Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
theregister.comI 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 :) )
> 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.
CS degree holder here who had many CE/EE friends who switched from CE/EE to CS (Rutgers University).
One thing that used to blow my mind was the difference between logical circuit design in CS vs CE/EE.
E.g. if the task was "Build a circuit to do X logic using these components AND, OR, XOR etc"
- In CS, it was " Please use the common shapes for each component"
- In CE/EE, it was "Please use the EXACT part code for EACH and EVERY component you use!"
I remember thinking: "Isn't the key lesson to learn the logic flow design vs being able to lookup each and every party number?? Is the EE department trying on purpose to get rid of people?"
You could make the argument that forcing people to do the detail but boring work is a good filter for people who are REALLY serious about EE but I would argue that there have to be better ways to do that.
It's not 'looking up the part code' it's identifying components that have level and drive compatibility, fanout and timing requirements met, acceptable internal and parasitic inductance/capacitance/resistance. Checking if the nets are still theoretically a wire and not a transmission line, that ringing isn't degrading intended application, that the final output of the logic can actually drive the output of the logic diagram. Ensuring the lead time, footprint, cost, and supply chain are all compatible with your manufacturing process and planning.
If you just use theoretical perfect lossless and timeless components you completely miss and forget about a huge portion of EE which is not just designing the logic but actually implementing it in reality. It sounds like the EE program was setting people up to take the real world and imperfections into account while the CS version of the same course makes the valid assumption an electrical engineer has already provided the hardware platform so you can focus on the logical implementation.
>Isn't the key lesson to learn the logic flow design
In CS yes, in EE no. In EE that is only one of many key lessons, and without interlocking with other key lessons necessary to pick the real world components you end up with a circuit that either works purely out of luck, only in low-speed designs in noiseless environments, or not reliably.
Do individual logic gates even have part numbers anymore? In my EE labs in college we had FPGA’s.
Here's a 4 channel OR gate
https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/...
But my logic labs were also done on FPGAs.
"Kids these days" ;)
Yes, I think now it's mostly the 74AHC, 74ALVC, some 74ALS/74HC families (maybe others) Depends on the application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7400-series_integrated_circuit...
(using the fpga is fine, but I'd probably want to focus on the circuit itself ant not something like VHDL at first)
To be clear, this was a 200-level EE class that was, at the time, also part of the CS curriculum. One of my favorite classes, at least in retrospect.
The professor was simultaneously the founder of a company that made FPGA boards for EE students. They also made a little microcontroller board that was basically Arduino before Arduino; we used that in another class where we made robots and programmed them in AVR assembly.
They're still used sometimes for low level ancillary board functionality. Like, controlling reset lines going to SoC's, etc.
It's actually something that an EE may end up using in their career quite often if they're doing board design.
Though, we normally use CPLDs for that kind of stuff now, but if you can get away with a few logic chips, maybe it can simplify the design.
BTW these hardware glue logic is often done with e.g. TI LittleLogic series (i.e. 74LVC1/2Gxx) where you can use a tiny package for a tiny function otherwise not integrated into big chips.
> 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).
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.
Sounds like TUKE (or any other uni in Slovakia). I've studied Cybernetics/AI there from 2008. Your comment is eerily familiar to me, even though I don't think I attended a course with the professor.
Yes good? old TUKE. The guy's name is Jan Dudas. I can see on wiki he is prosecuted for denying holocaust... not that surprised to be honest, he was extreme
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?
Two things - I don't think it's as easy as you think it is. If you're good at it, it can feel comparatively easy, because when you're good at it and you enjoy it - it's fun. It's flow. You get lost in it and don't realize that you were just working flat out for 12 hours. But there are lots of things that are flow that are not easy.
I've been coding since I was 12, I have flow days where it's just an absolute pleasure. But on a bad day where I never hit flow, it's brutal. It's so hard to force myself to focus. And often when I come back the next day, the code I wrote is absolute shit and I spent a good chunk of the next day just debugging it.
So yeah, echoing those who say not easy.
The other piece of it, is that I actually think a lot of software engineers are massively underpaid. I was at my last job for 7 years. My total compensation, including benefits, options and what have you, was probably less than $1 million (over 7 years mind you). But I can draw a direct line between work I did and the enablement of millions of dollars of ARR. The company probably got anywhere from a 5x or a 10x return from their investment in me. I was paid a little under market, but not so far under market that I'm that different from the norm. I worked on some particularly high impact features in terms of return, so that line is particularly clear for me and not all of my peers there could say the same -- but a lot of them could, and even for the ones where it was less obvious it's still true. As software engineers at a software company, our work is ultimately essentially. The companies don't exist with out us.
As a class, given that, we're still underpaid ;)
Yeah. One thing. I found that if I spend even an hour in the morning on a passion project, before going to work, it really helps me focus on the soul-sucking office task. I don't know why, but that's the case for me.
I can take an online course and start a job in SE in 6 months. Good luck doing that for another engineering field.
Cmon... it is definitely easier. It's easier to start, it's easier to develop. With many other engineering courses you need a HUGE base of knowledge to even start being useful. With SE you can start being useful almost from the get go in comparison.
Not saying it's not hard to master, because i believe it is. But comparatively, it is definitely easier. But tbh who cares? I've been doing mechanical engineering for years, and it's hard as hell, and what do I get from that difficulty? A pat on the back to feel good about how smart i am? Getting home tired because my brain is fried of thinking about complex stuff? At this point i'd rather have gone the easy way and take SE. We only have one life. Easy = Good.
Software engineering is not easy but no profession comes close to software engineering when it comes to the sheer number of high-paying jobs it creates. I think much of the "alpha" comes from being truly cross-disciplinary - all jobs can perhaps eventually be abstracted away into code, including software engineering itself.
One thing that becomes apparent when working on important, safety critical stuff is that cross-disciplinary problems require a team, many of whom are not SWE, because there’s a ton of domain specific and tacit knowledge a SWE generally won’t know.
Writing software to control a rocket or surgery or, hell, just a commonplace boiler shouldn’t be approach cavalierly.
Edit: to the downvoter(s): what claim do you have issue with? Do you think safety critical software can be treated cavalierly? Or that SWEs can replace that domain knowledge without other domain experts?
I think a large part of it is that software engineering is barely _engineering_, in the traditional sense. And I do not mean that in a derogatory way, I have an EE degree, but write software all day long.
There are extremely few EE jobs available to be people with only undergrad degrees, and literally zero available to those without college degrees. This is a huge limit on the number of potential job applicants.
So you'd _think_ this would drive salaries up, but...
There's also just fewer companies doing EE work, where basically every company on earth does something with software at this point.
So there is a supply/demand component, but there just aren't that many places people who want to do EE can actually work. If you're top-of-the-field in EE/low-level CE, you will be paid handsomely.
> I also keep thinking, surely other industries will start paying more and treating folks better, so they can attract top talent, but nope!
In most industries, the money to pay more does not exist.
American companies dominate in software, and they are also highly profitable. Because immigrating to the US is difficult and because many people don't even want to move there, there is a shortage of software engineers in the US. Compensation is primarily driven by the domestic job market, where businesses compete for talent.
In other areas of technology, American companies are not so dominant. There is also more competition, driving the profits down. If an American business pays too much, it will get less talent for the same money. Their products will be worse and more expensive, and they will lose to their competitors.
As someone from Finland, I've been familiar with this dynamic since childhood. You hear about it in the news all the time. High wages are a grave threat to the economy, because they make our businesses less competitive.
If software use is generating 1% of that growth, it explains why it's so important - whatever is growing productivity the most is going to grow profit and thus ability to pay higher wages.
Especially as software can be applied in so many different applications to replace human workers and improve productivity, you can almost always make more money with more devs, hence the almost unceasing demand for devs. I think this is unlikely to stop, as things keep changing and demanding software be rewritten, or more applications found for software.
The market is absolutely not flooded with workers, if you've ever tried to hire people, and that is because it is not an easy job.
There's also a bit of a coordination effect: just as you can't replace Ronaldo with 1,000 cheaper footballers, you can't easily replace one good dev with lots of less good devs.
> As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job
I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer. Even at a company like Amazon, I think something like 20% engineers can barely code. Add to that industry expectation to work independently with little guidance and not that many people who will fit the bill.
There are lots of junior engineers, who with guidance and mentoring can actually flourish but your average "move fast" startup won't invest in them.
Genuine question as I'm surprised by the Amazon comment given their well known interview process, are there really programmers there who can't program very well?
Anytime I interview I get that impression, but when I work with teams of varying talent levels, there are a lot of people that can write good code it just takes a long time. In the long term these people are more useful than people who write ok code quickly, because they, slowly, reduce the amount of tech debt.
One problem is that it is extremely hard for management to tell good devs apart from bad devs. So that puts a huge randomness in as far as who is given authority and interesting projects and so on. Some of the best devs I have worked with, the best bosses I have worked for would not rehire. It is quite odd.
It is not always the case that slow-high-quality is better than fast-low-to-medium quality.
Managers tend to want people at both ends of the spectrum.
High quality is sometimes not worth paying for (in engineering time) if you don’t know if you’re building the right thing yet.
Anecdotally I would say that standards are going down for Amazon hires. Recently I've seen some average and below-average people move there. They also seem to be expanding their hiring locations geographically. IMO the reason for all this is because they have grown to such a size that they are exhausting the supply of talented developers in the world.
Yes, I've interviewed several AWS SWEs and was shocked at the lack of basic proficiency / competence. It's not just Amazon, though. This is everywhere.
Interviewing is it's own skill, and even then some complete head scratcher cases get through (who can't code and interview poorly).
> I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer.
Even these people make out pretty good. I know educated people who say they'd kill for $60k, and I've seen plenty of braindead programmers pulling that in.
They didn't say flooded with good workers...
Is it really an easy job? I know a lot of technically-minded people who struggle with programming, especially when thinking about the design of a larger system.
I see all these coding bootcamps that supposedly graduate people who can get right to work, but in my experience less than 20% of the bootcamp graduates I've interacted with were even remotely competent, or seemed like they could even be trained up to be competent. Many who I'd kept in passing contact with ended up going into engineering or product management within a year or so (with very entry-level roles).
That's not to say you need a 4-year CS (or related) degree to be a successful software developer, but in my experience it's more difficult than you seem to think.
I do think it's bonkers that software developers in the US (and especially in northern California) make orders of magnitude more money than software developers in western Europe, in places with more or less comparable costs of living.
I think EE/CE-related jobs are mostly harder than software-related jobs, but that doesn't make software easy.
Regardless, I think it's just a matter of supply and demand, plus where the easy VC money has been directed. Most companies these days do something with software. Most do not do anything with hardware beyond buying finished products. Add to that the fact that most EE/CE jobs have moved away from the US and Europe, so Western EE/CE types don't have much in the way of employment prospects compared to the number of people who graduate into the field.
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.
>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?"
I live in the USA. My highest degree is high school. I had some college, but was a complete waste.
I taught myself systems engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and some chemistry. Most of these, I taught myself with low amount of investment, pirated books, pirated software, and garbage salvage.
I now work for the federal govt as a contractor making $150k/yr. The classes I took never even remotely got me here. I got me here.
How did u go about teaching ur self electrical engineering?
Start basic. Learn the basics of electricity. Ham radio is great for this. A license to operate is $15 or so.
Start looking at what the basic parts are. Look up spec sheets. Figure them out and what they mean. You may know what you want to do, but finding the part is half this battle. Start figuring out what the landscape looks like. Last you want to do is design something with retired status and no NOS (new old stock).
Also start getting electronic books on the basic topics. Trawl through college book lists, and then hit up libgen.is or other library genesis sites and get the books. We're trying to do this assuming you have very little money to work with. So piracy it is. And in actuality, the fundamentals don't really change much.
Learn analog circuitry. Go study and make your own simple circuits like circuit benders and acoustic effects.
Then dig into digital stuff. Lots of things here. You'll want to learn boolean logic, circuit analysis, and the like. There's tons of electronics to fuck around with to l;earn how they work and not work.
Past analog and digital stuffs are sensors and actuators. Sensors pick up things from the world, and actuators are things that interact with the real world. Learning and building your own 3d printer can teach you a LOT about this area in a rather quick manner. And working with an open source firmware like Merlin or Klipper can teach you digital handlings, firmware (with no OS), timing, handling analog signals, cleaning up various data, extending the hardware/software, and generally teaching yourself by trial by fire.... and print a whole lot of cool things too. (Helps to also 3d print project boxes.)
Learn how to handle power applications. Obviously we're not talking the 10kV circuits... We're talking handling batteries of various chemistries, building charge/discharge circuitry, and safe handling of the more dangerous lithium chemistries so they dont do a boeing or tesla on you. If you mess with lithiums, invest in 2 big metal buckets each half-full with sand. You'll thank me.
Get good with an IDE, like KiCAD. You'll eventually start building your own boards and parts and add them as usable things in other designs. If you get a job in industry, you'll likely use Altium. Pirate it if you can to learn it. Use the autorouter, and then do it by hand, and realize how terrible the autorouter is. Board design is just as much as an art as it is hard science. I've also heard for calculating EM prop to use something like http://openems.de/start/index.php but most tools in this realm are stupid expensive. Again, find and pirate.
Pick up some cheaper instrumentation. You'll want a good bench power supply, good 2 channel oscilloscope at 50MHz or better, signal generator, good soldering iron, good hot air rework station, fluxes, solders, solder braid, solder sucker, inspection microscope, logic analyzer, and more narrower hardware as your studies and need arise.
I also learned reverse engineering, at multiple levels. There's a lot of stuff that this can be used to attack your hardware that protects itself from, well, you. Some of the attacks are pretty simple, and others are crazy complex. Again, you might get really lucky. This usually inst taught in schools 'proper'. "Hacker skills" are usually frowned upon by the academics.
If you;re adventurous, you can also get into RF. Just be aware, this will sink your money like nothing else. A single decent SDR can easily cost you $700... And you still need a whole slew of equipment to get it to work. You can start out pretty cheaply, with 2 hackRF clones, 2 tcxo's, 2 RatLSnake antenna kits, and start learning from there. There's a lot to learn from a whole lot of fields, but even small advances are definitely noteworthy, and easily could get you published.
I know this misses quite a lot in the EE domain. However you can easily fill in the blanks as your need arises. There's a bit of analytics and mathematics I didn't directly discuss. You'll need to learn calculus. FFTs are definitely super importent and "integral" (haha) to anything regarding signals and information. https://catalog.purdue.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=7&poid... has a general listing of what their EE classes look like. You can hit wikipedia and youtube for those topics. There's LOTS of really great videos that explain the math and science online. Use those resources.
(I saved this for last, but I would also ask that you consider working on your English and grammar. Some of the worst spelling I've seen has been done by engineers. Try not to continue that trend. Lay-people and managerial/leadership types will take you more seriously.... But engineers... I don't think they'd notice :D )
>So how is that fair again?
Kid making iOS apps provides value to more people with almost no cost compared to EE working on his niche product and involving a bunch of other high cost components and capital investment to get to market.
I mean above average of everything you mentioned.
Don't have a hard data to reference, it's just my personal, anecdotal observation.
>I mean above average of everything you mentioned.
Almost 50% of the people on the planet are technically above average. Not exactly a high bar to clear for something so well paid.
And it's not what I mentioned. I was talking about the original traits you mentioned. Most professions need those traits as well, web devs aren't that intellectually special as you might think, at least in Europe where plenty have access to free upper education.
I added advanced math, signal processing and control systems theory to show you the bar that EEs have, that many web devs couldn't clear as most web dev are just plumbing various flavor-of-the-month languages, frameworks and microservices together to parse a shitty JSON in AWS. Stuff that can be learned at home in a few months without studying engineering in University.
And I'm saying this with first hand experience, as an EE turned cloud dev. Web dev is basically overpaid when you look at how easy the bar is and how much money you make vs EE and other skilled careers that are the other way around in comparison. This goes double for my mechanical engineering friends who had to pass super difficult exams in university in terms of difficult math, CFD, structural analysis and simulations, all requiring very complex and domain specific knowledge only to get paid less than a Java dev. Do you think they are not above average?
> SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.
I don't buy this. I think developers are highly paid because so many jobs are subsidized by VC speculation.
It's easy to get a software job working on a BS product that solves no real problems and eventually disappears. But the money you get paid is real enough in your bank account.
As long as VCs are willing to throw money at any random BS SaaS company that crops up, with the expectation that the losers are going to be outweighed by some unicorn, this will remain the case.
If/when the stock market corrects this free ride is going to be over.
(Disclaimer: I'm a developer, but I no longer work at a tech company)
This is an interesting take. I wonder how much the last 20 years of relatively cheap capital contributed to this. A lot of VC money seems to already have dried up as interest rates start to rise.
If you look at the explosion in salaries it's mostly been the last decade, which is coincidentally the decade of near 0 interest rates and capital chasing even more tenuous returns (ie the influx of money into VC funds which went into startups)
In theory, shouldn’t the cheap capital also caused explosion in salaries outside of tech? That didn’t seem to happen over the same time horizon
Well a lot of that capital went into VC funds, and not many VCs are funding things outside of tech.
I think the simplified answer is that software scales really well. So in theory, if I pay one developer really well I can then sell whatever that developer produces a lot of times for virtually no extra cost (and no shipping/logistics). Embedded devices/hardware etc. don't scale nearly that well.
I realize this is a widespread explanation, but it doesn't completely make sense that software is a magic money faucet. The reason is that there's still only so much money that can be spent on software, and at some point the customers run out. I'm not saying it's a zero sum game, but it's not an infinite sum game. Somewhere in between.
The greatest software driven economy in the world grows at an average rate of roughly 2% per year. All of this software, and we're living barely above subsistence. What it suggests to me is that for every company that has turned a software program into a magic money faucet, there are as many if not more who will spend money on software and not make a dime. There will also be as many companies that bury themselves in software costs and wreck themselves.
Software is clearly empowering us. I use Python instead of doing calculations by hand. But it's also draining us. Talk to virtually any office worker, even programmers, and they will complain about the software that they have to deal with, basically stealing their attention and productivity.
Where are the customers' yachts?
A better answer is that the money has to be coming from somewhere other than merely customers, and I think the answer is: Investors.
What hardware doesn't have is investors going gaa-gaa to spend their money on anything that looks like a hardware project.
Once you make a software, you can copy it a billion times for very very cheap. A single programmer can impact millions of people.
An electric engineer is working in physical systems and you can't copy physical systems that cheaply. Unless you are in RnD, you can't have the level of impact a junior software engineer can have.
A single piece of software can have an unlimited number of paying or ad-supported customers. Hardware usually can’t do that, and has significantly higher costs (manufacturing) per customer. Thus software engineers generally can generate significantly more profit than hardware engineers.
I see this from the business side. The reason is that growth continues to outpace supply. Software and technology are high growth industries and there aren't enough experienced workers to fill all the new positions opening.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think it's a bit tougher to move from SE to EE. I mean do they even hire experienced non-low level SE?
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.
I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college math gets paid almost nothing compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I've been on floors where multi-million dollar pieces of equipment are used to produce parts with obscene levels of precision being used by expert machinists making 80k a year who risk their own personal safety making these parts.
