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I'm really hoping the salaries for EE type roles start to match software as the grey beards start to retire and talent becomes scarce. We've got a legion of gra

I'm really hoping the salaries for EE type roles start to match software as the grey beards start to retire and talent becomes scarce. We've got a legion of grads going into CS, but EE classes are a fraction of that. Despite that, software roles are often more than double the salary. Any role I go into as an EE/Embedded Systems engineer, I'm more often than not the youngest by 20-30 years. I wonder how the industry in the West is going to survive it, beyond hiring contractors from India/South Asia.

SteveMoody73 4y ago
I design the majority of the electronics for my company and pretty much all the firmware as well. Wages are not bad for the area i'm in, which is fairly rural, but could be a lot better for the work involved. Move to a big city would probably help but I like the quieter lifestyle. I've not done any web development full time for close 20 years, first started writing JSP code. Dabbled with a few personal website designs since then. I'm sure if I went back to web development, it may pay more but I don't think it would have the same level of job satisfaction for me. I try to keep up to date on some of the technologies used but it seems overwhelming from the outside. Part is resistence to change, but I do find the work for the most part enjoyable so it's a risk to change jobs as well.
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
The industry will do just fine. In all my years assisting in the hiring process (I'm software, but due to my EE background I was often asked to help with interviewing EEs), I've never noticed a shortage of EE applicants. OTOH, we had a lot of trouble finding enough software people to hire. The reality is that EE jobs are a small fraction of the software ones and supply is keeping up with demand, so there's no upward salary pressure.
georgeburdell 4y ago
EE won’t go higher, SWE will go lower
- Retric 4y ago
  Alternatively, web is generally more valuable. You don’t buy a new washing machine because the current firmware sucks, but you will shop somewhere else if Newegg’s website is terrible. That relationship is generally true where people rarely test embedded software until after a purchase, but people tend to jump ship more frequently online. Net result a lot of critical infrastructure and devices suck as much as possible while still getting the job done.
  - Negitivefrags 4y ago
    I’m building a house at the moment and I have been insisting that I am able to actually test all the built in appliances with power to see if the software is garbage. I have found that most of the high end brands have a completely horrible user experience. Miele is the worst I’ve tried, and I found that as you go up the price range even inside that brand the experience gets worse. The top end Miele induction cooktop takes over 5 seconds to boot up before you can even turn a hob on. The interface has a second of latency on presses. It took me probably 20 seconds to work out how to turn a hob on. I happened to be with my mother at the time and I asked her to try to work out how to turn a hob on and she had failed after 1 minute of trying and gave up and asked me. It looks nice though. The thing I find the most infuriating about it is that my attitude towards this stuff is just not understood by designers at all. They complain at my choices because the Miele appliances which they specified are “better quality”. And yet I feel like they can’t have actually tried to use them because as far as I can tell the quality is total garbage.
    - VBprogrammer 4y ago
      Slightly off topic but imagine an induction cooker with the original iPod control wheel as it's power control. We opted for a gas hob when we installed our kitchen. Mostly because I like the controllability when cooking. Obviously it's a nightmare for health and the environment but man it makes cooking easier.
      - dudeofea 4y ago
droopyEyelids 4y ago
The demand for EE roles is far less than the demand for Software roles. For a simple thought experiment, imagine if you could get a good developer for $20 an hour. Every single company on the planet, from a mom and pop shop to big corporations could turn a profit off their work. Now imagine you could get an electrical engineer for the same price. What percent of businesses could profit from electrical engineering? 2%?
- gryBrd1987 4y ago
  The context OP setup was “when grey beards retire.” The ideas being demand is low as the senior EEs stay put. Mom and pop shops could use Excel and did successfully for years. Big banks even ran on gigabyte sized Excel sheets before the 2010s hype bubble (Source: direct experience working in fintech 2010-2015) Anyone in tech believing the last 10-15 years was about anything but the US government juicing its economy to stay relevant, titillate, and ingratiate itself on now 30-40 something college grads is fooling themselves. All those students are now bought in to keeping the dollar alive. Software has gotten so over thought and bloated given a “too many cooks in the kitchen.” situation. Templating a git repo with appropriate dep files given mathematical constraints is not rocket science. The past needed to imagine software as out of this world to gain mindshare. Correct and stable electrical state is what really matters. We are entering a new era of tearing down the cloud monolith for open ML libs that put machines to work, not people. Behavioral economics has been running the US since before Reagan.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  My point wasn't about demand though. I'm well aware it flags behind SW companies by a staggering margin. A small team of SE's with enough money to buy some laptops between them can create multi-million dollars worth of value in a few years. It would take a team of EEs 5x the time and 25x the initial investment to create the same. Of course there are going to be 100's of SE companies for every EE one. My comment was regarding supply. EE is an art that blossomed in the 80s and 90s in terms of practicing engineers, and has shrunk per capita since. This is largely driven by kids getting drawn into SWE over EE as people look at salaries and modern day billionaires, and figure it to be a no-brainer. Today EEs are a small fraction of the total engineering disciplines, despite being essential for the communication, power generation, distribution, consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, and of course, the computer hardware industry on which the software one is built; amongst many other growing sectors like robotics, medical, and IoT. If there are a legion of EEs are set to retire in the next 5-10 years, and all the would-be EEs are now designing web apps, surely at some point the supply/demand scales start to tip one way? Many of the above industries are abstracting everything to software platforms as time goes on, but no amount of money can make a SW dev design a power-train for a car, antenna for a 5G device, or program an FPGA for silicon verification.
metalforever 4y ago
Yeah same, I’m an EE camping out in software because of the pay. It’s also just easier work. I would much rather be intellectually challenged coding firmware or embedded work. I didn’t go to school to build web widgets. It’s just EE pays so badly you can’t make the bills. I was getting offered numbers that wouldn’t have afforded my own studio apartment to rent. For EE work. It’s insulting.
- riskable 4y ago
  ...which is ridiculous because of what it takes to become an EE VS what it takes to become a "web developer". Basically anyone who can handle basic logic can be a web developer if they just put in a bit of effort. Degree or not! To become an EE you need a 4-year degree and a whole heck of a lot of knowledge about things that are a real pain in the ass for laypeople like calculating inductance, capacitance, and impedance (<shudder>). You don't need much knowledge to make a circuit board, no. But when your boss wants to add a USB 3.0 hub to your product it suddenly becomes a, "wow, we really need an EE" job (because the spec has so many requirements and you're not going to get your product certified unless you can demonstrate that you followed it).
  - robomartin 4y ago
    > You don't need much knowledge to make a circuit board Not quite. For most modern high speed designs PCB's are very far from being simple. Signal and power integrity are critical. It doesn't help that these can be "voodoo" fields where, a bit like RF, years of experience as well as the theoretical foundation are really important. That said, I think I know where you are coming from. A ton of low-performance embedded designs these days can be done by people with very little EE education. Anyone can learn anything online. There are plenty of resources. This is a good thing, of course.
    - riskable 4y ago
      As someone who's not an EE (with no degree in anything at all) and has made many circuit boards... No, they're not that complicated. Not really. I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.

