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EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is

EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak. Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits is extremely leaky, so you often learn to ignore it unless you absolutely need to pay attention. Hobbyist and undergrad projects thus usually consist of cargo culting combinations of simple circuit building blocks connected to a microcontroller of some kind. A lot of research (not in EE) needs this kind of work, but it's not necessarily glamorous. This is the same as pulling software libraries off the shelf to do software work ("showing my advisor docker"), but the software work gets more credit in modern academia because the skills are rarer and the building blocks are newer. Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE. Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. If you compare hard EE research to basic software engineering, it makes sense that you think there's a "wall," but you're ignoring the easy EE and the hard CS.

amelius 1y ago
This is especially true because for doing most _hard_ EE work, you really need access to a fab, and so a lot of money. This is not really the case for most hard CS work.
- nudgeee 1y ago
  By fab you mean lab, then agree. Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits. EE encompasses more than just manufacturing of ICs, for example research and applications in radio propagation and EM/wireless, signal integrity, antenna design, coexistence/desense, advanced power electronics, control systems, simulation/solvers, etc.
  - amelius 1y ago
    This is true, although for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering, not research. That's why I said fab, not lab. But yes, you are right to a great extent. The main point is that the hard EE work can be prohibitively expensive for individuals and smaller companies.
    - pclmulqdq 1y ago
      I think you're oversimplifying this. Lots of RF research is done with a DAC, an ADC, an FPGA, and a frontend made of discretes (sometimes also with off-the-shelf boxes connected with SMA connectors). A lot of power electronics research is done with microcontrollers and discrete parts. Digital circuits research often stops on an FPGA or in a simulator. You can do a lot of actual original work without a fab.
      - rramadass 1y ago
        Can you recommend some good resources (books/videos/etc.) for studying RF Engineering and doing RF Research by oneself? Assume beginner knowledge of relevant mathematics/electronics and good software skills. Am interested in both the practical side (eg. build a SDR from components) and the theoretical side i.e. the Physics/Mathematics to explain it.
    - nudgeee 1y ago
      Sibling poster did a good job explaining how research relies on labs. Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :) A comment on the application side: > "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering" Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs. Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system. Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  Fabs are only part of this, and not universal in EE research at all. However, almost all serious EE research requires at least $100k of lab equipment of one kind or another.
  - wildzzz 1y ago
    That's definitely an unfortunate part of EE, the hardware required to design hardware is expensive. CS requires a laptop and maybe some time on a server or a big GPU cluster, expensive to own but very cheap to rent. I think the explosion in availability of inexpensive microcontrollers and FPGA dev boards have made it much easier for people to get into hardware design without spending a ton of money. This has also made it cheaper to buy high end test equipment, you don't need to buy a $3k Keysight oscope when a cheap Chinese USB oscope works just as well with plenty of features built-in for free. Obviously a proper academic or corporate research lab is going to be a lot different than a well-equiped hobbyist lab but the difference is not as stark as you'd imagine.
- sevensor 1y ago
  “Things you can only do in a fab” is but a subset of “hard problems in EE.” How many people actually understand induction motors well enough to design a better one? Or how about antenna theory? The math makes most people’s eyeballs melt, and the space of possible antenna designs is utterly unfathomably huge. And then there’s acoustics, which is just like antenna theory except the math is sideways. I could go on. Control theory. Analog signal processing. Digital signal processing. Biomedical. I say all this as a recovering semiconductor engineer: EE is a huge field. I can’t think of a subdiscipline where we’ve run out of new ideas to explore, and most of them don’t require bucketfuls of HF. The real problem is that the financial rewards are relatively small, the math is ferocious, and there are so few practitioners, let alone experts doing research.
- hwillis 1y ago
  Does radar or radar reflection not count as "hard"? There's a lot more to electronics and electrical engineering than ICs.
carlmr 1y ago
>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics. The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understanding. It requires more unlearning than is worth it for the slight benefit of making the concepts slightly more intuitive to understand at the beginning.
  - junon 1y ago
    Once I ditched the hydraulic analogy and really tried to internalize charge, current, voltage, etc. is when I finally started to understand why the hydraulic analogy "works" but only for people who already understand electricity. Electricity behaves in many ways just like water (just at a significantly faster time scale) but I don't think it actually helped me learn how it all worked to start with.
    - r_lee 1y ago
      This is a common problem in all fields IMO. It's easy for many to fall into the "It's like X" but it only makes sense if you already have the information needed in your head to connect the dots Which is why I also don't generally like analogies and the kind
    - foobarchu 1y ago
