12 ms·

U.S. predicts zero job growth for electrical engineers

143 points by Futurebot 11y ago

ydkditfi 11y ago
Reminder that "STEM" was just a buzzword designed to flood the skill-intensive labor markets with a generation of idealistic youngsters, all with the intention of driving down wages. There never was a labor shortage, or as it's occasionally framed, a "talent" shortage.
- reality_czech 11y ago
  Yes. We need fewer STEM graduates, and/or more money in science.
  - reality_czech 11y ago
    Care to explain why this was modded down? I think the lack of resources for new graduate students is sad, and it blights the lives of many people in science. There are too few tenure track spots, so many PhDs have to wait until their 40s to have a normal job and salary. People are not willing to question authority or publish negative results because that would slow down the all-consuming struggle to outcompete the other 50 people applying for the same fellowship / grant / position / whatever. A little competition is good, but most STEM careers are a ridiculous vow of poverty at this point. If we're not going to fund it more (and we should...) we should at least be honest to kids about what's waiting for them. The idea that there was ever a shortage of STEM graduates is really a very deceitful piece of propaganda, when the real shortage is funding.
    - seibelj 11y ago
      Perhaps the issue isn't that a STEM career is a vow of poverty. I have met many people who are quite wealthy in STEM. I have personally done very well. In America we have become good at identifying talent, and promoting it. And we reward people higher up much more than people lower down the ladder. I'm not going to say whether I think it's good or bad, but it's quite clear the the rich are getting richer, while the rest stay the same.
      - reality_czech 11y ago
        "STEM" isn't a single thing (another reason why it's a deceitful term.) The term encompasses a lot of different fields with a lot of different economic situations. For example, you might find it difficult to find a job in nuclear engineering, but easy to find a job in computer engineering. There isn't really a "shortage" of people in almost any math or science related field. Whenever you hear management talk about a personnel shortage, what they really mean is that "we have to pay people more than we think we ought to." If people want to advance science faster, the way to do it is to divert some of those truckloads of money that are going to blowing up stuff in Iraq and putting it back together, or buying fighter planes that even the air force thinks we don't need. Paying scientists and engineers less (by having more of them competing for the same pool of resources) won't advance science and may even hold it back if it makes the best people go into other fields where they can earn a decent living (like finance of medicine).
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  There is also the intention to produce, which is easy to forget when the rhetoric gets thick in protectionism-promoting circles.
- secondtimeuse 11y ago
  Wages are not being driven down by labor supply. Rather as this particular example clearly shows, they are being driven down by the underlying economics of production. Another example of this trend is Detroit. The United Auto Workers union succeeded in keeping the wages high, but the underlying economics of production destroyed the industry. The lesson in this scenario, is counter-intuitive. You can regulate, unionize and force wages to stabilize. But that can only help you in short term. On a longer timeframe, innovation and foreign labor catches up and now instead of losing few jobs to talented foreigners you end up losing the entire supply chain. The Software Industry thankfully has been able to resist this trend. The same report shows solid growth across all software related professions.
- jackcosgrove 11y ago
  STEM is misnomer. Ever met an unemployed or underemployed biologist, ultrasound tech, environmental engineer, or statistician? The real sweet spot is PI - physics and informatics. These roles are unique in that they can be explosively productive and create more jobs than were there at the start. PI, or "STEM" is more than a buzzword.
  - jimmaswell 11y ago
    I've often read in physics communities that explicitly getting a job in "physics" is pretty hard outside academia, is that wrong?
  - WesternStar 11y ago
    I'm confused if there ever was a field at the intersection of Physics and Informatics, EE has got to be it. Shannon literally invented information theory....
secondtimeuse 11y ago
To pre-empt anticipated comments Job Outlook "Growth" is change in number of people employed: From the source here are the numbers for other disciplines. Software Developer Job Outlook, 2014-24 17% (Much faster than average) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s... Computer Hardware Engineers Job Outlook, 2014-24 3% http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/computer-hardware-engineers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/computer... Database Administrators Job Outlook, 2014-24 11% (Faster than average) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/database-administrators.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/d... statisticians Job Outlook, 2014-24 34% (Much faster than average) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/statisticians.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/statisticians.htm computer-and-information-systems-managers Job Outlook, 2014-24 15% (Much faster than average http://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/computer-and-information-systems-managers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/computer-and-information-s... Yet the article conveniently uses cherry picked data for arguing against H1B. The majority of the H1B are being awarded for above categories and not for electrical engineering. The simple explanation is that it's cheaper to manufacture components in Taiwan, Korea and China. H1B is not causing electrical engineers to lose jobs, it's the fundamental economics of production that are stacked against the occupation.
- revelation 11y ago
  What's the connection between electrical engineering and cheap soldering in China? That's like saying it's cheaper to hire Chinese to type into a keyboard, so programmers are no longer in demand.
  - secondtimeuse 11y ago
