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The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like

The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditional engineering routes in the US. I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.

binarymax 2y ago
Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand
- jopsen 2y ago
  I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because: (A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way. If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills. Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses. Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change. Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.
  - wbl 2y ago
    There were a ton of chip making startups in the 1970-1980's. Now the processes are much harder to access so you have fabless. It's just maturity. You can't invent the op amp twice.
  - adamc 2y ago
    The same analysis makes me doubt those wages are likely to prevail for software engineers. They are the result of a particular time and place.
    - jopsen 2y ago
      > They are the result of a particular time and place. Absolutely, it can't go one forever. But it might go on longer than you think ;) To be fair, we've already seen things change: today most entry level jobs are gated by degree requirements. It's no longer enough to just be computer savvy. Probably because there increasingly a lot of computer savvy people today.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change. It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen. The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land. There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway. Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public. An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.
- Kirby64 2y ago
  The jobs needed for chip manufacturing aren’t primarily EE. It’s largely chemical engineering with specializations related to semiconductor tech. EEs use the tools developed by fabs to make their products, but those are typically separate companies (or, in the case of in-house fabs like Intel, basically run as separate companies).
in-pursuit 2y ago
What you said seems contradictory. You open with the premise that intelligent youth go the finance / CS / MBA path instead of engineering and then say that those who do go into traditional engineering can’t find jobs. Couldn’t it be that people don’t go into engineering because there aren’t any jobs? Wouldn’t the lack of jobs explain the low salaries and thus the preference for more high paying alternatives?
ecshafer 2y ago
Everyone I know that was in EE falls into two camps basically: 1. Became web developers 2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China
- bnetd 2y ago
  Is there a somber write-up anywhere as to the future of EE in the West?
  - ecshafer 2y ago
    I don't know if there is a somber write up. But from what I have heard from a lot of people, is that jobs designing and making say PCB boards and electronic circuits just don't exist. They are all in Shenzhen. Those American firms that have American engineers still, seem to all involve flying to those factories to help fix problems, and are dead end jobs. At least thats my impression.
    - brickfaced 2y ago
      Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Does that include the EEs designing PCBs and circuits for Apple products?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      So basically fits the theme of "we gave up silicon production to cheaper countries and we're shocked those countries have surpassed us"
  - bfrog 2y ago
    Limited to non existent jobs. Not much else to say, the jobs like so many others have been exported. Taiwan and China being the electronics and manufacturing centers means design has steadily moved as well. Ask any board house in the west how things are going, the ones that are left that is.
rhubarbtree 2y ago
Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.
- herval 2y ago
  why would someone pursue a route that's harder AND pays less AND has far fewer jobs available?
  - rjbwork 2y ago
    And has less cultural cachet.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - PhilipRoman 2y ago
      I disagree. From what I've seen, the lower level you go, the more advanced it is seen by other developers. As the copypasta goes: At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries. From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers. Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.
      - nemomarx 2y ago
        that's by other developers, but I think in the mainstream know nothing culture people have an image of "coding" that's more prestigious and hackery than EE?
thinkingtoilet 2y ago
It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  For nearly a century Europe incinerated itself twice over.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > That is no longer the case. For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Going through the _legal_ immigration in the US is hell. Even if you're immigrating through a "talent" visa. Never mind regular work visa/GC.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      Well, what's the alternative? Live in some poor country with a happy and contented existence? Fuck no, I want money: happiness is for suckers
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        You have the metaphor backwards. Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent? It's the brain drain out of the US to worry about, not the influx of immigration.
somethoughts 2y ago
My hot take as to the reason EE is a bit of a dead end in the US is that the options outside of the handful of primary employers are limited. It is very capital intensive to run a semiconductor fab, design chips or assemble electronics at scale. Therefore the employer has all of the leverage. The equipment and/or factory worker infrastructure comes first and the engineering teams are just a cog. Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.
Gomer1800 2y ago
I think your explanation about large numbers of motivated students pursuing lucrative Non-STEM degrees is incomplete without mentioning the cost of an undergraduate and graduate STEM education in the USA. The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering. These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.
DontchaKnowit 2y ago
Your argument doesnt really make sense : there are no EE jobs in the use, therefore no one wants to pursue EE jobs, therefire there are no EE jobs.
intull 2y ago
Really appreciate this comment and perspective! In the larger context of immigration and brain drain in other countries, how the US also has one, but of a different kind. Ultimately, it's a loss of potential. I'd somewhat disagree with the directionality of the correlative/causal relation, though. But what can be said is that the US also experiences a knowledge drain towards plainly lucrative jobs. I'd wager that it was/is a cyclical effect that just worsened over the decades and that neither engineers moving to fintech nor low-paying engineering jobs were/are the sole reason.
rockostrich 2y ago
Hit the nail on the head. I went to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany for a master's in "nanoscale engineering" which essentially boiled down to a master's in being a fab line manager. I finished the degree since it was only a 3 semester program and I was getting paid for research work, but almost immediately after chatting with alumns that went to go work at IBM/Intel/etc it was pretty clear that software engineering was a much more lucrative and less stressful career.
alsetmusic 2y ago
> I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.

