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Comment by programmertote | Hacker News Reader

The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditional engineering routes in the US.

I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.

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Everyone I know that was in EE falls into two camps basically:

1. Became web developers

2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

> 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

It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.

For nearly a century Europe incinerated itself twice over.

> That is no longer the case.

For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.

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.

Well, what's the alternative? Live in some poor country with a happy and contented existence? Fuck no, I want money: happiness is for suckers

You have the metaphor backwards. Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent? It's the brain drain out of the US to worry about, not the influx of immigration.

> Where do you go if you're a talented American and your own country continually does not want to pay for your talent?

China is the only country that pays even remotely competitively. Yes, even including all the nice benefits of living in a european welfare state, yes including the other anglo colonies.

Makes sense, it's just basic economy to pay for spent and get it. Something the US is continually giving up.

Still, their culture basically does make it so certain types of people simply can't exist there. And I hear there's a healthy dose of racism as well. Nothing unique to China, sadly.

The alternative is to go to another first-world country that makes it easier. E.g. Canada or Australia.

>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.

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.

Einstein didn't emigrate to get rich, he emigrated because the Nazi's took over Germany. Germany had the best universities in the world before they took the path of self-destruction. So that was a second, separate event that helped America.

America stills gets a lot of immigrants.

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

So use a different example? Einstein isn’t interchangeable, lol.

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.

The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. 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. 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.

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.

Our Jews from Odessa were better than theirs too.

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

If you only came across ten thousand years ago, you are just a colonist that killed and displaced the people who came across sixteen thousand years ago. But that said, native born has a definition, and it is where you were born, not where your parents, grandparents or grand^14 parents was born.

my grand^10 parent's didn't exactly "immigrate" her per se. They were "invited". I guess they were "persuaded" to help fight the occasional war though.

It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future.

Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.

I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.

>Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective.

Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.

It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.

It seems like you have misread my comment and think I have a particular thing against any group of people.

That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.

I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.

Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...

We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.

This type of solipsistic kumbaya slop is running face-first into reality, fast. People are different. Groups of people are different. Nations of people can be very different. They differ in meaningful and important and obvious ways. You'll live to see these differences continue to manifest in ways that will doubtless surprise you.

And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.

Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.

My ancestor was a Punjabi who immigrated in 1920. He managed not to blow up the country.

What’s magic about the Bering strait?

It's always a treat knowing every comment you get is going to either be triggered or purposely obtuse.

Usually considered the way that first humans got to the landmass, way back when.

You would never apply this reductive, solipsistic lens to any non-white ethnicity or culture and I think you know 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-...

I hear you, I took umbrage with that comment as well. But I think it’s fair to consider whether we are doing enough for Americans just as we are welcoming newcomers to settle here at the same time? My experience as a native born Californian, raised by a single immigrant mother living in urban poverty is no, we do not. Granted I escaped poverty by self-funding my engineering education (Federal Loans and working full time) but it took the better part of my 20s to do so, at great personal cost and risk. In many ways that experience taught me just how unfairly stacked the odds are against the working poor, let alone their children.

I am really curious how welcoming do you think US is to new comers.. Most of the early immigrants in 1800s and early 1900s were blue collar workers (exactly like the people coming from the south of the border). Do you think there is any part of the system that is welcoming to them?

The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.

I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.

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.

That team was one of three that was developing rockets. The others were air force and navy.

1,200 men of the same ethnic and religious background of the median American, brought over in a one-time arrangement in the wake of the most destructive war ever fought, versus 100,000 Indian H1B visas granted annually. That's just India, not counting other countries or visa types. Okay. Sure. Totally the same. We couldn't have made it back to the Moon without a million indentured IT workers.

I really have no clue what you're trying to say. You presented as a bad historical example for your argument, landing on the moon. I showed how that was a flawed example and now you're talking about a people from India in IT and the Artemis program and an accomplishment of it that hasn't even happened yet. Looks like your trying to pick an argument of H1B visas with my comment that had no mention of it.

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

> The US didn't win World War 2

The USSR would like a word.

The USSR never did pay us back for the massive, unprecedented, war-winning aid we delivered to them under Lend-Lease. Half a million trucks, thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airplanes, millions of tons of food. And what did we get out of it? An implacable evil empire that sat like a boot on the neck of Eastern Europe for another 50 years after our "victory."

  A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $672 billion in 2023 when accounting for inflation) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.

  In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies.

  Material delivered under the act was supplied at no cost, to be used until returned or destroyed.

  In practice, most equipment was destroyed, although some hardware (such as ships) was returned after the war.

  Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to the United Kingdom at a large discount for £1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States, which were finally repaid in 2006.

  Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

This is all correct. It’s also hard to believe that any other country could have sustained the casualties the USSR took and it saved lives for the other allies by diverting troops to the Eastern Front. The US had nearly 500k deaths, the USSR (post war borders) had something like 26 million.

Both sides needed each other. From a US perspective, trading money for lives likely seemed worth it.

The USSR was an objectively terrible regime, and most the Russian governments that have followed on from it have been too. Underestimating the deaths Russian leadership is willing to tolerate has proven unwise a few too many times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

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.

> 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.

