Bad news for US Engineers

I guess from all tis good discussion, one can deduce;
. exporting of jobs will continue and there is nothing engineers can do about it.
. If you are an engineer in a developed country and you know your job, then don't count on having a job past 25 years from now.
. If you are an engineering student in a developing country, chances are you are going to be working for a developed country once you graduate.
. If you are an engineering student in a developed country, then you better choose a different field.

To Guestsy:

Talking about the long run, I think in the long run the people who lacked knowledge and culturally different, can gain knowledge and be culturally compatible (if they already are not, and if it is a big barrier to a project's success ).... Come on, how difficult is it gain `specific knowledge` if you know the generic things ? I am sure they are objective people.

Hope new year brings wipes out this insecurity and brings good for all.

We're all doomed!

To add to this longterm view - eventually when conditions get equalized [and they will] - the US Engineering workforce will gain - bad news for the Immigrants who try to get US jobs...

Equalized conditions means equalized competence and tech spread among all developed and developing countries . This means less business for US companies also due to wordlwide strong competition . That also means less engineering job market available in US .
The question is , will really Immigrants go to US for engineering jobs , if they will be able to find the same job under same conditions at home ?

Artem,
That was a very good point: "The question is , will really Immigrants go to US for engineering jobs , if they will be able to find the same job under same conditions at home ?"
I can say by myself and some other engineers living in US and Canada that the survival period in our original countries is over. We are all returning to start in a much better job than we have now in North America with an additional advantage to be in home.
I think this will be the tendency in a near future for the foreign qualified workers living in North America.

NandoPG

A similar transient condition occurred 33 years ago in the US. There was an oversupply of new graduates and the number of engineering jobs dropped suddenly as the US space program cut back. It took 5-10 years for the supply and demand to equalize. After it equalized, the salaries were much higher than before.

Back in 1930 something similar happened but for other reasons. I know of a person who had trained in engineering getting a job in the Church because he thought that all engineering in the future would decline. He later moved to California and became a land surveyor with great success as the state's population rapidly rose and they bought property for houses.

I wonder as many of US guy here have not taken into the account the enormous potential of US market. I like to think US as the "big sleeping".

I can pick a sort of pessimism about future (and bit of basic xenophobia which is directly related). Is a fact that technical knowledges have seen US as hegemonist for most of half century; is not a case we must talk everybody in english! :wink:

However, most of responsability about this situation lies on European countries and their poor investements in Research. We must recognize that US has given a great value and greatest opportunities to our best scientists or engineers who are choosen to go there to continue their jobs of which we too have beneficted.

Said that, I think the main problem we must face is simply related to the above bad policy. We are in a situation where all the opportunities, as well as welfare, riches and why not opulence are concentrated on 1/3 of globe population.
It means that we can see (and we will), sooner or later, one of the biggest mass immigration never seen before and not laws, not any immigration departments will suffice to stop it: it could be the end for our fragile economies. If you cannot prevent yourself to be pessimist, well, think it about.

We do need equalization ! For us and equalization of conditions and knowledges for those countries.
Could we continue to send money in order to equalize ? I don't think so.

Most of the funds we send are emploied to purchase weapons (so, most of the money can go back again). Sorry for frankness, but this makes the richness of some companies!

We must send technology.
We have to export knowledges.
We must make these countries, those you call developping countries, in the same conditions such they can promote, advance their economies in their own countries using our technology. Perhaps we will make less riches the ours, but only initially, because we will create further opening exciting market opportunities for us.

What above is not populism or excess of generousity, not at all: it's pretty opportunist and real matter!

This is (absurdly) the true essence of Globalism. Provided that it's the system where many of us are living (never split in plate one is eating), we all agree we must save capitalism. But capitalism makes sense if companies have a capital (and earn margins) and capital exists if commercial exchanges are free and prosperous. In a few words: a free and not saturated market. Otherwise you right to be pessimist.

Just personal views not directly related to nobody.

papertiger said:

Why do you earn more than most people in your country?
Because you have better experince/knowadge/education/chance than a fast-food chain's waiter.
If you do not have the edge ,you will not be paid more than the average (42K/year in US) .
Since the India/China engineers are catching up ,
the edge between you and them is getting away, outsourcing is reasonable
Global market is also meaning global competetion .

Click to expand...

Oh not only Indian or Chinese but also Korean and Arab and Iraniyan and also French, all caught up and catch up and will catch up American peoples.

Hi all, when I am thinking of the numnber of future jobs in electrical engineering I get pessimistic...