    If you think hon hai precision industry co. ltd (aka foxconn) is merely doing "soldering" in China you ought to catch up with the market reality. Almost everyone I know who is employed at Apple (in California) with electrical engineering degree, goes on multi-month annual visits to Chinese plants.
heapcity 11y ago
People with Engineering / Comp. Sci. Degrees are not in short supply. Exceptional engineers and programmers are. Its almost like the difference between kids who want to play football and the people with talent to make it.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  A lot of programming jobs don't require rock star programmers.
  - emidln 11y ago
    Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. How many of those jobs wouldn't exist with access to a more talented team? As an analogy, I don't require a phone to communicate with my mother, but if I didn't have the faster method, I'd have to travel to see her.
  - adevine 11y ago
    While this is true, I have found that a developer who can do the following to be very rare: 1. Take a set of requirements, and first identify those reqs for any underspecified elements, or elements where the underlying tech would limit the functionality. 2. Implement the reqs according to the now agreed upon spec 3. Provide adequate documentation and tests for the new implementation. 4. Perhaps most importantly, and rarely, implement the reqs in a manner where the code is not brittle (some small req change doesn't require a huge overhaul) and where other developers can quickly get into and understand the code. That is, even if you don't need a rock star programmer, if your code base is going to live on for more than the life of the person originally writing it you are going to find that people who can fulfill this role are quite rare.
    - coliveira 11y ago
      All of these things could be easily overcome with better training. The way I see it, the software industry in the US invests close to nothing in training and expects to receive "talented" developers by just selecting a small proportion from a large pool of candidates. This is a lazy and irresponsible way to create a workforce. The time and effort they spend in interviewing could be very well spent on teaching best practices to new employees, so they would be much more productive, instead of just expecting that they somehow "grok" these concepts from the get go.
nashashmi 11y ago
In response to a comment claiming outsourcing was the issue, I responded with this and thought it relevant to post here: FWIW, the very cap on H-1Bs plus the decreasing attraction of coming to the US is the very reason ALL companies are going overseas. I once did a research on outsourcing and the pivotal reason I found for outsourcing was not the "cheapness" of the foreign markets, but the decreasing flexibility and opportunity to continue development at home, and this decrease was dominated mainly by inability to find people to do the work. It may seem hard to believe but it isn't once you add up all the pieces. While factory workers may seem abundant and easy to find, finding upper-level factory operators across various disciplines from IT to Management to Operations was very difficult. Conversely, the two places where they were the easiest to find was China and India in that order. After all, who wants to work in a factory when they grow up anyways? So what do companies do? They go above and beyond plus bend backwards to make overseas operations feasible. This problem is not just limited to factory workers, or electrical engineering, but any industry that has a hard time finding good quality workers. My industry of civil engineering is probably going to go next. I could write an entire paper on this, but I will stop here.
- pm90 11y ago
  This is a great observation. I wonder when cooler heads will prevail and reform the worker visa program into one which is more flexible (and sane) than the one that exists currently. I understand that there are a lot of difficulties but the present situation just cannot continue unless more jobs are outsourced completely. With the difficulty in obtaining worker visas, US corporations might have to resort to outsourcing wholesale.
- coliveira 11y ago
  You are buying a completely flawed argument. The reason there are fewer and fewer American factory workers is that nobody is going to pay for a degree for which there are no jobs. If you are in the US and you have to decide on a degree, would you go to do factory-related work, knowing that companies are moving oversees as soon as they can? The only way to get workers for a particular field is to have investments in that field, especially in a country where citizens have free initiative. If the industry and the government continue to subsidize companies that open factories outside the US, it is not a big surprise that they will have trouble finding workers for this kind positions. This is the logical consequence, not the cause for this big shift. The cause is that big business want to take advantage of cheap labor and no regulation at third world countries, while at the same time slashing the taxes they need to pay in the US.
draw_down 11y ago
There is no STEM shortage.
ashwinaj 11y ago
There are two kinds of H1B petitions: 1. Genuine candidates: I'm going to quote the extreme, people like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla etc. came to the US on H1B and there are a lot of other "superstars" on H1B or naturalized citizens. More practically, there are thousands of other talented people from all countries who work on H1B. So the argument that H1B should be done away with is absurd, unless the US doesn't care about staying atop of the technology sector. Also, H1B workers get paid the same as local workers; there is a minimum wage requirement that has to be satisfied by the company applying for the H1B. So if you buy the allegation that wages are being depressed by H1B workers, why don't you take a peek at the bulletin board of your break room (which have H1B applications with salaries posted) or online and lodge a complaint with the state department of labor rather than posting bigoted comments? 2. Candidates hired by "staffing" companies: Blanket applications made by these "staffing" companies which may or may not have actual jobs. These are the applications that need to be stopped/scrutinized by USCIS (they have tightened this during the recession 2008-2010). It's arguable there is a genuine requirement for staffing companies, but these need to be scrutinized thoroughly.
- vadym909 11y ago
