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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 incumb

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.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I was in roughly the same spot but I had to switch when I transferred schools because I would have practically had to start from scratch in CE but I was halfway done with a CS degree. Not sure it's possible to design an ECE curriculum that's easier to transfer into, take part time, or is more forgiving of early failures, but if it is I bet it would help. Also at the time I went to school (2006-2008) there wasn't any soldering and very little hands-on anything in the courses I took at CMU and UMass Amherst. It was formulae and Verilog (more coding than a lot of CS classes). In the Intro to CivE class I had to take for scheduling reasons we made a cardboard bridge and watched it fail to support the professor who was suspended over a pit. I can't remember a single ECE lab from the two years of classes I took. I learned a lot more from playing around with Arduino and such in the years after.
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  I also went to school for EE, but after a summer job doing SW, I switched to CS when I got back in the fall. I think CS (a good program) teaches you fundamentally how Systems work, independent of the substrate. EE is actually rather trivial compared to the complexity of big systems. EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits. Throw it in LT spice if you think it'll impress the boss. That's it. You need to know at most 2 pieces of sophisticated SW (schematic/PCB + spice). For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
  - smilekzs 4y ago
    If all you do is board-level integration of relatively low-speed stuff, then yes, SWE is more demanding. But that's not even the tip of the iceberg in the EE world. To name a few: high speed digital (Gbps+), ASIC (digital vs. mixed signal, RTL vs. physical design, ...), RF, precision analog, both very low and very high power, photonics, EMI... Each of these subjects require deep, arcane domain knowledge on top of physics, AND lots of grinding + experience + tacit knowledge + know-how, much more than SWE. Source: Electronics/Embedded hobbyist with an SWE day job.
okwubodu 4y ago
Meanwhile, CS is reaping the benefits of a decade and a half of pushing the “Anyone can code!” narrative. CE and EE’s disdain for juniors and rampant credentialism will inevitably become a national security issue.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robocat 4y ago
  You think we should blame the developers/engineers for abysmal security? Security failure is a systematic fault of businesses and regulation: not the fault of the grunts mining at the coal face.
slaymaker1907 4y ago
Yeah, I started out as EE and ended up in CS not only because I enjoyed it more but because the courses seemed less hostile towards me.
pojzon 4y ago
Did something better - studied CS on EE university. Best decision of my life.
tqi 4y ago
Is that not true of other majors? I experienced the undergrad ECE meat grinder firsthand, so that part definitely tracks, but I had always assumed it was the same for all other eng departments (including CS).
- jjk166 4y ago
  Never experienced it in aerospace engineering. The only "weed-out" courses I had were electrical requirements.
jimkleiber 4y ago
I started out in EE and switched to Intercultural Communications lol. Not because I couldn't hack it, I was probably near the top of my class in EE, I just thought it was a lot of work and realized I liked human communication more than electrical communication. So I hear ya on the impossibly hard: I got good grades but all I did was study. When I switched, I still got good grades but also enjoyed a social life. But to each their own, I still code, but building tools to help me and others get better at communicating how we feel. So maybe EE didn't leave my bones completely :-)
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  That’s awesome. I had a similar experience, started out in comp sci and switched to game design and found it way easier & more fulfilling. Although a difference is that rather than being top of my class, I nearly failed all the courses I took. I ended up as a coder anyway and I find the mental models that I learned in game design often help me out when understanding the business side of what I’m coding (and often I can find a simpler solution that meets our users’ needs just as well if not better)
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    Ah, I'm glad you shared! From what I've seen on books about game design, I really like it as well for its blend of psychology and design, and well, games :-)
notch656a 4y ago
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  I don’t really get this mentality. I love coding and want to share the things I love about it with other people. If I knew someone out there was teaching a freshman-level class and deliberately leaving a bad impression or scaring people off, I’d be pretty annoyed. I only took one programming class in college, which was designed as a weed-out class and it did succeed in weeding me out. Luckily I continued teaching myself how to program and now I make more than either of my parents doing a job I love. Part of a professor’s job is to educate, so I suggest they leave the hazing to the frats and at least try to be good at it.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll. You can be an engineer without college. You're free to start your own university, if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man. Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor doesn't bend just because some people interpreted it to be ill intent, when really the ill intent was their perception to academic challenge.
    - johnny53169 4y ago
      > I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. This is pretty bad faith of you to interpret the argument this way, the OP said nothing about being coddled. > Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor Again nothing about lack of rigor, maybe you should put more rigor into reading their comment.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ben_w 4y ago
