EE spent so many years making sure everyone knew it's impossibly hard, the professors eat their young, etc. I've seen this in other professions where the incumbents desperately want to impose, in actuality, the uphill-both-ways life story they believe they endured. And then they are shocked when the young peace out. The military, and their insanely rigorous special warfare training. The medical profession in general.
Seriously, people, what did you expect was going to happen?
In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China. It's very difficult to find a company in the west where you could go to do an engineering apprenticeship and learn how to build cool stuff, because all of them outsourced their "building cool stuff" operations years ago. And designing things when you cannot try out your design (or when you need to wait 2 weeks for a parcel from China for each attempt) is really difficult and demotivating.
I graduated a double degree of EE and Comp Science. My final year thesis was a project with a local company integrating their custom designed GPRS module with a GPS module to demonstrate mobile tracking tech (it was 2003).
Because of the project I went straight into a hardware design job out of uni. I was designing boards for mobiles! Working on circuit design, prototyping PCBs, I was psyched!
Problem is the company was run _terribly_. 3 months in we all got put on 2 weeks forced leave and then given redundancies. Aside from dinner pretty terrible management, the economics of doing mobile hardware design in Australia just didn't stack up (we were the only company trying).
In the end there were probably 10:1 software jobs for every hardware job. Given my experience so far, I opted for software.
It has been great, I love software, but I sometimes wish I had lived somewhere that had a higher critical mass of EE work.
Very similar to me! Double degree in EE/IT, my first job out of uni was with a small company building gps chips. I actually spent a lot of time writing testing software. A couple of years in it went down the drain and I just naturally transitioned in to a software role (paid a lot better).
Funnily enough, there are quite a few Australian (and a few Kiwi) companies in the telematics space these days. Not sure how many of them are designing hardware from scratch though, versus off the shelf devices with custom firmware.
The job I used to do as a C/EE at Intel decades ago is now currently being done by PhD physicists. I think the knowledge requirements have changed quite a bit now that everything is running in quantum level problems.
I still build audio amplifiers, filters, and dabble in RF, but my day job is mostly administrative, now.
The impact of not having local apprenticeships available cannot be overstated.
I see this within regions of the US in regards to software. If you grow up in a tech hub(even just your local state one) it can seem like it was "easy" to get into computers and mod games. But the farmers son's who are technical near me where I live now go and tinker with cars and diesel engines the way I did with my dad's old 286.
> In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China.
This is what I was thinking. There are few fabs in North America anymore, so SMD work requires a lot of shipping and patience. You can also outsource EE work to China very easily and they have a long history doing this stuff, but outsourcing software is not so easy for some reason (yet).
It happened with a fair bit of mechanical engineering stuff too. (Or it went away.) For example, there used to be a huge disk drive industry in the US. Not just the big "commodity" drive suppliers but every minicomputer company used to design and build its own disk (and tape) drives.
Yep. I was about to ask this question: suppose I was born 20 years ago in a > 0.5 M people city in Europe or North America and I'm into an EE course. I'd be considering my job options for when I graduate. Which companies need an EE around me? As a non EE engineer I can think of one (STMicroelectronics is not far away from where I live.) As CS graduate: almost infinite (of which only slightly less than infinite shitty jobs, for sure.)
This is true. I went to school for EE, but was interested in Computer Science. There was a stigma to switching from EE to CS as taking an easier course because you couldn't hack it in EE. It was seen as a failure or a defeat. I toughed it out and graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but now I'm a programmer anyway. Wish I had just switched once I realized I liked CS more and saved a bunch of time.
I had the exact opposite experience. The CS dept. actively recruited me, and I didn't even realize what CS was until I had completed 2 years of study. I like CS, but had I known better at 17yo, I would have gone EE or CE all the way, because that is my interest, and there is little chance I could uncover anything on my own about electronics without the structure of university. I never wanted to be a programmer, but programming is not computer science, nor does a lucrative programming career require a computer science degree, or any degree. But every where I have seen, a computer science career requires a computer science degree or a mathematics degree, but I have little doubt there is the odd physics grad or engineering grad working as a computer scientist. Just remembered, I know a guy with a biology or botany degree that works as a computer scientist on the modeling side and has for almost 20 years. But he just does modeling, not everything CS.
> I would have gone EE or CE all the way, because that is my interest, and there is little chance I could uncover anything on my own about electronics without the structure of university
This so much. Programming is accessible, that's great. I learned as a stupid kid and it worked out fine economically.