I have EE friends with master degrees who design PCBs that are printed millions of times that struggle to afford rent.
It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
>It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
Interest rate intervention (making them lower than equilibrium) changed the DCF valuation that is the fundamental way of evaluating business (i.e. people working together on large endeavors) to one where promising massive returns in the future(20+ years) made low returns in the near term (x<20 years) acceptable. Investment dollars chased growth and VC and PE grew. Meanwhile, in order to compete for capital, all businesses focused on delivering value now had to adjust their income statements (try to grow revenue, or more likely cut expenses) as hard as possible to compete with businesses that aren't delivering on much now but seem like they will change everything in the future.
Google "DCF Valuation" and model out 100 years in excel. Add a row that divides the PV of each year by the NPV so you can see the % it contributes to the NPV. Then setup a bar chart so you can visually get a vibe for the integral of different time periods. Once that is all setup, try a real simple assumption: 0 growth for CF and .5% for your Risk Free Rate. Then try it at 5%.
If the Federal Reserve sticks to its guns and gets rates up, and keeps them there, it will be unsurprising to see "hard" engineering jobs be valuable again, while all the CSS people suddenly can't find two pennies to rub together.
Same thing could be said in 2007.
All of the goldbug quantity-theory-of-money folks were screaming about Greenspan holding rates artifically low for so long -- both before the tech bubble in 2001 and up until they started to delicately raise rates after 2003.
Once the real crash starts to unfold it may get bad for awhile, but once the Billionaires start getting worried about it they'll hit the monetary gas pedal again. SWEs will mostly weather the storm, and even if it gets bad enough that a lot of them lose their jobs (particularly at the margins), it'll still all come back.
Which is to stay that the Fed will definitely not stick to their guns once something significant pops.
(And your analysis kind of shows that there will be significant pain because everything has been built up around the interest rate environment that we've had post-2009 and trying to create any kind of structural change there will definitely cause a crash -- And the Fed works for the Billionaires so once they start to feel the pain then policy will reverse)
Greenspan is interesting to me because although he seems to have started this whole low-interest paradigm, he was once an ardent supporter of a gold standard in 1967. It's a short paper, worth looking up.
So I wonder, how did he go from "fiat schemes exist only as a means for welfare statists to infringe on property rights" to being in charge of interest rate intervention?
>significant pain because everything has been built up around the interest rate environment that we've had post-2009
Permanent money is always in disequilibrium. It doesn't build up anything. It is always broken which forces constant interventions to reach equilibrium.
What do you mean by 'permanent money'?
> If the Federal Reserve sticks to its guns and gets rates up, and keeps them there, it will be unsurprising to see "hard" engineering jobs be valuable again, while all the CSS people suddenly can't find two pennies to rub together.
I was under the impression that "hard" engineering isn't as financially attractive to investors due to the long payoff period as compared to web software. In that case, won't high interest rates actually hurt "hard" engineering due to a greater discount being applied to future cashflows?
Precisely; electrical engineering as a field requires enormous amounts of capital. Software development also requires capital, but not nearly as much, and the returns are much higher.
The iPhone had some pretty huge returns for Apple. Maybe "most" EE doesn't have huge returns, but that's also true of most software.
I’ve been wondering if SWE pay rates have been artificially high for a while due to easy lending - it will be interesting to see if your prediction comes true. Probably a lot of SW companies out there right now are dependent on discretionary income which puts them at risk in a tough market.
SWE salaries are also very high because right now it's cheap as hell to run a software company leading to huge returns. Overheads are miniscule. The salaries can take a larger slice of the pie.
A lot of people in the comments are talking about how EE work is comparatively much harder. But that's irrelevant. SWEs simply make businesses more money.
But a large number of software businesses are not making any money at all.
Which goes back to this subthread’s root post about investors focusing on companies “promising massive returns in the future.”
Ironically, the 6 hour Fundamentals of Engineering test that I took after earning my EE degree had a section on Discounted Cash Flow. It is funny that you are using it now to explain why taking that has given me no utility so far.
A locked-in user has a long (or very long) economic lifecycle, whereas a widget has a short lifecycle.
"Software engineering" is probably subsidized by borrowed money aimed at growing locked-in userbases and therefore valuations.
>Interest rate intervention (making them lower than equilibrium) changed the DCF valuation that is the fundamental way of evaluating business
According to the Friedman rule the optimal interest rate is 0%.
I'll add that to my long list of stuff he didn't understand cause he was a dummy.
This really seems like a stretch.
I can maybe see how low interest rates could maybe increase software salaries. But I can't see anyway that would depress EE salaries.
Not enough hardware startups compared to purely software startups. EE as an industry is not benefiting from low interest rates to the same stratospheric extent as SW has, thus the individual engineers aren’t either.
If you think that’s bad, just wait until you see what salaries look like for postdocs in theoretical physics.
The economy does not reward people for how smart they are, how impressive their credentials are, or how hard their skills were to learn. It rewards people who solve problems. Preferably problems that other rich people have. Many, many, many more rich people have website problems than PCB circuit board problems. Ergo those that can solve website problems make more money.
Doing something difficult can be a way to make a lot of money, because it restricts supply and is a competitive moat. But low supply is a winning recipe when coupled with high demand. The supply of string theorists is low, but so is the demand.
If you’re going to do something difficult make sure that it’s something that lots of rich people need. For example being a hedge fund quant is a really well paying job because it’s both difficult, and highly in demand because every rich person on the planet wants higher returns on their portfolio.
Nit: Printed Circuit Board circuit board
Was going to post almost the exact same thing. Income is, sadly, an exchange of assets and services, not a reward for being good at a thing.
The most you can get paid is the amount your company thinks it would cost to replace you. The difficulty of your job has absolutely nothing to do with how much you’re paid, other than maybe reducing labor supply a bit. But there are tons of smart people, if the opportunities exist people will come. Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Their options mean that if a company doesn’t want to pay much they’ll work somewhere else.
Expert machinists using fancy equipment in a factory don’t really have the same ability to just go to a competitor, so they can’t negotiate a raise.
> Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work.
Not sure this is reality; or that a meritocracy for webdevs exists.
In recent years, it seems the quality of big "prestige brand" websites (not exactly big tech) is declining, to the point of being unusable on mobile browsers or throttled connections. Not because of technical trade-offs, but reliance on frameworks to achieve "demoable effects" instead of real world features or usability.
We're more than fifteen years into "ajax" and today's kids simply can't do it without burning 10x the cpu cycles and bandwidth. To me it seems there is a decoupling between the utility of webdevs and their pay, and some sort of market failure is occurring.
I think this is analogous to and is happening for similar reasons as the airline customer experience gradually went from being very "classy" to increasingly "cheap" all at the same time as the market for air travel expanded tremendously.
>Expert machinists using fancy equipment in a factory don’t really have the same ability to just go to a competitor, so they can’t negotiate a raise.
Machinists own their own tools, in general... and I knew a CNC machinist who quit, went somewhere else, and came back to the shop I was working in over the course of a few months... they aren't easy to replace, even in a job shop. The equipment is a sunk cost, and if you don't have someone who knows how to use it, you're wasting money while it's idle.
The machinist actually probably can move around relatively easily (and a good machinist isn't much cheaper than an engineer, if at all). The engineers are going to be both more specialized and less in-demand. They work at a higher level where less people are needed, and due to specialization, can often be contracted out.
I left embedded for web in 2014 and I doubled my salary overnight. My experience from embedded translated to an ability to troubleshoot problems that baffled others and has led to a lot of personal career growth that I suspect I wouldn't have otherwise seen. Wish it wasn't like this, because I quite miss what I was doing in that previous life, but it is what it is.
I have an EE degree and was in embedded for a few years. I kept getting hired for that one problem, then was no longer needed. All the jobs I could find were short term contract work or "Thanks for fixing that, now we don't need you" situations. I still get emails about short term, in office work in the Midwest. I enjoyed the work but I couldn't find stable employment. Embedded worked out to be a good transition to software and then web development though.
I'm considering the same. Out of curiosity, did you jump into front end or back end dev?
Primarily backend... But I had a 2 year stint as a data engineering lead and then led a ReactJS SPA product development team for 18 months. I'm back to the backend now, though, and I'm very happy with it.
As someone in software with an EE background, I think it's simple. There's far more demand for software people compared to the available supply, so pay rates are high. Which job is "harder" has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I noticed the trend about 20 years ago when I decided that I'd never again have a job that was mostly hardware design. The money's in software.
The demand is there. After all, somebody has to be doing the design work for the electronic products out there. In a globalized economy with outsourced production most of the EE work goes to SEA with cheaper labor.
There is simply much more software work to be done than hardware work. Pretty much every company running a real business has some software presence on their staff, whereas the presence of people with an EE background is quite rare by comparison.
Hardware design work is hard, but you usually only have to do it once for any given component or any given product. Most of the parts I use were already well-established in their markets over 10 years ago. (Although whether they'll still be around 10 years from now -- or 1 year for that matter -- is a very different question.)
Conversely, a web developer's work is never done. There is always another web site to build. Failing that, someone always wants to do another gratuitous reskin of an existing site, just to keep their users from growing complacent.
I went from chemical engineering into data science, and I wonder this constantly. Everything about chemical engineering was much more difficult (at least what you would be expected to do in a typical job; exceptions apply). I really miss the hard sciences, but I also really do not want to take a 4x pay cut.
Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case.
There aren’t any people over the age of like 35 who started their career in data science. Careers are sticky, people don’t like switching once they’re in one. They’re being trained quickly and I think you’re right, the salary used to be higher than a normal software dev but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
More like no one hires you into a new career after 35. I’m 34 now and it was hell getting into software engineering from chemical engineering even with good project experience and acing leetcode.
I switched from full stack to ML at 38. I was preparing for a few years by doing courses, personal projects and following new papers as they come up. When I got hired there was no issue with the fact that I was self trained - they have been interviewing for 6 months and failing every candidate by then.
Soon after I got hired I was myself part of the interviewing committee and saw the hiring situation first hand - most candidates can't program their way out of a shoe or explain how the most commonly used neural net layers work. I mean, I had one who couldn't open a TXT file in 30 minutes, the data file he was supposed to use in the problem.
Same, I miss Cheme and actually doing work on physical systems. But applied DS is more lucrative and so much more flexible in work location. DS is way easier although the stats and programming does throw many people off
> Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case.
I would question my assumptions before disputing the function of supply and demand curves.
There is a severe oversupply of engineering graduates in the US, that's all there is to it. All hardware engineering jobs have been colocated with the actual manufacturing facilities they are designing for – i.e., Asia-Pacific. Even the reduced number of graduates is too many, because the demand is virtually zero. People are not dying and retiring as fast as the industry itself is.
Because real engineers become hyper-specialists and get trapped.
My one my high school classmates was a mechanical engineer who was one of the top guys for some semiconductor process that failed to scale and got abandoned. Got laid off and was unemployable. He sold herballife to go back to school and is a physical therapist now.
It happens in software too. Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and government who have legacy mainframe or middleware skills.
This doesn’t ring true to me, especially for an ME which is one of the broadest disciplines. I know one who had a BS and has worked in construction on building automation and energy systems, automotive robotics, healthcare as a process engineer, aerospace software, and finally as a data scientist.
Some people struggle with reinvention. I tend to branch out every 4-5 years. I think this person thought he had the one true career and had difficulty with reality.
Our high school cohort was just old enough to see the end of the “dinosaur” tech company era. This guy was a few years older than me (his younger brother was my age), I think he thought he was retiring with a gold watch or whatever.
It seems quaint now, but it was a thing. My dad’s friend was a GE lifer, they moved around the world like they were in the army to the next posting.
Today, we’re all more paranoid and mercenary, even govenrment workers jump ship.
It's probably true but the ME in question chose to go a different route probably because they deep down did not like the job. No doubt they could have retooled their skillset and kept reapplying at various places or move elsewhere if they were inclined.
I think it's a mindset that people "get" trapped. I know many engineers who are trapped, but it was their own doing, they never tried to avoid the trap and have never worked hard to get out from it. It's a mindset, it's easy to fall into. You get paid well enough, things are stable, you become an expert within a company or industry, and you feel valued when your expertise is found to be important. If you don't work to get yourself out of that trap, to expand your own value and knowledge, then you get stuck both in a job and in a salary range. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes it's a horrible experience, it all depends on what the person is striving for.
I've worked with many people who were realistically less than 5 years from retirement, most of them were "trapped" but this was often by design. They knew they could ride out the next 5 years getting paid pretty well, having low stress, and the stability of this ensured that they'd hit their retirement financial numbers. Sometimes younger engineers fall into this trap, and that's when it's sad, often they don't even realize it and no one tells them.
Funny, I was duped once into coming to a Herbalife-similar Multi-Level-Marketing introduction meeting by a university colleague (we both did EE). He called some other people from our class saying it was a "business opportunity". The constant pestering for us to buy stuff burned him some bridges. He obviously couldn't adapt to new technologies and realities.
In Latin America there's also a meme that lots of engineers have become Uber drivers. I have definitely chatted with more than a handful that were engineers. All of them said they hated programming classes too much during university, so they won't try to change to SE now, or to anything really.
I graduated as EE but immediately became SE. Ironically I also doubt that I could go back into being an EE now, so I'm also a bit "trapped".
> Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and government who have legacy mainframe or middleware skills.
Well, a lot of people warn of those, but you were one of the naive people who believed throwing your career on rusty crap was a way of "never ending unemployed" or you thought banks for some reason were the best technological choice option then I guess those are the consequences of your actions (not to mention the mental toll)
My first software engineering job Was creating an internal, CRUD app for a utility company. It allowed tasks to be efficiently given to installers based on their locations.
It was a really basic CRUD app, but it increased efficiency dramatically. Insane amounts of value were created.
The repairers were experienced professionals. Some had advanced degrees in EE. But that silly little CRUD app made them exponentially more productive.
They could have been heart surgeons, astronauts, or anything really.
> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
ZIRP, and the VC ecosystem, FAANG stock bubble, EBITDA-creative accounted IPOs, etc. that grew up around it, are a helluva an alphabet soup:
> why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company.
> Then, for the companies that attracted the money had to spend it. Salaries inflate. Cultures change. Consumers are subsidized. Sure, some technology is created, but overall, nothing operates as it would without that thirsty capital. It changes the economics for competitors that do not welcome in the dollars.
> compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while.
I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that being said...
Finally someone said it!
Ok, I understand that we’re in some anal-retentive age as humans, where we’re discovering our new digital medium and whatnot, but enough with the fixation on small shiny digital bullshit - it’s robbing us of real depth and wonder.
And if it’s reached to the point where real engineering is depreciated, I wonder what carcasses lie ravaged in fields no one looks at until it’s too late.
> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
I think it’s understandable if you explain it using the same reason that mushrooms are clearly the better drug, but cocaine is the more popular one (our dopamine wiring? idk), criss-crossed with an actively pushed economic bubble that’s high on the rise, and will be for a long while.
Software development is completely abstract and is one of the most difficult things humans do. An average codebase can easily hold millions of lines of code with millions more hidden in libraries that all have to work together. The complexity is incredible really.
This post in no way diminishes the complexity of the hard sciences.
Not sure that bubble is long for this world. Scarcity called, it said "remember me? Ive been on vacation to everywhere but the west, now I'm back!".
What makes shrooms better than coke? Never tried either one, probably not stable enough to risk it, so curious what your valuation criteria are.
not the person you're responding to, but I suspect it would be due to life outcomes of both - mushrooms have been shown to help people resolve past trauma and change their habits for the better, whereas cocaine tends to be habit forming and cokeheads are generally pretty unhappy people.
Yep that’s pretty much what I meant, plus that psychedelics in general have wider dimensions while cocaine is sort of a dumb drug.
Not judging, just saying.
Supply & Demand (aka Market Economics) dictates pay rate.
Not difficulty, danger, or years spent studying challenging topics.
Changing a color... that's basic html/css-- that's the lowest pay rung of front end developers, which is the lowest paid occupational field within the occupation of full stack web app engineers. So, you're grossly exaggerating. People who just change colors of a web site might make $15-20/hr in the US.
The folks making $150-$200k+ have skills in frontend development, serverside development, databases, plus often things like data engineering or setting up/maintaining cloud computing infrastructure. From there, add in specialty Security knowledge or Machine Learning or highly efficient massively global scale+speed programs, and you'll begin to understand how they're making $400k-$600k+
For example: Go have a look at kubernetes (combined with Docker, Helm, and a Cloud provider + all the various underlying technologies which involve an OS and 2+ programming languages and/or frameworks) and tell me how difficult it is compared to machining + CNCing + welding a metal part. Not to knock machinists-- I've worked on metal machines and I understand why master mechanics make $100k/year.
But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology.
I've met precious few devs of any flavor who understand databases. Not just "how do I write SQL," but actually understand what the query optimizer is doing, minor but infuriating differences between DB flavors, and critically, troubleshooting them.
ORMs and cloud DB providers have enabled people to charge ahead without understanding the consequences of their actions, and when latency starts climbing, just scale vertically!
Re: Kubernetes, again, managed services and package providers like Helm have made it easy for anyone to spin up a K8s cluster and even successfully run things on it, without having the underlying ability to fix or maintain it when things go awry.
> and tell me how difficult it is compared to machining + CNCing + welding a metal part. Not to knock machinists-- I've worked on metal machines and I understand why master mechanics make $100k/year.
> But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology.
I can simplify k8s down to "this is just a bunch of containers that run small pieces of software that talk to each other and autoscale up and down as you tell it to", and naturally that doesn't scratch the surface of what's going on.
In 4+ DoF metal manufacture, there's so many things to keep mind of. Basically, those people are metallurgical-based materials scientists. They'd be in charge of helping choose the materials for the application, billet sizes from the ingot factories, QA at all levels, impurity calculations from the ingots, grain structure sizes, can even be radioactivity measurements.
And then there's the actual machining process. If you've ever used a 6DoF mill, its nowhere near idiot-proof. And one improperly tightened part = damaged 6DoF head. That's a sad day indeed. And you're not done after the part completes. There's also post-processing all the way on up.
And I didn't even discuss metrology - or the study of measurements. Measuring what you're doing is the difference between a passed part and a failed part. And your failures may be caught upstream. And depending on some parts, you may also be doing xray spectroscopy to determine voids and other subsurface defects with the machining type you used.
You also mentioned welding. That's its own massive area of tons of failure modes, not all which also can be seen by the naked eye. Or, imagine doing underwater welding in a water tower that sprung a leak because someone shot at it. You're going up with 200 lbs of equipment, including SCUBA gear and thermite or a thermic lance.
To be honest, I have it easy. I work remote as systems engineer. I thought about switching to EE if the economy cools. But the "blue collar" (Read: tremendously skilled roles) are looked down on because they mess with physical stuffs. And the EE's do physical but are considered white collar, so they're "more acceptable". But I try to see them as the fellow professionals they truly are. The end of the day, they can hold their stuff and go "I made this". I certainly can't hold up an EC2 and say the same. Doesnt have the same feel.
