What do you do for a living?

I was curious what the most common occupations were in the states and as I started to dig through BLS data I discovered they produced the table already. I'm not surprised to see retail at number 1 and food prep and food service at number 4 and waiters at number 6. I guess I'm surprised elementary school teachers even made the list (this is from 2010, I wonder if it will drop for the current year) and very surprised any management type occupation made the list at all: operations managers at number 12. Given the disparity in mean annual salary between that and everything else it seems like not a bad job to get into.

 

What do you think, does this look like what you thought it would?

Mechanical Engineering Employment and Pay

Continuing this week's theme of jobs jobs jobs for all you hardworking engineers, I was curious what the outlook had been in my own discipline. I already covered employment and salaries in most disciplines between 1999 and 2010 but wanted to zero in on the mechanical engineers.

Mechanical engineers have had a bit of a bumpy past. The general trend is up but it hasn't been easy. My personal theory for the boost is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have acted as stimulus programs for mechanical engineers. Our own Works Progress Administration putting us to work building tanks and humvees and fighter jets and bombs. The first major climb lags us entering the wars but is pretty strong. I give the delay to the delay in starting Department of Defense contracts and actually funding companies.

Maybe the post 2006 boom is due to the surge (I'd have to look it up). Trends in the automotive industry could also be strongly responsible as well as oil drilling, coal mining, etc. I think the strength even in the recession shows the numbers benefit from more than just commercial development alone. For comparison I pulled the civil engineer's chart over the same period of time.

So same boost up from about the same period on. This one has got to be thanks to housing. The quick and consistent line up and the drop right at the housing crash has had a big effect on the employment of civil engineers. How about our friends the sparkies?

It ain't easy being a sparky. The dot com bubble burst and it hurt. A couple of little climbs later and the recession hits and they are knocked back again. Still, given how heavily commercial electrical engineering is it's probably got a much more sustainable path to growth than defense dollars and government bailouts of the auto industry. Something to keep in mind.
Next a quick look at pay for mechanical engineers:

The bottom line is inflation adjusted. Without that the skyrocketing wages look pretty crazy. But even with inflation engineers managed a 10.5% increase to their mean annual salary over the last ten years. What? You're probably thinking. I'm a sprocket and my salary hasn't been going up. Could be what with the recession and choosey employees they're more likely to hang on to somewhat older and more experienced engineers in lieu of hiring younger ones or keeping young ones on. That may not be the personal experience of older engineers, but even if we're taking very minimal trends it can add up. And 10% increase over 10 years for the gain of 10 years of experience seems kind of like a bargain on the employer's side of things.

Still, the war might be to thank (or blame) for the strength in mechanical engineering employment. ME employment is up over 15% from 1999. Despite the bust civil engineers are employed at 19% more than 1999. And as you can see in the graph electrical engineers broke just about even (actually a drop of two tenths of one percent). I don't think engineers should go into a field based on national numbers and national salaries. Locality can make a huge difference. And of course it's important not to chase money but to do something because you think you'll enjoy it.

Engineering Employment Over Time

How has engineering fared as a career during this recession? How has it been doing over time? Must be jobs week here at Design. Build. Play. Since I was so hard on software "engineers" before I made a separate category from today's Bureau of Labor Statistics data. I'm including programmers separately (but still there) from computer/software engineers (which here includes both systems software and applications). So how do we engineers do?

As you can see computer and software engineers have done particularly well. I'd grant the decline to programmers as being employers are ever more demanding specific degrees from their programmers so it's more just a transfer between categories. The recession has only continued the downward trend from before.

In comparison, civil, electrical and mechanical look almost flat. Of course they aren't really. So maybe you went into engineering for the money, how's that been doing? Here's some not adjusted for inflation salaries over time.

Again it's the same breakdown by discipline and again you see the obvious levelling off of the programmers' salaries. Mechanical and civil seem tied like in the previous graph and now electrical has a definitely higher salary. Is this because it has lower employment compared to the other disciplines as seen in the first graph? Does scarcity drive electrical engineering salaries up?

Engineering Jobs by Discipline

I talked before about what states are hiring engineers and where all the engineering jobs are. Best estimate there are something like 44,000 engineering jobs open nationally right now. The census says that in 2008 84,000 people graduated with engineering degrees. Engineering shortage? I think not. Probably my 44,000 search was not broad enough to include the kinds of jobs engineering graduates might go into. But still, that's nowhere near a shortage, is it Corporate America?

So what kind of engineers are being hired right now? Software engineers.