But if I had to re-do everything, I'd go to school, and select anything but CS. I can always teach myself that. I find myself interested in many things nowadays, but almost never engage them, because I just can't, there's just not much an individual outside of reading.
I did a mechanical engineering degree and ended up programming (way better pay) which I already could do before uni. I don't regret it though - it's much much easier to learn programming on your own than other kinds of engineering.
E.g. if you got a job doing low level programming, like firmware development or even chip design (basically still programming) your EE knowledge would be very helpful.
Tinkering with hardware at home arguably used to be more accessible to the home tinkerer starting with building Heathkits. But hardware got more complex and faster and the necessary gear etc. sort of got out of reach. Arguably things like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos have made it more accessible again at a different level of abstraction. But I don't think there's much debate that software is easier for someone without the resources of a university or company to work on in general.
I was in roughly the same spot but I had to switch when I transferred schools because I would have practically had to start from scratch in CE but I was halfway done with a CS degree. Not sure it's possible to design an ECE curriculum that's easier to transfer into, take part time, or is more forgiving of early failures, but if it is I bet it would help.
Also at the time I went to school (2006-2008) there wasn't any soldering and very little hands-on anything in the courses I took at CMU and UMass Amherst. It was formulae and Verilog (more coding than a lot of CS classes).
In the Intro to CivE class I had to take for scheduling reasons we made a cardboard bridge and watched it fail to support the professor who was suspended over a pit. I can't remember a single ECE lab from the two years of classes I took. I learned a lot more from playing around with Arduino and such in the years after.
I also went to school for EE, but after a summer job doing SW, I switched to CS when I got back in the fall. I think CS (a good program) teaches you fundamentally how Systems work, independent of the substrate. EE is actually rather trivial compared to the complexity of big systems. EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits. Throw it in LT spice if you think it'll impress the boss. That's it. You need to know at most 2 pieces of sophisticated SW (schematic/PCB + spice). For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
If all you do is board-level integration of relatively low-speed stuff, then yes, SWE is more demanding.
But that's not even the tip of the iceberg in the EE world. To name a few: high speed digital (Gbps+), ASIC (digital vs. mixed signal, RTL vs. physical design, ...), RF, precision analog, both very low and very high power, photonics, EMI... Each of these subjects require deep, arcane domain knowledge on top of physics, AND lots of grinding + experience + tacit knowledge + know-how, much more than SWE.
Source: Electronics/Embedded hobbyist with an SWE day job.
The stuff about needing to know a lot more physics or arcane domain specific stuff isn't so true. If you talk to someone who's got pink sunglasses about SWE, they'll say a bunch of stuff in our industry is "arcane domain specific knowledge" to them.
You're probably romanticising it too because it's a hoby of yours, which just leads to skwes in your perception.
Source: studied EE, after realising I wouldn't like my career paths, I switched to CS. Mostly worked as SWE tho, but I did work in ab unusual and creative EE role first, before realising that most EE jobs wouldn't be so engaging
Pardon, but I don't understand the point you tried to make...
Does a software engineer have perfect grasp and understanding about every subfield in SWE? Ranging from DX to writing compilers or designing languages, SWE is an extremely broad field.
The EE domain is substantially smaller than the CS domain. It take less time and effort to be an EE "domain expert" than it does to become a "CS domain expert".
Sure, if you arbitrarily slice the pie to make it that way. The great thing is you can just semantically decide what you want to call EE and CS until your assertion is true, so you've made an assertion that is completely impossible to disprove. Bravo.
You know, I'm a microwave engineer who is currently doing CS.
I find most of these comments against my original points as me not explaining myself so well. And, I can say one thing for sure, EE's are good at downvoting! ;-)
I'm trying to say that EE, like MechE is not especially complicated. You have your theories you need to know but that's it. Yes, you can be inspired, you can figure out some trick. But: how often does an ME invent a fundamentally new mechanism? Pretty much never. How often does an EE invent a fundamentally new circuit? Pretty much never.
Now, how often does a CS person have to solve some nasty problem that has never been solved before --- every day!
I have done microwave engineering for over 20 years. I know what it takes. It's NOT Rocket Science, I assure you.
My degree (6-3) is in EECS from a small technical school on the banks of the Charles River.
So I'm not full of it when I make my statements; they come from over 50 years' experience.
Are you seriously citing a fucking MIT degree in support of your case that microwave engineering is not complicated? You went to the most prestigious engineering school in the US, if not the world. I think you've lost sight of reality. You started off 2 miles above ground level and with the hindsight of 50 years of experience beyond that, sure it might seem like nothing to you.
> EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits.
Initially I just thought you were a troll, but with this kind of experience and education now I just know you're vicious liar. I'm sure every time you made a microstrip filter, feed ramp, or antenna you just poof from Altium after looking at a datasheet and it just worked. Not to mention a great deal of microwave engineering now happens in other tools like microwave office and ADS, I'm not sure Altium is even that great or useful for relatively common microwave stuff like designing say a microwave horn antenna.
I haven't seen any arcane domain specific knowledge that was in the software part, sure a your business can be infinitely arcane but the software was always very straightforward.
EE is in a different ballpark, imagine if you had to explicitly pay attention to write software that didn't melt your CPU.
Electrical Engineers also work in semiconductor design, nuclear power, RF, and a whole host of other domains, none of which are child's play.
>For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
Surely you jest. From what I can see the "always something that must be mastered and pronto" is simply javascript kids justifying their inflated salaries by rewriting their codebases in new frameworks every few months only to rediscover bad solutions to problems that were solved a decade ago.
I don't think you've ever been an EE who worked in any of those areas; I worked in Microwave & RF. Yes, it is child's play -- because you keep doing the same things over and over.
As for javascript kiddies ---- I suppose you're right, I don't know. And I share your frustration with a new framework solving the same problems we fixed 20 years ago. I get that.
However, CS that drives the world forward -- that stuff --- is not 'turning the crank'. To the extent that any profession is 'turning the crank' --- that is the extent to which some automated systems will be doing that soon enough.
I've done EE, RF, Analog, Digital and much more. That stuff is trivial (and I mean trivial) compared with, say some of the stuff that this guy does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
I can tell you where the 'hard stuff' is in EE: it's in getting to electronic devices & circuits that perform near the limits of what physics allows. Extremely low noise, extremely fast switching, extreme power, those areas. And, yes, those folks have to be clever. Generally, most of those people are building chips, not doing what normal EEs do -- which is connect chips together --- and gluing chips together is trivial, this is my point.
Maybe it's just easy for me, that's possible. But I'm not that smart, so I dunno.
There is a reason Marc of a16z says Software Eat World, and not EE Eat World.
You learn at least Altium, PADS, Eagle and some open alternatives. You learn the specific quirks of all those software. You hate every hour you have to fight with PADS' decades-old bugs and "features".
In addition to LT Spice you probably learn a more specialized simulation software. Who knows, maybe you have to design power elecronics. Maybe antennas. Maybe both. Maybe in the same system. Maybe you are specialized in power electronics and you have to integrate another specialist's design into yours.
You learn about all the basic components, basic circuits and how to apply them. And yes, to "read some data sheets". You learn about the most common IC's and how to apply them, and when not to. And so on. You learn about EMI. You learn about trace lengths, placement, and their myriad of requirements in a multitude of scenarios. You learn about multilayered PCB design and its requirements. And so on.
You learn about having to minimize cost by reducing the components to their absolute minimum. You learn about having to minimize space due to real life demands of where your PCB has to fit. Maybe you even specialize in PCB design, and you apply a specialist circuit designer's schematic to the real world. Or maybe you are said specialist designer. In any case, at some point you need to know both and neither is easy.
Inevitably when you have to lock in your design, the prototypes are manufactured. Perhaps you need to assemble them yourself, certainly at least partially. You may even have just a partial device at first, which you still need to be able to wake up. Without fail, the real world reveals its ugly face to you. Despite all your simulations and meticulous design, something doesn't work like it should. You likely need to have mastery of a table full of expensive measurement equipment, and you need to know what to look for and how to look for it. After you diagnose the issue, you need to know how to fix it. You probably have to fix it manually, likely involving precision soldering work to sub-millimeter pads. After the fix, you don't hit "recompile", you fix the schematic, then the PCB, then wait for weeks or months for the next prototype round. Until then, you need to continue testing the device with hand-fixed prototypes. You need to instruct other people on how to do the same modifications.
Who knows, maybe a pandemic happens, maybe also a war that affects global economy. A chip you used becomes unavailable. There is no drop-in replacement. You have to at least replace the chip, and perhaps the circuit surrounding it. You don't just hit "recompile"...
All the while you likely have one or multiple microcontrollers in the device. You need to interface with the SW architects as well as the developer side. You need to be the datasheet for the software developer - likely you even need to write the datasheet.
All that jazz in addition to the regular stuff everyone has to deal with in one form or another.
