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Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

• cochne 4y ago
  Just like all the supply chain issues we've seen unfold, we are due for a nasty correction when all the would-be EE's end up as software engineers.
• anewpersonality 4y ago
  Any EE remember 5-10 years ago when all the ECE folks online had a HUGE chip on their shoulders about absolutely needing an MS? Kind of funny to see software people outearn them 10x these days. That's what gatekeeping does to you.
• barkingcat 4y ago
  This is a symptom of an outdated curriculum and lack of a future in the industry in North America. Electrical Engineering is a very hot and in demand degree in South / South East Asia precisely because that's where all the jobs are.
  • coryrc 4y ago
    The curriculum is fine. The entirety of the problem is correctly identified by the remainder of your statements.
  • slategruen 4y ago
    Nope. EEs still earn relatively less here despite electrical and infrastructure projects in general not slowing down yet. You might think that since we're still in a developing economy, careers in formal engineering should pay more but in reality, compared to the tech sector, the pay is still abysmal.
• texaslonghorn5 4y ago
  It seems like undergrads are entering ECE/EECS departments with far more programing experience as well, and there is far more awareness / advertisement / (over)hyping of "glamorous" FAANG-type environments and trajectories. As compared to EE companies where the perception is that jobs are far more "traditional". Regarding the article's comments on the decline of tinkering, either it's causal or correlated, but it seems like students have far less physics (E&M) exposure than programming experience, and many don't want to grind through the math required (differential equations is often taught poorly, contributing to this phenomenon). So it's seen as far simpler to just do as little EE as possible to finish the degree and get the sweet SWE job.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• Daishiman 4y ago
  In a software engineer. My cousin is an electrical engineer working at a large power distribution firm. For all intents and purposes his job is absolutely critical to society. I basically fumble around and do a few projects for my clients. I get paid several times more than him. I am happy for myself but it makes no sense to me how society is mispricing our work.
  • aerostable_slug 4y ago
    Mechanical engineers are similarly low-paid. Some time back I hired a few MechE's (with advanced degrees) to write simulation code for a startup. I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role, which turned out to be a significant amount more than the same job would have paid if they had a different title (they would have been doing substantially the same work at Honda/John Deere/Ford/Boeing/Lockheed/etc.). Strange.
    • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
      > I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role The 'fair' pay in the Bay area is sustained/inflated by the vast amounts of VC money with a _huge_ appetite for risk. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is absolutely unique, you just don't have those finance conditions anywhere else in the world, bar maybe New York. Also all the quoted companies in your comment will have physical goods with way way smaller profit margins compared to most Bay area products. My point is that it is not strange at all if you follow the money.
      • aerostable_slug 4y ago
        Those same companies pay much more in the same metro areas for different titles, working on those small profit margin items you speak of, like electric vehicles and satellites. Journeyman software developer plunking along in a middling role gets A; while a mechanical engineer, with graduate degrees and who actually grasps the material, writing well-formed Modelica code, gets B. That made me go "hmm."
  • 4y ago
• shswkna 4y ago
  The article is basically saying that there is a focus on commoditising tech talent for what builds shareholder value, and a loss of the passion, imagination and richness that tech can add to the world. My own relationship with tech reflects in that: I despise some of the things that tech is used for and has managed to amplify in our species. I still pursue my passion because somewhere deep down I know that it could also be different: That the power of technology can also be used to magnify and infuse the world with values that make our existence worthwhile and wondrous.
  • supertrope 4y ago
    Intel cancelled their sponsorship of Intel Science Talent Search. That was a relatively cheap way to build goodwill and cultivate the talent pipeline.
    • georgeburdell 4y ago
      ISEF was a competition among parents and professors living vicariously through children
      • brewdad 4y ago
        My kid was an ISEF finalist and even won a small bit of prize money. It's never been a big deal at our high school and he was one of the first, if not the first, from our school to advance beyond the state finals. His project was completely self-driven with off the shelf parts or tools he designed and 3D printed. I was amazed/disgusted to see finalists partnered with the JPL and working with NASA partnerships and university labs when my kid tinkered mostly solo in our garage or his bedroom. It really made me proud of what he was able to accomplish.
• MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Tinkering with junk to develop an interest in real electrical engineering: Totally resonates. Personal recollection from 1983-84 or so follows. We had a broken black-and-white TV that was mined out for parts (tubes, resistors, capacitors etc) but the front shell with the CRT, high voltage anode connector and deflection coils remained. How do we make this light up again with teenager-accessible loose parts? What can generate the necessary voltage? Oh, how about this car ignition coil. How to tickle the coil into generating this voltage, i.e. pulse its primary input? How about this "vibrator" from an ancient tube car radio (a mechanical chopper for turning DC into AC). But how do we rectify multiple kilovolts? No suitable stack-of-diodes rectifier stick on hand. Oh well, resort to the original HV rectifier tube from the TV. But need to power its (directly heated cathode) filament. Cop-out: Do it with a battery or two. Voila, bright spot on the CRT. Can we make it move? Well sure, just apply a suitable voltage (trial and error!) 60Hz AC waveform to the horizontal deflection coil. Voila, a line. What about the Y axis? Well, we can amplify a microphone with a stereo amplifier and drive the vertical deflection coil with the speaker output. Amplitude? Trial and error (volume control). This was getting pretty cool! Except that it was like seeing the waveform wrapped around a cylinder, seen from the side, because of the full sinusoid horizontal pattern. Which looked really neat, but... I can crank up the horizontal deflection by increasing the voltage (I did have a VARIC based adjustable power supply - homemade of course) until only the linear-ish part of the sinewave remained onscreen. From there it was a straightforward matter of an RC phase shift to drive one of the control grids (found by trial and error by applying small DC voltages to various pins until the beam was blanked) to blank out the right-to-left direction. And we had a sort of homemade oscilloscope. This was cool in so many ways but only because the technological underpinnings were still relevant at the time. Nowadays it would be as ancient as dabbling with atmospheric steam engines. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere is still doing. As an extreme niche hobby without a clear track into a profitable career.
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    For the next generation it'll be 'hey, let's pull this tv apart', 'oh the chassis intrusion sensor tripped and every single IC inside it packed a tantrum and will now refuse to work without the vendor's $10k/mo software subscription'.
• dusted 4y ago
  I guess the world needs orders of magnitudes more codemonkeys bashing away at their proverbial typewriters than those gods-amongst-men who actually build the chips on which all that spaghetti code crawls along. (I'm a software developer, because the other thing, while obviously way cooler and more hardcore, sounded difficult and... I could teach myself how to program way easier than teach myself how to microprocessor design...)
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days. Time to finally turn EE into a software discipline. Then some decent tools will be developed and normal folk will be willing to design stuff.
  • schlauerfox 4y ago
    A poor workman blames his tools.
    • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      So you'll sign up to use crappy tools to design hardware with millions of elements? This isn't about chest-beating. Its about attracting people to a discipline which is currently arcane because of obtuse tools.
    • antod 4y ago
      It wasn't until a few years ago that I properly understood that somewhat trite line. It isn't implying that a good workman has the skills to work wonders with bad tools, it's that a good workman will make damn sure they won't have bad tools to begin with.
  • spfzero 4y ago
    The tools EEs used even IN the DOS days were already graphical. Tablets were used for input, pre-mouse. Workstations were expensive, because they were graphics workstations, not text terminals. The chips DOS ran on were designed on graphical layout systems.
    • dboreham 4y ago
      I was going to say the same thing. As an EE in the late 80s I got to use some kick-ass workstations and leading edge GUI frameworks (e.g. MentorGraphics). The company I worked for also wrote their own CAD system for VLSI design. I never touched DOS.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
• 0x20cowboy 4y ago
  I loved tinkering with electronics when I was younger - still do to a smaller degree. I built my first computer by fixing some blown capacitors on a motherboard I found in the trash. Back in the day, lots of products came with schematics, now you might get a lawsuit if you dare to take something apart. It was way easier to take apart and tweak through hole components too - now everything is surface mount or on chip and it’s much harder to get into with just a soldering iron. The first thing I ever did was rewire a stereo to broadcast instead of receive to make a little pirate radio station - really, none of those things exist anymore. I think it’s just a harder thing to get into now.