klodolph 4y ago
I became disillusioned with EE when I worked with a bunch of EEs (mostly MS EE, I think) at a software company. It was the same mix of people who know what they're doing and people who have just been sliding by most of their life--same mix as I found in other professions. I was hired because I was a programmer who knew enough about EE to be dangerous. That said, the people I know who work in EE in aerospace seem to have an uphill-both-ways job experience, in terms of all the documentation and justification they do for their designs. There's a revolving door of new hires, and every once in a while somebody will get hired and actually stick it out.
raverbashing 4y ago
And right you are! Now the latest trend are MS/PhD only openings. Especially at IC manufacturers But I have two questions for those: why not on-the-job training, and did the people that joined 20/40yrs ago have those qualifications? All of them? Well, good luck filling those positions then! /s
- t-3 4y ago
  To be fair, tech hiring is rather credentialized in general these days. Even help desk and cable-runner jobs are requiring 4 year degrees.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Nowadays we expect people to pay for their own education. No company wants to be the sucker that invested in fleeting human capital.
  - pid-1 4y ago
    My company has the following deal: we pay for your education, but you must stay for x years. If you decide to leave before, you must pay $PRICE * (x - $TIME_WORKING_HERE_AFTER_WE_INVESTED_IN_YOU)
  - znpy 4y ago
    i had the chance to read "The Juggling Act" by Pat Gelsinger, which is about a lot of things, and among these also about his work at intel. the thing that struck me the most that a) intel was paying for his tuition b) he used to have enough flexibility to attend classes, in person. for people who don't know, Pat Gelsinger is the guy behind the intel 386 and 486, and has been recently made CEO of Intel.
WebbWeaver 4y ago
I think it starts young and the well of people who have been actually been exposed to basic electronics is shrinking. The well is changing and we may not be catering to our future needs.
nebula8804 4y ago
Don't forget low level embedded programmers, Kernel developers, and many who live in the world of coding in C/ASM. I recall numerous instances in my undergraduate career where professors and the students passionate in these fields would actively persuade people who didn't get exposes to the stuff from even trying. I remember one professor teaching an elective class on the Linux kernel and how he would try his best to scare people into dropping the class early on. We lost 25% of the class after the first lecture (and the only girl). To be fair the class was hardcore for the typical level of CS students you'd see in my school. It was painful but fun. I just wonder about the people who got scared away, maybe some of them could have really embraced the Kernel and become contributors. To this day I see hostility among the low level crowd in my dealing with people in the industry. They think that because what they do is more complicated that writing a bog standard web app that they are special and should be left in their caves not to be disturbed. On a different note: I feel this is playing at least a small part in hindering Linux adoption. I have dealt with the community on and off for over 10 years and just the level of negativity that comes out of that community has got to be putting off at least some people wanting to tip their toes in the water. We need to MLLGA: Make Low Level Great Again! At that starts with really welcoming normies with open arms and patience while they get over the initial hurdles.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers We're looking for bare metal developers so basic SPI, I2C, UART knowledge is essential, but even in that realm it's surprising how many embedded devs can't work outside of an RTOS and lack basic hardware knowledge
  - vitno 4y ago
    Pay better. It's totally possible that you are paying appropriately, but I've been disappointed with my most recent job search and am likely winding up doing backend work again simply because those roles pay almost double.
    - stackbutterflow 4y ago
fxtentacle 4y ago
In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China. It's very difficult to find a company in the west where you could go to do an engineering apprenticeship and learn how to build cool stuff, because all of them outsourced their "building cool stuff" operations years ago. And designing things when you cannot try out your design (or when you need to wait 2 weeks for a parcel from China for each attempt) is really difficult and demotivating.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  This matches my experience, too. Even if maybe not mainland China for the coolest stuff, definitely it is moving to Taiwan, India, etc.
- healsjnr1 4y ago
  Yep, this was my experience. I graduated a double degree of EE and Comp Science. My final year thesis was a project with a local company integrating their custom designed GPRS module with a GPS module to demonstrate mobile tracking tech (it was 2003). Because of the project I went straight into a hardware design job out of uni. I was designing boards for mobiles! Working on circuit design, prototyping PCBs, I was psyched! Problem is the company was run _terribly_. 3 months in we all got put on 2 weeks forced leave and then given redundancies. Aside from dinner pretty terrible management, the economics of doing mobile hardware design in Australia just didn't stack up (we were the only company trying). In the end there were probably 10:1 software jobs for every hardware job. Given my experience so far, I opted for software. It has been great, I love software, but I sometimes wish I had lived somewhere that had a higher critical mass of EE work.
  - toomanybeersies 4y ago
    Funnily enough, there are quite a few Australian (and a few Kiwi) companies in the telematics space these days. Not sure how many of them are designing hardware from scratch though, versus off the shelf devices with custom firmware.