The days when a company needed armies of engineers are gone !
Why ?
Look at those tools we got know and which will be further refined in the future :
In the field of RF/microwave:
Tools like Genesys 2003, where the program almost suggests what kind of subcurcuit to use, and you just have to call the optimizer, to find the optimum match. Accurate today upto 40 GhZ they say.
A couple of good engineers can design
whatever you want, radar, radio link, .. Just search the templates and call the optimizer.

In the field of digital design:
Buy an IP-block, and merge it to your design.
Sorry friend there's no space for you to implement your processor !
Ahh, but what about verification ? Sorry there also, read some paper of Carl Seger, principal engineer of verification at Intel, something on "CTL".computational tree logic. Do also a google on "Prover", and on the guy who have the patent: "Stålhandske" or something.
The day will come, yes its almost here, were you write your high-level description of your project in C++, and you call the "behavioural compiler"
that will generate both software and hardware implementation.
Generation of software is not done yet, because of the mathematical tools doesn't exist, yet. But I am really not updated on that field....
F------ curse :-( !!

Software programming:
How the hell can our brothers and sisters in the software programming field get any jobs, when so many programs are free. I think of Linux in general and other "free" software in particular.
There is so much out there for free, that you don't need armies of programmers. A single programmer is expected to be able to do a lot I think. "Just read and modify a similar application that you'll find on the internet" I guess. If you havn't been programming since you were 14 years old, or havn't programmed a bigger game or similar that is availible on the net for download in Linux, BeOs and Win32 version, don't even consider a programming career.
Charles Darwin rules !!!
(F------ shit!)

The other thing that bothers me is that we cannot compete about the jobs as soon as the companies move to South east asia, because of the language barrier.

The solution is to throw the all country borders in the the trash can as well as the many languages of the world, and stick to one language that is spoken by most of the people: english.

But how the hell so we solve that !

I will tell my son to become an electrician, not an engineer.

/StoppTidigare

Life is like the golfball in a golf tournament a series hard blows until you're lying in the bottom of a hole.
(F------ shit !)

What a nice piece of scientific fiction above!! Maybe in 2100 we will be there.

NandoPG

'StoppTidigare'
Your vision is too simplistic.
Good engineering, and good engineers are measured by a pure design & system architecture work - and not by the degree these automatic EDA tools are used.

As systems grow in both size and complexity, there's no doubt that these EDA tools become essential, but still there's no doubt in my mind that demand for skilled System, Architecture, & Sub-Modules engineers will grow.

Remember that no automatic EDA tool [no matter how great its sofistication is] will ever replace human brains & skills.

I mostly agree with 'james' and also with bigger part of truth not mentioned there .
Of course, truth is something relative .

I have seen how the skills of newly-fledged engineers have declined year
after year - at least in Sweden, where I live. They have learned to
copy-paste designs and have little understanding of how things really work.
When the first prototype arrives and they power it up in the lab it is
stone dead they are completely lost. That's when I move in, with my magic
oscilloscope probe and a deeper understanding of electronics...
However, being an engineer in Sweden today is beeing unemployed -
and I am both.

I have a feeling though, that young guys from e.g. Eastern Europe have
better possibilities for the future as they seem to be both skilled and hungry -
which elektroda is an excellent example of. I don't know how things are
in Asia, but it could be similar in China.
My recommendation would be to be broad in the electronics field.
For instance, becoming an ASIC designer today is probably not as hot as
it was 15 years ago...

/Ram

Hi again ! Help me with this one then nandopg.
Which part is science fiction ?
The part that lesser engineers can do more than ever ?

Is it not true that the future (soon, and in some cases already) RF/microwave tools tend to be more and more of the wizard-type. (Specify your frequency, number of stages, bang ! Filter ready and synthesiszed. Done in lesser than 20 seconds with Genesys 2003. )

Do you mean that it is not possible to design an arbitrary rf/microwave subcircuit from a library of templates and a good optimizer tool ?
If its not possible, why have the gurus at Eagleware included these features in Genesys ?

In the field of behavioural descriptions of digital systems. Don't you know that these tools exists that compile to RTL-level ? This is old stuff know.
Do a google on "silicon compilers" ?

About verification: I attended a presentation of formal hardware verification, 1999. The speaker was this guy that I mentioned Carl Seger from Intel. He said that today (1999) you need a Ph.D to be run/interact
with the formal verification programs. A couple of months ago I read about
"Prover"and Stålhandske. I've run that prover ones in a lab. He's company got a contract with one of those big dragons now: was it mentor graphics ? I don't remember.

And by the way how many people do you think have been involved developing that monster ? A couple of gifted people.

I don't know much about formal verification of software. But I know this : as soon as you have the mathematics to formally verify something, you have everything you need to write a generator. Compare with compilation theory and compilation generators.

