I should have loved electrical engineering
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I should have loved electrical engineering
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Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#2When I studied electrical engineering, I'd say that a good half of our class were your typical "DIY" tinkering guys, which had been a hobby for quite some time. For some, like me, it was audio equipment. Guitar amplifiers, effects pedals, and all that. For others it was robotics. Other again enjoyed building their own DIY home automation systems. Or fitting mechanical systems with sensors and such, ham radio, whatever.
But, yes, probably half of my classes were a real drag to get through. It all depended on who the lecturer was, and how enthusiastic they were.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#3If you want to learn how to solve problems with hammers, engineering is what you want to do. If you want to know how the hammer works, do mathematics or physics. If you want to get paid, do software.
This is why I did an EE degree, didn't get paid much, went into software and used that to pay for a mathematics degree.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#4If you want to learn how to solve problems with hammers, engineering is what you want to do. If you want to know how the hammer works, do mathematics or physics. If you want to get paid, do software. This is why I did an EE degree, didn't get paid much, went into software and used that to pay for a mathematics degree.
This is outdated advice. If you want to get paid, get a hammer.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#5> It seemed crazy to me that with all the amazing technological advancement we had, our efficiency in communicating via the computer wasn’t much higher than someone with a typewriter 150 years ago.
We're making electric super cars that still use a steering wheel and gas pedal. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's deficient. Humans haven't fundamentally changed in the past 100 years, so it is probably the most intuitive way to manually control a car.
The typewriter/keyboard is probably the most intuitive method to input alphabet characters. Of course that doesn't preclude entirely new ways to control our computers. But if you set out to simply replace the mouse and keyboard without fundamentally changing how we interact with a computer, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#6If you want to learn how to solve problems with hammers, engineering is what you want to do. If you want to know how the hammer works, do mathematics or physics. If you want to get paid, do software. This is why I did an EE degree, didn't get paid much, went into software and used that to pay for a mathematics degree.
This is outdated advice. If you want to get paid, get a hammer.
I disagree with this entirely as I rather like a desk job and hammers make my hands hurt after a bit :)
If you want to get paid in software don't do something utterly commoditised and popular or you're just a fungible meat flavoured work unit. Get really damn good at something with some longevity in a stable niche.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#7Weirdly my background is physics and CS and I am recently discovering a love of EE. I don't think it's as easy to pare these subjects apart as history suggests. Modern bleeding-edge solutions require a "full-stack" understanding. If you know maxwell's equations with your physics knowledge - then you can implement them numerically with your CS knowledge - build a hardware optimized version with verilog/FPGA with your EE knowledge.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is outdated advice. If you want to get paid, get a hammer.
I disagree with this entirely as I rather like a desk job and hammers make my hands hurt after a bit :) If you want to get paid in software don't do something utterly commoditised and popular or you're just a fungible meat flavoured work unit. Get really damn good at something with some longevity in a stable niche.
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Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#9If you want to learn how to solve problems with hammers, engineering is what you want to do. If you want to know how the hammer works, do mathematics or physics. If you want to get paid, do software. This is why I did an EE degree, didn't get paid much, went into software and used that to pay for a mathematics degree.
This is outdated advice. If you want to get paid, get a hammer.
And once you're actually using that hammer for real work, you'll learn how to use it to solve all sorts of problems, better than any school could teach you.
Re: I should have loved electrical engineering
#10The EE component of my CSE degree felt like a math degree in disguise. Calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, discrete mathematics... It was a long time ago but I remember it as three years of math prerequisites and Maxwell’s equations and then finally we could learn what a MOSFET is. Absolutely terrible. I just want to learn how circuits work and how to build a guitar amp! But noooooo I need to learn how to solve partial differential equations, which I’ve done zero times in the field.