  • fleventynine 4y ago
    Surface mount isn't that big of a deal. A cheap hot air gun, a soldering iron, flux, and some solder paste are all you need to work with most BGAs, QFN, and other modern packages. PCB prototype manufacturing has never been cheaper thanks to companies like JLCPCB. With all the fantastic learning material on YouTube, open source tools like KiCad, and inexpensive chinese test equipment, the kids these days can do WAY more than I could dream of back in the 90s.
    • stas2k 4y ago
      Could not agree more. I have designed my first PCB in Kicad as a MIT licence project. Kicad ecosystem is very much alive and I was able to reuse dimensions from another project for the same computer. I made a RAM expansion board for Sharp X68000. You can check it out on https://github.com/stas2k/galspanic https://github.com/stas2k/galspanic
    • 0x20cowboy 4y ago
      But, I mean, you could get by with just a $10 soldering iron from RadioShack. It’s just harder to get into and tinker with is my point - which I think you just supported?
      • _moof 4y ago
        I do surface mount with a $20 hotplate from Target. A lot of parts you can even do with a soldering iron. I know it looks scary but once you give it a try you'll find it's not really any harder than through-hole and doesn't require any special equipment.
• fatnoah 4y ago
  I'm not surprised. I was a double EE/CS major as an undergrad, and earned an MSEE. My career has been mostly software, though, and the economics of what EE vs. SWE get paid makes it very unlikely that I'd ever move back since it would mean (at best) making < 50% of my current compensation.
• jaygreco 4y ago
  I graduated with a BSEE and worked as an EE for 6~ yr in hardware design, mostly as a generalist before switching outright to embedded FW. I make more money and have greater autonomy. I like hardware but enjoy firmware an equal amount and would only switch back into a role that encompassed both (like engineering lead, etc)
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  I graduated in EE and this is no surprise- hardware is hard and Google will throw you $500k a year to tweak the font on their internal compiler. Optics, Power engineering, ASIC design, it’s all fascinating and * really hard * and * really underpaid *. It’s worrying in the long term, the industry’s been built on underpaid geniuses. We need them, but you can’t begrudge them moving to the money.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > I graduated in EE and this is no surprise- hardware is hard and Google will throw you $500k a year to tweak the font on their internal compiler Google isn't really a great example because they are one of the few places to get highly paid EE / hardware jobs. That said, there are many more software jobs than hardware jobs at Google.
    • livinginfear 4y ago
      I think he's pointing out the relative difficulty of hardware positions compared with being a 'software engineer' in FAANG.
• tekla 4y ago
  I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college math gets paid almost nothing compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I've been on floors where multi-million dollar pieces of equipment are used to produce parts with obscene levels of precision being used by expert machinists making 80k a year who risk their own personal safety making these parts. I have EE friends with master degrees who design PCBs that are printed millions of times that struggle to afford rent. It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
  • williamcotton 4y ago
    > It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? Value is determined by quantitative exchange in a market and not by any intrinsic qualities such as difficulty of labor.
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    Profit margin. It's all profit margin. Software is reliably >25%, where physical manufacturing is in the single digits.
    • georgeburdell 4y ago
      But the question is why? Shouldn’t there be the same race to single digit margins in software as well?
      • simmerup 4y ago
        I think you're right. It's my suspicion that eventually software engineers will be paid the same as copy writers and scientists. But not yet.
        • insightcheck 4y ago
          I was initially going to disagree that copywriters get paid in the same range as scientists, but the numbers in the US are roughly similar from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Indeed. -Indeed average copywriter annual pay [0] is $54,998 USD, versus a staff scientist's [1] at $69,091 USD -BLS median copywriter pay for 2021 [2] was $69,510 USD, versus a medical scientist's [3] at $95,310 USD I'm surprised that the median annual salary difference is only roughly $15,000 to $25,000 USD in favor of working as a scientist, considering the additional years doing a Master's/PhD, whereas copywriter jobs often don't need even a Bachelor's. In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?). Alternatively, maybe the numbers are missing important contextual information in some way. [0] https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries [1] https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-authors.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-... [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/medical-scientists.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/med...
• frazbin 4y ago
  Might be a language thing. Observationally, the products of hardware design cross language barriers better than software/UX. Therefore software producers compete mostly within their own language, but hardware producers must complete globally. This would tend to produce a deficit of HW engineers in countries like the US/UK, just because there isn't as much money to chase vs software.
• humanwhosits 4y ago
  Perhaps there will be a wage spike if there's less EEs
• devwastaken 4y ago
  Stop tying engineering to universities and the problem will be solved. People want careers, they want to solve complex problems, and we have more tooling and knowledge than ever to do so. The problem is U S. Education is squeezing it dry. In the U.K. you can go for engineering in many fields without it breaking the bank or having to compete for the top 0.1% of schools. If india, Taiwan, and china can do better than the U.S. - there's a big problem. Rebuild the system.
  • P_I_Staker 4y ago
    While still fairly expensive, you don’t have to be in the top 0.1% to go into engineering.
  • robk 4y ago
    I don't see us producing a surplus of EEs here despite that
• coastermug 4y ago
  Engineer turned programmer in the UK. I put the salary discrepancy down to the ease with which I can move jobs. In programming I can bounce around different companies every couple of years in the same city. In engineering things are so frequently sub-industry and even employer specific. If you’re the only person that can operate a company’s machinery that’s great, but if that machinery is unique to that company that doesn’t mean you can get employment elsewhere.
• bsder 4y ago
  If there's a problem, then companies will pay out money. If companies aren't paying out money, is there really a problem? Given that, it sounds like students are making a rational economic choice to avoid an underpaid profession.
• Ancalagon 4y ago
  Its the same problem everywhere now. Pay people what their skills are worth, or they'll walk and your business will go under. I really have no respect for margins or operating expenses, or the executives and government officials that, until now, have taken advantage of the working classes. According to the free market rules, any business which cannot sustain itself and its employees should fail. So, EE, buckle-up, things just got that difficult and you're in for some rough times unless you can start paying people what they're worth.
• freyr 4y ago
  PhD in EE. Moved to software for better pay and more job openings. Now I optimize button colors.
  • schappim 4y ago
    >> Now I optimize button colors Hardware or software, either way you'll still be optimizing buttons!
  • defterGoose 4y ago
    Man, I can't put my finger on why exactly, but this fact makes me feel like humanity is irrefutably screwed in some way.
    • badpun 4y ago
      I think we're producing too many EE PhDs.
  • thunkshift1 4y ago
    Feel you man/woman
• ChrisGammell 4y ago
  EEs are pretty far away from the money. That really impacts earning potential. Most EEs who went the traditional route and want to keep doing electronics in some form but make money become Field Application Engineers (FAEs) to get closer to the sale and show their value to the company. The crustiest old engineers are buried deep within a corporation and it's hard to show value on the bottom line. Similarly, the FAANG/MANGA folks of the world are beneficiaries of being closer to the end customer, at least in terms of always being able to track customer usage of products. And hey, some of the highest paid ones are doing some hyper scale stuff that touches billions of users. Then there's just the general markete conditions of having much more need than talent available, especially at the upper eschelons. Credentials: 20 year EE, have the largest podcast about designing electronics (The Amp Hour, check us out)
  • doix 4y ago
    I worked in the semiconductor industry, and at least in our niche of the semiconductor industry, FAEs were some of the worst paid people, a long with production test for some reason. FAEs were seen as the lowest level support who were a stop-gap for our application engineers (non-field). If a big customer had a problem, we would send an AE out to show that we were taking it seriously. No idea if it's the same in other industries though. Application engineers weren't that we'll paid either. Technical marketing and sales were paid well, but maybe this is a just a title thing (what you called FAE is what we called sales/marketing). Their salaries were predominantly sale/deal based bonuses though. For people that actually developed the chips, analogue designers were the highest paid followed by digital designers. Then digital verification engineers, with verification engineer salary increasing very quickly. The salaries were shit compared to software though. But now, talking to my friends still in the sector(doing design), competition is absolutely fierce and their salaries are increasing rapidly along with getting a lot more shares. There was a point where a senior analogue engineer could move to a graduate software position and make more money. Those days are gone now, and salaries are pretty close. A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
• dang 4y ago
  Related articles: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/08/semiconductor_engineer_shortage/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/08/semiconductor_enginee... https://semiwiki.com/events/314964-a-crisis-in-engineering-education-where-are-the-microelectronics-engineers/ https://semiwiki.com/events/314964-a-crisis-in-engineering-e... Smallish, recentish discussions: America's chip land has another potential shortage: Electronics engineers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048654 - July 2022 (5 comments) Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012660 - July 2022 (32 comments)
• valbaca 4y ago
  I guess I'm part of the problem. I dual-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, I did well in both, and graduated with a B.S. in each. Going into software development was a no brainer over EE. Twice the pay, "twice"* the job security, and no credentials needed beyond my degree and ability to deliver. It was made even easier given that most of what I did during my EE project labs was doing the C coding that the other EEs didn't want to do. At that point I figured if I ever needed to go back to EE (some super-dot-com burst or whatever) I probably could. * twice is just a vibe. Graduating in 2011, during a recession, there were NO junior EE jobs and I managed to get a coding job out of college.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    Same. I had a whole career in H/W design, then moved into S/W as a second career (I had always been a coder through personal projects and writing some device drivers and hardware test programs). Much higher pay, and if you screw up : ship a patch. In recent decades the rise of SaaS has degraded the relative experience a bit -- H/W engineers don't often get to be paged in the night.
