If there’s such a shortage why aren’t EEs paid more than CS grads?
Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
211–220 of 536 posts
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#212Earlier 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.…
That's a bit like saying SWEs just bang out fizzbuzz every day and poof, out pops the software.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#213EE 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 think it starts young and the well of people who have been actually been exposed to basic electronics is shrinking. The well is changing and we may not be catering to our future needs.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compare the amount of effort that goes into both design and production of a physical part and a line of code. A single physical part generally has many, many inputs and outputs (expressed as its physical contact surfaces, tolerances, forces and stresses of all possible kinds from all directions they are supposed to withstand, etc., all with the added dimension of time) compared to a line of code or even a function. Y…
Software has analogous constraints, with regards to scale, performance, latency, design, etc. Everyone thinks that a line of code can be quickly replaced. On a small program, this is true. But at scale, this is not true at all and anyone that's worked on a multi-million line application knows this. You cannot have every line of a complex system in your head at once. You cannot instantly solve for all of the interconn…
I'm not arguing EE is better than SE or otherwise. My point is specifically that EE has both more complexity and stricter constraints, and both unavoidable due to the nature of it being mechanical as opposed to ideal. Yes, in SE you also have complexity, but you can abstract it away with many tricks like isolating side effects and writing pure functions that are easy to reason, re-running from clean slate at will at little cost or even running your code anew at every request, letting things fail completely and be sure it's cleaned up reliably, etc. In EE, you have enormous implicit state that you can't ignore, the global of time and everything else all at once you must juggle.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t really get this mentality. I love coding and want to share the things I love about it with other people. If I knew someone out there was teaching a freshman-level class and deliberately leaving a bad impression or scaring people off, I’d be pretty annoyed. I only took one programming class in college, which was designed as a weed-out class and it did succeed in weeding me out. Luckily I continued teaching mys…
I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll. You can be an engineer without college. You're free to start your own university, if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man. Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor doesn't be…
> I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled.
This is pretty bad faith of you to interpret the argument this way, the OP said nothing about being coddled.
> Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor
Again nothing about lack of rigor, maybe you should put more rigor into reading their comment.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Single line of code is single line of code. Physical part might have multiple lines of code defining it. Let's take something relatively simple like bracket. Now gather together all the dimensions, angles, hole dimensions, material specifications of it and treat all of those as their individual lines of code.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#217PhD in EE. Moved to software for better pay and more job openings. Now I optimize button colors.
>> Now I optimize button colors
Hardware or software, either way you'll still be optimizing buttons!
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#218EE 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.…
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> My advice for the young who don't want to do what it takes to pursue their profession is to put in an application at McDonalds. Smiling and burger flipping is an honorable career too.
If you actually think that you wouldn't write this condescendingly, these low effort comments with no source ("I know a guy") are beneath this forum.
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#219I 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 it's worth nothing in comparison. I'll say the thing others won't: real engineering is about creating value through constraint fitting. Web development is more engineering than this formal engineering. Better constraint fitting. Greater value created. Better engineers.
Video game logic leads people to believe hard => valuable. But the real world is different. Valuable => valuable.
But that's also kind of gauche to say because it's a bit of punching down. The tradition in society is to say kind things about those who have to work hard and produce little value. "The janitors are the real backbone of America" and so on and so forth. Absent value we must feed them platitudes so that they can clothe themselves in shreds of dignity.
Occasionally, though, it's worthwhile to look at the truth. Which is most definitely revealed in our revealed preferences. How much would you spend on this occupation if you started a company?
Re: Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
#220I 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…
>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…
This really seems like a stretch.
I can maybe see how low interest rates could maybe increase software salaries. But I can't see anyway that would depress EE salaries.