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I should have loved electrical engineering

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Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#41

Post by mynameajeff »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #15

TL;DR author discovers there is little overlap between EE and CS. Hardware and software are called different things for a reason? I do agree that tinkering with the hardware always needs to be in-step with the lesson at hand. You can't just state KVL/KCL and move-on, you need to have the student build a circuit and play with it for a day or two.

The build part was really helpful for me when I really struggled with EE. My program only ever made us build things for very first semester "build a circuit to light up the LED" type labs. Once we got to even the most basic of components it all became on paper. I really struggled with some of the mental models to the point where I made a habit of going out of my way to build a lot of circuits that I was just supposed to solve on paper. Getting everything correct felt no different to getting things completely wrong in a paper problem until I actually built out the circuits and suddenly "correctness" actually became a real thing that I was tangibly experiencing. I wish my program would've at least taught SPICE a little more to at least scratch the ability to simulate things a little better.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#42

Post by lukan »

marcosdumay wrote: post #38
stephen_g wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics. The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understandi…

Hum... The hydraulic analogy is for school kids to learn what electricity is. If you are creating circuits to hook into an arduino, you should have moved from it already.

I believe school kids should be already creating circuits and hooking them up to arduinos.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#43

Post by acdha »

crinkly wrote: post #6
kennyloginz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is outdated advice. If you want to get paid, get a hammer.

I disagree with this entirely as I rather like a desk job and hammers make my hands hurt after a bit :) If you want to get paid in software don't do something utterly commoditised and popular or you're just a fungible meat flavoured work unit. Get really damn good at something with some longevity in a stable niche.

Not just a niche but something requiring domain experience. If your resume says “will React for food”, you are competing with a million other people. If your resume also says you understand a particular industry, user community, etc. you stand out of the generic community.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#44

Post by sevensor »

carlmr wrote: post #27
pclmulqdq wrote: post #11

EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak. Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits…

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#45

Post by carlmr »

sevensor wrote: post #44
carlmr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.

That's a good point, too, I had a bunch of abstractions without applications in my head.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#46

Post by nudgeee »

amelius wrote: post #29
nudgeee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By fab you mean lab, then agree. Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits. EE encompasses more than just manufacturing of ICs, for example research and applications in radio propagation and EM/wireless, signal integrity, antenna design, coexistence/desense, advanced power electronics, control systems, simulation/solvers, etc.

This is true, although for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering, not research. That's why I said fab, not lab. But yes, you are right to a great extent. The main point is that the hard EE work can be prohibitively expensive for individuals and smaller companies.

Sibling poster did a good job explaining how research relies on labs.

Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :)

A comment on the application side:

> "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering"

Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs.

Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system.

Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#48

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

marcosdumay wrote: post #38
stephen_g wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics. The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understandi…

Hum... The hydraulic analogy is for school kids to learn what electricity is. If you are creating circuits to hook into an arduino, you should have moved from it already.

It is a flawed analogy but it behaves like a fluid more than most realize:

https://youtu.be/2AXv49dDQJw?feature=shared&t=1248

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#49

Post by crinkly »

justinclift wrote: post #22
rkagerer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And once you're actually using that hammer for real work, you'll learn how to use it to solve all sorts of problems, better than any school could teach you.

Here's a screw, here's a bit of wood. What tool do you use...? ;)

Screws are incredibly difficult to hammer in. Use a big hammer.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#50

Post by hwillis »

amelius wrote: post #20
pclmulqdq wrote: post #11

EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak. Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits…

This is especially true because for doing most _hard_ EE work, you really need access to a fab, and so a lot of money. This is not really the case for most hard CS work.

Does radar or radar reflection not count as "hard"? There's a lot more to electronics and electrical engineering than ICs.
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