be done in-house because it involves IP and competitive secrets. My OPINION...
Somebody had to create the hundreds of millions of web pages.
We do, we're doing it right now. [submit]
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Also, wages are determined by supply and demand. That basically means that wages are likely to fall and continue falling.
If you want wages to fall, increase supply of workers, (or create computers that work for nothing).
When you do both, thats evil "shock treatment"
They expect rapid change. But I think its inevitably going to backfire on everybody by creating an economic implosion the likes of the world has never seen. Because we are looking at what is the beginning of the end of work, for good. For most people. And perhaps the end of money. It certainly looks like they are trying to force the planet to reject the current system by just pushing harder and harder to make things break. Kind of like the end of the Roman Empire, when it fell to the Vandals, in the Sack of Rome, nobody was sorry to see it go. However, Europe descended into the Dark Ages, literacy was lost and people's bodies can be shown to have shrunk in stature and most Europeans generally starved for around a thousand years.
Wages have nothing to do with fairness or sustainability in the free market. The core concept behind the market, is supply and demand.
Thats why a cult based around it is not the work of the wise. Its an attempt to make the planet stupid and reverse our progress. because people and humanity are arguably growing out of the need for money as we needed it in the past. because we wont need people to tend the expensive machines of industry. They will largely run themselves. Thats what we're building. Automation on a scale we've never seen before.
To cash in on all this, they think, the pending TiSA tries to create a monoculture of Amazons and Wal Marts and cheap labor (and unemployment) and "global value chains" -- A world without walls" sort of a global mall where you can buy workers here, women there, where workers and work are interchangeable parts and disposable..
Thats a guaranteed disaster.
Notice the lack of ambiguity or wiggle room in the images returned from this simple search below.
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Do embedded programming fall under EE?
Embedded covers a wide range of things. If you mean MCU programming, that is mostly done by EEs who do a mixture of hardware and software work. Larger embedded developments generally partition the hardware and software work, with EEs doing the hardware and software engineers doing the software.
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You have to remember with everybody having so much more time and information being so easy to find, DIY is increasing exponentially. People will become their own factories. they will design and make their own products.
Which is a small part of a much larger and more important trend-line..The spread of ideas and new knowledge is a function of how much existing knowledge there is and the speed at which it can be shared.
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I should put this in its own thread..
I think that the definitions of things we do today are changing rapidly. Embedded hardware is becoming ubiquitous. Except this process is still in its infancy, compared to where it may take us.
For example, we will likely use technology to expand human abilities and eventually, overcome the liimitations imposed on us by our bodies.
"Transhumanism" will be a new form of human life plus embeddable-ware, a shift we will undergo in the coming years - we will likely incorporate (computers? biocomputers? nanotech?) into our bodies.
This is because we will need to extend life, most people's knowledge takes so long to acquire, our lives need to become longer so we can keep on learning and growing.
Life is an engineering problem.
Unless we make the Earth uninhabitable first, it'll eventually mean people's bodies will likely be able to repair most kinds of cellular damage.
It will mean the gradual ends of aging and death as we have known it.
Maybe tiny machines will enable cellular self repair mechanisms.. at the molecular level..
"There's lots of room at the bottom" (Feynman referring to size i.e. room in our recipe book for nano technology..
maybe we'll be able to introduce self repair into our bodies by ingestion. You can see how that would seem to be magic or a God like ability, (Gods are always portrayed as immortal) to people of not very long ago.
I'm just engaging in a speculative exercise about what the next century may bring. The graphics below explain why so few people realize how fast things are changing.
Politicians and economists, especially always make the same mistake, not understanding the exponential growth aspect of technological change.
Non-scientists always look to the past to estimate the rate of future change, a really huge mistake that leads to huge mistakes in judgement on policy matters.
Do embedded programming fall under EE?
Embedded covers a wide range of things. If you mean MCU programming, that is mostly done by EEs who do a mixture of hardware and software work. Larger embedded developments generally partition the hardware and software work, with EEs doing the hardware and software engineers doing the software.
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It will mean the gradual ends of aging and death as we have known it.
For select few maybe. Others are just not needed. As for transhumanism - teens are often depressed as is. Not nice to live your little life and watch some shining show on YT. Being hardwired to biased and deceptive information field will not help. Also "merging with machines" do not enlighten one with some higher understanding or goal in life. If want to go next level better go into woods, watch life and try to understand how superior it is to our dead tech.
Note that mr Kasparov emphasized that best candidates for efficient human-machine operations are average persons, and bright ones are counterproductive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp7Pq7_tHsY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp7Pq7_tHsY)
So Im afraid perspectives for general populace are rather grim - problems with jobs is just beginning. Dunno if this could be changed somehow.
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Mr. Wolf,
I don't buy into this argument. Thats exactly what the german agenda was in WWII, and it was rejected by all humanity. lets NOT go there.
If anything,a substantial body of evidence shows that over-emphasis on wealth amassment and environments where people are encouraged to make more and more money to the detriment of all else are conducive to dishonest and antisocial behaviors.