      This reminds me a lot of the car analogy that gets used to (poorly) teach object oriented programming.
markus_zhang 1y ago
Interesting. My approach to hobbyist EE (actually embedded) is: 1. Learn soldering 2. Treat circuits like black boxes. If I need X amount of Y, e.g. I need a circuit to smooth the voltage, I pick one black box with adequate attributes. However this is pretty introductory and I have no idea how to learn to fix old consoles. Sometimes it’s just a broken capacitor but I first need to figure out which part is broken.
- toast0 1y ago
  Fixing old consoles is roughly... a) inspect for obviously damaged components. Capacitors that leaked, chips that released the magic smoke, etc. b) confirm voltages are good c) inspect the inputs and outputs of the ics to see if they're doing what you expect d) depending on the boards involved, a lot of checking if pin A is electrically connected to pin B when it should be. Sometimes traces get broken and need to be fixed up.
- choilive 1y ago
  Fixing consoles is also treating circuits like black boxes :) . just gotta know what the black boxes are
- pkolaczk 1y ago
  Circuits as black boxes is usually a very leaky abstraction, because how circuits work depends a lot on what’s connected to them. And they have plenty of attributes that can interact in very weird ways.
dfawcus 1y ago
Yeah - there was a massive filtering of the students between the 1st year entry, and the second year at my Uni. Largely down to people unable to handle the (not terribly) complex maths at that stage. I knew a number of folks in the first year who were very good at practical electronics, having come in from a technician side, but simply gave up due to the heavy maths load. It got more complex when doing Control Theory, what with Laplace and Z transforms, freq domain analysis, and the apocryphal Poles and Zeros. Further culling ensued at that point.
- Eggpants 1y ago
  I went into EE wanting to learn how to design CPU’s and thought the analog side would be boring. However, control theory turned out to be my favorite class. Learning how negative feedback loops are everywhere was an eye opener. Also learning Laplace transforms was one of my first “holy shit this is freaking clever and cool” moments. Just like how parity bits in data streams can be used to detect AND correct errors.
  - buildbot 1y ago
    Same on the laplace transforms. I was kinda mad we had learned any other way. It was a lot easier than whatever we were doing before mathematically! I wonder, how much control theory is there in CPU?
    - zhemao 1y ago
      In computer architecture / digital ASIC design there's zero control theory. There's not much mathematics in general.
    - dreamcompiler 1y ago
      There's Boolean algebra but no control theory is needed for logic design. One minor caveat is that most CPUs nowadays contain phase-locked loop (PLL) clock multipliers. Those fall into the domain of control theory but strictly speaking they're not part of the logic.
morpheuskafka 1y ago
> Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE But aren't there a lot of actual hardware products that are "simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller"? Like a toaster, shaver, keyboard, etc. If that's not "work in EE" then what is it classified under? It's not CS either.
- buckle8017 1y ago
  Computer engineering is the degree for that.
- pkaye 1y ago
  That would be Computer Engineering. Its somewhere between EE and CS.
- petsfed 1y ago
  The actual electrical engineering involved there is the sort of thing that an early-career engineer could bang out in an afternoon. Maybe a day or so for the PCB designer. The more time consuming part might be managing the regulatory compliance testing. Most of the orgs I worked in building simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller either farmed out the actual EE work to contractors or design houses or had 1 EE for like 20 different projects.
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  It would have been better phrased as "research in EE." There's no research involved in building a toaster. Another commenter pointed this out, but those products take about 1-2 days of engineering time.
alnwlsn 1y ago
I'm sure part of it is that EE claims probably the widest range out there. You can have kilovolts or microvolts, but mostly the same rules apply. Or you can learn how to power a small sensor for years off one small battery, or how to power a country. I don't know many other disciplines that can lay claim to 10-15 orders of magnitude. At most levels, software will be in there somewhere, even those fake flickering candle LEDs have RAM, ROM, and a processor these days.
- ForHackernews 1y ago
  I feel like astronomy probably wins, the magnitudes are literally astronomical. The Perseus Cluster of galaxies is estimated[0] at something like 816,592 light years in diameter, so that's 10^21 meters, and on the other end 2008 TC3[1] is an asteroid 4.1m across. [0] https://www.universeguide.com/galaxy/perseuscluster https://www.universeguide.com/galaxy/perseuscluster [1] https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/2008_TC3 https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/2008_TC3
jsmith45 1y ago
> Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. That is largely true of academic research. A critical difference though is that you don't need big expensive hardware, or the like to follow along with large portions of the cutting edge CS research. There are some exceptions like cutting edge AI training work super expensive equipment or large cloud expenditures, but tons of other cutting edge CS research can run even on a fairly low-end laptop just fine. It is also true that plenty of software innovation is not even tied to CS style academic research. Experimenting with what sort of perf becomes possible via implementing a new kernel feature, can be very important research but isn't always super closely tied to academic CS research. Even the more hobbyist level cutting edge research for EE will have more costs, simply because components and PCBs are not exactly free, and you cannot just keep using the same boards for every project for several years like you can with a PC.

