The quiet resurgence of RF engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#51

Post by RhysabOweyn » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

uejfiweun wrote: post #13

TimorousBestie wrote: post #2

I agree broadly with the author but I think they miss the fact that American EE supply is not going to grow at e.g., 7% year over year. The infra for training new EEs, that is, the technical university, is losing the societial investment and public policy that made it possible.

Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck? I have to imagine that sometime in the next decade, there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context. Credentials are going to become less important, standardized testing and examination far more.

To just get started in RF you need to have a basic understanding of multivariate calculus, circuit analysis (including non-linear devices), systems and signals, electromagnetism, and semiconductor physics.

These are not topics you will just figure out on your own or "on the job".

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#52

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 11:42 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #10

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…

What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#53

Post by teleforce » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 11:45 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #10

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…

> I see hardware as being a thing for the second world and unlikely to stage a big comeback.

I cannot disagree more.

Actually the synergy of software and hardware (primarily due to the increasing popularity of electromagnetics EM spectrums sensing like Radar/LIDAR/mmWave/THz/etc compared to sound) will create unprecedented beyond human perception and intelligence embodied and enhanced by physical AI. Heck the EXG sensings including ECG/EMG/EEG/etc that are technically part of EM, are now generating hundreds of papers/patents/articles everyday in which this product/patent/paper by Meta and its subsidiary CTRL-labs is only the tip of the iceberg [1],[2].

Please check my other comments for more contexts.

[1] A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction (Nature article):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w

[2] Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025 - 962 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#54

Post by pryanbeng » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 11:46 PM UTC

uejfiweun wrote: post #13

TimorousBestie wrote: post #2

I agree broadly with the author but I think they miss the fact that American EE supply is not going to grow at e.g., 7% year over year. The infra for training new EEs, that is, the technical university, is losing the societial investment and public policy that made it possible.

Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck? I have to imagine that sometime in the next decade, there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context. Credentials are going to become less important, standardized testing and examination far more.

I find it hard to see there being an alternative for the time being. I had access to tens of thousands of dollars of lab equipment during my EE degree. Probably worth the cost of tuition itself. Not to mention the commercial cost of simulation and cad software that we got for "free".

The other aspect is the professional engineering credentials. At least in Canada Engineering is a protected title. of which the easiest way to get your P.Eng is getting a degree through an accredited engineering program.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#55

Post by ambicapter » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 11:54 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #7

I don't know that I agree with the article's point about stagnation ("quiet, non-evolving field") as there have been plenty of new developments in the 2010s and 2020s, but speaking as someone who hires RF engineers of various sorts, the hiring market is definitely heating up. As the article points out, space seems to be the main driver by a huge margin, with Amazon especially as well as SpaceX hiring a ridiculous num…

Does a hiring boom result in entry-level positions being made available or is it just going to lead to higher salaries for those already in the industry?

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#56

Post by mikestorrent » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:00 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

WarmWash wrote: post #10

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…

What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?

I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#57

Post by mikestorrent » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:01 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #30

WarmWash wrote: post #10

I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…

Curious if it's the same in China. We forgot how to make things, and maybe we're now forgetting how to do RF engineering. Those grey beards will retire at some point.

And now we're actively making this worse by not hiring juniors to learn from us while we're still able to take on apprentices. What could go wrong?

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#58

Post by drivebyhooting » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

But when will RF engineering pay 500k (common mid level SWE)?

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#59

Post by mediaman » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:26 AM UTC

drivebyhooting wrote: post #58

But when will RF engineering pay 500k (common mid level SWE)?

SWE are paid that because the industry makes so much money off advertising, and it marks the market for everything else.

It's more business model than skillset, because RF engineering is, in many ways, so much more technically challenging.

People who care about pay should mostly be thinking about how their potential employers make money. Do they have fat variable margins? Is there volume? Do I have the opportunity to impact those margins in some way? If you do, there's a good chance you can make good money, regardless of the actual technical challenge at hand.

For a lot of RF engineering, the answers are generally no, at least enough such that the general market isn't getting set at a high clearing rate.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#60

Post by idkyall » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 12:28 AM UTC

bigfatkitten wrote: post #19

cactacea wrote: post #3

> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working…

Even in defense, the advancements being made in fields like radar are incredible.

Radar improvements have also propagated to consumer fields. You can buy a mmWave presence sensor for smart home purposes for ~$40 on Amazon, and the raw sensors for $2-4 in bulk from Aliexpress. I remember seeing tech demos of mmWave in college used for imaging humans through tent fabric and dust storms, and now they're cheap enough you could put one in every room of your house.