US Predicts Zero Job Growth For Electrical Engineers (bls.gov) 223
dcblogs writes: An occupation long associated with innovation, electrical and electronics engineering, has stopped growing, according to the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an update of its occupational outlook released Friday, said that the number of people employed as electrical and electronics engineers is now at 316,000, and will remain mostly unchanged for the next decade. The government put the 10-year job outlook for electronic and electrical engineers at "0% — little or no change." The IEEE-USA said the BLS estimates "are probably correct."
Of course it's zero growth! (Score:2, Insightful)
The jobs here are stolen from us and given to immigrants and the companies are outsourcing everything else to China and India.
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The jobs were not stolen because they were never yours to begin with. Jobs are for employers to give out, not for employees to own. Employers are giving jobs to people who can do them more efficiently and more economically. If you can, compete. If you can't do it more economically, add value to your work. Be exceptional. If you can't, your problem. Sorry.
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Jobs are for employers to give out, not for employees to own.
I agree, but the point is the employers are colluding with government to skew it in their favor.
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Lobby harder.
My one dollar vote in the boonies is no match for a corporation's $1M dollar vote in Washington.
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Exactly which corporations are made up of something other than people, specifically the owners of said company? Should unions and other organizations (the NRA, the EFF, etc) also not be allowed to lobby?
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Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:4, Insightful)
No it's NOT within their right to lobby ($$$) the government
If we went back to the origin of the term, then I think it's fine for "companies to lobby the government". That would mean that companies are free to send one or more people to Washington, DC, meet with members of Congress in the lobby of the Capitol building, and discuss their concerns. The problem is that "lobbying" now means bribery, such as bringing an envelope full of cash, or using the lobby of a resort hotel instead of the lobby of the Capitol.
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^^ this is asinine. It's the kind of bullshit argument that oligarchs made against democracy at the outset of the American Revolution.
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Interesting factoid about the American Revolution: 2/3 of Americans didn't care either way who ran the government.
Interesting factoid about the 2014 midterm elections: 1/3 of registered voters decided the election, the lowest turnout in 80 years.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
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It's also within our right to change the rules so that they don't have the right to lobby the government anymore.
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Yes. His initial proposed amendment left unions alone - but his latest draft recognizes this shortcoming and is something I could definitely get behind.
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The economy is the RESULT of people doing 'stuff'. "It" is not a servant of anyone. If that 'stuff' is wealth destroying feel good nonsense - wealth is destroyed - thus mathless degrees have no ROI. If instead that 'stuff' is production - wealth is created ( why we are seeing the general transfer of capital to Asia.)
Under the cartel/socialist system we have now, the creation of wealth in the USA is declining because the rewards are steered to the corrupt rather than the productive. It is simply political t
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It is simply political theater that there the 'big-business' and 'big-government' people are not one and the same.
I hope Sanders gets elected so it finishes collapsing sooner rather than later. The longer they prop it up - the farther it will fall.
So as you're obviously not a fan of Sanders, who would you vote for? Donald Trump is crazy. Bush/Clinton are more of the same. Rand Paul might be ok but doesn't have a chance. Sanders is also a career politician but seems to at least care. Yeah, he might bankrupt the country but at least it's better than the status quo and I would prefer us bankrupt the country by providing money to the poor than by spending it on million dollar weapons. At least when you give the money to the poor, than money is spen
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Stolen? Why don't the Chinese and Indians deserve jobs? Can't you compete?
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Stolen? Why don't the Chinese and Indians deserve jobs? Can't you compete?
No, they DON'T deserve jobs in the USA over US citizens.
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Nobody deserves jobs. Nobody deserves anything.
We enter into these arrangements for mutual benefit. Everything else is just politics.
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It's a level playing field for only a relatively few specialized occupations and those who are in industries where the workers have organized. Unions are in decline in this country and not so coincidentally so is the middle class.
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Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:4, Insightful)
But not only that, more importantly IMO is that the engineering takes place where the factories are. From a market viewpoint it makes sense to integrate both design, developing, testing and manufacturing. Just let them do all the work from start to finish over there, because it will cut down on the time it takes to develop and ship out new products.
That you get better stuff out the door quicker when you have development and manufacturing working closely together isn't really that new.
The big question is what the west is going to do while Asia does both development and manufacturing. Just being consumers only works until you run out of money.
Well, I guess it will be time to start up manufacturing then. Starving labor tends to be cheap.
