Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?

I was a RF engineer two years ago, and now I am doing software development. I think I kind of resonate with many of the above comments. While I was doing RF design, I spend a lot of time on CAD tools(I agree many of them are overpriced), after I got my design from the fabs or manufactures, I spend most of my time on lab to validate/optimize my designs, due to that fact that some unforeseeable fab/manufacture processes variation that are not captured by the CAD tools. thing I feel very gratifying was if you utilize the right framework/methods that are reason upon physics, the performance of the design most likely will mach to what you predicted, and that allow you to design something reach/surpass some industry benchmarks

This year, I left my electrical engineering (EE) studies for software engineering. I had a lot of personal experience with coding before going in EE and I wondered if some hardware would make my life more interesting.

After 1.25 years, I realized that I was spending all my life in a lab with no windows, to the smell of toxic soldering fumes, fighting against extremely annoying software (altium & other proprietary overpriced pieces of technical debt). Also, I realized whatever I created needed a lot of work for an unsatisfying outcome (A sound amplifier is less satisfying than some webgl stuff that moves [but it requires a lot more work]). The nice feeling of being powerful when writing software & the instant compiler/interpreter feedback is what I missed the most.

At least, when you are a software engineer, you have more odds of finding a nice workplace, with windows and software you can choose.

The part I miss from electrical engineering is the physics part (But we were only skimming this part anyway).

Finally, circuits are a thousand times less satisfying to me than code. I've seen people for whom it was the opposite. They did not get programming at all, but they were designing circuits at the speed of light with an intuition that I did not have.

I got this in my inbox a few days. An Oakland, CA coworking space has an "Engineering Accelerator"[1] that they're doing on nights and weekends to help people do hw engineering. Not sure if it's 100% what you're looking for.

[1] http://www.engineeraccelerator.com/

I'm just a beginner. I write in hardware description languages for test benches, simulations, checkers and constrained random tests. I've also done PCB layout (hobbyist to RF microstrip), GUI programming (I don't enjoy that), and using IC design software for.simulation and layout. I also spend a lot of time working with hardware. The debugging process is very challenging, and certain aspects of it can be tedious. Overall I find it to be satisfying, challging work. I also get to apply my Linux knowledge most of the time when working on things, which is great.

depend on what hw skill that you try to acquire, things like fabrication/device level design, antenna RF design/measurement etc, you have to go to university, because many of these topic require some very expensive equipments to gain the hand on exp, but not necessary truth for like something like digital circuit design