• nine_zeros 4y ago
  I'm not sure why this is surprising. The structure of corporations as it stands is untenable for skilled workforce retention. in In America, the business is run by "business" people, not by people who understands how to build the thing that the business claims to be building. Layers and layers of management will not produce your next small arm powered microwave. So even if a company started off with success, eventually, it will be taken over by "business" people instead of a a committee of engineers+sales+product+marketing - all of whom work in sync. You laugh at business majors? In America, they have more longevity than an engineer who specializes in a niche area.
• thrown_22 4y ago
  It's the pay stupid. As a data engineer I could make a base salary of $300k quite easily. As an electrical engineer I could hardly make $80k for a lot more work. Guess which one I picked as my full time job?
  • ta988 4y ago
    What does a data engineer making 300k do of its days?
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      Promptly reply to emails with impeccable spelling and grammar.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Pay more and get more talent. If a local web startup is paying 2x, 3x, 5x more money for some html and css (and/or whatever language of the week is for the backend), than companies like Intel are paying for serious hardware knowledge, it's no wonder people don't choose this profession.
  • jimmydddd 4y ago
    Agreed. I went to law school (of all things) at night while working as an engineer and started as a newly minted attorney with 0 experience at 2x my engineering salary (I was a 6th year EE).
  • noodle 4y ago
    As a CompE and EE major who switched to software after graduation like 20 years ago, EE work was also like way harder IMO. They SHOULD be getting paid more. But they don't seem to be. I switched due to low salary and few available jobs and never looked back.
    • mohaine 4y ago
      Same here. Soon after graduation (~y2k) I know another, older EE who just retired early because it just wasn't worth it to work (and his SO made good money). The salary he was going to get with 10 years experience as an EE was about what I got straight out of college.
    • lumost 4y ago
      IIRC intel pays the “Median” compensation for a position. This ultimately doesn’t mean much in semi when intel was hiring 3/4 of the engineering talent. Inflation has been brutal to gen y/z in ways that aren’t tracked. A recent college graduate in EE makes about the same they did 30 years ago, but paid 10x for college and 4x for housing.
• arduinomancer 4y ago
  Personally I think from a business standpoint its just much easier to make money from software compared to hardware. Very low marginal unit costs, easy distribution, faster iteration, easier to scale, etc...
  • ranger_danger 4y ago
    I agree but as a developer I have zero clue how to come up with useful ideas that haven't been done a hundred times over. And I have had zero success trying to find a platform for freelancers where you don't have to compete with less experienced third world coders underbidding everyone (and the customers always seem to pick them anyway).
• tomohawk 4y ago
  I recall when there were still engineering magazines and the focus was what was going on in the US. Then, as China was able to dupe the useful idiot free traders, and all the manufacturing went there, there was less and less need for electrical engineers in the US. Just before those magazines folded, it was more about trying to manage offshored manufacturing than doing any real engineering work. The more tenacious engineers were learning Mandarin to try to stretch their careers, but the writing was on the wall. China graduates 7 times more engineers than the US now, and most of the people who would be suitable for an EE degree are going into finance or web dev.
• alyandon 4y ago
  I am a chemical engineer by education and I am also part of this problem. It did not take me very long at all to figure out where the actual money is and transition to full time software development.
  • thrill 4y ago
    I suspect it's been that way for a while. I graduated with Electrical and Computer Engineering degrees last century plus several years, with a schedule to go into the AF about a year later. No one wanted to hire me as an EE for "such a short time", but one crusty old NASA aeronautical engineer, who told me to "stay the hell away from this field you'll die from neglect" and to play up my software skills. First phone call pitching my coding skills and got an interview and offer on the phone in 15 minutes, drove over and went to work after lunch writing a custom assembly language application that took six months. It worked too and made the company a lot of money, and the boss told me to do whatever I wanted for the rest of the time I was there.
• dmikalova 4y ago
  My friend is an EE that I went to school with. He's very bright and definitely sharper and harder working than me. I went to school for Chemistry and switched to DevOps - which are the not the highest paid of SEs. I make 1.5x what he does. I help run a package tracking dashboard. He ensures power systems for millions of people work flawlessly in all conditions. He's looking to quit the industry because its so hopeless.
  • shadycuz 4y ago
    You might want to do some more research. DevOps is for sure one of the top paying engineering positions. I think the average salary right now is 134k a year USD.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • hellohowareu 4y ago
      Can confirm. Making ~$145k salary, with $40k in bonuses. This is with 3 years of experience in Full Stack Web Dev SWE, and zero years in DevOps (but some basic experience with containers, cloud, and general linux server config). I was hired as a Web App SWE, but was offered the chance to train in DevOps and took it, in order to grow additional skills. Full stack web apps are mostly CRUD. To learn the ecosystem around them... in terms of Cloud Computing, Kubernetes, and Customizing Containers... I consider that incredibly valuable. My company needs DevOps but is having difficulty hiring for the role-- it's in high demand but low supply apparently. So, they're letting me become one of their interdisciplinary DevOps/Full Stack people. I'm very happy as I am learning new things, working with a great team of enthusiastic, positive-attitude people, and upon my first promotion I imagine I'll make around $250k or so. I don't know of many other professions where this is possible, while working 100% remotely.
      • sli 4y ago
        I've done full stack and frontend but always had a lot more fun and felt more productive doing devops stuff on my personal projects than anything I've ever done at a job. I've been considering a switch, primarily because I'm just so burnt out on writing software, so maybe I should do that. I've got about the experience you had, maybe a bit more, since I've done a good amount of hobbyist work with devops.
• dsalzman 4y ago
  Was ECE in undergrad - graduated in 2014. Everyone I knew went into software. There just weren't that many opportunities in HW if you didn't want to get a masters/+PHD.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  I started as an EE and gradually moved over to software out of a mix of interests and career options. Strangely, the EE degree seemed to trigger certain hiring managers into downplaying my software experience and lowballing my offers. A lot of "He's an electrical engineer but he can write some code too" introductions. I heard a lot of "Wow, you're really good at software for an EE!" from various people. The stereotypes out there are baffling, given how multi-talented all of my EE colleagues are. There are companies out there that value EE experience and pay appropriately, but you have to look around. If you get stuck at a place where management believes CS = high pay and EE = necessary evil, it's time to get out.
  • YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    What are you talking about? IT is the most degree inclusive industry ever by far, even in your example. I like EE and created many things, but don't have a degree. Everyone knows I can't get an interview there, let alone job, forget equality.
• Panzer04 4y ago
  When the money comes, so will the engineers. I did EE, work in embedded SW because it was way easier to find a job with decent pay. Everyone looking for EEs was pickier and paying less :/. Maybe when this "shortage" materializes and companies have to start paying EE the same as SW I'll try my luck. No reason to for now, though.
• livinginfear 4y ago
  I'll never understand this. It's my opinion that you need to be much smarter to be an electrical engineer than a computer scientist, which again requires much more intellectual rigor than being a 'software engineer'. The kinds of wages companies are paying for just about anyone to write Node.js right now are ridiculous. My view is that this state of affairs can't possibly last forever, given how low the bar is. I imagine that eventually the standards will rise again as more intelligent people are attracted by the absurd pay, and the field becomes more competitive.
• tho23u4o23i4 4y ago
  Seems like a software-bubble in the US; I've worked at FAANG and never understood why I was getting paid so much to do such mundane work. Hardware is so much more fascinating.
• Arubis 4y ago
  N+1. B.S. ECE back in 2006, worked hard for long hours in the industry right out of college, called it quits and did some other stuff, came back to software for twice the pay.
