Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

So I've been doing higher-level work for a long time now.

Sure, but what happens when you decide you're sick of a poor salary, and you learn Python and CS in your spare time and interview for Google and then quit your airplane engine job to make 3x as much working for Google? Where is GE going to get a replacement with your expertise and experience? What happens if all the engineers at GE do this?

It seems like the only reason this doesn't happen is because of inertia: the airplane engine engineers just aren't ambitious enough to leave their field for much higher pay. That doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy for a company making a critical component of a globally-important industry however.

Start looking at what the basic parts are. Look up spec sheets. Figure them out and what they mean. You may know what you want to do, but finding the part is half this battle. Start figuring out what the landscape looks like. Last you want to do is design something with retired status and no NOS (new old stock).

Also start getting electronic books on the basic topics. Trawl through college book lists, and then hit up libgen.is or other library genesis sites and get the books. We're trying to do this assuming you have very little money to work with. So piracy it is. And in actuality, the fundamentals don't really change much.

Learn analog circuitry. Go study and make your own simple circuits like circuit benders and acoustic effects.

Then dig into digital stuff. Lots of things here. You'll want to learn boolean logic, circuit analysis, and the like. There's tons of electronics to fuck around with to l;earn how they work and not work.

Past analog and digital stuffs are sensors and actuators. Sensors pick up things from the world, and actuators are things that interact with the real world. Learning and building your own 3d printer can teach you a LOT about this area in a rather quick manner. And working with an open source firmware like Merlin or Klipper can teach you digital handlings, firmware (with no OS), timing, handling analog signals, cleaning up various data, extending the hardware/software, and generally teaching yourself by trial by fire.... and print a whole lot of cool things too. (Helps to also 3d print project boxes.)

Learn how to handle power applications. Obviously we're not talking the 10kV circuits... We're talking handling batteries of various chemistries, building charge/discharge circuitry, and safe handling of the more dangerous lithium chemistries so they dont do a boeing or tesla on you. If you mess with lithiums, invest in 2 big metal buckets each half-full with sand. You'll thank me.

Get good with an IDE, like KiCAD. You'll eventually start building your own boards and parts and add them as usable things in other designs. If you get a job in industry, you'll likely use Altium. Pirate it if you can to learn it. Use the autorouter, and then do it by hand, and realize how terrible the autorouter is. Board design is just as much as an art as it is hard science. I've also heard for calculating EM prop to use something like http://openems.de/start/index.php but most tools in this realm are stupid expensive. Again, find and pirate.

Pick up some cheaper instrumentation. You'll want a good bench power supply, good 2 channel oscilloscope at 50MHz or better, signal generator, good soldering iron, good hot air rework station, fluxes, solders, solder braid, solder sucker, inspection microscope, logic analyzer, and more narrower hardware as your studies and need arise.

I also learned reverse engineering, at multiple levels. There's a lot of stuff that this can be used to attack your hardware that protects itself from, well, you. Some of the attacks are pretty simple, and others are crazy complex. Again, you might get really lucky. This usually inst taught in schools 'proper'. "Hacker skills" are usually frowned upon by the academics.

If you;re adventurous, you can also get into RF. Just be aware, this will sink your money like nothing else. A single decent SDR can easily cost you $700... And you still need a whole slew of equipment to get it to work. You can start out pretty cheaply, with 2 hackRF clones, 2 tcxo's, 2 RatLSnake antenna kits, and start learning from there. There's a lot to learn from a whole lot of fields, but even small advances are definitely noteworthy, and easily could get you published.

I know this misses quite a lot in the EE domain. However you can easily fill in the blanks as your need arises. There's a bit of analytics and mathematics I didn't directly discuss. You'll need to learn calculus. FFTs are definitely super importent and "integral" (haha) to anything regarding signals and information. https://catalog.purdue.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=7&poid... has a general listing of what their EE classes look like. You can hit wikipedia and youtube for those topics. There's LOTS of really great videos that explain the math and science online. Use those resources.

(I saved this for last, but I would also ask that you consider working on your English and grammar. Some of the worst spelling I've seen has been done by engineers. Try not to continue that trend. Lay-people and managerial/leadership types will take you more seriously.... But engineers... I don't think they'd notice :D )

> But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology.

I can simplify k8s down to "this is just a bunch of containers that run small pieces of software that talk to each other and autoscale up and down as you tell it to", and naturally that doesn't scratch the surface of what's going on.

In 4+ DoF metal manufacture, there's so many things to keep mind of. Basically, those people are metallurgical-based materials scientists. They'd be in charge of helping choose the materials for the application, billet sizes from the ingot factories, QA at all levels, impurity calculations from the ingots, grain structure sizes, can even be radioactivity measurements.

And then there's the actual machining process. If you've ever used a 6DoF mill, its nowhere near idiot-proof. And one improperly tightened part = damaged 6DoF head. That's a sad day indeed. And you're not done after the part completes. There's also post-processing all the way on up.

And I didn't even discuss metrology - or the study of measurements. Measuring what you're doing is the difference between a passed part and a failed part. And your failures may be caught upstream. And depending on some parts, you may also be doing xray spectroscopy to determine voids and other subsurface defects with the machining type you used.

You also mentioned welding. That's its own massive area of tons of failure modes, not all which also can be seen by the naked eye. Or, imagine doing underwater welding in a water tower that sprung a leak because someone shot at it. You're going up with 200 lbs of equipment, including SCUBA gear and thermite or a thermic lance.

To be honest, I have it easy. I work remote as systems engineer. I thought about switching to EE if the economy cools. But the "blue collar" (Read: tremendously skilled roles) are looked down on because they mess with physical stuffs. And the EE's do physical but are considered white collar, so they're "more acceptable". But I try to see them as the fellow professionals they truly are. The end of the day, they can hold their stuff and go "I made this". I certainly can't hold up an EC2 and say the same. Doesnt have the same feel.