Live data from Hacker News

Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

theregister.com

421–430 of 536 posts

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

#421
post #277

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.…

If there was lack of supply and excess demand, it would show in higher pay.

For most professions there is an incredibly long lag time between a drop in enrollment and a shortage of workers. If everyone immediately stopped going into EE overnight, it would take at least 4 years before there was any noticeable effect on the labor market as people already enrolled continue to graduate. Then for some time you'd still have a large pool of reasonably young people that would be regularly changing jobs - it might take longer on average to fill a position but they would still be filled, and in the meantime the slack would be taken up by other employees taking on additional responsibilities (which likely aren't too extensive when the missing labor pool is just from the entry level cohort) and older employees delaying retirement. Indeed productivity may even improve in the short term as no one is taking time out of their busy schedules to teach the next generation. Only after about 10-15 years would you start seeing a shortage that can't be compensated for as the youngest EEs are settling down and thus less open to relocation, older EEs can't put off retirement for longer, and the tasks left undone are too advanced to be easily performed by other employees. Of course at that point you get rampant poaching which drives up salaries but it also makes firms hesitant to invest anything in training new EEs as they'll be poached the moment they're competent - thus even if the salary increase starts driving renewed interest in the profession the pipeline never recovers. You soon have lots of new guys competing for the same low-skill work which drives down starting salaries while only the old timers can be trusted with work requiring even moderate experience. In another few years the last of the "original" EEs start retiring and with them incredible amounts of tribal knowledge are lost.

While that's obviously an extreme scenario and unlikely to ever happen with electrical engineers, it's not too far off from what happened to many trades like welding.

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

#422

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…

Scalability predictions from a software developer need to be taken with a grain of salt. There is no universal law determining it. The prediction is sound up until it runs into somebody else's fuckup, at which point it becomes worthless.

The idea that most software engineers can make any real guarantees about the correctness of their programs is laughable. At least once a month we hear about a massive new vulnerability that proves that that just isn't true. To not accept it is hubris.

It's not about calculating performance. It's about proving that something fundamentally fits in with everything we know about the world. Software developers that approach their work with this mindset are exceedingly rare, and their work is largely academic.

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

#424
post #165

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.…

Is that not true of other majors? I experienced the undergrad ECE meat grinder firsthand, so that part definitely tracks, but I had always assumed it was the same for all other eng departments (including CS).

Never experienced it in aerospace engineering. The only "weed-out" courses I had were electrical requirements.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 go…

How did u go about teaching ur self electrical engineering?

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

#426
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…

It's because software engineers don't need capital to do their job, giving them a ton of leverage compared to other engineers.

Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor. Your work is probably fairly specialized to, so if you transfered into some other engineering domain, you'd start at entry level salary.

Now look at a software engineer working for google, if he wants more there's a dozen companies, in silicon valley, FAANG, wall street that will take his services, he and a few friends can even start their own thing with their laptops and a garage. And skills transfer relatively well between different software engineering jobs.

Because software as low entry to barrier and many employers and non specialized skillset, the competent generalist has massive leverage in the labor market. Mr PhD in electric optics, has 3 employers in the country that can give an opportunity to actually use his degree.

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

#427
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess it’s all about supply and demand since Germany is the Mecca for Process Controls and Automation. There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software

> There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software Not "in North America". On the coasts, in attractive big cities, sure. The midwest is still full of manufacturing though, and they still hire engineers (but they're going to make $100,000+, not $300,000+ like software devs in CA).

That Manufacturing is more light and heavy industries though? Like Automotive and the like?

When I mean hardware I mean Electronics and PCB - like Apple or Internet Connected Electronics.

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

#428
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most you can get paid is the amount your company thinks it would cost to replace you. The difficulty of your job has absolutely nothing to do with how much you’re paid, other than maybe reducing labor supply a bit. But there are tons of smart people, if the opportunities exist people will come. Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Their options mean that if a comp…

> Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Not sure this is reality; or that a meritocracy for webdevs exists. In recent years, it seems the quality of big "prestige brand" websites (not exactly big tech) is declining, to the point of being unusable on mobile browsers or throttled connections. Not because of technical trade-offs, but reliance on frameworks to achieve "dem…

I think this is analogous to and is happening for similar reasons as the airline customer experience gradually went from being very "classy" to increasingly "cheap" all at the same time as the market for air travel expanded tremendously.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Anytime I interview I get that impression, but when I work with teams of varying talent levels, there are a lot of people that can write good code it just takes a long time. In the long term these people are more useful than people who write ok code quickly, because they, slowly, reduce the amount of tech debt. One problem is that it is extremely hard for management to tell good devs apart from bad devs. So that puts…

It is not always the case that slow-high-quality is better than fast-low-to-medium quality.

Managers tend to want people at both ends of the spectrum.

High quality is sometimes not worth paying for (in engineering time) if you don’t know if you’re building the right thing yet.

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, I've interviewed several AWS SWEs and was shocked at the lack of basic proficiency / competence. It's not just Amazon, though. This is everywhere.

Interviewing is it's own skill, and even then some complete head scratcher cases get through (who can't code and interview poorly).

Post reply on HN