  comparison of the salaries and numbers of h1b visas of the 'genuine' vs 'staffing'. Last year the top 2 staffing cos - Infosys and TCS got 40,000 visas (2/3rds of the quota) at an average salary between $60-80K. The top 2 R&D cos- Microsoft and Google got 9,000 visas (14% of quota) at an average salary of $125K. Pretty easy to tell what is genuine. http://www.oncontracting.com/article/how-the-us-can-reduce-h1b-visa-abuse.html http://www.oncontracting.com/article/how-the-us-can-reduce-h...
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  There is a separate "superstar" visa. The O-1 visa is available to "individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics". The claimed point of H1B is to benefit Americans and the American economy by filling positions which have a temporary shortage, in a way that does not drive down wages. Of course that's not even close to how it works in practice.
chejazi 11y ago
First thought: does this account for the emerging DIY electrical engineering community, e.g. the raspberry pi "gadgeteers" on kickstarter?
kelukelugames 11y ago
Link to the report. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm#tab-1 http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electric...
1971genocide 11y ago
I find it funny that we leave it to the economist to decide the fate of research. I remember in uni I found EE topics much harder and boring then Software topics. Anything below C is a big nope. Verilog, VLSI, FPGA, anything to do with embedded IoT. Yeah america wont survive if kids today stop valuing EE topic just due to some misguided economical models/interpretation. The rockets that will land on mars wont be designed solely by software guys - it will require a lot of EE innovations - if america gives up then some other country will take its place. Reminds of the movie Interstellar.
madengr 11y ago
I have been an EE for 20 years. I think one of the things driving it is the increase in productivity. I can do a lot more with my RF/Microwave design software than 20 years ago, so I am now probably doing the work of two people. There is also consolidation with complexity. How many 5G chipsets do you need when 95% of the phone market is held by two manufacturers? Hardware is expensive to develop and takes time. Investors/companies want cheap and fast, and are unwilling to fund R&D.
seanxh 11y ago
I optimistic about such issue. I will say software is good occupation while everything is blooming, but you can be more secure during the down time if you are an EE. Furthermore, you can train yourself to be a good software developer if you next to a computer and have internet access(of course you need dedication), but you cannot be a good EE without knowing how to operate a very expensive equipment(i.e PNA, MOCVD, etc). Disclaimer: I am a software developer with a background in EE
- madengr 11y ago
  Sheesh, I have a PNA in my basement lab. My wife can run all sorts of PVD/CVD vacuum processes, dicing, grinding, bonding, etc. We seem both stuck in dead end EE jobs.
  - seanxh 11y ago
    I understand your feeling. But speaking about dead end, that is exactly what a concentration means while you pick a major in college, otherwise you can pick liber art. If you change the perspective and think like a you are a software developer without any other skill, you are in dead end too. I think the main problem is laid on whether you like to learn more about other skill sets and take risk to create something new from what you learned
tn13 11y ago
IT/CS industry is the major consumer of H1B visas. IT/CS is also the industry that relies mostly on outsourcing. Guess how healthy this industry is, guess which computer major pays the most salary in USA today and so on and also the consumers are happiest with the laptops, iphones, apps and Uber. Now compare it with the heavily regulated industry of Healthcare. No one likes paying hospital bills in USA, almost everyone works on wafer thin margins and a constant fear of law-suites. Only the doctors and that too only few of them manage to earn a fortune but everyone else is worse off. Far more importantly USA has very inefficient and expensive healthcare system.
andyl 11y ago
First they came for the Auto workers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an Auto worker, and I felt they were overpaid and sort of lazy. Then they came for the Electronics manufacturing, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a line worker, and the line workers need to work in high-value fields. Then they came for the Electrical Engineers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a EE, and it seems sort of racist to take jobs from Chinese. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
MisterBastahrd 11y ago
H1Bs should have to be paid at least 20% more than the local market average for qualified workers. If people with their qualifications are truly THAT scarce, then businesses should have to pony up more than the going rate given their specializations.
Quanticles 11y ago
I wonder if this is a side-effect of the current silicon-valley investment scene. There are lots of low-capital startup opportunities, so who wants to fund the high-capital startups in computer hardware? There have been very few computer hardware startups the past few years, and that might have an effect on overall innovation and growth.
super2 11y ago
First they came for the Auto workers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an Auto worker, and I felt they were overpaid and sort of lazy. Then they came for the Electronics manufacturing, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a line worker, and the line workers need to be in high-value fields. Then they came for the Electrical Engineers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a EE, and it seems sort of racist to take jobs from Chinese. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Nutmog 11y ago
  They came for you and stripped you of your privileged position in society that was granted to you by the lottery of birth and maintained by your fellow members of the privileged class? They instead imposed a meritocracy that gave equal opportunities to people from many diverse backgrounds alongside your own? It sounds like a net win from an outsider's perspective.
  - super2 11y ago
    Self-hating cultural marxists celebrate when good-paying jobs are destroyed and sent overseas.
TYPE_FASTER 11y ago
A couple thoughts...robotics needs EEs. Growth in robotics will mean an increased demand in the field. Also, if you start in EE and study signal processing, you end up in a good position to get into data science and Big Data.

