EETimes' Salary Survey: Turnaround's first glimmer?
2003 Salary and opinion survey
by Bob Bellinger, EETimes
Silicon Strategies
09/01/2003, 12:12 PM ET
Don't break out the champagne yet, but the report from the engineering trenches in Austin, San Jose and Chicago is that more new product development projects are getting the green light these days.
One-quarter of our 842 respondents saw an increase in new R&D projects in the past year. That's not a robust number -- in 2000 38.5 percent of the survey respondents reported new product starts -- but 25 percent in 2003 is better than the 16 percent last year. In Europe, 22 percent of our respondents say their companies have started new projects.
"After three rounds of layoffs, cost-cutting seems to have hit its peak," one U.S. respondent reports. "Economic indicators show business improving slightly now, too."
The U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.4 percent in the second quarter, providing a glimmer of encouragement to risk-averse employers.
More than a fourth of this year's surveyed engineers have seen decreases in new R&D projects. But that's better than in 2002, when a third encountered cutbacks. In 2000, only 16 percent saw reduced R&D.
Half the U.S. engineers and managers in our survey tell us their current project is on time. And that's true pretty much across the board of product categories, from computers to automotive and consumer electronics. At one-third of our respondents' plants, the project is late. We have to assume the remaining 15 percent are early, don't have a set deadline or aren't aware of a time goal. On average, our readers work on a given project about nine months, the same as in previous years.
It may come as a surprise, but more than two-thirds of our readers' projects are meeting budget projections, with another 17 percent actually below the allocated cost levels. Some 14 percent are struggling with budgetary overruns.
Staffing is another matter. Overall, 47 percent consider their projects to be understaffed in these tight times, with only 19 percent satisfied with the current levels. When we examine those numbers more closely, we find that 60 percent of managers want more people.
In search of the killer app
This year, we're hearing a lot of cries from engineers along the lines of: "Where's the next killer app?"
"For continued growth at anywhere near historic rates, a new 'big' technology (like PCs or cell phones) is needed," a reader writes. "Otherwise we're facing a structural industry change where growth is slower and most products are commoditized."
"There's no breakthrough technologies on the horizon," another observes. "While computing power increases, the attendant applications that can make that power useful are lagging."
We asked engineers and managers for their opinions on various technologies to see whether any of them might spawn a killer app. According to our readers, the technologies that will see "broad usage" include:
streaming media, 69 percent; system-on-chip, 64 percent; embedded memories, 63 percent; Linux, 59 percent; 3G wireless, 56 percent; nanotechnologies, 53 percent; XML and open scripting languages, 51 percent.
Technologies that our readers think will remain in the niche category include:
reconfigurable communications switches, 67 percent; reconfigurable processors, 57 percent; embedded Java, 57 percent; 3-D packaging, 57 percent; MEMS, 52 percent.
And here is what readers think will flop:
Web-based design tools, 20 percent; Bluetooth, 17 percent; embedded Java, 12 percent.
Some technologies ended up on more than one list. The strong support for Linux was illuminating; nearly six out of 10 respondents consider the language a strong candidate for broad usage. On the other hand, our readers appear to have consigned Java to the niche category. The support for system-on-chip is no surprise, since SoC is already seeing broad use; but the engineers in this survey don't seem ready to embrace web-based design tools or the Bluetooth communications standard.
But the question still remains whether streaming media or embedded memories hold the potential to be, or generate, killer applications. One reader asks us to consider this: "Sometimes coming up with too much new technology does nothing for the greater population. Maybe a good trade-off is to improve or reduce costs for existing technologies, since tech advances are far ahead of society's acceptance of them. Examples include 3G or 4G wireless. It is good to always be thinking ahead about new technology, but in watching how the rollout of these technologies occurs, there has to be more of a balance."
How accurate are our readers? Their record is spotty. Here were the "hot" technologies of 1994:
wireless communications; interactive TV; HDTV; 3.3-volt technology; multimedia.
More than 80 percent of the 1994 engineers bought into those technologies as hot. The wireless-communications field, while a treacherous frontier for businesses, can still be seen as a leading-edge technology. But it's taken 10 years for high-definition television to gain traction. Multimedia is certainly a prevalent success. We got to 3.3-V technology and went beyond it. But does anyone remember what "interactive TV" was supposed to be about? It's here, but in a morphed form of DVDs with multiple, user-selected endings to movies, Internet communications and X-Box games.
Skills that pay big
Ultimately, engineers are paid based on skill. Design and development skills that pay the best include:
deep-submicron IC design, $107,152; ASIC design, $97,270; DSP design, $92,155.
One reason the wages are high for these skills is that they are not widely possessed. Only 10 percent of our respondents claim the capability to work on deep-submicron IC designs, 28 percent work with ASICs and 28 percent claim DSP skills.
Here are the most common technical skills and the salaries those skills command. Bear in mind that respondents could answer in more than one category because they possess multiple design skills:
hardware/software co-design (60 percent), $88,520; C/C++ (58 percent), $87,948; systems integration (53 percent), $90,062; analog design (51 percent), $87,607; embedded-systems design (50.7 percent), $89,135; RF wireless design (20.8 percent), $90,273.
There's also a chicken-and-egg situation. Most of the highest-paid engineers by skill also live in the highest-paying region of the country, namely Silicon Valley. We suspect, however, that a top-notch deep-submicron IC designer would command six figures no matter where that designer lived.
Many of this year's engineers are ambidextrous handling hardware and software. While 50 percent describe themselves as hardware-oriented and 15 percent see their work as primarily software-oriented, 35 percent work with both. As you might expect, the most hardware-oriented engineers in the survey come from the components field, at 73 percent.
Just under 9 percent of the respondents describe their principal job function as "software design," but a good portion of our sample spends more than a third of their day on software tasks, especially in integrating software with their new hardware. No more tossing the hardware over the cubicle wall to the software side.
At $111,000, design and development managers easily outearn staff-level engineers ($88,500). Given that the engineer with no business skills has gone the way of the bubble memory, which skills help divide a manager from a staffer? (And we don't mean the ability to handle corporate politics.) Here are key division points:
Budgeting. More than 70 percent of our managers hew the bottom line, vs. 26 percent of staffers. Personnel hiring. Some 68 percent of managers recruit, interview and hire; 28 percent of staffers perform those tasks. Time management of other people in their department. Bosses boss other people. Three-quarters of the surveyed managers track just how workers spend their time; only 33 percent of staffers do so. Setting of project deadlines. It's a responsibility for 82 percent of our chief engineers, vice presidents and department heads but for only a little more than half of the staff-level people.
Engineers and managers share common ground in writing reports for internal use, resolving technical trade-offs, exhibiting team leadership, managing projects and making oral presentations.
To some extent, these skills are learned on the job; perhaps they're learned in an MBA program. Engineers promoted into management acquire these talents as they go. But in previous salary surveys, they've admitted that "people skills" have been some of the most difficult ones to conquer.
Leading a group of engineers is like "herding cats," one manager complained last year. Add upper management, salespeople and manufacturing foremen to the mix, and you have a jungle.
In the end, EEs get the $35 DVD players, life-saving medical devices and laser-directed weapons out the door, mostly on time and on budget. |