amelius 1y ago

This is especially true because for doing most _hard_ EE work, you really need access to a fab, and so a lot of money. This is not really the case for most hard CS work.

nudgeee 1y ago
By fab you mean lab, then agree. Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits. EE encompasses more than just manufacturing of ICs, for example research and applications in radio propagation and EM/wireless, signal integrity, antenna design, coexistence/desense, advanced power electronics, control systems, simulation/solvers, etc.
- amelius 1y ago
  This is true, although for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering, not research. That's why I said fab, not lab. But yes, you are right to a great extent. The main point is that the hard EE work can be prohibitively expensive for individuals and smaller companies.
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    I think you're oversimplifying this. Lots of RF research is done with a DAC, an ADC, an FPGA, and a frontend made of discretes (sometimes also with off-the-shelf boxes connected with SMA connectors). A lot of power electronics research is done with microcontrollers and discrete parts. Digital circuits research often stops on an FPGA or in a simulator. You can do a lot of actual original work without a fab.
    - rramadass 1y ago
      Can you recommend some good resources (books/videos/etc.) for studying RF Engineering and doing RF Research by oneself? Assume beginner knowledge of relevant mathematics/electronics and good software skills. Am interested in both the practical side (eg. build a SDR from components) and the theoretical side i.e. the Physics/Mathematics to explain it.
  - nudgeee 1y ago
    Sibling poster did a good job explaining how research relies on labs. Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :) A comment on the application side: > "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering" Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs. Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system. Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.
pclmulqdq 1y ago
Fabs are only part of this, and not universal in EE research at all. However, almost all serious EE research requires at least $100k of lab equipment of one kind or another.
- wildzzz 1y ago
  That's definitely an unfortunate part of EE, the hardware required to design hardware is expensive. CS requires a laptop and maybe some time on a server or a big GPU cluster, expensive to own but very cheap to rent. I think the explosion in availability of inexpensive microcontrollers and FPGA dev boards have made it much easier for people to get into hardware design without spending a ton of money. This has also made it cheaper to buy high end test equipment, you don't need to buy a $3k Keysight oscope when a cheap Chinese USB oscope works just as well with plenty of features built-in for free. Obviously a proper academic or corporate research lab is going to be a lot different than a well-equiped hobbyist lab but the difference is not as stark as you'd imagine.
sevensor 1y ago
“Things you can only do in a fab” is but a subset of “hard problems in EE.” How many people actually understand induction motors well enough to design a better one? Or how about antenna theory? The math makes most people’s eyeballs melt, and the space of possible antenna designs is utterly unfathomably huge. And then there’s acoustics, which is just like antenna theory except the math is sideways. I could go on. Control theory. Analog signal processing. Digital signal processing. Biomedical. I say all this as a recovering semiconductor engineer: EE is a huge field. I can’t think of a subdiscipline where we’ve run out of new ideas to explore, and most of them don’t require bucketfuls of HF. The real problem is that the financial rewards are relatively small, the math is ferocious, and there are so few practitioners, let alone experts doing research.
hwillis 1y ago
Does radar or radar reflection not count as "hard"? There's a lot more to electronics and electrical engineering than ICs.

carlmr 1y ago

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

stephen_g 1y ago
Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics. The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understanding. It requires more unlearning than is worth it for the slight benefit of making the concepts slightly more intuitive to understand at the beginning.
- junon 1y ago
  Once I ditched the hydraulic analogy and really tried to internalize charge, current, voltage, etc. is when I finally started to understand why the hydraulic analogy "works" but only for people who already understand electricity. Electricity behaves in many ways just like water (just at a significantly faster time scale) but I don't think it actually helped me learn how it all worked to start with.
  - r_lee 1y ago
    This is a common problem in all fields IMO. It's easy for many to fall into the "It's like X" but it only makes sense if you already have the information needed in your head to connect the dots Which is why I also don't generally like analogies and the kind
  - foobarchu 1y ago
    This reminds me a lot of the car analogy that gets used to (poorly) teach object oriented programming.

markus_zhang 1y ago

Interesting. My approach to hobbyist EE (actually embedded) is: 1. Learn soldering 2. Treat circuits like black boxes. If I need X amount of Y, e.g. I need a circuit to smooth the voltage, I pick one black box with adequate attributes. However this is pretty introductory and I have no idea how to learn to fix old consoles. Sometimes it’s just a broken capacitor but I first need to figure out which part is broken.

