9 ms·

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

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.
- jsjohnst 4y ago
  > 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. … I had/have 0 understanding of those topics, I just pattern matched questions to equations and then solved them like I solved everything else. Sounds virtually identical to my experience from high school on, across almost every subject. Thankfully I retained >0, but still not what I should’ve. Instead, what I learned is I could JIT memorize what I needed to know just to pass the test. Took me years after school to unwind that and deeply learn topics again (outside things I had an interest in learning, those were never a problem).
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Ah, I have this experience burned in my skull. My backwardish university, where I started 1999, had SW engineering degree only available on their Faculty of electro engineering and informatics. Historically it has been EE through and through, CE was just an relatively new addition and you could see it on classes. Even on CE, we had for first 2 years tons of absolutely mandatory EE courses which had 0 relevance to software development. One (Theoretical electrotechnics II) was especially hardcore due to 1) math used was tougher than actual dedicated math courses we had at that time; 2) the professor was an absolute a-hole, I mean proper evil twist in his personality... everybody on whole university hated him, I mean teachers, management, everybody, students were properly scared of him. He was so well known even people on other universities knew him well. But he had some good expertise in some topics so he was tolerated, and he served as biggest student filter on whole faculty. He literally fired people from whole school (as in last attempt to pass this mandatory course, 2 attempts per year, if failed could repeat next year) in their 3rd year at uni, because of a single dot in whole equation calculation (which was at least 1 A4 per exercise). Dot was just above given variable in equation to give it different meaning than non-dot ones, and pens did often fail us back then (so after solving an example we all tripple-checked all dots were visible where they should be). He often told girls they shouldn't study EE since its not for them, guys that had long hair that they should get back to their moms, people with hungarian-sounding names that they should go to Hungary etc... He was fired eventually. If it hadn't been for him, EE would be above-average difficulty but definitely manageable subject. As it was done, one basically done university for CE degree once passing him. And the best thing of all this - he was consistently given only to teach and examine CE people only. EE people had such an easygoing professor that everybody passed it. Needless to say, I loathed anything EE-related for quite some time. Schools have ways to effectively discourage even good topics to folks like me.
christophilus 4y ago
I don’t understand how the market dynamics work here. As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job. I have no idea how we’ve managed to sustain these salaries for so long. At some point, I keep expecting a correction in salaries simply due to supply / demand. I also keep thinking, surely other industries will start paying more and treating folks better, so they can attract top talent, but nope! Why is this?
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  You may find SE an easy job, but it isn't for most people. It requires above average: - Working memory capacity - Tolerance to extreme frustration, persistence - Ability to learn fast - Capacity to deal with particularly high incidence of imposter syndrome - I could keep going all day... SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >It requires above average: [...] Literally all those traits you listed are needed as an EE(and in many other white collar and blue collar professions too) plus add even more scary stuff like advanced math (for PID tuning, system signal processing, system modelling and simulation, etc.), but for way less pay that even a kid making iOS apps who hasn't passed highschool math can out-earn you. So how is that fair? My example was a slight exaggeration, though I bet there are plenty of mobile app kiddies making more than EEs. My point is not that SW devs and app kiddies are overpaid, but that in comparison to them, pretty much any other career is massively underpaid, even the related ones like EE, since the barrier of entry is higher and the pay is lower. To wit, there was a highly popular and controversial topic on my country's subreddit where a youngster was asking half snarky, half serious: "What's the point of going to school, when I make 65k/year as a self taught web-dev without needing any of the useless knowledge I had to learn in school, while the people who go into professions where they actually do need that knowledge from school for their career (engineering, medical, farming, chemistry, nursing, etc.) can end up earning less than me, a school dropout and mediocre webdev?"
markus_zhang 4y ago
I think it's a bit tougher to move from SE to EE. I mean do they even hire experienced non-low level SE?
irjustin 4y ago
