There's a lot of overlap between the two, or there can be; there is as much variation in what one does in EE as you can imagine, from supervising operations to

There's a lot of overlap between the two, or there can be; there is as much variation in what one does in EE as you can imagine, from supervising operations to semiconductor design, etc. A design engineer tends to have a batch-oriented life. Typical workflow might be like CAD -> sim -> layout -> debug -> small scale production -> testing -> handoff to production. Of course all of this is as a member of a larger team. Somewhere in there you'll either work on software or firmware or both. I spend about half my time in the lab or field, the rest in my office or meetings. One bad side of EE is that you can break stuff much differently from software. When the magic smoke comes out, there's no 'svn revert' - you have to figure out what you broke and fix it before you can move on. This always happens when you're in a rush and causes plenty of unplanned late nights. And for additional fun, it's not uncommon for problems to crop up where you just have no way to get at the underlying issue. Datasheets don't have all the info you need, and you can't always figure it out. Sometimes you hit a wall and just have to start over. I used an Atmel processor which had a weird bug in its I2C slave module which prevented it from working properly. Best solution ended up being to go to a different processor, which was incredibly painful. It's really awesome to be able to hold on to a thing that you built and make it go. Seeing your thing go out in the field and work is very rewarding.