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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

What's the connection between electrical engineering and cheap soldering in China?

That's like saying it's cheaper to hire Chinese to type into a keyboard, so programmers are no longer in demand.

If you think hon hai precision industry co. ltd (aka foxconn) is merely doing "soldering" in China you ought to catch up with the market reality. Almost everyone I know who is employed at Apple (in California) with electrical engineering degree, goes on multi-month annual visits to Chinese plants.

You still haven't clarified this. Are they going there to supervise the manufacturing process or to learn from their peers? Is Foxconn doing EE design for Apple?

Apple recently opened a new R&D center in Taiwan. Which shows that not only production but also research and development can move / will eventually move to other countries.

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/12/16/apple-taiwan-factory-ole...

OP never mentioned cheap soldering - where did you get that from? The issue (as I understand it) is that the design and manufacture of most electrical components is happening offshore. The biggest fab in the world is in Taiwan. We aren't talking about cheap soldering, we are talking about the semiconductor work that drives most hardware.

We are starting to see a few hardware startups but most of the jobs created are still overseas as manufacturing happens abroad. Most of the EEs I know switched into CS fields because of reasons like this. I wonder where the future of EE lies.

OP said 'cheaper to manufacture'.

Cheaper to manufacture means something completely different from soldering. That's a huge and nonsensical leap you make there. Soldering isn't even the largest cost associated with electronics and semiconductor manufacturing.

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