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article in IEEE Spectrum
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/career...ds/nov04/1104e=
esb1.html
Stay Current, Stay Lucky, Stay Employed
Electrical engineering isn't the same ticket to a comfortable,
middle-class life that it once was
By Paul Wallich
FOR THE LEGIONS of young people who measure a profession by the
purchasing power of its practitioners, electrical engineering has been
losing luster for decades. In 1969, a U.S. electrical engineer made
almost as much as a lawyer or judge-on average US $ 11 180 a year,
according to the 1974 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United
States. Twenty years ago, compensation was still good: full-time EEs
who weren't self-employed earned about $34 000-close to $4000 more
than the average for a salaried doctor, according to figures from the
U=2ES. Department of Labor.
But for electrical engineers in the United States and other
industrialized countries, real salary gains have been close to
negligible for years. Between 1971 and 1997, the average salary of an
IEEE member barely kept ahead of inflation. More substantial gains
since then have been tempered by a roughly fivefold increase in the
unemployment rate, to approximately 7 percent of EEs in 2003. In the
meantime, IEEE members' median salaries have fallen from about the 92nd
percentile of U.S. household income in 1971 to about the 85th two years
ago, according to a recent study by IEEE-USA.
The reasons for economic stagnation among U.S. and other first-world
EEs aren't obscure. A major one is that these workers inhabit an
increasingly global business environment in which cheaper but
nonetheless effective technological expertise always seems available
somewhere else. Whatever the reasons, electrical engineering is not as
attractive a career as it once was. Indeed, the entire notion of an
engineering career as a ticket to a comfortable middle-class life may
no longer be true, says Rosalind H. Williams, director of the Program
in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, in Cambridge. Jobs do not last as long as they once did,
she notes, and salaries are flat.
For as long as EEs have been around, electrical engineering has changed
with the decades, and EEs have had to change, too, or be left behind.
The number of jobs has also had its ups and downs over the last 40
years, and periodic recessions have forced many EEs out of the
profession, notes Robert A. Rivers, of Orange, Mass., editor of the
now-defunct Engineering Manpower Newsletter. But the extreme salary
disparity between the fully industrialized and the less-developed
countries is a fundamental new shift in the employment equation.
Unfortunately, no one really knows how many or what kind of jobs are
being sent offshore, says Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public
policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York. The data
simply are not being collected.
Most companies don't want it known that they're shipping out
white-collar operations, Hira says, because of the obvious potential
for backlash from customers, employees, and competitors. The widely
cited estimate by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research that up to
half a million computer-industry jobs will leave the United States by
2015 may be excessive, but even a fraction of that number could be
disastrous for IEEE's U.S. membership, Hira says.
It is clear, he notes, that less exalted jobs such as tech support and
low-level programming and design aren't the only ones going offshore.
Engineers tell Hira that Texas Instruments, in Dallas, for example, has
transferred its entire IEEE 802.11b wireless R&D effort from Research
Triangle Park, N.C., to Bangalore, India, and that Agilent Technologies
Inc., a Hewlett-Packard Co. spinoff in Palo Alto, Calif., has moved
much of its semiconductor R&D to Singapore. Meanwhile, Indian computer
services giant Infosys Technologies Ltd., in Bangalore, is growing so
rapidly that its market valuation is higher than that of U.S. giant
Electronic Data Systems Corp., in Plano, Texas.
When a salary of $15 000 a year in India or Russia buys technical
capabilities comparable to those that would cost $70 000 in the United
States, the business case for moving technical jobs to lower-cost
countries is hard to counter. "The U.S. is still the place where
innovation takes place," says Mathukumalli Vidyasagar, an IEEE fellow
who heads Tata Consultancy's Advanced Technology Centre in Hyderabad,
India. "But to turn an idea into a prototype and then a product does
not require the same level of people or the same salaries."
Vidyasagar returned to his native India in 1989 after more than 20
years as an electrical engineering professor in North America. He
argues that the U.S. position as a center of innovation is safe for at
least the next generation but that the loss of hands-on engineering
jobs could ultimately threaten that role.