I guess this has something to do with a lot of manufacturing having moved to Asia. Here in Germany it is flipped arround. As a software developer in Berlin I can only dream about the salaries I could get as mechanical / electrical engineer in South Germany at one of the big car manufacturers.
Guess it’s all about supply and demand since Germany is the Mecca for Process Controls and Automation.
There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software
> There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software
Not "in North America". On the coasts, in attractive big cities, sure. The midwest is still full of manufacturing though, and they still hire engineers (but they're going to make $100,000+, not $300,000+ like software devs in CA).
That Manufacturing is more light and heavy industries though? Like Automotive and the like?
When I mean hardware I mean Electronics and PCB - like Apple or Internet Connected Electronics.
There are lots and lots of electronics in automobiles, industrial machinery, and robots. They need engineers of all kinds to design products, processes, equipment, etc.
Perhaps those manufacturing jobs could pay closer to software if the employers were willing to give more equity.
Software is a pure ideas business.
You'd be surprised how many people have, sell, and get venture capital for ideas without a huge upfront spend attached just to try something out.
Software is the scratch tickets of "engineering."
Nice, haven't seen "engineering" elitism since university. Software is the nervous system of a business. Everything from accounting, to payroll, to inventory tracking, to sales, to marketing, to communications, is achieved in today's world by interfacing with dozens if not hundreds of software programs and systems. Impossible to achieve with hardware alone obviously, you need operating systems, you need data centers, need custom dashboards and BI, you need ACH/SWIFT routing interfaces to make payments go through, you need file management, you need chat software to communicate with employees and customers, you need software nearly every step of the way. It's complex as hell. And the complexity of making all those systems work together just compounds that complexity.
As a software engineer, software "engineering" is a joke, at least in the sense we apply that term to other disciplines of engineering. It's not like all that complexity you mentioned is understood. It's worked around, and then the workaround is taken for granted and exists in perpetuity because nobody can discern why it was done in the first place. Watching a mechanical or electrical engineer be able to predict the performance of a design in a hypothetical scenario and then have that prediction largely reflect reality in later testing is pretty enlightening. These types of things generally don't happen in non-trivial software systems largely because software "engineers" don't really care. Formal methods for verifying correctness is something we've decided isn't worth it. Formally verified operating systems like seL4, and languages that lend themselves to formal verification like Ada/SPARK, are nothing more than oddities for most software engineers; the only places that bother with this are hard engineering firms that are trying to live up to do-or-die performance guarantees.
Additionally, the minimum knowledge required to be a "good" software engineer is significantly lower than the amount required to be a "good" electrical engineer. You are not pushing any limits without an expansive understanding of mathematics, multiple opportunities to work on some very expensive shit, and an employer that's actually pushing something forward. Getting a VLSI/radio electronics/DSP/etc. engineer online is a process that takes years before that engineer doesn't need constant input to keep them from shitting the bed. Unless you're so passionate about it that you can't possibly bring yourself to do anything else, you would have to be insane to go through the amount of learning required so you can pull a salary that will only slightly top an entry-level software development job.
None of this is to say that software development isn't valuable, or that the people that are doing aren't skilled, but as an industry, we don't hold ourselves to anywhere near the standard that other disciplines do, and there's not much to gain other than saving face by not admitting it.
You comment a lot about calculating performance, but this is not engineering.
Engineering is about suiting the needs to the means. In the realm of widely-used webapps, the need is 1. speed to market, 2. features and 3. maybe stability against errors 4. if successful, scalability.
And our engineering is perfectly successful for that. We are able to output features after features, we’ve factorized the boilerplate, and we publish our apps before they’re even ready.
Scalability predictions from a software developer need to be taken with a grain of salt. There is no universal law determining it. The prediction is sound up until it runs into somebody else's fuckup, at which point it becomes worthless.
The idea that most software engineers can make any real guarantees about the correctness of their programs is laughable. At least once a month we hear about a massive new vulnerability that proves that that just isn't true. To not accept it is hubris.
It's not about calculating performance. It's about proving that something fundamentally fits in with everything we know about the world. Software developers that approach their work with this mindset are exceedingly rare, and their work is largely academic.
They are discussing the difference between engineers that have to toil with the rules of the universe, and engineers who have to toil with rules that they make themselves.
Software does exactly what you tell it. Hardware does what you tell it, but it always listens to mother nature first.
Disagree. The impression I've got when talking to friends in traditional engineering is that the scope of a software role is larger (More vertically integrated, more expectations) and we have better processes (E.g. code review, deployment pipeline, monitoring, etc).
Cannot speak for EE, but I'm friends with people who do ChemE, MechE, Civil and mechatronics.
Most of that is software glue, and not particularly challenging. It's necessary to run a modern company to have this kind of glue to connect systems together, but at the same time EE and ChemE are much more challenging.
Consider that the space shuttle was considered one of the most complex projects in history with around 1 million parts. 1 million loc projects are common, a large tech company like google likely has billions of loc.
Putting all of this together sensibly is hard.
A line of code isn't really equivalent to a physical part of a space shuttle.
Why not? A simple one line change recently brought down CloudFlare. And least you think that's not important, a one line change to code brought down most of AT&T's phone network in 1990 (think 911).
Compare the amount of effort that goes into both design and production of a physical part and a line of code.
A single physical part generally has many, many inputs and outputs (expressed as its physical contact surfaces, tolerances, forces and stresses of all possible kinds from all directions they are supposed to withstand, etc., all with the added dimension of time) compared to a line of code or even a function. You cannot design a 'functionally pure' part, or design a part that creates itself for every discrete 'use'. And unlike a line of code, it can't be quickly replaced so you must get it right. And if you get it wrong, people may die in this particular example. Etc.
And that's before we become concerned with actual production of that part, whereas all you need for to write a line of code is a text editor or pen and paper.
Software has analogous constraints, with regards to scale, performance, latency, design, etc. Everyone thinks that a line of code can be quickly replaced. On a small program, this is true. But at scale, this is not true at all and anyone that's worked on a multi-million line application knows this. You cannot have every line of a complex system in your head at once. You cannot instantly solve for all of the interconnecting pieces in your mind at once. It takes a team of software engineers of various disciplines to consider the tradeoffs of any change to these complex systems. In particular when they are live and supporting millions to billions of users. And because software has more of an organic quality than traditional hardware, managing hundreds or thousands of changes that need to go into the system over the course of a month or quarter is non-trivial. People that think software is trivial are the same ones that fall for the idea that anything can be quickly refactored and redesigned and nothing will break and everything will go smoothly. It's just not true.
Most human beings can handle, at most, 5 to 9 variables in their head at once. Software systems grow to immense complexity of thousands to millions of variables, with various runtimes, databases, caching layers, frameworks, libraries, coding styles accrued over multiple decades in some cases, data aggregation pipelines, dozens to hundreds of APIs with their own unique interfaces, etc. It is a constant battle against entropy, which happens inevitably in such systems.
Meanwhile, there isn't a single modern "real engineer" who doesn't get their daily work done thanks to multiple software programs supporting their own productivity so much that they can replace what used to be teams of dozens to hundreds of assistants, techs, engineers, and other various human support systems. They draw lines on AutoCAD that automatically compute moments of inertia, shaft calcs, bill of materials, etc. Then they take that file output and zap it over Slack instantly to their colleague who works from home hundreds of miles away to get their feedback on it. Behind all of that is a team of software engineers and product devs that not only has to understand the constraints of their own technical systems, but the technical needs of their engineering clientele.
I'm not arguing EE is better than SE or otherwise. My point is specifically that EE has both more complexity and stricter constraints, and both unavoidable due to the nature of it being mechanical as opposed to ideal. Yes, in SE you also have complexity, but you can abstract it away with many tricks like isolating side effects and writing pure functions that are easy to reason, re-running from clean slate at will at little cost or even running your code anew at every request, letting things fail completely and be sure it's cleaned up reliably, etc. In EE, you have enormous implicit state that you can't ignore, the global of time and everything else all at once you must juggle.
Single line of code is single line of code. Physical part might have multiple lines of code defining it. Let's take something relatively simple like bracket. Now gather together all the dimensions, angles, hole dimensions, material specifications of it and treat all of those as their individual lines of code.
Profit margin. It's all profit margin. Software is reliably >25%, where physical manufacturing is in the single digits.
But the question is why? Shouldn’t there be the same race to single digit margins in software as well?
The rate of innovation in software is not constrained by capital or physics (and to a lesser extent regulation) to the extent it is in other engineering disciplines, which overweights the importance of individual skill and execution in outcomes. Software isn't an intrinsically high-margin business, but the cost of creating and operating in new high-margin business frontiers is uniquely low, allowing individuals to leave the rapidly commoditizing part of the software business in the rear-view mirror.
The margins would be single-digits if the pace of change and innovation possible was like other engineering disciplines. The business of software engineering evolves at an incredible rate that would be unimaginable in the engineering discipline I went to school for.
The distribution cost of selling software is far lower than selling a physical product. For example, to manufacture and sell cars, you currently have to worry about supply chain considerations and chip shortages. You don't need to worry about this to sell software to an interested purchaser.
There will be, but right now software is eating the world (and establishing entire new markets) faster than developer talent enters the market. So prices for developers go up. Eventually this will end, either by the demand curve slowing down, or developer supply meeting demand. Whether it happens within the next 5 or 10, or even 20 years, who knows.
This saturation of demand for software talent has been predicted for literally decades. In 1992, Ed Yourdon published “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” only to reverse himself four years later with the publication of “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
If anything, the rate at which capable software professionals can create value has dramatically increased over time. Software is not a zero sum game, cumulative advances make it possible to solve an expanding frontier of problems with increasingly effective and efficient solutions.
Frontier is a good term because just as the US frontier age eventually ended, the software frontier expansion is also eventually going to stop.
I don’t mean frontier as in “the American Western Frontier.” I meant frontier as in, “the frontiers of human knowledge.” It’s not clear to me that the latter is limited in the way that the former is.
Creation of knowledge products both facilitates the further production of new knowledge products and expands the scope of new knowledge products which can be created. This process is like a chain reaction where the potential energy unleashed may ultimately exceed any practical scale modern economics has meaningfully considered.
Software costs almost nothing to deploy, even on a global scale, versus its potential value delivered; and it can be created or improved with almost no additional consumption of resources vs (the programmer) simply existing.
Marginal cost of an additional user is zero. And instant global distribution with the internet.
And then there’s the freemium B2B SaaS business model (Slack, Notion) that is just insanely lucrative…
The marginal cost of software is basically zero. The marginal cost of hardware is high.
A different answer than everyone else so far: Leverage.
Super-simple example: a single developer focused just on internal tools for a 10 person company.
Let's say that this company has a full plate, everyone is busy 100% of the time. They can't really bring on new clients. They could hire a new person to do some of the work, but let's say that that new person will cost almost as much as a new client would bring in. Their margins are very tight, they wouldn't be able to expand fast at all, and losing a client would be very perilous.
(This is how a lot of small companies work. People getting laid off because a client went away is something I've seen firsthand.)
Let's say over the course of a year an engineer could build out enough basic, CRUD-app-style automation to free up 30% of everyone else's time. Now you can get multiple new clients for the cost of one new person! And if you can further automate and reduce the drudgery, even more!
(This is also a partial explanation for why the outsourcing, salaries-will-go-to-zero expectations of the early-2000s haven't come to pass: it requires tight communication and a good understand of people's workflows, which is much harder to do across time zone and language barriers. Hardware, on the other hand, needs a firmer spec and less ability to iterate rapidly with rapid communication and feedback.)
Of course the real world is more complicated and some of that automation comes from SaaS tools, etc (a less-direct way of paying those engineers, and something that could be more outsourceable in the long run) but a surprising amount of companies still need hands-on internal expertise to glue everything together. Less code tends to result in more code, because now that you and your competitors have gotten more efficient too, you have to get even more efficient to move the needle again. The thing about business processes is that they will always evolve as old companies die, new ones start, and consumers (both individuals and other companies) want different things.
I think you're right.
It's my suspicion that eventually software engineers will be paid the same as copy writers and scientists. But not yet.
I was initially going to disagree that copywriters get paid in the same range as scientists, but the numbers in the US are roughly similar from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Indeed.
-Indeed average copywriter annual pay [0] is $54,998 USD, versus a staff scientist's [1] at $69,091 USD
-BLS median copywriter pay for 2021 [2] was $69,510 USD, versus a medical scientist's [3] at $95,310 USD
I'm surprised that the median annual salary difference is only roughly $15,000 to $25,000 USD in favor of working as a scientist, considering the additional years doing a Master's/PhD, whereas copywriter jobs often don't need even a Bachelor's. In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?). Alternatively, maybe the numbers are missing important contextual information in some way.
[0] https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries
[1] https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries
[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-...
[3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/med...
> In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?)
Probably, but given that ~20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, while ~40% have a college degree, the supplies might not be too different. Reading and writing are also skills which are neither prestigious nor especially lucrative, while scientists of any kind are esteemed pretty highly.
The scientists I know see it as almost a vocation. They want the prestige of having their names in journals and the feeling that they're helping advance human knowledge. I can't really blame them... I class it as a bit like development in the way they undervalue their skills so that they can get it.
I guess the other side of it is that the people paying scientists really don't know if their grant money will pay off so they want to hedge their bets on costs (eg salaries)
Software's network effects make it much easier to construct a "monopoly" which gets to have very large margins. Where you see margins, look for moats.
In a free market, there is such race in every industry. It's just that demand for software is growing too damn fast and supply can't keep up.
You might want to look at the margins of Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, ...
You are not paid by the difficulty of your work. You are paid according to how much the hiring manager thinks he can replace you for.
Sometimes this creates falsely inflated salaries- like when a company insists on hiring Harvard MBAs. Often it creates lower than expected salaries. People forget just how many Asian EEs there are.
It's because software engineers don't need capital to do their job, giving them a ton of leverage compared to other engineers.
Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor. Your work is probably fairly specialized to, so if you transfered into some other engineering domain, you'd start at entry level salary.
Now look at a software engineer working for google, if he wants more there's a dozen companies, in silicon valley, FAANG, wall street that will take his services, he and a few friends can even start their own thing with their laptops and a garage. And skills transfer relatively well between different software engineering jobs.
Because software as low entry to barrier and many employers and non specialized skillset, the competent generalist has massive leverage in the labor market. Mr PhD in electric optics, has 3 employers in the country that can give an opportunity to actually use his degree.
>Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor.
Sure, but what happens when you decide you're sick of a poor salary, and you learn Python and CS in your spare time and interview for Google and then quit your airplane engine job to make 3x as much working for Google? Where is GE going to get a replacement with your expertise and experience? What happens if all the engineers at GE do this?
It seems like the only reason this doesn't happen is because of inertia: the airplane engine engineers just aren't ambitious enough to leave their field for much higher pay. That doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy for a company making a critical component of a globally-important industry however.
Most don't even know that they can leetcode themselves to a way higher salary. And if you got a PhD in something, it's very hard on your ego to leave it behind. Plus the corporate propaganda on taking a paycut to do "cool things" works very well. Look at how many smart people work at SpaceX
Yeah, so basically these places are propped up by tons of people willing to sacrifice their time and lives for some corporate execs to get rich. I'm not really sure what can be done about that, except to opt out for myself and choose a career for myself that's a better balance of compensation, working hours, etc.
If people are going to let their ego put them in a position to be taken advantage of, isn't that basically their own fault?
It’s all about demand and supply. It has nothing to do with how hard/easy anything is. So it actually makes perfect sense. Everybody needs web software. Very few needs hard engineering skills.
There is some correlation if price keeps high for a long duration
If there was tremendous demand for ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well. How hard something is has nothing to do with it.
If the current supply and demand stays the way it is eventually things will even out. Programmer salaries will stagnate as more people enter the field and other fields may have salaries go up if there are not enough candidates.
This process is very slow though. It’s not a very efficient market due to opaqueness and the fact that people don’t like to change jobs too much. A huge reallocation can take a generation or more.
> ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well
Only if ditches are valuable enough.
Otherwise everyone does without ditches (long drop, sump hole), or find solutions that don’t need ditches (eg wireless or overground cables), or invent new ways of making ditches that are not digging (ditch witch, suction vacs), or other smart workarounds (trenchless water pipe, fibre optic horizontal drilling).
This is basically the water/diamonds question in disguise. You'll find it in any introductory economics textbook: Why does water cost nothing when we all need it, but diamonds cost a fortune when nobody needs it?
Nerd trap. It is hard science, and interesting so people are more willing to deal with bullshit to get close to it.
Engineering processes are very well developed and therefore less leadership is expected out of the ICs.
I mostly troubleshoot this dreadful old C# application these days. At this point, you almost couldn't pay me to do it. And I don't have any better prospects with the great depression 2 coming up
There's a huge demand for Software Developers in every industry in the last few years. Retail, Finance, Marketing, etc.
Also, looking at a Marketing Company for example. There would be a ton of need for Software Developers, but generally no need for an electrical engineer.
Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
What you earn is a function of the complexity of what you do and the value you generate. Web engineers earn a lot because of the second part of the equation.
> Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
low barrier to entry, high potential impact.
also web development is trendy and developers in general will make a lot of fuss about pretty much anything (tabs vs spaces? emacs vs vi? xorg vs wayland, "btw i use arch" is literally a meme) and about money in particular... a lot of company finally give up and accept paying more and then a lot more companies have to follow the trends and pay more.
With physical products, design is a cost center not a revenue center. They want to pay next to nothing for the design, and then just churn out pieces. You'd think they'd want to pay more for a design that then costs less to manufacture, but it just doesn't work that way. Cheapness all around.
This is mostly do to a 'proximity effect'.
The close a business or individual is to justifying their salary, the more they are paid.
It's why bankers are often paid more than they are worth.
This is an industrial effect: 'hardware' is moving to China, because VC doesn't like long business cycles. And so the jobs shift there etc..
Because it's worth nothing in comparison. I'll say the thing others won't: real engineering is about creating value through constraint fitting. Web development is more engineering than this formal engineering. Better constraint fitting. Greater value created. Better engineers.
Video game logic leads people to believe hard => valuable. But the real world is different. Valuable => valuable.
But that's also kind of gauche to say because it's a bit of punching down. The tradition in society is to say kind things about those who have to work hard and produce little value. "The janitors are the real backbone of America" and so on and so forth. Absent value we must feed them platitudes so that they can clothe themselves in shreds of dignity.
Occasionally, though, it's worthwhile to look at the truth. Which is most definitely revealed in our revealed preferences. How much would you spend on this occupation if you started a company?
> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?
Value is determined by quantitative exchange in a market and not by any intrinsic qualities such as difficulty of labor.
Because picking the right colors on a website brings in more money.
My friend is an EE that I went to school with. He's very bright and definitely sharper and harder working than me. I went to school for Chemistry and switched to DevOps - which are the not the highest paid of SEs. I make 1.5x what he does. I help run a package tracking dashboard. He ensures power systems for millions of people work flawlessly in all conditions. He's looking to quit the industry because its so hopeless.
You might want to do some more research. DevOps is for sure one of the top paying engineering positions. I think the average salary right now is 134k a year USD.