• civilized 4y ago
  How is The Register so good? Its thick red banner always gives me the vibe that it's just another Daily Mail type garbage pit.
• adapteva 4y ago
  Seems like people are interpreting whatever they want from the original chart by Raja Koduri at the VLSI symposium...plotted with absolute numbers you see that EE enrollment is pretty flat. What has happened is that the number of CS majors has exploded. Kind of makes sense that there SHOULD be 10x programmers for every chip designer? Unless we want the hardware to become the application and for every programmer to be an EE?? https://ee.stanford.edu/about/fast-facts https://ee.stanford.edu/about/fast-facts https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers [edited: formatting]
  • Derbasti 4y ago
    This needs more upvotes.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  People say supply/demand but also they is price stickiness/anchoring. A grad SF coder might make $200k but in Europe they might make $20k and I believer the main reason is that prices are sticky. Like the housing market when you want to buy X you need to judge what X is worth and so you look to the market to see what other people are paying for X. Candidates too are playing the same game. The talent market acting like the stock market effectively. This means SF companies have to be very profitable or grow fast. A European company can plot along and be efficient, have bad sales etc. but survive on the cheap staff costs for a long time a a zombie. It means any well tuned geo-arb company, selling in the US and paying locals outside can make a fortune. Someone in 2050 “when i was young you could earn a fortune as a software engineer because for some reason they didn’t have the efficient global labour market we have now. Now that all the coders work for Uber Code many have decided electrical engineering is actually a better choice as it pays a bit more”
• killjoywashere 4y ago
  EE spent so many years making sure everyone knew it's impossibly hard, the professors eat their young, etc. I've seen this in other professions where the incumbents desperately want to impose, in actuality, the uphill-both-ways life story they believe they endured. And then they are shocked when the young peace out. The military, and their insanely rigorous special warfare training. The medical profession in general. Seriously, people, what did you expect was going to happen?
  • seattle_spring 4y ago
    Yep. I was so stoked on EE in high school. Took the first EE course in college and got as far away from it as possible after that. Subject matter was interesting, but the professor took every ounce of fun out.
    • bradfa 4y ago
      I have a BS EE, my day job now is lower level software/firmware - almost entirely with Linux these days but have done a fair share of bare metal, too. My favorite course in university was my 2nd year circuits course, the professor who taught it had a research grant to study how to better teach electrical engineering to undergrads, and it showed. I vividly remember demonstrations and labs we did in that class even 20 years later. I imagine part of the problem is there's just fewer EEs than there are CS grads, so the EEs who end up teaching might be the best at that in their field but since the field of CS grads is so much larger you generally get better teachers in CS. I feel there's also been a huge push to make CS approachable over the past 30 years and it shows, it's easy to find great teachers both online and in universities for CS. It's much harder to find good teachers for EE. Knowing EE or CS does not make a good teacher. Being a good teacher is significantly more than simply knowing the material.
  • imgabe 4y ago
    This is true. I went to school for EE, but was interested in Computer Science. There was a stigma to switching from EE to CS as taking an easier course because you couldn't hack it in EE. It was seen as a failure or a defeat. I toughed it out and graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but now I'm a programmer anyway. Wish I had just switched once I realized I liked CS more and saved a bunch of time.
• Ericson2314 4y ago
  All the manufacturing is off-shored and so the EEs are too. It's that simple.
• bumby 4y ago
  Food for thought: At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches. Any engineering position can lead to a comfortable life, but when everything is about the hustle to make the most money the quickest way possible, it’s worrisome. It’s like when you look at how the career fields for elite schools tend to fall into a few select categories: law, finance, consulting. (Sometimes medicine but that can be for or against this point, and would be a digression.) It’s not bad per se, but it’s can smell an awful lot like status climbing. To paraphrase a professor of mine: “there are people who’s goal is to climb to the top of the world and those who’s whose goal is to build the world. Be careful not to confuse the two.”
  • earle_wa 4y ago
    Used to be an EE and couldn't afford a house in a major metropolitan area. Went into FW/SW and now I can. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but that's what worked for me.
    • bumby 4y ago
      I’m not discounting anyone’s personal experience, but that saying something when the average EE salary is about the 85th percentile of salary. Maybe it’s indicative of how broken the housing situation is in cities (and I suppose it’s very location dependent - anyone outside of SW, law, medicine, or finance may struggle to buy a home in SV or Manhattan) https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-2071.00 https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-2071.00
      • jbay808 4y ago
        The housing market has a lot to do with it. In Canada, average home prices (all types) are up ~6x since 2000, and in specific cities like Vancouver and Toronto, even more so. Compensation has not kept pace. Back when I was a high school student, I didn't think pay was very important. Now I realize it's much easier to pursue one's curiosity if one can afford, say, a garage.
• georgeoliver 4y ago
  There are a few commenters here (out of 120+ currently) noting that lots of EE work has moved to Asia. How much of this article is accurate and how much of it represents a huge blindspot in the USA/Euro market perspective?
• entropicgravity 4y ago
  EE here and done a lot of software. The economics of software vs hardware remuneration goes something like this. Doctors and Lawyers provide skilled service to untrained individuals, and they make decent money. As a hardware engineer you provide your labour to a company that typically knows at least as much as you do about your work. And the company has usually at least handful of people on staff who can take over your work if they decide to let you go. So, not surprisingly, it comes down to power in the value chain. Doctors and lawyers have it, hardware engineers do not. Software engineers on the other hand deal with code that few people beyond a handful would really understand your code. It's not as easy to swap you out for another guy. Then, the cost of producing a new instance of a piece of software that is already working is very low. You make one website, tomorrow 100,000 people could use it. Hardware on the other costs typically at least a few hundred dollars for each unit. Software creates much more value especially on the web with zero marginal cost ... except maybe a bit of marketing until it goes viral. So, software engineers create much more economic value (typically) because zero marginal cost and are harder to replace because software is inscrutable. So they make more than hardware engineers that do harder stuff much less cash. Not unlike comparing the salaries of NBA players vs underwater hockey players.
• larryliu 4y ago
  Rather than "computer" science, CS is actually "the science of problem solving" Traditional engineering: you work on one field for X years to become a specialized expert of that field. The industry employs thousands of these "specialists" solving similar problems over and over. CS/IT: you worked on one field for X years, codified your know how know why in a piece of software/algorithm/library, the field became so mature that minimum wage high schoolers can use your creations. You move on into the next highly demanded blue sea. Needless to say which industry has higher productivity that could translate to higher income.
  • visarga 4y ago
    IT has been automating its lunch away for decades and now even more people work in IT. A paradox. There's no field more cannibalistic than IT. On top of it, most software is open source and yet salaries are high. Apparently making so much of our field free was not a disaster, another paradox. More recently, even AI is doing the same trick - years of task specific work replaced with a prompt and two examples executed by a huge model. No large training dataset needed. That's why we need even more people deploying it now, because it can solve so many tasks previously too difficult to even attempt.
    • zwkrt 4y ago
      I know you use the term 'paradox' loosely, but all you are saying is investments pay off, which is hardly a paradox!
      • visarga 4y ago
        The paradox is that automation didn't render us jobless.
        • astrange 4y ago
          That's not a paradox. The actual confusing thing is that people believe automation will make them jobless, despite economists not believing this happens, and "rich people fire everyone and replace them with computers" being the plot of Atlas Shrugged rather than a real life scenario. Jobs come from comparative advantage and demand; demand is infinite and it's not possible for a worker to not have comparative advantage at something, even if it's niche.
• nickelpro 4y ago
  I wonder if the "employers of X occupation pay too little for required skill set" articles will ever cease. What do carpenters, electrical engineers, and grade school teachers have in common? They've all had this exact same article hit the HN front page about them in the past year. It's not interesting and any solution other than "pay more or accept the shortage" is worthless.
  • Gravyness 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't think they will cease. Frustrated managers that cannot fill a position will always produce these as they literally have nothing to do with the lack of workers. My university was filled with 'accelerator' companies because of this: It is very hard to find talent on the market and everyone is aware of the reason. It also doesn't matter that everyone commenting here knows the reason and are willing to spell it out every time one of these articles shows up. There are thousand plus companies that are specialized on finding talent for other companies just because of how difficult it is. I wouldn't be surprised if there already exists companies that hire these talent-seeking companies for your company.
