<p>Interesting that you would invoke Paul Graham, because he has also expounded on the growing trend of software/IT entrepreneurs requiring less outside funding in years to come due to ever-dropping prices of computer hardware and the availability of free and powerful open-source software tools. Today you can reasonably launch a Web 2.0 prototype site for just a few hundred dollars. Granted, that prototype won’t be able to scale to a large userbase, but that’s a good problem to have, as a large userbase provides the opportunity for advertising or subscription revenue with which to invest into industrial-strength infrastructure, pay for the living expenses of the founders, and still be cash-flow positive, a notion that Graham dubs “Ramen Profitable”. </p>
<p>Graham has also spearheaded a new business model of funding entrepreneurs within not only a pre-VC or even pre-angel framework, but to perhaps one day bypass the funding system entirely. Y-combinator, the startup incubator that he founded, is designed to provide small doses of funding, generally only $15-20k at a time, and perhaps in the future won’t offer any funding at all and merely offer the business contacts, general management advice, and brand name imprimatur that VC’s supposedly provide. </p>
<p>Now granted, outside funding may be more necessary in fields such as biotechnology or (especially) green energy. Yet even those fields offer burgeoning opportunities to low-cost innovation. The ‘biohacking’ movement offers opportunities for amateur hobbyists to engage in genetic research and genetic engineering through relatively cheap second-hand lab equipment, mail-order synthetic DNA, open source genetic algorithm software, and publicly available genomic sequence data. The amateur biohobbyist community already runs informal ‘competitions’ to see who can engineer the coolest ‘glow-in-the-dark bacterium’. I suspect that one of them will eventually discover a highly commercializable gene patent or other biotechnology advance. </p>
<p>But that’s my point: doing so would be irrelevant, because hiring standards are going to change in a few years anyway. This is especially true in the IT/SE space where the industry changes constantly and new firms are constantly being founded while old ones die off, and hence hiring requirements change constantly. If you’re an incoming engineering student as the OP seems to be, who cares what the industry looks for in their candidates now when that’s probably going to be different by the time you’ve graduated? </p>
<p>What you would like to do is ask what companies will be looking for in their candidates in the future. But that’s obviously impossible because nobody actually knows exactly what that is, and in many cases, the new technologies and new companies haven’t even been founded yet, so there’s nobody to ask.</p>
<p>Which is why baseball players are evaluated over the course of numerous at-bats, not just a few, and usually over an entire season, in order to maintain a reliable sample size. </p>
<p>More to the point, this is also why many companies do not rely solely or even primarily on interviews. Instead, they use intelligence/problem-solving tests - Google being famous for doing so. Many also rely on social networking and word-of-mouth: arguably the most reliable way to obtain any job is to be endorsed by somebody within the company, and why every jobhunting book or website recommends that the first step to take is always to leverage your network. </p>
<p>To be clear, I don’t dispute the importance of the interview. The problem, again, is that different companies are looking for different attributes within the interview, and as an incoming engineering freshman, you won’t know exactly what those desired interview attributes will be by the time you you graduate. Paul Graham relates the story of how the founders of Lotus could not be hired by Lotus after the company had become large, and Bill Gates might not be hired by Microsoft today and if he did, he probably would not have been successful at the company.</p>
<p>They are often part of the candidate assessment process, and even parts of the actual interviews.</p>
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<p>This is why you need to keep abreast of such things throughout your time in school.</p>
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<p>In essence, you’ve proved my point: even the very “best” might struggle to find jobs under certain circumstances. Now I’m not saying this is untrue of any other field, but there seems to be some feeling here that the computer industry is somehow “found money” and it’s oh-so-easy to get and stay hired. This may have been true in the dotcom era when companies would just pull html coders off the street, but it’s not true now, especially due to the recession.</p>
<p>All companies are not web sites. And even those who are experience financial problems. The more web sites there are looking to make money from people clicking on or viewing ads, the more thinly sliced the advertising pie becomes. Let’s not forget that the recession has caused less angel/VC money to flow to startups as well.</p>