I'm not an EE, I'm an Embedded Systems and Electronics Engineer. So I don't know 100% how to explain what they do, although I have some peripheral knowledge. Which is exactly I wrote this. I have just been in my safe firmware developer's bubble, trying to support the people designing the hardware so that they can get their side in order with the MCU's doing what they should. I have immense respect for the people who are able to make the physical side of what I write the code for. Those circuits certainly don't just "pop out".
Both sides always have something to be mastered. Both sides have their different flavors, too, but neither one is easy. Both sides have to learn and apply. Funnily enough, both sides have clear analogues to eachother, and very similar problems, just in a different plane of existence. Oh and this is just one facet of EE like others have mentioned.
Yes, this seems to be such a tiny domain. If you know Maxwell's equations, you know all you need to know about EMI, pcb layout, RF, and more. If you know how to do something other than 'Datasheet Engineering' -- you know how to plan for part substitutions.
I'm trying to make the point that EE is a Fixed Domain, where one only needs to know a very small number of things to be an 'expert' in said domain. This is not the case for CS, which is, basically, all of mathematics that can possibly be applied to computers.
EEs will be one of the first technical professions to be replaced by robots & AI when AI moves up to white collar professions. Mark. My. Words. ;-)
> For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
The main difference are that the constraints of EE are a lot clearer than software. From the laws of physics to the lists of available parts and processes to pick from. Then manufacturability and cost.
With software, your instruction set and available system resources/hardware APIs are your only real constraints. Everything else is an abstraction which you can question and rebuild.
Turns out the "correct" way to do things fall out more readily when you have more constraints, particular because we humans are worse at constructing constraints and abstractions than the universe. You get a lot more rope to hang yourself with to use a metaphor.
My argument is somewhat more sophisticated than your strawman. If you fully learn Altium, I can guarantee you (since I fully know Altium) that you know pretty much all you need to know about EE, especially since every situation an EE is likely to encounter in Real Life is part of what Altium provides.
So sure, if you do NOT know your tool inside and out, then that's a hacker's knowledge. To be a professional, you know your tool(s) inside, outside, and backward.
So yes, if one knew Altium inside, outside, and backward (incl SPICE sim & FPGAs), then such a person knows EE very well.
Uhh, what? Altium teaches you how to design a battery? Teaches you optics? Teaches you RF? Teaches you motors? Teaches robotics? Knowing the software doesn't even mean you understand all of the components you can place on a board
Don't forget low level embedded programmers, Kernel developers, and many who live in the world of coding in C/ASM.
I recall numerous instances in my undergraduate career where professors and the students passionate in these fields would actively persuade people who didn't get exposes to the stuff from even trying.
I remember one professor teaching an elective class on the Linux kernel and how he would try his best to scare people into dropping the class early on. We lost 25% of the class after the first lecture (and the only girl). To be fair the class was hardcore for the typical level of CS students you'd see in my school. It was painful but fun. I just wonder about the people who got scared away, maybe some of them could have really embraced the Kernel and become contributors.
To this day I see hostility among the low level crowd in my dealing with people in the industry. They think that because what they do is more complicated that writing a bog standard web app that they are special and should be left in their caves not to be disturbed.
On a different note: I feel this is playing at least a small part in hindering Linux adoption. I have dealt with the community on and off for over 10 years and just the level of negativity that comes out of that community has got to be putting off at least some people wanting to tip their toes in the water. We need to MLLGA: Make Low Level Great Again! At that starts with really welcoming normies with open arms and patience while they get over the initial hurdles.
We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers
We're looking for bare metal developers so basic SPI, I2C, UART knowledge is essential, but even in that realm it's surprising how many embedded devs can't work outside of an RTOS and lack basic hardware knowledge
Pay better. It's totally possible that you are paying appropriately, but I've been disappointed with my most recent job search and am likely winding up doing backend work again simply because those roles pay almost double.
They can't. Margins are thinner. Hardware companies have extra costs that software companies don't have.
I almost tripled my salary by moving from what the person your replied to is looking for to the web. AND it's easier. AND I can work remotely.
I don't blame them. But they'll be more and more desperate to attract people. The democratization of remote web jobs after COVID is another nail in the coffin. They pay less, 99% of the time you have to be in office. It's a losing battle.
This frequently isn't true, although I'll admit it's industry dependent. This is the rhetoric used to depress the wages. Sure, they have extra costs but when you do the math, frequently the wages are still just a drop in the bucket of the operational expenditures.