Yeah at some point the market has to correct itself. There's no way guys like Intel/AMD can keep this up. "Can't afford" simply isn't true given our insane need for chips.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >There's no way guys like Intel/AMD can keep this up. They can. They're aggressively expanding in Europe and Asia where the EE wages they pay are very good for the local market. Also, Israel is a major tech hub where Intel, AMD, Apple, Nvidia and others develop plenty of cutting edge tech. Not everything has to be done in the US with US wages and those companies know it and are taking advantage of it.
- jinto36 4y ago
  I think that microelectronics engineering is treated as a separate subfield from electrical engineering. I went to RIT which AFAIK is reasonably well-respected for MicroE, and while it wasn't my major, I have some friends who were in it, and they're all getting paid pretty well at Samsung and AMD and Intel. Even 15 years ago, anyone who graduated would be insta-hired somewhere for a reasonable salary. There were a lot of specialty courses for MicroE that weren't in EE, in addition to projects in the teaching fab and such. I recorded video for classes with distance-learning students as a student job, some of which were MicroE, so I basically got paid to audit Semiconductor Metrology taught by Dr. Lynn Fuller (who founded the MicroE program and apparently retired last year).
anotherhue 4y ago
I'm a CE, interned at Intel. Pure software now (some IaaS). Hardware can't hit the market reach of software so your potential value can never be as high. The fact that most software companies fail is an entirely different fact.
wink 4y ago
Matches my experience 100%. I'm a Software Developer in Germany and more than half of the EEs I know went into software because it was better money and a lot more available jobs, which might be even more important. We don't get Silicon Valley money here after all. Oh, and also the scale I guess. I worked at a startup that did Hardware + Software. One hardware team (6-8 people), 5 software teams (~50 people).
- c3bkr 4y ago
  Software is not even paid that well in Germany, I can't imagine EE salaries. There probably are some well-paid engineering positions for EEs there but mostly in very hard-to-get positions at Daimler, BMW, Bosch etc. Typical engineer is forced to work at a very low paying Mittelstand.
bob1029 4y ago
> Have never met an SE moving into EE. I started out doing EE at UT Austin and never finished because I was a lazy child and had zero awareness of what I was getting myself into. Decided to get a computer "engineering" degree from a cheaper local institution. Fast forward 15+ years, and I am now responsible for more than I dreamed possible and am considering an EE path as my next steps for when I burn out as a software developer. I still deeply enjoy all of the nuances of electronic devices, how they are made, why they work, etc... I used to work in a semiconductor factory, and might return with a new title some day. I also might go macro and help out with the grid. Both things are still very fascinating to me.
rowanG077 4y ago
Waving hi as a a SE that is moving partially into EE. It's definitely more challenging. Mostly because the tools are really utter shit.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  Would be interested to hear a bit more about your experience. Is your software experience with low level firmware/ kernel stuff? Are you finding the math for EE hard to pick up?
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    My software experience is partly low level firmware stuff but I have also designed databases and done backend/frontend work. I'm mostly doing FPGA and PCB design. Where you do need a little bit of math but it's all pretty basic stuff. Nothing I didn't get during my software degree.
  - c3bkr 4y ago
    What math do EEs actually use? I have an EE degree and I didn't find the math content in it particularly daunting and in the actual EE courses I felt hardly any math was used beyond at most basic calculus.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kelnos 4y ago
> Half of my class of EEs and CEs went into other careers immediately after graduation because money was better. This more or less describes me. I switched after graduation (nearly 20 years ago) more because I realized I didn't enjoy it that much, and I already had done a bunch of programming for a while, which I did enjoy. I only realized the financial upside later. When I'd hear over the years from friends who'd stayed in EE/CE fields, it did indeed sound way more stressful than what I had to deal with, even though there was a lot of stress in my jobs as well.
Yhippa 4y ago
Well put. I absolutely loved my CE work in university. I loved doing digital logic design, living in state machines, and programming in VHDL. I loved how highly deterministic it all felt. I loved the Mentor Graphics software and seeing a visual representation of my code. For me, on the East Coast of the US, there didn't seem to be many jobs at the time and I wasn't feeling moving to the West Coast where I assumed the jobs would be. In the end I went down the software track for my career and feel like it would be impossible to get back into this. I can probably get my kicks by playing with a Raspberry Pi but I always wonder what that alternate universe would have felt like going down the CE career path.
asfarley 4y ago
This echoes my experience. SW pays, EE screws you around. It’s still nice to be able to dive down to the electrical level if necessary but it’s generally not a profitable level to spend time at.