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<p>It is not such a good problem to have if the prototype does not actually scale to the “userbase” that is using the site at the time when it is most necessary that it does so. Do you know about the search engine Cuil? Their founders (one a former Googler, among other things) set out to challenge Google. However, when it came time for them to handle the traffic they claimed they would, they did not. You would think people that had years of experience in search would be acutely aware of the seriousness of being able to handle a large volume of traffic, which is yet another example of what I am saying – even the very “best” do not always do “well”.</p>
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<p>Which is why it is important to be able to track changes as they occur, to the extent that this is feasible. One can’t merely rest on the laurels of one’s GPA or university.</p>
<p>I don’t think I have proved your point, unless your point was the generic (and uninteresting) statement that nobody is guaranteed a job, regardless of their major or skillset. But that’s something that everybody should have known already. </p>
<p>I thought your more interesting point was that you could be aware of what companies actually want by, as you said, keeping abreast of such issues. My point simply is that, in the case of IT/SE, it’s not that simple. For example, if I was graduating in June 1994 and had asked a bunch of software hiring managers, they would have probably told me that they were looking for COBOL or C++ developers to write corporate client-server or mainframe infrastructure. Practically nobody knew that the upcoming launch of the Netscape browser 6 months later was going to revolutionize the entire software & IT industry, not even Netscape itself. Similarly, practically nobody knew, not even within Apple itself, that the Iphone was going to spark an explosion of mobile apps. </p>
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<p>Yet that’s where the bulk of the innovation in the software/IT space is now taking place. It’s not becoming increasingly more difficult to justify the production of packaged software that is also not available through an online service. For example, most of the major corporate IT packages such as the Oracle 11i database or SAP through an online cloud service - even Microsoft is planning to port MSOffice to the cloud. The lone holdout is MSWindows, but Windows has become increasingly less relevant in terms of dictating the direction of industry innovation. </p>
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<p>Yet online advertising continues to grow quickly, and in fact is the only sector of advertising that remains healthy. Not only are more people spending more time online, but more importantly, the advertising is becoming ever-more-targeted and microsliced and hence more valuable to the advertisers. I would rather market my product to 10k customers who actually care about the product I’m trying to sell than to 100k customers who don’t care. </p>
<p>But more importantly, nobody ever said you should rely solely on advertising. Subscription revenue represents a giant revenue stream, as does (in the case of gaming), virtual goods. The online porn industry - clearly the most profitable online industry in the world - is living proof that people will gladly pay for desirable Internet content. Facebook may generate up to $50mn a year just from virtual goods alone. </p>
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<p>But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the flow of innovation. Angel/VC funding, frankly, has been hurting for years - at least since 2006 and probably earlier - yet that hasn’t precluded the rise of social networking, mobile apps, online video, and cloud computing. Just consider: YouTube was founded in 2005, and was sold in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Not bad for a year’s work; not bad at all. </p>
<p>Like I said before, it doesn’t take much money to launch a prototype Web 2.0 site. Or an online service/game. Or an Iphone or Android app. Or a Facebook widget. {Or, if you are so inclined as to produce the content, a porn site.} </p>
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<p>Actually, that’s an excellent problem to have: far far better than simply not launching at all until you’re completely scaled, as by that time, you run the grave risk of being surpassed. What matters is capturing a userbase and learning what they want so as to dynamically iterate your way towards providing a better product through constantly customer interaction, even if that means suffering from traffic overflows. After all, if you’re not doing that, somebody else is.</p>
<p>As a case in point, it would not be particularly hard for a team of developers to build a highly scalable version of Twitter. But what would be the point? Nobody would use it, because Twitter has already captured the userbase. Twitter has suffered numerous infamous outages in the past, and still does today. But they nevertheless captured the userbase. </p>
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<p>No, the main problem with Cuil was not that they couldn’t handle the traffic, but rather that the search results simply did not justify the hype - being not clearly better than Google’s, and in many cases, demonstrably worse, i.e. by returning porn images for search queries that requested no such content. If Cuil had truly built a better search engine, people would have surely put up with the outages, in the same way that people put up with periodic Google, Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter outages today. </p>