> It's totally possible that you are paying appropriately
Doubtful. If anyone is having a hell of a time finding electrical engineers or embedded developers, then by definition that means the field isn't lucrative enough for people to stay in it. That's exactly the case I've seen repeated in every post in this thread.
Previously the embedded/bare metal software lead for a high availability robotics system for almost a decade. Left that space for backend development because my pay literally tripled.
It's easy to think that you're just competing against the other EE job offers of $120k total comp, but you're actually also competing against the software positions those EEs could get with $300k total comp.
I love bare metal work, and part of me would love to go back to it, but it's really hard to justify: hardware product cycles are extremely slow, full-time remote positions are unheard-of, and pay is no more than half of what you can get for much cushier work in the software world. It makes more sense as a hobby than a profession.
We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers
In my opinion that is essentially almost the same problem, though depending on the university/courses followed. To be able to program bare metal one needs some knowledge of bare metal, which is what an EE has. To be able to program one also needs some programming knowledge, which most EEs have. However if you take a 'standard' software engineer then they often only have a clue about the latter.
Not interested though because after 9 years of sensor experience software just pays triple my best pay in those years with easier deliverables. Never again.
There must be plenty of 50+ year old EE developers that can do that, probably very cynical neck-beards by now, or even retired. Most people move into better paying roles so it is hard to buy them, and you duck your resume by taking on low-paying work (even if you paid highly, the next gig won’t).
There was so much low-level microcontroller dev work in the past, but perhaps that has mostly moved overseas now?
I used to do that work and I am not working at present, but I’ve moved up the stack a long way since then, so my pay and working condition expectations are probably ridiculous. And I don’t want to move from New Zealand!
I can do that kind of work. I regularly get recruiter emails for these jobs because my resume clearly shows I have experience in it. But the jobs are always some shitty contract job, and located in some stupid place I don't want to live (no remote work possible), and if the salary is given it sucks.
So I've been doing higher-level work for a long time now.
I've been sending lots of resumes out to companies for embedded jobs since I'm looking for something new. I currently do embedded Linux but my education was EE so hardware isn't mysterious to me. Never-the-less I just get constant rejections, so not sure how desperate these employers are.
I had professors like that in physics but it was more of a comedic stunt than anything. Being scared of your course is something very relatable, so I thought it was quite entertaining to have a comical lecturer who was very humorous and yet brutal about the course. In the end the lecturer I had that was the most brutal about the course content of ended up not being a particularly bad exam.
If it’s not paired with humour though, it can be quite horrible
I don't know when I first heard students boasting about these scare away intro lectures [0] but it was noticeable by the early eighties.
I've a few unsubstantiated hypotheses why:
Zero Sum Game taught by boomer parents conscious that the party was already over but would be sustained inevitably with increasing ruthlessness.[1]
Intellectual Property laws started slicing and dicing knowledge that became temporarily more valuable by fencing it in.
Higher Education caught performance metrics (without much if any performance pay) and so especially elite schools but eventually the rest cottoned onto input pre selection as a way of surviving.
Society became a overt lottery particularly for low income families. This placed the easy weight of the burden of responsibility of tutors on the side of direction to easier subjects.
I believe all these factors and more began compounding exponentially with the enclosures act imposition of a requirement for a degree for work with no or marginal utility for the same.
Marketing, loans and for a particularly insidious enclosures act, the UK's "classless society" introduction of University status not only for a tsunami of new institutions (the UK will now accredit degree granting university status in only two years..) and the white washing of the vocational STEM/ Engineering focused UK Polytechnic system (making them independent degree awarding institutions enabled diversification and dilution) which multiplied the demand for least effort maximum passing grade tertiary education throughout the world ,by the turn of this century to lamentable result.
[0] turning up next week seems to have been the objective of one I spoke with, to demean the honest and intimidated.
[1] The last market play I laid on with my late cofounder was in reaction to the dotbomb. Bought military tech suppliers :-| Point being we need the new program before we are fully grown up so to pass it on. With massive shifts to younger population and the current generation of middle aged folk being capitalized by three bull cycles the last two payable like a Japanese 80's mortgage, by the grandchildren, this means now.
Edit: second footnote placed and "enclosures act" gains a act adjectivally. Edit2 for work para7 Edit3 last para payable not relatable.
I don't think it needs a big society explanation. I think it's a small scale machismo problem. People love gatekeeping fields: hobbies, fandoms, sports. Especially if it has in the past got flack for being "uncool".
Meanwhile, CS is reaping the benefits of a decade and a half of pushing the “Anyone can code!” narrative. CE and EE’s disdain for juniors and rampant credentialism will inevitably become a national security issue.