  - nice2meetu 4y ago
yobbo 4y ago
If there was lack of supply and excess demand, it would show in higher pay.
- nosianu 4y ago
  I generally agree and I'm one of those responding similarly in similar contexts. However, thinking about it, I think there may be a valve here that prevents this from happening: If costs get too high Asian companies win, setting an upper bound. So it may show up in more outsourcing and imports rather than higher pay. I have not completely thought this through, so I'm posting it as a condensation nucleus for discussion rather than as some "truth", because I only formulated it in word form just now.
  - golemarms 4y ago
    > If costs get too high Asian companies win Wouldn't this apply to software companies as well? Yet we see higher pay, rather than imports/outsourcing.
    - flyingfences 4y ago
      The key difference, I think, is that software is user-facing, whereas hardware no longer is. The bigwigs and bean counters who make the hire-versus-outsource decisions can tell that lowest-bidder outsourced software sucks and so don't go for it, whereas the outsourced hardware "works" well enough to ship, so they keep outsourcing it.
      - golemarms 4y ago
        Interesting. I wonder if this distinction applies within software as well. For example, systems programmers getting paid less than application programmers because the latter makes software "closer" to the user, and backend programmers getting paid less than frontend programmers for the same reason.
        4y ago
frognumber 4y ago
I don't think that's at all right. EE is hard. Bad EEs are unemployable. There's no demand. EE is also beautiful and absolutely fascinating. You get to: - Do beautiful math - Build things and get your hands dirty - Do super-creative design ... and so on. It's just fun! I have a Ph.D in electronic engineering from a top school, and I don't regret one minute of the program. I graduated during a downturn, and finding a job was neigh-impossible, despite being one of the best graduates from probably the best EE Ph.D program in the nation. Industry wanted experience. SE jobs were easy to find and paid better. I eventually found an EE job but many didn't. I noped it out of the field after that. The core problem is EE companies are no fun. Employees just aren't treated well. IC design jobs mostly have all the accoutrements of Office Space and Dilbert: cubicle farms, rigid bureaucracies, limited vacation policies, button-down shirts, and so on. None of these things make people more productive or contribute to the bottom line. I do EE only as a hobby now. I don't think the trick is to water down schools, so much as to make the industry less oppressive.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I also wonder how much is due to location. EEs in the US only seem to get hired in certain industries these days, depending on what it is (i.e., writing HDL vs. electronic/PCB design and other things). Much of it just seems to be military now. So if you stay in EE, that means the jobs are only in certain locations, which might not be all that attractive to you, compared to where many software jobs are.
  - frognumber 4y ago
    It's mostly due to old, inflexible, stodgy companies. Analog Device, Texas Instruments, Intel, etc. have been around forever, and haven't updated the worst parts of their employment practices and corporate cultures since the eighties. Military is even worse, but it's not just military. Right now, I work in a company where I have work-life integration. I enjoy being at work. It's a pleasant place to be. I enjoy working from home, and balancing work with family. I enjoy my vacations. None of these are hard or expensive. I'd never get that designing integrated circuits or in any other sort of high-performance EE work. Why can't I ask for a pleasant office, with a nice window looking at something green, flexible (not short) working hours, flexible vacation (I do better with fewer / longer trips), comfortable clothing, and similar in the EE world?
BlackSwanManZ 4y ago
This is definitely part of it. The entry level courses we took in electrical engineering were insanely hard, and pretty worthless for developing any real engineering skills. It was mostly felt like it was selecting for people who were really good at math puzzles. It just felt like they were trying to scare people away.
c3bkr 4y ago
I did EE and I thought it was not difficult AT ALL - like nowhere near what the reputation is. The thing is I went to a shit university, did end up putting in a lot of time studying so that I could graduate top of my class (which I did) because I stupidly though this would help me stand out. I could have coasted by with significantly less work, there were people I helped out who honestly should have been failed out - barely understood basic circuits in 3rd year. I think the department was desperate to hold onto students and so nothing was made too tough. As I said shit school. In the end I currently do "embedded" programming (all just embedded Linux not even bare metal). I really regret the whole thing - I should have done something completely different finance, actuary. EE is a completely stupid field. To have a "serious" EE career now you need a PhD or at the very least a MS. Despite graduating top-of-my-class and honestly have a very good command of the material at the time, I graduated having ZERO skills in electrical engineering. I went the software route basically because its something I could pick up and learn and get work with, what the FUCK was I supposed to do with my "skills" solving textbook problems? As I said it was a shit school where the courses didn't involve nearly enough project work to build real skills. The only people I know who went on to do legitimate EE stuff got a masters. Not sure how they are doing. I realized by the end of the degree I had zero passion for this shit, I wouldn't even know what I would want to specialize in. The only courses I found interesting were control theory and signal processing somewhat. I though the actual electronics courses blew.

