271–280 of 406 posts
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But if you could see through the hype and bought one of the houses in PA for cheap today you would have been set for life.
You have similarly endless opportunities for arbitrage today, which will only become clear in a decade or two.
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Why is EE so bad? On the surface it looks like a degree with a strong grounding in mathematics, exposure to programming, the discipline of engineering, and a diverse range of applications across industry. It kind of seems like the ideal degree if you want to hire someone. I'm always baffled when I hear stories like this.
An EE degree IS awesome. It gives a generalizable mathematical foundation which applies in just about any other field of work. It gives a huge competitive edge. For example: * Circuits are physical implementations of differential equations, and EE gives a unique way to intuitively think about dynamics, which applies to finance, epidemiology, and just a really diverse range of domains. * With a rigorous EE background,…
But career-wise, it's a mediocre choice in most Western countries. (Possible exception is Germany, where engineers have a similar status to doctors and lawyers.)
Most people have no clue what EE even is, or just how much math and engineering goes into building everyday devices and services.
(A friend of the family said "Great! You'll be able to get a job repairing TVs!" when I got my course offer.)
> "It's not a video games major." If it was true in the 80s, it was certainly true in the early 2000s when I was getting my CprE degree. I met quite a few people who were studying ComS or CprE for reasons that can be summed up as, "I built my own computer, I like video games, people said I'm good with computers, so I should be a Computer Science/Computer Engineering major!" They rarely lasted more than a semester or…
There's a Samsung R&D center in my country where they do very cool and tough stuff and they ARE desperate for hires - mostly because their salaries are a laughing stock of the entire city. Web and data/backend pay best and the "tough" fields are trying to get by on sub-web salaries.
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If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…
I had almost exactly the same career arc. Perl became Python, Sun became Linux and I eventually moved beyond sysadmin work into automation, then API development and now I lead software development teams. Are you still doing sysadmin work?
Think my position is probably “internal consultant” really.
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It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that…
In the Netherlands, permanent employment contracts are much harder for companies to break than in the US, so they often hire new people as consultants or temporary employees for a few months, then offer them a permanent contract if they work out. It worked out well for me at TomTom: I kicked ass during the 3 month probationary period as a contractor, then when they decided to offer me a full time contract, I was in a…
Related content, a slightly depressing video of some Finnish programmers talking about their work: https://youtu.be/AxSdWhkMB_A
My biggest issue with education is the whole "study this, get a job doing that" idea. It's plainly wrong, and it sucks in people who drink the koolaid and think there's an easy route to work. Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. By general I mean just about everything that isn't licensed, like being a doctor. What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects…
Obviously for a programming job you don't necessarily need a 4-year university degree, but I wouldn't diminish its value either.
>What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects at you that you slog through
No. That's not the right way to look at university education. The golden rule is "You get out what you put in". If you see college as being useless and irrelevant then that's what you'll get. You can certainly graduate with a 4 year degree and know nothing and have it be a complete waste of time. That's on you. I know many people like this. On the other hand, every CS class you take is valuable and does teach you something deep about our profession that you can take away. It's also especially valuable for a student because as someone learning you don't know where your interest lie so getting a sampling of the entire field is very nice IF YOU PUT THE WORK INTO IT. So what you deem as 'slogging' is really 'learning challenging topics' - which is hard whether you do it in class, or independently.
So tell me, which CS classes do you think are irrelevant and useless?
Looking back at my education, I had a Database class where we had to implement a database backed by a B-Tree, the cornerstone data structure of many modern databases. Was that useful? In your world, it isn't because I didn't have to implement a B-Tree in my career ever again and if I want a database, I can choose an existing offering ... but when I work with databases having this as part of my mental model of how databases work has been invaluable.
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If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…
Why is EE so bad? On the surface it looks like a degree with a strong grounding in mathematics, exposure to programming, the discipline of engineering, and a diverse range of applications across industry. It kind of seems like the ideal degree if you want to hire someone. I'm always baffled when I hear stories like this.
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Amiga was £399 in 1989 in the UK, which is about £1000 in today's money. I expect they were cheaper in the US, but £1000 is fairly reasonable for a computer.
Good deal from a company obviously swirling around the bowl who sold computers through the mall ninja store. Great games! Meanwhile, their university presence was just about nil. If you weren't a gamer, you probably didn't know Amiga existed.
Some didn't realise that games are pretty taxing on the hardware, but I need to let that go, it's been three decades now. :)
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> If you can write solid C, ring 0/EL3 doesn't scare you off, or you can figure out how to cram 10 pounds of hard realtime code into a 5 pound microcontroller... yeah, you'll go far. Come out having done the minimum, knowing Python and Javascript, well... there's an awful lot of competition for most of those positions if you're just a basic coder, not skilled at using those to accomplish interesting real world tasks…
Wonder on which world you live - around here the salary for hard real time on embedded are around 30-40k. Personal data point : a few years ago, after my PhD (revolving around some aspects of real-time), I did some interviews to stay fresh and was offered 35k to work on embedded chips used in Dassault missiles. I told them that I was already making more from freelance consulting at that time, they said tough luck.