I am not finished yet with my pessimism. I need to let it out. I hope that you can prove to me that I got it all wrong. I'll be happy!!

Take for example a company that makes TV-sets. When it all started I suppose that they needed lots of engineers to carry through all the challanges to design something from scratch brings with it.
When the same company have to design their seventh or eight generation of TV-sets. Do you think that they need as many people that they needed for the first generations ? My point is that companies that have developing a systems for say at least 15-20 years, they have a lot "reference material". They don't need to invent the weel again. They use something old, and modify it !! (Loosly speaking)
Developments in documentation technology will transfer experience from older engineers to newer engineers with more ease than before.
It will be such that the knowledge of the old ones in a company still lives though they've retired long ago.
How ? With video,interactive documentation of projects.

Hell, I got to run now ! Work is calling. But not in the field of electronics design neither programming :-(

/StoppTidigare

Oh not only Indian or Chinese but also Korean and Arab and Iraniyan and also French, all caught up and catch up and will catch up American peoples.

Click to expand...

I am not so optimistic about that. As prediction for next 25 years, economic grow in Asia will slow down. (I wish the best to people of these great countries, but severe reality is against them, btw Europe's grow will also slow down). Engineering job will move to these countries, mostly service and weapon production will remain in USA. You see this tendency (in Roli's root message) and it will be increasing. Better to think what to do in this situation.

'klug' wrote: "...what to do in this situation ..."
This depends on what will happen in the near/far end future.

Let me do a guesstimate:
1. There will be certainly a decrease in demand for ASIC/VLSI/Digital & Software Programmers.
2. There will be a steady demand for Analog/RF & Embeded SW engineers.
3. There will be an increased demand for EE System Architects
4. There will be an increase in Genome[e.g. DNA], BioTechnology, and NanoTechnology support EEs.

Regardless, we are facing an EE level of employment equal to that of 10 to 15 years ago. That is regardless of Country....

roli,

I think you've nicely summarized the near-term demand trends for EEs. I think another area that may see pretty large growth is robotics. I've seen many news releases in the last several months in this area and it seems that a lot of breakthroughs are being made in their mobility.

Another area that I think will pick up again is telecom. The field has been decimated in the last couple of years when the bubble burst but I think that companies panicked and let too many people go. There is still a lot of growth left in this sector and once things start to pick up again, there should be a good amount of hiring/re-hiring.

I guarantee you there's probably going to be another area that's going to have substantial growth in the near term but we just don't see it yet. Anyone one care to guess what the next unforseen hot growth area is going to be?

It would be nice if there was an increased push to do space exploration. That's a field that has some challenging work and can be pretty exciting as well as truly useful for future generations.

Hope this post isn't too far off topic!

Cheers,
Radix

Dear StoppTidigare,

In a general sense the needs and challenges for new circuits and system arrangements come first than the deliver of analysis and design tools. So, the human being creativity is the actual driver for new efforts in the automation field. If the human creativity activity stops for sure you will not see new programs and tools coming up. That would be more or less like the end of the History: “we have automatic solution for all kind of problems so that anyone can put blocks together.” What a mistake!!

I have about 35years working in the RF/Microwave field and when I think that all the problems are equated I face problems like:

1- To design an 8Watts 40MBPS QPSK 4.3GHz digital transmitter taking only 1.5Amps and using one single +18 Volts power supply in a volume of 6 cubic inch. Where are the templates and the behavioral compilers to help me in this situation?

2- To design a 10Watts diplexer to combine two different frequencies in 2 cubic inch footprint. Where are the ready to use blocks for this?

3- To design a simple and stupid regulator that takes 24Volts input voltage and deliver a 5 volts/2A regulated voltage with 70% efficiency in a board 1x1.5inch. My God, where are the ready to use approach for a so simple DC regulator?

You see my friend, 35 years acting in exactly the same professional field and still facing exotic problems like those. Extending, I imagine what is to come in terms of new demands 10 years from now.

It is a mistake to think that in a while engineers will no longer be necessary.

All the tools available today are outstanding to help us to solve problems, but the human capacity to create new problems is infinity and you, me and all other engineers and technicians will be there searching solutions for the new problems and feeding the softhouses with new demands to be automated. Doesn’t matter if we will be here or there, but our work will always be fundamental.

NandoPG

I don't think there is any bad news for US engineers. This is a transition time. I hv seen many US engineers working on contract basis in China. They just visit once in two months in China. they charge US$5000/- per month to this companies. If Indian/chinese finding oursourcing jobs then US engineers can give consultancy services of their expertise to china & India. It is question grabbing the opportunity. For most of US people US menas the whole world. Germany & Japan r looking for many software engineers. So if they try then many can get jobs there.
MP