Declining Electrical engineering employment

EE grads occupy an interesting identity crisis. While on one hand they want to pass off as ECE (computer-engineering) candidates with decent programming skills, they also want to identify with being an "applied math" or "Alogirthm" engineer.

Unfortunately in today's world nimbleness in learning new s/w skills is valued more than having specific expertise is "speech coding" or "image segmentation", etc. Further more, it is easier to be a generalist as a pure CS person, than being a hard-core EE person. Bottom line the "tool" has become more important than the "solution".

Inevitably, being a specialist means the labor force is fragmented, and purely from a relative comparison to the CS "supply-demand" situation, its a relatively "low-supply [specialized] - low-demand" situation.

It not that you are undervalued or underemployed as the article might suggest (btw I wouldn't read too much into the first quarter results on unemployment figures/ considerations on how many to include in labor force, etc.), but its more like being a "lightly traded stock, with not much liquidity, high big-ask spreads".

"The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally."

Exactly this. I ran into the exact same problem when I graduated from EE, where employers wanted 20 years experience, familiarity with every piece of software out there, and to pay just minimum wage. When I did finally land a job, I sat around for weeks reading every manual and piece of documentation I could find - it was the only way I could do my job. I never did receive any training, and quit after 4 months.

I ended up picking up work as a Web Developer, and here we are. Even though people are people, I've found myself much happer in the "developer" atmosphere. As much as I would like to get back into EE, the bureaucracy of most of the "good" companies will keep me away.

The article is all over the place. Is it talking about EE grads in the s/w engineering space? Because I don't see any decent coder-engineer having trouble finding a job in todays environment. And what's with the disjoint paragraph on immigration?