What do you think a nation is? Is it a sports team or economic zone that hands out name tags to whoever steps off the boat with the right attitude? Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny? I submit to you that it's the latter, and no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.

> Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny?

I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.

> no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.

Looking at many of the longer-lived nations and empires of the past—having a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, common destiny? They had none of those. They were a conglomeration of people speaking different languages, from different lineages, with different cultures, different histories, and practicing different faiths.

>I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.

"What is water?", said the fish

Wait, you think America is that? Dude, you need to get out more, meet some new people.

Today's Einstein ARE immigrating to US for such positions as finance, adtech and management, ones that explicitly produce no physical artifact.

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

Is adtech the new pejorative for Facebook & co?

Adtech is a pejorative on its own.

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

Exactly. Something is penalizing or inhibiting manufacturing in developed countries. That something is just regular progression on the ladder of classical infinitely extending three-sector model[1] and gradual obsolescence of its lower rungs, but that is problematic, and without healthy preceding sectors for each, it's just a measuring contest being held in a skydiving.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector

That is still the case and no where else is even close.

https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world...

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

Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.

why would someone pursue a route that's harder AND pays less AND has far fewer jobs available?

And has less cultural cachet.

I disagree. From what I've seen, the lower level you go, the more advanced it is seen by other developers. As the copypasta goes:

At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries.

From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers.

Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.

that's by other developers, but I think in the mainstream know nothing culture people have an image of "coding" that's more prestigious and hackery than EE?

I don't know a single person outside the tech bubble who sees "coding" as something prestigious

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".

Hard and well paid gets a flood of people pursing it so difficulty can't be the only explanation. Finance, actuarial science, medicine, and law get plenty of applicants. I think it's that CS is an office job that pays well and is in-demand.

Nah I did EE and then CompE (which was just replacing some later EE classes with hardware design stuff) and EE is not "actually really hard" - although people like to put it on a pedastel.

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

Both?

I studied both, can't say for sure EE was harder. Some courses in computer science were extremely hard for me (complexity, discrete math) and some courses in EE engineering were equally hard (most of the physics courses, analog circuits and more)

Both degrees can be made super hard, as hard as the school desires them to be...

Hit the nail on the head. I went to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany for a master's in "nanoscale engineering" which essentially boiled down to a master's in being a fab line manager. I finished the degree since it was only a 3 semester program and I was getting paid for research work, but almost immediately after chatting with alumns that went to go work at IBM/Intel/etc it was pretty clear that software engineering was a much more lucrative and less stressful career.

Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand

I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because:

(A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.

If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.

Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.

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

Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.

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.

> They are the result of a particular time and place.

Absolutely, it can't go one forever. But it might go on longer than you think ;)

To be fair, we've already seen things change: today most entry level jobs are gated by degree requirements.

It's no longer enough to just be computer savvy. Probably because there increasingly a lot of computer savvy people today.

> 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.

I believe you’ve just described the RISC-V project, though I could be mistaken.

RISC-V is the ISA, which is a solid first step. What you need is a production-ready fully open source whole device, so that someone who wants to fork it only has to change the parts they need to be different instead of having to also re-engineer the missing components.

The startup costs are probably astronomically higher for a startup doing custom chips. Even if you're fabless.

There is probably also a lot fewer customers.

There is no shortage of businesses and private people who need a CRUD app to track something. We probably won't run out anytime soon :)

And even then, there is probably also a long list of factories that would like to automate something using robots and software.

How many use cases for custom SOCs are there really? It's a lot cheaper to customize the software, than it is to customize the hardware. Which is kind of the point.

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 jobs needed for chip manufacturing aren’t primarily EE. It’s largely chemical engineering with specializations related to semiconductor tech. EEs use the tools developed by fabs to make their products, but those are typically separate companies (or, in the case of in-house fabs like Intel, basically run as separate companies).

I think your explanation about large numbers of motivated students pursuing lucrative Non-STEM degrees is incomplete without mentioning the cost of an undergraduate and graduate STEM education in the USA.

The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering.

These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.

> I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO).

Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.

My hot take as to the reason EE is a bit of a dead end in the US is that the options outside of the handful of primary employers are limited. It is very capital intensive to run a semiconductor fab, design chips or assemble electronics at scale. Therefore the employer has all of the leverage. The equipment and/or factory worker infrastructure comes first and the engineering teams are just a cog.

Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.

Really appreciate this comment and perspective! In the larger context of immigration and brain drain in other countries, how the US also has one, but of a different kind. Ultimately, it's a loss of potential. I'd somewhat disagree with the directionality of the correlative/causal relation, though. But what can be said is that the US also experiences a knowledge drain towards plainly lucrative jobs. I'd wager that it was/is a cyclical effect that just worsened over the decades and that neither engineers moving to fintech nor low-paying engineering jobs were/are the sole reason.

What you said seems contradictory. You open with the premise that intelligent youth go the finance / CS / MBA path instead of engineering and then say that those who do go into traditional engineering can’t find jobs. Couldn’t it be that people don’t go into engineering because there aren’t any jobs? Wouldn’t the lack of jobs explain the low salaries and thus the preference for more high paying alternatives?

Your argument doesnt really make sense : there are no EE jobs in the use, therefore no one wants to pursue EE jobs, therefire there are no EE jobs.

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