about electronics

I know new EE graduates being offered around £25K at the present time. This was also the starting salary in the late 90's.

Around 2005 a number of countries were admitted to the EU, causing an influx of supposedly skilled workers. Companies took advantage of this to recalibrate pay scales.

At the moment only an idiot would study EE (if they intended to work in the UK). Even if they could obtain work as an EE they would earn more (much more) in the trades (electrician, plumber, car mechanic etc.).

Wasn't it classically about $5? I see that in old brit novels.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

This looks interesting:

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Isn't that what they *should* do? The market, in turn, should recalibrate skillsets (sadly, a longer term investment strategy).

But, the trades take a toll on your physical being. Ask a 60 year old electrician, plumber or car mechanic how much of the job *they* do vs. delegating to an apprentice?

Most engineering *design* jobs (not just electrical) can be outsourced and done remotely. You don't need an on-site presence, given that you can shuffle your "product" back and forth electronically. In the 35 years I operated my business, I don't think I met more than one or two of my clients. This, despite having to ship hardware prototypes across country (some being the size of clothes washing machines).

So, if someone on the other side of the continent -- or, other side of the *world* (e.g., India) -- can do your job, why would you be surprised that an AI can do it as well?

What has value isn't the "grunt work" that is involved but the process, inspiration and ethics. (Do you think some anonymous face in India cares about your task after he's completed it? Any more than an AI would??)

PhD students about EE in the UK are not idiots. They are not paid highly. Money is not too important to them. (S.

And the Ph.D. is an internationally negotiable qualification.

Once you've got it you can go off and do a post-doc in some country which is still doing manufacturing.

Back when I got my Ph.D. (1970) the UK was one of those places. My wife pulled the same kind of trick. Of course, she had a US Ph.D. and did rather better and eventually got head-hunted from the UK to the Netherlands in 1993. From an economic point of view she got head-hunted by Germany because she became a director a Max Planck Society institute, but it happened to be located in the Netherlands, some 8 km west of the border with Germany.

What would be more useful is the quintiles (or deciles) data, not just the median, because quintiles quantify the spread.

I also wondered what the difference between programmer and software developer might be.

These need quintiles as well. The plumber median number looks like an apprentice.

Joe

You end up with an N-dimensional dataset as location (and available positions!) plays a big role beyond just "skillset". Pick a region/area and that shifts up or down significantly. And then you have to start looking at total compensation, cost of living, etc. I.e., numbers alone are a bad way to pick a career. The BLS site has more data; my friend just wanted me to "talk some sense" into his kid (though likely didn't like my advice! :> )

Software Developer

CNA

DBA

EE's

Computer Programmer

A programmer writes code *to* a specification. (Sadly, as most projects don't HAVE formal specifications, it means a programmer just writes what he *thinks* he should be writing)

A Software Developer *designs* the software solution. "Architects" the

A 3-month bootcamp and I'll bet anyone (even accountants!) can write code (in whatever language) to satisfy a SPECIFIED set of requirements. There's no "thinking" involved, just following someone else's WRITTEN thought process. The "Do-this-to-get-that" bootcamp mentality.

E.g., I use VMM to fault in TEXT (from a semipersistent store) "on demand". A common approach in "big machines"; less common in smaller systems that just copy a NAND FLASH into RAM and run with that. This lets me economize on physical RAM ($$$) by not loading code that isn't used (d'uh!): Why load all of the code that lets a user alter settings if he's happy with the settings that he's already selected??? (All of that is DEAD CODE!)

But, I *know* that the "startup code" in every process will only be executed ONCE (or, this can easily be imposed on such designs). So, they "must" linger in the logical memory space even though they are effectively useless, there. And, tie up REAL memory (as their contents *must* be preserved, somewhere -- right?? We don't want to have to add a backing store just to preserve "read once" memory!)

So, I change the *architecture* of the system so a process *can* (but is not REQUIRED) tell the system when it has reached a point the preceding contents of which can be discarded.

A "programmer" likely won't consider CREATING something like this *or* have access to mechanisms that would support it without the system architect having put those in place. A *good* programmer will recognize the value of EXPLOITING such a mechanism, if available; an "average" programmer will just focus on getting his code to work (efficiency not an issue likely never having considered the consequences/costs of HOW he writes his code).

