The quiet resurgence of RF engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#101

Post by sleepycat801 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

WarmWash wrote: post #10

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…

Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.

A fundamental problem is automation and tooling make senior staff more efficient at almost all tasks than junior staff or fresh graduates. This creates an inverted pyramid of demand (i.e. companies require more senior than junior staff).

China has followed Japan and Korea's lead in providing a low cost of capital for domestic companies, so they now have a generation of under-employed technical graduates, as automation replaces the "grunt work".

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#102

Post by fisf » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

Pay08 wrote: post #86

high_priest wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.

That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?

Last time I head of them, Bosch was planning to cut 13000 jobs in Germany.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#103

Post by croemer » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

merlinq wrote: post #16

Author here :) glad this sparked some discussion. A few folks raised the geographic scope and consumer RF side, which are fair things to flag. I tried to cover automotive, 5G, and IoT in the piece, though looking back at this, I could've framed the opening more clearly, as it was more a gut feeling specific to my US aerospace / defense experience rather than a universal claim. That context should've been clearer from…

Since you're here, to calibrate my LLM detector, it'd be great if you could say whether or not you used an LLM to write parts of the article.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#104

Post by sleepycat801 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #17

uejfiweun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.

Except for "You make less money, often half.", which is a hell of a pill to swallow. As someone ~10 years into my software career, I'm pretty confident that even if I got laid off tomorrow and never found work as an engineer again, I'd still be better off now than if I had stuck with ME or EE as I originally planned.

You make more money, but the work is highly unstable. I find the "applying for jobs" process far more difficult than "doing the work" (especially in a small country where hiring freezes are highly correlated). If I could start again I would have gone overseas to do EE instead of switching to SW/FW. Now I intend to start a new career in another scientific field.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#105

Post by sleepycat801 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:52 AM UTC

rhave wrote: post #4

Going into the RF field myself, I've been troubled with the license costs of tools like HFSS and CST. After a brief test of the open source tool OpenEMS I've landed firmly on the newer open source tool EMerge ( https://github.com/FennisRobert/EMerge ). It's a little rough around the edges still as it was released in the fall. But I've already gotten good results from it designing my own RF hardware. Apart from that I…

On the military front, the US has pressured allies to spend more GDP on weapons. Most countries have realised that as domestic industrial policy, rather than shell out foreign exchange for (cost ineffective) US made equipment.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#106

Post by sleepycat801 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 8:07 AM UTC

cactacea wrote: post #3

> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working…

I agree with the author, certainly 5 years ago most things looked like a "solved problem". Huawei gave the telco equipment makers a run for their money with some interesting applications of SDR, but incumbents preferred trade barriers and export restrictions to competition. Even 5G was more of an optimisation of LTE than a revolution. Baseband over fibre is the only major innovation in that period which I can think of.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#107

Post by sleepycat801 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC

amoshebb wrote: post #11

cactacea wrote: post #3

> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working…

Also ignoring the massive new market that has been automotive radars which, as a market, have totally eclipsed weapons

That is something requiring new antenna design, but was a spin off from FMCW radar already used on ships.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#108

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 8:19 AM UTC

superxpro12 wrote: post #82

drtz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least. Hopefully things have improved since then, but my perception at the time was that engineers in the field were paid and treated quite poorly compared to software engineers, despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry i…

It's funny because i have the exact opposite experience at my medium-large sized engineering company. The hardware team had a team lead at the staff level for years. Software, which had an equal headcount, was compartmentalized below the hardware team. It was such a massive struggle to get equal salary, or a voice at the table for impacts to the software team. At one point, IT added some new intrusion detection syste…

I've observed this as well, that software in a hardware org is a bit of a second class citizen. The absolute worst case is AMD leaving a trillion dollars on the table because they can't compete with CUDA software APIs, but lots of places are like this.

But software in general - well, in America - got pulled up into the stratosphere by FAANG money. I feel that should have had more of an effect than it did on non-software orgs.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#109

Post by sneak » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC

I’m not sure how the unit counts relate to the idea that vastly more EEs will be required. Sure there is some overhead in scaling manufacturing but I doubt it requires that many more EEs whether your satellite or automotive fleet is 10 units or 1000.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#110

Post by TrackerFF » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

I took a bunch of RF / coms classes during my MSEE. Those were some of the hardest for me to learn - and we were few students. Never more than 10, but usually in the 3-5 range depending on how "general" the classes were, with microwave engineering being the biggest class.

Do undergrad EEs get work as RF engineers? Again, when I went to school, so many of the RF classes were mostly grad school classes, or at very minimum last year undergrad classes. I personally did not have any during undergrad. So many prereq courses.