EE is hard. Bad EEs are unemployable. There's no demand. EE is also beautiful and absolutely fascinating. You get to:
- Do beautiful math
- Build things and get your hands dirty
- Do super-creative design
... and so on. It's just fun!
I have a Ph.D in electronic engineering from a top school, and I don't regret one minute of the program. I graduated during a downturn, and finding a job was neigh-impossible, despite being one of the best graduates from probably the best EE Ph.D program in the nation. Industry wanted experience. SE jobs were easy to find and paid better. I eventually found an EE job but many didn't.
I noped it out of the field after that. The core problem is EE companies are no fun. Employees just aren't treated well. IC design jobs mostly have all the accoutrements of Office Space and Dilbert: cubicle farms, rigid bureaucracies, limited vacation policies, button-down shirts, and so on. None of these things make people more productive or contribute to the bottom line.
I do EE only as a hobby now.
I don't think the trick is to water down schools, so much as to make the industry less oppressive.
I also wonder how much is due to location. EEs in the US only seem to get hired in certain industries these days, depending on what it is (i.e., writing HDL vs. electronic/PCB design and other things). Much of it just seems to be military now. So if you stay in EE, that means the jobs are only in certain locations, which might not be all that attractive to you, compared to where many software jobs are.
It's mostly due to old, inflexible, stodgy companies. Analog Device, Texas Instruments, Intel, etc. have been around forever, and haven't updated the worst parts of their employment practices and corporate cultures since the eighties. Military is even worse, but it's not just military.
Right now, I work in a company where I have work-life integration. I enjoy being at work. It's a pleasant place to be. I enjoy working from home, and balancing work with family. I enjoy my vacations. None of these are hard or expensive. I'd never get that designing integrated circuits or in any other sort of high-performance EE work.
Why can't I ask for a pleasant office, with a nice window looking at something green, flexible (not short) working hours, flexible vacation (I do better with fewer / longer trips), comfortable clothing, and similar in the EE world?
I became disillusioned with EE when I worked with a bunch of EEs (mostly MS EE, I think) at a software company. It was the same mix of people who know what they're doing and people who have just been sliding by most of their life--same mix as I found in other professions. I was hired because I was a programmer who knew enough about EE to be dangerous.
That said, the people I know who work in EE in aerospace seem to have an uphill-both-ways job experience, in terms of all the documentation and justification they do for their designs. There's a revolving door of new hires, and every once in a while somebody will get hired and actually stick it out.
I think it starts young and the well of people who have been actually been exposed to basic electronics is shrinking. The well is changing and we may not be catering to our future needs.
Yep. I was so stoked on EE in high school. Took the first EE course in college and got as far away from it as possible after that. Subject matter was interesting, but the professor took every ounce of fun out.
I have a BS EE, my day job now is lower level software/firmware - almost entirely with Linux these days but have done a fair share of bare metal, too. My favorite course in university was my 2nd year circuits course, the professor who taught it had a research grant to study how to better teach electrical engineering to undergrads, and it showed. I vividly remember demonstrations and labs we did in that class even 20 years later.
I imagine part of the problem is there's just fewer EEs than there are CS grads, so the EEs who end up teaching might be the best at that in their field but since the field of CS grads is so much larger you generally get better teachers in CS. I feel there's also been a huge push to make CS approachable over the past 30 years and it shows, it's easy to find great teachers both online and in universities for CS. It's much harder to find good teachers for EE.
Knowing EE or CS does not make a good teacher. Being a good teacher is significantly more than simply knowing the material.
Is that not true of other majors? I experienced the undergrad ECE meat grinder firsthand, so that part definitely tracks, but I had always assumed it was the same for all other eng departments (including CS).
I generally agree and I'm one of those responding similarly in similar contexts. However, thinking about it, I think there may be a valve here that prevents this from happening: If costs get too high Asian companies win, setting an upper bound. So it may show up in more outsourcing and imports rather than higher pay.
I have not completely thought this through, so I'm posting it as a condensation nucleus for discussion rather than as some "truth", because I only formulated it in word form just now.
The key difference, I think, is that software is user-facing, whereas hardware no longer is. The bigwigs and bean counters who make the hire-versus-outsource decisions can tell that lowest-bidder outsourced software sucks and so don't go for it, whereas the outsourced hardware "works" well enough to ship, so they keep outsourcing it.