Can confirm. Making ~$145k salary, with $40k in bonuses.
This is with 3 years of experience in Full Stack Web Dev SWE, and zero years in DevOps (but some basic experience with containers, cloud, and general linux server config).
I was hired as a Web App SWE, but was offered the chance to train in DevOps and took it, in order to grow additional skills. Full stack web apps are mostly CRUD. To learn the ecosystem around them... in terms of Cloud Computing, Kubernetes, and Customizing Containers... I consider that incredibly valuable.
My company needs DevOps but is having difficulty hiring for the role-- it's in high demand but low supply apparently. So, they're letting me become one of their interdisciplinary DevOps/Full Stack people.
I'm very happy as I am learning new things, working with a great team of enthusiastic, positive-attitude people, and upon my first promotion I imagine I'll make around $250k or so.
I don't know of many other professions where this is possible, while working 100% remotely.
Better to hire generalists who can relentlessly dig through problems while under time pressure, and maintain emotional equanimity. These are the people who will figure out Kubernetes, even if they don't have prior experience. I've been through a hiring process where they tested for that, and I'm stealing that method.
Can you share more details about how that hiring process tested for that? I'd love to hear about it.
It was installing a well-known blogging platform. Something the team had already done before, and sounded simple, only turning into something gnarly. The trouble started with the host running on Debian, with Apache (without mod_php), so now you got a choice of fastcgi or try to force Docker on there … there are no docs for that weird combination.
You only have 30 mins. No one had ever completed it in that time, and finishing it in 30 mins was not the point. The observer can take in all sorts of things, from ability to problem solve, to how one handles the time pressure.
The point isn’t this specific combination of tech (it does not have to be a blog or an installation task), but that someone in devops will run into obscure things as a matter of course.
I've done full stack and frontend but always had a lot more fun and felt more productive doing devops stuff on my personal projects than anything I've ever done at a job. I've been considering a switch, primarily because I'm just so burnt out on writing software, so maybe I should do that. I've got about the experience you had, maybe a bit more, since I've done a good amount of hobbyist work with devops.
That's awesome, congratulations! I hope you're me from the future.
I'm doing almost exactly the same thing, with the exception that I spent less time as a full stack dev and I'm doing the DevOps for a dramatically lower salary.
I'm hoping to bump up to at least the national average (and remote would be nice) after completing the large projects laid out for the next year.
You have hit two niches:
- web development SE (there is a bunch of them, but rarely anyone good)
- devops with kubernetes SE (there is few of them and rarely any good)
Yep, DevOps has a similarly high status with ML.
I think it has to do with how much money some job will produce over the investment, and also OFC due to to supply/demand. How hard a job is, is kind of irrelevant for the compensation.
Due to the nature of SW, you can reach thousands of customers with little investment, so you may as well slap a fat margin on it. There are SW products associated with pretty much any economic activity these days, from textile machines to farm management (got job offers to work on products in these areas recently), so SWEs are in high demand. And if the market is not doing well, you can always strike on your own and try building something people will want to use and to pay for, for little investment (again).
I'm also an EE who started my career ar a sysadmin and went to Cloud / DevOps later.
My long term plan was to switch to SE, but DevOps jobs are absolutely on fire rn.
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?
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.
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.
Very similar to me! Double degree in EE/IT, my first job out of uni was with a small company building gps chips. I actually spent a lot of time writing testing software. A couple of years in it went down the drain and I just naturally transitioned in to a software role (paid a lot better).
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.
The job I used to do as a C/EE at Intel decades ago is now currently being done by PhD physicists. I think the knowledge requirements have changed quite a bit now that everything is running in quantum level problems.
I still build audio amplifiers, filters, and dabble in RF, but my day job is mostly administrative, now.
The impact of not having local apprenticeships available cannot be overstated.
I see this within regions of the US in regards to software. If you grow up in a tech hub(even just your local state one) it can seem like it was "easy" to get into computers and mod games. But the farmers son's who are technical near me where I live now go and tinker with cars and diesel engines the way I did with my dad's old 286.
> In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China.
This is what I was thinking. There are few fabs in North America anymore, so SMD work requires a lot of shipping and patience. You can also outsource EE work to China very easily and they have a long history doing this stuff, but outsourcing software is not so easy for some reason (yet).
This matches my experience, too. Even if maybe not mainland China for the coolest stuff, definitely it is moving to Taiwan, India, etc.
It happened with a fair bit of mechanical engineering stuff too. (Or it went away.) For example, there used to be a huge disk drive industry in the US. Not just the big "commodity" drive suppliers but every minicomputer company used to design and build its own disk (and tape) drives.
Yep. I was about to ask this question: suppose I was born 20 years ago in a > 0.5 M people city in Europe or North America and I'm into an EE course. I'd be considering my job options for when I graduate. Which companies need an EE around me? As a non EE engineer I can think of one (STMicroelectronics is not far away from where I live.) As CS graduate: almost infinite (of which only slightly less than infinite shitty jobs, for sure.)
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.
> but now I'm a programmer anyway
I had the exact opposite experience. The CS dept. actively recruited me, and I didn't even realize what CS was until I had completed 2 years of study. I like CS, but had I known better at 17yo, I would have gone EE or CE all the way, because that is my interest, and there is little chance I could uncover anything on my own about electronics without the structure of university. I never wanted to be a programmer, but programming is not computer science, nor does a lucrative programming career require a computer science degree, or any degree. But every where I have seen, a computer science career requires a computer science degree or a mathematics degree, but I have little doubt there is the odd physics grad or engineering grad working as a computer scientist. Just remembered, I know a guy with a biology or botany degree that works as a computer scientist on the modeling side and has for almost 20 years. But he just does modeling, not everything CS.
> I would have gone EE or CE all the way, because that is my interest, and there is little chance I could uncover anything on my own about electronics without the structure of university
This so much. Programming is accessible, that's great. I learned as a stupid kid and it worked out fine economically.
But if I had to re-do everything, I'd go to school, and select anything but CS. I can always teach myself that. I find myself interested in many things nowadays, but almost never engage them, because I just can't, there's just not much an individual outside of reading.
I did a mechanical engineering degree and ended up programming (way better pay) which I already could do before uni. I don't regret it though - it's much much easier to learn programming on your own than other kinds of engineering.
E.g. if you got a job doing low level programming, like firmware development or even chip design (basically still programming) your EE knowledge would be very helpful.
Tinkering with hardware at home arguably used to be more accessible to the home tinkerer starting with building Heathkits. But hardware got more complex and faster and the necessary gear etc. sort of got out of reach. Arguably things like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos have made it more accessible again at a different level of abstraction. But I don't think there's much debate that software is easier for someone without the resources of a university or company to work on in general.
This is my big takeaway. I didn’t really learn programming in my SE courses anyway, so I might as well have done something more useful.
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.
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.
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.
The stuff about needing to know a lot more physics or arcane domain specific stuff isn't so true. If you talk to someone who's got pink sunglasses about SWE, they'll say a bunch of stuff in our industry is "arcane domain specific knowledge" to them.
You're probably romanticising it too because it's a hoby of yours, which just leads to skwes in your perception.
Source: studied EE, after realising I wouldn't like my career paths, I switched to CS. Mostly worked as SWE tho, but I did work in ab unusual and creative EE role first, before realising that most EE jobs wouldn't be so engaging
>The stuff about needing to know a lot more physics or arcane domain specific stuff isn't so true
ha ha wait until you find out about microwave engineering.
Pardon, but I don't understand the point you tried to make...
Does a software engineer have perfect grasp and understanding about every subfield in SWE? Ranging from DX to writing compilers or designing languages, SWE is an extremely broad field.
EE is no different.
The EE domain is substantially smaller than the CS domain. It take less time and effort to be an EE "domain expert" than it does to become a "CS domain expert".
Sure, if you arbitrarily slice the pie to make it that way. The great thing is you can just semantically decide what you want to call EE and CS until your assertion is true, so you've made an assertion that is completely impossible to disprove. Bravo.
The failure modes are substantially different, which changes the approach.
Free climbing a 5ft rock wall is not different than a 50ft one, etc.
You know, I'm a microwave engineer who is currently doing CS.
I find most of these comments against my original points as me not explaining myself so well. And, I can say one thing for sure, EE's are good at downvoting! ;-)
I'm trying to say that EE, like MechE is not especially complicated. You have your theories you need to know but that's it. Yes, you can be inspired, you can figure out some trick. But: how often does an ME invent a fundamentally new mechanism? Pretty much never. How often does an EE invent a fundamentally new circuit? Pretty much never.
Now, how often does a CS person have to solve some nasty problem that has never been solved before --- every day!
I have done microwave engineering for over 20 years. I know what it takes. It's NOT Rocket Science, I assure you.
My degree (6-3) is in EECS from a small technical school on the banks of the Charles River.
So I'm not full of it when I make my statements; they come from over 50 years' experience.
Are you seriously citing a fucking MIT degree in support of your case that microwave engineering is not complicated? You went to the most prestigious engineering school in the US, if not the world. I think you've lost sight of reality. You started off 2 miles above ground level and with the hindsight of 50 years of experience beyond that, sure it might seem like nothing to you.
> EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits.
Initially I just thought you were a troll, but with this kind of experience and education now I just know you're vicious liar. I'm sure every time you made a microstrip filter, feed ramp, or antenna you just poof from Altium after looking at a datasheet and it just worked. Not to mention a great deal of microwave engineering now happens in other tools like microwave office and ADS, I'm not sure Altium is even that great or useful for relatively common microwave stuff like designing say a microwave horn antenna.
I haven't seen any arcane domain specific knowledge that was in the software part, sure a your business can be infinitely arcane but the software was always very straightforward.
EE is in a different ballpark, imagine if you had to explicitly pay attention to write software that didn't melt your CPU.
That's still just domain knowledge, though... It's arcane to you, not them
Electrical Engineers also work in semiconductor design, nuclear power, RF, and a whole host of other domains, none of which are child's play.
>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.
Surely you jest. From what I can see the "always something that must be mastered and pronto" is simply javascript kids justifying their inflated salaries by rewriting their codebases in new frameworks every few months only to rediscover bad solutions to problems that were solved a decade ago.
Not everyone spends their days chasing frameworks in SWE, and not everyone spends designing the next SoC breakthrough in EE.
EE and SWE are both very wide paths to travel along.
I don't think you've ever been an EE who worked in any of those areas; I worked in Microwave & RF. Yes, it is child's play -- because you keep doing the same things over and over.
As for javascript kiddies ---- I suppose you're right, I don't know. And I share your frustration with a new framework solving the same problems we fixed 20 years ago. I get that.
However, CS that drives the world forward -- that stuff --- is not 'turning the crank'. To the extent that any profession is 'turning the crank' --- that is the extent to which some automated systems will be doing that soon enough.
I've done EE, RF, Analog, Digital and much more. That stuff is trivial (and I mean trivial) compared with, say some of the stuff that this guy does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
I can tell you where the 'hard stuff' is in EE: it's in getting to electronic devices & circuits that perform near the limits of what physics allows. Extremely low noise, extremely fast switching, extreme power, those areas. And, yes, those folks have to be clever. Generally, most of those people are building chips, not doing what normal EEs do -- which is connect chips together --- and gluing chips together is trivial, this is my point.
Maybe it's just easy for me, that's possible. But I'm not that smart, so I dunno.
There is a reason Marc of a16z says Software Eat World, and not EE Eat World.
That's a bit like saying SWEs just bang out fizzbuzz every day and poof, out pops the software.
My point is that EE is inherently simpler than CS.
You learn at least Altium, PADS, Eagle and some open alternatives. You learn the specific quirks of all those software. You hate every hour you have to fight with PADS' decades-old bugs and "features".
In addition to LT Spice you probably learn a more specialized simulation software. Who knows, maybe you have to design power elecronics. Maybe antennas. Maybe both. Maybe in the same system. Maybe you are specialized in power electronics and you have to integrate another specialist's design into yours.
You learn about all the basic components, basic circuits and how to apply them. And yes, to "read some data sheets". You learn about the most common IC's and how to apply them, and when not to. And so on. You learn about EMI. You learn about trace lengths, placement, and their myriad of requirements in a multitude of scenarios. You learn about multilayered PCB design and its requirements. And so on.
You learn about having to minimize cost by reducing the components to their absolute minimum. You learn about having to minimize space due to real life demands of where your PCB has to fit. Maybe you even specialize in PCB design, and you apply a specialist circuit designer's schematic to the real world. Or maybe you are said specialist designer. In any case, at some point you need to know both and neither is easy.
Inevitably when you have to lock in your design, the prototypes are manufactured. Perhaps you need to assemble them yourself, certainly at least partially. You may even have just a partial device at first, which you still need to be able to wake up. Without fail, the real world reveals its ugly face to you. Despite all your simulations and meticulous design, something doesn't work like it should. You likely need to have mastery of a table full of expensive measurement equipment, and you need to know what to look for and how to look for it. After you diagnose the issue, you need to know how to fix it. You probably have to fix it manually, likely involving precision soldering work to sub-millimeter pads. After the fix, you don't hit "recompile", you fix the schematic, then the PCB, then wait for weeks or months for the next prototype round. Until then, you need to continue testing the device with hand-fixed prototypes. You need to instruct other people on how to do the same modifications.
Who knows, maybe a pandemic happens, maybe also a war that affects global economy. A chip you used becomes unavailable. There is no drop-in replacement. You have to at least replace the chip, and perhaps the circuit surrounding it. You don't just hit "recompile"...
All the while you likely have one or multiple microcontrollers in the device. You need to interface with the SW architects as well as the developer side. You need to be the datasheet for the software developer - likely you even need to write the datasheet.
All that jazz in addition to the regular stuff everyone has to deal with in one form or another.
I'm not an EE, I'm an Embedded Systems and Electronics Engineer. So I don't know 100% how to explain what they do, although I have some peripheral knowledge. Which is exactly I wrote this. I have just been in my safe firmware developer's bubble, trying to support the people designing the hardware so that they can get their side in order with the MCU's doing what they should. I have immense respect for the people who are able to make the physical side of what I write the code for. Those circuits certainly don't just "pop out".
Both sides always have something to be mastered. Both sides have their different flavors, too, but neither one is easy. Both sides have to learn and apply. Funnily enough, both sides have clear analogues to eachother, and very similar problems, just in a different plane of existence. Oh and this is just one facet of EE like others have mentioned.
I could never be a hard EE.
Yes, this seems to be such a tiny domain. If you know Maxwell's equations, you know all you need to know about EMI, pcb layout, RF, and more. If you know how to do something other than 'Datasheet Engineering' -- you know how to plan for part substitutions.
I'm trying to make the point that EE is a Fixed Domain, where one only needs to know a very small number of things to be an 'expert' in said domain. This is not the case for CS, which is, basically, all of mathematics that can possibly be applied to computers.
EEs will be one of the first technical professions to be replaced by robots & AI when AI moves up to white collar professions. Mark. My. Words. ;-)
I feel Maxwell's equations are to EE what Boolean logic is to CS. Yes it's what it's all based on, but it's a tremendous oversimplification.
> 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.
The main difference are that the constraints of EE are a lot clearer than software. From the laws of physics to the lists of available parts and processes to pick from. Then manufacturability and cost.
With software, your instruction set and available system resources/hardware APIs are your only real constraints. Everything else is an abstraction which you can question and rebuild.
Turns out the "correct" way to do things fall out more readily when you have more constraints, particular because we humans are worse at constructing constraints and abstractions than the universe. You get a lot more rope to hang yourself with to use a metaphor.
"Just learn some Altium?" Really? It's like saying, just learn some python and visual code and off you to to a 400k FAANG job
My argument is somewhat more sophisticated than your strawman. If you fully learn Altium, I can guarantee you (since I fully know Altium) that you know pretty much all you need to know about EE, especially since every situation an EE is likely to encounter in Real Life is part of what Altium provides.
So sure, if you do NOT know your tool inside and out, then that's a hacker's knowledge. To be a professional, you know your tool(s) inside, outside, and backward.
So yes, if one knew Altium inside, outside, and backward (incl SPICE sim & FPGAs), then such a person knows EE very well.
It's a small, limited domain. THAT is my point.
Uhh, what? Altium teaches you how to design a battery? Teaches you optics? Teaches you RF? Teaches you motors? Teaches robotics? Knowing the software doesn't even mean you understand all of the components you can place on a board
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.
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
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.
They can't. Margins are thinner. Hardware companies have extra costs that software companies don't have.
I almost tripled my salary by moving from what the person your replied to is looking for to the web. AND it's easier. AND I can work remotely.
I don't blame them. But they'll be more and more desperate to attract people. The democratization of remote web jobs after COVID is another nail in the coffin. They pay less, 99% of the time you have to be in office. It's a losing battle.
This frequently isn't true, although I'll admit it's industry dependent. This is the rhetoric used to depress the wages. Sure, they have extra costs but when you do the math, frequently the wages are still just a drop in the bucket of the operational expenditures.
Agreed, its the same tactic used in healthcare.
I think the real issue is that software is way overpriced.
Software is underpriced for the value it generates.
So is everything else, you just take it for granted at this point.
> It's totally possible that you are paying appropriately
Doubtful. If anyone is having a hell of a time finding electrical engineers or embedded developers, then by definition that means the field isn't lucrative enough for people to stay in it. That's exactly the case I've seen repeated in every post in this thread.
> We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers
I had a hell of a time getting a wage close to watch SWEs make. Hence I am no longer an embedded developer.
It's a no-brainer decision.
Previously the embedded/bare metal software lead for a high availability robotics system for almost a decade. Left that space for backend development because my pay literally tripled.
It's easy to think that you're just competing against the other EE job offers of $120k total comp, but you're actually also competing against the software positions those EEs could get with $300k total comp.
I love bare metal work, and part of me would love to go back to it, but it's really hard to justify: hardware product cycles are extremely slow, full-time remote positions are unheard-of, and pay is no more than half of what you can get for much cushier work in the software world. It makes more sense as a hobby than a profession.
We are currently having a hell of a time trying to hire embedded developers
In my opinion that is essentially almost the same problem, though depending on the university/courses followed. To be able to program bare metal one needs some knowledge of bare metal, which is what an EE has. To be able to program one also needs some programming knowledge, which most EEs have. However if you take a 'standard' software engineer then they often only have a clue about the latter.
The EE's in both places I studied tended to come out as better low level programmers than the CS grads.
Most of the CS grads rarely touched C, and never ASM.
Hi there, I fit your bill.
Not interested though because after 9 years of sensor experience software just pays triple my best pay in those years with easier deliverables. Never again.
There must be plenty of 50+ year old EE developers that can do that, probably very cynical neck-beards by now, or even retired. Most people move into better paying roles so it is hard to buy them, and you duck your resume by taking on low-paying work (even if you paid highly, the next gig won’t).
There was so much low-level microcontroller dev work in the past, but perhaps that has mostly moved overseas now?
I used to do that work and I am not working at present, but I’ve moved up the stack a long way since then, so my pay and working condition expectations are probably ridiculous. And I don’t want to move from New Zealand!