In the paper linked at the bottom, below, starting on Page 12 there is a discussion about services liberalisation fallacies and the danger of framing them as they are now doing..
Changes being made worldwide are based on extremely fallacious ill-logic and they will necessitate substantially more education to reach a break even point for citizens of developed nations.
(i.e. stable lifelong employment) The vast middle and bottom of jobs will be funneled to others, even in the developed countries.
As part of a "grand bargain" between developed giants and the developing world which shafts everybody in both except their elites.
Nobody is questioning this rehash of discredited trickle-down economics, and in fact, in the US, people dont even know trade deals have already been made (in the case of the (WTO) "GATS") that sell out the entire country, potentially blocking and or gutting all chances for progressive policy changes, subsuming democracy under bad WTO policy and that additional binding "bargains" between elites to set aside democracy and end policies which offer management of otherwise unmanageablet economic uncertainties.. (social programs such as public healthcare and education, in particular) would never stand if people knew even the most basic things about them. That makes them and their global power grab wholly illegitimate.
Seeing changes necessitating adult behavior in politicians coming soon, what was their response to the moral challenge? Instead of common sense, their reaction was the worst possible one. They attempted to use what amounts to a straw man transaction to "sell" rights that coincidentally nullified our democracy to their sycophants among the elites overseas. In exchange they were expected to shaft THEIR poor people.
Of course, they frame this as helping the poor. Nothing could be farther from the truth s they are gutting public services that more than anything else helped the entire developing world to get where it is today, despite the huge burden of tropical diseases of poverty, diseases which are moving northward and southward with global warming.
MNCs hope to cash in on every misfortune, without exception.
This would be comical if it wasnt real, but it is, Its a sordid story, the attempted global theft of all humanity's ability to vote to fix crucial policy such as healthcare, education, access to the increasingly necessary tools necessary to "exist" as a member of modern society are being snattched away in what amounts to a global voter nullification campaign..
In order to take away peoples power, they intend to force millions of workers to exchange places, becoming non-citizens where they work, to allow them to be cheated of most of their wages.. dis-empowering all of them. (If they want to work)
Because this will destroy unions and independent professionalism.. By tying permission to work in temporary migration, to employment by MNCs.. tying new entitlements for corporate entities to move employees around at will in a system of indentured servitude (Mode Four) thats been frequently compared to modern day slavery.. Because the way of doing things in the past has not been swept away yet, but changes have already been promised, in what some countries with extraordinary levels of affluence and poverty claim is a huge IOU to them of jobs. Clueless they press on, failing to see that the world has changed and that jobs everywhere are going away so they need to be preserved for the people most entitled to them, people in the countries where the work is located.
They should blame the elites who made these unconscionable promises to them, not attempt to push an agenda so horrible its advocates have been afraid to disclose it, even the slightest bit.
This is why the world needs to eliminate the whole idea of irreversible criminogenic "trade agreements" to destroy democracy.No agreement should be allowed to last longer than the terms of office of its advocates, otherwise one bad batch of corrupt politicians (the one thing virtually all Americans and likely also Australians agree we all have a big problem with now!) can curse an entire country's future, forever, forcing its entire population to move elsewhere or surrender their futures and efforts to the unwholesome enrichment of others.
This is what is being done. democracy is rendered a nullity by deals to give away all policy "affecting trade in services" to corporations unless a service sector is in its entirelty "supplied neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers."
The following is from "The Scope of GATS and of Its Obligations" by Bregt Natens and Jan Wouters
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2324078 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2324078)
‘All understand that the GATS represents a complex and multi-faceted compromise
between these twin goals of trade liberalization and regulatory autonomy. The contours
of this compromise are defined by a variety of rules and understandings […]. Where
proponents of the GATS […] express confidence in the ability of the trade regime to
interpret and apply its rules within the bounds of reasonableness, GATS critics tend to
see them as inadequate and indeterminate, and are suspicious of the tendency of
ambiguity to be resolved in the interests of the powerful.’2
On the multilateral level, global trade is mainly governed by the World Trade Organization
(WTO). After very difficult negotiations3, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (‘GATS’
or ‘the Agreement’) was concluded as the key WTO agreement on trade in services, providing a
basic framework for the liberalisation of trade in services and a platform for further negotiations.4
However, the Agreement is the textually unclear result of an elaborate political compromise5,
highlighting from its preamble on that it is concluded between parties with almost diametrically
opposite views on an inherently complex issue. Moreover, because of this ambiguity and the
possibly very broad scope of GATS and some of its obligations, some civil society actors have
expressed grave concerns on the impact of GATS – reminiscent of the criticism on the (EU) Services
Directive.6
Although the GATS (nonbinding and largely symbolic only) preamble states that the achievement of progressively higher levels of
liberalisation of trade in services is desired to promote ‘the interests of all participants on a
mutually advantageous basis’, the subsequent paragraph also recognises the right of Members
to regulate and to introduce new regulation to meet national policy objectives.7"
(only if those objectives are "consistent with the goals of the GATS agreement", basically a world where a long list of bad policy ideas gutting the world's social safety nets and eliminating regulations -are locked in more and more tightly by the appropriately named "ratchet" clauses.