• jupp0r 4y ago
  The drop is due to less demand (my guess would be due to increased automation in the hardware design process). If there was an actual shortage of electrical engineers, salaries would reflect that. In fact, the opposite is the case and Software Engineers are compensated better, reflecting higher demand compared to supply.
• throwaway4good 4y ago
  Most electrical engineers I know work as computer programmers.
• baka367 4y ago
  I graduated from EE, spent many years learning how electromagnetic fields impact traces if they are positioned incorrectly, how to measure radiation patterns and design antennas. I could still design a simple sensor module without having touched the field for 10 years. I am more than happy to be a software engineer and earn 3x over what I would earn for a much more stressful job as an EE. A software bug in production or a bad deployment - do an RCA and you are fine. Ship a PCB to mass production with a weird design fault you somehow missed through all the Greek versions.. and you have a nice bill to explain to the management.
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    >I am more than happy to be a software engineer and earn 3x over what I would earn for a much more stressful job as an EE. A software bug in production or a bad deployment - do an RCA and you are fine. Ship a PCB to mass production with a weird design fault you somehow missed through all the Greek versions.. and you have a nice bill to explain to the management. This exact thing happened to me at my first job out of college. I had a small error in my prototype PCB design for my first PCB design ever, and management used it to justify giving me a bad review and no raise. I ended up leaving the job after less than a year, and not long after I was doing software. I never looked back. As far as I'm concerned, American companies simply should not do hardware. American management cares too much about short-term results and has no long-term vision, so they should concentrate of work that supports that way of thinking, like software. Leave the hardware to companies and cultures that can think long-term, like the Asian nations.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• henning 4y ago
  This is like every article about not being able to find people to do the work: the salaries ARE SHIT. This is exactly the same as articles about shortages of infosec and COBOL people.
• reedjosh 4y ago
  I wanted to build computer chips, but CS pays so much more.
• ankurdhama 4y ago
  Based on the comments here, it looks like people have this notion of "Work in XYZ domain is hard/important/impactful and should get paid more".... but that isn't how pay works in real world.
  • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    Pay is mostly a compensation that is "good enough for you to not walk away". HR will not choose to pay more because you bring more money to the table. But bringing more money to the table gives you leverage on a negotiation table. In this case a very large fraction of EE's are walking away from the career into Software related jobs because that is where they are getting money that is "good enough for you to not walk out". So while previously companies working on semi-conductor, power electronics, RF design, where competing within the field, now they are bleeding grads into another 'transferable' skills field i.e. anything that touches software. These companies either accept a full migration of HW design to Asia, which will last them a few more years until the COL is raised in China, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. Or they indeed have to accept that the cost of goods just got marginally more expensive and labour costs on design will have to increase. To quote the late Ray Liotta "Fuck you, pay me!".
• atlgator 4y ago
  I have an MS ECE from Georgia Tech and did embedded systems for the first 4 years out of school. The pay was terrible, promotions were rare. So I left.
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  When skilled labor is turned into a commodity through regulatory capture, it unfortunately bids down the opportunity cost of a labor sector. Global minimums are natural as western businesses forgo ownership, in exchange for foreign authoritarian or subsidized labor pools. The fruit of outsourcing tastes rotten, but people still love their iPhones. ;) How about people use some of that STEM money to train thousands of new CEOs and Fund managers. This would drive down the relative top wages, create more competition, and increase tax revenue.
• fny 4y ago
  Follow the pay. Everyone I knew in EECS flipped to the CS route because software salaries are so damn high. Electronics became a low margin commodity business, software somehow hasn't. And somehow the software industry has enough revenue to warrant hiring at a rapid clip (VC capital?). Unless software margins collapse or we end up with a dev glut, there's no way EE can bid labor up to match.
• mathattack 4y ago
  If there’s such a shortage why aren’t EEs paid more than CS grads?
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    They don't deliver value as rapidly as devs do. Hardware has massive lead time and substantial pre-production costs, can't possibly compete with iteration rate of pure software.
    • mathattack 4y ago
      If the higher value work is in SW that explains the shortage.
• mNovak 4y ago
  Worth noting also that a lot of the more specialized roles that someone like Intel or the few other HW companies need is increasingly specialized, meaning MS and PhD. That makes it all the more frustrating to encounter these salary disparities others have described. Part of what's happening here may also relate to the fact that EE PhDs are dominated by international students (70-80%), compared to ~10% in CS undergrad. That gives companies a lot of negotiating power to drag down the average salary.
• jacksonkmarley 4y ago
  After my EE degree, every time an article came out about the 'shortage' of electrical engineers, we would all look at each other and snort and ask "has anyone landed a job doing real EE?", and the answer was always a very small number of grads. At least where I'm from, there is no shortage, it's all bullshit. Universities keep pumping out more EE grads than are needed. I guess it keeps supplies high.
• JaDogg 4y ago
  What is the best way to switch from software engineering to EE or hardware engineering? I assume you do not do scrum and agile practices.
• janandonly 4y ago
  At our company, we have a hard time hiring new recruits for the maintenance engineering positions. But I get why: - the pay is relatively low - you have to be on standby at night (in shifts, but still). - you have to travel all across the country and you’re suppose to do this in your own time (only the time on site with the customer are payed working hours). I wouldn’t pick a job like that either.
• amself 4y ago
  I find it very funny that this article came out right after the deadline for university applications passed here (Greece). Anyway, I chose a CS Bachelor’s program with just enough EE classes to qualify for a MEng in EE later. I was thinking about starting from EE (I’m equally interested in both subjects, if not a bit more in EE) but I was discouraged by comparing salary info and seeing many dissatisfied electrical engineers. If things look better in 4 years I’ll do my Master’s in EE. I would prefer if I could do both degrees at the same time, even if it meant more coursework and slightly longer time to complete. I can do a version of this with the degree I chose, studying n subjects in CS and n subjects in EE instead of 2n in only one of these, but ideally it should be 2n in both.
  • zeroth32 4y ago
    You could study both. CS degree is worthless, nobody asks for it. So take EE degree and study CS in parallel. You can attend classes without being signed.
• Animats 4y ago
  This is some manager at Intel complaining. This is Intel office space, shown on Conan O'Brien.[1] It's been a while since I was inside an Intel building, but that's exactly what it looked like. Multi-story buildings built from the ground up with acre-sized grey cube farms. And they wonder that they have a hiring problem. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXReifFHXbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXReifFHXbY
  • lnsru 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing this video. Until now I imagined, that such offices existed only in movies.
  • golemarms 4y ago
    According to the youtube description, that video was originally aired in 2007.
  • JasserInicide 4y ago
    I'd kill for a cubicle over a loud chaotic open office
  • cdaringe 4y ago
    Ex intel employee. That video is p much how I genuinely feel about the place
• negative_zero 4y ago
  I will just add to the chorus here: * I graduated as a Computer Engineer. * Worked as EE/EEE entire career (currently almost 14 years). * Half of my class of EEs and CEs went into other careers immediately after graduation because money was better. * 10 years later my best conservative estimate (based on sampling from friends from my year) is that at least another quarter has left because money. * I have mainly worked in companies that make embedded devices, which is a market that is supposed to be exploding. So I should be getting paid better right? Have always been paid worse than my SE peers even though there's x5 - x10 as many of them. * Know lots of SEs who moved from EE because money was better (chief complaint from them is that SE is easier but they don't care because job less stressful and again more money). * Have never met an SE moving into EE. * I am now at a junction point in my career where I will either: Leave EE completely and work in something else (probably SE or IT), start my own EE business, consult in compliance of EE products (had one gig for a while and it paid well). Why? because money. And I don't want fast cars or huge houses or any of that absurdity (although A house would be nice). Just living comfortably would be nice. Having the salaries of my SE and CS friends would be amazing. To those commenters who say that you need to be bright to be an EE, it is very flattering, but I am obviously not very bright :D (edit: formatting because, again, not very bright :) )
  • doix 4y ago
    > To those commenters who say that you need to be bright to be an EE, it is very flattering, but I am obviously not very bright :D I did a CE degree as well. Reading all the comments saying that it's super hard at university makes me feel like my university was really shit. The difficulty in EE exams came from having to solve stupidly long and complex equations by hand in an exam with significant time pressure. Pretty much every single exam question was look at problem, identify equations to use, solve them by hand. And all the exam questions were close enough to stuff that was solved in lectures/tutorial. In a way, that made it easier because everything was basically the same. I only had to get good at solving equations quickly and then I could get an A in an exam after just looking at all the tutorials/lecture notes the day before the exam. There are entire subtopics of my degree that I had 0 interest in (high voltage, electromagnetism), skipped all the lectures and then still got an A. I had/have 0 understanding of those topics, I just pattern matched questions to equations and then solved them like I solved everything else. For some reason, the CS exams never had this sort of "difficulty". They were much harder to bullshit through with 0 understanding, but if you did understand the material, were much easier. I remember in a computer graphics exam they did force us to solve some matrix multiplication by hand, it was so absurdly trivial compared to the shit in EE exams that I almost laughed. But a lot of my pure CS peers really struggled because they didn't practice solving hundreds of much nastier problems by hand.
