Are Engineering Jobs Hard to Find?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>@aegrisomnia, YMMV, of course. But in my experience (especially with the type of software engineering interviews conducted now), one should not expect that they can get through an interview with only a casual acquaintance with a new language, platform, etc. they are learning on the side. The types of software engineering interviews that are conducted now require more than a passing fancy with the technologies in question; there is a level of detail that requires a certain amount of quality time spent with the subject.</p>

<p>FWIW, some people I know who’ve worked for 40 years in the software engineering field have done just that. As new technologies emerged, they shifted their focus to these technologies.</p>

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err… How do you have a family without money?</p>

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<p>You can say the same thing about being a doctor. You aren’t guaranteed a job rheidzan, so your argument doesnt really hold up here.</p>

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<p>Plenty of people have families without making loads of cash. It just means you probably won’t ever be getting that Benz until your kids are out of college. Money isn’t everything. I’d rather enjoy my job and family an drive a Ford Taurus than hate my live but drive a Ferrari.</p>

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<p>It’s called “riding the wave”.</p>

<p>Although most of my software career has been related to databases, at one time I was a PowerBuilder developer. There was a 5-6 year span where PowerBuilder was one of the hottest development skills to have.</p>

<p>Once the demand for PowerBuilder wanned, I was consultant supporting a client who processed worker compensation claims and they did not have the money to hire both a powerbuilder developer and a SQL Server DBA, so I worked longer hours (got paid too because the contract was “time & materials”) and learned the back-end database concepts.</p>

<p>About that time (1997/1998), data warehousing was getting real big. I paid out of my own money to take various courses given by the Data Warehouse Institute in preparation for those kind of jobs. Sure enough, when my employer found data warehousing gigs, I was the first one sent out to the client…and still riding that “wave”.</p>

<p>Right now, I recently built a new desktop at home JUST for Linux so I can brush up for the Linux administrator and Java certifications (probably only take the Linux cert) SO that I can be ready for Apache Haddoop/MapReduce which is big with “cloud computing”.</p>

<p>Time to get my surfboard and ride another wave. You know sooner ot later, DoD and the Intel agencies will “want in” and I’ll be there waiting with my security clearance in my hand :-)</p>

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<p>No, there are several job portal that offers engineering jobs. you can visit for jobs in Indiana to find one.</p>

<p>[Jobs</a> In Indiana](<a href=“http://www.jobsindiana.net%5DJobs”>http://www.jobsindiana.net)</p>

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<p>Engineering jobs hard to find? Absolutely. Graduated in the top quartile of my class, in 2002, in EE/CS, from a top quartile school (ranked by the Gorman Report at the time). Final design project was an Ethernet / tcp/ip to custom control system interface for a professor’s high energy physics experiment.</p>

<p>The employers were laying highly experienced people off like crazy in 2002. A major employer of engineers in Canada (Nortel) collapsed in subsequent years and laid off 100,000 people, a good number of whom had engineering skillsets.</p>

<p>Of the thousands of resumes I’ve submitted to employers, with custom cover letters, I’ve received replies, from human beings, from no more than approximately a dozen.</p>

<p>Had I graduated just 2 years earlier, the headhunters were all over campus and even 3rd year students were being flown by tech firms to lavish recruiting events. </p>

<p>So yes, I would say that engineering jobs are hard to find. The only people I know who reasonably successful are those who were able to return to their previous internship employers. Some of my classmates now can only find jobs as construction labour. A few live off of inheritances or work the family businesses (restaurants, farms, etc.). The females have mostly married and converted themselves into full-time stay-at-home mothers (usually married to guys in financial or government jobs). One guy is even an ordained Catholic Church priest now! A few drift in and out of grad schol, and a few work on oil rigs – hardly what we ever thought would be our fate when we started school amidst the 1990s tech boom!</p>

<p>Who or what do I blame? The mass importation of over a million guest workers and foreign students, on the H-1B, L-1, and OPT visa programs at a time when domestic students were graduating in droves ready and eager to fill any labour shortages in the engineering sector. </p>

<p>You know how ridiculous it is? You have civil engineers, trained in India, a place without universal running water and hundreds of millions of people without basic sanitation, being imported by technology firms, retrained to write software, and put to work on creating websites like eBay. Meanwhile eBay receives hundreds of thousands of resumes from qualified US citizens who are unemployed and would like to earn some income! Talk about ruining a lot of lives, not only those in India (who are deprived of those civil engineering skills), but also the engineers in the US who don’t even get the ‘time of day’ from firms such as eBay.</p>

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<p>They’re all interchangeable to a high degree. If there is great demand for Computer Scientists, but little demand for EE’s, then EE’s can do much of the work of Computer Scientists. And the reverse is often true as well. </p>

<p>Engineers and CS people might take different courses, but at the end of the day, they’re all generally cut from the same cloth. CS guys tend to be a little bit more on the creative/artistic side. Engineers tend to be more serious and value stability (this is also why engineers are forced to take accounting and finance courses in school!). But, a few knowledge-related items aside, that’s where the difference usually ends.</p>

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<p>Its only that ‘low’ because the cost of living in the SV is so high that if one can’t find a job in a few months, the typical course of action is simply to move away. Or in the case of employees on H-1B or OPT, leaving the United States is mandatory.</p>

<p>Tech employment still isn’t really back to the levels of 2000, yet in the past decade over a million H-1B guest workers have been admitted to the United States, primarily to work in technology jobs. Guess who has been squeezed out? Older workers and new grads. </p>