143 points by Futurebot 11y ago

Reminder that "STEM" was just a buzzword designed to flood the skill-intensive labor markets with a generation of idealistic youngsters, all with the intention of driving down wages. There never was a labor shortage, or as it's occasionally framed, a "talent" shortage.

reality_czech 11y ago
Yes. We need fewer STEM graduates, and/or more money in science.
- reality_czech 11y ago
  Care to explain why this was modded down? I think the lack of resources for new graduate students is sad, and it blights the lives of many people in science. There are too few tenure track spots, so many PhDs have to wait until their 40s to have a normal job and salary. People are not willing to question authority or publish negative results because that would slow down the all-consuming struggle to outcompete the other 50 people applying for the same fellowship / grant / position / whatever. A little competition is good, but most STEM careers are a ridiculous vow of poverty at this point. If we're not going to fund it more (and we should...) we should at least be honest to kids about what's waiting for them. The idea that there was ever a shortage of STEM graduates is really a very deceitful piece of propaganda, when the real shortage is funding.
  - seibelj 11y ago
    Perhaps the issue isn't that a STEM career is a vow of poverty. I have met many people who are quite wealthy in STEM. I have personally done very well. In America we have become good at identifying talent, and promoting it. And we reward people higher up much more than people lower down the ladder. I'm not going to say whether I think it's good or bad, but it's quite clear the the rich are getting richer, while the rest stay the same.
    - reality_czech 11y ago
      "STEM" isn't a single thing (another reason why it's a deceitful term.) The term encompasses a lot of different fields with a lot of different economic situations. For example, you might find it difficult to find a job in nuclear engineering, but easy to find a job in computer engineering. There isn't really a "shortage" of people in almost any math or science related field. Whenever you hear management talk about a personnel shortage, what they really mean is that "we have to pay people more than we think we ought to." If people want to advance science faster, the way to do it is to divert some of those truckloads of money that are going to blowing up stuff in Iraq and putting it back together, or buying fighter planes that even the air force thinks we don't need. Paying scientists and engineers less (by having more of them competing for the same pool of resources) won't advance science and may even hold it back if it makes the best people go into other fields where they can earn a decent living (like finance of medicine).
oldmanjay 11y ago
There is also the intention to produce, which is easy to forget when the rhetoric gets thick in protectionism-promoting circles.
secondtimeuse 11y ago
Wages are not being driven down by labor supply. Rather as this particular example clearly shows, they are being driven down by the underlying economics of production. Another example of this trend is Detroit. The United Auto Workers union succeeded in keeping the wages high, but the underlying economics of production destroyed the industry. The lesson in this scenario, is counter-intuitive. You can regulate, unionize and force wages to stabilize. But that can only help you in short term. On a longer timeframe, innovation and foreign labor catches up and now instead of losing few jobs to talented foreigners you end up losing the entire supply chain. The Software Industry thankfully has been able to resist this trend. The same report shows solid growth across all software related professions.
jackcosgrove 11y ago
STEM is misnomer. Ever met an unemployed or underemployed biologist, ultrasound tech, environmental engineer, or statistician? The real sweet spot is PI - physics and informatics. These roles are unique in that they can be explosively productive and create more jobs than were there at the start. PI, or "STEM" is more than a buzzword.
- jimmaswell 11y ago
  I've often read in physics communities that explicitly getting a job in "physics" is pretty hard outside academia, is that wrong?
- WesternStar 11y ago
  I'm confused if there ever was a field at the intersection of Physics and Informatics, EE has got to be it. Shannon literally invented information theory....

