Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

atempleton.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 160 posts

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#81

Post by TheBog »

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…

A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#82

Post by superxpro12 »

drtz wrote: post #39
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 left a career in RF and analog design about 15 years ago to go all-in on software. I liked technical aspects of hardware design, but the workplace culture was very lacking to say the least. Hopefully things have improved since then, but my perception at the time was that engineers in the field were paid and treated quite poorly compared to software engineers, despite having a significantly higher barrier to entry i…

It's funny because i have the exact opposite experience at my medium-large sized engineering company.

The hardware team had a team lead at the staff level for years. Software, which had an equal headcount, was compartmentalized below the hardware team.

It was such a massive struggle to get equal salary, or a voice at the table for impacts to the software team.

At one point, IT added some new intrusion detection systems that increased our compile times from 10 seconds to over 600.... And we STRUGGLED to get our issue escalated because "it was a software problem" and the hardware team didnt really care about anything other than hardware issues.

Like imagine grinding an entire division to a halt, and not even raising that concern. Thats a Tier1 issue. It took over a month to get a workaround in place. IT wasnt ever really fixed. We were just told "youre not important enough so youre gonna have to deal with 3x compile times. tough"

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#83

Post by colechristensen »

TheBog wrote: post #81
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…

A counter perspective, but I feel like the prospects are great for hardware engineers as the "gray beards" retire and leave a wide open lane (and need) for hardware expertise.

everyone retiring doesn't mean pay or culture is actually going to improve

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#84

Post by brianpan »

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…

3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x predate their 8 years in aerospace. I worked on some of those 25 years ago. If you're not an EE, maybe you also didn't consider the lead time of working on HW to its adoption.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#85

Post by Pay08 »

teleforce wrote: post #53
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 sen…

Not to mention the various manufacturing nationalisation initiatives by the USA, EU, etc. And while it's a scant hope after Covid, maybe American investment culture will calm down and software engineering ceases to be so overvalued.

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#86

Post by Pay08 »

high_priest wrote: post #15
uejfiweun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These all sound like factors that make hardware a better long-term prospect to build a career around. Basically every single thing you just mentioned makes the field more resistant to automation.

There are far too many Asian electronic engineers for NA or EU based craftsmen to gain easy living. You have to make a viral product and find a way to satiate the demand, to find similar success to software & AI bros.

That's just not true. Do you think Bosch is a Chinese company or something?

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#87

Post by ijustlovemath »

deweywsu wrote: post #8

I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or site…

While not an RF book per se, High Speed Digital design does a great job of spanning the gap from EE undergrad to the basics of RF as it relates to digital design. I'd also recommend brushing up on more advanced E&M, eg T{E,M} modes and antenna design if you haven't looked at them in a while

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#89

Post by nickledave »

merlinq wrote: post #16

Author here :) glad this sparked some discussion. A few folks raised the geographic scope and consumer RF side, which are fair things to flag. I tried to cover automotive, 5G, and IoT in the piece, though looking back at this, I could've framed the opening more clearly, as it was more a gut feeling specific to my US aerospace / defense experience rather than a universal claim. That context should've been clearer from…

Thanks for writing this, I've had a similar experience

Since you mentioned pySDR: `sdr` is a newer Python library I like https://github.com/mhostetter/sdr

Re: The quiet resurgence of RF engineering

#90

Post by deweywsu »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #87
deweywsu wrote: post #8

I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or site…

While not an RF book per se, High Speed Digital design does a great job of spanning the gap from EE undergrad to the basics of RF as it relates to digital design. I'd also recommend brushing up on more advanced E&M, eg T{E,M} modes and antenna design if you haven't looked at them in a while

Thank you for the recommendation!
Post reply on HN