binarymax 2y ago

Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand

jopsen 2y ago
I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because: (A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way. If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills. Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses. Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change. Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.
- wbl 2y ago
  There were a ton of chip making startups in the 1970-1980's. Now the processes are much harder to access so you have fabless. It's just maturity. You can't invent the op amp twice.
- adamc 2y ago
  The same analysis makes me doubt those wages are likely to prevail for software engineers. They are the result of a particular time and place.
  - jopsen 2y ago
    > They are the result of a particular time and place. Absolutely, it can't go one forever. But it might go on longer than you think ;) To be fair, we've already seen things change: today most entry level jobs are gated by degree requirements. It's no longer enough to just be computer savvy. Probably because there increasingly a lot of computer savvy people today.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change. It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen. The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land. There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway. Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public. An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.
Kirby64 2y ago
The jobs needed for chip manufacturing aren’t primarily EE. It’s largely chemical engineering with specializations related to semiconductor tech. EEs use the tools developed by fabs to make their products, but those are typically separate companies (or, in the case of in-house fabs like Intel, basically run as separate companies).

in-pursuit 2y ago

What you said seems contradictory. You open with the premise that intelligent youth go the finance / CS / MBA path instead of engineering and then say that those who do go into traditional engineering can’t find jobs. Couldn’t it be that people don’t go into engineering because there aren’t any jobs? Wouldn’t the lack of jobs explain the low salaries and thus the preference for more high paying alternatives?

ecshafer 2y ago

Everyone I know that was in EE falls into two camps basically: 1. Became web developers 2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China

bnetd 2y ago
Is there a somber write-up anywhere as to the future of EE in the West?
- ecshafer 2y ago
  I don't know if there is a somber write up. But from what I have heard from a lot of people, is that jobs designing and making say PCB boards and electronic circuits just don't exist. They are all in Shenzhen. Those American firms that have American engineers still, seem to all involve flying to those factories to help fix problems, and are dead end jobs. At least thats my impression.
  - brickfaced 2y ago
    Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Does that include the EEs designing PCBs and circuits for Apple products?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    So basically fits the theme of "we gave up silicon production to cheaper countries and we're shocked those countries have surpassed us"
- bfrog 2y ago
  Limited to non existent jobs. Not much else to say, the jobs like so many others have been exported. Taiwan and China being the electronics and manufacturing centers means design has steadily moved as well. Ask any board house in the west how things are going, the ones that are left that is.

rhubarbtree 2y ago

Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.

herval 2y ago
why would someone pursue a route that's harder AND pays less AND has far fewer jobs available?
- rjbwork 2y ago
  And has less cultural cachet.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - PhilipRoman 2y ago
    I disagree. From what I've seen, the lower level you go, the more advanced it is seen by other developers. As the copypasta goes: At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries. From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers. Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      that's by other developers, but I think in the mainstream know nothing culture people have an image of "coding" that's more prestigious and hackery than EE?

thinkingtoilet 2y ago

It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.

drivebyhooting 2y ago
For nearly a century Europe incinerated itself twice over.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> That is no longer the case. For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Going through the _legal_ immigration in the US is hell. Even if you're immigrating through a "talent" visa. Never mind regular work visa/GC.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Well, what's the alternative? Live in some poor country with a happy and contented existence? Fuck no, I want money: happiness is for suckers
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      You have the metaphor backwards. Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent? It's the brain drain out of the US to worry about, not the influx of immigration.

somethoughts 2y ago

My hot take as to the reason EE is a bit of a dead end in the US is that the options outside of the handful of primary employers are limited. It is very capital intensive to run a semiconductor fab, design chips or assemble electronics at scale. Therefore the employer has all of the leverage. The equipment and/or factory worker infrastructure comes first and the engineering teams are just a cog. Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.

Gomer1800 2y ago

I think your explanation about large numbers of motivated students pursuing lucrative Non-STEM degrees is incomplete without mentioning the cost of an undergraduate and graduate STEM education in the USA. The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering. These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.

DontchaKnowit 2y ago

Your argument doesnt really make sense : there are no EE jobs in the use, therefore no one wants to pursue EE jobs, therefire there are no EE jobs.

intull 2y ago

Really appreciate this comment and perspective! In the larger context of immigration and brain drain in other countries, how the US also has one, but of a different kind. Ultimately, it's a loss of potential. I'd somewhat disagree with the directionality of the correlative/causal relation, though. But what can be said is that the US also experiences a knowledge drain towards plainly lucrative jobs. I'd wager that it was/is a cyclical effect that just worsened over the decades and that neither engineers moving to fintech nor low-paying engineering jobs were/are the sole reason.

rockostrich 2y ago

Hit the nail on the head. I went to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany for a master's in "nanoscale engineering" which essentially boiled down to a master's in being a fab line manager. I finished the degree since it was only a 3 semester program and I was getting paid for research work, but almost immediately after chatting with alumns that went to go work at IBM/Intel/etc it was pretty clear that software engineering was a much more lucrative and less stressful career.

alsetmusic 2y ago

> I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.