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Contract Engineers, get out

Eavesdropper
I had a job interview today, and I candidly told about other candidate's job hunting experiences. They were grave.
 
It seems that electronic (industry) engineers are being hired and fired in droves. Brought on for one specific task, and then immediately let go, so I was told.
 
In a world soaked in electronics I find it so odd that the job market is so harsh to so many.
 
Have several contract engineering jobs myself, I have found that it is not an overseas outsourcing of the jobs, but must be some other intangible reason.
 
I was told that almost every engineer that they interviewed had a minimum of 5 or so contract jobs as of recent. All short lived, never reaching the full promised committeemen of that contract.

 
Is this the state of our industry? Thoughts on why it is this way?
 
Another, more survey like question; how many contract jobs have you had?
 
E
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    A complex question you could write a thesis on.

    Here are some random sometimes relevant thoughts to explain part of it...

    Big rich companies are so financially complex, they need to be run by accountants and lawyers.

    Executives are not motivated to take risks, because that is the one thing that jeopardizes their lucrative jobs.

    Technology these days is so complex non-technical executives do not understand it.

    Executives are not keen to risk investing in something they know nothing about.

    It is safer to buy a small company that has proven their technology is marketable than to hire engineers to develop the next big thing.

    So far this doesn't sound like a steady demand for engineers.

    Small companies are often started by a tech wizard who needs some engineering talent to get his big idea to market. This is a risky low budget venture with all kinds of failure modes, all of which imply short term employment for engineers. If the small company makes a go of it and gets bought out, the original mentors and champions retire, abandoning the engineers to the whims of the new management, which is no longer interested in big R&D budgets. They just want to milk the golden goose for maximum quarterly profit - often at the expense of long term profit.

    Still no sign of steady demand for engineers.

    These are sort of the extremes, but many companies exhibit some of these characteristics.

    Of course there are stable engineering jobs like say a plant engineer, if that is what you are looking for, but every industry segment has dynamics that dictate what the turnover rate will be.

    What has been your experience?

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  • 0

    A complex question you could write a thesis on.

    Here are some random sometimes relevant thoughts to explain part of it...

    Big rich companies are so financially complex, they need to be run by accountants and lawyers.

    Executives are not motivated to take risks, because that is the one thing that jeopardizes their lucrative jobs.

    Technology these days is so complex non-technical executives do not understand it.

    Executives are not keen to risk investing in something they know nothing about.

    It is safer to buy a small company that has proven their technology is marketable than to hire engineers to develop the next big thing.

    So far this doesn't sound like a steady demand for engineers.

    Small companies are often started by a tech wizard who needs some engineering talent to get his big idea to market. This is a risky low budget venture with all kinds of failure modes, all of which imply short term employment for engineers. If the small company makes a go of it and gets bought out, the original mentors and champions retire, abandoning the engineers to the whims of the new management, which is no longer interested in big R&D budgets. They just want to milk the golden goose for maximum quarterly profit - often at the expense of long term profit.

    Still no sign of steady demand for engineers.

    These are sort of the extremes, but many companies exhibit some of these characteristics.

    Of course there are stable engineering jobs like say a plant engineer, if that is what you are looking for, but every industry segment has dynamics that dictate what the turnover rate will be.

    What has been your experience?

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