[golemarms]

> 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?

[mjh2539]

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.

[naasking]

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.