All of these professions run in cycles.
for a time, there’s a shortage.
Then salaries go up, attract new folks.
Kids take it up in school.
then over saturation because a new way is found, or OFF SHORING
Then the pay is crap, so nobody studies it.
Then the cylce begins again.
Remember when Nurses were over-worked, underpaid and treated like crap? Ask any Nurse over 60, they’ll tell you.
Now good money paid for marginally tained folks, Nursing schools are packed, and the push for foreign workers to slow the salary increases is everywhere.
That’s exactly right. Presumably there are still physics majors, who could be repurposed to EE in a pinch. The dominance of CS over EE probably reflects the software (versus hardware) focus of the tech sector right now:
As a former EE, now retired, I have an idea as to what may be going on. I struggled to bill just $20/ hr in the nineties when I had my own company. The competition was over the internet with India where they had some very capable guy’s billing less than me. Just about anything I did could be put on the internet and done in India overnight. That happened a lot.
The only place where they can’t replace you easily is in the building industry, the power industry and anyplace in the military/industrial complex as they usually required a security clearance, or they didn’t want any of their blueprints on the internet for security reasons.