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.

jrumbut 4y ago
I was in roughly the same spot but I had to switch when I transferred schools because I would have practically had to start from scratch in CE but I was halfway done with a CS degree. Not sure it's possible to design an ECE curriculum that's easier to transfer into, take part time, or is more forgiving of early failures, but if it is I bet it would help. Also at the time I went to school (2006-2008) there wasn't any soldering and very little hands-on anything in the courses I took at CMU and UMass Amherst. It was formulae and Verilog (more coding than a lot of CS classes). In the Intro to CivE class I had to take for scheduling reasons we made a cardboard bridge and watched it fail to support the professor who was suspended over a pit. I can't remember a single ECE lab from the two years of classes I took. I learned a lot more from playing around with Arduino and such in the years after.
GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
I also went to school for EE, but after a summer job doing SW, I switched to CS when I got back in the fall. I think CS (a good program) teaches you fundamentally how Systems work, independent of the substrate. EE is actually rather trivial compared to the complexity of big systems. EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits. Throw it in LT spice if you think it'll impress the boss. That's it. You need to know at most 2 pieces of sophisticated SW (schematic/PCB + spice). For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
- smilekzs 4y ago
  If all you do is board-level integration of relatively low-speed stuff, then yes, SWE is more demanding. But that's not even the tip of the iceberg in the EE world. To name a few: high speed digital (Gbps+), ASIC (digital vs. mixed signal, RTL vs. physical design, ...), RF, precision analog, both very low and very high power, photonics, EMI... Each of these subjects require deep, arcane domain knowledge on top of physics, AND lots of grinding + experience + tacit knowledge + know-how, much more than SWE. Source: Electronics/Embedded hobbyist with an SWE day job.

okwubodu 4y ago

Meanwhile, CS is reaping the benefits of a decade and a half of pushing the “Anyone can code!” narrative. CE and EE’s disdain for juniors and rampant credentialism will inevitably become a national security issue.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robocat 4y ago
You think we should blame the developers/engineers for abysmal security? Security failure is a systematic fault of businesses and regulation: not the fault of the grunts mining at the coal face.

slaymaker1907 4y ago

Yeah, I started out as EE and ended up in CS not only because I enjoyed it more but because the courses seemed less hostile towards me.

