State of the Engineer: The Young and the Restless

By David Roman, Junko Yoshida

August 21, 2006

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The single, young, energetic, upwardly mobile engineer constantly angling for better pay and greener pastures was for decades a Silicon Valley stereotype. But that image no longer holds true.

The go-getters are now in India.

The "EE Times 2006 State of the Engineer Survey" on salaries and professional concerns found that Indian engineers are confident, ambitious and anxious for better pay. With good reason: The mean base salary of Indian engineers is $38,300, less than half of what U.S.-based engineers earn.

At the same time, the climbing salaries of U.S.-based engineers can't suppress some dissatisfaction over compensation, management and overseas competition.

"We are not professionals," said Eric Gene Price, senior software engineer with Honeywell in Phoenix. "Engineers must sacrifice to keep CEOs, marketing types and bean counters living the lifestyle they are accustomed to. If you show up five days a week to work for the man, guess what? You're just hired help."

Seventy-three percent of electronics engineers in the United States received a pay increase last year. Raises averaged 4.6 percent, lifting the profession's mean base salary to $99,300, up slightly from $99,200 the year before. Only 40.3 percent of engineers got a raise last year in Japan, where the mean salary is $75,803. In Europe, 69 percent received an increase, and the mean base salary is $71,800. Eighty-five percent of engineers surveyed in India received a pay raise last year.

Issues commonly viewed as American--offshore outsourcing and the immigration of foreign-born professionals--are in fact global issues, according to our survey, which was conducted in the United States, Japan, Europe and India. Half of employers in the United States and Europe, and over a third in India, send design work offshore, our survey found.

Affirming the global scope of the electronics industry, the survey found that engineers from India, as well as from the United States and other countries, move around the world to find work.

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