secondtimeuse 11y ago

To pre-empt anticipated comments Job Outlook "Growth" is change in number of people employed: From the source here are the numbers for other disciplines. Software Developer Job Outlook, 2014-24 17% (Much faster than average) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s... Computer Hardware Engineers Job Outlook, 2014-24 3% http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/computer-hardware-engineers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/computer... Database Administrators Job Outlook, 2014-24 11% (Faster than average) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/database-administrators.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/d... statisticians Job Outlook, 2014-24 34% (Much faster than average) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/statisticians.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/statisticians.htm computer-and-information-systems-managers Job Outlook, 2014-24 15% (Much faster than average http://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/computer-and-information-systems-managers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/computer-and-information-s... Yet the article conveniently uses cherry picked data for arguing against H1B. The majority of the H1B are being awarded for above categories and not for electrical engineering. The simple explanation is that it's cheaper to manufacture components in Taiwan, Korea and China. H1B is not causing electrical engineers to lose jobs, it's the fundamental economics of production that are stacked against the occupation.

revelation 11y ago
What's the connection between electrical engineering and cheap soldering in China? That's like saying it's cheaper to hire Chinese to type into a keyboard, so programmers are no longer in demand.
- secondtimeuse 11y ago
  If you think hon hai precision industry co. ltd (aka foxconn) is merely doing "soldering" in China you ought to catch up with the market reality. Almost everyone I know who is employed at Apple (in California) with electrical engineering degree, goes on multi-month annual visits to Chinese plants.

heapcity 11y ago

People with Engineering / Comp. Sci. Degrees are not in short supply. Exceptional engineers and programmers are. Its almost like the difference between kids who want to play football and the people with talent to make it.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
A lot of programming jobs don't require rock star programmers.
- emidln 11y ago
  Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. How many of those jobs wouldn't exist with access to a more talented team? As an analogy, I don't require a phone to communicate with my mother, but if I didn't have the faster method, I'd have to travel to see her.
- adevine 11y ago
  While this is true, I have found that a developer who can do the following to be very rare: 1. Take a set of requirements, and first identify those reqs for any underspecified elements, or elements where the underlying tech would limit the functionality. 2. Implement the reqs according to the now agreed upon spec 3. Provide adequate documentation and tests for the new implementation. 4. Perhaps most importantly, and rarely, implement the reqs in a manner where the code is not brittle (some small req change doesn't require a huge overhaul) and where other developers can quickly get into and understand the code. That is, even if you don't need a rock star programmer, if your code base is going to live on for more than the life of the person originally writing it you are going to find that people who can fulfill this role are quite rare.
  - coliveira 11y ago
    All of these things could be easily overcome with better training. The way I see it, the software industry in the US invests close to nothing in training and expects to receive "talented" developers by just selecting a small proportion from a large pool of candidates. This is a lazy and irresponsible way to create a workforce. The time and effort they spend in interviewing could be very well spent on teaching best practices to new employees, so they would be much more productive, instead of just expecting that they somehow "grok" these concepts from the get go.

