TL;DR; I'm an impoverished small scale serial arsonist of expensive components remembering that software means never having to leave physical proof of your boo boos, most of the time. OK, I'm actually a software engineer back into hardware engineering after 20 some years cause I need to build custom cameras for machine vision projects. Major recovered sills are CAD (Eagle), more geometry (layout), exercising credit cards due to I'm still bad a spice, lazily using standard cap and resistor values even when they're wrong for >this< circuit, and excessive shining about stray capacitance - since I need to work at 3.3V and I'm in my 50's, I can't see the parts so well and my motor skills aren't what they once were, so thats even more expensive crap I need (rework station, reflow oven)
Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
71–80 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#72So EE today is almost entirely about digital circuitry?
I'd guess others are less likely to read HN.
I know people that design electric motors, microphones for hearing aids, overhead electrification for railways, railway signalling systems and power distribution in very large buildings.
However, I don't know what a typical day would be for any of them.
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think Altium is a "overpriced piece of technical debt", HOLY SHIT you should try anything it competes with. It's sooo much nicer then anything else out there in the EDA market. At my work they use Proteus, and it's horrible. Also, solder fumes aren't toxic!
> Also, solder fumes aren't toxic! If the solder has lead the fumes are toxic. If the solder has a rosin flux the fumes are toxic, and the operator needs ventilation to keep exposure below recommended levels. It's a bad idea to be breathing in the fumes, but obviously this depends on how much you're breathing. At most risk are people who solder all day everyday.
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Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#74I'm an electrical engineer by trade, and do embedded systems design for a living. I do a lot of board placement and layout planning, plus writing test plans for verifying that what we build is good at scale. I also do a reasonable amount of debug, as that just comes with the territory. I'd say it's about 70% software time for planning and CAD work, 30% hands-on lab time. Note that it's not uniform - I might be in the…
> embedded systems
> there's a lot more standardization in the components I string together
Embedded Systems is just one discipline in EE. How many people design something like an lm317 deployed on embedded devices? EE tries to teach that, too, until it's all to complex not to specialize on one branch. Another discipline I was offered to specialize in was Motor Appliances and Power Amplifiers. Those don't have much to do with CS, except maybe for digital control circuits.
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think Altium is a "overpriced piece of technical debt", HOLY SHIT you should try anything it competes with. It's sooo much nicer then anything else out there in the EDA market. At my work they use Proteus, and it's horrible. Also, solder fumes aren't toxic!
> Also, solder fumes aren't toxic! If the solder has lead the fumes are toxic. If the solder has a rosin flux the fumes are toxic, and the operator needs ventilation to keep exposure below recommended levels. It's a bad idea to be breathing in the fumes, but obviously this depends on how much you're breathing. At most risk are people who solder all day everyday.
> If the solder has lead the fumes are toxic.
I encourage you to support this statement. Lead doesn't vaporize at anywhere close to soldering temperatures, and from what I have read there is no lead component to soldering fumes and consequently no exposure through respiration.
Rosin and particularly No-Clean fluxes do pose a respiratory hazard, so fume extraction is a good idea regardless.
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#76TL;DR; I'm an impoverished small scale serial arsonist of expensive components remembering that software means never having to leave physical proof of your boo boos, most of the time. OK, I'm actually a software engineer back into hardware engineering after 20 some years cause I need to build custom cameras for machine vision projects. Major recovered sills are CAD (Eagle), more geometry (layout), exercising credit c…
Having just deployed a machine vision system (using GigE machine vision cameras): why exactly are you building custom cameras? If you don't mind/are allowed to share this information, of course.
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#77I've served a whole bunch of roles in my five years at my current employer, and I'd probably classify myself as being an "electrical engineer" for all of them. (No single experience is typical, but mine is probably representative of a lot of chip companies.) When I joined the company, the very first role I was put in was on the core bringup team for a complex ASIC -- that is to say, the team responsible for screening…
No VHDL? ( :) ) Also, TCL - WHRYYYY.. ASIC work is fascinating.
Because TCL was one of the first great scripting languages, so we glommed onto it and it got used everywhere. You would be surprised (and then maybe appalled) at the number of times TCL appears in a tool chain like that.
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think Altium is bad, you've never used Orcad. If you think Orcad is good, you've never used Eagle.
If you think eagle is good, you've never used KiCad.
I'd love a recommendation for a good KiCad intro tutorial. I tried to just hack through learning it once and I couldn't pick it up. Any suggestions?
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think Altium is bad, you've never used Orcad. If you think Orcad is good, you've never used Eagle.
Tell me if I got this right. Altium is better then Orcad, and Eagle is better then Orcad. So which one is better between Altium and Eagle?
Whoops, I meant to imply that Orcad is better than Eagle.
I really just find it hard to do hobby projects in Eagle because I'm so used to Orcad's workflow by now. All the shortcuts are different. :(
Re: Ask HN: What does an electrical engineer actually do at work?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was a very high minded response to an attempt at commiserating.
Yeah. Sorry... I do think, though, that it's possible for an organization to structure it's meetings so that they're a useful and productive part of the job, and not a thing to be dreaded in the least. I've seen this done with varying degrees of success/failure.
I think a real problem is that meetings bloat in attendance, and that the amount of useful stuff you can get done is inversely proportional of the number of attendees. I think this is doubly true when you don't have good, clear leadership and agendas. This doesn't happen that often in my experience.
I feel like I go to a lot of meetings with a lot of people who are just there to be "in the loop" rather than actually contributing to the topic at hand.