I can do that kind of work. I regularly get recruiter emails for these jobs because my resume clearly shows I have experience in it. But the jobs are always some shitty contract job, and located in some stupid place I don't want to live (no remote work possible), and if the salary is given it sucks.
So I've been doing higher-level work for a long time now.
I've been sending lots of resumes out to companies for embedded jobs since I'm looking for something new. I currently do embedded Linux but my education was EE so hardware isn't mysterious to me. Never-the-less I just get constant rejections, so not sure how desperate these employers are.
I think I fit the bill! You can contact me if you want to have a discussion (details in bio)
I had professors like that in physics but it was more of a comedic stunt than anything. Being scared of your course is something very relatable, so I thought it was quite entertaining to have a comical lecturer who was very humorous and yet brutal about the course. In the end the lecturer I had that was the most brutal about the course content of ended up not being a particularly bad exam.
If it’s not paired with humour though, it can be quite horrible
I don't know when I first heard students boasting about these scare away intro lectures [0] but it was noticeable by the early eighties.
I've a few unsubstantiated hypotheses why:
Zero Sum Game taught by boomer parents conscious that the party was already over but would be sustained inevitably with increasing ruthlessness.[1]
Intellectual Property laws started slicing and dicing knowledge that became temporarily more valuable by fencing it in.
Higher Education caught performance metrics (without much if any performance pay) and so especially elite schools but eventually the rest cottoned onto input pre selection as a way of surviving.
Society became a overt lottery particularly for low income families. This placed the easy weight of the burden of responsibility of tutors on the side of direction to easier subjects.
I believe all these factors and more began compounding exponentially with the enclosures act imposition of a requirement for a degree for work with no or marginal utility for the same.
Marketing, loans and for a particularly insidious enclosures act, the UK's "classless society" introduction of University status not only for a tsunami of new institutions (the UK will now accredit degree granting university status in only two years..) and the white washing of the vocational STEM/ Engineering focused UK Polytechnic system (making them independent degree awarding institutions enabled diversification and dilution) which multiplied the demand for least effort maximum passing grade tertiary education throughout the world ,by the turn of this century to lamentable result.
[0] turning up next week seems to have been the objective of one I spoke with, to demean the honest and intimidated.
[1] The last market play I laid on with my late cofounder was in reaction to the dotbomb. Bought military tech suppliers :-| Point being we need the new program before we are fully grown up so to pass it on. With massive shifts to younger population and the current generation of middle aged folk being capitalized by three bull cycles the last two payable like a Japanese 80's mortgage, by the grandchildren, this means now.
Edit: second footnote placed and "enclosures act" gains a act adjectivally. Edit2 for work para7 Edit3 last para payable not relatable.
I don't think it needs a big society explanation. I think it's a small scale machismo problem. People love gatekeeping fields: hobbies, fandoms, sports. Especially if it has in the past got flack for being "uncool".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Nowadays we expect people to pay for their own education. No company wants to be the sucker that invested in fleeting human capital.
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.
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)
To be fair, tech hiring is rather credentialized in general these days. Even help desk and cable-runner jobs are requiring 4 year degrees.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Never experienced it in aerospace engineering. The only "weed-out" courses I had were electrical requirements.
If there was lack of supply and excess demand, it would show in higher pay.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Do backend engineers get paid less than frontend? In my experience its been the opposite.
Yes, backend engineers do get paid more in general. I was just wondering why this runs contrary to OP's explanation that "closeness" to user triumphs job difficulty (when it comes to leverage/salaries).
There's more software engineering companies, than "hard" engineering companies.
You'd think so but it's much cheaper to bemoan a lack of skills than it is to raise salaries.
For most professions there is an incredibly long lag time between a drop in enrollment and a shortage of workers. If everyone immediately stopped going into EE overnight, it would take at least 4 years before there was any noticeable effect on the labor market as people already enrolled continue to graduate. Then for some time you'd still have a large pool of reasonably young people that would be regularly changing jobs - it might take longer on average to fill a position but they would still be filled, and in the meantime the slack would be taken up by other employees taking on additional responsibilities (which likely aren't too extensive when the missing labor pool is just from the entry level cohort) and older employees delaying retirement. Indeed productivity may even improve in the short term as no one is taking time out of their busy schedules to teach the next generation. Only after about 10-15 years would you start seeing a shortage that can't be compensated for as the youngest EEs are settling down and thus less open to relocation, older EEs can't put off retirement for longer, and the tasks left undone are too advanced to be easily performed by other employees. Of course at that point you get rampant poaching which drives up salaries but it also makes firms hesitant to invest anything in training new EEs as they'll be poached the moment they're competent - thus even if the salary increase starts driving renewed interest in the profession the pipeline never recovers. You soon have lots of new guys competing for the same low-skill work which drives down starting salaries while only the old timers can be trusted with work requiring even moderate experience. In another few years the last of the "original" EEs start retiring and with them incredible amounts of tribal knowledge are lost.
While that's obviously an extreme scenario and unlikely to ever happen with electrical engineers, it's not too far off from what happened to many trades like welding.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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)
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 :-)
Did something better - studied CS on EE university.
Best decision of my life.
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.
EEs are pretty far away from the money. That really impacts earning potential. Most EEs who went the traditional route and want to keep doing electronics in some form but make money become Field Application Engineers (FAEs) to get closer to the sale and show their value to the company. The crustiest old engineers are buried deep within a corporation and it's hard to show value on the bottom line.
Similarly, the FAANG/MANGA folks of the world are beneficiaries of being closer to the end customer, at least in terms of always being able to track customer usage of products. And hey, some of the highest paid ones are doing some hyper scale stuff that touches billions of users. Then there's just the general markete conditions of having much more need than talent available, especially at the upper eschelons.
Credentials: 20 year EE, have the largest podcast about designing electronics (The Amp Hour, check us out)
I worked in the semiconductor industry, and at least in our niche of the semiconductor industry, FAEs were some of the worst paid people, a long with production test for some reason.
FAEs were seen as the lowest level support who were a stop-gap for our application engineers (non-field). If a big customer had a problem, we would send an AE out to show that we were taking it seriously. No idea if it's the same in other industries though. Application engineers weren't that we'll paid either.
Technical marketing and sales were paid well, but maybe this is a just a title thing (what you called FAE is what we called sales/marketing). Their salaries were predominantly sale/deal based bonuses though.
For people that actually developed the chips, analogue designers were the highest paid followed by digital designers. Then digital verification engineers, with verification engineer salary increasing very quickly. The salaries were shit compared to software though.
But now, talking to my friends still in the sector(doing design), competition is absolutely fierce and their salaries are increasing rapidly along with getting a lot more shares. There was a point where a senior analogue engineer could move to a graduate software position and make more money. Those days are gone now, and salaries are pretty close.
A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.
>A friend interviewed for a hardware position at Apple and the salary was definitely SWE levels of high.
Which probably explains why Apple is the only, or one of the rare few, consumer electronics companies with products most people actually want to buy and love to own.
People keep pointing out how shitty products form Apple's competitors are (Samsung, Dell, etc.), but when you look how little they pay for talent in comparison to Apple, it becomes obvious why their products are so inferior.
Engineering great devices is expensive, and since the West offshored everything to China, and went for cutting costs as much as possible including on engineering wages, how can they expect to deliver quality?
You clearly have never seen Louis Rossman's critiques of Apple's repeatedly poor hardware designs.
Ahhh love the podcast! You guys and Embedded helped me learn a lot as an EE going into embedded. Thanks for putting on a great and informative show!
Pay more and get more talent. If a local web startup is paying 2x, 3x, 5x more money for some html and css (and/or whatever language of the week is for the backend), than companies like Intel are paying for serious hardware knowledge, it's no wonder people don't choose this profession.
As a CompE and EE major who switched to software after graduation like 20 years ago, EE work was also like way harder IMO. They SHOULD be getting paid more. But they don't seem to be. I switched due to low salary and few available jobs and never looked back.
IIRC intel pays the “Median” compensation for a position. This ultimately doesn’t mean much in semi when intel was hiring 3/4 of the engineering talent.
Inflation has been brutal to gen y/z in ways that aren’t tracked. A recent college graduate in EE makes about the same they did 30 years ago, but paid 10x for college and 4x for housing.
Same here.
Soon after graduation (~y2k) I know another, older EE who just retired early because it just wasn't worth it to work (and his SO made good money). The salary he was going to get with 10 years experience as an EE was about what I got straight out of college.
Agreed. I went to law school (of all things) at night while working as an engineer and started as a newly minted attorney with 0 experience at 2x my engineering salary (I was a 6th year EE).
Seems like people are interpreting whatever they want from the original chart by Raja Koduri at the VLSI symposium...plotted with absolute numbers you see that EE enrollment is pretty flat. What has happened is that the number of CS majors has exploded. Kind of makes sense that there SHOULD be 10x programmers for every chip designer? Unless we want the hardware to become the application and for every programmer to be an EE??
https://ee.stanford.edu/about/fast-facts
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers
[edited: formatting]
This needs more upvotes.
"Classical electrical engineers are trained in design. A small number of designers will be critical. These designers will be highly sought, and handsomely paid. Educators will pride themselves on the demand for the shrinking number of graduates that they produce, while other disciplines will produce growing numbers of informed users who will work at the application levels. Electrical engineering will be in danger of shrinking into a neutron star of infinite weight and importance, but invisible to the known universe." Robert E. Lucky, 1998
Source: http://www.boblucky.com/reflect/may98.htm via
Yeah well my EE degree didn't train me in design. Just textbook bullshit.
Food for thought:
At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches. Any engineering position can lead to a comfortable life, but when everything is about the hustle to make the most money the quickest way possible, it’s worrisome.
It’s like when you look at how the career fields for elite schools tend to fall into a few select categories: law, finance, consulting. (Sometimes medicine but that can be for or against this point, and would be a digression.) It’s not bad per se, but it’s can smell an awful lot like status climbing. To paraphrase a professor of mine: “there are people who’s goal is to climb to the top of the world and those who’s whose goal is to build the world. Be careful not to confuse the two.”
I'm an engineer at heart, but I do have bills to pay and I can become interested in basically any complex system.
If EE paid better, I would be an EE. EE is interesting. Neither SWE nor my chosen career are sufficiently less interesting than EE though so it's not like I picked an uninteresting career for financial reasons.
At the end of the day it's all just problem solving. If the puzzles are all fun and don't go against my principles, I might as well go work for the highest bidder.
Exactly this.
In uni I got offered internships as part of the course, to write my Master's thesis.
An engineering firm in Aerospace offered me a job doing something with airplanes. Pretty interesting, but paid £12K/yr, which really isn't much money, even for a student.
I kept my mouth shut (uni wanted us to take whatever came) and got offered a job at a major chip manufacturer, but in marketing. Also interesting, £15K/yr. I took it and learned a bunch about that business.
I went to visit a friend in London who'd gotten an internship working at an investment bank. £38K/yr.
What do you suppose I applied to when I graduated? It wasn't engineering or marketing.
As things happened, I'm still an engineer. I just make algorithms to move money around, and that's also got nerd value, since there's interesting problems in financial trading as well. I've literally has days where I made more money for myself than I would have gotten in a whole year at either of the other careers. I also ran into people who'd dumped those careers to work in finance, because the incentive is so strong (colleague directly told me he saw his boss's payslip, then decided to leave).
I had a professor who’s brother worked in finance and he openly admitted his brother sometimes paid more in taxes than he got in salary. So I understand where you’re coming from.
And I do think some of that finance work has value. But let me ask, if you had to put a percentage on it, how many of the best and brightest would you want going into finance vs say, medicine or physics? At what point does it tip to being a worse outcome for society? What percentage should go to ad-spend software jobs?
The problem as I see it is when we’re acting on a value system with the singular goal of making the most money, it can become a sort of prisoner’s dilemma where the rational choice at the individual level leads to worse outcomes for the group (to include the individual making the choice)
I don't know what the right amount is, but with the numbers being where they are, it just seems like doing any of the jobs that are considered socially useful (doctor/nurse/policeman/research/etc) is simply too big a sacrifice if you have the choice.
You might be right about the prisoner's dilemma: if you are an engineer and you get an offer from the cure for cancer research group, vs potentially 7 figures in a few years, it's going to be awfully hard to save humanity.
I agree with this. It's easy to get caught up in a very binary "in it for the money" vs "doing what you love" mindset, but I think the reality is a balance of both. Money is actually quite great and I am willing to compromise a little bit in my day job in order to receive more money. At the same time, there are some jobs I simply do not want to do, even if they may be higher paid than what I'm doing now.
This is exactly my point. The issue I was pointing out is that the comments only spoke to a single side of this, with none of the nuance you provided.
This is a very reasonable take. As you say, you can become interested in any complex systems to try and solve problems, so the main differentiator can become money. The issue I was pointing to is nobody else was pointing out that same context, they were solely about money. Not solving worthwhile problems. Not developing skill sets. Just the paycheck
> At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches.
This is not incompatible with what the comments are saying. I'm an ECE, I love hardware and working in VLSI, and I eagerly engage with the open hardware movement. I also love working with software, it scratches the same itch, hacking on multiplier layouts and hacking on SIMD accelerated code both involve the same type of analytical mindset.
And yet I work in software because it pays more. As always, these "this highly skilled occupation is collapsing" posts are linked entirely to pay. A talented EE or CE can easily transition to software, and they do.
I said it elsewhere, but I am not implying a false dichotomy. Indeed, I’m one of those engineers who took a software job in part because I get to work on more interesting problems. But it’s telling that the top comments are only about money and (at least at the time of my OP) not about “money and interesting/fulfilling work”
Used to be an EE and couldn't afford a house in a major metropolitan area. Went into FW/SW and now I can. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but that's what worked for me.
I’m not discounting anyone’s personal experience, but that saying something when the average EE salary is about the 85th percentile of salary. Maybe it’s indicative of how broken the housing situation is in cities (and I suppose it’s very location dependent - anyone outside of SW, law, medicine, or finance may struggle to buy a home in SV or Manhattan)
The housing market has a lot to do with it. In Canada, average home prices (all types) are up ~6x since 2000, and in specific cities like Vancouver and Toronto, even more so. Compensation has not kept pace. Back when I was a high school student, I didn't think pay was very important. Now I realize it's much easier to pursue one's curiosity if one can afford, say, a garage.
That leads to a follow up. Is the goal to have a home in one of those cities or is the goal to have a home? The first may require working in software while the latter could foreseeably mean you could be an EE elsewhere.
Everyone chooses their own goals and priorities of course. Where in Canada would you recommend for a young EE?
I don’t know Canada unfortunately. But maybe Windsor? EEs working as control engineers across the river in automotive while I was there could easily pull surgeon-level salaries in an area that has a cost of living a fraction below SV
What does it matter if it's in the 85th percentile if they can get more money in another industry?
The question isn't, "can you survive as an EE?" sure, you can survive as fry cook at a fast food chain. The question is, "will headhunters poach this occupation and have a high success rate due to the salary delta?" And the answer for the EE -> SWE transition is obviously yes.
The question isn’t about which pays more, it’s about whether the best tack is to treat an occupation as an economic transaction where the sole goal is to be a mercenary to the highest bidder.
If someone finds can find fulfillment dedicating their life to making ad-spend software while getting paid handsomely, that’s wonderful. But the larger point is that the comments seemed to be focused exclusively on the pay with little consideration to the work.
I have a relative (now in his 60's) who is a globally renowned network engineer from Silicon Valley. He has many patents, worked on just about every protocol known out there, etc. Truly one of the people who made the internet what it is today. From what I can see, he was always equally interested in the money and changing the world. But now, he's in the luxurious position of being able to "work for free" if its a project that he believes will change the world for the better. Both factors have always mattered for him.
To be clear, I’m not implying they are mutually exclusive goals. But go through the comments and see how many people say “if EE had more impact or more interesting projects” vs speaking strictly about compensation to see my point
It doesn't really seem like a "hustle" thing. You have the choice in working one of two quite similar jobs, in quite similar fields, but one of the jobs pays far more.
You also may have a friend who's already made the move telling you to join.
>You have the choice in working one of two quite similar jobs
My issue with this take is that it’s also quite likely that the jobs are completely dissimilar. How long do you think it would take a front-end SWE to develop a 480kV electrical grid or vice versa? Both domains require specific skills and should be respected as such
You're maximizing the gap though. People go from doing EE work on some embedded device, to writing software for the same class of device.
Sure, because there is large variance in engineering. Not just EE, either. If your an ME you might design HVAC but it doesn’t mean you can take an ME’s role designing CFD models in aerospace applications. Pretending jobs are interchangeable is a disservice to the skillsets
It is not that an aspiring EE switches to become a lawyer. EE is often a special kind of software development. Switching to a "software" job often enough doesn't deeply mean a change of proffession. You are still an engineer (at least in the interesting software jobs).
And it is not about "hustling to make the most money the quickest way possible", if you switch to a company which pays a lot better for a similar job. And as a lot of those jobs are located in expensive places, an engineering salary doesn't easily pay for a nice house or any house at all.
>To paraphrase a professor of mine: “there are people who’s goal is to climb to the top of the world and those who’s whose goal is to build the world. Be careful not to confuse the two.”
The new goal is to have enough money for gas and healthcare while also paying off the student loans.
Before I moved to the technology sector, I worked in academia and earned a fraction of what I earn now. I loved doing research in my field, and now I'm moderately interested in my work. I don't hate it, but I don't wake up saying, " Man, isn't this great?"
However, I would not go back to work in research for the miserable salary I was getting. If they paid the same amount I make now, maybe.
The trouble with doing a low-pay career for the passion is that it's usually low pay because there are a million other people willing to do the same thing, so it actually does become a hustle.
I hear you, but I don’t think this is a fair assessment because EE isn’t a “low pay job” by almost any objective measure. I get that it doesn’t pay SWE money in many cases, but it comes across as somewhat out of touch, like saying “the problem with a Tesla is it’s a low end car” because you’re comparing it to a Maserati
You have to have some sort of scope for comparison. Here we're talking about engineeringy careers that the same person might want to do. So cleaner and sports star aren't relevant even if their pay is much lower or higher.
I am trained in electronics. I love it. I have never stopped messing with electronics and microcontrollers over my whole life.
(And how good is it these days with things like, the RISC-V ESP32 with wifi and cheap as chips, unreal little modules, for example measuring temperature to +/- 0.01C, air-born particles, radiation etc etc).
This said, I doubt I could afford a comfortable life with a house and family in a major city like Sydney on half the pay. I know as I have thought about switching from SE back to EE many times.
I love electronics and circuit building. I’ve been told that the compensation is shockingly poor compared to that of software engineers. This didn’t affect my college experience, as I was already well into my SE career when I finished my degree. As I recall though, the course load was harder and the opportunities fewer.
Incidentally, I had a friend who was an EE who went on to become a Patent attorney. He told me he did so because he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life maintaining a print server design.
Even firmware development in C is lower paid than almost any Java/JS conventional development role in Sydney. Having done both, the C one is much harder due to being in a much more resource limited environment.
