How "SAFE" is engineering major or engineering job???

sakky
Sun, 24 May 2009 01:05:35 +0000

Safety is a relative term: there is no engineering job that is perfectly safe.



I want to major on engineering in college, but my parents are always telling me that engineering is not a safe field anymore.



The perfect rejoinder to your parents is: what’s the alternative? Would they rather have you major in one of the liberal arts? Is that safer?



especially when all the products are being made in China and most of the computer engineers are in India



Both of these claims are clearly false. Granted, China’s manufacturing output has been rising swiftly, but that doesn’t mean that the US manufactures less. In fact, until the recession, US manufacturing output was the highest it had ever been in its history, and that output will surely rise apace when the economy recovers. Just because one country manufactures more doesn’t mean that others manufacture less, for the demand for manufactured goods is not fixed, but rather rises over time, as the demand for consumption is insatiable.

Secondly, most of the computer engineers are not in India. The confusion seems to stem from how different countries define the term ‘engineer’, with community-college-equivalent technical training deemed as ‘engineering’ within certain countries. By a fair measure, the US actually graduates more engineers than India does.

[About That Engineering Gap…](Businessweek - Bloomberg)

The truth is, outsourcing is, at worst, only a minor threat to engineering employment. The far more “dangerous” threat is simple technological obsolescence, which ironically receives relatively little attention despite - or perhaps because - it is fostered by the engineers themselves. How many mainframe developers have lost their jobs because of the rise of the PC, and consequently how many PC developers have lost their jobs because of the rise of the Internet as a software development channel? How many traditional fixed-line telephony jobs have been lost because of the rise of mobile phones and VoIP? How many videotape and VCR manufacturing jobs have disappeared because of the rise of the DVD and DVR? How many people are still employed by the typewriter industry? The number of jobs shifted to another country by outsourcing is a tiny fraction of the number of jobs that are lost completely due to changes in technology.

With that said, the real goal is not to fret over which particular engineering discipline may be outsourced or eliminated due to technological change, but rather to obtain a strong educational base upon which you can flexibly shift your career to whatever happens to be the hot new industry of your career, whatever that may be. It also means developing marketable and topical skills whenever the opportunities present themselves. That also means not being locked into one particular discipline.

Think of it this way. 15 years ago, practically nobody outside of academia had even heard of the Internet, much less actually used it. But those who had a strong technical base and were willing to aggressively develop new skills were able to capitalize on what is arguably the most important technological development of this generation.