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I live in the southern US, mom is a chemical engineer, dad is a mechanical engineer, and there is such a shortage here that it is not uncommon for starting salaries to go up 6-8% in any given year...even now while the economy is soft, engineering graduates are snapped up like hot cakes.
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<p>Yep there is a shortage of engineers in the U.S. in general. An unemployed engineer is pretty rare and usually just means that person hasn't been trying hard enough to get a job.</p>
<p>That actually, is flat out wrong. Engineering is only second to Medicine in lowest unemployement rates. Engineering major graduates are always going to be in demand. The jobs for an engineering major are projected to increase significantly in the next 10 years.</p>
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Yep there is a shortage of engineers in the U.S. in general. An unemployed engineer is pretty rare and usually just means that person hasn't been trying hard enough to get a job.
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Please stop this non-sense, do you know what you are talking about. I can point out to you 10 unemployed engineers very easily right now.</p>
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Congrats you must come from a very strange area or those engineers you know must not be trying to find a new job.
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<p>IME, and that of some other people I've known for many years, (software) engineers can be laid off in the blink of an eye, especially when the economy is lousy (as it is now). Look at what is happening at several tech companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, etc. The Silicon Valley is not that strange an area (or did you mean "area" of engineering?), although some others might disagree.</p>
<p>Pointing the the volatility of Silicon Valley for all of engineering is like pointing to petroleum engineers as a barometer for the stability of engineering jobs.</p>
<p>Doesn't engineering still have one of the lowest unemployment rates of any profession in the US?</p>
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Pointing the the volatility of Silicon Valley for all of engineering is like pointing to petroleum engineers as a barometer for the stability of engineering jobs.
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<p>OTOH, a sizable number of engineers are employed by Silicon Valley companies, and there is a sizable amount of concern in this forum about the stability of such jobs. This particular thread is about computer engineering, after all.</p>
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Doesn't engineering still have one of the lowest unemployment rates of any profession in the US?
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<p>Sure, but that doesn't negate my point. It is ridiculous to make a sweeping claim that unemployed engineers are somehow in strange areas or are not trying hard to find work. In fact, that is insulting to the many computer technologists who have been unfortunate enough to become unemployed.</p>
<p>How many civil, mechanical, or chemical engineers are employed in Silicon Valley? As far as I know it's mostly computer related engineers, such as EE, CE, and CS people. And, even then, their jobs have historically been very volatile.</p>
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How many civil, mechanical, or chemical engineers are employed in Silicon Valley?
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<p>I don't have exact numbers. They can most likely be obtained from a census bureau or some such. At any rate, this thread is about computer engineering, and my points speak directly to that.</p>
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As far as I know it's mostly computer related engineers, such as EE, CE, and CS people. And, even then, their jobs have historically been very volatile.
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Congrats you must come from a very strange area or those engineers you know must not be trying to find a new job. </p>
<p>You dug pretty deep to find this thread by the way it's from last month.
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<p>Silicon Valley is not strange. It's considered the center of the universe as far as engineering is concerned. Yes, I checked to see what kind of background you have when you made this kind of comment. I wonder if you actually have 30+ years of work experience or a brand new graduate hoping for a job when you made this statement.</p>
<p>I live in a neighborhood of Indian software engineers and IT guys (wow, what a stereotype haha...I'm Indian btw). These guys are seriously living the life...I don't know exactly what sector of the field they're involved in, but they're living in $800k - $1.4 million homes, driving the latest and hottest cars, often telecommute (like once a week on average...), have extremely lax work hours, are constantly partying or playing, and just seem so low stress and chill in general (these guys are in their late thirties to late forties btw). I think I exhaust more brain cells in a day than they do in a week. Don't take my word for it because the people that live in my area are probably freakishly gifted or lucky or something, but I can't help but think that computer engineering has to be a good career option (that is if material wealth is your thing).</p>
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I live in a neighborhood of Indian software engineers and IT guys (wow, what a stereotype haha...I'm Indian btw). These guys are seriously living the life...
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<p>There are always going to be people who do very well financially even when others don't do so well. Just be advised that there are potential highs and lows over the course of one's career in the computer field.</p>
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How many civil, mechanical, or chemical engineers are employed in Silicon Valley?