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<p>But, as I’ve been saying, that’s probably not easy to do simply through asking people for hiring trends, particularly 4 years out (from the time of school matriculation to graduation).</p>
<p>It is not so much an issue of what “companies” want, per se; it is an issue of what individuals who have certain preferences for skillsets want who work for these companies. You have to look in places like Slashdot or some of the other sites I’ve mentioned to realize this.</p>
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<p>And the BLS somehow “knew” this? If it did, why didn’t it know that there would be a demand for pay-per-click, rather than display ads, because of the recession of the early 2000s? (But if you were reading sites like WebmasterWorld or SearchEngineWatch, you would have known this.) WRT Apple apps, I can’t say, not being much of a follower of them, but it’s not as if there weren’t sites like Engadget that covered the mobile phone industry prior to the release of the iPhone. After all, there was quite a following for the Treo, Razr, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t know where you got your information, but I got mine directly from using their site (or trying to). It would have been nice to even get some results, even porn results, instead of the “HTTP server unavailable” errors I was getting (if I even was able to open a connection), not infrequently, but constantly. And I was using Lynx with an unproxied, top-tier Internet connection, so it was just my fat pipe between me and Cuil.</p>
<p>People do not put up with outages on an unestablished Internet service because they do not need to. They just go back to Google or whatever else they were using.</p>
<p>As for the rest of what you’ve written, let me put it this way. If you (or anyone else) think the BLS does a more credible job of tracking trends than sites that are dedicated to actual trends created and participated in by the very people setting those trends, then you should use that. Use whatever works for you.</p>
<p>I would argue that that’s still rather difficult to know. Slashdot gives you a picture of what the popular technologies are now, but says little about what the trends will be years from now. Wired Magazine or even Fast Company are better, but even so, a wide band of uncertainty exists. </p>
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<p>Nobody is arguing that the BLS is perfect. However, what matters, and what the BLS tries to measure, albeit imperfectly, are general technical trends. Generally speaking, I think it is safe to say that computerization and Internet-ization will become a more prominent feature on the landscape, subsuming more technologies under its umbrella. Cars and other mechanical devices will become more computerized over the next few decades, not less so. More media will be consumed over the Internet, not less. More traditional phone systems will be replaced with VoIP and other data-based systems, not the reverse. </p>
<p>But what I find dangerous - and why I entered this thread - was to simply point out the shortcomings inherent in talking to extant employers about specific skills they are looking to employ and extrapolating that into the future. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that Novell Netware and IPX networking were the hot skills that employers would have ‘recommended’ that everybody learn. Now, practically nobody really cares about those skills, not even Netware itself. Extant employers, by definition, include only those employers who exist today, not those who have yet to be founded. As I said before, I am confident that in 5-10 years, one of the most influential tech companies in the world will be one that doesn’t exist today because it hasn’t even been founded. You can’t talk to employers who don’t yet exist. Searchenginewatch is a prime example: I strongly recall stern proclamations made that the search engine space would be dominated by such firms as Yahoo or Alta Vista. Whoops. </p>
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<p>Uh, the prior growth of smart-phones has little to do with the growth of mobile apps. Razr had basically no (successful) apps, and while the Treo did, it has clearly been eclipsed. Palm even dropped the old PalmOS platform in favor of the new webOS platform. </p>
<p>What makes the present growth of mobile apps interesting is not merely that smartphones have grown in popularity - which is, frankly, of interest only to the vendors and providers themselves - but that the smartphones have become a delivery vehicle for open innovation. Anybody can build and launch an Iphone app for relatively little cost. The SDK and all of the hosting and delivery services are provided by Apple itself for only $99 a year. What that means is that you clearly don’t need any outside funding to launch at least a prototype Iphone app. Well over 3 billion total apps have been downloaded in the 1.5 year history of the existence of the platform.</p>
<p>Uh, I just fired it up right now, and seems to me as if I’m able to use Cuil just fine. </p>
