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Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

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Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#121

Post by lumost »

jfim wrote: post #112
chrisco255 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Most of that is software glue, and not particularly challenging. It's necessary to run a modern company to have this kind of glue to connect systems together, but at the same time EE and ChemE are much more challenging.

Consider that the space shuttle was considered one of the most complex projects in history with around 1 million parts. 1 million loc projects are common, a large tech company like google likely has billions of loc.

Putting all of this together sensibly is hard.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#122

Post by bumby »

Food for thought:

At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches. Any engineering position can lead to a comfortable life, but when everything is about the hustle to make the most money the quickest way possible, it’s worrisome.

It’s like when you look at how the career fields for elite schools tend to fall into a few select categories: law, finance, consulting. (Sometimes medicine but that can be for or against this point, and would be a digression.) It’s not bad per se, but it’s can smell an awful lot like status climbing. To paraphrase a professor of mine: “there are people who’s goal is to climb to the top of the world and those who’s whose goal is to build the world. Be careful not to confuse the two.”

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#123

Post by imgabe »

killjoywashere wrote: post #119

EE spent so many years making sure everyone knew it's impossibly hard, the professors eat their young, etc. I've seen this in other professions where the incumbents desperately want to impose, in actuality, the uphill-both-ways life story they believe they endured. And then they are shocked when the young peace out. The military, and their insanely rigorous special warfare training. The medical profession in general.…

This is true. I went to school for EE, but was interested in Computer Science. There was a stigma to switching from EE to CS as taking an easier course because you couldn't hack it in EE. It was seen as a failure or a defeat. I toughed it out and graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but now I'm a programmer anyway. Wish I had just switched once I realized I liked CS more and saved a bunch of time.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#124

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

_vdpp wrote: post #111
boppo1 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? Interest rate intervention (making them lower than equilibrium) changed the DCF valuation that is the fundamental way of evaluating business (i.e. people working together on large endeavors) to one where promising massive returns in the future(20+ years) made low returns in the near term (x now had to adjust…

I’ve been wondering if SWE pay rates have been artificially high for a while due to easy lending - it will be interesting to see if your prediction comes true. Probably a lot of SW companies out there right now are dependent on discretionary income which puts them at risk in a tough market.

SWE salaries are also very high because right now it's cheap as hell to run a software company leading to huge returns. Overheads are miniscule. The salaries can take a larger slice of the pie.

A lot of people in the comments are talking about how EE work is comparatively much harder. But that's irrelevant. SWEs simply make businesses more money.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#125

Post by earle_wa »

bumby wrote: post #122

Food for thought: At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches. Any engineering position can lead to a comfortable life, but when everything is…

Used to be an EE and couldn't afford a house in a major metropolitan area. Went into FW/SW and now I can. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but that's what worked for me.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#126

Post by imgabe »

lumost wrote: post #121
jfim wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that is software glue, and not particularly challenging. It's necessary to run a modern company to have this kind of glue to connect systems together, but at the same time EE and ChemE are much more challenging.

Consider that the space shuttle was considered one of the most complex projects in history with around 1 million parts. 1 million loc projects are common, a large tech company like google likely has billions of loc. Putting all of this together sensibly is hard .

A line of code isn't really equivalent to a physical part of a space shuttle.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#127

Post by sli »

hellohowareu wrote: post #110
shadycuz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've done full stack and frontend but always had a lot more fun and felt more productive doing devops stuff on my personal projects than anything I've ever done at a job. I've been considering a switch, primarily because I'm just so burnt out on writing software, so maybe I should do that. I've got about the experience you had, maybe a bit more, since I've done a good amount of hobbyist work with devops.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#128

Post by jollybean »

tekla wrote: post #18

I 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…

This is mostly do to a 'proximity effect'.

The close a business or individual is to justifying their salary, the more they are paid.

It's why bankers are often paid more than they are worth.

This is an industrial effect: 'hardware' is moving to China, because VC doesn't like long business cycles. And so the jobs shift there etc..

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#129

Post by runnerup »

colinmhayes wrote: post #103
Xcelerate wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More like no one hires you into a new career after 35. I’m 34 now and it was hell getting into software engineering from chemical engineering even with good project experience and acing leetcode.

Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

#130

Post by bogantech »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days. Time to finally turn EE into a software discipline. Then some decent tools will be developed and normal folk will be willing to design stuff.

> The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days.

Care to name a couple? Because that doesn't sound right at all.

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