pojzon 4y ago

Did something better - studied CS on EE university. Best decision of my life.

tqi 4y ago

Is that not true of other majors? I experienced the undergrad ECE meat grinder firsthand, so that part definitely tracks, but I had always assumed it was the same for all other eng departments (including CS).

jjk166 4y ago
Never experienced it in aerospace engineering. The only "weed-out" courses I had were electrical requirements.

jimkleiber 4y ago

I started out in EE and switched to Intercultural Communications lol. Not because I couldn't hack it, I was probably near the top of my class in EE, I just thought it was a lot of work and realized I liked human communication more than electrical communication. So I hear ya on the impossibly hard: I got good grades but all I did was study. When I switched, I still got good grades but also enjoyed a social life. But to each their own, I still code, but building tools to help me and others get better at communicating how we feel. So maybe EE didn't leave my bones completely :-)

ChadNauseam 4y ago
That’s awesome. I had a similar experience, started out in comp sci and switched to game design and found it way easier & more fulfilling. Although a difference is that rather than being top of my class, I nearly failed all the courses I took. I ended up as a coder anyway and I find the mental models that I learned in game design often help me out when understanding the business side of what I’m coding (and often I can find a simpler solution that meets our users’ needs just as well if not better)
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  Ah, I'm glad you shared! From what I've seen on books about game design, I really like it as well for its blend of psychology and design, and well, games :-)

notch656a 4y ago

ChadNauseam 4y ago
I don’t really get this mentality. I love coding and want to share the things I love about it with other people. If I knew someone out there was teaching a freshman-level class and deliberately leaving a bad impression or scaring people off, I’d be pretty annoyed. I only took one programming class in college, which was designed as a weed-out class and it did succeed in weeding me out. Luckily I continued teaching myself how to program and now I make more than either of my parents doing a job I love. Part of a professor’s job is to educate, so I suggest they leave the hazing to the frats and at least try to be good at it.
- notch656a 4y ago
  I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. By all means, if you disapprove of the way a university does things, don't enroll. You can be an engineer without college. You're free to start your own university, if your teaching is truly better and more rewarding to your students the free market will make you a rich man. Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor doesn't bend just because some people interpreted it to be ill intent, when really the ill intent was their perception to academic challenge.
  - johnny53169 4y ago
    > I don't get the mentality that people think they're entitled to be coddled. This is pretty bad faith of you to interpret the argument this way, the OP said nothing about being coddled. > Personally I'm glad there are places where academic rigor Again nothing about lack of rigor, maybe you should put more rigor into reading their comment.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 4y ago

klodolph 4y ago

I became disillusioned with EE when I worked with a bunch of EEs (mostly MS EE, I think) at a software company. It was the same mix of people who know what they're doing and people who have just been sliding by most of their life--same mix as I found in other professions. I was hired because I was a programmer who knew enough about EE to be dangerous. That said, the people I know who work in EE in aerospace seem to have an uphill-both-ways job experience, in terms of all the documentation and justification they do for their designs. There's a revolving door of new hires, and every once in a while somebody will get hired and actually stick it out.

raverbashing 4y ago

And right you are! Now the latest trend are MS/PhD only openings. Especially at IC manufacturers But I have two questions for those: why not on-the-job training, and did the people that joined 20/40yrs ago have those qualifications? All of them? Well, good luck filling those positions then! /s

t-3 4y ago
To be fair, tech hiring is rather credentialized in general these days. Even help desk and cable-runner jobs are requiring 4 year degrees.
imtringued 4y ago
Nowadays we expect people to pay for their own education. No company wants to be the sucker that invested in fleeting human capital.
- pid-1 4y ago
  My company has the following deal: we pay for your education, but you must stay for x years. If you decide to leave before, you must pay $PRICE * (x - $TIME_WORKING_HERE_AFTER_WE_INVESTED_IN_YOU)
- znpy 4y ago
  i had the chance to read "The Juggling Act" by Pat Gelsinger, which is about a lot of things, and among these also about his work at intel. the thing that struck me the most that a) intel was paying for his tuition b) he used to have enough flexibility to attend classes, in person. for people who don't know, Pat Gelsinger is the guy behind the intel 386 and 486, and has been recently made CEO of Intel.