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Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:4, Interesting)
Donald Trump [cnn.com] thinks it's bullshit too. Just sayin'.
Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:5, Insightful)
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This also applies to politicians.
Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:2, Insightful)
I know a lot of people think Sander's views would put us in line with that of Nordic countries, but it just looks to me like it would be more similar to that of France, or rather, that of Francois Hollande, whose administration has been somewhat of a train wreck.
Not that I'm saying Hillary or Trump would be better (in fact I don't care for any of the three.) Though I'm one of those weirdo libertarians with ideas about going left on social issues and right on the economy.
Re: Of course it's zero growth! (Score:4, Informative)
I know a lot of people think Sander's views would put us in line with that of Nordic countries
Hahahahahaha no. There's not a US party that would stand a snowflake's chance in hell in a Norwegian election, nor a Norwegian party in a US election. For example, here's the policy for healthcare and care for the elderly of our right-most party, the Progress Party [google.no]:
Elderly
What we will do
The Progress Party believes that everyone should have a good and dignified elderly. Thus it is important that the government takes the bill for elderly care, and that does not address shall determine whether you get a worthwhile offer or not.
For better elderly care, and ensure everyone a good offer, we wish to competitive tendering services in that it is the best option that takes on work - whether it is a public or private is not the most important, but that the elderly get a good services that meet their quality of life.
All older shall have the right nursing home placement when they need this. There is no municipal budgets that will be decisive for whether seniors receive the necessary help - it will come automatically through state funding. At the same time we must allow private operators to offer good services in elderly care. This way you can decide for yourself which older offerings to suit them, and reject bad deals. A4 systems does not contribute to a warm and dignified elderly.
The Progress Party believes that everyone should have a worthy offer, thus we must give the elderly the opportunity to stay at home as long as they wish. This must be done through a broad and varied offer.
(...)
Health
What we will do
Progress will change health structure fundamentally, so that patients are put in the center and that absolutely everybody gets safe and prompt medical care regardless of their wallet.
We will do this through efforts based funding, which means that hospitals receive funding based on how many patients they treat. When someone needs treatment, it should automatically get the means to treat them. In one of the richest countries, we will not experience that one does not receive health care on the basis of lack of funding. Everyone shall have the right to good health care.
Health Queues must be reduced. After they have grown so much during the coalition government it is necessary to reform health care to put patients at the center.
Free user choice is a right all patients should have. It should be up to each individual to decide how they want to receive health care. This applies to both private and public institutions. It is not up to the bureaucracy to think where and how to be treated. It is a matter between you and your doctor - no one else.
I'm guess most of this would fly like a lead balloon in the US. And the left side of our politics consists of Red, Socialist Left and the Worker's Party, proud socialists. For a good laugh watch the series "Lillyhammer" about a New York mafia boss who retreats to rural Norway, it's a hilarious culture clash. And no, it's not really all that exaggerated either.
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Uh, that's brilliant. (Score:1)
Everything else is being exported to the third world, but EEs won't all be?
Of course, I also expect this to be way optimistic. China's started to develop its own interesting shit rather than just do what American companies tell it.
Re:Uh, that's brilliant. (Score:5, Interesting)
China has a thieving industry of original design manufacturers (ODMs)
Fixed that for you.
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China has a thieving industry of original design manufacturers (ODMs)
Fixed that for you.
If they were only thieving, there would be no need for EEs there, and increasing need here.
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Please. It's only theft when the Chinese do it. When western companies copy each other it's inspiration. Ever notice that once Japanese cars got good all the western manufacturers stated ripping them off, both in terms of the engineering and the styling?
China is developing a lot of original technology now. Their CPUs are the best price/performance/power ratio available. They make some really good audio gear. Chinese network hardware is years ahead in some areas, particularly mobile.
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They have far more people. They are just as smart as us, and they will work for less.
I read this exact same thing back in the 80's on a panel discussion of the US in a developed world, so at least some have been expecting this for 30+ years. I guess the future really is here. Those that can adapt will do well, those that can't, maybe not.
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Honestly, that's bullshit unless you mean that US IDMs are paying Chinese ODMs (which really would have to be Chinese IDMs acting as ODMs, right?)
And then why would US IDMs be called IDMs?
Let's look at where stuff is designed and made:
- Many many US companies are fabless manufacturers (design + sale.) No Chinese company comes close to Qualcomm or Broadcom revenue in that area.