The only real electronics roles I see outside the occasional advert for some of the bigger names maybe once every six months are uni roles paying 1/4 of the salary outside of unis (always boasting 18% Super/RRSP LOL)
>I doubt I could afford a comfortable life with a house and family in a major city like Sydney
I don’t think there’s any disagreement here, but it’s because you layered on an important constraint regarding location. Similarly, there are very few jobs that could support living in Manhattan or on a yacht, but that’s not really the larger point. The larger point being, the posts focused singularly on money. Like your location, if we narrowly constrain the problem, of course it means there are only a few options that make sense. If all I care any is money, there are only a handful of acceptable job prospects.
Not working for the highest bidder (money, status, time etc) can be seen as a form of charity. Which company deserves the donation of your life energy?
This confuses the point with “doing work you may not want to do”. I’m saying there are multiple dimensions of finding fulfillment, with money only being a single dimension. The idea that anything outside that single dimension would be considered nothing but charity is telling.
Every single company I joined that promised a stress-free environment has outright lied to me to the point that I will find it suspicions if HR mentions how happy and balanced the work is. It is a huge deal for me but HR will never be honest about it to me because if they did they wouldn't hire much and would be replaced by someone who says "Working here is a fun challenge where you will be tested for your vast knowledge, quick understanding of complicated subjects, reason about its working and explain it to superiors, quality and fast deliveries of working products, and will certainly grow like no where else!"
This reminds me of the author of "Man's Search for Meaning" who wrote a international master piece while on a concentration camp. Yes, growth is there to be had, but that is an experience I would rather avoid, thank you.
Believing HR is like asking a barber if you need a haircut. You already know what the answer will be. I think it’s easier to get an accurate answer by asking tangentially related questions in the interview.
>This confuses the point with “doing work you may not want to do”
No. An example: Maybe you find “fulfilling” work but the pay is half what you could make elsewhere in your job market.
In that case, you should be certain that you are somehow compensated non-monetarily for that “missing half” of your salary. Otherwise you are simply making a donation to the company by working for much less than market-clearing salary.
Indeed. The internet helps bring up shades of these egos under the cover of anonymity, and SWEs are not immune to it - just check the anonymous forums to see what I mean. Leetcode overemphasis, holding someone in awe because he has a fancy title or once presented at some convention are traps most humans fall into.
When the CS pay is double EE pay, if not more, it's a non-starter.
If your primary goal is to make money as fast as possible. As said elsewhere, EE salary is roughly the 85th percentile in the US. If that is enough, there may be other social/psychological issues going on that skew the calculus.
Surely, there’s jobs that pay double SWE. And ones that pay double that. But I think most people would agree, there’s a certain point where it becomes absurd to focus solely on that.
It’s understandable when a physicist goes to work for a hedge fund, but when it becomes the prevailing track for degreed physicists, it might say something about our collective value system
I think the pseudo-moralist argument you are making is really cringe, as it's often the type of language the professional managerial class uses to shame employees into accepting less than they are worth. "You're not here for the money. You're here to make a difference." People work to live, not live to work, and so long as people trade their precious time for money, they will go where their skills are highly valued. Or if they want to make a difference they will remain in academia or work at a nonprofit. There really isn't an excuse for Intel not to pay their EEs a competitive wage when they made $42B in profit last year. Same goes for the rest.
I am not an advocate for that in the least. If it’s what you want to do, there’s no reason that means you shouldn’t be paid market rate. But that’s entirely different than distilling everything down to a single monetary dimension, which was my original point. What’s “cringe” to me is when all work is reduced to transactional measure of time and salary, implying the only measure of work is economic. That makes you nothing more than a wage slave in every sense of the word. There are certainly cases where that’s warranted like when it’s necessary to survive but if we’re talking about the difference between a SWE and EE that’s just not the case. That singly-focused economic mindset also seems to correlate with misery. My position is actually the opposite of the exploitative one you’re framing it as. When you are working solely for the paycheck, it’s easy to exploit yourself, foregoing a fulfilling career chasing dollars. Again, my point is people only talked about money. Not that SW providing them with a lower stress life, or the ability to work from home so they can spend more time with family, or any other reasonable goals. Even money is worthwhile if you frame it as a means to a good end, but I didn’t that. It was treated as an end unto itself.
We already know this isn’t intuitively rational. Why aren’t you spending all your free time taking side jobs? Presumably because you realize there’s an opportunity cost that is not merely economic. I’m saying the same thing, only people often somehow have been duped into thinking their 9-5 is somehow different.
Do you not think capitalism might drive most humans to think that way? Looking at most of your replies, it's definitely not a simple conclusion that "pay is a primary consideration".
Pay is the primary consideration because capitalism forces us to make it the primary consideration. Most folks would rather it not be, but when our survival depends on it, this is the result you get.
I think maybe you’re onto something. It reminded me of the parable of the NYC businessman who met a Mexican fisherman and was taken aback by the fact that the fisherman spent so much time drinking wine with friends and sitting in the sun on the beach. The businessman said “Well, it’s a disgrace that you’re leaving so much on the table. If you worked harder, you could get a fleet of boats and eventually make millions.”
The fisherman said, “After I make millions, then what will I do?”
And the businessman said, “Well, then you can spend your time drinking wine on the beach with your friends.”
To your point, I think a lot of people act like optimizing for wealth is the main goal simply because that’s what society has trained us to do.
I started as an EE and gradually moved over to software out of a mix of interests and career options.
Strangely, the EE degree seemed to trigger certain hiring managers into downplaying my software experience and lowballing my offers. A lot of "He's an electrical engineer but he can write some code too" introductions. I heard a lot of "Wow, you're really good at software for an EE!" from various people. The stereotypes out there are baffling, given how multi-talented all of my EE colleagues are.
There are companies out there that value EE experience and pay appropriately, but you have to look around. If you get stuck at a place where management believes CS = high pay and EE = necessary evil, it's time to get out.
What are you talking about? IT is the most degree inclusive industry ever by far, even in your example. I like EE and created many things, but don't have a degree. Everyone knows I can't get an interview there, let alone job, forget equality.
Rather than "computer" science, CS is actually "the science of problem solving"
Traditional engineering: you work on one field for X years to become a specialized expert of that field. The industry employs thousands of these "specialists" solving similar problems over and over.
CS/IT: you worked on one field for X years, codified your know how know why in a piece of software/algorithm/library, the field became so mature that minimum wage high schoolers can use your creations. You move on into the next highly demanded blue sea.
Needless to say which industry has higher productivity that could translate to higher income.
IT has been automating its lunch away for decades and now even more people work in IT. A paradox. There's no field more cannibalistic than IT. On top of it, most software is open source and yet salaries are high. Apparently making so much of our field free was not a disaster, another paradox. More recently, even AI is doing the same trick - years of task specific work replaced with a prompt and two examples executed by a huge model. No large training dataset needed. That's why we need even more people deploying it now, because it can solve so many tasks previously too difficult to even attempt.
I know you use the term 'paradox' loosely, but all you are saying is investments pay off, which is hardly a paradox!
The paradox is that automation didn't render us jobless.
That's not a paradox. The actual confusing thing is that people believe automation will make them jobless, despite economists not believing this happens, and "rich people fire everyone and replace them with computers" being the plot of Atlas Shrugged rather than a real life scenario.
Jobs come from comparative advantage and demand; demand is infinite and it's not possible for a worker to not have comparative advantage at something, even if it's niche.
I guess I'm part of the problem. I dual-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, I did well in both, and graduated with a B.S. in each.
Going into software development was a no brainer over EE. Twice the pay, "twice"* the job security, and no credentials needed beyond my degree and ability to deliver.
It was made even easier given that most of what I did during my EE project labs was doing the C coding that the other EEs didn't want to do. At that point I figured if I ever needed to go back to EE (some super-dot-com burst or whatever) I probably could.
* twice is just a vibe. Graduating in 2011, during a recession, there were NO junior EE jobs and I managed to get a coding job out of college.
Same. I had a whole career in H/W design, then moved into S/W as a second career (I had always been a coder through personal projects and writing some device drivers and hardware test programs). Much higher pay, and if you screw up : ship a patch. In recent decades the rise of SaaS has degraded the relative experience a bit -- H/W engineers don't often get to be paged in the night.
PhD in EE. Moved to software for better pay and more job openings. Now I optimize button colors.
Man, I can't put my finger on why exactly, but this fact makes me feel like humanity is irrefutably screwed in some way.
I think we're producing too many EE PhDs.
>> Now I optimize button colors
Hardware or software, either way you'll still be optimizing buttons!
Feel you man/woman
I graduated in EE and this is no surprise- hardware is hard and Google will throw you $500k a year to tweak the font on their internal compiler. Optics, Power engineering, ASIC design, it’s all fascinating and * really hard * and * really underpaid *.
It’s worrying in the long term, the industry’s been built on underpaid geniuses. We need them, but you can’t begrudge them moving to the money.
> I graduated in EE and this is no surprise- hardware is hard and Google will throw you $500k a year to tweak the font on their internal compiler
Google isn't really a great example because they are one of the few places to get highly paid EE / hardware jobs.
That said, there are many more software jobs than hardware jobs at Google.
I think he's pointing out the relative difficulty of hardware positions compared with being a 'software engineer' in FAANG.
Tinkering with junk to develop an interest in real electrical engineering: Totally resonates. Personal recollection from 1983-84 or so follows.
We had a broken black-and-white TV that was mined out for parts (tubes, resistors, capacitors etc) but the front shell with the CRT, high voltage anode connector and deflection coils remained.
How do we make this light up again with teenager-accessible loose parts? What can generate the necessary voltage? Oh, how about this car ignition coil. How to tickle the coil into generating this voltage, i.e. pulse its primary input? How about this "vibrator" from an ancient tube car radio (a mechanical chopper for turning DC into AC).
But how do we rectify multiple kilovolts? No suitable stack-of-diodes rectifier stick on hand. Oh well, resort to the original HV rectifier tube from the TV. But need to power its (directly heated cathode) filament. Cop-out: Do it with a battery or two.
Voila, bright spot on the CRT.
Can we make it move? Well sure, just apply a suitable voltage (trial and error!) 60Hz AC waveform to the horizontal deflection coil. Voila, a line.
What about the Y axis? Well, we can amplify a microphone with a stereo amplifier and drive the vertical deflection coil with the speaker output. Amplitude? Trial and error (volume control). This was getting pretty cool! Except that it was like seeing the waveform wrapped around a cylinder, seen from the side, because of the full sinusoid horizontal pattern. Which looked really neat, but...
I can crank up the horizontal deflection by increasing the voltage (I did have a VARIC based adjustable power supply - homemade of course) until only the linear-ish part of the sinewave remained onscreen. From there it was a straightforward matter of an RC phase shift to drive one of the control grids (found by trial and error by applying small DC voltages to various pins until the beam was blanked) to blank out the right-to-left direction.
And we had a sort of homemade oscilloscope.
This was cool in so many ways but only because the technological underpinnings were still relevant at the time. Nowadays it would be as ancient as dabbling with atmospheric steam engines. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere is still doing. As an extreme niche hobby without a clear track into a profitable career.
For the next generation it'll be 'hey, let's pull this tv apart', 'oh the chassis intrusion sensor tripped and every single IC inside it packed a tantrum and will now refuse to work without the vendor's $10k/mo software subscription'.
If there even is an “inside” and it’s not some kind of 1mm thick welded OLED-SoC-battery sandwich.
This is some manager at Intel complaining. This is Intel office space, shown on Conan O'Brien.[1] It's been a while since I was inside an Intel building, but that's exactly what it looked like. Multi-story buildings built from the ground up with acre-sized grey cube farms. And they wonder that they have a hiring problem.
I'd kill for a cubicle over a loud chaotic open office
Thanks for sharing this video. Until now I imagined, that such offices existed only in movies.
Ex intel employee. That video is p much how I genuinely feel about the place
According to the youtube description, that video was originally aired in 2007.
I guess the world needs orders of magnitudes more codemonkeys bashing away at their proverbial typewriters than those gods-amongst-men who actually build the chips on which all that spaghetti code crawls along.
(I'm a software developer, because the other thing, while obviously way cooler and more hardcore, sounded difficult and... I could teach myself how to program way easier than teach myself how to microprocessor design...)
I'm not sure why this is surprising. The structure of corporations as it stands is untenable for skilled workforce retention. in
In America, the business is run by "business" people, not by people who understands how to build the thing that the business claims to be building.
Layers and layers of management will not produce your next small arm powered microwave. So even if a company started off with success, eventually, it will be taken over by "business" people instead of a a committee of engineers+sales+product+marketing - all of whom work in sync.
You laugh at business majors? In America, they have more longevity than an engineer who specializes in a niche area.
Its the same problem everywhere now. Pay people what their skills are worth, or they'll walk and your business will go under. I really have no respect for margins or operating expenses, or the executives and government officials that, until now, have taken advantage of the working classes. According to the free market rules, any business which cannot sustain itself and its employees should fail. So, EE, buckle-up, things just got that difficult and you're in for some rough times unless you can start paying people what they're worth.
At our company, we have a hard time hiring new recruits for the maintenance engineering positions.
But I get why:
- the pay is relatively low
- you have to be on standby at night (in shifts, but still).
- you have to travel all across the country and you’re suppose to do this in your own time (only the time on site with the customer are payed working hours).
I wouldn’t pick a job like that either.
Everyone in these comments sounds like they are just trying to beat the system. Mindlessly optimize income above all else.
I'm a mechanical, electrical and systems engineer. A hardware person. I design medical devices mostly. Yes I could make more money being a dev, a data scientist, etc. But I don't want that. I deeply enjoy, love what I do. I love that I can receive a list of requirements on Monday and sit down in CAD and design something, order it by Friday and build a medical device prototype the next week. It's so satisfying, and it's what I've wanted to do since I was 5.
I dont make the kind of salary that folks are saying here for a FAANG data scientist, but close - and I haven't sold my soul. I deeply love what I do, I have chosen to do the part I love and am deeply talented at rather than the part that pays the most. I still get paid handsomely.
Hopefully this inspires another person like me to say it's OK to not maximize your income, it's ok to do what you love and are passionate about. You'll still be ok.
Engineer turned programmer in the UK. I put the salary discrepancy down to the ease with which I can move jobs. In programming I can bounce around different companies every couple of years in the same city. In engineering things are so frequently sub-industry and even employer specific. If you’re the only person that can operate a company’s machinery that’s great, but if that machinery is unique to that company that doesn’t mean you can get employment elsewhere.
I graduated from EE, spent many years learning how electromagnetic fields impact traces if they are positioned incorrectly, how to measure radiation patterns and design antennas. I could still design a simple sensor module without having touched the field for 10 years.
I am more than happy to be a software engineer and earn 3x over what I would earn for a much more stressful job as an EE. A software bug in production or a bad deployment - do an RCA and you are fine. Ship a PCB to mass production with a weird design fault you somehow missed through all the Greek versions.. and you have a nice bill to explain to the management.
>I am more than happy to be a software engineer and earn 3x over what I would earn for a much more stressful job as an EE. A software bug in production or a bad deployment - do an RCA and you are fine. Ship a PCB to mass production with a weird design fault you somehow missed through all the Greek versions.. and you have a nice bill to explain to the management.
This exact thing happened to me at my first job out of college. I had a small error in my prototype PCB design for my first PCB design ever, and management used it to justify giving me a bad review and no raise. I ended up leaving the job after less than a year, and not long after I was doing software. I never looked back.
As far as I'm concerned, American companies simply should not do hardware. American management cares too much about short-term results and has no long-term vision, so they should concentrate of work that supports that way of thinking, like software. Leave the hardware to companies and cultures that can think long-term, like the Asian nations.
In addition to the pay aspects many have mentioned here, I think another huge problem is accessibility of the knowledge and the ability to practice it early on.
My experience in becoming a professional software engineer started when my parents got me hooked on computer programming as child. Computers weren't nearly as cheap when I was a kid as they are now (90s and 00s), but writing random software was mostly just limited by my imagination. All but the most advanced concepts could be experimented with on a laptop.
EE and hardware design is so much harder to access. The software is very expensive and the open source versions are very limited in comparison (I love Kicad but it's no Altium). Protocols for anything you'll find in consumer devices is locked down behind tons of fees, NDAs, etc. Parts are locked down in the same way. No one will talk to you unless you want to order tens of thousands of components at a time.
I wonder if the "employers of X occupation pay too little for required skill set" articles will ever cease.
What do carpenters, electrical engineers, and grade school teachers have in common? They've all had this exact same article hit the HN front page about them in the past year. It's not interesting and any solution other than "pay more or accept the shortage" is worthless.
Yeah, I don't think they will cease. Frustrated managers that cannot fill a position will always produce these as they literally have nothing to do with the lack of workers. My university was filled with 'accelerator' companies because of this: It is very hard to find talent on the market and everyone is aware of the reason. It also doesn't matter that everyone commenting here knows the reason and are willing to spell it out every time one of these articles shows up.
There are thousand plus companies that are specialized on finding talent for other companies just because of how difficult it is. I wouldn't be surprised if there already exists companies that hire these talent-seeking companies for your company.
It seems like undergrads are entering ECE/EECS departments with far more programing experience as well, and there is far more awareness / advertisement / (over)hyping of "glamorous" FAANG-type environments and trajectories. As compared to EE companies where the perception is that jobs are far more "traditional".
Regarding the article's comments on the decline of tinkering, either it's causal or correlated, but it seems like students have far less physics (E&M) exposure than programming experience, and many don't want to grind through the math required (differential equations is often taught poorly, contributing to this phenomenon). So it's seen as far simpler to just do as little EE as possible to finish the degree and get the sweet SWE job.
There are a few commenters here (out of 120+ currently) noting that lots of EE work has moved to Asia. How much of this article is accurate and how much of it represents a huge blindspot in the USA/Euro market perspective?
This is a symptom of an outdated curriculum and lack of a future in the industry in North America.
Electrical Engineering is a very hot and in demand degree in South / South East Asia precisely because that's where all the jobs are.
The curriculum is fine. The entirety of the problem is correctly identified by the remainder of your statements.
Nope. EEs still earn relatively less here despite electrical and infrastructure projects in general not slowing down yet. You might think that since we're still in a developing economy, careers in formal engineering should pay more but in reality, compared to the tech sector, the pay is still abysmal.
People say supply/demand but also they is price stickiness/anchoring.
A grad SF coder might make $200k but in Europe they might make $20k and I believer the main reason is that prices are sticky.
Like the housing market when you want to buy X you need to judge what X is worth and so you look to the market to see what other people are paying for X.
Candidates too are playing the same game.
The talent market acting like the stock market effectively.
This means SF companies have to be very profitable or grow fast.
A European company can plot along and be efficient, have bad sales etc. but survive on the cheap staff costs for a long time a a zombie.
It means any well tuned geo-arb company, selling in the US and paying locals outside can make a fortune.
Someone in 2050 “when i was young you could earn a fortune as a software engineer because for some reason they didn’t have the efficient global labour market we have now. Now that all the coders work for Uber Code many have decided electrical engineering is actually a better choice as it pays a bit more”
In a software engineer. My cousin is an electrical engineer working at a large power distribution firm.