Plumber, Pipefitter, Steamfitter

Note they (BLS) aren't consistent about how things are categorized (and I have no desire to sort out the discrepancies/differences beyond pointing out the types of pays and openings available to the kid).

Lots of data there but too hard to organize it in a way that lets you explore the various "surfaces" in N-space.

Yeah, that's helpful. Master Plumbers do very well, and while new work stops during recessions, but when toilets stop working, plumbers start working.

A missing dimension in the BLS data is geographic region - pay scales in NYC exceed those in the South by a factor. I'm beginning to wonder what purpose these BLS statistics are meant to serve.

Joe

But, you have to invest in an apprenticeship, etc. before you get there -- and hope your employer NEEDS another (given that a Journeyman can likely do the same work at a lower wage)

I think that's why all of the trades show "average growth" instead of the demand driven growth of other occupations (can't factor recessions into "projections")

I think there was a "tab" for that but I didn't dig deeper. As I said, my interest was to show "the kid" the range of pays instead of just arbitrarily *picking* a career choice "in the dark" (though that's how

Absent them, how would anyone know what they should expect to pay, earn, plan, etc.?

Note the trend in education seems to be to produce what employers are looking for *today*. I guess the thinking is to replace your workforce tomorrow with folks who have tomorrow's skills... <shrug>

Hmm. Maybe a better (more convincing) source is The Wall Street Journal, which publishes an annual ranking of colleges et al sorted by how many months and years it take to repay their cost using the added income due to the added education. Unfortunately it's behind a pay wall, but local libraries can get it.

Joe

Sigh.

What it -- and any of these "numerics" miss -- is the value (to the future employee) of the *type* of work he'll be doing and the conditions under which he will be doing it. IMO, *that* deserves an outsized emphasis in any decision that will drive ~1/3 of your waking hours for the next 40+ years! One can usually adapt one's lifestyle to different income levels but if you hate going to work each day, there's little you can do about it (save change to another job in the same field as changing fields is often considerably more complicated).

Personally, I can't imagine how someone could become an accountant. But, my mind/personality thrive on change, opportunity, challenges. Someone who wants to "leave work at the office" may find accounting a good fit!

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |---------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] | |>>> And, as I've said, "anyone can write code" [. . .] | |[. . .]" | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|

The Daily What The F-word alleges that a transition from a forest ranger to a producer of source code is not successful. (It alleges that this really happened.)

|---------------------------------------------------------------------| |">>> By way of comparison (no "formal" post-HS education required!): | |[. . .] | |>>> "Landscaper" $ 38,470 1,296,400 4%"| |---------------------------------------------------------------------|

Yikes! I know a landscaper scientist who migrated from Poland to Portugal to become a PhD student in landscaping (yep - a Ph.D. in landscaping), who used to be paid no more than 980.00 Euro per month from a doctoral scholarship, not counting social security of not much more than 100.00 Euro per month. (S.

That just means that he/she wasn't able to be commercially successful at it. He was too "inefficient" for The Market to make use of his efforts.

But, that doesn't mean he COULDN'T write code!

At the opposite extreme, I would claim that *few* can write appealing novels or produce blockbuster cinema -- even if "backers" were no object. I see these occupations/efforts as requiring an entirely different mindset and skillset -- not one that could be picked up in "Learn how to program in 24 hours" (paraphrasing a series of modern tutorial books).

Last night, I watched "John Dies at the End" (JDatE). The *novel* is something I can imagine few people could ever write -- let alone come up with the underlying premis. Yet, the film adaptation showed an even greater skillset to take that as a starting point, "visualize" it, tweek the parts that would not have added value and come up with an enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

Ditto "Rubber".

I am not awed by techical people as I see their skillsets as learnable and teachable. But, some of these "artistic types" are just off operating on another axis completely! No amount of effort on *our* axis will ever close that gap!

Landscapers, here, tend to just be "grunts" -- moving dirt around. A "landscape Architect" has a more abstract job of sorting out what to put where.

Which is to say, skill sets which you can see yourself learning. My impression is that you aren't as awed as you probably ought to be.

They are operating in an environment which you know very little about. If you did some of the preliminary work that gave you more insight into that arena you might be able to form a more realistic idea of the talents involved and required.

Rowan Atkinson was well into an M.Sc. in electronic engineering at Cambridge when he made the transition into comedy. The skill sets may be closer than you think.