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.

jsjohnst 4y ago
> 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. … I had/have 0 understanding of those topics, I just pattern matched questions to equations and then solved them like I solved everything else. Sounds virtually identical to my experience from high school on, across almost every subject. Thankfully I retained >0, but still not what I should’ve. Instead, what I learned is I could JIT memorize what I needed to know just to pass the test. Took me years after school to unwind that and deeply learn topics again (outside things I had an interest in learning, those were never a problem).
saiya-jin 4y ago
Ah, I have this experience burned in my skull. My backwardish university, where I started 1999, had SW engineering degree only available on their Faculty of electro engineering and informatics. Historically it has been EE through and through, CE was just an relatively new addition and you could see it on classes. Even on CE, we had for first 2 years tons of absolutely mandatory EE courses which had 0 relevance to software development. One (Theoretical electrotechnics II) was especially hardcore due to 1) math used was tougher than actual dedicated math courses we had at that time; 2) the professor was an absolute a-hole, I mean proper evil twist in his personality... everybody on whole university hated him, I mean teachers, management, everybody, students were properly scared of him. He was so well known even people on other universities knew him well. But he had some good expertise in some topics so he was tolerated, and he served as biggest student filter on whole faculty. He literally fired people from whole school (as in last attempt to pass this mandatory course, 2 attempts per year, if failed could repeat next year) in their 3rd year at uni, because of a single dot in whole equation calculation (which was at least 1 A4 per exercise). Dot was just above given variable in equation to give it different meaning than non-dot ones, and pens did often fail us back then (so after solving an example we all tripple-checked all dots were visible where they should be). He often told girls they shouldn't study EE since its not for them, guys that had long hair that they should get back to their moms, people with hungarian-sounding names that they should go to Hungary etc... He was fired eventually. If it hadn't been for him, EE would be above-average difficulty but definitely manageable subject. As it was done, one basically done university for CE degree once passing him. And the best thing of all this - he was consistently given only to teach and examine CE people only. EE people had such an easygoing professor that everybody passed it. Needless to say, I loathed anything EE-related for quite some time. Schools have ways to effectively discourage even good topics to folks like me.

christophilus 4y ago

I don’t understand how the market dynamics work here. As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job. I have no idea how we’ve managed to sustain these salaries for so long. At some point, I keep expecting a correction in salaries simply due to supply / demand. I also keep thinking, surely other industries will start paying more and treating folks better, so they can attract top talent, but nope! Why is this?

rmbyrro 4y ago
You may find SE an easy job, but it isn't for most people. It requires above average: - Working memory capacity - Tolerance to extreme frustration, persistence - Ability to learn fast - Capacity to deal with particularly high incidence of imposter syndrome - I could keep going all day... SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >It requires above average: [...] Literally all those traits you listed are needed as an EE(and in many other white collar and blue collar professions too) plus add even more scary stuff like advanced math (for PID tuning, system signal processing, system modelling and simulation, etc.), but for way less pay that even a kid making iOS apps who hasn't passed highschool math can out-earn you. So how is that fair? My example was a slight exaggeration, though I bet there are plenty of mobile app kiddies making more than EEs. My point is not that SW devs and app kiddies are overpaid, but that in comparison to them, pretty much any other career is massively underpaid, even the related ones like EE, since the barrier of entry is higher and the pay is lower. To wit, there was a highly popular and controversial topic on my country's subreddit where a youngster was asking half snarky, half serious: "What's the point of going to school, when I make 65k/year as a self taught web-dev without needing any of the useless knowledge I had to learn in school, while the people who go into professions where they actually do need that knowledge from school for their career (engineering, medical, farming, chemistry, nursing, etc.) can end up earning less than me, a school dropout and mediocre webdev?"

markus_zhang 4y ago

I think it's a bit tougher to move from SE to EE. I mean do they even hire experienced non-low level SE?

