I should have loved electrical engineering

Fixing old consoles is roughly...

a) inspect for obviously damaged components. Capacitors that leaked, chips that released the magic smoke, etc.

b) confirm voltages are good

c) inspect the inputs and outputs of the ics to see if they're doing what you expect

d) depending on the boards involved, a lot of checking if pin A is electrically connected to pin B when it should be. Sometimes traces get broken and need to be fixed up.

The blog post describes the problem with this strategy, I think—the author was already pulled over to the CS side because they could just throw together a web app that people could actually interact with, day one.

If you start with easy circuit models, at least the labs can put together something tangible in the first couple semesters, to keep people interested.

And, I mean, a lot of engineering students end up going into sort of technician-y jobs, so keeping the hands-on spark alive has a lot of value, IMO.

Electricity behaves a lot like a fluid. But not much like water or air, so there's little point in using it as an intuitive analogy.

> Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot.

That is largely true of academic research. A critical difference though is that you don't need big expensive hardware, or the like to follow along with large portions of the cutting edge CS research. There are some exceptions like cutting edge AI training work super expensive equipment or large cloud expenditures, but tons of other cutting edge CS research can run even on a fairly low-end laptop just fine.

It is also true that plenty of software innovation is not even tied to CS style academic research. Experimenting with what sort of perf becomes possible via implementing a new kernel feature, can be very important research but isn't always super closely tied to academic CS research.

Even the more hobbyist level cutting edge research for EE will have more costs, simply because components and PCBs are not exactly free, and you cannot just keep using the same boards for every project for several years like you can with a PC.

As an EE who changed majors from CS in college and who has also done a lot of programming, I can see where the author is coming from. But electrical engineering, by its nature, is a low-level field. If CS students spent their first couple years doing algorithms and data structures in assembly, they would also find it difficult!

A key purpose of the repeated exercises in circuit analysis is to build up the student's intuition for how electricity works. Mathematically, it's "simple" -- just systems of (possibly complex) equations and basic diff eq. But for sophomores, all that is still new, and most students don't enjoy going deep into derivations.

Building kits and plugging pre-made modules into microcontroller development boards is fun, but it's not really engineering. You don't hire an EE to plug off-the-shelf components together, you hire an EE to do design work, to make sure everything is going to work under all operating conditions, and to diagnose problems when something goes wrong.

Finally, software is just easier[1] than hardware. Modern software is a mathematical idealization that runs of top of decades of high-level tools and abstractions. That's why it's so cheap and popular!

[1] This does not mean that everything in software development is easy, just that you don't need to deal with physics or chemistry or manufacturing or the procurement of physical goods in order to create new software.