<p>And that’s the point. Sure, we all agree that Cuil made a major PR mistake in hyping the search engine before it could be scaled, and a better strategy would have been to simply have stayed in stealth mode. But that’s not the point. It’s not clear to me that Cuil is a significantly better search experience than Google or Bing even now. If it was, more people would be using it. </p>
<p>Take Facebook and Twitter - both of which experienced plenty of outages, especially in the beginning, and periodically even today. Yet they offered enough unique features that people kept coming back to them despite the numerous outages. Today, nobody really seems to remember or care about just how unreliable those sites were in their early days. </p>
<p>Let’s keep in mind that the vast majority of Internet users are not tech cognoscenti. They don’t visit a website merely because of its media hype. Therefore, most of them have never heard of Cuil, do not know about its notorious outages of 2 year ago, and, frankly wouldn’t care. What matters is whether Cuil is useful to them now. Similarly, most Facebook users don’t know and don’t care that Facebook had a major outage 2 years ago that extended for an entire day throughout much of the world, and most Twitter users don’t care that Twitter was functionally unavailable during the 2008 Macworld conference. What matters is how useful Facebook and Twitter (and Cuil) is to users today. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Facebook and Twitter are popular mostly due to social connections. People use Facebook and Twitter because that’s where their friends are, and if their friends were to leave those two sites, perhaps because of downtime issues, then they would leave also. Cuil has no such social properties, but is rather an individual website experience. I don’t really care if my friends use or like Cuil. The fact that they use it (or not) does not change the experience for me. All I care about is whether Cuil would be useful to me. So the fact that Cuil may have soured some people due to poor response time in 2008 doesn’t matter to me right now. </p>
<p>The point is, at the end of the day, the outages were not Cuil’s differentiating factor. Every major web company has had serious outages - including Google. But if what you offer is compelling and differentiated enough, people will come back to use it. Nobody cares about how unreliable Facebook was when it was first launched. Similarly, if Cuil was a clearly better search engine today, I would be using it, without caring about whatever problems it may have had 2 years ago. Why would I care? That was the past, and has no relevance to how useful the service would be for me today. </p>
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<p>But that’s not what you said before. What you said is that people should be speaking to existing employers, which is not the same thing as speaking to people who are setting trends. As I said before, new technologies and trends tend to be set by future employers or future divisions that don’t yet exist.</p>
<p>If you go back and read what I wrote, you’ll see that I made mention of talking to the very people who are creating the innovations (ie. the software engineers themselves), and not “extant employers”, per se.</p>
<p>It’s funny that you mention AltaVista, because if you spoke to some of the top Google people, you’d find out that they worked for AltaVista, back in the days when it was a part of Digital’s SRC. A good deal of Google’s success (in search quality and coverage) can be attributed to work done by AltaVista people. So if you were talking to those AltaVista people, you would have gotten some insight into what knowledge and skills were important for getting a position in the search industry.</p>
<p>If I wrote that, what I meant was that they should be talking to the software engineers within these companies who are doing the innovative, groundbreaking work, not just generic “software managers”. I’m sorry if I did not make that clear. I think I have clarified this in subsequent posts.</p>
<p>Well, experts differ here. People I talk to – software engineers and others who follow technical search technology – believe that Cuil made a gross error in overhyping their engine too soon. As seasoned search vets (former Googlers, AltaVistans, etc.), they should have known the risk of making claims about their engine that could not be fulfilled. If you leave a bad impression in people’s minds about your Internet service, they won’t bother to use it, especially if there are better functioning alternatives. Yes, Facebook, Twitter, etc. had (and have) outages. A significant difference here is that people had much lower expectations of those sites, especially in their infancy, than they had of Cuil. And for what it’s worth, my comments about Cuil were a response to your claim that being unable to support your userbase doesn’t matter, based on what happened at the time of their big PR blitz. These issues matter when the userbase has high expectations of the service.</p>
<p>But at least one of the points I’m trying to make here is that you won’t learn any of this information from the BLS.</p>
<p>“But at least one of the points I’m trying to make here is that you won’t learn any of this information from the BLS.”
