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
1. Became web developers
2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China
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 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.
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 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 :)
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.
Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China
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.
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.