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your nephew is lucky, not everyone is graduating from the top schools and going to work for MSFT. Across the board, engineering is in decline as a profession. Middle aged ones are being offshored, college bound kids are not entering the programs. I see nothing that will reverse this trend.

I know what you mean. I was a software developer from 1990 through 2001, working primarily as a high-paid consultant. Then the whole thing just turned upside-down in 2001. 80% of new development was for internet applications and the requirements of employers became incredibly stringent. They wanted people who already knew everything about web development. There also seems to be some unspoken but very real age discrimination against people over 40 in software development, and I was in my early 40's by 2001. I had to give it up--there was just too much new stuff to learn and it wasn't worth the effort to me because I had alternatives open to me.

Fortunately I had made quite a lot of cash from consulting and stock investing in the 90's and I sold a lot of stocks in '99 and 2000 before the bear market started in the summer of 2000. Now I'm an entrepeneur doing a few different things at once: real estate renovations, stock investing & trading, and some oil & gas investing. But if I hadn't invested my income well during the 80's and 90's and then sold in 99-2000, I would be in tough shape today. I'd be working away learning all this new web development software, fighting age discrimination, and I probably would have ended up working in some really cold place where young people don't want to work (like Milwaukee). Yes, it's tough out there in engineering and software development. You have to work long and hard and be one of the best in your field.