toast0 1y ago
Fixing old consoles is roughly... a) inspect for obviously damaged components. Capacitors that leaked, chips that released the magic smoke, etc. b) confirm voltages are good c) inspect the inputs and outputs of the ics to see if they're doing what you expect d) depending on the boards involved, a lot of checking if pin A is electrically connected to pin B when it should be. Sometimes traces get broken and need to be fixed up.
choilive 1y ago
Fixing consoles is also treating circuits like black boxes :) . just gotta know what the black boxes are
pkolaczk 1y ago
Circuits as black boxes is usually a very leaky abstraction, because how circuits work depends a lot on what’s connected to them. And they have plenty of attributes that can interact in very weird ways.

dfawcus 1y ago

Yeah - there was a massive filtering of the students between the 1st year entry, and the second year at my Uni. Largely down to people unable to handle the (not terribly) complex maths at that stage. I knew a number of folks in the first year who were very good at practical electronics, having come in from a technician side, but simply gave up due to the heavy maths load. It got more complex when doing Control Theory, what with Laplace and Z transforms, freq domain analysis, and the apocryphal Poles and Zeros. Further culling ensued at that point.

Eggpants 1y ago
I went into EE wanting to learn how to design CPU’s and thought the analog side would be boring. However, control theory turned out to be my favorite class. Learning how negative feedback loops are everywhere was an eye opener. Also learning Laplace transforms was one of my first “holy shit this is freaking clever and cool” moments. Just like how parity bits in data streams can be used to detect AND correct errors.
- buildbot 1y ago
  Same on the laplace transforms. I was kinda mad we had learned any other way. It was a lot easier than whatever we were doing before mathematically! I wonder, how much control theory is there in CPU?
  - zhemao 1y ago
    In computer architecture / digital ASIC design there's zero control theory. There's not much mathematics in general.
  - dreamcompiler 1y ago
    There's Boolean algebra but no control theory is needed for logic design. One minor caveat is that most CPUs nowadays contain phase-locked loop (PLL) clock multipliers. Those fall into the domain of control theory but strictly speaking they're not part of the logic.

morpheuskafka 1y ago

> Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE But aren't there a lot of actual hardware products that are "simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller"? Like a toaster, shaver, keyboard, etc. If that's not "work in EE" then what is it classified under? It's not CS either.

buckle8017 1y ago
Computer engineering is the degree for that.
pkaye 1y ago
That would be Computer Engineering. Its somewhere between EE and CS.
petsfed 1y ago
The actual electrical engineering involved there is the sort of thing that an early-career engineer could bang out in an afternoon. Maybe a day or so for the PCB designer. The more time consuming part might be managing the regulatory compliance testing. Most of the orgs I worked in building simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller either farmed out the actual EE work to contractors or design houses or had 1 EE for like 20 different projects.
pclmulqdq 1y ago
It would have been better phrased as "research in EE." There's no research involved in building a toaster. Another commenter pointed this out, but those products take about 1-2 days of engineering time.

alnwlsn 1y ago

I'm sure part of it is that EE claims probably the widest range out there. You can have kilovolts or microvolts, but mostly the same rules apply. Or you can learn how to power a small sensor for years off one small battery, or how to power a country. I don't know many other disciplines that can lay claim to 10-15 orders of magnitude. At most levels, software will be in there somewhere, even those fake flickering candle LEDs have RAM, ROM, and a processor these days.

ForHackernews 1y ago
I feel like astronomy probably wins, the magnitudes are literally astronomical. The Perseus Cluster of galaxies is estimated[0] at something like 816,592 light years in diameter, so that's 10^21 meters, and on the other end 2008 TC3[1] is an asteroid 4.1m across. [0] https://www.universeguide.com/galaxy/perseuscluster https://www.universeguide.com/galaxy/perseuscluster [1] https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/2008_TC3 https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/2008_TC3

jsmith45 1y ago

> Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. That is largely true of academic research. A critical difference though is that you don't need big expensive hardware, or the like to follow along with large portions of the cutting edge CS research. There are some exceptions like cutting edge AI training work super expensive equipment or large cloud expenditures, but tons of other cutting edge CS research can run even on a fairly low-end laptop just fine. It is also true that plenty of software innovation is not even tied to CS style academic research. Experimenting with what sort of perf becomes possible via implementing a new kernel feature, can be very important research but isn't always super closely tied to academic CS research. Even the more hobbyist level cutting edge research for EE will have more costs, simply because components and PCBs are not exactly free, and you cannot just keep using the same boards for every project for several years like you can with a PC.