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<p>Well, it does seem to me that there are plenty of civil projects going on in the Bay Area. For example, public transit systems like BART and Caltrain are scheduled for expansion.</p>
<p>I don't know so much about mechanical, but there certainly is a lot of chemical engineering happening in the Bay Area. The semiconductor industry is one of the largest employers of chemical engineers, and the semiconductor industry gave Silicon Valley its moniker. After all, it's not 'Computer Valley' or 'Internet Valley', it's 'Silicon Valley'. Former CEO of Intel and Time Magazine's 1997 Man of the Year Andrew Grove is a chemical engineer. Much of the actual production process of wafer fabrication - i.e. the epitaxial growth of the silicon crystal, the chemical doping, the etching, etc. - is really a chemical engineering process. </p>
<p>Another major employer of chemical engineers is the biotechnology industry. The Bay Area is the world's largest cluster of biotech firms in the world, and the oversight of biochemical reactors is a chemical engineering process. Yet another would be the large alternative energy cohort, especially the numerous battery and fuel-cell startups, but also biofuels.</p>
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Much of the actual production process of wafer fabrication - i.e. the epitaxial growth of the silicon crystal, the chemical doping, the etching, etc. - is really a chemical engineering process.
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<p>Isn't most all of this done overseas in a couple of large facilities? I seem to recall learning in my semiconductor processing course that each facility to create semiconductor-grade silicon costs billions and billions of dollars.</p>
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Isn't most all of this done overseas in a couple of large facilities? I seem to recall learning in my semiconductor processing course that each facility to create semiconductor-grade silicon costs billions and billions of dollars
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<p>You must be thinking of the Taiwanese foundries such as TSMC and UMC. While they are indeed large, the truth is, the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world by far is Intel, and has been so for many years. Almost all of Intel's fabs are in the US (with a few in Israel and 1 in Ireland). None are in East Asia. </p>
<p>The truth of the matter is that there actually is little labor cost advantage to locating a fab in Asia, for the reasons you alluded to: wafer fabs nowadays cost about $5 billion+ each in capital expenditures to outfit, which makes the labor costs negligible. What really matters are infrastructural costs such as access to cheap electricity and water supplies (as semiconductor manufacturing consumes a lot of water), transportation networks, and proximity to customers (i.e. the OEM's), as well as tax policies and/or government subsidies. Hence, there is no inherent reason to prefer East Asia. </p>
<p>Now, it is true that Intel has numerous assembly and testing facilities in East Asia. But that is basically a process that involves significant manual labor, which means that labor costs do become an issue. </p>
<p>But even this discussion is missing the point. Chemical engineers don't just work only where semiconductor manufacturing happens. Most Silicon Valley chip firms are the so-called "fabless" design firms that will indeed oursource their manufacturing elsewhere - but they still need semiconductor manufacturing engineers onsite to verify that a particular design can be manufactured economically. After all, there is no point in producing a brilliant chip design whose manufacturing costs are so expensive that nobody can afford to buy it. That is why many (probably most) of these 'fabless' design firms still have their own R&D cleanroom (which is basically a mini-fab) onsite to verify that their designs can actually be built at reasonable cost. I know a bunch of chemical engineers who work in those cleanrooms. It's not manufacturing per se - it's really just prototyping - but it still involves significant chemical engineering work. Moreover, it also takes manufacturing knowhow in order to be able to choose which outsourcer to use. </p>
<p>As a case in point, Wilf Corrigan, chemical engineer and founder and former CEO/Chairman of LSI Logic, was one of the pioneers of the fabless semiconductor business model.</p>
<p>If you want to be a computer engineer, then go for it. You might want to think about becoming a patent lawyer--the combination of computer engineer and patent lawyer should be a very nice combination. The only field where I think there is nearly 100% guarantee of employment is working with the elderly population in health care related fields (nursing for example). Also, check out the UCSD career/internships web site/office on campus. This is where you will see the job listings and can ask what happened to the graduates of the UCSD computer engineering program. There are many
engineering related tech companies (plus the U.S. Navy) in San Diego so jobs should be easily available to you.</p>