Making up almost half of open jobs software engineers have it made. If we have a shortage of engineers, maybe it's that kind of engineer. The problem is we're recruiting people into a very diverse field without specifying what we really want or really need. I was curious how this stacked up to major choice and pulled a some numbers from a local university to give a breakdown:

You can tell mechanical and civil/structural majors are heavily overrepresented. People are probably going into these fields and finding the jobs aren't there. This is all magnified when certain geographic areas (Detroit vs Silicon Valley) have very different focuses even when colleges might be more diverse. Chemical and electrical engineering majors are a little closer to the national average of open jobs and software/computer engineering heavily underrepresented.

I'm a bit torn by including software engineers here. There's a big difference between "computer engineer" and a programmer. Many job openings ask for a degreed engineer when what they really need is a programmer. But if they're asking for an engineering degree that becomes a part of the requirement that job seekers have to meet even when it's unlike other engineering disciplines. Given the low numbers though it's possible those with other degrees, or no degrees at all, are filling the gap for these open software jobs. That is if anyone is even hiring.

Appendix A: Where are the engineering jobs?

Ask and ye shall receive! A full version of the list available for your ranking/competing pleasure. I only hope this means arguments about whether South Dakota is better than North Dakota (it's not) start erupting. Sorry for the jpg, while I am an excel pseudo-wizard my blogger skills are lacking.

Yes I know Washington DC isn't a "state" and I left out some exciting US territories. Sorry!

Where are the engineering jobs?

So who's hiring engineers? It's no surprise in raw numbers that the top five states with engineering jobs open* include some of the most populace states with large metro areas and of course the center of automotive engineering in the states.

But how does that compare to the population of those states? Washington DC tops the list at the most engineering jobs per capita. Illinois is still doing pretty good and though it's not the list Michigan pulls in at #6. As for bottom of the list Montana comes in last but no region is left alone here with southern states and northeast also represented. The big population states of California and Texas fell in the middle of the list.

*Total job openings per state were pulled from CareerBuilder as a basis of estimate. Total state populations pulled from Wikipedia.

Excel-Fu: Selection Boxes and Cost

I thought it might be handy to post some of the tips and tricks I've been learning lately in various software programs. Because in order to teach myself I had to go scouring the internet for different sources, and maybe someone else is trying to do the same thing (plus the best way to remember something seems to be to teach it to somebody else, or if that fails write it down in the indelible ink of the internet).

Say you're considering building an assembly and have different options for different parts that would result in total cost differences. For my example I'm only using two components, but if you had a lot you might want something more automated. In the end what I needed was several drop down boxes where each option would reflect its cost and then add to a total below.

So here's how you'd do that which should be helpful if you've been trying to implement drop downs in Excel, use a lookup table, or figure out how to pull and use data from a selected drop down value.

In order to use a drop down you need what Excel considers developers tools. In order to turn this tab in, you go to File-> Excel Options. There, depending on your version of Microsoft Office, it might be under the popular tab, or might be under the "customize ribbon" tab. You want to have the "show developer tab" checked.

Then you go into your developer tab, click "insert" and there should be a drop down of various options. The one I'm using is the Form Controls -> Combo Box. But I imagine a lot of this stuff would work on either types of controls and boxes.

This will turn your mouse into a little plus sign. Go ahead and drag how big you want your box over wherever you want it. Then right click it and select Format Control.

But let's backtrack. First you're going to need some data for all this. I have two sets of options for my two widgets. You can locate this in another sheet of your excel document, but here I've stuck mine on the same sheet so it's clear what I'm doing.

Now back to your format control. It gives you three options to fill in in the "control" tab. Input range, cell link, and drop down lines. If I'm building the box for my first widget (options A through C) my input range is I3:I5. You can type this in, or just put your mouse in the box then drag your mouse over the cells you want. For right now, you don't care about the cost, only your "names". Cell link is the actual cell where your drop down value is going to be stored. I usually select the cell that seems most inhabited by my drop down box. Drop down lines is the number of values I have, 3 in this case, and I usually select 3-D shading cause why not, it's pretty.

Now you've got a drop down box that has some values in it that you can select. If it's bugging out at this point, you've probably messed something up in switching between sheets, so re-check your values and make sure they're still calling out the cells you want.

Next you'll need two columns to the right. One I've hidden because its sole purpose is to grab the "name" from the drop down. The problem with excel and drop down menus is it just correlates values to numbers. If you try to copy the value of your drop down it will just be a number of 1 through N where N is the number of options you have. In order to get that number to correspond to the value, you have to use a kind of silly workaround formula, the OFFSET formula.

In this case it's =OFFSET(the cell directly above my "names" table,the cell that my drop down box is storing its info in,0). The 0 is the actual offset value. Or in my case, =OFFSET(I2,C3,0). This is all important too because it means you need a row above your names table as you can see I had above. Now no matter which value you select in drop down, the column should mirror that value. Since you don't really need this column again later you can hide it (right click the whole column, select hide).

Next to callout the price value of your component you'll use the tables I showed a few figures up. This is the next colum over and uses the VLOOKUP function.