SteveMoody73 4y ago

I design the majority of the electronics for my company and pretty much all the firmware as well. Wages are not bad for the area i'm in, which is fairly rural, but could be a lot better for the work involved. Move to a big city would probably help but I like the quieter lifestyle. I've not done any web development full time for close 20 years, first started writing JSP code. Dabbled with a few personal website designs since then. I'm sure if I went back to web development, it may pay more but I don't think it would have the same level of job satisfaction for me. I try to keep up to date on some of the technologies used but it seems overwhelming from the outside. Part is resistence to change, but I do find the work for the most part enjoyable so it's a risk to change jobs as well.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

The industry will do just fine. In all my years assisting in the hiring process (I'm software, but due to my EE background I was often asked to help with interviewing EEs), I've never noticed a shortage of EE applicants. OTOH, we had a lot of trouble finding enough software people to hire. The reality is that EE jobs are a small fraction of the software ones and supply is keeping up with demand, so there's no upward salary pressure.

georgeburdell 4y ago

EE won’t go higher, SWE will go lower

Retric 4y ago
Alternatively, web is generally more valuable. You don’t buy a new washing machine because the current firmware sucks, but you will shop somewhere else if Newegg’s website is terrible. That relationship is generally true where people rarely test embedded software until after a purchase, but people tend to jump ship more frequently online. Net result a lot of critical infrastructure and devices suck as much as possible while still getting the job done.
- Negitivefrags 4y ago
  I’m building a house at the moment and I have been insisting that I am able to actually test all the built in appliances with power to see if the software is garbage. I have found that most of the high end brands have a completely horrible user experience. Miele is the worst I’ve tried, and I found that as you go up the price range even inside that brand the experience gets worse. The top end Miele induction cooktop takes over 5 seconds to boot up before you can even turn a hob on. The interface has a second of latency on presses. It took me probably 20 seconds to work out how to turn a hob on. I happened to be with my mother at the time and I asked her to try to work out how to turn a hob on and she had failed after 1 minute of trying and gave up and asked me. It looks nice though. The thing I find the most infuriating about it is that my attitude towards this stuff is just not understood by designers at all. They complain at my choices because the Miele appliances which they specified are “better quality”. And yet I feel like they can’t have actually tried to use them because as far as I can tell the quality is total garbage.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Slightly off topic but imagine an induction cooker with the original iPod control wheel as it's power control. We opted for a gas hob when we installed our kitchen. Mostly because I like the controllability when cooking. Obviously it's a nightmare for health and the environment but man it makes cooking easier.
    - dudeofea 4y ago

