Doug has an excellent point. Are the salaries trending higher because of layoffs on the junior end of staffing? Could be the rise in average salaries is a function of layoffs at the lower end of the pay scale.
We don't have any data on unemployment, Jack. I'll be parsing out more info from the survey in upcoming posts, and there will be a broader article in the August print issue of Design News.
I'd like to see user selectable criteria for two or more demographics to generate salary information. For example, a geographic region, years of engineering, and a discipline to arrive at a salary. Or discipline, number of employees supervised, and years within a company. The existing single demographic related to a salary is certainly informational, but shallow given the data that has been collected.
Seems like engineers are in a better place than a lot of working Americans, at least according to a report I saw posted today on the Huffington Post. The report says the National Employment Law project crunched some recent Census numbers and found that low-wage jobs grew faster (3.2 percent) than higher-wage jobs which fell by 1.2 percent from the beginning of 2010 to the beginning of 2011. While it is still tough out there, it's nice to know that engineering skills can still command a premium.
It's good to see the income average still rising but I agree in order to truly understand what we are looking at one would need to correlate the numbers with the average of years worked. Perhaps, as stated previously, layoffs of younger workers or younger workers leaving has resulted in the "old guard" just picking up more work.
As much as I want to believe engineers have it better than a lot of Americans working out there, I believe engineering is one of those jobs where quite often the focus is to continue with the same or greater output, using less resources and a faster timeline. Then after things don't quite work out, we have designs that fit right into the designed by monkeys articles.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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