<p>Contrary to what Mark77 have said about the job market for ece, my personal experience is a very good one. All of our year of software and electrical engineers (2010) got positions within a year. A good handful (including myself) got into fortune 100 companies (even though i did move on to the public sector within 8months on the job). It only took me a week to have interviews started rolling in and by the end of the month I got 2 offers to choose from.</p>
<p>I am an electrical from Alberta Canada if that changes anything.</p>
Outsourcing is a whole different monster with its own set of woes. H1-B cutbacks would have a pretty small effect on outsourcing because outsourcing is awful unless it really, really, really saves money.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I’ve had a pretty good experience myself. I have an okay GPA (3.3) in Materials Engineering from Cal Poly SLO. Landed an internship at Phillips 66 over this last summer, and between ending the internship and getting an offer I sent out maybe a dozen resumes. I accepted the offer from Phillips 66, but in the past week or so, I’ve gotten several requests for interviews (which I of course turned down). Quite a few of my classmates have jobs lined up already as well.</p>
<p>A pretty small sampling to be sure, but from what I’ve seen engineers are in demand.</p>
<p>No. If it was a good call to outsource a job, it’s already been outsourced or will be outsourced regardless of whether or not it could be filled by an H1-B engineer. H1-B engineers aren’t cheap, they’re often just more educated/experienced and maybe a little easier to exploit than an American engineer would be.</p>
<p>Outsourcing seems to cause as many problems as it solves. People seem to job hop like crazy, so there is often trouble with continuity due to the very high turnover. Also, hear (anecdotally) that there is a tendency to say “yes” to everything, but fail to be able to deliver what they agree to.</p>
<p>Outsourcing and offshoring are more similar than you seem to think. Even if you outsource within the country, you start to develop problems. Business is all about location, and it has to be a very good deal to move a factory from a prime location (where else would you set up shop?) to a substandard yet cheaper one.
The difference we’re more interested in is between “offshoring jobs” and “importing labor.” Outsourcing is close enough to interchangeable here.</p>
<p>Oh, btw, several Fortune 100 companies are now requiring all their outsourcing agencies within the US providing contractors, to have their employees as W-2 workers, not 1099 independent contractors. This has had good and bad effects, butis leading to some contractors that dont have sufficient documentation/visa/work status to not be able to go on the payroll.</p>
<p>I don’t get the $5000 referral thing. To find an engineer that newmont hires, can’t I just go to the newmont company search directory? I’d work in Northern Neveda, can’t be all that far from Vegas for weekend trips, right?</p>
<p>Six hours from where I live. Four hours form salt lake and four hours from reno. The referral is what everyone else has mentioned. Biggest problem with getting a job in gold mining right now is that as soon as the economy improves, gold should drop and layoffs are very likely. Barrick dot com and newmont dot com have alot of listings for jobs all the time.</p>
<p>Does anyone know what the employment prospects are for computer engineers? Computer engineering is what I really want to study, but I am at the same time afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find a job afterwards. On some websites, I read the job prospects for computer engineers are great, other places say forget it, they are horrible. I have no idea which way it is.</p>
<p>On the East Coast, CpE has no jobs. It’s all about CS there.
On the West Coast, it’s a bit better, but if you live there you should check for yourself by going to career fairs.</p>
<p>hylyfe: What are you looking for? If you are looking for VLSI/Digital Logic Design jobs, then make sure you know Verilog not VHDL. Also make sure you are familiar with Perl, tcl (most design tools use tcl as the scripting language) and tcsh/bash scripting languages. I would not call the job market for EECS at high level, but it has been steady since dropping four years ago. If you graduated with 3.6 GPA from a top school, you should be able to get good jobs. </p>
<p>One thing to remember: engineering is solving problems by creating solutions (whether building a bridge or designing a chip that goes into a cellphone). What we solve or how we solve the problems is different from 10yrs ago and will definitely be different 10yrs from now. Because of the nature of work, managers at most tech companies consider flexibility and willingness/capability to learn new things higher priority than the rest. </p>
<p>Electrical engineers in my school with an embedded systems concentration (near equivalent of CpE at most other schools, with more extensive electrical background) haven’t had much trouble finding jobs. However, most of the jobs tend to be in Oregon (Hillsboro, Beaverton), California (Bay Area, San Diego), and Texas (Austin). If you’re passion is in doing CpE and hardware design, you will most likely need to relocate, whereas Comp Sci majors can find a job pretty much anywhere.</p>
<p>Networking is key in landing interviews and job opportunities, in my opinion. Also make sure your resume is rock solid and is creative enough to pop out among the 1000+ resumes that recruiters look through every day.</p>