Comment by programmertote

> there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance

How much electrical engineering is there in these jobs? I knew a few electrical engineer at university (weirdly they outnumbered the software engineers 3 to 1) and some of them told me they could get work for a local power company, but it was mostly looking at spreadsheets and not really using anything that they'd learned.

“Fun” fact: pure EE is no longer a major at MIT

Similar qualifications here, but no internships. Couldn't find anything after grad school in the early 2010s (and still nothing in the mid 2010s after trying again). Went into telcom and I'm a happy little coder now. Nice to actually feel appreciated in this field compared to EE where it felt like I was always working my butt off for scraps.

I don't know if there is a somber write up. But from what I have heard from a lot of people, is that jobs designing and making say PCB boards and electronic circuits just don't exist. They are all in Shenzhen. Those American firms that have American engineers still, seem to all involve flying to those factories to help fix problems, and are dead end jobs. At least thats my impression.

Chip design/semiconductors/etc. have been a dead end in the US for 30+ years, but EE is a broad field and other specialties like RF/power systems/anything defense related are still in high demand. An EE with a PE will have an infinitely easier time getting a job working at a utility or engineering firm than any software developer these days to be honest.

Limited to non existent jobs. Not much else to say, the jobs like so many others have been exported. Taiwan and China being the electronics and manufacturing centers means design has steadily moved as well. Ask any board house in the west how things are going, the ones that are left that is.

Does a want to immigrate necessarily mean that the US is the most favoured destination for the world’s intellectuals?

It might, but how do you measure that?

I just want to point out that germany and US have a similar number when adjusted to it's respected population size (I think it's even a little bit higher).

I am kinda surprised to see it so far on the top

Unfortunately, I spent more than a trivial amount of time wondering what an Einstein of Adtech looks like.

But not for the hardware that powers the white collar. China is taking those.

Well, hopefully nothing like that happens in the US - that is to say an ideologue that ruins a country by ostracizing and then removing skilled immigrants or deters them from coming in the first place. Perhaps we can examine some recent large scale survey data to determine if the US populace gives a shit.

Pretty sure the use of "Einstein" here is symbolic, not literal.

Going through the _legal_ immigration in the US is hell. Even if you're immigrating through a "talent" visa. Never mind regular work visa/GC.

You make a good point about China. It’s still an ethnostate, and I don’t see how it can reconcile such a strong ethnic nationalist identity with its own demographic crisis and competition for labor from abroad.

>if you're well-situated to make money

so basically, like everything else, you make a lot of money but it isn't a great place to live unless you make ALL the money.

We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decade or so before we started to invest into it.

>Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.

Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)

Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.

>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.

Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.

[0]https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/hidden-no-more-...

Our German scientists were better than their German scientists. We had no real science PhD programs until the 1920's. We had no scouting for young minds until the 1950's.

> Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.

Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.

I wouldn't say most native borns "built" the US. But sure, there are plenty of native born leaders who set the direction towards building such stuff.

> The US didn't win World War 2

The USSR would like a word.

Unless your ancestors crossed the Bering Strait ten thousand years ago, calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing.

If you want to pick an era of technological progress to make that point maybe don't pick the one that involves America becoming a superpower by putting a bomb invented by Jewish refugees on a rocket build by ex Nazi scientists after a physics revolution where be basically got to go and take all of Germany's top talent lol

Well yes, that's why China's in the lead. We willingfully gave it up because corporate decided it was too expensive to pay american talent. They started the death spiral towards "No American wants to work in EE anymore".

And has less cultural cachet.

Compared to CompE or Comp Sci?

I never studied the hard sciences very seriously, although I feel like in retrospect I could have done so at much lesser proficiency than someone with much more encouragement, discipline, and interest, so my path of starting with web/software and then diving into electronics and EE would feel quite different

[dead]

> Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.

It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen.

The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land.

There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway.

Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public.

An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.

There were a ton of chip making startups in the 1970-1980's. Now the processes are much harder to access so you have fabless.

It's just maturity. You can't invent the op amp twice.

The same analysis makes me doubt those wages are likely to prevail for software engineers. They are the result of a particular time and place.