- Countries that make equipment to manufacture semiconductors? The Netherlands, USA, and Japan. No Chinese company in the top 15 by r
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They took a Segway, which was shit to start with, and took the handle off.
Clearly the Socratic straitjacket prevented my occidental mind from coming up with a brilliant idea like that.
Tim Cook/Apple (Score:2)
Not suprising (Score:1, Interesting)
It really isn't surprising, at least on the computer/networking side of things. Tech in general has been stagnant for about 10 years, particularly in network hardware. What new innovations on the hardware side have there been? An iPad with a slightly larger screen? A curved LED television? On the network side Juniper and Cisco see no need to innovate.
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Thanks to the efforts of the Sauds to ruin alternative oil production and the electronics jobs being shipped overseas to countries that don't care about the environment or their population's well-being, inflation is at an all-time low. So low even, it risks flipping over into deflation at the moment. If you have pointers as to why 'the real' inflation would be high, I'd like to see them.
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There should be some need for new grads (Score:2)
Re:There should be some need for new grads (Score:5, Insightful)
Job creation at zero means there are no new jobs created. If someone replaces a worker in a job, that's still only one job, not a new job.
Technological innovation serves to reduce the labor required to produce a product. Jobs grow when we reduce scarcity: with 1,000,000 acres of land and hunter-gatherer society, you can only hunt so many deer and collect so many berries; go agrarian and you can get 10 times as much food; and bring it up to modern agricultural practices and genetically-modified crops and you can take that to 70 times as much. Don't believe me? The optimistic projection for hunter-gatherer society is a maximum of 135 million humans supported before exhausting all resources and incurring mass famine; our modern agricultural practice feeds over 7,000 million humans.
Reduce scarcity. If you have 1,000,000 acres of arable land, you'll expend the same amount of labor to farm each acre, the same amount of labor to feed each new person. When you run out of arable land, you have to expend extra labor to transport water for irrigation, to manufacture fertilizer, and to harvest smaller yields. That means instead of 10 hours to feed one person, you have to expend 20 hours. That's where scarcity comes from: we can continue to expand, but we'll have to pour in more human labor, meaning we have to pay these people, which means the cost of goods goes up, which means standard-of-living falls and some people just don't have anything to trade (notably, currency) to buy enough food to live.
In markets, reducing the labor that goes into a product reduces its cost, reducing its minimum price, enabling us to sell that product to more of the consumer market. As the price comes down, existing consumers end up with more money in their pockets, and can buy new goods. Producing more of a good and producing a new good both require labor, which creates new jobs for the ones we displace by lowering labor costs.
That only holds us at an equal number of jobs. When you become capable of scaling up further without incurring more than a proportional increase in labor, you create more jobs: you can make more units without increasing the cost-per-unit. That's often accompanied by an increase in population, which creates more jobs.
In politics, you look at unemployment rate when consumer markets recover from a rapid job depletion, pointing out the lowering of the marginal unemployment. You look at number of jobs created and pointedly avoid mentioning unemployment rate when scarcity decreases, creating more jobs but also creating more total unemployed, managing to not affect the unemployment rate in the process.
Given all that, a stagnation of job creation in EE doesn't necessarily mean we're not innovating; we may be innovating new analysis methods which require fewer EEs, thus shifting their labor away.
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Mostly from what I've seen, custom hardware is being replaced by off the shelf components with customizable software.
Which is why this EE major from 25 years ago is now a programmer.... Actually the writing has been on the wall for decades and I realized early in my career that engineering hardware like in the 50, 60, and 70 was quickly going to die out. Bailed out into Software Engineering to beat the mad rush.
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More than that, engineers have generalized broad workloads into categories, and created standard hardware to handle those workloads. GPGPU allows hardware acceleration of anything similar to GPU processing; it's cost-effective, as designing hardware *and* software for a specialized task (bitcoin mining, protein folding, encryption cracking) is obviously more complex than designing only specialized software. PhysX specifically targets physics, a broad problem, and so reduces the amount of programming need
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Mostly from what I've seen, custom hardware is being replaced by off the shelf components with customizable software.
Yes, I have this trend over the last ten years and accentuated over the last five years.
The 1990's was the golden age of the IC startup. Many many companies were designing their own chips as a result of new tools and the new decoupling of design and manufacturing.
