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

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51–60 of 118 posts

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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Altium is a "overpriced piece of technical debt", HOLY SHIT you should try anything it competes with. It's sooo much nicer then anything else out there in the EDA market. At my work they use Proteus, and it's horrible. Also, solder fumes aren't toxic!

If you think Altium is bad, you've never used Orcad. If you think Orcad is good, you've never used Eagle.

[deleted]

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

#52

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 ove…

If you think Altium is a "overpriced piece of technical debt", HOLY SHIT you should try anything it competes with. It's sooo much nicer then anything else out there in the EDA market. At my work they use Proteus, and it's horrible. Also, solder fumes aren't toxic!

Depends on if you use leaded solder or not (and really, I appreciate why people do - unleaded solder at home as a hobbyist has been a nightmare for me so far).

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

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Altium is a "overpriced piece of technical debt", HOLY SHIT you should try anything it competes with. It's sooo much nicer then anything else out there in the EDA market. At my work they use Proteus, and it's horrible. Also, solder fumes aren't toxic!

If you think Altium is bad, you've never used Orcad. If you think Orcad is good, you've never used Eagle.

Tell me if I got this right. Altium is better then Orcad, and Eagle is better then Orcad.

So which one is better between Altium and Eagle?

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

#54
I do FPGAs and hardware design. The FPGA part of my work is more like software I guess; bug fixes, feature enhancements, maintenance, etc. Hardware design comes in waves depending on how complex the design is and how the requirements change. When it's "design season" I spend most of my time in schematic and PCB layout, then wait for hardware to come back, then do bringup. I also get to dabble a bit in RF/microwave and DSP.

But as others have said, EE jobs run the gamut. Depending on where you go to school and what emphasis you choose, you could be doing digital IC design (which contains multitudes within itself, e.g. high-level architecture, clock trees, verification, integration), analog IC design, RFIC design, board-level RF, chip package design, embedded systems, power electronics, antennas, FPGA, HDL/IP cores, test engineering, digital signal processing, control theory, communications systems -- the list goes on and on.

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

#55
post #32

Been doing RF/Microwave/Antenna design for 20 years. Fortunately I have stayed hands-on with hardware development. Start with simulation, then PCB layout, followed by lots of measurements in the lab. Sometimes meetings for customer requirements, writing technical parts of proposals, getting capital equipment purchased, etc.

Hey what's with that 'path loss' equation? Looks sketchy to me.

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

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Altium is bad, you've never used Orcad. If you think Orcad is good, you've never used Eagle.

Tell me if I got this right. Altium is better then Orcad, and Eagle is better then Orcad. So which one is better between Altium and Eagle?

No comparison, Altium is much better than Eagle, especially for professional work. I haven't used Orcad in a long time, but back then, Orcad was much better than Altium. Nowadays, Orcad is priced beyond mortals, Altium is relatively affordable, and Eagle is cheap. Kicad is free and considered equivalent to Eagle.

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

#57

There are a bunch of EEs in here complaining about the software they have to use. I took a few EE courses in school and the only thing I remember is having to use horrible software. Why hasn't someone made good software for EEs to use? And if the have, why do no EEs use it?

Many reasons for lots of legacy software that just gets updates and refreshes. Someone mentioned the small size of the market, which I think is the main reason. Originally, these programs were designed and written by EEs themselves, who weren't really experts at SW. Today's software has moved towards user friendliness and onto the web. The EE tools are mostly based on older windows platforms or Sun workstations that ran primitive x-windows environments which looked like windows 3.1.

The best stuff is usually pretty expensive. Although Altium is making lower cost and free versions available with their CircuitMaker series.

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

#58

There are a bunch of EEs in here complaining about the software they have to use. I took a few EE courses in school and the only thing I remember is having to use horrible software. Why hasn't someone made good software for EEs to use? And if the have, why do no EEs use it?

That's ironic. Every time I've worked with an EE (as a software engineer), they've been among the best developers on the team.

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

#59

I'm a SW guy .. been mulling getting a job in hw at some point. I watch a lot of YouTube and do hw projects in my spare time. Is there something like sw boot camps for developing hw skills? I'm almost considering getting an ee bachelors or masters as a part time student.

Not really, because hardware is not amenable to boot-camp style things. Basically, hardware is way /way/ harder then software. Imagine software where each compile took multiple weeks, and cost lots of money (hundreds of dollars for the simplest of projects, to tens or even hundreds of thousands for really complex things). Changing the layout or design almost always involves a complete board respin. There is no easy g…

You're right that you couldn't do a 'boot camp' style short course and land an EE job, but it's not a hard as you make out if you set your sights lower.

To give one example, let's say you want to start out by making guitar pedals. There's a healthy market for boutique guitar pedals, plenty of existing designs available online that you can modify when starting out, and when you're ready to start making designs from scratch you're looking at stuff you can understand with entry level electronics knowledge. Furthermore, there's room to grow as your knowledge improves (can get into DSPs, for example).

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me if I got this right. Altium is better then Orcad, and Eagle is better then Orcad. So which one is better between Altium and Eagle?

No comparison, Altium is much better than Eagle, especially for professional work. I haven't used Orcad in a long time, but back then, Orcad was much better than Altium. Nowadays, Orcad is priced beyond mortals, Altium is relatively affordable, and Eagle is cheap. Kicad is free and considered equivalent to Eagle.

> Altium is relatively affordable, and Eagle is cheap

For reference Altium is still around $7500 plus $1500 per year for updates and Eagle without board restrictions is $1600.

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