droopyEyelids 4y ago

The demand for EE roles is far less than the demand for Software roles. For a simple thought experiment, imagine if you could get a good developer for $20 an hour. Every single company on the planet, from a mom and pop shop to big corporations could turn a profit off their work. Now imagine you could get an electrical engineer for the same price. What percent of businesses could profit from electrical engineering? 2%?

gryBrd1987 4y ago
The context OP setup was “when grey beards retire.” The ideas being demand is low as the senior EEs stay put. Mom and pop shops could use Excel and did successfully for years. Big banks even ran on gigabyte sized Excel sheets before the 2010s hype bubble (Source: direct experience working in fintech 2010-2015) Anyone in tech believing the last 10-15 years was about anything but the US government juicing its economy to stay relevant, titillate, and ingratiate itself on now 30-40 something college grads is fooling themselves. All those students are now bought in to keeping the dollar alive. Software has gotten so over thought and bloated given a “too many cooks in the kitchen.” situation. Templating a git repo with appropriate dep files given mathematical constraints is not rocket science. The past needed to imagine software as out of this world to gain mindshare. Correct and stable electrical state is what really matters. We are entering a new era of tearing down the cloud monolith for open ML libs that put machines to work, not people. Behavioral economics has been running the US since before Reagan.
Aromasin 4y ago
My point wasn't about demand though. I'm well aware it flags behind SW companies by a staggering margin. A small team of SE's with enough money to buy some laptops between them can create multi-million dollars worth of value in a few years. It would take a team of EEs 5x the time and 25x the initial investment to create the same. Of course there are going to be 100's of SE companies for every EE one. My comment was regarding supply. EE is an art that blossomed in the 80s and 90s in terms of practicing engineers, and has shrunk per capita since. This is largely driven by kids getting drawn into SWE over EE as people look at salaries and modern day billionaires, and figure it to be a no-brainer. Today EEs are a small fraction of the total engineering disciplines, despite being essential for the communication, power generation, distribution, consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, and of course, the computer hardware industry on which the software one is built; amongst many other growing sectors like robotics, medical, and IoT. If there are a legion of EEs are set to retire in the next 5-10 years, and all the would-be EEs are now designing web apps, surely at some point the supply/demand scales start to tip one way? Many of the above industries are abstracting everything to software platforms as time goes on, but no amount of money can make a SW dev design a power-train for a car, antenna for a 5G device, or program an FPGA for silicon verification.

metalforever 4y ago

Yeah same, I’m an EE camping out in software because of the pay. It’s also just easier work. I would much rather be intellectually challenged coding firmware or embedded work. I didn’t go to school to build web widgets. It’s just EE pays so badly you can’t make the bills. I was getting offered numbers that wouldn’t have afforded my own studio apartment to rent. For EE work. It’s insulting.

riskable 4y ago
...which is ridiculous because of what it takes to become an EE VS what it takes to become a "web developer". Basically anyone who can handle basic logic can be a web developer if they just put in a bit of effort. Degree or not! To become an EE you need a 4-year degree and a whole heck of a lot of knowledge about things that are a real pain in the ass for laypeople like calculating inductance, capacitance, and impedance (<shudder>). You don't need much knowledge to make a circuit board, no. But when your boss wants to add a USB 3.0 hub to your product it suddenly becomes a, "wow, we really need an EE" job (because the spec has so many requirements and you're not going to get your product certified unless you can demonstrate that you followed it).
- robomartin 4y ago
  > You don't need much knowledge to make a circuit board Not quite. For most modern high speed designs PCB's are very far from being simple. Signal and power integrity are critical. It doesn't help that these can be "voodoo" fields where, a bit like RF, years of experience as well as the theoretical foundation are really important. That said, I think I know where you are coming from. A ton of low-performance embedded designs these days can be done by people with very little EE education. Anyone can learn anything online. There are plenty of resources. This is a good thing, of course.
  - riskable 4y ago
    As someone who's not an EE (with no degree in anything at all) and has made many circuit boards... No, they're not that complicated. Not really. I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.