WebbWeaver 4y ago

I think it starts young and the well of people who have been actually been exposed to basic electronics is shrinking. The well is changing and we may not be catering to our future needs.

nebula8804 4y ago

Don't forget low level embedded programmers, Kernel developers, and many who live in the world of coding in C/ASM. I recall numerous instances in my undergraduate career where professors and the students passionate in these fields would actively persuade people who didn't get exposes to the stuff from even trying. I remember one professor teaching an elective class on the Linux kernel and how he would try his best to scare people into dropping the class early on. We lost 25% of the class after the first lecture (and the only girl). To be fair the class was hardcore for the typical level of CS students you'd see in my school. It was painful but fun. I just wonder about the people who got scared away, maybe some of them could have really embraced the Kernel and become contributors. To this day I see hostility among the low level crowd in my dealing with people in the industry. They think that because what they do is more complicated that writing a bog standard web app that they are special and should be left in their caves not to be disturbed. On a different note: I feel this is playing at least a small part in hindering Linux adoption. I have dealt with the community on and off for over 10 years and just the level of negativity that comes out of that community has got to be putting off at least some people wanting to tip their toes in the water. We need to MLLGA: Make Low Level Great Again! At that starts with really welcoming normies with open arms and patience while they get over the initial hurdles.

ChrisRR 4y ago
We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers We're looking for bare metal developers so basic SPI, I2C, UART knowledge is essential, but even in that realm it's surprising how many embedded devs can't work outside of an RTOS and lack basic hardware knowledge
- vitno 4y ago
  Pay better. It's totally possible that you are paying appropriately, but I've been disappointed with my most recent job search and am likely winding up doing backend work again simply because those roles pay almost double.
  - stackbutterflow 4y ago

fxtentacle 4y ago

In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China. It's very difficult to find a company in the west where you could go to do an engineering apprenticeship and learn how to build cool stuff, because all of them outsourced their "building cool stuff" operations years ago. And designing things when you cannot try out your design (or when you need to wait 2 weeks for a parcel from China for each attempt) is really difficult and demotivating.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
This matches my experience, too. Even if maybe not mainland China for the coolest stuff, definitely it is moving to Taiwan, India, etc.
healsjnr1 4y ago
Yep, this was my experience. I graduated a double degree of EE and Comp Science. My final year thesis was a project with a local company integrating their custom designed GPRS module with a GPS module to demonstrate mobile tracking tech (it was 2003). Because of the project I went straight into a hardware design job out of uni. I was designing boards for mobiles! Working on circuit design, prototyping PCBs, I was psyched! Problem is the company was run _terribly_. 3 months in we all got put on 2 weeks forced leave and then given redundancies. Aside from dinner pretty terrible management, the economics of doing mobile hardware design in Australia just didn't stack up (we were the only company trying). In the end there were probably 10:1 software jobs for every hardware job. Given my experience so far, I opted for software. It has been great, I love software, but I sometimes wish I had lived somewhere that had a higher critical mass of EE work.
- toomanybeersies 4y ago
  Funnily enough, there are quite a few Australian (and a few Kiwi) companies in the telematics space these days. Not sure how many of them are designing hardware from scratch though, versus off the shelf devices with custom firmware.
- nice2meetu 4y ago

yobbo 4y ago

If there was lack of supply and excess demand, it would show in higher pay.

nosianu 4y ago
I generally agree and I'm one of those responding similarly in similar contexts. However, thinking about it, I think there may be a valve here that prevents this from happening: If costs get too high Asian companies win, setting an upper bound. So it may show up in more outsourcing and imports rather than higher pay. I have not completely thought this through, so I'm posting it as a condensation nucleus for discussion rather than as some "truth", because I only formulated it in word form just now.
- golemarms 4y ago
  > If costs get too high Asian companies win Wouldn't this apply to software companies as well? Yet we see higher pay, rather than imports/outsourcing.
  - flyingfences 4y ago
    The key difference, I think, is that software is user-facing, whereas hardware no longer is. The bigwigs and bean counters who make the hire-versus-outsource decisions can tell that lowest-bidder outsourced software sucks and so don't go for it, whereas the outsourced hardware "works" well enough to ship, so they keep outsourcing it.
    - golemarms 4y ago
      Interesting. I wonder if this distinction applies within software as well. For example, systems programmers getting paid less than application programmers because the latter makes software "closer" to the user, and backend programmers getting paid less than frontend programmers for the same reason.
      - 4y ago

