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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

#151

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

imgabe wrote: post #123
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.

I also went to school for EE, but after a summer job doing SW, I switched to CS when I got back in the fall. I think CS (a good program) teaches you fundamentally how Systems work, independent of the substrate. EE is actually rather trivial compared to the complexity of big systems. EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits. Throw it in LT spice if you think it'll impress the boss. That's it. You need to know at most 2 pieces of sophisticated SW (schematic/PCB + spice). For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.

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

#152

Post by visarga »

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…

Yep, DevOps has a similarly high status with ML.

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

#153

Post by pojzon »

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.…

Did something better - studied CS on EE university.

Best decision of my life.

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

#154

Post by Maursault »

imgabe wrote: post #123
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.

> but now I'm a programmer anyway

I had the exact opposite experience. The CS dept. actively recruited me, and I didn't even realize what CS was until I had completed 2 years of study. I like CS, but had I known better at 17yo, I would have gone EE or CE all the way, because that is my interest, and there is little chance I could uncover anything on my own about electronics without the structure of university. I never wanted to be a programmer, but programming is not computer science, nor does a lucrative programming career require a computer science degree, or any degree. But every where I have seen, a computer science career requires a computer science degree or a mathematics degree, but I have little doubt there is the odd physics grad or engineering grad working as a computer scientist. Just remembered, I know a guy with a biology or botany degree that works as a computer scientist on the modeling side and has for almost 20 years. But he just does modeling, not everything CS.

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

#155

Post by visarga »

larryliu wrote: post #141

Rather than "computer" science, CS is actually "the science of problem solving" Traditional engineering: you work on one field for X years to become a specialized expert of that field. The industry employs thousands of these "specialists" solving similar problems over and over. CS/IT: you worked on one field for X years, codified your know how know why in a piece of software/algorithm/library, the field became so mat…

IT has been automating its lunch away for decades and now even more people work in IT. A paradox. There's no field more cannibalistic than IT. On top of it, most software is open source and yet salaries are high. Apparently making so much of our field free was not a disaster, another paradox. More recently, even AI is doing the same trick - years of task specific work replaced with a prompt and two examples executed by a huge model. No large training dataset needed. That's why we need even more people deploying it now, because it can solve so many tasks previously too difficult to even attempt.

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

#156

Post by pyuser583 »

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…

My first software engineering job Was creating an internal, CRUD app for a utility company. It allowed tasks to be efficiently given to installers based on their locations.

It was a really basic CRUD app, but it increased efficiency dramatically. Insane amounts of value were created.

The repairers were experienced professionals. Some had advanced degrees in EE. But that silly little CRUD app made them exponentially more productive.

They could have been heart surgeons, astronauts, or anything really.

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

#157

Post by pojzon »

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…

You have hit two niches:

- web development SE (there is a bunch of them, but rarely anyone good)

- devops with kubernetes SE (there is few of them and rarely any good)

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

#158

Post by jupp0r »

The drop is due to less demand (my guess would be due to increased automation in the hardware design process). If there was an actual shortage of electrical engineers, salaries would reflect that. In fact, the opposite is the case and Software Engineers are compensated better, reflecting higher demand compared to supply.

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

#160

Post by spc476 »

imgabe wrote: post #126
lumost wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? A simple one line change recently brought down CloudFlare. And least you think that's not important, a one line change to code brought down most of AT&T's phone network in 1990 (think 911).
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