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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

#281

Post by ratww »

Spooky23 wrote: post #54
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…

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…

Funny, I was duped once into coming to a Herbalife-similar Multi-Level-Marketing introduction meeting by a university colleague (we both did EE). He called some other people from our class saying it was a "business opportunity". The constant pestering for us to buy stuff burned him some bridges. He obviously couldn't adapt to new technologies and realities.

In Latin America there's also a meme that lots of engineers have become Uber drivers. I have definitely chatted with more than a handful that were engineers. All of them said they hated programming classes too much during university, so they won't try to change to SE now, or to anything really.

I graduated as EE but immediately became SE. Ironically I also doubt that I could go back into being an EE now, so I'm also a bit "trapped".

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

#282

Post by healsjnr1 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #246
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.…

In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China. It's very difficult to find a company in the west where you could go to do an engineering apprenticeship and learn how to build cool stuff, because all of them outsourced their "building cool stuff" operations years ago. And designing things when you cannot try out your design (or when you need to wait 2 weeks for a parcel from China for each attempt)…

Yep, this was my experience.

I graduated a double degree of EE and Comp Science. My final year thesis was a project with a local company integrating their custom designed GPRS module with a GPS module to demonstrate mobile tracking tech (it was 2003).

Because of the project I went straight into a hardware design job out of uni. I was designing boards for mobiles! Working on circuit design, prototyping PCBs, I was psyched!

Problem is the company was run _terribly_. 3 months in we all got put on 2 weeks forced leave and then given redundancies. Aside from dinner pretty terrible management, the economics of doing mobile hardware design in Australia just didn't stack up (we were the only company trying).

In the end there were probably 10:1 software jobs for every hardware job. Given my experience so far, I opted for software.

It has been great, I love software, but I sometimes wish I had lived somewhere that had a higher critical mass of EE work.

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

#283

Post by pjc50 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #27
ramesh31 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit margin. It's all profit margin. Software is reliably >25%, where physical manufacturing is in the single digits.

But the question is why? Shouldn’t there be the same race to single digit margins in software as well?

Software's network effects make it much easier to construct a "monopoly" which gets to have very large margins. Where you see margins, look for moats.

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

#284

Post by yobbo »

boppo1 wrote: post #88
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…

>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…

A locked-in user has a long (or very long) economic lifecycle, whereas a widget has a short lifecycle.

"Software engineering" is probably subsidized by borrowed money aimed at growing locked-in userbases and therefore valuations.

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

#285

Post by Derbasti »

adapteva wrote: post #107

Seems like people are interpreting whatever they want from the original chart by Raja Koduri at the VLSI symposium...plotted with absolute numbers you see that EE enrollment is pretty flat. What has happened is that the number of CS majors has exploded. Kind of makes sense that there SHOULD be 10x programmers for every chip designer? Unless we want the hardware to become the application and for every programmer to be…

This needs more upvotes.

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

#286

Post by doix »

negative_zero wrote: post #250

I will just add to the chorus here: * I graduated as a Computer Engineer. * Worked as EE/EEE entire career (currently almost 14 years). * Half of my class of EEs and CEs went into other careers immediately after graduation because money was better. * 10 years later my best conservative estimate (based on sampling from friends from my year) is that at least another quarter has left because money. * I have mainly worke…

> To those commenters who say that you need to be bright to be an EE, it is very flattering, but I am obviously not very bright :D

I did a CE degree as well. Reading all the comments saying that it's super hard at university makes me feel like my university was really shit.

The difficulty in EE exams came from having to solve stupidly long and complex equations by hand in an exam with significant time pressure. Pretty much every single exam question was look at problem, identify equations to use, solve them by hand. And all the exam questions were close enough to stuff that was solved in lectures/tutorial.

In a way, that made it easier because everything was basically the same. I only had to get good at solving equations quickly and then I could get an A in an exam after just looking at all the tutorials/lecture notes the day before the exam. There are entire subtopics of my degree that I had 0 interest in (high voltage, electromagnetism), skipped all the lectures and then still got an A. I had/have 0 understanding of those topics, I just pattern matched questions to equations and then solved them like I solved everything else.

For some reason, the CS exams never had this sort of "difficulty". They were much harder to bullshit through with 0 understanding, but if you did understand the material, were much easier. I remember in a computer graphics exam they did force us to solve some matrix multiplication by hand, it was so absurdly trivial compared to the shit in EE exams that I almost laughed. But a lot of my pure CS peers really struggled because they didn't practice solving hundreds of much nastier problems by hand.

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

#288

Post by lnsru »

Animats wrote: post #249

This is some manager at Intel complaining. This is Intel office space, shown on Conan O'Brien.[1] It's been a while since I was inside an Intel building, but that's exactly what it looked like. Multi-story buildings built from the ground up with acre-sized grey cube farms. And they wonder that they have a hiring problem. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXReifFHXbY

Thanks for sharing this video. Until now I imagined, that such offices existed only in movies.

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

#289

Post by yobbo »

colinmhayes wrote: post #59
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…

The most you can get paid is the amount your company thinks it would cost to replace you. The difficulty of your job has absolutely nothing to do with how much you’re paid, other than maybe reducing labor supply a bit. But there are tons of smart people, if the opportunities exist people will come. Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Their options mean that if a comp…

> Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work.

Not sure this is reality; or that a meritocracy for webdevs exists.

In recent years, it seems the quality of big "prestige brand" websites (not exactly big tech) is declining, to the point of being unusable on mobile browsers or throttled connections. Not because of technical trade-offs, but reliance on frameworks to achieve "demoable effects" instead of real world features or usability.

We're more than fifteen years into "ajax" and today's kids simply can't do it without burning 10x the cpu cycles and bandwidth. To me it seems there is a decoupling between the utility of webdevs and their pay, and some sort of market failure is occurring.

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

#290

Post by black_13 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #246
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.…

In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China. It's very difficult to find a company in the west where you could go to do an engineering apprenticeship and learn how to build cool stuff, because all of them outsourced their "building cool stuff" operations years ago. And designing things when you cannot try out your design (or when you need to wait 2 weeks for a parcel from China for each attempt)…

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