Jobs, jobs, jobs. World leaders should be concentrating on job creation, as everyone appears to agree. FluxCorp has been hiring, but mostly in China and India. In North America, it's been a real small trickle. Still, we've added a few to our numbers. In my pre-Christmas post on A New Friend, we hired an aging Ukranian-born (not Russian-born, as I had originally suspected) analog designer locally in Ottawa. By next week, we'll also be adding another warm body to the Ottawa team -- a Chinese-born contractor. And this time, he works for my team! Yeah! Both of these guys have fairly strong accents. Meetings are going to be fun! And both of these guys are experienced engineers. According to the anonymous commenter in my post on A New Friend, s/he thinks that North American "engineers with a passion for analog design (and in my case testing) all quickly found out that there is no longer such a thing as an entry-level analog job; and so we all got forced into other lines of work/volunteer projects."
I agree. It's tough for new electrical engineers of any stripe these days. But in early 2010, we did hire someone right out of school. In my post on Women in Engineering, Part II, I mentioned that I had interviewed two female and one male candidate for a junior analog test engineer position located in northeastern United States. We didn't hire any of them. I did interview one more person afterwards, a young woman nearing the completion of her Master's from UCLA, and she was by far the best of the bunch. We gave her an offer, but she was unable to start for several more months. The reason? She's a foreign student from India, so FluxCorp had to jump through the necessary hoops to get her an H-1B visa.
For quite a while now, there's been a lot of complaints about the H-1B work visa and how it drives down American wages by allowing companies to easily import cheap engineering labour. IEEE-USA is a particularly loud voice in its opposition of how H-1B visas are being used. I certainly won't wade into this whole debate, partly because I'm not American and partly because if I ever move to the US to work, it won't be on an H1B visa. I'll just mention that in this particular case, we weren't out to save money. We simply hired the best person for the job. And we hired locally; it's just that she, herself, isn't local.
Sorry if this post is meandering between outsourcing, job hunting, experience levels, women in engineering, place of birth, and work visas. But I do have a point somwhere in here. And it all goes back to the same question that I asked just before Christmas. Where are the locally born engineers? Or am I living in a parallel universe where all engineers come from alien lands?
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There's a plethora of local universities in my urban area. The problem actually is an overflow of mechanical/aerospace engineers and perhaps a lack of EE/software. People with EE degrees who are also comfortable in software are highly sought after around here and I suspect they don't even need to attend job fairs. It's always the MEs/AEs that I see who are struggling to get jobs. I think it's just an issue of what companies are based here along with typical percentages of different kinds of engineers coming out of college. The more willing you are to move, the more likely you'll find a company somewhere where there are no universities who desperately needs mechanical engineers.
I have to ask, why didn't you hire any of the entry level people? Just nobody good enough so your company decided to hold off hiring anyone at all? I have seen much the same thing here, despite hoardes of graduating engineers in this area (as well as this being a magnet area for where people want to move). I guess I am a little sympathetic, but also a little irritated that entry level people no longer qualify for entry level jobs. Somehow the bar has gotten higher.
We didn't hire any of the entry level people simply because we only had one position open and the one which we eventually hired blew the rest of the field away.
The bar wasn't all that high. I don't expect to be wow'd, but I do expect entry level EE candidates to have a firm understanding of circuit fundamentals and good familiarity with intermediate level topics. The trouble is, two of them failed miserably and one was marginal. Perhaps they needed a refresher, but they should've done that before the interview. We would've hired the marginal candidate if the young lady from UCLA didn't show up.
As for the bar moving higher (or lower), it's always been that way. Supply and demand. During the dot-com bubble, a warm body with half a degree was enough to have companies fight over you. The tide has turned.
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