181–190 of 536 posts
It'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?
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.…
Now the latest trend are MS/PhD only openings. Especially at IC manufacturers
But I have two questions for those: why not on-the-job training, and did the people that joined 20/40yrs ago have those qualifications? All of them?
Well, good luck filling those positions then! /s
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.…
I started out in EE and switched to Intercultural Communications lol. Not because I couldn't hack it, I was probably near the top of my class in EE, I just thought it was a lot of work and realized I liked human communication more than electrical communication. So I hear ya on the impossibly hard: I got good grades but all I did was study. When I switched, I still got good grades but also enjoyed a social life. But t…
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…
Because real engineers become hyper-specialists and get trapped. My one my high school classmates was a mechanical engineer who was one of the top guys for some semiconductor process that failed to scale and got abandoned. Got laid off and was unemployable. He sold herballife to go back to school and is a physical therapist now. It happens in software too. Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and governme…
Well, a lot of people warn of those, but you were one of the naive people who believed throwing your career on rusty crap was a way of "never ending unemployed" or you thought banks for some reason were the best technological choice option then I guess those are the consequences of your actions (not to mention the mental toll)
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…
However, I would not go back to work in research for the miserable salary I was getting. If they paid the same amount I make now, maybe.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started out in EE and switched to Intercultural Communications lol. Not because I couldn't hack it, I was probably near the top of my class in EE, I just thought it was a lot of work and realized I liked human communication more than electrical communication. So I hear ya on the impossibly hard: I got good grades but all I did was study. When I switched, I still got good grades but also enjoyed a social life. But t…
That’s awesome. I had a similar experience, started out in comp sci and switched to game design and found it way easier & more fulfilling. Although a difference is that rather than being top of my class, I nearly failed all the courses I took. I ended up as a coder anyway and I find the mental models that I learned in game design often help me out when understanding the business side of what I’m coding (and often I c…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
>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.
Surely you jest. From what I can see the "always something that must be mastered and pronto" is simply javascript kids justifying their inflated salaries by rewriting their codebases in new frameworks every few months only to rediscover bad solutions to problems that were solved a decade ago.