Posted on 07/08/2009 9:20:44 AM PDT by Zathras
WASHINGTON — U.S. engineering unemployment soared to a record in the second quarter of 2009, nearly doubling on a quarterly basis to 8.6 percent, the IEEE-USA said Tuesday (July 7), citing government figures.
The previous quarterly record for joblessness among U.S. electrical and electronic engineers was 7 percent, reached in October 2003.
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| EE unemployment previously peaked in 2003. (Source: Ron Hira) |
Portal Player ( design company for the iPod and iPhone chips ) discovered that when they moved much of their stuff to Korea ... Samsung was able to get the technology and Portal learned the hard way not to move offshore ... they don't exist anymore nor does my job at Portal because of it. AGAIN if you're NOT in the industry and live and breathe it EVERY day ... you don't know what your talking about
IT is not chip design. You can build a car without all the automation (by hand) but you can’t build a car without a transmission ... and sell it
This article refers to electrical engineers, not computer science or programming guys. The IT fields have been in a glut of job seekers for some time now but they are a different thing entirely though the public often confuse to two. We’ve not lost any electrical engineers where I work. It takes a long time to get someone up to speed... months. We change IT guys at the drop of a hat.
The Chinese guy spent most of his time cruising the internet for porn. The idjit was accessing dial up connections in JAPAN! Yes, he connected to the internet via an overseas/long distance phone line...
The Vietnamese guy is adequate.
The Indian guy is pretty good.
The two survivors are less creative and more compliant than I was. Quite willing to do it the the way the boss wants even if it's harder, less effective, and more expensive than a method they know.
Teradyne ... trained several Indian H1B's .. lay off came ... Americans were laid off ... ALL the H1B's stayed
Intel ... Muslim H1Bs ... project cancelled ... once again Americans were laid off ... me too ... H1Bs stayed
AMD ... hired my old co-worked who I mentored and taught for two years. They shipped him in from India ... did not hire me though we applied at the same time.
Just to name a few
Sure you can. You just need to find more dishonest salesmen. Or dumber customers. Or, offer the transmission as an "upgrade package" and contract out the installation.
Or, if you're my old company, you tell your employees that they need to sell X number of cars, period, and then let AR and the Purchasing Departments figure out how to install a third-party, aftermarket transmission.
It's worked for my old company so far....they're still in business. Sooner or later though, some other place is going to come in and absolutely eat their lunch. The execs will then be left with a bankrupt company (or one that's just much smaller, there is such a thing as "brand loyalty", no matter how much the product sucks) ...and they'll wonder what happened.
Teradyne ... trained several Indian H1B's .. lay off came ... Americans were laid off ... ALL the H1B's stayed
Intel ... Muslim H1Bs ... project cancelled ... once again Americans were laid off ... me too ... H1Bs stayed
AMD ... hired my old co-worker who I mentored and taught for two years. They shipped him in from India ... did not hire me though we applied at the same time.
Just to name a few
Looks like I better hurry up and finish my Masters.
My stuff is totally weaved thru the other parts of the design. It is not stand alone plug-in stuff. It is common to purchase stand alone IP for chip design like CPU cores or DDR2/3 or USB modules. My stuff connects all that stuff together and controls it.
Your anecdotes do confirm my claim that the suits who offshore their engineering and other activities are idiots. But they're still doing it.
And that's part of what's driving that 8.6% unemployment rate. It's not due to H1Bs. It's because those jobs went somewhere else. If they got rid of the H1Bs here, it's most likely that the jobs would follow them back home.
Companies are learning that is NOT what to do ...
Friend of a friend?
Is he in management or an actual worker bee?
On my last full time job, I was replaced by THREE H1-B's. I got replaced by an outsourcing company. Who proceeded to crash mission critical firewalls (like all of them) at an internet based financial company for several hours.
They're still not above water (losses) on that decision after 5 years.
Both, actually ... he's an actual engineer who managed a design team. (He recently quit, but the point remains...)
I guess my point in all the previous posts is that it's wrong to assume 1) that you're irreplaceable and 2) that the company will always make rational, sound decisions.
Let me give you a for instance....my old company stated in a press release about two years back that they were planning to open "400 stores over the next two years". One of the last projects I worked on for them was coordinating store openings. We put in five (5) over the course of four months. And, don't think my team dawdled...we really busted our butts to get them done, along with handling the other day-to-day stuff that was going on. And, we were the most qualified people to do it...we weren't just a bunch of grunts.
So, when I heard the exec say "400 in 2 years" I laughed out loud. No way. Never happen. Especially as they're cutting back the team to begin with. And to outsource it would take 100's of IT guys....they weren't going to spring for that, either.
Only conclusion that I could draw was that the company was making irrational statements... or was outright lying.
So, to go back to your original example of trying to sell a car without a transmission....all the company would need is better marketing (new! now with NO TRANSMISSION!). Or, they could just outright say "There is no need for a transmission". Or any number of other things. Rationality doesn't need to factor into their equasion.
Good.
Yep, it's easier just to operate on your own rules and ignore everyone else's. Especially inconvenient engineers that bring up things like "facts" and "Laws of Physics" and so forth.
My bet is that they're so used to doing whatever the hell they want, that they just don't care. Either that, or - especially in the case of politicians - they know that 90% of the people who they work for either don't know the facts, don't care about them, or are too stupid to figure them out to begin with.
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