frognumber 4y ago

I don't think that's at all right. EE is hard. Bad EEs are unemployable. There's no demand. EE is also beautiful and absolutely fascinating. You get to: - Do beautiful math - Build things and get your hands dirty - Do super-creative design ... and so on. It's just fun! I have a Ph.D in electronic engineering from a top school, and I don't regret one minute of the program. I graduated during a downturn, and finding a job was neigh-impossible, despite being one of the best graduates from probably the best EE Ph.D program in the nation. Industry wanted experience. SE jobs were easy to find and paid better. I eventually found an EE job but many didn't. I noped it out of the field after that. The core problem is EE companies are no fun. Employees just aren't treated well. IC design jobs mostly have all the accoutrements of Office Space and Dilbert: cubicle farms, rigid bureaucracies, limited vacation policies, button-down shirts, and so on. None of these things make people more productive or contribute to the bottom line. I do EE only as a hobby now. I don't think the trick is to water down schools, so much as to make the industry less oppressive.

midoridensha 4y ago
I also wonder how much is due to location. EEs in the US only seem to get hired in certain industries these days, depending on what it is (i.e., writing HDL vs. electronic/PCB design and other things). Much of it just seems to be military now. So if you stay in EE, that means the jobs are only in certain locations, which might not be all that attractive to you, compared to where many software jobs are.
- frognumber 4y ago
  It's mostly due to old, inflexible, stodgy companies. Analog Device, Texas Instruments, Intel, etc. have been around forever, and haven't updated the worst parts of their employment practices and corporate cultures since the eighties. Military is even worse, but it's not just military. Right now, I work in a company where I have work-life integration. I enjoy being at work. It's a pleasant place to be. I enjoy working from home, and balancing work with family. I enjoy my vacations. None of these are hard or expensive. I'd never get that designing integrated circuits or in any other sort of high-performance EE work. Why can't I ask for a pleasant office, with a nice window looking at something green, flexible (not short) working hours, flexible vacation (I do better with fewer / longer trips), comfortable clothing, and similar in the EE world?

BlackSwanManZ 4y ago

This is definitely part of it. The entry level courses we took in electrical engineering were insanely hard, and pretty worthless for developing any real engineering skills. It was mostly felt like it was selecting for people who were really good at math puzzles. It just felt like they were trying to scare people away.

c3bkr 4y ago

I did EE and I thought it was not difficult AT ALL - like nowhere near what the reputation is. The thing is I went to a shit university, did end up putting in a lot of time studying so that I could graduate top of my class (which I did) because I stupidly though this would help me stand out. I could have coasted by with significantly less work, there were people I helped out who honestly should have been failed out - barely understood basic circuits in 3rd year. I think the department was desperate to hold onto students and so nothing was made too tough. As I said shit school. In the end I currently do "embedded" programming (all just embedded Linux not even bare metal). I really regret the whole thing - I should have done something completely different finance, actuary. EE is a completely stupid field. To have a "serious" EE career now you need a PhD or at the very least a MS. Despite graduating top-of-my-class and honestly have a very good command of the material at the time, I graduated having ZERO skills in electrical engineering. I went the software route basically because its something I could pick up and learn and get work with, what the FUCK was I supposed to do with my "skills" solving textbook problems? As I said it was a shit school where the courses didn't involve nearly enough project work to build real skills. The only people I know who went on to do legitimate EE stuff got a masters. Not sure how they are doing. I realized by the end of the degree I had zero passion for this shit, I wouldn't even know what I would want to specialize in. The only courses I found interesting were control theory and signal processing somewhat. I though the actual electronics courses blew.