Interesting. I wonder if this distinction applies within software as well. For example, systems programmers getting paid less than application programmers because the latter makes software "closer" to the user, and backend programmers getting paid less than frontend programmers for the same reason.
Yes, backend engineers do get paid more in general. I was just wondering why this runs contrary to OP's explanation that "closeness" to user triumphs job difficulty (when it comes to leverage/salaries).
For most professions there is an incredibly long lag time between a drop in enrollment and a shortage of workers. If everyone immediately stopped going into EE overnight, it would take at least 4 years before there was any noticeable effect on the labor market as people already enrolled continue to graduate. Then for some time you'd still have a large pool of reasonably young people that would be regularly changing jobs - it might take longer on average to fill a position but they would still be filled, and in the meantime the slack would be taken up by other employees taking on additional responsibilities (which likely aren't too extensive when the missing labor pool is just from the entry level cohort) and older employees delaying retirement. Indeed productivity may even improve in the short term as no one is taking time out of their busy schedules to teach the next generation. Only after about 10-15 years would you start seeing a shortage that can't be compensated for as the youngest EEs are settling down and thus less open to relocation, older EEs can't put off retirement for longer, and the tasks left undone are too advanced to be easily performed by other employees. Of course at that point you get rampant poaching which drives up salaries but it also makes firms hesitant to invest anything in training new EEs as they'll be poached the moment they're competent - thus even if the salary increase starts driving renewed interest in the profession the pipeline never recovers. You soon have lots of new guys competing for the same low-skill work which drives down starting salaries while only the old timers can be trusted with work requiring even moderate experience. In another few years the last of the "original" EEs start retiring and with them incredible amounts of tribal knowledge are lost.
While that's obviously an extreme scenario and unlikely to ever happen with electrical engineers, it's not too far off from what happened to many trades like welding.
I did EE and I thought it was not difficult AT ALL - like nowhere near what the reputation is. The thing is I went to a shit university, did end up putting in a lot of time studying so that I could graduate top of my class (which I did) because I stupidly though this would help me stand out. I could have coasted by with significantly less work, there were people I helped out who honestly should have been failed out - barely understood basic circuits in 3rd year. I think the department was desperate to hold onto students and so nothing was made too tough. As I said shit school.
In the end I currently do "embedded" programming (all just embedded Linux not even bare metal). I really regret the whole thing - I should have done something completely different finance, actuary. EE is a completely stupid field. To have a "serious" EE career now you need a PhD or at the very least a MS.
Despite graduating top-of-my-class and honestly have a very good command of the material at the time, I graduated having ZERO skills in electrical engineering.
I went the software route basically because its something I could pick up and learn and get work with, what the FUCK was I supposed to do with my "skills" solving textbook problems?
As I said it was a shit school where the courses didn't involve nearly enough project work to build real skills.
The only people I know who went on to do legitimate EE stuff got a masters. Not sure how they are doing. I realized by the end of the degree I had zero passion for this shit, I wouldn't even know what I would want to specialize in. The only courses I found interesting were control theory and signal processing somewhat.
I though the actual electronics courses blew.
This is definitely part of it. The entry level courses we took in electrical engineering were insanely hard, and pretty worthless for developing any real engineering skills. It was mostly felt like it was selecting for people who were really good at math puzzles. It just felt like they were trying to scare people away.
I started out in EE and switched to Intercultural Communications lol. Not because I couldn't hack it, I was probably near the top of my class in EE, I just thought it was a lot of work and realized I liked human communication more than electrical communication. So I hear ya on the impossibly hard: I got good grades but all I did was study. When I switched, I still got good grades but also enjoyed a social life. But to each their own, I still code, but building tools to help me and others get better at communicating how we feel. So maybe EE didn't leave my bones completely :-)
That’s awesome. I had a similar experience, started out in comp sci and switched to game design and found it way easier & more fulfilling. Although a difference is that rather than being top of my class, I nearly failed all the courses I took. I ended up as a coder anyway and I find the mental models that I learned in game design often help me out when understanding the business side of what I’m coding (and often I can find a simpler solution that meets our users’ needs just as well if not better)
Ah, I'm glad you shared! From what I've seen on books about game design, I really like it as well for its blend of psychology and design, and well, games :-)
> My advice for the young who don't want to do what it takes to pursue their profession is to put in an application at McDonalds. Smiling and burger flipping is an honorable career too.
If you actually think that you wouldn't write this condescendingly, these low effort comments with no source ("I know a guy") are beneath this forum.