You realize the point of the BLS report is to give people a basic idea without making them learn all the minutiae, one of which you and sakky have been discussing at some length in this thread. If everybody who wanted a job had to go out and learn the myriad things affecting employment, I imagine unemployment would increase.</p>
<p>To illustrate, since the post in which I said I wasn’t referring to the BLS salary statistics, you and sakky alone have produced approximately 5096 words of information for potential job seekers to digest.</p>
<p>The BLS report, on the other hand, produced only 3050 words when discussing software engineers and programmers.</p>
<p>If your argument is that the BLS data is inaccurate, that’s one thing. If it is that it’s incomplete, the argument is sort of silly, since summaries are usually lacking in details. We can imagine a thousand other tales like the one you’re telling before one gets even a reasonable understanding of employment and salary. Not to mention the time and money involved in asking people first hand!</p>
<p>Most people don’t have the time to do what you’re saying or the desire to get results as accurate as you are claiming are necessary. In any event, I don’t see the BLS data as being a bad zeroth-order approximation. People can have their conspiracy theories about government, but I really believe that if the data was worthless, they wouldn’t do the report. (And if you don’t like the projections, ignore them. The current data is probably much more accurate, and you can usually draw short-term conclusions from that.)</p>
<p>Here is a simple gut-check approach to answer these questions from the OP. If we focus on computer-related engineering jobs, including SW Eng. jobs, then
On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being strongly disagree and 10 being strongly agree, how do you rate these questions?</p>
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<p>Anyone care to rate?</p>
<p>I’m thinking a 6-7 for computer/SW eng. jobs, with regular engineering jobs rated at a 4. (Pre-Y2K Dot-Com burst, I would have put computer/SW eng. jobs at an 8, roughly).</p>
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<li><p>I’d rate this at about a 5. There are a lot of jobs being outsourced… but I am to believe these are (a) not the majority and (b) not the best jobs. Programming, for instance, is actually a dying field in the US, as well it should be. Software engineering, however, is increasing. EE job growth is hampered by outsourcing as well, but again, I doubt that the jobs that are going away are the most desirable ones. If anything, outsourcing will make it harder to break into the field, and may make graduate training the norm in these fields.</p></li>
<li><p>I would little to none… I’d rate it at a 2 or a 3. Yes, if there weren’t outsourcing, there would be less risk of being laid off and in theory there would be more openings as well. But another thing to consider is that for a lot of companies it would be a financial shot in the foot not to outsource, and that could have repercussions on the job market as well.</p></li>
<li><p>I’ll rate this a 0, or a 1 if that’s the lowest. Computing is the future of our economy, not the past. Even if it gets to a point where the US is no longer producing physical (or logical in the case of software) artifacts, I believe that design and R&D will do well here forever. Furthermore, outsourcing only makes sense as long as there are developing nations where it makes sense to outsource… you’d think if these people got enough of our work, and it was such a bad thing for us, it would be a correspondingly good thing for them, and help them expect a higher standard of living. In other words, I wouldn’t expect developing countries to be developing forever…</p></li>
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<p>Auburn: this is from wiki, so you can guess this is a short list of sub fields in EE:</p>
<p>5.1 Power
5.2 Control
5.3 Electronics
5.4 Microelectronics
5.5 Signal processing
5.6 Telecommunications
5.7 Instrumentation
5.8 Computers</p>
<p>apart from 5.8, which one is outsourced? ( enough to say that EE is a bad field )
and 5.8 is directly related to your major. But the fact is that there are many fields that need EE’s right now in USA especially in Power and control. Outsourcing is not as bad as off-shoring which happens to CS majors mostly. India anyone?. And as far as manufacturing ( EE ) goes, that has been off shored for a while now. No bigs news there, yet there are opportunities. </p>
<p>Heres something else, Civils are least to be outsourced, yet they dont comprise a significant number of entry level job demand. How would your concept work with that? Every major has a trend in the economy and jobs like civil move parallel to it. Just like Aerospace E. when there is a new budget raise/cut for the agencies that hire them ( defense and AA). But its stupid to make a decision based on market conditions - thats like selling something before its even packaged.</p>
<p>Edit* I agree that it shouldn’t be concern for a good student if he/she is getting a job just because an H1b is in the waiting room. If your good, your good. Enough said.</p>
<p>^ Guessing, I’d say electronics and microelectronics are pretty vulnerable. And while the manufacturing industry is being offshored, it isn’t gone yet, and there are still jobs to be lost to offshoring. The BLS says that the growth of jobs in EE is lower than in some other engineering and software fields due to “intense foreign competition” = outsourcing (euphemism). Maybe the BLS explains more carefully the trends by subfield… I don’t know.</p>
<p>I’m not claiming that these constitute the majority of the jobs in EE or that these jobs are desirable anyway. There are software jobs that are being offshored at a magnificent rate - programming, the manufacturing of the software world - and I really think it’s for the best. For the record, I don’t think that EE is a major that leads to bad job prospects, quite the contrary: I think EE is an excellent major for getting a well-paying and rewarding job after graduation, as much so as with any technical major.</p>