irjustin 4y ago

Yeah at some point the market has to correct itself. There's no way guys like Intel/AMD can keep this up. "Can't afford" simply isn't true given our insane need for chips.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>There's no way guys like Intel/AMD can keep this up. They can. They're aggressively expanding in Europe and Asia where the EE wages they pay are very good for the local market. Also, Israel is a major tech hub where Intel, AMD, Apple, Nvidia and others develop plenty of cutting edge tech. Not everything has to be done in the US with US wages and those companies know it and are taking advantage of it.
jinto36 4y ago
I think that microelectronics engineering is treated as a separate subfield from electrical engineering. I went to RIT which AFAIK is reasonably well-respected for MicroE, and while it wasn't my major, I have some friends who were in it, and they're all getting paid pretty well at Samsung and AMD and Intel. Even 15 years ago, anyone who graduated would be insta-hired somewhere for a reasonable salary. There were a lot of specialty courses for MicroE that weren't in EE, in addition to projects in the teaching fab and such. I recorded video for classes with distance-learning students as a student job, some of which were MicroE, so I basically got paid to audit Semiconductor Metrology taught by Dr. Lynn Fuller (who founded the MicroE program and apparently retired last year).

anotherhue 4y ago

I'm a CE, interned at Intel. Pure software now (some IaaS). Hardware can't hit the market reach of software so your potential value can never be as high. The fact that most software companies fail is an entirely different fact.

wink 4y ago

Matches my experience 100%. I'm a Software Developer in Germany and more than half of the EEs I know went into software because it was better money and a lot more available jobs, which might be even more important. We don't get Silicon Valley money here after all. Oh, and also the scale I guess. I worked at a startup that did Hardware + Software. One hardware team (6-8 people), 5 software teams (~50 people).

c3bkr 4y ago
Software is not even paid that well in Germany, I can't imagine EE salaries. There probably are some well-paid engineering positions for EEs there but mostly in very hard-to-get positions at Daimler, BMW, Bosch etc. Typical engineer is forced to work at a very low paying Mittelstand.

bob1029 4y ago

> Have never met an SE moving into EE. I started out doing EE at UT Austin and never finished because I was a lazy child and had zero awareness of what I was getting myself into. Decided to get a computer "engineering" degree from a cheaper local institution. Fast forward 15+ years, and I am now responsible for more than I dreamed possible and am considering an EE path as my next steps for when I burn out as a software developer. I still deeply enjoy all of the nuances of electronic devices, how they are made, why they work, etc... I used to work in a semiconductor factory, and might return with a new title some day. I also might go macro and help out with the grid. Both things are still very fascinating to me.

rowanG077 4y ago

Waving hi as a a SE that is moving partially into EE. It's definitely more challenging. Mostly because the tools are really utter shit.

ghostpepper 4y ago
Would be interested to hear a bit more about your experience. Is your software experience with low level firmware/ kernel stuff? Are you finding the math for EE hard to pick up?
- rowanG077 4y ago
  My software experience is partly low level firmware stuff but I have also designed databases and done backend/frontend work. I'm mostly doing FPGA and PCB design. Where you do need a little bit of math but it's all pretty basic stuff. Nothing I didn't get during my software degree.
- c3bkr 4y ago
  What math do EEs actually use? I have an EE degree and I didn't find the math content in it particularly daunting and in the actual EE courses I felt hardly any math was used beyond at most basic calculus.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kelnos 4y ago

> Half of my class of EEs and CEs went into other careers immediately after graduation because money was better. This more or less describes me. I switched after graduation (nearly 20 years ago) more because I realized I didn't enjoy it that much, and I already had done a bunch of programming for a while, which I did enjoy. I only realized the financial upside later. When I'd hear over the years from friends who'd stayed in EE/CE fields, it did indeed sound way more stressful than what I had to deal with, even though there was a lot of stress in my jobs as well.

Yhippa 4y ago

Well put. I absolutely loved my CE work in university. I loved doing digital logic design, living in state machines, and programming in VHDL. I loved how highly deterministic it all felt. I loved the Mentor Graphics software and seeing a visual representation of my code. For me, on the East Coast of the US, there didn't seem to be many jobs at the time and I wasn't feeling moving to the West Coast where I assumed the jobs would be. In the end I went down the software track for my career and feel like it would be impossible to get back into this. I can probably get my kicks by playing with a Raspberry Pi but I always wonder what that alternate universe would have felt like going down the CE career path.

asfarley 4y ago

This echoes my experience. SW pays, EE screws you around. It’s still nice to be able to dive down to the electrical level if necessary but it’s generally not a profitable level to spend time at.