

Declining Electrical engineering employment - shubhamjain
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240709/Electrical_engineering_employment_trending_down

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AlexPandian
EE grads occupy an interesting identity crisis. While on one hand they want to
pass off as ECE (computer-engineering) candidates with decent programming
skills, they also want to identify with being an "applied math" or "Alogirthm"
engineer.

Unfortunately in today's world nimbleness in learning new s/w skills is valued
more than having specific expertise is "speech coding" or "image
segmentation", etc. Further more, it is easier to be a generalist as a pure CS
person, than being a hard-core EE person. Bottom line the "tool" has become
more important than the "solution".

Inevitably, being a specialist means the labor force is fragmented, and purely
from a relative comparison to the CS "supply-demand" situation, its a
relatively "low-supply [specialized] - low-demand" situation.

It not that you are undervalued or underemployed as the article might suggest
(btw I wouldn't read too much into the first quarter results on unemployment
figures/ considerations on how many to include in labor force, etc.), but its
more like being a "lightly traded stock, with not much liquidity, high big-ask
spreads".

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SpikedCola
"The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect
match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally."

Exactly this. I ran into the exact same problem when I graduated from EE,
where employers wanted 20 years experience, familiarity with every piece of
software out there, and to pay just minimum wage. When I did finally land a
job, I sat around for weeks reading every manual and piece of documentation I
could find - it was the only way I could do my job. I never did receive any
training, and quit after 4 months.

I ended up picking up work as a Web Developer, and here we are. Even though
people are people, I've found myself much happer in the "developer"
atmosphere. As much as I would like to get back into EE, the bureaucracy of
most of the "good" companies will keep me away.

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krama
The article is all over the place. Is it talking about EE grads in the s/w
engineering space? Because I don't see any decent coder-engineer having
trouble finding a job in todays environment. And what's with the disjoint
paragraph on immigration?

