I'm a EE and had no problem finding a job and neither did any of my classmates in my EE program (early 2010s). I also didn't exactly go to anything approaching MIT, but it was an engineering school and I had a decent GPA. Particularly, there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance. We have an energy transition going on, so that helps. Having an internship probably helped me too. I acknowledge that things might have broadly changed.

> 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.

It depends on what exactly you do as the industry is so vast.

It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where yeah, you use a lot of spreadsheets and Python scripts and SQL to help automate software and analyze the results. In a lot of cases you don't really need an engineering degree, but it helps a lot in understanding what is going on when the results don't make sense. Getting the engineering degree is also just really good training for the kind of rigorous thought processes needed for solving open problems.

There are also plenty of jobs in power that are closer to what you would consider engineering. For example, you might have to go to the substation switch yard, help supervise a crew installing new transformers, help design a microgrid...etc.

I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world. It's kind of similar in computer science where most graduates are basically just gluing library code together instead of writing their own software from scratch in C. I recall reading somewhere that the famous SICP course moved from Scheme to Python precisely because of the change in how people coded now.

> I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world.

Thank you for saying this out loud. It took me years to recover from this, and I "recovered" mostly by giving up and accepting that, unlike fiction, real world doesn't have to make sense or offer interesting, fulfilling work.

Now I just dream that one of these days, I'll build a house, and I'll design it with a Jefferies tube, just to scratch my itch.

I'm with you there friend! To continue the Star Trek analogies, I think a lot of modern day engineers (mind you not all) are at least partially just business folks, but instead of being Ferengi we have a more Vulcan like mindset and fill a different niche within the business in understanding the technical side of things in a way that few have an aptitude/interest for.

I work a lot with electricity markets though and find it to be very interesting and challenging as the field is surprisingly vast and incredibly dynamic. It requires knowledge of power fundamentals as well as economics, operations research, and honestly history. It isn't at all what I thought I would do back when I was in highschool, but a pleasant surprise all the same. I do sometimes get the itch to be like the guy that invented the lotus office software who lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere and implemented his own product, but the software market is already saturated in this space. Also, I have a family now which prevents my hermit dream and that is yet another wonderful surprise and has been very fulfilling as well as maddening at times :)

“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.

Just curious, were you still looking for entry level jobs after grad school or something more in the R&D realm?

I was focused on finding something entry-level. Did a non-thesis masters focused on mixed signal / RF design and R&D didn't really appeal to me at the time

Is there a somber write-up anywhere as to the future of EE in the West?

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.

Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.

So basically fits the theme of "we gave up silicon production to cheaper countries and we're shocked those countries have surpassed us"

Does that include the EEs designing PCBs and circuits for Apple products?

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.

Plenty of chip design done in the US

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.

It would help if they didn't charge $50 for a single raw PCB in low quantity when I can have the same board not just made, but also assembled in China for a fraction of that, shipping included. Literally.

I've often wondered if that's some kind of industry inertia issue, or if there's some underlying additional cost to build in the US.

People here cost a little more. No one here does quite the volume jlcpcb likely does. Perhaps there’s some artificial market factor as well like CCP tends to weigh some scales. There’s board assembly machines made in china as well likely further reducing the cost to build out assembly lines. Perhaps cheaper sources of basic materials like copper.

Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China

I could buy that to some degree, but not to the current insane level of price disparity.

PCB production should be one of those things that is or can be mostly automated if it isn't already. Assembly is definitely already a mostly automated process. This is all existing tech. Thus the cost differential doesn't seem justifiable.

I have to think that this is very much "build it and they will come" territory if you can get within 1.5x to 3x the price, so it continues to boggle my mind that nobody has managed to make it happen.

The only blocker I can truly identify is the magnitude of the initial investment. That doesn't explain why the prices at domestic board houses seem to have remained pretty much exactly the same for the last couple of decades, though.

As far as I can tell, they just don't want the business.

The personnel that swaps part dispenser blades in the USA costs more. What's there to understand? Automated assembly still has setup costs that take real humans walking around physically.

It's more likely that the Chinese companies are offering prototyping at a loss, because they know people won't switch to a different board house, once the prototyping phase is over.

Software jobs are more plentiful, sure, but you’re discounting the extremely high quantity of EE/CE jobs available at semiconductor companies (Intel, AMD, and many smaller ones) and companies like Apple. They don’t pay as well, but they can pay quite good over time and tend to be more stable than software jobs.