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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

#381

Post by jltsiren »

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 also keep thinking, surely other industries will start paying more and treating folks better, so they can attract top talent, but nope!

In most industries, the money to pay more does not exist.

American companies dominate in software, and they are also highly profitable. Because immigrating to the US is difficult and because many people don't even want to move there, there is a shortage of software engineers in the US. Compensation is primarily driven by the domestic job market, where businesses compete for talent.

In other areas of technology, American companies are not so dominant. There is also more competition, driving the profits down. If an American business pays too much, it will get less talent for the same money. Their products will be worse and more expensive, and they will lose to their competitors.

As someone from Finland, I've been familiar with this dynamic since childhood. You hear about it in the news all the time. High wages are a grave threat to the economy, because they make our businesses less competitive.

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

#382

Post by Workaccount2 »

eastbound wrote: post #367
seabird wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software engineer, software "engineering" is a joke, at least in the sense we apply that term to other disciplines of engineering. It's not like all that complexity you mentioned is understood. It's worked around, and then the workaround is taken for granted and exists in perpetuity because nobody can discern why it was done in the first place. Watching a mechanical or electrical engineer be able to predict the…

You comment a lot about calculating performance, but this is not engineering. Engineering is about suiting the needs to the means. In the realm of widely-used webapps, the need is 1. speed to market, 2. features and 3. maybe stability against errors 4. if successful, scalability. And our engineering is perfectly successful for that. We are able to output features after features, we’ve factorized the boilerplate, and…

They are discussing the difference between engineers that have to toil with the rules of the universe, and engineers who have to toil with rules that they make themselves.

Software does exactly what you tell it. Hardware does what you tell it, but it always listens to mother nature first.

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

#383

Post by rowanG077 »

ghostpepper wrote: post #377
rowanG077 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waving hi as a a SE that is moving partially into EE. It's definitely more challenging. Mostly because the tools are really utter shit.

Would be interested to hear a bit more about your experience. Is your software experience with low level firmware/ kernel stuff? Are you finding the math for EE hard to pick up?

My software experience is partly low level firmware stuff but I have also designed databases and done backend/frontend work. I'm mostly doing FPGA and PCB design. Where you do need a little bit of math but it's all pretty basic stuff. Nothing I didn't get during my software degree.

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

#384

Post by 40acres »

I worked at Intel for 5+ years. I was a CS grad and most of my peers were EE grads. The amount of folks who I saw over the years retrain themselves for a move to software development was pretty large. If this is happening at a blue blood for EEs it's a decent sign the market is drying up.

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

#385

Post by sgarland »

hellohowareu wrote: post #114
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…

Supply & Demand (aka Market Economics) dictates pay rate. Not difficulty, danger, or years spent studying challenging topics. Changing a color... that's basic html/css-- that's the lowest pay rung of front end developers, which is the lowest paid occupational field within the occupation of full stack web app engineers. So, you're grossly exaggerating. People who just change colors of a web site might make $15-20/hr i…

I've met precious few devs of any flavor who understand databases. Not just "how do I write SQL," but actually understand what the query optimizer is doing, minor but infuriating differences between DB flavors, and critically, troubleshooting them.

ORMs and cloud DB providers have enabled people to charge ahead without understanding the consequences of their actions, and when latency starts climbing, just scale vertically!

Re: Kubernetes, again, managed services and package providers like Helm have made it easy for anyone to spin up a K8s cluster and even successfully run things on it, without having the underlying ability to fix or maintain it when things go awry.

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

#386

Post by badpun »

defterGoose wrote: post #258
freyr wrote: post #40

PhD in EE. Moved to software for better pay and more job openings. Now I optimize button colors.

Man, I can't put my finger on why exactly, but this fact makes me feel like humanity is irrefutably screwed in some way.

I think we're producing too many EE PhDs.

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

#387

Post by nibbleshifter »

stinos wrote: post #279
ChrisRR wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers We're looking for bare metal developers so basic SPI, I2C, UART knowledge is essential, but even in that realm it's surprising how many embedded devs can't work outside of an RTOS and lack basic hardware knowledge

We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers In my opinion that is essentially almost the same problem, though depending on the university/courses followed. To be able to program bare metal one needs some knowledge of bare metal, which is what an EE has. To be able to program one also needs some programming knowledge, which most EEs have. However if you take a 'standard' software engine…

The EE's in both places I studied tended to come out as better low level programmers than the CS grads.

Most of the CS grads rarely touched C, and never ASM.

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

#388

Post by bennysomething »

throwaway4345 wrote: post #310
christophilus wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer. Even at a company like Amazon, I think something like 20% engineers can barely code. Add to that industry expectation to work independently with little guidance and not that many people who will fit the bill. There are lots of junior engineers, who with…

Genuine question as I'm surprised by the Amazon comment given their well known interview process, are there really programmers there who can't program very well?

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

#389

Post by naasking »

mjh2539 wrote: post #199
golemarms wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the Federal Reserve sticks to its guns and gets rates up, and keeps them there, it will be unsurprising to see "hard" engineering jobs be valuable again, while all the CSS people suddenly can't find two pennies to rub together. I was under the impression that "hard" engineering isn't as financially attractive to investors due to the long payoff period as compared to web software. In that case, won't high interes…

Precisely; electrical engineering as a field requires enormous amounts of capital. Software development also requires capital, but not nearly as much, and the returns are much higher.

The iPhone had some pretty huge returns for Apple. Maybe "most" EE doesn't have huge returns, but that's also true of most software.

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

#390

Post by the_only_law »

throwaway4345 wrote: post #310
christophilus wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer. Even at a company like Amazon, I think something like 20% engineers can barely code. Add to that industry expectation to work independently with little guidance and not that many people who will fit the bill. There are lots of junior engineers, who with…

> I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer.

Even these people make out pretty good. I know educated people who say they'd kill for $60k, and I've seen plenty of braindead programmers pulling that in.

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