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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

#411

Post by robocat »

okwubodu wrote: post #136
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.…

Meanwhile, CS is reaping the benefits of a decade and a half of pushing the “Anyone can code!” narrative. CE and EE’s disdain for juniors and rampant credentialism will inevitably become a national security issue.

You think we should blame the developers/engineers for abysmal security?

Security failure is a systematic fault of businesses and regulation: not the fault of the grunts mining at the coal face.

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

#412

Post by noasaservice »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #328
rmbyrro wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may find SE an easy job, but it isn't for most people. It requires above average: - Working memory capacity - Tolerance to extreme frustration, persistence - Ability to learn fast - Capacity to deal with particularly high incidence of imposter syndrome - I could keep going all day... SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.

>It requires above average: [...] Literally all those traits you listed are needed as an EE(and in many other white collar and blue collar professions too) plus add even more scary stuff like advanced math (for PID tuning, system signal processing, system modelling and simulation, etc.), but for way less pay that even a kid making iOS apps who hasn't passed highschool math can out-earn you. So how is that fair? My ex…

I live in the USA. My highest degree is high school. I had some college, but was a complete waste.

I taught myself systems engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and some chemistry. Most of these, I taught myself with low amount of investment, pirated books, pirated software, and garbage salvage.

I now work for the federal govt as a contractor making $150k/yr. The classes I took never even remotely got me here. I got me here.

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

#413

Post by atlgator »

bumby wrote: post #345
atlgator wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 und…

I think the pseudo-moralist argument you are making is really cringe, as it's often the type of language the professional managerial class uses to shame employees into accepting less than they are worth. "You're not here for the money. You're here to make a difference." People work to live, not live to work, and so long as people trade their precious time for money, they will go where their skills are highly valued. Or if they want to make a difference they will remain in academia or work at a nonprofit. There really isn't an excuse for Intel not to pay their EEs a competitive wage when they made $42B in profit last year. Same goes for the rest.

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

#415

Post by foobiekr »

ramesh31 wrote: post #19
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…

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

You might want to look at the margins of Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, ...

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

#416

Post by ben_w »

notch656a wrote: post #393
ben_w wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll. By the time you find out, it is too late. See also "The Market for Lemons". > You can be an engineer without college. Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere. > You're free to start your own university, University is a protected term in many places, so agai…

>Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere. I've repeatedly stated you can practice in the capacity of an engineer without a PE except in some exceptional circumstances. IDK why on earth you would equate "you can be an engineer" to "you can be in every single case." You don't even have to have the 'Electrical Engineer' 'term' title to do elec…

> Apparently not, because here and now we're discussing why EE programs are lemons . I've heard the same 'lemon' statement from plenty of people that washed away in the horrible attrition during my undergrad EE.

Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll".

Also, I'm getting the vibe that you really don't get the point of what a lemon is: If I buy a second hand car, I lack the skills to tell in advance if it's right for me, even if I can find out 1000 miles later. The solution to this absolutely does not include "make my own car", which is essentially what you're suggesting in the educational environment for which I am using the car lemon market as a metaphor.

> Great more entitlement. You're not entitled to have your business be instantly successful.

You're the one who suggested the free market would reward competence, not me.

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

#417

Post by notch656a »

ben_w wrote: post #416
notch656a wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Electrical engineer is AFAICT a protected term in some places and not others, so you legally can't do that everywhere. I've repeatedly stated you can practice in the capacity of an engineer without a PE except in some exceptional circumstances. IDK why on earth you would equate "you can be an engineer" to "you can be in every single case." You don't even have to have the 'Electrical Engineer' 'term' title to do elec…

> Apparently not, because here and now we're discussing why EE programs are lemons . I've heard the same 'lemon' statement from plenty of people that washed away in the horrible attrition during my undergrad EE. Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll". Also, I'm getting the vibe that you really don't get the point of what a lemon is: If I buy a second hand car, I lack the ski…

>Dropping out is literally after the point where it is too late for "don't enroll".

Yes so don't enroll in the first place after your research that universities are bad, or whatever it is you're saying you don't like about them. Apparently it is a priori known university programs contain attributes you don't like. I don't feel sorry for people that sign up for 10s of K in debt without even bothering to ask prior students what their experience was like -- not researching your purchase is just stupidity. You said yourself it takes 15 years before these programs even reach market penetration so that's plenty of time that you'll be able to find some prior students to ask before entering. The ones who didn't research are just the lemons, only they end up as EE dropouts and lemons on the labor market.

>don't get the point of what a lemon is

Yes I get it. Many of these dropout students are "lemons" of the labor market. Employers don't realize what hot garbage they're going to end up with -- low-quality talent that give up and whine about how challenging it is to actually have to realize your goal. They whine and complain about university and blame anyone but themselves for their own poor qualities.

>You're the one who suggested the free market would reward competence, not me.

This is pure gibberish as a reply and I have no idea what you even mean by repeating this. The market rewarding the value you provide is not incompatible with not seeing instant gratification because you're so arrogant as to think you're better than the university system. Your comment is the kind of busted logic that would impugn the notion that planting a tree provides shade, because you're upset you won't have shade tomorrow.

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

#418

Post by randomtwiddler »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #151
imgabe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. I went to school for EE, but was interested in Computer Science. There was a stigma to switching from EE to CS as taking an easier course because you couldn't hack it in EE. It was seen as a failure or a defeat. I toughed it out and graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but now I'm a programmer anyway. Wish I had just switched once I realized I liked CS more and saved a bunch of time.

I also went to school for EE, but after a summer job doing SW, I switched to CS when I got back in the fall. I think CS (a good program) teaches you fundamentally how Systems work, independent of the substrate. EE is actually rather trivial compared to the complexity of big systems. EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits. Throw it in LT spice if you think it'll impress the boss.…

> For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.

The main difference are that the constraints of EE are a lot clearer than software. From the laws of physics to the lists of available parts and processes to pick from. Then manufacturability and cost.

With software, your instruction set and available system resources/hardware APIs are your only real constraints. Everything else is an abstraction which you can question and rebuild.

Turns out the "correct" way to do things fall out more readily when you have more constraints, particular because we humans are worse at constructing constraints and abstractions than the universe. You get a lot more rope to hang yourself with to use a metaphor.

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

#419

Post by matusfi »

saiya-jin wrote: post #354
doix wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ah, I have this experience burned in my skull. My backwardish university, where I started 1999, had SW engineering degree only available on their Faculty of electro engineering and informatics. Historically it has been EE through and through, CE was just an relatively new addition and you could see it on classes. Even on CE, we had for first 2 years tons of absolutely mandatory EE courses which had 0 relevance to sof…

Sounds like TUKE (or any other uni in Slovakia). I've studied Cybernetics/AI there from 2008. Your comment is eerily familiar to me, even though I don't think I attended a course with the professor.

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

#420

Post by JeremyNT »

rmbyrro wrote: post #309
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…

You may find SE an easy job, but it isn't for most people. It requires above average: - Working memory capacity - Tolerance to extreme frustration, persistence - Ability to learn fast - Capacity to deal with particularly high incidence of imposter syndrome - I could keep going all day... SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.

> SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.

I don't buy this. I think developers are highly paid because so many jobs are subsidized by VC speculation.

It's easy to get a software job working on a BS product that solves no real problems and eventually disappears. But the money you get paid is real enough in your bank account.

As long as VCs are willing to throw money at any random BS SaaS company that crops up, with the expectation that the losers are going to be outweighed by some unicorn, this will remain the case.

If/when the stock market corrects this free ride is going to be over.

(Disclaimer: I'm a developer, but I no longer work at a tech company)

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