• bigbacaloa 4y ago
  Engineering professors tend to be proud of being assholes. EE professors are proud of being bigger assholes than mechanical engineers.
• srvmshr 4y ago
  I graduated in Electrical Engineering & I feel the spectrum of things one learnt in EE makes for a very well rounded engineer. That being said, only a fraction of PhDs awarded nowadays are "core EE" topics. I can safely say I am a better SWE because of the EE grounding back in the day.
• Teknoman117 4y ago
  In addition to the pay aspects many have mentioned here, I think another huge problem is accessibility of the knowledge and the ability to practice it early on. My experience in becoming a professional software engineer started when my parents got me hooked on computer programming as child. Computers weren't nearly as cheap when I was a kid as they are now (90s and 00s), but writing random software was mostly just limited by my imagination. All but the most advanced concepts could be experimented with on a laptop. EE and hardware design is so much harder to access. The software is very expensive and the open source versions are very limited in comparison (I love Kicad but it's no Altium). Protocols for anything you'll find in consumer devices is locked down behind tons of fees, NDAs, etc. Parts are locked down in the same way. No one will talk to you unless you want to order tens of thousands of components at a time.
• black_13 4y ago
• 2sk21 4y ago
  Not just electrical engineering - I was recently talking to my daughter who goes to a big tech university in the US. Very few students are enrolling in many engineering disciplines including civil engineering.
• iammjm 4y ago
  I don’t blame people because they choose IT instead of EE - you don’t have to commute and there is no direct danger to your health if you fuck something up. But it is a big problem for the environment if we don’t have people who can repair stuff because it will force us to buy new every time something is broken. If there only was something that could incentivise people to work in EE… $$$
• tluyben2 4y ago
  I did an EE degree first, then CS; I like EE and I enjoy the tinkering. My father taught me electronics since I was young (5) and I always like the smell of soldering and my hands have many battle scars. However, cs always paid so much more that I lost electronics for a while until I worked on smarter-payment card product and the other payment products we did. It was a lot of fun prototyping and optimising every cpu cycle and memory storage bit to push down the cost 1 cent at a time, but also being able to swap in and out parts to save more costs and make it more robust and better quality. I wish I could do it fulltime but SE just pays a lot more, especially as senior and I also like that a lot.
• adenozine 4y ago
  As it almost always goes: pay people better. Deep down, we know capitalism doesn’t really work and we’re stuck playing this stupid game for now, and that means individuals have to look out for their own bottom line. If EE wants better supply, they must pay more.
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    >Deep down, we know capitalism doesn’t really work It doesn't? Do you have any examples of anything proven to work better? I don't remember feudalism being very good at promoting specialization of labor.
• thorin 4y ago
  I studied elec eng for 4 years in the UK up to masters level. I went from being top of the class with a good knowledge of maths/physics to struggling. A few people moved from elec eng to cs and went from failing to getting a 1st. On graduation I had options to work in defense building radar and all sorts of stuff, but I didn't have the confidence to take up any of those options. I took a programming job which was basically adding numbers up, saving stuff to a database which I actually had some chance of succeeding in. I'd imagine within a couple of years that job would be paying double what I could make doing engineering. I see quite a few places doing embedded work in the uk that involves some electronics. When I did need to do something that involved elec eng recently we did a procurement which ended up in an Indian company providing some custom built Arduino devices to do signal testing and report back to us. They were pretty good, but there was no sensible option where we could get the same thing done in Europe on budget.
• the_origami_fox 4y ago
  I'm a mechanical engineer and I can give a similar perspective. I'm now in software engineering and I'm doing well. My other classmates who moved into consulting or finance are doing even better. Those who stayed in engineering have struggled. I live in a developing country: too poor to manufacture anything high-tech, too rich with strong labour laws to manufacture anything low-tech. My friends who stayed in engineering are "installation engineers" or "sales engineers" or "stand-by engineers" since the products they use/sell/watch over are designed elsewhere. Those who are in design firms have suffered layoffs and company bankruptcies. My friends in engineering are passionate about what they do which is why they stick with it. I like the intellectual challenge I get from software engineering and the people I work with. I'm glad I get paid well for it too. I don't think I would get the same level of stimulation in an "engineering" firm here and certainly not the same salary.
• thunkshift1 4y ago
  Nonsense, we just need more tik tok influencers
• airbreather 4y ago
  I did a degree in Electrcial Engineering, as in volts and amps, as opposed to Electronics Engineering (or Communications, Computer and various other discplines of EE offered). I now do design related to power, instruments, electrical, controls, equipment design for explosive atmospheres, thermodynamics (steam), lighting, functional safety etc etc - which also means I do networking, software architecture and programming (mostly industrial controllers, but also tools for my own use) and pretty well anything with a wire. To get to the point where you are designing real stuff, stuff the public might interact with and mis-use or have it harm them, without very tight direction and supervision is: 4 years degree 3 years graduate engineer 3 years junior enginner and then you are just an engineer, so thats 10 years, same time to become a specialist doctor and easily as difficult to do well. After that there is senior, lead and then principal engineer. Many peopoe never go past senior in their lives, lead and principal take qualities that start becoming all about personality as much as technical abilities, though a real talent in either direction may well rise. It's a lot of work, the turnover annually of knowledge is one of the highest there is, based on rule of 72 wiith 6% new or updated knowledge to acquire each year just to stand still without developing means 100% in 12 years, in a full careeer thats the equivelent of 3-4 degrees worth of learning, often totally new concepts, that might need to be made during the working life of an engineer. In order to do this it probably means you spend a certain amount of your "free time" on related interests, eg ham radio, recreational computing, side projects whatever. It's reasonably well paid, but in order to really be good at it you don't do it for the money, you do it because you like it, it is calling. You would probably do it for free if they had good work and you were fed and housed comfortably. If that is not the case, then maybe it is not for you. First year EE graduates are looking at around 90k starting, 30 odd percent start at over 100k according to our local university. Mining engineering graduates might be looking at 120-150k first year out )remote or fly in fly out) right now, they are being wined and dined by prospective employers starting in first year of studying undergraduate!!! So it's still probably underpaid though, even though at the twenty year mark EE might stretch to 200-250k pa, more in high cost centres or particular circumstances. but the span of knowledge required and responsibility is very high. As they say, most doctors only kill one patient at a time (and then bury them), engineers can kill a whole heap of people all at once...
• TT-392 4y ago
  "While computer science course take-up had gone up by over 90 percent in the past 50 years, electrical engineering (EE) had declined by the same amount" Well yes, computer science used to be just a specialization of EE. Not that I don't think the EE scene is a little sad these days (I am currently an EE student) but I think this is important that we don't forget that EE has been split into a bunch of specializations.
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    >Well yes, computer science used to be just a specialization of EE. Huh? No, it wasn't. CS started out as a specialization in the Math department, since CS is really just an extension of mathematics. EE is very math-heavy compared to other engineering fields, but CS never came from EE though there's a lot of overlap.
    • TT-392 4y ago
      A lot of programmers sure came from the EE field
• airbreather 4y ago
  I am making a second post here. Dave Packard once asked in a famous speech, "Why do people form or join companies?" It's not to make money or create wealth, ultimately. That might be the goal, but not the reason. It is so they can do things together that they couldn't otherwise do on their own. Because otherwise they would on their own, you might say. So if you think about that, that says a lot about what work is.
• atmosx 4y ago
  "Classical electrical engineers are trained in design. A small number of designers will be critical. These designers will be highly sought, and handsomely paid. Educators will pride themselves on the demand for the shrinking number of graduates that they produce, while other disciplines will produce growing numbers of informed users who will work at the application levels. Electrical engineering will be in danger of shrinking into a neutron star of infinite weight and importance, but invisible to the known universe." Robert E. Lucky, 1998 Source: http://www.boblucky.com/reflect/may98.htm http://www.boblucky.com/reflect/may98.htm via
  • c3bkr 4y ago
    Yeah well my EE degree didn't train me in design. Just textbook bullshit.