On the other hand, Kenneth R. Foster, a professor in the bioengineering
department at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, is
concerned for the present generation. He finds the engineering field
"in turmoil," with the job market much less stable for engineers than
it has ever been. "Many engineers change jobs so often that they wind
up with no vested pension rights," he says. And with so much movement
between short-term jobs, Foster wonders if a sufficient number of
engineers will be available in the future with the advanced design
skills needed at innovative and top-of-the-line engineering companies.
The question is whether engineering careers remain sufficiently
desirable relative to other career options to attract and keep the best
and brightest students in the field, says Foster.
Prospects can be daunting for EEs who want to keep up their skills to
remain employable. Although many of the senior engineers who spoke to
IEEE Spectrum stressed the need for technical currency and lifelong
learning, reinventing yourself every few years may go only so far. Take
Sandra Robinson of Fort Worth, Texas, a systems integrator turned
database engineer turned technical business analyst almost turned
community college instructor turned database engineer (again). She was
unemployed for 30 months before landing a job last year in defense,
which tends to be resistant to moving jobs offshore because government
security rules effectively require employees to be U.S. citizens. Many
job postings, she recalls, "wanted six months experience on very
specific versions of software that wasn't in existence when I was in
the trenches." Some of her fellow EEs left the profession entirely, she
says-one is now a financial advisor, another a telemarketer.
"I don't think that going back to school to learn new technology
helps," says David Meppelink, a Boston-area software engineer who found
himself scrambling for a safer job when his employer was bought and
started downsizing. Prospective employers passed him up because they
wanted people who had used particular tools and technologies to build
commercial applications, not just done a semester or two of course work
in school. Meppelink ultimately found work with a former colleague, and
he says he now looks carefully at how his tasks might look on his
r=E9sum=E9. Building software infrastructure for the use of other
programmers in the same company or subsidiary components of a featured
product is out, because he wouldn't be able to tell a future employer
how much his code contributed directly to the company's bottom line.
According to engineering manager Jean Eason of IEEE-USA's Employment
and Career Services Committee, such career management tactics are
becoming common among younger engineers and programmers. They look
carefully at the tasks they take on, she says, because they expect to
change employers on a regular basis throughout their careers.
In Europe, Emile Aarts, a vice president at Philips Research
Laboratories, in Eindhoven, Netherlands, envisions a future in which
most engineering is done locally, to solve problems that people outside
a particular region or subculture might not comprehend. Such work, he
suggests, will require not merely multidisciplinary teams but engineers
with a wide range of interests in addition to deep technical
competence. You need "mathematicians who play in a band on the weekend,
EEs who do drama, industrial engineers who dance," he says.
Will engineers in lower-income countries eventually learn to dance,
too? As things stand now, say Vidyasagar and others, in India or
Eastern Europe or Russia, the tendency to think inside the box is still
strong. Changing engineering cultures could take generations, says
Vidyasagar. In addition to its enormous material head start, he
contends, the United States also enjoys a more immigrant-friendly
culture, so that any given team is more likely to contain a wide mix of
backgrounds and viewpoints.
Even the most culturally enlightened and versatile engineers may
nevertheless face a peculiar paradox: the profession tends to put its
own practitioners out of work. John Mashey, a former chief scientist at
Silicon Graphics Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., notes that one of
electrical engineering's recurring themes is reducing complex tasks to
routine practice. That, in turn, often means that fewer EEs are needed.
Mashey, now a technology consultant, notes how his own field shrank
once a few CPU architectures became dominant. Big projects that once
called for CPU designers now often demand only routine application of
design-automation software, he says.
The good news is that as some engineering tasks become obsolete, new
application areas open up, Mashey adds. He points to Canesta Inc., of
San Jose, Calif., a new company that recently began offering modules
for three-dimensional "machine vision" based on the time it takes light
pulses to illuminate a scene and return to a sensor. The company offers
modules or circuit and optical hardware layouts, plus software, that
designers can apply to position-location and tracking systems of their
own.
Of course, as technological advances and offshoring alter the
engineering landscape, predicting the future is far from easy. It never
was. William A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering,
in Washington, D.C., who has just finished shepherding a task force
that considered what engineers will be doing in 2020, fully expects
that his successors will ask the same kinds of existential questions
about what their field will look like in 2050. He feels, though, that
even then, people with an irremediable bent to shape the more or less
material world will still be doing engineering.
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