Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Everyone in these comments sounds like they are just trying to beat the system. Mindlessly optimize income above all else.

I'm a mechanical, electrical and systems engineer. A hardware person. I design medical devices mostly. Yes I could make more money being a dev, a data scientist, etc. But I don't want that. I deeply enjoy, love what I do. I love that I can receive a list of requirements on Monday and sit down in CAD and design something, order it by Friday and build a medical device prototype the next week. It's so satisfying, and it's what I've wanted to do since I was 5.

I dont make the kind of salary that folks are saying here for a FAANG data scientist, but close - and I haven't sold my soul. I deeply love what I do, I have chosen to do the part I love and am deeply talented at rather than the part that pays the most. I still get paid handsomely.

Hopefully this inspires another person like me to say it's OK to not maximize your income, it's ok to do what you love and are passionate about. You'll still be ok.

I think I fit the bill! You can contact me if you want to have a discussion (details in bio)

CS degree holder here who had many CE/EE friends who switched from CE/EE to CS (Rutgers University).

One thing that used to blow my mind was the difference between logical circuit design in CS vs CE/EE.

E.g. if the task was "Build a circuit to do X logic using these components AND, OR, XOR etc"

- In CS, it was " Please use the common shapes for each component"

- In CE/EE, it was "Please use the EXACT part code for EACH and EVERY component you use!"

I remember thinking: "Isn't the key lesson to learn the logic flow design vs being able to lookup each and every party number?? Is the EE department trying on purpose to get rid of people?"

You could make the argument that forcing people to do the detail but boring work is a good filter for people who are REALLY serious about EE but I would argue that there have to be better ways to do that.

Once you make a software, you can copy it a billion times for very very cheap. A single programmer can impact millions of people.

An electric engineer is working in physical systems and you can't copy physical systems that cheaply. Unless you are in RnD, you can't have the level of impact a junior software engineer can have.

As a child I was equally interested in hardware and software but ultimately ended up earning an MSEE because I wanted to design CPUs. At the time I was in school (early-mid 2000's), software development generally wasn't viewed as being significantly higher paying than EE. The huge boom in software development didn't seem to start until at least a few years after I graduated. While I was in school the general sentiment toward the tech industry in general was somewhat negative due to the recent bursting of the 90's tech bubble. That said I do recall a meeting during my senior year of undergrad called by the chair of the EE department asking for all graduating seniors' thoughts as to why enrollment in the EE program had dropped off so much since our class started. I think "other engineering disciplines are less difficult" was a much more common answer than “significantly higher pay in software".

Throughout my first several years working as a CPU designer, I watched as the software industry expanded rapidly. The potential pay seemed to be much higher than what was available as a CPU/IC designer, and on multiple occasions I seriously considered a career change into software development. The CPU/IC design industry seemed to be consolidating during this same time period.

Then shortly before COVID hit, I started learning of various large software companies moving into the custom IC space, and the number of opportunities available to CPU/IC designers seemed to be expanding. Over the last year or so my pay has increased significantly due to the apparent worker shortage our industry has been experiencing. It's not as high as what I've read an average FAANG SWE can make, but it's now high enough that I'm not feeling the same urge to make a career change that I was several years ago. I'm able to work mostly remote, have a great team, and get to solve interesting problems. That said, a fair amount of my work does consist of writing code. Having said that, the semiconductor industry seems to be notoriously volatile. Things are good now but could quickly take a turn for the worst. All of the software companies currently experimenting with designing their own custom ICs could decide these side projects are no longer viable.

If I was giving advice to a current college student, I would probably steer them toward software development rather than hardware. The unfortunate reality is that there seems to be many more opportunities and much higher pay potential working in software development than hardware. If I had started college 10+ years later I would have become a software developer. Is the CPU/IC design industry different from other EE fields in terms of potential pay and job opportunities? Maybe it depends on the specific employer.