* 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

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.

I assume you do not do scrum and agile practices.

- 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.

IT is the opposite. Writing code is quite simple, but once you get to bigger systems, things can get really complicated.

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...

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.

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.

Now all I do is tune hyper parameters, but man I miss all the wild mind-blowing physics that photonics had to offer.

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 can safely say I am a better SWE because of the EE grounding back in the day.

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.

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.

Kind of funny to see software people outearn them 10x these days. That's what gatekeeping does to you.

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'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...

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.

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.

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.

Is this distinction still made?

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.

Electrical Engineering is a very hot and in demand degree in South / South East Asia precisely because that's where all the jobs are.

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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Given that, it sounds like students are making a rational economic choice to avoid an underpaid profession.

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.

Unless software margins collapse or we end up with a dev glut, there's no way EE can bid labor up to match.

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)

Very low marginal unit costs, easy distribution, faster iteration, easier to scale, etc...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That made me go "hmm."

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

If you decide to leave before, you must pay $PRICE * (x - $TIME_WORKING_HERE_AFTER_WE_INVESTED_IN_YOU)

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.

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?

Permanent money is always in disequilibrium. It doesn't build up anything. It is always broken which forces constant interventions to reach equilibrium.

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)

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.

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.

- 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)

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.

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).

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)

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.

Wouldn't this apply to software companies as well? Yet we see higher pay, rather than imports/outsourcing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

So I've been doing higher-level work for a long time now.

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.

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.

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.

And then there’s the freemium B2B SaaS business model (Slack, Notion) that is just insanely lucrative…

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.

It's my suspicion that eventually software engineers will be paid the same as copy writers and scientists. But not yet.

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.

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.

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 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)

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 )

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.