<p>Think about it this way – San Jose pays City Police interns ~$30/hour + benefits to attend the police academy, and $72k/year to start once they’re done (+ overtime). Your typical Stanford or UCB grad will probably have at least $100k in debt before he/she (if she’s lucky) manages to get a Google or Facebook internship at $10,000 for 3 months – an internship in which, to achieve return employment with those firms, one will have to work their butt off. Tech sector and tech salaries suppressed for those who have the fortune of working? Hell yes!</p>

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<p>Those were the days. I remember the new grads being treated like rock
stars and all of the new BMWs in the parking lot.</p>

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<p>Where are you located?</p>

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<p>Perhaps with a few year’s training or maybe not at all.</p>

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<p>Many jobs require concentration areas where you need three or four courses
in an area (which is why you’re better off with an MSCS or Phd). It’s just
hard to get a few years of experience on the fly.</p>

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<p>In fairness, that’s not the fault of those Indian engineers. The Indian government should be offering higher pay to entice them to stay home and utilize their engineering talents there. </p>

<p>Let’s be perfectly honest: if you were one of those Indian engieners - born in a country that, like you said, lacks running water and basic sanitation for hundreds of millions of people - you too would jump on a program such as H1B to improve your life by working in the US. We all would do that. </p>

<p>And besides, it’s not clear that India as a whole is being hurt by the ‘braindrain’ that you cite. Those H1B engineers transmit large remittances to their families in India and that surely improves the living standards of at least those families. Returning visa holders also bring improved skills and contacts back to India - indeed, much of the Indian IT industry boom was sparked by returning visa holders. </p>

<p>One can debate whether the program helps or hurts the US. But the benefits to India seem to be clear.</p>

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<p>There are Indians choosing to return there after their studies here and many choosing to study and work there. There are several people in my group that work in India. One had the option to move here and declined. Some people do want to stay with their friends, family and culture.</p>

<p>Another friend moved back to India to take care of his in-laws.</p>

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<p>Of course! I don’t blame the actual individuals; I have a number of very nice friends from India (and I love their ethnic cooking!). I blame the system, that has allowed big corporations to use immigration as a way of destroying compensation (and job opportunities) for domestic workers as it has obviously affected me and probably tens of thousands of others personally in a very tragic way.</p>

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<p>Then I’ll put it to you this way. Just off the topic of my head, I can think of dozens of American working as engineers for Sony, Toyota, Honda, Samsung, Siemens, Nintendo, Nokia, RIM, Ericsson, Shell, Toshiba, Novartis and the like: all being foreign firms. One could similarly argue that we have a system where large (foreign) multinational corporations to destroy compensation and job opportunities for foreign engineers in favor of Americans. Heck, I know one American woman who seems to be having the time of her life working as an engineer at Novartis headquarters at Basel, Switzerland, because of the relaxed European work schedule, near-perfect job security (for it’s practically impossible to be fired in Europe), and ample vacations that allow her to roam throughout Europe freely. Couldn’t we argue that she is taking a job that should have gone to a Swiss engineer?</p>

<p>If American firms should not be allowed to hire foreigners, then similarly, foreign firms should not be allowed to hire Americans. What’s fair is fair.</p>

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<p>this is crazy makes me not want to go through all the math and physics if the job market is still bad lol</p>

<p>If engineers have a tough time finding a job then how is it for business majors or english majors???</p>

<p>Is it hard for Doctors to get hired too now ? lol</p>

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<p>Has the job market changed that much in the past couple of years? Everyone in my son’s graduating class (2009) got jobs and top grads usually had more than one offer. I guess if things can change so radically, students applying to college shouldn’t place too much emphasis of the current market because it could be entirely different in four years. If you have “the knack”, do what you love.</p>

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<p>It’s not that the job market is bad, it’s that it may not be as strong as you think (based on all the statistics that are posted by the BLS, etc.). It may not be able to sustain as many job seekers as is predicted, at various times.</p>

<p>IMO, anyone who is considering a STEM career should be aware of the cyclical and sometimes volatile nature of such careers. If you’re not passionate about math and physics – if you’re not the type of person who wants to pursue the study of those (or similar subjects) for their own sake, you should at least consider some other less cyclical or volatile careeer as a backup.</p>

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<p>The job market for software engineers is arguably better now than it was in 2002, although not as good as it was in 1998-2000. Some believe we are in a bubble. (I agree.)</p>

<p>[Is</a> the Facebook IPO the Start of Another Tech Bubble? - Yahoo! Finance](<a href=“http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-ipo-start-another-tech-140545534.html]Is”>http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-ipo-start-another-tech-140545534.html)</p>

<p>At any rate, I agree with the “do what you love” adage. Unless you’re a total mercenary, you’re likely to have more peace of mind doing work you enjoy than hoping you’ll become wealthy just by being an engineer.</p>

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Besides jobs in healthcare, I don’t see anything else as less cyclical.
I don’t see how anyone can be a doctor, too. So what would these jobs be?</p>

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<p>Actually, IMO, healthcare is a more stable career than software engineering or some other types of engineering that are coupled with construction. True, not “anyone” can be a doctor. Off the top of my head, other more stable careers are the supermarket industry and pharmacy.</p>

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<p>i love learning the math and physics and chemistry it all gets more difficult but very interesting as well. Its just the money spent and all the tuition fees around it that has made it tough for me. Luckily im at a Small division two university even though Id love to transfer to a big petroleum engineering school or Mechanical engineering.</p>

<p>i see where you are coming from though that makes sense</p>