To give a particularly horrid example, financial services regulation (banking, health insurance) bad policies which were previously the status quo which was rejected in elections - and which in the case of health insurance, arguably caused and is still causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and in financial services, (in the US) GATS driven deregulation repealing the Glass Steagall Act literally caused a massive world financial disasters, (2008 World Financial Crisis) ignoring the entire country's obvious needs and wishes, because of a "Standstill" in GATS, now again are being effectively rolled back to their state in the distant past (February 1998) and locked in forever. Why? To make the US financial services markets, such as banking and health insurance more attractive for foreign investment and firms.
Another goal is the creation of a vast shift in work and workforces - using "compeittiton" (foreign firms will get a legal way of paying much lower wages) under unfair conditions . GATS frames market access - as a core goal, leading elites in developing countries, who by and large are wealthier than those whose jobs they seek to subcontract away, now clearly seeever increasing growth of these arguably unsustainable and unfair schemes as the repayment of some kind of debt owned them by the people of the developing world. Not only is this a mistake, it threatens to throw away decades of progress made in relations between developing and developed countries, one can only see it as likely to cause an immense and totally unnecessary conflict and perhaps even a descent into fascism, as people become disenchanted with what they thought was democracy but what actually was not. Instead they are being cynically manipulated by fake" parties that behind the scenes are against our entire countries for a tiny few. Hoping to use a series of artificially created "crises" occurring in the context of a hidden GATS and the dysfunction its Byzantine rules create, to destroy peoples lives and faith in government, gut the social contract, and as a form of labor arbitrage, to lower wages and professional standards, eliminating independence and common sense in a plethora of skilled professions.
People in the US, EU and likely also Australia are wholly unaware these changes are occurring and designed to lock in bad policy, and by means of their "ratchet" are intended to become irreversibly expensive to fix - and are pending and almost done.. They will also discourage people from taking the financial risks (student loans) which they need to take to have even a small chance of becoming part of the middle class..
Engineering employment's financial aspects (such as the possibility of employment and the likely wages of such) as well as the likelihood of large scale economic implosion due to loss of good paying middle class jobs, are not as important as the changes being undertaken in health care, health insurance, higher education and essential utilities like water which could threaten many's very survival, but still are very important to our future.
We must not make changes that lead to millions of jobs being lost or insourced, outsourced, contracted out or (just as likely I think, due to desires to not lose any chance at keeping incomes in the country) prematurely automated, a shift which will most certainly discourage large numbers of young people from attending college long enough to get a good job, even if that length of time rises to eight or even ten or twelve years due to competitive pressures. Because without any college education and with political pressure to employ those with only four or six year degrees in even unskilled laborer jobs rising (as happened with returning veterans after wars) people without any college degrees, nomatter how well skilled - those without formal credentials or with only a basic credential - a four or six year degree, will likely lose out the most to artificially low wage trade-deal enabled foreign competition.
There are so very few pieces of literature that point out the many fallacies in the thinking thats being used to justify it. And virtually no writing from the US. (where these radical increasingly imminent changes are unchallenged by virtue of being not only virtually unknown to the public. Americans have also been told that their current president is against these policies, also they are unaware that the WTO can rule in this matter forcing the US to comply since we signed the GATS in 1994 and the Understanding in 1998.. and that them doing anything other than forcing us into this, is quite unlikely. )
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Colin_Hay2/publication/4764298_Keynote_Article_What_Doesn%27t_Kill_You_Can_Only_Make_You_Stronger_The_Doha_Development_Round_the_Services_Directive_and_the_EU%27s_Conception_of_Competitiveness/links/0f31753887a266c1c0000000/Keynote-Article-What-Doesnt-Kill-You-Can-Only-Make-You-Stronger-The-Doha-Development-Round-the-Services-Directive-and-the-EUs-Conception-of-Competitiveness.pdf (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Colin_Hay2/publication/4764298_Keynote_Article_What_Doesn%27t_Kill_You_Can_Only_Make_You_Stronger_The_Doha_Development_Round_the_Services_Directive_and_the_EU%27s_Conception_of_Competitiveness/links/0f31753887a266c1c0000000/Keynote-Article-What-Doesnt-Kill-You-Can-Only-Make-You-Stronger-The-Doha-Development-Round-the-Services-Directive-and-the-EUs-Conception-of-Competitiveness.pdf)
This will discourage the non-wealthy from pursuing an engineering education, in costly countries, especially at non-prestigious universities.
(a workaround for non-wealhy Americans might be attending college overseas, perhaps in Germany, where education is free, even for non-Germans, so as to avoid otherwise massive, soon to become likely unpayable debts as wages drop.)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227464560 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227464560)
The 'dangerous obsession' with cost competitiveness ...and the not so dangerous obsession with competitiveness