nashashmi 11y ago

In response to a comment claiming outsourcing was the issue, I responded with this and thought it relevant to post here: FWIW, the very cap on H-1Bs plus the decreasing attraction of coming to the US is the very reason ALL companies are going overseas. I once did a research on outsourcing and the pivotal reason I found for outsourcing was not the "cheapness" of the foreign markets, but the decreasing flexibility and opportunity to continue development at home, and this decrease was dominated mainly by inability to find people to do the work. It may seem hard to believe but it isn't once you add up all the pieces. While factory workers may seem abundant and easy to find, finding upper-level factory operators across various disciplines from IT to Management to Operations was very difficult. Conversely, the two places where they were the easiest to find was China and India in that order. After all, who wants to work in a factory when they grow up anyways? So what do companies do? They go above and beyond plus bend backwards to make overseas operations feasible. This problem is not just limited to factory workers, or electrical engineering, but any industry that has a hard time finding good quality workers. My industry of civil engineering is probably going to go next. I could write an entire paper on this, but I will stop here.

pm90 11y ago
This is a great observation. I wonder when cooler heads will prevail and reform the worker visa program into one which is more flexible (and sane) than the one that exists currently. I understand that there are a lot of difficulties but the present situation just cannot continue unless more jobs are outsourced completely. With the difficulty in obtaining worker visas, US corporations might have to resort to outsourcing wholesale.
coliveira 11y ago
You are buying a completely flawed argument. The reason there are fewer and fewer American factory workers is that nobody is going to pay for a degree for which there are no jobs. If you are in the US and you have to decide on a degree, would you go to do factory-related work, knowing that companies are moving oversees as soon as they can? The only way to get workers for a particular field is to have investments in that field, especially in a country where citizens have free initiative. If the industry and the government continue to subsidize companies that open factories outside the US, it is not a big surprise that they will have trouble finding workers for this kind positions. This is the logical consequence, not the cause for this big shift. The cause is that big business want to take advantage of cheap labor and no regulation at third world countries, while at the same time slashing the taxes they need to pay in the US.

draw_down 11y ago

There is no STEM shortage.

ashwinaj 11y ago

There are two kinds of H1B petitions: 1. Genuine candidates: I'm going to quote the extreme, people like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla etc. came to the US on H1B and there are a lot of other "superstars" on H1B or naturalized citizens. More practically, there are thousands of other talented people from all countries who work on H1B. So the argument that H1B should be done away with is absurd, unless the US doesn't care about staying atop of the technology sector. Also, H1B workers get paid the same as local workers; there is a minimum wage requirement that has to be satisfied by the company applying for the H1B. So if you buy the allegation that wages are being depressed by H1B workers, why don't you take a peek at the bulletin board of your break room (which have H1B applications with salaries posted) or online and lodge a complaint with the state department of labor rather than posting bigoted comments? 2. Candidates hired by "staffing" companies: Blanket applications made by these "staffing" companies which may or may not have actual jobs. These are the applications that need to be stopped/scrutinized by USCIS (they have tightened this during the recession 2008-2010). It's arguable there is a genuine requirement for staffing companies, but these need to be scrutinized thoroughly.

vadym909 11y ago
comparison of the salaries and numbers of h1b visas of the 'genuine' vs 'staffing'. Last year the top 2 staffing cos - Infosys and TCS got 40,000 visas (2/3rds of the quota) at an average salary between $60-80K. The top 2 R&D cos- Microsoft and Google got 9,000 visas (14% of quota) at an average salary of $125K. Pretty easy to tell what is genuine. http://www.oncontracting.com/article/how-the-us-can-reduce-h1b-visa-abuse.html http://www.oncontracting.com/article/how-the-us-can-reduce-h...
fiatmoney 11y ago
There is a separate "superstar" visa. The O-1 visa is available to "individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics". The claimed point of H1B is to benefit Americans and the American economy by filling positions which have a temporary shortage, in a way that does not drive down wages. Of course that's not even close to how it works in practice.

chejazi 11y ago

First thought: does this account for the emerging DIY electrical engineering community, e.g. the raspberry pi "gadgeteers" on kickstarter?

kelukelugames 11y ago

Link to the report. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm#tab-1 http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electric...

