Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 118 posts

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

#91

Post by androng »

stephen_g wrote: post #90
androng wrote: post #85

I am a board level design engineer and the work is similar in many ways to software. It is very numerical and requires attention to detail. I spend 25% of the time talking about requirements to other engineers, 50% comparing components to use with datasheets, 12% in Altium Designer and 12% buying components and PCBs. Huge pain #1: the unbelievably slow process of manufacturing PCBs. Imagine that you were back in the…

How small is your company that you have to order your own components and boards? We only have 45 people in our company but even at our small size we have dedicated purchasing people to do that for us.

My company has thousands of employees but I am on an experimental division that only has 13 people in the office. Three of them are entry level engineers. Everyone else is in another time zone. The company is not about electronics so I am not aware of any purchasing people I can use. Even if I could, I am not at the stage when I want to produce tens of thousands of boards yet.

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

#92

Post by pepijndevos »

chclau wrote: post #22

I have been working for about 20 years. At the beginning of my career I had a choice of being in the ASIC side or board design and chose for board design because I thought (rightfully so, I learned later), that that was a more "physical" task. So I worked for about 10 years in board design and my typical work day was not typical at all. Some of the time researching parts. Some making schematics of circuits. Some maki…

It seems like board design is a much less monotonous and more practical task that you seemed to enjoy. What made you change to FPGA? Do you feel that the bulk of what used to be board design is now happening inside silicon?

I started my career as a software developer, but got bored by web development that seems to make up 90% of the industry, so I started to study EE because I really enjoy playing prototyping fun projects. I just ordered a PCB for one of my projects.

But when I read your, and other comments, it seems that just as the things I enjoy about programming are not what a typical job is about, the things I enjoy about EE are not what typical EE jobs are about. I'm not sure where that leaves me...

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

#93

Post by pepijndevos »

cushychicken wrote: post #8

I'm an electrical engineer by trade, and do embedded systems design for a living. I do a lot of board placement and layout planning, plus writing test plans for verifying that what we build is good at scale. I also do a reasonable amount of debug, as that just comes with the territory. I'd say it's about 70% software time for planning and CAD work, 30% hands-on lab time. Note that it's not uniform - I might be in the…

> It's very, very gratifying to see something real, that you can hold in your hands, work. Doubly so when people actually use your stuff and tell you how much they love it. (Yay, consumer electronics!)

This is why I quit my software job and started to study EE. I'm currently waiting to get my PCB back from Oshpark. It does worry me a bit that some people here describe their EE job as more boring and frustrating than software development.

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

#94

Post by chclau »

pepijndevos wrote: post #92
chclau wrote: post #22

I have been working for about 20 years. At the beginning of my career I had a choice of being in the ASIC side or board design and chose for board design because I thought (rightfully so, I learned later), that that was a more "physical" task. So I worked for about 10 years in board design and my typical work day was not typical at all. Some of the time researching parts. Some making schematics of circuits. Some maki…

It seems like board design is a much less monotonous and more practical task that you seemed to enjoy. What made you change to FPGA? Do you feel that the bulk of what used to be board design is now happening inside silicon? I started my career as a software developer, but got bored by web development that seems to make up 90% of the industry, so I started to study EE because I really enjoy playing prototyping fun pro…

Yeps, as I said, I felt that I was doing less design and more system integration or "lego building". Besides, I had been doing that for many years and I thought a change was due. From my description it may seem that FPGA is monotonous... that was not my intention at all. For me, FPGA design is much more challenging and fun than board design never was. The downside of FPGA design is that human contact is much more limited.

You cannot really receive answers for your questions, because most of these things are subjective. You have to make your own way and make your own experience. Experience, after all, is the comb you get when you have no more hair ^^

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

#95

Post by mungoid »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #23

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…

Good answer. Although I'm actually kind of in the opposite boat.

I've been doing software dev for a little over 10 years now and recently I have been leaning more towards electrical engineering. Partly because I loved electronics before I knew how to code, but the main reason is that I have yet to find a software company that can make thought out decisions on languages, frameworks, listen to their devs, etc. Most companies I've worked at usually just pick the most common stuff and go with it because they either don't care or aren't actually the right fit for their position, only to realize waay too late that the software wasn't the best choice. And usually us devs get the blame because we are the magic people that can "make anything work".

The other part to this is that we always voice our concerns early on, but they fall on deaf ears because it is too much of a hassle for our decision makers to make more decisions, weigh pros and cons, etc. It gets really frustrating knowing a project is going to have issues down the road but nobody listens until it happens. If you were to look back on our slack chats at the beginning of most projects you would see many devs predicting the issues with almost perfect accuracy.

Where as, (imo without real world experience mind you), EE is fairly straight forward because there are only schematics and circuits and tangible progress. No hours long meetings on which of the hundreds of frameworks will guarantee success, PMs that don't really know much about proper project management, owners that think of themselves as the next google even though us dev grunts know that isn't true, etc.

I'm probably letting my frustrations guide this reply a little too much, but what i think im trying to say is that the grass always seems to be greener on the other side even if it's not.

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

#98

Post by posterboy »

cushychicken wrote: post #81
posterboy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> embedded systems > there's a lot more standardization in the components I string together Embedded Systems is just one discipline in EE. How many people design something like an lm317 deployed on embedded devices? EE tries to teach that, too, until it's all to complex not to specialize on one branch. Another discipline I was offered to specialize in was Motor Appliances and Power Amplifiers. Those don't have much t…

When I said "a lot more standardization", I had things like DRAM or PCIe in mind, which are spec'd by their relevant consortiums (JEDEC and PCI-SIG, respectively). As in, there's clear limits on the way to make it work, and if you meet those limits, it's fine. I do a lot of POL planning for purposes of thermal management, so yeah. I'm definitely not that specialized.

> DRAM or PCIe

Well, that's also a better example for my point. the sppeds they achieve require some research

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

#99

Post by madengr »

sunstone wrote: post #55
madengr wrote: 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.

I'd say it is sketchy as people say path loss increases with frequency; well it doesn't if you have the same physical antenna apertures (think parabolic dish). Though the formula is called a loss since it's used that way from a circuit perspective, and you treat the antenna gains as not related to aperture, so loss does then increase with frequency.

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

#100

Post by catbird »

loydb wrote: post #67

This video is an amazing time lapse of the creation of a Eurorack synth module. It shows you what you'll spend a lot of time doing in a smaller org (smaller, as in, you do everything...). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pawXfoTg1k

Wow that was mesmerizing. I'm surprised that all of the traces were drawn manually. I had always assumed that modern design software would do all of that tedious stuff for you.

The creator of that video was answering questions on reddit, and amazingly the whole design and build process took less than a week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/50tqgx/the_d...

Post reply on HN