So the values I want here are =VLOOKUP(the value I'm converting, my WHOLE lookup table, 2, FALSE) or in my case =VLOOKUP(F3,I3:J5,2,FALSE). The 2 is because the value I want is in the 2nd column. If you were selecting a larger table you could specify any column you want. The F3 cell is where I used offset to grab the "name" value from the drop down. The false is to indicate I want only an exact match (for the name) rather than a partial match.

So now you can have drop downs with selected values, connect them to prices, and of course you can use a sum value (=SUM(G3:G7) ) to nab your costs and make a total further down.

Some of these methods are probably cheap workarounds, but still I hope you learned something. If you didn't and were bored sorry. Maybe you can write in with your badass software tricks.

Perspective

There's been a lot of discussion in the news lately about the James Webb telescope. It's planned orbit is about 1.5 million miles from earth. I was curious how this compared to existing space objects so I rigged up a scale representation. The larger dotted circles are just for clarification of finding the much smaller centers and locations of the objects. The moon is about 250,000ish miles out from the earth and the hubble telescope, at 366 miles, would have been visually on top of earth in this view so I left it off. What do you think, does it properly convey the scale and ambition of the Webb telescope? 

DARPA Thursdays: 3D Holographic Battle Planning

One of the challenges facing the military is how to effectively communicate a battle plan. If you're going to a physical place it's helpful to have as many visual aids as possible. One of the things DARPA has tried to develop along these lines is a 3D holographic display. And they've succeeded.

Not that 3D holographic display, this 3D holographic display.

It's called UPSD Urban Photonic Sandtable Display. It allows a 3D display that does not require any special glasses and allows up to 20 participants to stand around, look at it, and interact. Or interact so much as freezing, rotating, zooming, etc. Freeze and enhance! (I know mixing my Star Wars metaphors with my Star Trek quotes is just asking for it).

It can be any where from six inches to six feet and is meant to process data (possibly population or medical data) and interpret in like a 3D graph. They're working on incorporating that with previous 3D technology they've developed for mapping that is supposedly being used by troops in Afghanistan.

So what does this mean? Doesn't look too impressive admittedly at the moment but clearly the capabilities and options are there. And while now it's being developed by the military for urban missions I could see it being used by city planners and developers or by aid groups who are going into devastated areas. I can think of a wide range of applications from medical professionals looking at treatment and spread of disease or just basic medical care in a geographical area to a Dilbert-esque style marketing corporate tool who wants to see how well they can sell widgets in a city and monitor real time influence or purchase of their product to find better ways to appeal to the consumer.

The technology and the implications so jaw dropping even Nien Nunb can't keep his mouth closed.

Blogging about STEM

With all this talk about women science bloggers a few have been mentioning a problem. That it seems as if women who blog about science do not get the same attention/audience that men who blog about science. And that women who may start off blogging about science will eventually be compelled to blog about women in science. So I was curious where I stood on the balance.

 

From the pie chart (mmmmpie) I'm actually surprised how much engineering fills up my posts. Of course this is post only, not based on reaction/audience. And I'm surprised how little bitching about work is in there. The women thing I did not foresee when I started blogging but it's something I have strong opinions about so it doesn't bother me it's part of the balance. Clearly I'm not blogging about my cat enough.

 

If any readers/commenters would like to pipe up with suggestions or what they'd like to see more/less of, go right ahead! Like I told my professor today in lecture after he criticized my design and then pseudo-apologized, go ahead, I can take it!

Face Time

How can I get shit done when you keep inviting me to more meetings?

Or the alternate title, me goofing around with excel instead of doing all the work I should be and am complaining about being overwhelmed with.

But really, the chart design elements in Micrsoft's Excel 2007 are pretty sharp. They make my data look like Fucking Data, man! I'm easily impressed. But then most of the people who read my powerpoint presentations share that same quality.

Data Dump

I've been staring at lines of data lately and looking for trends. No, not economic trends like the above, but abnormal values or sustained low or high values of hardware that might explain equipment failures. Often the values from a test track each other, much like the large dips and jumps in the DOW Jones Industrial Average can be seen mirrored in gas prices. Both are no doubt related to some third value of consumer demand or consumer confidence or perhaps even industrial production or health of the economy depending on how far you want to extrapolate. Both are charging up right now, leading many to wonder if there isn't a bubble in the stock market. But gas prices we tend to expect will continue to rise as the economy recovers. We might even see rising gas prices lead to rising inflation which in general would not be good for the stock market.

 

But it's difficult to make any predictions on data you can't see. I've talked before about the problems of data extrapolation which I think are especially true when something pertains to the economy. And yet here I sit, strolling through a massive amount of data looking for trends or trying to predict when failures can occur. Even when it might be a binary failure that no data can predict, I must look for trends nonetheless.

