[HN Gopher] Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction thre...
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Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire
tech ecosystems
Author : anxrn
Score : 33 points
Date : 2022-07-18 19:47 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| 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.
| idrios wrote:
| I finished undergrad with a biomedical engineering degree and
| minors in EE & physics.
|
| Outside of the university I didn't have the money to buy a
| bench, some optical lasers, detectors, machine parts, etc --
| nor room to keep that stuff at my parents house.
|
| I didn't even have money to buy the full diversity of simple
| electronic components that I would have wanted to tinker with,
| though I did at least buy some stuff.
|
| But I had a laptop and that's all you need to do any kind
| software development, short of running ML algorithms that
| require massive computation, or running a very high-traffic
| server.
|
| I wish I had a use for all the levels of calculus, physics,
| circuits that I learned in college, and I'm massively envious
| of the people working on, e.g. this optogenetics project that
| was just posted [1] but I am quite certain the problem stems
| not from a lack of experience but rather the lack of
| opportunities, all driven by natural economic incentives.
|
| As a BME there was maybe 1 relevant job posted on Indeed per
| week. For something purely electrical engineering it was maybe
| 1 per day. In software, there are pages of new positions posted
| daily.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32140661
| jaygreco wrote:
| 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)
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Perhaps there will be a wage spike if there's less EEs
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| A poor workman blames his tools.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| 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.
| supertrope wrote:
| 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.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| 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.
| fleventynine wrote:
| 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.
| stas2k wrote:
| 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
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| 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?
| Johnythree wrote:
| 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.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| 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...
| shswkna wrote:
| 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.
| supertrope wrote:
| Intel cancelled their sponsorship of Intel Science Talent
| Search. That was a relatively cheap way to build goodwill and
| cultivate the talent pipeline.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| ISEF was a competition among parents and professors living
| vicariously through children
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| coastermug wrote:
| 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.
| tekla wrote:
| 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?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Profit margin. It's all profit margin. Software is reliably
| >25%, where physical manufacturing is in the single digits.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| But the question is why? Shouldn't there be the same race to
| single digit margins in software as well?
| insightcheck wrote:
| 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.
| simmerup wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| frazbin wrote:
| 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.
| fatnoah wrote:
| 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.
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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.
| robk wrote:
| I don't see us producing a surplus of EEs here despite that
| barkingcat wrote:
| 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.
| dusted wrote:
| 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...)
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