1971genocide 11y ago

I find it funny that we leave it to the economist to decide the fate of research. I remember in uni I found EE topics much harder and boring then Software topics. Anything below C is a big nope. Verilog, VLSI, FPGA, anything to do with embedded IoT. Yeah america wont survive if kids today stop valuing EE topic just due to some misguided economical models/interpretation. The rockets that will land on mars wont be designed solely by software guys - it will require a lot of EE innovations - if america gives up then some other country will take its place. Reminds of the movie Interstellar.

madengr 11y ago

I have been an EE for 20 years. I think one of the things driving it is the increase in productivity. I can do a lot more with my RF/Microwave design software than 20 years ago, so I am now probably doing the work of two people. There is also consolidation with complexity. How many 5G chipsets do you need when 95% of the phone market is held by two manufacturers? Hardware is expensive to develop and takes time. Investors/companies want cheap and fast, and are unwilling to fund R&D.

seanxh 11y ago

I optimistic about such issue. I will say software is good occupation while everything is blooming, but you can be more secure during the down time if you are an EE. Furthermore, you can train yourself to be a good software developer if you next to a computer and have internet access(of course you need dedication), but you cannot be a good EE without knowing how to operate a very expensive equipment(i.e PNA, MOCVD, etc). Disclaimer: I am a software developer with a background in EE

madengr 11y ago
Sheesh, I have a PNA in my basement lab. My wife can run all sorts of PVD/CVD vacuum processes, dicing, grinding, bonding, etc. We seem both stuck in dead end EE jobs.
- seanxh 11y ago
  I understand your feeling. But speaking about dead end, that is exactly what a concentration means while you pick a major in college, otherwise you can pick liber art. If you change the perspective and think like a you are a software developer without any other skill, you are in dead end too. I think the main problem is laid on whether you like to learn more about other skill sets and take risk to create something new from what you learned

tn13 11y ago

IT/CS industry is the major consumer of H1B visas. IT/CS is also the industry that relies mostly on outsourcing. Guess how healthy this industry is, guess which computer major pays the most salary in USA today and so on and also the consumers are happiest with the laptops, iphones, apps and Uber. Now compare it with the heavily regulated industry of Healthcare. No one likes paying hospital bills in USA, almost everyone works on wafer thin margins and a constant fear of law-suites. Only the doctors and that too only few of them manage to earn a fortune but everyone else is worse off. Far more importantly USA has very inefficient and expensive healthcare system.

andyl 11y ago

First they came for the Auto workers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an Auto worker, and I felt they were overpaid and sort of lazy. Then they came for the Electronics manufacturing, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a line worker, and the line workers need to work in high-value fields. Then they came for the Electrical Engineers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a EE, and it seems sort of racist to take jobs from Chinese. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

MisterBastahrd 11y ago

H1Bs should have to be paid at least 20% more than the local market average for qualified workers. If people with their qualifications are truly THAT scarce, then businesses should have to pony up more than the going rate given their specializations.

Quanticles 11y ago

I wonder if this is a side-effect of the current silicon-valley investment scene. There are lots of low-capital startup opportunities, so who wants to fund the high-capital startups in computer hardware? There have been very few computer hardware startups the past few years, and that might have an effect on overall innovation and growth.

super2 11y ago

First they came for the Auto workers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an Auto worker, and I felt they were overpaid and sort of lazy. Then they came for the Electronics manufacturing, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a line worker, and the line workers need to be in high-value fields. Then they came for the Electrical Engineers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a EE, and it seems sort of racist to take jobs from Chinese. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Nutmog 11y ago
They came for you and stripped you of your privileged position in society that was granted to you by the lottery of birth and maintained by your fellow members of the privileged class? They instead imposed a meritocracy that gave equal opportunities to people from many diverse backgrounds alongside your own? It sounds like a net win from an outsider's perspective.
- super2 11y ago
  Self-hating cultural marxists celebrate when good-paying jobs are destroyed and sent overseas.

TYPE_FASTER 11y ago

A couple thoughts...robotics needs EEs. Growth in robotics will mean an increased demand in the field. Also, if you start in EE and study signal processing, you end up in a good position to get into data science and Big Data.