But as we moved through the 2000's, the cost of a developing a new chip rose astronomically. This is due to a combination of the need to make much more complex chips to be competitive and greatly increasing cost to gear up manufacturing at smalle
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At 316K that's roughly 1/1000 population - if you think about what EEs do, you wouldn't expect 25 EEs per 1000 people. One engineer designs something that is replicated at least dozens, if not thousands or millions of times. There's quite a bit of prototype / research work which supports later mass production, but all in all, the EEs make the hardware, and you don't want too much diversity of hardware design, otherwise the software gets to be a mess. And, over the last 20 years, software has been creepin
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Service jobs aren't going away soon. Jobs where the personal touch matters aren't going away (but then, those jobs require a bit of creativity). The skilled trades aren't going away soon. Retail jobs may dwindle, but slowly, over lots of time.
There's very little manufacturing left in the US to lose. It's the "paper pusher" jobs that are currently seeing the hardest decline: not manual labor in the classic sense (that's mostly a done deal, aside from agricultural stuff), but nearly-mindless labor nonethe
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There are articles in the paper every day about service job destruction.
A year ago when I went to chilli's there was a waitperson per 5 tables.
Last month when I went to chilli's there was a waitperson per 13 tables and a 1 "food delivery" person. An automated kiosk at the table took our order and allowed us to pay our bill. The waitperson basically refilled our drinks 3 times and checked if we had any special needs. The food delivery person actually brought our food and confirmed the order matched what
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Entry-level jobs of all sorts are suffering, and will continue to fade due to automation. Skilled jobs are a bit different. Still, we really need something to fill the social role of entry-level jobs for teens, and raising the minimum wage really hurts that. I expect a huge rise in skilled, "personal touch" service jobs, but that would be especially hard for teens to get into. It's hard to find a good model elsewhere, too, as youth unemployment is really bad throughout most of Europe.
I'm hoping that, wh
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The problem is we are reaching a tipping point where cheap machine labor will soon be able to replace all repetative labor which simply relies on having vision, manual dexterity, or even smart but not creative thinking work.
Maybe. We did this before, and got 80% unemployment and an economic disaster. That's just a matter of speed: we constantly unemploy and re-employ people; we just do it slowly, so we lose maybe 1% over the time it takes to create new jobs for those 1%. If we lose 30% over the time it takes to create jobs, we might create jobs faster--which doesn't help if we create jobs for 3% of them in that time, but end up with 27% standing unemployment.
The trend is accelerating so the next 20 years are going to be a period of rapid employment destruction.
We can slow it. That's one of the biggest goals of my Citizen
Only part of the story (Score:3)
A lot of boomer EEs are retiring soon. So don't think there are no jobs.
I don't know about that (Score:3)
Company know how isn't an issue (Score:2)
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A lot of boomer EEs are retiring soon. So don't think there are no jobs.
Hate to bust your bubble, but there is no glut of baby boomer engineers waiting to retire. They were run out a long time ago due to age discrimination or just being fed up with corporate America.
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What we need are the data as to the number of new hires that will be needed to keep that worker number constant. It w
Scary thing is: EE has the *best* outlook ! (Score:2)
Eliminate EE H1B (Score:3)
step 1 - cancel all EE H1B holder's VISA.
problem solved.
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Would prefer H1B holders working in the US, paying US taxes, or working in their country of origin, paying taxes there? That is your choice.
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Except that the reality is that your assumption won't happen. There is a reason that outsourcing has failed in the long term for almost every project: the infrastructure and communication required to outsource a project successfully just does not exist in the countries the higher ups want to outsource them to. If it was possible, they would not bring in H1-B's for $65k when they could outsource it for $35k.
If you take away the $65k option, they are left with the $100k vs. the $35k option which they have a
Rest assured H1B Visas are here to save the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there is zero percent growth. But rest assured companies will argue that they still can't find any qualified workers and require H1B Visa holders to be imported and paid a meager $65K a year, rather than the $110K/year of the U.S. engineer they just let go.
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>> What does it mater if its a computer or a person (labour).
Because if you outsource something for long enough your own population loses those skills and all you end up with is an entire population of project managers who can't compete in the world market for anything other than project management. Then your whole economy goes even more to shit.
Robotics revolution is just around the corner... (Score:5, Informative)
I do robotics development in Silicon Valley for both new startups and with large established companies. Our small team is a mix of software and electrical engineers (we team up with other firms doing mechanical and industrial design) and we're finding it difficult to keep up with all the opportunities in the burgeoning robotics field. The nice thing is it seems we're just at the infancy of robotics so growth should be sustainable for quite a while.
