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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

#441

Post by robocat »

api wrote: post #52
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…

If there was tremendous demand for ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well. How hard something is has nothing to do with it. If the current supply and demand stays the way it is eventually things will even out. Programmer salaries will stagnate as more people enter the field and other fields may have salaries go up if there are not enough candidates. This process is very slow though. It…

> ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well

Only if ditches are valuable enough.

Otherwise everyone does without ditches (long drop, sump hole), or find solutions that don’t need ditches (eg wireless or overground cables), or invent new ways of making ditches that are not digging (ditch witch, suction vacs), or other smart workarounds (trenchless water pipe, fibre optic horizontal drilling).

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

#442

Post by t-3 »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #427
t-3 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are lots and lots of electronics in automobiles, industrial machinery, and robots. They need engineers of all kinds to design products, processes, equipment, etc.

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

#443

Post by bumby »

neon_electro wrote: post #402
bumby wrote: post #122

Food for thought: At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches. Any engineering position can lead to a comfortable life, but when everything is…

Do you not think capitalism might drive most humans to think that way? Looking at most of your replies, it's definitely not a simple conclusion that "pay is a primary consideration". Pay is the primary consideration because capitalism forces us to make it the primary consideration. Most folks would rather it not be, but when our survival depends on it, this is the result you get.

I think maybe you’re onto something. It reminded me of the parable of the NYC businessman who met a Mexican fisherman and was taken aback by the fact that the fisherman spent so much time drinking wine with friends and sitting in the sun on the beach. The businessman said “Well, it’s a disgrace that you’re leaving so much on the table. If you worked harder, you could get a fleet of boats and eventually make millions.”

The fisherman said, “After I make millions, then what will I do?”

And the businessman said, “Well, then you can spend your time drinking wine on the beach with your friends.”

To your point, I think a lot of people act like optimizing for wealth is the main goal simply because that’s what society has trained us to do.

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

#444

Post by bumby »

jbay808 wrote: post #139
bumby wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not discounting anyone’s personal experience, but that saying something when the average EE salary is about the 85th percentile of salary. Maybe it’s indicative of how broken the housing situation is in cities (and I suppose it’s very location dependent - anyone outside of SW, law, medicine, or finance may struggle to buy a home in SV or Manhattan) https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-2071.00

The housing market has a lot to do with it. In Canada, average home prices (all types) are up ~6x since 2000, and in specific cities like Vancouver and Toronto, even more so. Compensation has not kept pace. Back when I was a high school student, I didn't think pay was very important. Now I realize it's much easier to pursue one's curiosity if one can afford, say, a garage.

That leads to a follow up. Is the goal to have a home in one of those cities or is the goal to have a home? The first may require working in software while the latter could foreseeably mean you could be an EE elsewhere.

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

#445

Post by bumby »

atlgator wrote: post #413
bumby wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I am not an advocate for that in the least. If it’s what you want to do, there’s no reason that means you shouldn’t be paid market rate. But that’s entirely different than distilling everything down to a single monetary dimension, which was my original point. What’s “cringe” to me is when all work is reduced to transactional measure of time and salary, implying the only measure of work is economic. That makes you nothing more than a wage slave in every sense of the word. There are certainly cases where that’s warranted like when it’s necessary to survive but if we’re talking about the difference between a SWE and EE that’s just not the case. That singly-focused economic mindset also seems to correlate with misery. My position is actually the opposite of the exploitative one you’re framing it as. When you are working solely for the paycheck, it’s easy to exploit yourself, foregoing a fulfilling career chasing dollars. Again, my point is people only talked about money. Not that SW providing them with a lower stress life, or the ability to work from home so they can spend more time with family, or any other reasonable goals. Even money is worthwhile if you frame it as a means to a good end, but I didn’t that. It was treated as an end unto itself.

We already know this isn’t intuitively rational. Why aren’t you spending all your free time taking side jobs? Presumably because you realize there’s an opportunity cost that is not merely economic. I’m saying the same thing, only people often somehow have been duped into thinking their 9-5 is somehow different.

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

#446

Post by kelnos »

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…

> Half of my class of EEs and CEs went into other careers immediately after graduation because money was better.

