51–60 of 536 posts
This is a symptom of an outdated curriculum and lack of a future in the industry in North America. Electrical Engineering is a very hot and in demand degree in South / South East Asia precisely because that's where all the jobs are.
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 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’s not a very efficient market due to opaqueness and the fact that people don’t like to change jobs too much. A huge reallocation can take a generation or more.
Going into software development was a no brainer over EE. Twice the pay, "twice"* the job security, and no credentials needed beyond my degree and ability to deliver.
It was made even easier given that most of what I did during my EE project labs was doing the C coding that the other EEs didn't want to do. At that point I figured if I ever needed to go back to EE (some super-dot-com burst or whatever) I probably could.
* twice is just a vibe. Graduating in 2011, during a recession, there were NO junior EE jobs and I managed to get a coding job out of college.
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…
My one my high school classmates was a mechanical engineer who was one of the top guys for some semiconductor process that failed to scale and got abandoned. Got laid off and was unemployable. He sold herballife to go back to school and is a physical therapist now.
It happens in software too. Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and government who have legacy mainframe or middleware skills.
In America, the business is run by "business" people, not by people who understands how to build the thing that the business claims to be building.
Layers and layers of management will not produce your next small arm powered microwave. So even if a company started off with success, eventually, it will be taken over by "business" people instead of a a committee of engineers+sales+product+marketing - all of whom work in sync.
You laugh at business majors? In America, they have more longevity than an engineer who specializes in a niche area.
As a data engineer I could make a base salary of $300k quite easily.
As an electrical engineer I could hardly make $80k for a lot more work.
Guess which one I picked as my full time job?
Tinkering with junk to develop an interest in real electrical engineering: Totally resonates. Personal recollection from 1983-84 or so follows. We had a broken black-and-white TV that was mined out for parts (tubes, resistors, capacitors etc) but the front shell with the CRT, high voltage anode connector and deflection coils remained. How do we make this light up again with teenager-accessible loose parts? What can g…
I guess I'm part of the problem. I dual-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, I did well in both, and graduated with a B.S. in each. Going into software development was a no brainer over EE. Twice the pay, "twice"* the job security, and no credentials needed beyond my degree and ability to deliver. It was made even easier given that most of what I did during my EE project labs was doing the C coding…
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…
Expert machinists using fancy equipment in a factory don’t really have the same ability to just go to a competitor, so they can’t negotiate a raise.
The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days. Time to finally turn EE into a software discipline. Then some decent tools will be developed and normal folk will be willing to design stuff.
The tools EEs used even IN the DOS days were already graphical. Tablets were used for input, pre-mouse. Workstations were expensive, because they were graphics workstations, not text terminals. The chips DOS ran on were designed on graphical layout systems.