I don’t really get this mentality. I love coding and want to share the things I love about it with other people. If I knew someone out there was teaching a freshman-level class and deliberately leaving a bad impression or scaring people off, I’d be pretty annoyed.
I only took one programming class in college, which was designed as a weed-out class and it did succeed in weeding me out. Luckily I continued teaching myself how to program and now I make more than either of my parents doing a job I love. Part of a professor’s job is to educate, so I suggest they leave the hazing to the frats and at least try to be good at it.
I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll. You can be an engineer without college. You're free to start your own university, if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man.
Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor doesn't bend just because some people interpreted it to be ill intent, when really the ill intent was their perception to academic challenge.
> By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll.
By the time you find out, it is too late. See also "The Market for Lemons".
> You can be an engineer without college.
Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere.
> You're free to start your own university,
University is a protected term in many places, so again, you can't "freely" do that. This is to protect against the information asymmetry that the potential students have, precisely because of the aforementioned lemon market issues if they don't, and even then it's not perfect.
> if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man.
Except the potential students don't have any way to determine that until at a minimum of 15 years after you start, even if they're unusually highly informed and highly motivated. And university tuition fees in many places are fixed, so you don't get more reward than any other teacher.
>Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere.
I've repeatedly stated you can practice in the capacity of an engineer without a PE except in some exceptional circumstances. IDK why on earth you would equate "you can be an engineer" to "you can be in every single case." You don't even have to have the 'Electrical Engineer' 'term' title to do electrical engineer things in most cases, this is a total red herring.
>By the time you find out, it is too late. See also "The Market for Lemons".
Apparently not, because here and now we're discussing why EE programs are lemons . I've heard the same 'lemon' statement from plenty of people that washed away in the horrible attrition during my undergrad EE. The program wasn't a lemon -- those students were the lemons.
>University is a protected term in many places, so again, you can't "freely" do that. This is to protect against the information asymmetry that the potential students have, precisely because of the aforementioned lemon market issues if they don't, and even then it's not perfect.
"University" and "college" are not federally protected terms in US and many other places. But if you want to go one of those other places, fine, call it a "training institute." You're never going to find a completely free market, just because you are free to do something doesn't mean you are free to do it precisely how you like. You are free to work at McDonalds but that doesn't mean you won't be fired if you show up wasted half the time.
>Except the potential students don't have any way to determine that until at a minimum of 15 years after you start, even if they're unusually highly informed and highly motivated. And university tuition fees in many places are fixed, so you don't get more reward than any other teacher.
Great more entitlement. You're not entitled to have your business be instantly successful. You can start a private service teaching people if you want control of your own salary. If the market doesn't choose you, then you can make sad statements about how the "market is uninformed." Good luck.
> Apparently not, because here and now we're discussing why EE programs are lemons . I've heard the same 'lemon' statement from plenty of people that washed away in the horrible attrition during my undergrad EE.
Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll".
Also, I'm getting the vibe that you really don't get the point of what a lemon is: If I buy a second hand car, I lack the skills to tell in advance if it's right for me, even if I can find out 1000 miles later. The solution to this absolutely does not include "make my own car", which is essentially what you're suggesting in the educational environment for which I am using the car lemon market as a metaphor.
> Great more entitlement. You're not entitled to have your business be instantly successful.
You're the one who suggested the free market would reward competence, not me.
>Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll".
Yes so don't enroll in the first place after your research that universities are bad, or whatever it is you're saying you don't like about them. Apparently it is a priori known university programs contain attributes you don't like. I don't feel sorry for people that sign up for 10s of K in debt without even bothering to ask prior students what their experience was like -- not researching your purchase is just stupidity. You said yourself it takes 15 years before these programs even reach market penetration so that's plenty of time that you'll be able to find some prior students to ask before entering. The ones who didn't research are just the lemons, only they end up as EE dropouts and lemons on the labor market.
>don't get the point of what a lemon is
Yes I get it. Many of these dropout students are "lemons" of the labor market. Employers don't realize what hot garbage they're going to end up with -- low-quality talent that give up and whine about how challenging it is to actually have to realize your goal. They whine and complain about university and blame anyone but themselves for their own poor qualities.
>You're the one who suggested the free market would reward competence, not me.
This is pure gibberish as a reply and I have no idea what you even mean by repeating this. The market rewarding the value you provide is not incompatible with not seeing instant gratification because you're so arrogant as to think you're better than the university system. Your comment is the kind of busted logic that would impugn the notion that planting a tree provides shade, because you're upset you won't have shade tomorrow.
Seriously, people, what did you expect was going to happen?