This more or less describes me. I switched after graduation (nearly 20 years ago) more because I realized I didn't enjoy it that much, and I already had done a bunch of programming for a while, which I did enjoy. I only realized the financial upside later.

When I'd hear over the years from friends who'd stayed in EE/CE fields, it did indeed sound way more stressful than what I had to deal with, even though there was a lot of stress in my jobs as well.

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

#447

Post by kelnos »

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…

Is it really an easy job? I know a lot of technically-minded people who struggle with programming, especially when thinking about the design of a larger system.

I see all these coding bootcamps that supposedly graduate people who can get right to work, but in my experience less than 20% of the bootcamp graduates I've interacted with were even remotely competent, or seemed like they could even be trained up to be competent. Many who I'd kept in passing contact with ended up going into engineering or product management within a year or so (with very entry-level roles).

That's not to say you need a 4-year CS (or related) degree to be a successful software developer, but in my experience it's more difficult than you seem to think.

I do think it's bonkers that software developers in the US (and especially in northern California) make orders of magnitude more money than software developers in western Europe, in places with more or less comparable costs of living.

I think EE/CE-related jobs are mostly harder than software-related jobs, but that doesn't make software easy.

Regardless, I think it's just a matter of supply and demand, plus where the easy VC money has been directed. Most companies these days do something with software. Most do not do anything with hardware beyond buying finished products. Add to that the fact that most EE/CE jobs have moved away from the US and Europe, so Western EE/CE types don't have much in the way of employment prospects compared to the number of people who graduate into the field.

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

#448

Post by aerostable_slug »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #241
aerostable_slug wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical engineers are similarly low-paid. Some time back I hired a few MechE's (with advanced degrees) to write simulation code for a startup. I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role, which turned out to be a significant amount more than the same job would have paid if they had a different title (they would have been doing substantially the same work at Honda/John Deere/Ford/Boeing/Lockheed/…

> I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role The 'fair' pay in the Bay area is sustained/inflated by the vast amounts of VC money with a _huge_ appetite for risk. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is absolutely unique, you just don't have those finance conditions anywhere else in the world, bar maybe New York. Also all the quoted companies in your comment will have physical g…

Those same companies pay much more in the same metro areas for different titles, working on those small profit margin items you speak of, like electric vehicles and satellites. Journeyman software developer plunking along in a middling role gets A; while a mechanical engineer, with graduate degrees and who actually grasps the material, writing well-formed Modelica code, gets B.

That made me go "hmm."

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

#449

Post by ZephyrBlu »

seabird wrote: post #134
chrisco255 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, haven't seen "engineering" elitism since university. Software is the nervous system of a business. Everything from accounting, to payroll, to inventory tracking, to sales, to marketing, to communications, is achieved in today's world by interfacing with dozens if not hundreds of software programs and systems. Impossible to achieve with hardware alone obviously, you need operating systems, you need data centers,…

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…

Disagree. The impression I've got when talking to friends in traditional engineering is that the scope of a software role is larger (More vertically integrated, more expectations) and we have better processes (E.g. code review, deployment pipeline, monitoring, etc).

Cannot speak for EE, but I'm friends with people who do ChemE, MechE, Civil and mechatronics.

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

#450

Post by notch656a »

alexpotato wrote: post #405
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…

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 EA…

It's not 'looking up the part code' it's identifying components that have level and drive compatibility, fanout and timing requirements met, acceptable internal and parasitic inductance/capacitance/resistance. Checking if the nets are still theoretically a wire and not a transmission line, that ringing isn't degrading intended application, that the final output of the logic can actually drive the output of the logic diagram. Ensuring the lead time, footprint, cost, and supply chain are all compatible with your manufacturing process and planning.

If you just use theoretical perfect lossless and timeless components you completely miss and forget about a huge portion of EE which is not just designing the logic but actually implementing it in reality. It sounds like the EE program was setting people up to take the real world and imperfections into account while the CS version of the same course makes the valid assumption an electrical engineer has already provided the hardware platform so you can focus on the logical implementation.

>Isn't the key lesson to learn the logic flow design

In CS yes, in EE no. In EE that is only one of many key lessons, and without interlocking with other key lessons necessary to pick the real world components you end up with a circuit that either works purely out of luck, only in low-speed designs in noiseless environments, or not reliably.

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