I don't know if growth in robotics can compensate for overall declines elsewhere, but it's at least one promising area of growth for electrical engineer over the coming decade and beyond. Currently, pretty much every robot is a unique design built from the ground up so the opportunities are very similar to what was available in the Valley during the early days of computing when pretty much every computer design was unique and created from the ground up. Certainly this will eventually change, but for now it makes for fun and interesting work that is in demand.
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^^ This, and also the whole electric car explosion. Um... NOT pun intended, but apropos considering what would happen if we really started to increase our electrical power infrastructure to support this without more knowledgable EEs adept at transforming and inverting and conducting higher-energy electrical components around the increasingly distributed power grid.
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I have a degree in EE and did some grad work in CS. Did a robotics internship with NASA many years ago and have been working as a software developer ever since. Some DoD contracting, now working in cybersecurity, but I don't find any of this stuff too fulfilling. I'm a huge 12-year-old at heart -- I want to be working on robots or spaceships!
That being said, based on my experience, those jobs don't exist [here]. I closest thing I could find was working for a contract manufacturer of
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I'm in a similar boat, only on the IC side of things...
Maybe the answer is California (doesn't seem to be anywhere in the Midwest or West). To me, though, that environment seems to have a lot of people "crushing it" who are really just crushing whatever financially independent future they might have had. I wonder how many truly succeed there (and for how long), and how many end up attempting to set up shop with some organic fusion bar or whatever... not that there's anything wrong with organic fusion bar
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Since you asked, I'll describe a bit what lead me down the path to my current career in robotics: Graduating with a degree in Computer Engineering in the late 80's my career has since been all over the map. I've done real-time embedded system design on phone switches, moved to application development on held devices back when they were called "pen computers", then multimedia applications for the web, then Internet search engine development when the .com boom was in full swing and finally Linux application
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Why would those robot design firms require lots of EEs? Couldn't they just use existing FPGAs or smartphone CPUs to control things?
These are Electrical Engineers (Score:5, Informative)
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You have a point. My university stopped giving out Electrical and Computer engineering degrees (like mine) about the same time I graduated. They went to two degrees, Electrical Engineer (power systems and electronics) and Computer Engineering (Designing computer systems components) way back then.
If you think about it, Power systems Electrical engineers have been generally on life support for 30 years, being relegated to designing power systems in buildings for the most part, ever since the bulk of the ru
The upshot is lots of retirement (Score:2)
At least in my industry (power), there is still a demand for good young engineers, in pretty well paying positions. A good part of that is retirement, but there is a bit of growth as well. You might not start at six figures, but you will get there in 4-5 years if you are solid.
Mars colonies are not going to build themselves (Score:2)
This estimate assumes that the world remains exactly same as today - no space missions, no solar and wind farms, no electric cars and buses. We already know that we have to do a lot of those things because of global warming, and countless things we don't know about will be invented during the next decade. A lot of them will require plenty of electrical design, construction and service.
Great! (Score:2)
Can we assume there is no need for H1B visa for EEs then?
Here's an idea (Score:2)
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I don't understand your fixation on transgendered people. You should probably talk to a psychologist about it.
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Sneak into your co-workers computers and you'll see how many transfans [wikipedia.org] there are out there.
<bad pun>If you're not careful, some of them can be a real pain in the ...</bad pun>
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The reason I would suggest GGP talk to a psychologist is because somehow GGP has the delusion that there's anybody who would rather have a trans woman as an employee.
Employers actively discriminate against male-to-female transsexuals. Female-to-male transsexuals reported no loss of earnings, and increased respect.
Before that sex change think about your next paycheck [nytimes.com]
You might expect that anybody who has had a sex change, or even just cross-dresses on occasion, would suffer a wage cut because of social stigmatization. Wrong, or at least partly wrong. Turns out it depends on the direction of the change: the study found that earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fell by nearly one-third after their gender transitions, but earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increased slightly.
and
Ben Barres, a female-to-male transgender neuroscientist at Stanford, found that his work was more highly valued after his gender transition. “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today,” a colleague of his reportedly said, “but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”
Dr. Barres, of course, doesn’t have a sister in academia.
poverty, etc [washingtonpost.com]
3) Poverty is a massive problem in the trans community.
