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I should have loved electrical engineering

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Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same on the laplace transforms. I was kinda mad we had learned any other way. It was a lot easier than whatever we were doing before mathematically! I wonder, how much control theory is there in CPU?

There's Boolean algebra but no control theory is needed for logic design. One minor caveat is that most CPUs nowadays contain phase-locked loop (PLL) clock multipliers. Those fall into the domain of control theory but strictly speaking they're not part of the logic.

And in my inexpert experience, they are IP developed by the fab. So if you are doing CPU design work, you may need to understand PLLs well enough to read a datasheet, but you will not need to design a PLL.

I maybe had the most trouble just figuring out which instantiated PLL in the chip belonged to which PLL design, and where someone stuck the documentation in the giant repo. Especially since a hardware designer may think, oh we don’t need to update the docs, “nothing changed,” but the PLLs did change names because of a process change and their parameters may have changed slightly, even if they’re essentially the same. And chasing down small changes and documenting them ends up being a lot of the job in software.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#132

It's hard to put this plainly without being insulting but I have to be blunt. EE is just 100000000000x harder to learn. The distance from theory to application for EE is especially gigantic. Software development for the most part is extremely easy. It's one of the few "engineering" fields where you can go to a bootcamp and learn it in 6 months. You won't see this kind of thing for quantum mechanics or electrical engi…

Agreed, it’s a very hot take on this website, where everyone’s egos have been inflated to near popping, but I’ve long held that most software jobs are pretty easy. But the cool thing about software is that it has paid so well despite its relative ease, it’s a well paying field that still secures a middle class life that’s resilient to inflation. Once that’s gone, a whole lot of people are going to find themselves con…

Yep, it's insane that SWEs working on products like pinterest earn more than engineers working on major infrastructure projects. Honestly without direct government intervention I think market forces will always lead to this outcome.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#133

The EE component of my CSE degree felt like a math degree in disguise. Calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, discrete mathematics... It was a long time ago but I remember it as three years of math prerequisites and Maxwell’s equations and then finally we could learn what a MOSFET is. Absolutely terrible. I just want to learn how circuits work and how to build a guitar amp! But noooooo I need to learn how…

Community college is the short cut. My local AAS EET program went safety -> DC -> AC -> amplifiers in 4 semesters.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is outdated advice. If you want to get paid, get a hammer.

Get a website that just sells hammers. I'm sure it already exists.

Quick search. Yup, it exists. "The Hammer Source: 100's of Hammers"

Reminds me of Hank Hill "I sell hammers and hammer accessories."

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#137
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.

Don't forget, Faraday hated math.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#138
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its interestine, when you say abstractions. Could you explain what you mean by abstractions in this context and what do you mean by the underlying fundamentals.

One example would be resonant circuits. Ok great you can build resonant circuits, but what for? The fundamentals to understand frequency responses came later in signals and systems. The application came much later when I learned about electric motors, which basically behave like low pass filters (resonant circuits) which enables us to use PWM to generate sine shaped current curves by switching the input voltage on an…

It’s crazy that VFDs work! You have to have a really good ground though, or you get arcing through the bearings.
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