• gorjusborg 4y ago
  I graduated as an EE, worked as a digital designer (writing verilog) but the job felt perilous and pay didn’t compensate for that. As a software dev, I can find a job seemingly anywhere. As an digital designer, there seemed to be 10 or so companies I could work at globally. Given the boom/bust cycles the chip industry experiences, and the few employers, the pay should be way higher.
  • sentinalien 4y ago
    I'm interested in hearing how you found transitioning from digital design to software development and what did you have to study in order to pass software interviews? I've also been a digital design engineer for the past 3-4 years since graduating but I would like to move into software development for my next job. I have some experience programming and a basic knowledge of CS/software topics but presumably not as much as a CS grad and would have to spend some time learning to close the knowledge gap.
    • gorjusborg 4y ago
      My 'strategy' was to take a job that needed software help, but couldn't pay well (university). My idea was to leverage the fact that the university offered free courses to employees, that I would work and backfill the formal education. I did follow through on that partially, but I found that the hands on experience was more important for employment than the degree, so I still work without a CS degree on my wall. As far as the leetcode stuff goes, I work for a large company, but I don't work in big tech so largely hasn't been a problem. My first job knew I had skills programming but not formal education, so they didn't grill me. After working there for a while, I had enough work experience and a few contacts that allowed me to pretty much get a written invitation to my next gig. In the companies I've wanted to work for (and I have pretty much decided not to work for MMANG companies and imitators) the emphasis has been on culture fit, experience building solutions, and references. I luckily haven't had to memorize solutions to canned problems to prove my worth. If I changed my mind and wanted to get the MMANG money/problems, I'd just get a copy of 'cracking the coding interview' and practice up. If you can write working RTL and test benches, you already have the skills to start as a software dev. In my opinion, going back to school would be a waste of time/resources. I am still working to backfill with theory, but I do it in my free time and I know I understand (and enjoy it) more than I would cramming it into a semester class.
• IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  There is a dimension that is missing on tue conversation on pay: The farther you are from the end customer, the lower your pay is going to be. There are too many levels of abstraction and distance between EE work product and the end consumer. Reduce that distance, and watch EE pay skyrocket.
• amelius 4y ago
  EE is more like a bag of tricks kind of profession, where every problem you encounter is quite localized. IT is the opposite. Writing code is quite simple, but once you get to bigger systems, things can get really complicated.
• slategruen 4y ago
  This is kind of depressing. I'm in computer engineering but I have a few friends in electrical engineering. I could really see that their workload is so much heavier and much more relevant to society than ours but the pay gap is just ridiculous.
• nodpekar 4y ago
  I come from an engg school in India where after 12th, the cream of the crowd joined EE. 80% of these kids were hired by software firms right after college. Other went on to do masters in CS or MBA. Out of a few thousand EE that I know of, I don't know 1 who works as an engineer. I'm not sure why nobody considered continuing ?
• 40acres 4y ago
  I worked at Intel for 5+ years. I was a CS grad and most of my peers were EE grads. The amount of folks who I saw over the years retrain themselves for a move to software development was pretty large. If this is happening at a blue blood for EEs it's a decent sign the market is drying up.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  Everyone in these comments sounds like they are just trying to beat the system. Mindlessly optimize income above all else. I'm a mechanical, electrical and systems engineer. A hardware person. I design medical devices mostly. Yes I could make more money being a dev, a data scientist, etc. But I don't want that. I deeply enjoy, love what I do. I love that I can receive a list of requirements on Monday and sit down in CAD and design something, order it by Friday and build a medical device prototype the next week. It's so satisfying, and it's what I've wanted to do since I was 5. I dont make the kind of salary that folks are saying here for a FAANG data scientist, but close - and I haven't sold my soul. I deeply love what I do, I have chosen to do the part I love and am deeply talented at rather than the part that pays the most. I still get paid handsomely. Hopefully this inspires another person like me to say it's OK to not maximize your income, it's ok to do what you love and are passionate about. You'll still be ok.
• hnu0847 4y ago
  As a child I was equally interested in hardware and software but ultimately ended up earning an MSEE because I wanted to design CPUs. At the time I was in school (early-mid 2000's), software development generally wasn't viewed as being significantly higher paying than EE. The huge boom in software development didn't seem to start until at least a few years after I graduated. While I was in school the general sentiment toward the tech industry in general was somewhat negative due to the recent bursting of the 90's tech bubble. That said I do recall a meeting during my senior year of undergrad called by the chair of the EE department asking for all graduating seniors' thoughts as to why enrollment in the EE program had dropped off so much since our class started. I think "other engineering disciplines are less difficult" was a much more common answer than “significantly higher pay in software". Throughout my first several years working as a CPU designer, I watched as the software industry expanded rapidly. The potential pay seemed to be much higher than what was available as a CPU/IC designer, and on multiple occasions I seriously considered a career change into software development. The CPU/IC design industry seemed to be consolidating during this same time period. Then shortly before COVID hit, I started learning of various large software companies moving into the custom IC space, and the number of opportunities available to CPU/IC designers seemed to be expanding. Over the last year or so my pay has increased significantly due to the apparent worker shortage our industry has been experiencing. It's not as high as what I've read an average FAANG SWE can make, but it's now high enough that I'm not feeling the same urge to make a career change that I was several years ago. I'm able to work mostly remote, have a great team, and get to solve interesting problems. That said, a fair amount of my work does consist of writing code. Having said that, the semiconductor industry seems to be notoriously volatile. Things are good now but could quickly take a turn for the worst. All of the software companies currently experimenting with designing their own custom ICs could decide these side projects are no longer viable. If I was giving advice to a current college student, I would probably steer them toward software development rather than hardware. The unfortunate reality is that there seems to be many more opportunities and much higher pay potential working in software development than hardware. If I had started college 10+ years later I would have become a software developer. Is the CPU/IC design industry different from other EE fields in terms of potential pay and job opportunities? Maybe it depends on the specific employer.
• shitpostbot 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• jgerrish 4y ago
  I don't know the answer to their puzzle. I really don't and I feel like I'm hurting The Industry and those in it because of that. I'm a savage software engineer with a mutt academic pedigree, even though I'm sidling closer to the civilized EE side. But I really don't know if that's the right choice, ya know? So, I'll spiral into further existential dread because I can't coordinate these choices with others. "On the Brink of Extinction", That's some grim storytelling right there...
• crypto420_69 4y ago
  I attended a top notch school for EE, where I specialized in optics and photonics. After witnessing one of our top lab graduates bag a 100k photonics job, I realized I had to switch, so I transferred into ML where the math was significantly easier but the pay was far better. Now all I do is tune hyper parameters, but man I miss all the wild mind-blowing physics that photonics had to offer.
• e-_pusher 4y ago
  The main issue with working as an EE is that you can’t get useful experience without working in the industry and picking up all sorts of tacit knowledge that one can grab only by working. This creates a huge gate keeping effect. Contrast that with SW where so much of the sausage making is accessible in the form of open source projects. Another difficulty is that with the offshoring of so much EE work to Taiwan etc, many US companies only want to hire senior EEs who can direct projects overseas. This unfortunately kills of paths of growth for junior EEs in the US.