By the Numbers

This graph is from Wikipedia (h/t to BikeMonkey). I think it illustrates nicely where the highest marginal tax income rates need to be to get us "back to good times" like the neocons so desperately want. The period of American growth when we were the world's leading manufacturers, scientists and engineers. We were putting men on the moon and making stealth fighters without personal computers. If we wonder at the decline of the middle class, prosperity and the American dream I think we need only look at this graph.

Life Tracking: Gas & Electric

Who knew my penchant for online bill pay would be a treasure trove for understanding my own behavior. Four years of using the internet to pay gas and electric bills provided the data and a few lines and colored blobs provide the context. The blue blobs are winter and the red summer.

 

Despite living in a warmer climate, and having access to air conditioning at the last two places I lived at, it's the winters that get to me. Also despite living in a temperate climate for a year where heat and AC weren't really a requirement, I fared no better than I fare if I purchase junk food and tell myself not to eat it. I'm not good at denying myself further comfort if the opportunity is there. Clearly I've been the most "green" by not having the option of heat or air. Fans and space heater use aside (and likely rising costs of utilities) I'm setting a new low trend at my current place. Will I see a resurgence this summer? Will that shiny new space heater I have my eye on increase my bills? Also, now that I can track it, will I be more aware of it and more likely to reduce my usage?

Life tracking: PTO

That blue line is my balance of PTO (paid time off). That purple is a hypothetical line from May if I hadn't used any of my time off how much I would have now. I haven't even taken a vacation! All this is school and other obligations bleeding away my time off. It would be interesting to drop lines in finals weeks and see how much of a hit I'm taking from those alone.

What's your city smell like?

DARPA is looking for a way to detect chemical attacks by gathering data on what various cities smell like. First they plan to make smell profiles for major urban areas. Then they'll need to take this data and figure out how to put it into some sort of map that a constant monitoring system could use. Theoretically these systems could detect any changes in the chemicals in a city's atmosphere rather quickly. I'm just curious to see the results once they have the data.

The problems with data extrapolation

I've been doing a lot of curve fitting lately. Mostly to create a pattern to improve software or just some stuff for school. But I've noticed that it's pretty easy to find the curve you want, rather than the curve you need.

Take the housing market. Plenty of people out there have a vested interest in it picking up again. But plenty of other people have an interest in it staying down. I get it. Some people are underwater and want/need it to go up again. And plenty of other people would like to buy and want it to go down even further to make that easier. Or just want to be right in their feeling that the market is still overinflated.

Take Michael David White, over at HousingStory.net. Here's his graph for where he thinks prices are going:

I'm curious how he came up with this fit so I exported the data myself (you can too from the Case-Schiller home index website) and played with it a little. For fun I also pulled some data from the government's various census collecting sites that you'll see later.

Case-Schiller has only been collecting data since 1986. I grabbed the data from my hometown county, which looks pretty similar to his curve fit but might be more representative of living in a higher cost of living than looking at the whole nation averaged together. If you assume from about 1997 and on is an abberation, and do a linear fit from 1986 to 1997 and extrapolate it on into the future you get a line that looks very similar to what White came up with.

Clearly that would mean a huge drop in home prices if you were looking only at the first 10 years of data. That yellow line is inflation, this fit would seem to say inflation should rise faster than home prices. Well what if you fit the whole thing?

 Fitting the whole collection of data would seem to say homes are now underpriced and we should expect a pickup soon. I don't think anyone's anticipating that much of an increase in home prices either. Once again, the danger of looking at even the whole data set, the first 10 years, the last, or whatever portion you pick. No matter what trying to predict can seem pretty silly.

Here I just grabbed inflation with both the average and the median. Looks like White could have grabbed the average for his data as well, but as it's rising slower than inflation you have to wonder at that. And what's inflation mean anyways? Should se assume home prices will rise any faster or slower than inflation? What about food prices. There's been a lot of talk that food has stayed relatively cheap for Americans, what if we compare total food inflation to home prices.

If we looked at the rise in food prices, home prices don't look that far off or too far inflated. Does White think there's a food-price bubble? Does he think food prices are going to come crashing down anytime soon? What about healthcare?

I don't hear anyone speculating that healthcare costs are going to go down anytime soon. There's been plenty of talk about the "housing bubble" or even the "higher education" bubble. But you don't hear anyone saying you should pull out of healthcare stocks or just wait for that big crash in healthcare prices that's going to happen anytime soon.

And that's the danger of data extrapolation. It's plenty fun to graph some data and draw some lines. If you have a specific agenda, it's not hard to find something to back it up. But truth is it's just not a good way to make a conclusion. I expect Mr. White gets a lot of press and blog hits from people who want to buy right now and are really hoping prices will drop even more. They might or they might not. But these lines could tell any story you wanted them to.