Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 536 posts

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

#341

Post by jsjohnst »

doix wrote: post #286
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. Prett…

> 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. … I had/have 0 understanding of those topics, I just pattern matched questions to equations and then solved them like I solved everything else.

Sounds virtually identical to my experience from high school on, across almost every subject. Thankfully I retained >0, but still not what I should’ve. Instead, what I learned is I could JIT memorize what I needed to know just to pass the test. Took me years after school to unwind that and deeply learn topics again (outside things I had an interest in learning, those were never a problem).

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

#342

Post by bumby »

nickelpro wrote: post #146
bumby wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not discounting anyone’s personal experience, but that saying something when the average EE salary is about the 85th percentile of salary. Maybe it’s indicative of how broken the housing situation is in cities (and I suppose it’s very location dependent - anyone outside of SW, law, medicine, or finance may struggle to buy a home in SV or Manhattan) https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-2071.00

What does it matter if it's in the 85th percentile if they can get more money in another industry? The question isn't, "can you survive as an EE?" sure, you can survive as fry cook at a fast food chain. The question is, "will headhunters poach this occupation and have a high success rate due to the salary delta?" And the answer for the EE -> SWE transition is obviously yes.

The question isn’t about which pays more, it’s about whether the best tack is to treat an occupation as an economic transaction where the sole goal is to be a mercenary to the highest bidder.

If someone finds can find fulfillment dedicating their life to making ad-spend software while getting paid handsomely, that’s wonderful. But the larger point is that the comments seemed to be focused exclusively on the pay with little consideration to the work.

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

#343

Post by someguydave »

bumby wrote: post #122

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…

Not working for the highest bidder (money, status, time etc) can be seen as a form of charity. Which company deserves the donation of your life energy?

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

#344

Post by bumby »

sacrosancty wrote: post #235
bumby wrote: post #122

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…

The trouble with doing a low-pay career for the passion is that it's usually low pay because there are a million other people willing to do the same thing, so it actually does become a hustle.

I hear you, but I don’t think this is a fair assessment because EE isn’t a “low pay job” by almost any objective measure. I get that it doesn’t pay SWE money in many cases, but it comes across as somewhat out of touch, like saying “the problem with a Tesla is it’s a low end car” because you’re comparing it to a Maserati

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

#345

Post by bumby »

atlgator wrote: post #193
bumby wrote: post #122

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…

When the CS pay is double EE pay, if not more, it's a non-starter.

If your primary goal is to make money as fast as possible. As said elsewhere, EE salary is roughly the 85th percentile in the US. If that is enough, there may be other social/psychological issues going on that skew the calculus.

Surely, there’s jobs that pay double SWE. And ones that pay double that. But I think most people would agree, there’s a certain point where it becomes absurd to focus solely on that.

It’s understandable when a physicist goes to work for a hedge fund, but when it becomes the prevailing track for degreed physicists, it might say something about our collective value system

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

#346

Post by vitno »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #293
vitno wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay better. It's totally possible that you are paying appropriately, but I've been disappointed with my most recent job search and am likely winding up doing backend work again simply because those roles pay almost double.

They can't. Margins are thinner. Hardware companies have extra costs that software companies don't have. I almost tripled my salary by moving from what the person your replied to is looking for to the web. AND it's easier. AND I can work remotely. I don't blame them. But they'll be more and more desperate to attract people. The democratization of remote web jobs after COVID is another nail in the coffin. They pay les…

This frequently isn't true, although I'll admit it's industry dependent. This is the rhetoric used to depress the wages. Sure, they have extra costs but when you do the math, frequently the wages are still just a drop in the bucket of the operational expenditures.

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

#347

Post by kriro »

christophilus wrote: post #296
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…

I don’t understand how the market dynamics work here. As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job. I have no idea how we’ve managed to sustain these salaries for so long. At some point, I keep expecting a correction in salaries simply due to supply / demand. I also keep thinking, surely other industries will start paying more and treating folks better, so they ca…

I think the simplified answer is that software scales really well. So in theory, if I pay one developer really well I can then sell whatever that developer produces a lot of times for virtually no extra cost (and no shipping/logistics). Embedded devices/hardware etc. don't scale nearly that well.

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

#348

Post by bumby »

lordnacho wrote: post #297
vostok wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer at heart, but I do have bills to pay and I can become interested in basically any complex system. If EE paid better, I would be an EE. EE is interesting. Neither SWE nor my chosen career are sufficiently less interesting than EE though so it's not like I picked an uninteresting career for financial reasons. At the end of the day it's all just problem solving. If the puzzles are all fun and don't go ag…

Exactly this. In uni I got offered internships as part of the course, to write my Master's thesis. An engineering firm in Aerospace offered me a job doing something with airplanes. Pretty interesting, but paid £12K/yr, which really isn't much money, even for a student. I kept my mouth shut (uni wanted us to take whatever came) and got offered a job at a major chip manufacturer, but in marketing. Also interesting, £15…

I had a professor who’s brother worked in finance and he openly admitted his brother sometimes paid more in taxes than he got in salary. So I understand where you’re coming from.

And I do think some of that finance work has value. But let me ask, if you had to put a percentage on it, how many of the best and brightest would you want going into finance vs say, medicine or physics? At what point does it tip to being a worse outcome for society? What percentage should go to ad-spend software jobs?

The problem as I see it is when we’re acting on a value system with the singular goal of making the most money, it can become a sort of prisoner’s dilemma where the rational choice at the individual level leads to worse outcomes for the group (to include the individual making the choice)

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

#349

Post by bumby »

nickelpro wrote: post #143
bumby wrote: post #122

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…

> 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. This is not incompatible with what the comments are saying. I'm an ECE, I love hardware and wor…

I said it elsewhere, but I am not implying a false dichotomy. Indeed, I’m one of those engineers who took a software job in part because I get to work on more interesting problems. But it’s telling that the top comments are only about money and (at least at the time of my OP) not about “money and interesting/fulfilling work”

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

#350

Post by bumby »

someguydave wrote: post #343
bumby wrote: post #122

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…

Not working for the highest bidder (money, status, time etc) can be seen as a form of charity. Which company deserves the donation of your life energy?

This confuses the point with “doing work you may not want to do”. I’m saying there are multiple dimensions of finding fulfillment, with money only being a single dimension. The idea that anything outside that single dimension would be considered nothing but charity is telling.
Post reply on HN