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Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
101–110 of 536 posts
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone in software with an EE background, I think it's simple. There's far more demand for software people compared to the available supply, so pay rates are high. Which job is "harder" has absolutely nothing to do with it. I noticed the trend about 20 years ago when I decided that I'd never again have a job that was mostly hardware design. The money's in software.
The demand is there. After all, somebody has to be doing the design work for the electronic products out there. In a globalized economy with outsourced production most of the EE work goes to SEA with cheaper labor.
There is simply much more software work to be done than hardware work. Pretty much every company running a real business has some software presence on their staff, whereas the presence of people with an EE background is quite rare by comparison.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#103I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college math gets paid almost nothing compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I've been on floors where multi-million dollar pieces of equipment are used to produce parts with obscene levels of precision being used by expert machinist…
I went from chemical engineering into data science, and I wonder this constantly. Everything about chemical engineering was much more difficult (at least what you would be expected to do in a typical job; exceptions apply). I really miss the hard sciences, but I also really do not want to take a 4x pay cut. Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler t…
There aren’t any people over the age of like 35 who started their career in data science. Careers are sticky, people don’t like switching once they’re in one. They’re being trained quickly and I think you’re right, the salary used to be higher than a normal software dev but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#104I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college math gets paid almost nothing compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I've been on floors where multi-million dollar pieces of equipment are used to produce parts with obscene levels of precision being used by expert machinist…
Software is a pure ideas business. You'd be surprised how many people have, sell, and get venture capital for ideas without a huge upfront spend attached just to try something out. Software is the scratch tickets of "engineering."
Nice, haven't seen "engineering" elitism since university. Software is the nervous system of a business. Everything from accounting, to payroll, to inventory tracking, to sales, to marketing, to communications, is achieved in today's world by interfacing with dozens if not hundreds of software programs and systems. Impossible to achieve with hardware alone obviously, you need operating systems, you need data centers, need custom dashboards and BI, you need ACH/SWIFT routing interfaces to make payments go through, you need file management, you need chat software to communicate with employees and customers, you need software nearly every step of the way. It's complex as hell. And the complexity of making all those systems work together just compounds that complexity.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#105It's the pay stupid. As a data engineer I could make a base salary of $300k quite easily. As an electrical engineer I could hardly make $80k for a lot more work. Guess which one I picked as my full time job?
What does a data engineer making 300k do of its days?
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#106My friend is an EE that I went to school with. He's very bright and definitely sharper and harder working than me. I went to school for Chemistry and switched to DevOps - which are the not the highest paid of SEs. I make 1.5x what he does. I help run a package tracking dashboard. He ensures power systems for millions of people work flawlessly in all conditions. He's looking to quit the industry because its so hopeles…
You might want to do some more research. DevOps is for sure one of the top paying engineering positions. I think the average salary right now is 134k a year USD.
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Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#107Seems like people are interpreting whatever they want from the original chart by Raja Koduri at the VLSI symposium...plotted with absolute numbers you see that EE enrollment is pretty flat. What has happened is that the number of CS majors has exploded. Kind of makes sense that there SHOULD be 10x programmers for every chip designer? Unless we want the hardware to become the application and for every programmer to be an EE??
https://ee.stanford.edu/about/fast-facts
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers
[edited: formatting]
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#108Pay more and get more talent. If a local web startup is paying 2x, 3x, 5x more money for some html and css (and/or whatever language of the week is for the backend), than companies like Intel are paying for serious hardware knowledge, it's no wonder people don't choose this profession.
As a CompE and EE major who switched to software after graduation like 20 years ago, EE work was also like way harder IMO. They SHOULD be getting paid more. But they don't seem to be. I switched due to low salary and few available jobs and never looked back.
Same here.
Soon after graduation (~y2k) I know another, older EE who just retired early because it just wasn't worth it to work (and his SO made good money). The salary he was going to get with 10 years experience as an EE was about what I got straight out of college.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#109I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college math gets paid almost nothing compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I've been on floors where multi-million dollar pieces of equipment are used to produce parts with obscene levels of precision being used by expert machinist…
I guess this has something to do with a lot of manufacturing having moved to Asia.
Here in Germany it is flipped arround. As a software developer in Berlin I can only dream about the salaries I could get as mechanical / electrical engineer in South Germany at one of the big car manufacturers.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#110My friend is an EE that I went to school with. He's very bright and definitely sharper and harder working than me. I went to school for Chemistry and switched to DevOps - which are the not the highest paid of SEs. I make 1.5x what he does. I help run a package tracking dashboard. He ensures power systems for millions of people work flawlessly in all conditions. He's looking to quit the industry because its so hopeles…
You might want to do some more research. DevOps is for sure one of the top paying engineering positions. I think the average salary right now is 134k a year USD.
Can confirm. Making ~$145k salary, with $40k in bonuses.
This is with 3 years of experience in Full Stack Web Dev SWE, and zero years in DevOps (but some basic experience with containers, cloud, and general linux server config).
I was hired as a Web App SWE, but was offered the chance to train in DevOps and took it, in order to grow additional skills. Full stack web apps are mostly CRUD. To learn the ecosystem around them... in terms of Cloud Computing, Kubernetes, and Customizing Containers... I consider that incredibly valuable.
My company needs DevOps but is having difficulty hiring for the role-- it's in high demand but low supply apparently. So, they're letting me become one of their interdisciplinary DevOps/Full Stack people.
I'm very happy as I am learning new things, working with a great team of enthusiastic, positive-attitude people, and upon my first promotion I imagine I'll make around $250k or so.
I don't know of many other professions where this is possible, while working 100% remotely.