• Rathseg 4y ago
  In addition to agreeing with the general sentiments expressed here about software paying more, there is a lot more to it. Here are a few things that probably aren't getting enough attention. I love chip design, but I am totally disillusioned with the engineering side of the business. I am actively trying to get away from it, whether it is move to the business side or management or even switch into software. - It is a job, not a career. Because the industry is so consolidated and highly specialized, there are actually very few jobs available. This is why I believe it pays so much less than software. Don't like the pay, the management, your coworkers, the career advancement? Where are you going to go? There are only a couple of options which may or may not be hiring for your specialty and you can only hop around so much since there are few employers. Having tons of jobs to choose from isn't just about getting more pay, it is another form of job security and freedom. This industry doesn't have that. - I get the whole argument that software is more capital efficient and so more money can be spent on salaries, and it may be part of the reason, but not the majority. Many of these hardware companies are quite profitable. They don't pay more because there are no market pressures forcing them to. I don't expect this to change even with a looming talent shortage. I know someone with a PhD, probably ~20-25 years of experience, and has spent their entire career in a single area which gives them deep domain knowledge and is making slightly more than what an L4 SWE(4-8 years experience with a Bachelor's Degree?) at Google(assuming I the information I have seen on Google pay grades are accurate). This is total comp by the way and even adjusting further for geo differences doesn't change the comparison much. Yet this is considered pretty good for our field. It is almost a sense of entitlement on the part of the semiconductor industry that they shouldn't have to compete on pay. On a couple occasions long ago I heard from official HR communications and high level management at Intel say something to the effect of being proud about paying "around industry average". Weird how they don't want average employees or average work/life balance though. - Salaries don't appear to have been influenced much by Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft getting into the business. Disclaimer: I haven't looked deeply into this. Are their teams to small to make a difference in the labor market? Are they paying chip industry rates instead of software rates? Are the traditional semiconductor companies just ignoring it and refusing to match their pay? - The industry like many others does not want to spend money to train people, so they only want unicorn candidates. Yet it is not enough to simply be an RTL designer, or a verification engineer, or a physical engineer, they usually want someone with the exact skills. e.g. USB experience, PCIE experience, power experience, etc. Things like tuition reimbursement are mostly a myth. It certainly was at Intel despite their claims of $50k for tuition reimbursement. The funds came out of the local discretionary budgets so managers never wanted to approve it because discretionary budget is also the same budget that pays for many other things like business travel and conferences. Discretionary was also the first thing to get hit in belt-tightening situations and was a good way to look good to upper management if a site manager wasn't using their full discretionary budget. Since tuition reimbursement is a several year commitment once approved, it couldn't be cut as easily once started. - Managers are incentivized to promote execution over learning/growth or innovation due to schedule pressures and frequent hiring freezes. For the same reasons, managers are also incentivized to block transfers because they don't benefit from it, even if there are rules to prohibit this behavior. Combined with wanting unicorn candidates that will accept low pay, it is no surprise that it is getting hard to find employees. Yet if you outlive your usefulness or burnout they will have no problems laying people off and looking for a new unicorn candidate rather than retraining existing employees despite all the sacrifices they made. I saw this happen first hand. Layoffs one week, 2 new job reqs the next week for RTL jobs which are hard to get. Also since they were "silver bullet" hires to fulfill "critical" needs(false!) no internal candidates from places like verification would be acceptable. So not only did they not try to save anyone from layoffs, they also basically said no one inside the group was worth investing in either. Classy. - Instead of a gradual talent pipeline, I think the industry appears to have had waves of talent progression. This leads to situations where if you are between waves, you will have a group ahead of you that is fairly young but in high level positions and which puts a real limit on how far you can advance regardless of how good you are because positions are just solidified. When I graduated most of the really senior engineers were from their mid 30s through their mid 40s. Grade level *distributions* get "maxed-out" as they say. Because there are few alternatives and people stay in jobs far longer than average, it becomes stagnant. People leave the companies or leave the industry altogether. When the current cohort that is now in their 50s starts to retire, there might not be a new wave to replace them. - Chip design is far more demanding than software engineering because you have to get it 98,99% right the first time you build it or you get a brick back from the fab instead of a working chip. Simulations are slow, and post-silicon ability to debug while impressive, is very limited compared to pre-silicon simulations. Unless it can be fixed in firmware, you are stuck until the next batch of samples gets made. If you "go fast and break things", you are going to fail and get fired. Schedule pressures are constant: you need product on time for back-to-school, or Christmas, or competitive threats. Sometimes the schedule pressures are artificially created by lazy management that want to create a sense of urgency. Pushing to tapeout can be grueling because you don't want to miss your fab window by being late. During power-on people are expected to work in shifts 24-7. Power on can last 2-6 weeks on early samples and be in foreign countries. This grates on people. When you look at software which has fewer schedule pressures, is less difficult to make, makes more money, and has more employers to choose from, why would anyone want to do this if they possess the skills and intelligence necessary to do software. Even if you don't work for FAANG salaries you can probably get paid the same as the chip industry and have a better life and better job security and career options. - There is nothing to get excited about and inspire kids to go into the profession. The startup space is minimal so no cool new ideas or riches to be had there. When I was in high school, hardware was the show, the performance improvements were huge with every generation. There was tons of coverage of new CPUs and GPUs talking about their architectures. Now there is little coverage. Between companies trying to be like Apple and minimize the importance of hardware and the chip companies releasing less info on their chip designs as performance gains get smaller it relegates hardware to being an after thought. - Lastly, I don't know if this has changed with the addition of Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc making chips, but around the time when I got out of college, the total number of EE jobs was actually declining in the US. This pours cold water on the talent shortage narrative that had been used for many years falsely. If jobs are going down, you should have an excess of workers unless they are choosing to retire or leave the industry. It also acts as a discouragement for people to join or stay in the field. Who wants to be in a shrinking industry that is already highly consolidated? The EE/ECE industry has no one to blame but themselves for the looming talent shortage. That was a lot to write in a short time and I didn't do a ton of proofreading, so hopefully there aren't too many sentence fragments or typos.
• giardini 4y ago
  At some time in the past departments made a distinction between electrical engineers who focused on power engineering versus electrical engineers who focused on digital computer hardware/software. Discussions at one time indicated the numbers of "power engineering" students was dwindling to a worrisome extent. Is this distinction still made?
• berkeshire 4y ago
  Am one of the black sheep of my Electrical Engineering batch who moved to software. Why? The steep learning curve that involved loads of memorization of long formulae and static values which sucked for someone like me. An easier, and more forgiving entry path based on self-learning ("hack my way through") in software development as compared to the entry barriers of EE - especially in India where Oscilloscopes and other equipment were crazy expensive some decades ago. 20% of my batch has moved to software over the last 25 years, compensation being one key factor.
• cydmax 4y ago
  I've read through half of the comments and still didn't read the most obvious reasons why SE or CS is much more in demand: * You can change software much faster than hardware * You can customize software exactly to your needs in hours, depending on the skill of the SE even in minutes * You can use hardware in ways beyond the initial purpose by changing the software
• plaguepilled 4y ago
  I think there's actually an engineering reason for this shift to "soft" tech: the workflow for software development is way better (at least IMO). There is just so much more information available and so many nicer tools available for the fledgeling developer. You have a huge library of languages, frameworks, tutorials and open source projects that need another pair of hands. This makes a difference when community and quick learning is desirable.
• throwaway4220 4y ago
  This is why I think places like sparkfun and adafruit do the Lord’s work.
• monological 4y ago
  If EE jobs paid $500k a year like SWE (in the Bay), I assure you you’d have a lot more. It’s all about incentives.
• theskypirate 4y ago
  This couldn't possibly be more wrong – we need fewer engineers, not more. We face two inescapable realities: 1. Hardware engineers should be located near manufacturing facilities, and should speak the same language as factory workers. 2. The economy in its infinite wisdom is signaling that Software engineers are more valuable than hardware engineers. Assembling and optimizing the logic of human society is an extremely productive task, and results in huge profits for companies. For unit of time it is more productive to write backend software which controls the behavior of physical objects, than to re-design physical objects to be marginally more efficient. There are lots of engineering grads getting jobs – in East Asia, earning a fraction of the salaries here, and working 12 hour days 6 days per week. US engineering graduates are retraining en-masse to be software engineers. The average newly minted hardware engineer graduate has a very low chance of finding a job, and will likely end up earning less than a skilled laborer. The lives of talented Americans are valuable, and should not be wasted learning unneeded skills.
• MF-DOOM 4y ago
  I don’t get it. If there’s a shortage of EEs, which are required for tech to operate, wouldn’t salaries rise up because of the demand? I mean, tech isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.. is it?
  • hwillis 4y ago
    1. Yes- as salaries are still low, you should be skeptical that companies are really trying to get talent. 2. On the other hand, the US(and/or EU) is not the only market. If engineers are being corned by the established large firms here, then instead of raising salaries to compete, smaller firms are simply killed off and replaced by foreign suppliers. China and India have very competent engineers, and make tons of US consumer products. 3. "Companies should just raise salaries and train up talent!" is obviously true, but there's still a large time lag between raising salaries and new graduates. EE salaries have been horrible and hard to find for 20+ years and freshman still get told repeatedly that EE is well paid and highly demanded. In the meantime, people retire later and the eventual crash just gets worse. All of the above coming from an EE/ECE graduate who immediately went into CS because the TC is easily 3x higher
• phasormaster 4y ago