Transgender respondents were nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000, compared to the general population, Injustice at Every Turn found. They were unemployed at twice the rate of the general population, or roughly between 10 percent and 14 percent throughout 2008, the year the survey was conducted.
Trans Americans 4 times more likely to be living in poverty [advocate.com]
In one of its most striking findings, MAP and CAP report that trans people are nearly four times more likely to have a yearly household income below $10,000 (15 percent vs. 4 percent of the nontrans population). The numbers go up if a trans individual is a person of color, with Asian American/Pacific Islander and Latino trans folks nearly six times as likely to be living in poverty as their API or Latino cisgender counterparts.
Maybe they see us as a threat because many of us are forced to either work for (much) lower wages or work the streets.
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Let's try looking at this another way. What you're saying is:
Seems the whole "don't judge a book by its cover" thing just doesn't work, and employers are missing out on many applicants, including those who are more qualified than the ones they eventually hire.
Now to deal with your "piece de resistance", or more appropriately "piece de merdr
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If it can do the job, it can do the job, no matter if man, women, transsexual, genetically modified dog...
Of course, that said, certain people try to force themselves in jobs etc not by their skills, but by other dirty means like appeasing to the race/gender/preference cards or having powerful contacts like rich parents etc.. and those obviously don't perform as well because they don't need to, so end not being well liked by his peers at the job and mostly paid less.
But not saying that ALL cases are like th
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Obviously this article fails to take into account the tiniest of electrical engineers. If you're an engineer, and your body's aspect ratio is, say, 10 orders of magnitude smaller than the average, you've got job security like a mofo.
The best part about it is that because the regular engineers are so cheap now, you can buy a bunch of tiny ones and be ok with losing them around the office.
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Generally only the worst of software jobs are outsourced. They tried it on a more massive scale and got hordes of very mediocre Java programmers in India which turned out to not be so much worth the hassle. I am not saying there aren't plenty of really good software people in other countries because there are. But I don't think any of our employment woes, to the extent they are real, are primarily due to outsourcing except for relatively less skilled labor and manufacturing.
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Since we're not bothering with making things in the USA anymore, and we're not improving our country's infrastructure, this was to be expected, no?
Not so fast. The issue is not where it's built, but where it is designed. Building stuff doesn't take all that much electrical engineering skill. DESIGNING it still does, although these days, with the layout and simulation tools we have doing design work is not that difficult unless you have to do something analog. Digital circuits are not all that complex to design and layout anymore. Analog though, can take a bit more effort if you depart from the part manufacturer's reference design by much.
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You've described all we've been doing since the early 90s - draw it here, make it anywhere but here.
Do you really think there's no link between that mentality (design here, build anywhere but) and the decline of the Electric and Electronic Engineer?
I think there is, so does the government, and so does the guy who wrote TFA.
Why do you think where it's built doesn't matter? Is it because that's the status quo for the past third of century?
I think it does matter, and for reasons which have been obscured by va
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Actually, right now the U.S. is about equal with China in manufacturing. You are just looking at the half that has gone bye-bye.
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Oh really? Is that based on how much money the US makes exporting?
I'm in the market for consumer-grade electronics, not jet airliners, space launch vehicles, locomotives or cars.
Please point out specific makes / models of consumer-grade electronics I can get in a typical big-box or online retailer that are made here.
Where is my US-made A/V receiver?
Where is my US-made phone?
Where is my US-made TV?
Nowhere. Ran out of the country decades ago in the race to the bottom.
The only thing I can think of in consume
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Yea, they are also conflating "Java Script" and "Java"
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Semi-retired EE here. Where you reside in the US also has a lot to do with it. If you are in San Diego, CA, good luck finding a job if you are over 40. If you are in the bay area it is easier.
This apparent glut of EE's would go away very quickly if the US went to war with China or Russia as the talent pool would be split. Actually, this is a likely scenario, and instantly it would be a crisis for the US as we have outsourced much of our manufacturing base.
Re: (Score:2)
Great hobby now as tools are widely accessible
I did electronics as a kid and took introductory courses in college, but never got far with it as a career. Most employers were hiring only Filipinos workers for assembly work in Silicon Valley. I eventually went into vide game testing and I.T. support. Thirty years later I'm taking up electronics as a hobby. Now that I have time and money, I'm able to do a lot more than before. Every datasheet is available on the Internet, something that I had hard time finding as a youngster. I can buy parts in 100-count