For all intents and purposes his job is absolutely critical to society. I basically fumble around and do a few projects for my clients.
I get paid several times more than him.
I am happy for myself but it makes no sense to me how society is mispricing our work.
Mechanical engineers are similarly low-paid.
Some time back I hired a few MechE's (with advanced degrees) to write simulation code for a startup. I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role, which turned out to be a significant amount more than the same job would have paid if they had a different title (they would have been doing substantially the same work at Honda/John Deere/Ford/Boeing/Lockheed/etc.).
Strange.
> I paid them what I thought was fair for a Bay Area coding role
The 'fair' pay in the Bay area is sustained/inflated by the vast amounts of VC money with a _huge_ appetite for risk. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is absolutely unique, you just don't have those finance conditions anywhere else in the world, bar maybe New York.
Also all the quoted companies in your comment will have physical goods with way way smaller profit margins compared to most Bay area products.
My point is that it is not strange at all if you follow the money.
Those same companies pay much more in the same metro areas for different titles, working on those small profit margin items you speak of, like electric vehicles and satellites. Journeyman software developer plunking along in a middling role gets A; while a mechanical engineer, with graduate degrees and who actually grasps the material, writing well-formed Modelica code, gets B.
That made me go "hmm."
>In a software engineer. My cousin is an electrical engineer working at a large power distribution firm. >For all intents and purposes his job is absolutely critical to society. I basically fumble around and do a few projects for my clients. >I get paid several times more than him.
If your cousin and all his fellow power EEs quit for software jobs, how would this affect the pay for these EE positions?
Supply and demand is a cruel mistress. If power electronics could scale up to hundreds of millions of customers with relatively flat headcount and capital intensity you might see unicorns too.
Or they don't extract enough from the market. Maybe they should be getting 50% of electricity price.
Based on the comments here, it looks like people have this notion of "Work in XYZ domain is hard/important/impactful and should get paid more".... but that isn't how pay works in real world.
Pay is mostly a compensation that is "good enough for you to not walk away". HR will not choose to pay more because you bring more money to the table. But bringing more money to the table gives you leverage on a negotiation table.
In this case a very large fraction of EE's are walking away from the career into Software related jobs because that is where they are getting money that is "good enough for you to not walk out". So while previously companies working on semi-conductor, power electronics, RF design, where competing within the field, now they are bleeding grads into another 'transferable' skills field i.e. anything that touches software.
These companies either accept a full migration of HW design to Asia, which will last them a few more years until the COL is raised in China, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. Or they indeed have to accept that the cost of goods just got marginally more expensive and labour costs on design will have to increase.
To quote the late Ray Liotta "Fuck you, pay me!".
I recall when there were still engineering magazines and the focus was what was going on in the US. Then, as China was able to dupe the useful idiot free traders, and all the manufacturing went there, there was less and less need for electrical engineers in the US.
Just before those magazines folded, it was more about trying to manage offshored manufacturing than doing any real engineering work. The more tenacious engineers were learning Mandarin to try to stretch their careers, but the writing was on the wall.
China graduates 7 times more engineers than the US now, and most of the people who would be suitable for an EE degree are going into finance or web dev.
EE here and done a lot of software. The economics of software vs hardware remuneration goes something like this. Doctors and Lawyers provide skilled service to untrained individuals, and they make decent money. As a hardware engineer you provide your labour to a company that typically knows at least as much as you do about your work. And the company has usually at least handful of people on staff who can take over your work if they decide to let you go.
So, not surprisingly, it comes down to power in the value chain. Doctors and lawyers have it, hardware engineers do not. Software engineers on the other hand deal with code that few people beyond a handful would really understand your code. It's not as easy to swap you out for another guy. Then, the cost of producing a new instance of a piece of software that is already working is very low. You make one website, tomorrow 100,000 people could use it. Hardware on the other costs typically at least a few hundred dollars for each unit. Software creates much more value especially on the web with zero marginal cost ... except maybe a bit of marketing until it goes viral.
So, software engineers create much more economic value (typically) because zero marginal cost and are harder to replace because software is inscrutable. So they make more than hardware engineers that do harder stuff much less cash.
Not unlike comparing the salaries of NBA players vs underwater hockey players.
Stop tying engineering to universities and the problem will be solved. People want careers, they want to solve complex problems, and we have more tooling and knowledge than ever to do so. The problem is U S. Education is squeezing it dry.
In the U.K. you can go for engineering in many fields without it breaking the bank or having to compete for the top 0.1% of schools.
If india, Taiwan, and china can do better than the U.S. - there's a big problem. Rebuild the system.
While still fairly expensive, you don’t have to be in the top 0.1% to go into engineering.
I don't see us producing a surplus of EEs here despite that
This couldn't possibly be more wrong – we need fewer engineers, not more. We face two inescapable realities:
1. Hardware engineers should be located near manufacturing facilities, and should speak the same language as factory workers.
2. The economy in its infinite wisdom is signaling that Software engineers are more valuable than hardware engineers. Assembling and optimizing the logic of human society is an extremely productive task, and results in huge profits for companies. For unit of time it is more productive to write backend software which controls the behavior of physical objects, than to re-design physical objects to be marginally more efficient.
There are lots of engineering grads getting jobs – in East Asia, earning a fraction of the salaries here, and working 12 hour days 6 days per week. US engineering graduates are retraining en-masse to be software engineers. The average newly minted hardware engineer graduate has a very low chance of finding a job, and will likely end up earning less than a skilled laborer. The lives of talented Americans are valuable, and should not be wasted learning unneeded skills.
It's the pay stupid.
As a data engineer I could make a base salary of $300k quite easily.
As an electrical engineer I could hardly make $80k for a lot more work.
Guess which one I picked as my full time job?
What does a data engineer making 300k do of its days?
Promptly reply to emails with impeccable spelling and grammar.
If there's a problem, then companies will pay out money. If companies aren't paying out money, is there really a problem?
Given that, it sounds like students are making a rational economic choice to avoid an underpaid profession.
I studied elec eng for 4 years in the UK up to masters level. I went from being top of the class with a good knowledge of maths/physics to struggling. A few people moved from elec eng to cs and went from failing to getting a 1st. On graduation I had options to work in defense building radar and all sorts of stuff, but I didn't have the confidence to take up any of those options. I took a programming job which was basically adding numbers up, saving stuff to a database which I actually had some chance of succeeding in. I'd imagine within a couple of years that job would be paying double what I could make doing engineering.
I see quite a few places doing embedded work in the uk that involves some electronics. When I did need to do something that involved elec eng recently we did a procurement which ended up in an Indian company providing some custom built Arduino devices to do signal testing and report back to us. They were pretty good, but there was no sensible option where we could get the same thing done in Europe on budget.
Follow the pay. Everyone I knew in EECS flipped to the CS route because software salaries are so damn high. Electronics became a low margin commodity business, software somehow hasn't. And somehow the software industry has enough revenue to warrant hiring at a rapid clip (VC capital?).
Unless software margins collapse or we end up with a dev glut, there's no way EE can bid labor up to match.
Related articles:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/08/semiconductor_enginee...
https://semiwiki.com/events/314964-a-crisis-in-engineering-e...
Smallish, recentish discussions:
America's chip land has another potential shortage: Electronics engineers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048654 - July 2022 (5 comments)
Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012660 - July 2022 (32 comments)
Personally I think from a business standpoint its just much easier to make money from software compared to hardware.
Very low marginal unit costs, easy distribution, faster iteration, easier to scale, etc...
I agree but as a developer I have zero clue how to come up with useful ideas that haven't been done a hundred times over. And I have had zero success trying to find a platform for freelancers where you don't have to compete with less experienced third world coders underbidding everyone (and the customers always seem to pick them anyway).
When the money comes, so will the engineers. I did EE, work in embedded SW because it was way easier to find a job with decent pay. Everyone looking for EEs was pickier and paying less :/.
Maybe when this "shortage" materializes and companies have to start paying EE the same as SW I'll try my luck. No reason to for now, though.
The drop is due to less demand (my guess would be due to increased automation in the hardware design process). If there was an actual shortage of electrical engineers, salaries would reflect that. In fact, the opposite is the case and Software Engineers are compensated better, reflecting higher demand compared to supply.
I'm not surprised. I was a double EE/CS major as an undergrad, and earned an MSEE. My career has been mostly software, though, and the economics of what EE vs. SWE get paid makes it very unlikely that I'd ever move back since it would mean (at best) making < 50% of my current compensation.
This is kind of depressing. I'm in computer engineering but I have a few friends in electrical engineering. I could really see that their workload is so much heavier and much more relevant to society than ours but the pay gap is just ridiculous.
I loved tinkering with electronics when I was younger - still do to a smaller degree. I built my first computer by fixing some blown capacitors on a motherboard I found in the trash.
Back in the day, lots of products came with schematics, now you might get a lawsuit if you dare to take something apart.
It was way easier to take apart and tweak through hole components too - now everything is surface mount or on chip and it’s much harder to get into with just a soldering iron.
The first thing I ever did was rewire a stereo to broadcast instead of receive to make a little pirate radio station - really, none of those things exist anymore.
I think it’s just a harder thing to get into now.
Surface mount isn't that big of a deal. A cheap hot air gun, a soldering iron, flux, and some solder paste are all you need to work with most BGAs, QFN, and other modern packages. PCB prototype manufacturing has never been cheaper thanks to companies like JLCPCB. With all the fantastic learning material on YouTube, open source tools like KiCad, and inexpensive chinese test equipment, the kids these days can do WAY more than I could dream of back in the 90s.
Not only that, but doing any rework with surface mount is usually much easier than with thru-hole or DIP chips. Removing a DIP chip usually means snipping the leads off (thus ruining the chip) and individually pulling each severed leg out with an iron and solder-sucker. By contrast, an SOIC-type chip can be removed in seconds with a hot-air gun.
Could not agree more. I have designed my first PCB in Kicad as a MIT licence project.
Kicad ecosystem is very much alive and I was able to reuse dimensions from another project for the same computer.
I made a RAM expansion board for Sharp X68000. You can check it out on https://github.com/stas2k/galspanic
But, I mean, you could get by with just a $10 soldering iron from RadioShack. It’s just harder to get into and tinker with is my point - which I think you just supported?
I do surface mount with a $20 hotplate from Target. A lot of parts you can even do with a soldering iron. I know it looks scary but once you give it a try you'll find it's not really any harder than through-hole and doesn't require any special equipment.
I find SMT easier than through-hole. And I say B.S. to your line of "rewire a stereo to broadcast instead of receive". There's very little commonality between a stereo and a Transmitter. Whatever, there are still thousands of Hams building Transmitters.
Don’t know what to tell you other than I did. It only would broadcast around the house and maybe a few houses down.
Here is someone else doing it as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=AudEdHpXTi4&f...
I teach kids how to solder at the local Makerspace, I start with SMT first because it's easier - through hole requires more skill and you have to be more aware of heat management to do it well.
We stockpile old proto boards that were never used for practice and give the kids old motherboards and hot air to scavenge from for practice
The main issue with working as an EE is that you can’t get useful experience without working in the industry and picking up all sorts of tacit knowledge that one can grab only by working. This creates a huge gate keeping effect. Contrast that with SW where so much of the sausage making is accessible in the form of open source projects.
Another difficulty is that with the offshoring of so much EE work to Taiwan etc, many US companies only want to hire senior EEs who can direct projects overseas. This unfortunately kills of paths of growth for junior EEs in the US.
The article is basically saying that there is a focus on commoditising tech talent for what builds shareholder value, and a loss of the passion, imagination and richness that tech can add to the world.
My own relationship with tech reflects in that: I despise some of the things that tech is used for and has managed to amplify in our species. I still pursue my passion because somewhere deep down I know that it could also be different: That the power of technology can also be used to magnify and infuse the world with values that make our existence worthwhile and wondrous.
Intel cancelled their sponsorship of Intel Science Talent Search. That was a relatively cheap way to build goodwill and cultivate the talent pipeline.
ISEF was a competition among parents and professors living vicariously through children
My kid was an ISEF finalist and even won a small bit of prize money. It's never been a big deal at our high school and he was one of the first, if not the first, from our school to advance beyond the state finals. His project was completely self-driven with off the shelf parts or tools he designed and 3D printed.
I was amazed/disgusted to see finalists partnered with the JPL and working with NASA partnerships and university labs when my kid tinkered mostly solo in our garage or his bedroom. It really made me proud of what he was able to accomplish.
The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days.
Time to finally turn EE into a software discipline. Then some decent tools will be developed and normal folk will be willing to design stuff.
The tools EEs used even IN the DOS days were already graphical. Tablets were used for input, pre-mouse. Workstations were expensive, because they were graphics workstations, not text terminals. The chips DOS ran on were designed on graphical layout systems.
I was going to say the same thing. As an EE in the late 80s I got to use some kick-ass workstations and leading edge GUI frameworks (e.g. MentorGraphics). The company I worked for also wrote their own CAD system for VLSI design. I never touched DOS.
> The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days.
EE here. That's not really true. Some of the proprietary vendor tools feel dated, but dropping into Altium to design a PCB definitely feels like a modern tool set.
> The tools for EEs are old, creaky, text-based stuff from the DOS days.
Care to name a couple? Because that doesn't sound right at all.
The GUIs I have the misfortune of using on a regular basis are VCS and Design Compiler. They are laggy and stuffed full of weird bugs.
However, 99% of the time I'm using the text interface instead since I can type faster/easier than I can move a mouse accurately around, and I'm mostly running scripts anyway. The tools mostly produce textual output so it seems natural to give them textual input. So while they do suck, it's because they are not seen as worth investing in, and the vendors are probably right about that. Some new hires do miss the shiny interface at first but then they go on to get stuff done. Plenty wrong with EE tooling but text-based isn't one of them.
A poor workman blames his tools.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I properly understood that somewhat trite line.
It isn't implying that a good workman has the skills to work wonders with bad tools, it's that a good workman will make damn sure they won't have bad tools to begin with.
So you'll sign up to use crappy tools to design hardware with millions of elements?
This isn't about chest-beating. Its about attracting people to a discipline which is currently arcane because of obtuse tools.
Worth noting also that a lot of the more specialized roles that someone like Intel or the few other HW companies need is increasingly specialized, meaning MS and PhD. That makes it all the more frustrating to encounter these salary disparities others have described.
Part of what's happening here may also relate to the fact that EE PhDs are dominated by international students (70-80%), compared to ~10% in CS undergrad. That gives companies a lot of negotiating power to drag down the average salary.
After my EE degree, every time an article came out about the 'shortage' of electrical engineers, we would all look at each other and snort and ask "has anyone landed a job doing real EE?", and the answer was always a very small number of grads.
At least where I'm from, there is no shortage, it's all bullshit. Universities keep pumping out more EE grads than are needed. I guess it keeps supplies high.
Might be a language thing. Observationally, the products of hardware design cross language barriers better than software/UX. Therefore software producers compete mostly within their own language, but hardware producers must complete globally. This would tend to produce a deficit of HW engineers in countries like the US/UK, just because there isn't as much money to chase vs software.
I'm a mechanical engineer and I can give a similar perspective. I'm now in software engineering and I'm doing well. My other classmates who moved into consulting or finance are doing even better. Those who stayed in engineering have struggled. I live in a developing country: too poor to manufacture anything high-tech, too rich with strong labour laws to manufacture anything low-tech. My friends who stayed in engineering are "installation engineers" or "sales engineers" or "stand-by engineers" since the products they use/sell/watch over are designed elsewhere. Those who are in design firms have suffered layoffs and company bankruptcies.
My friends in engineering are passionate about what they do which is why they stick with it. I like the intellectual challenge I get from software engineering and the people I work with. I'm glad I get paid well for it too. I don't think I would get the same level of stimulation in an "engineering" firm here and certainly not the same salary.
I attended a top notch school for EE, where I specialized in optics and photonics. After witnessing one of our top lab graduates bag a 100k photonics job, I realized I had to switch, so I transferred into ML where the math was significantly easier but the pay was far better.
Now all I do is tune hyper parameters, but man I miss all the wild mind-blowing physics that photonics had to offer.
I am making a second post here.
Dave Packard once asked in a famous speech, "Why do people form or join companies?"
It's not to make money or create wealth, ultimately. That might be the goal, but not the reason.
It is so they can do things together that they couldn't otherwise do on their own.
Because otherwise they would on their own, you might say.
So if you think about that, that says a lot about what work is.
I wanted to build computer chips, but CS pays so much more.
I graduated in Electrical Engineering & I feel the spectrum of things one learnt in EE makes for a very well rounded engineer. That being said, only a fraction of PhDs awarded nowadays are "core EE" topics.
I can safely say I am a better SWE because of the EE grounding back in the day.
I find it very funny that this article came out right after the deadline for university applications passed here (Greece).
Anyway, I chose a CS Bachelor’s program with just enough EE classes to qualify for a MEng in EE later. I was thinking about starting from EE (I’m equally interested in both subjects, if not a bit more in EE) but I was discouraged by comparing salary info and seeing many dissatisfied electrical engineers. If things look better in 4 years I’ll do my Master’s in EE.
I would prefer if I could do both degrees at the same time, even if it meant more coursework and slightly longer time to complete. I can do a version of this with the degree I chose, studying n subjects in CS and n subjects in EE instead of 2n in only one of these, but ideally it should be 2n in both.
You could study both. CS degree is worthless, nobody asks for it. So take EE degree and study CS in parallel. You can attend classes without being signed.
I did an EE degree first, then CS; I like EE and I enjoy the tinkering. My father taught me electronics since I was young (5) and I always like the smell of soldering and my hands have many battle scars. However, cs always paid so much more that I lost electronics for a while until I worked on smarter-payment card product and the other payment products we did. It was a lot of fun prototyping and optimising every cpu cycle and memory storage bit to push down the cost 1 cent at a time, but also being able to swap in and out parts to save more costs and make it more robust and better quality. I wish I could do it fulltime but SE just pays a lot more, especially as senior and I also like that a lot.
There is a dimension that is missing on tue conversation on pay:
The farther you are from the end customer, the lower your pay is going to be.
There are too many levels of abstraction and distance between EE work product and the end consumer.
Reduce that distance, and watch EE pay skyrocket.
I'll never understand this. It's my opinion that you need to be much smarter to be an electrical engineer than a computer scientist, which again requires much more intellectual rigor than being a 'software engineer'. The kinds of wages companies are paying for just about anyone to write Node.js right now are ridiculous. My view is that this state of affairs can't possibly last forever, given how low the bar is. I imagine that eventually the standards will rise again as more intelligent people are attracted by the absurd pay, and the field becomes more competitive.
Any EE remember 5-10 years ago when all the ECE folks online had a HUGE chip on their shoulders about absolutely needing an MS?
Kind of funny to see software people outearn them 10x these days. That's what gatekeeping does to you.
Am one of the black sheep of my Electrical Engineering batch who moved to software. Why? The steep learning curve that involved loads of memorization of long formulae and static values which sucked for someone like me.
An easier, and more forgiving entry path based on self-learning ("hack my way through") in software development as compared to the entry barriers of EE - especially in India where Oscilloscopes and other equipment were crazy expensive some decades ago.
20% of my batch has moved to software over the last 25 years, compensation being one key factor.
I am a chemical engineer by education and I am also part of this problem. It did not take me very long at all to figure out where the actual money is and transition to full time software development.
I suspect it's been that way for a while. I graduated with Electrical and Computer Engineering degrees last century plus several years, with a schedule to go into the AF about a year later. No one wanted to hire me as an EE for "such a short time", but one crusty old NASA aeronautical engineer, who told me to "stay the hell away from this field you'll die from neglect" and to play up my software skills. First phone call pitching my coding skills and got an interview and offer on the phone in 15 minutes, drove over and went to work after lunch writing a custom assembly language application that took six months. It worked too and made the company a lot of money, and the boss told me to do whatever I wanted for the rest of the time I was there.
I don't know the answer to their puzzle. I really don't and I feel like I'm hurting The Industry and those in it because of that.
I'm a savage software engineer with a mutt academic pedigree, even though I'm sidling closer to the civilized EE side. But I really don't know if that's the right choice, ya know?
So, I'll spiral into further existential dread because I can't coordinate these choices with others.
"On the Brink of Extinction", That's some grim storytelling right there...
When skilled labor is turned into a commodity through regulatory capture, it unfortunately bids down the opportunity cost of a labor sector. Global minimums are natural as western businesses forgo ownership, in exchange for foreign authoritarian or subsidized labor pools.
The fruit of outsourcing tastes rotten, but people still love their iPhones. ;)
How about people use some of that STEM money to train thousands of new CEOs and Fund managers. This would drive down the relative top wages, create more competition, and increase tax revenue.
This is like every article about not being able to find people to do the work: the salaries ARE SHIT. This is exactly the same as articles about shortages of infosec and COBOL people.
Was ECE in undergrad - graduated in 2014. Everyone I knew went into software. There just weren't that many opportunities in HW if you didn't want to get a masters/+PHD.
Seems like a software-bubble in the US; I've worked at FAANG and never understood why I was getting paid so much to do such mundane work. Hardware is so much more fascinating.
N+1. B.S. ECE back in 2006, worked hard for long hours in the industry right out of college, called it quits and did some other stuff, came back to software for twice the pay.
I think there's actually an engineering reason for this shift to "soft" tech: the workflow for software development is way better (at least IMO).
There is just so much more information available and so many nicer tools available for the fledgeling developer. You have a huge library of languages, frameworks, tutorials and open source projects that need another pair of hands. This makes a difference when community and quick learning is desirable.
"While computer science course take-up had gone up by over 90 percent in the past 50 years, electrical engineering (EE) had declined by the same amount" Well yes, computer science used to be just a specialization of EE. Not that I don't think the EE scene is a little sad these days (I am currently an EE student) but I think this is important that we don't forget that EE has been split into a bunch of specializations.
>Well yes, computer science used to be just a specialization of EE.
Huh? No, it wasn't. CS started out as a specialization in the Math department, since CS is really just an extension of mathematics.
EE is very math-heavy compared to other engineering fields, but CS never came from EE though there's a lot of overlap.
A lot of programmers sure came from the EE field
I don’t blame people because they choose IT instead of EE - you don’t have to commute and there is no direct danger to your health if you fuck something up. But it is a big problem for the environment if we don’t have people who can repair stuff because it will force us to buy new every time something is broken. If there only was something that could incentivise people to work in EE… $$$
I graduated as an EE, worked as a digital designer (writing verilog) but the job felt perilous and pay didn’t compensate for that.
As a software dev, I can find a job seemingly anywhere. As an digital designer, there seemed to be 10 or so companies I could work at globally.
Given the boom/bust cycles the chip industry experiences, and the few employers, the pay should be way higher.
I'm interested in hearing how you found transitioning from digital design to software development and what did you have to study in order to pass software interviews? I've also been a digital design engineer for the past 3-4 years since graduating but I would like to move into software development for my next job. I have some experience programming and a basic knowledge of CS/software topics but presumably not as much as a CS grad and would have to spend some time learning to close the knowledge gap.
My 'strategy' was to take a job that needed software help, but couldn't pay well (university). My idea was to leverage the fact that the university offered free courses to employees, that I would work and backfill the formal education.
I did follow through on that partially, but I found that the hands on experience was more important for employment than the degree, so I still work without a CS degree on my wall.
As far as the leetcode stuff goes, I work for a large company, but I don't work in big tech so largely hasn't been a problem. My first job knew I had skills programming but not formal education, so they didn't grill me. After working there for a while, I had enough work experience and a few contacts that allowed me to pretty much get a written invitation to my next gig. In the companies I've wanted to work for (and I have pretty much decided not to work for MMANG companies and imitators) the emphasis has been on culture fit, experience building solutions, and references. I luckily haven't had to memorize solutions to canned problems to prove my worth.
If I changed my mind and wanted to get the MMANG money/problems, I'd just get a copy of 'cracking the coding interview' and practice up. If you can write working RTL and test benches, you already have the skills to start as a software dev. In my opinion, going back to school would be a waste of time/resources. I am still working to backfill with theory, but I do it in my free time and I know I understand (and enjoy it) more than I would cramming it into a semester class.
At some time in the past departments made a distinction between electrical engineers who focused on power engineering versus electrical engineers who focused on digital computer hardware/software. Discussions at one time indicated the numbers of "power engineering" students was dwindling to a worrisome extent.
Is this distinction still made?
I come from an engg school in India where after 12th, the cream of the crowd joined EE. 80% of these kids were hired by software firms right after college. Other went on to do masters in CS or MBA. Out of a few thousand EE that I know of, I don't know 1 who works as an engineer. I'm not sure why nobody considered continuing ?
I've read through half of the comments and still didn't read the most obvious reasons why SE or CS is much more in demand:
* You can change software much faster than hardware
* You can customize software exactly to your needs in hours, depending on the skill of the SE even in minutes
* You can use hardware in ways beyond the initial purpose by changing the software
I graduated with a BSEE and worked as an EE for 6~ yr in hardware design, mostly as a generalist before switching outright to embedded FW. I make more money and have greater autonomy. I like hardware but enjoy firmware an equal amount and would only switch back into a role that encompassed both (like engineering lead, etc)
I worked at Intel for 5+ years. I was a CS grad and most of my peers were EE grads. The amount of folks who I saw over the years retrain themselves for a move to software development was pretty large. If this is happening at a blue blood for EEs it's a decent sign the market is drying up.
As a child I was equally interested in hardware and software but ultimately ended up earning an MSEE because I wanted to design CPUs. At the time I was in school (early-mid 2000's), software development generally wasn't viewed as being significantly higher paying than EE. The huge boom in software development didn't seem to start until at least a few years after I graduated. While I was in school the general sentiment toward the tech industry in general was somewhat negative due to the recent bursting of the 90's tech bubble. That said I do recall a meeting during my senior year of undergrad called by the chair of the EE department asking for all graduating seniors' thoughts as to why enrollment in the EE program had dropped off so much since our class started. I think "other engineering disciplines are less difficult" was a much more common answer than “significantly higher pay in software".
Throughout my first several years working as a CPU designer, I watched as the software industry expanded rapidly. The potential pay seemed to be much higher than what was available as a CPU/IC designer, and on multiple occasions I seriously considered a career change into software development. The CPU/IC design industry seemed to be consolidating during this same time period.
Then shortly before COVID hit, I started learning of various large software companies moving into the custom IC space, and the number of opportunities available to CPU/IC designers seemed to be expanding. Over the last year or so my pay has increased significantly due to the apparent worker shortage our industry has been experiencing. It's not as high as what I've read an average FAANG SWE can make, but it's now high enough that I'm not feeling the same urge to make a career change that I was several years ago. I'm able to work mostly remote, have a great team, and get to solve interesting problems. That said, a fair amount of my work does consist of writing code. Having said that, the semiconductor industry seems to be notoriously volatile. Things are good now but could quickly take a turn for the worst. All of the software companies currently experimenting with designing their own custom ICs could decide these side projects are no longer viable.
If I was giving advice to a current college student, I would probably steer them toward software development rather than hardware. The unfortunate reality is that there seems to be many more opportunities and much higher pay potential working in software development than hardware. If I had started college 10+ years later I would have become a software developer. Is the CPU/IC design industry different from other EE fields in terms of potential pay and job opportunities? Maybe it depends on the specific employer.
All the manufacturing is off-shored and so the EEs are too. It's that simple.
Not just electrical engineering - I was recently talking to my daughter who goes to a big tech university in the US. Very few students are enrolling in many engineering disciplines including civil engineering.
I don’t get it. If there’s a shortage of EEs, which are required for tech to operate, wouldn’t salaries rise up because of the demand? I mean, tech isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.. is it?
1. Yes- as salaries are still low, you should be skeptical that companies are really trying to get talent.
2. On the other hand, the US(and/or EU) is not the only market. If engineers are being corned by the established large firms here, then instead of raising salaries to compete, smaller firms are simply killed off and replaced by foreign suppliers. China and India have very competent engineers, and make tons of US consumer products.
3. "Companies should just raise salaries and train up talent!" is obviously true, but there's still a large time lag between raising salaries and new graduates. EE salaries have been horrible and hard to find for 20+ years and freshman still get told repeatedly that EE is well paid and highly demanded. In the meantime, people retire later and the eventual crash just gets worse.
All of the above coming from an EE/ECE graduate who immediately went into CS because the TC is easily 3x higher
If there’s such a shortage why aren’t EEs paid more than CS grads?
They don't deliver value as rapidly as devs do. Hardware has massive lead time and substantial pre-production costs, can't possibly compete with iteration rate of pure software.
If the higher value work is in SW that explains the shortage.
Perhaps there will be a wage spike if there's less EEs
Just like all the supply chain issues we've seen unfold, we are due for a nasty correction when all the would-be EE's end up as software engineers.
I have an MS ECE from Georgia Tech and did embedded systems for the first 4 years out of school. The pay was terrible, promotions were rare. So I left.
Engineering professors tend to be proud of being assholes. EE professors are proud of being bigger assholes than mechanical engineers.
If EE jobs paid $500k a year like SWE (in the Bay), I assure you you’d have a lot more. It’s all about incentives.
What is the best way to switch from software engineering to EE or hardware engineering?
I assume you do not do scrum and agile practices.
This is why I think places like sparkfun and adafruit do the Lord’s work.
In addition to agreeing with the general sentiments expressed here about software paying more, there is a lot more to it. Here are a few things that probably aren't getting enough attention. I love chip design, but I am totally disillusioned with the engineering side of the business. I am actively trying to get away from it, whether it is move to the business side or management or even switch into software.
- It is a job, not a career. Because the industry is so consolidated and highly specialized, there are actually very few jobs available. This is why I believe it pays so much less than software. Don't like the pay, the management, your coworkers, the career advancement? Where are you going to go? There are only a couple of options which may or may not be hiring for your specialty and you can only hop around so much since there are few employers. Having tons of jobs to choose from isn't just about getting more pay, it is another form of job security and freedom. This industry doesn't have that.
- I get the whole argument that software is more capital efficient and so more money can be spent on salaries, and it may be part of the reason, but not the majority. Many of these hardware companies are quite profitable. They don't pay more because there are no market pressures forcing them to. I don't expect this to change even with a looming talent shortage. I know someone with a PhD, probably ~20-25 years of experience, and has spent their entire career in a single area which gives them deep domain knowledge and is making slightly more than what an L4 SWE(4-8 years experience with a Bachelor's Degree?) at Google(assuming I the information I have seen on Google pay grades are accurate). This is total comp by the way and even adjusting further for geo differences doesn't change the comparison much. Yet this is considered pretty good for our field. It is almost a sense of entitlement on the part of the semiconductor industry that they shouldn't have to compete on pay. On a couple occasions long ago I heard from official HR communications and high level management at Intel say something to the effect of being proud about paying "around industry average". Weird how they don't want average employees or average work/life balance though.
- Salaries don't appear to have been influenced much by Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft getting into the business. Disclaimer: I haven't looked deeply into this. Are their teams to small to make a difference in the labor market? Are they paying chip industry rates instead of software rates? Are the traditional semiconductor companies just ignoring it and refusing to match their pay?
- The industry like many others does not want to spend money to train people, so they only want unicorn candidates. Yet it is not enough to simply be an RTL designer, or a verification engineer, or a physical engineer, they usually want someone with the exact skills. e.g. USB experience, PCIE experience, power experience, etc. Things like tuition reimbursement are mostly a myth. It certainly was at Intel despite their claims of $50k for tuition reimbursement. The funds came out of the local discretionary budgets so managers never wanted to approve it because discretionary budget is also the same budget that pays for many other things like business travel and conferences. Discretionary was also the first thing to get hit in belt-tightening situations and was a good way to look good to upper management if a site manager wasn't using their full discretionary budget. Since tuition reimbursement is a several year commitment once approved, it couldn't be cut as easily once started.
- Managers are incentivized to promote execution over learning/growth or innovation due to schedule pressures and frequent hiring freezes. For the same reasons, managers are also incentivized to block transfers because they don't benefit from it, even if there are rules to prohibit this behavior. Combined with wanting unicorn candidates that will accept low pay, it is no surprise that it is getting hard to find employees. Yet if you outlive your usefulness or burnout they will have no problems laying people off and looking for a new unicorn candidate rather than retraining existing employees despite all the sacrifices they made. I saw this happen first hand. Layoffs one week, 2 new job reqs the next week for RTL jobs which are hard to get. Also since they were "silver bullet" hires to fulfill "critical" needs(false!) no internal candidates from places like verification would be acceptable. So not only did they not try to save anyone from layoffs, they also basically said no one inside the group was worth investing in either. Classy.
- Instead of a gradual talent pipeline, I think the industry appears to have had waves of talent progression. This leads to situations where if you are between waves, you will have a group ahead of you that is fairly young but in high level positions and which puts a real limit on how far you can advance regardless of how good you are because positions are just solidified. When I graduated most of the really senior engineers were from their mid 30s through their mid 40s. Grade level *distributions* get "maxed-out" as they say. Because there are few alternatives and people stay in jobs far longer than average, it becomes stagnant. People leave the companies or leave the industry altogether. When the current cohort that is now in their 50s starts to retire, there might not be a new wave to replace them.
- Chip design is far more demanding than software engineering because you have to get it 98,99% right the first time you build it or you get a brick back from the fab instead of a working chip. Simulations are slow, and post-silicon ability to debug while impressive, is very limited compared to pre-silicon simulations. Unless it can be fixed in firmware, you are stuck until the next batch of samples gets made. If you "go fast and break things", you are going to fail and get fired. Schedule pressures are constant: you need product on time for back-to-school, or Christmas, or competitive threats. Sometimes the schedule pressures are artificially created by lazy management that want to create a sense of urgency. Pushing to tapeout can be grueling because you don't want to miss your fab window by being late. During power-on people are expected to work in shifts 24-7. Power on can last 2-6 weeks on early samples and be in foreign countries. This grates on people. When you look at software which has fewer schedule pressures, is less difficult to make, makes more money, and has more employers to choose from, why would anyone want to do this if they possess the skills and intelligence necessary to do software. Even if you don't work for FAANG salaries you can probably get paid the same as the chip industry and have a better life and better job security and career options.
- There is nothing to get excited about and inspire kids to go into the profession. The startup space is minimal so no cool new ideas or riches to be had there. When I was in high school, hardware was the show, the performance improvements were huge with every generation. There was tons of coverage of new CPUs and GPUs talking about their architectures. Now there is little coverage. Between companies trying to be like Apple and minimize the importance of hardware and the chip companies releasing less info on their chip designs as performance gains get smaller it relegates hardware to being an after thought.
- Lastly, I don't know if this has changed with the addition of Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc making chips, but around the time when I got out of college, the total number of EE jobs was actually declining in the US. This pours cold water on the talent shortage narrative that had been used for many years falsely. If jobs are going down, you should have an excess of workers unless they are choosing to retire or leave the industry. It also acts as a discouragement for people to join or stay in the field. Who wants to be in a shrinking industry that is already highly consolidated?
The EE/ECE industry has no one to blame but themselves for the looming talent shortage.
That was a lot to write in a short time and I didn't do a ton of proofreading, so hopefully there aren't too many sentence fragments or typos.
Most electrical engineers I know work as computer programmers.
EE is more like a bag of tricks kind of profession, where every problem you encounter is quite localized.
IT is the opposite. Writing code is quite simple, but once you get to bigger systems, things can get really complicated.
Nonsense, we just need more tik tok influencers
How is The Register so good? Its thick red banner always gives me the vibe that it's just another Daily Mail type garbage pit.
As it almost always goes: pay people better. Deep down, we know capitalism doesn’t really work and we’re stuck playing this stupid game for now, and that means individuals have to look out for their own bottom line. If EE wants better supply, they must pay more.
>Deep down, we know capitalism doesn’t really work
It doesn't? Do you have any examples of anything proven to work better? I don't remember feudalism being very good at promoting specialization of labor.
I did a degree in Electrcial Engineering, as in volts and amps, as opposed to Electronics Engineering (or Communications, Computer and various other discplines of EE offered).
I now do design related to power, instruments, electrical, controls, equipment design for explosive atmospheres, thermodynamics (steam), lighting, functional safety etc etc - which also means I do networking, software architecture and programming (mostly industrial controllers, but also tools for my own use) and pretty well anything with a wire.
To get to the point where you are designing real stuff, stuff the public might interact with and mis-use or have it harm them, without very tight direction and supervision is:
4 years degree 3 years graduate engineer 3 years junior enginner
and then you are just an engineer, so thats 10 years, same time to become a specialist doctor and easily as difficult to do well.
After that there is senior, lead and then principal engineer. Many peopoe never go past senior in their lives, lead and principal take qualities that start becoming all about personality as much as technical abilities, though a real talent in either direction may well rise.
It's a lot of work, the turnover annually of knowledge is one of the highest there is, based on rule of 72 wiith 6% new or updated knowledge to acquire each year just to stand still without developing means 100% in 12 years, in a full careeer thats the equivelent of 3-4 degrees worth of learning, often totally new concepts, that might need to be made during the working life of an engineer.
In order to do this it probably means you spend a certain amount of your "free time" on related interests, eg ham radio, recreational computing, side projects whatever.
It's reasonably well paid, but in order to really be good at it you don't do it for the money, you do it because you like it, it is calling. You would probably do it for free if they had good work and you were fed and housed comfortably. If that is not the case, then maybe it is not for you.
First year EE graduates are looking at around 90k starting, 30 odd percent start at over 100k according to our local university.
Mining engineering graduates might be looking at 120-150k first year out )remote or fly in fly out) right now, they are being wined and dined by prospective employers starting in first year of studying undergraduate!!!
So it's still probably underpaid though, even though at the twenty year mark EE might stretch to 200-250k pa, more in high cost centres or particular circumstances. but the span of knowledge required and responsibility is very high.
As they say, most doctors only kill one patient at a time (and then bury them), engineers can kill a whole heap of people all at once...