[Aromasin]

I'm really hoping the salaries for EE type roles start to match software as the grey beards start to retire and talent becomes scarce. We've got a legion of grads going into CS, but EE classes are a fraction of that. Despite that, software roles are often more than double the salary. Any role I go into as an EE/Embedded Systems engineer, I'm more often than not the youngest by 20-30 years. I wonder how the industry in the West is going to survive it, beyond hiring contractors from India/South Asia.

[metalforever]

Yeah same, I’m an EE camping out in software because of the pay. It’s also just easier work. I would much rather be intellectually challenged coding firmware or embedded work. I didn’t go to school to build web widgets. It’s just EE pays so badly you can’t make the bills. I was getting offered numbers that wouldn’t have afforded my own studio apartment to rent. For EE work. It’s insulting.

[riskable]

...which is ridiculous because of what it takes to become an EE VS what it takes to become a "web developer". Basically anyone who can handle basic logic can be a web developer if they just put in a bit of effort. Degree or not!

To become an EE you need a 4-year degree and a whole heck of a lot of knowledge about things that are a real pain in the ass for laypeople like calculating inductance, capacitance, and impedance (<shudder>).

You don't need much knowledge to make a circuit board, no. But when your boss wants to add a USB 3.0 hub to your product it suddenly becomes a, "wow, we really need an EE" job (because the spec has so many requirements and you're not going to get your product certified unless you can demonstrate that you followed it).

[weatherlite]

> Basically anyone who can handle basic logic can be a web developer if they just put in a bit of effort. Degree or not!

A "modern" web dev needs to know a whole bunch of crap nowadays. Not saying it's insanely hard but its not that easy. But sure, getting a job as a junior should be way easier than EE.

[robomartin]

> You don't need much knowledge to make a circuit board

Not quite.

For most modern high speed designs PCB's are very far from being simple. Signal and power integrity are critical. It doesn't help that these can be "voodoo" fields where, a bit like RF, years of experience as well as the theoretical foundation are really important.

That said, I think I know where you are coming from. A ton of low-performance embedded designs these days can be done by people with very little EE education. Anyone can learn anything online. There are plenty of resources. This is a good thing, of course.

[riskable]

As someone who's not an EE (with no degree in anything at all) and has made many circuit boards... No, they're not that complicated. Not really.

I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.

[robomartin]

> I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.

Sorry to burst your bubble...

Glad you learned enough to do it and had fun with it.

Yet, such PCB's are trivial to design. Heck, one could auto-route something like that and get a working board for prototyping. In fact, I have done exactly that many times over the last four decades for keyboard/control-panel boards. And auto-routers suck. The fact that one can actually use one for a PCB is a good indicator of how trivial that design might be.

One of the big differences between hobby PCB's and professional EE-driven PCB's is in manufacturing and reliability.

It's one thing to make one or a few of something, anything. Quite another to make hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions. As an example, I am pretty sure you did not run your design through safety, environmental, vibration, susceptibility and emissions testing.

For an example of complex design one can look at such things as almost any dynamic RAM implementation, from SDR to DDRn. Timing, signal integrity and power integrity are a big deal and can make a massive difference in performance and reliability.

Another example is just-about any PCB used in automotive designs. They have to survive brutal power, thermal, vibration and RF environments for decades. This is not trivial.

Other fields with critical needs are medical, aerospace (which includes civilian flight) and industrial.

Consumer electronics is actually quite critical at the limit because you are dealing with very large numbers of units being manufactured. In other words, while a design for something like an industrial CNC machine might only require a few hundred or a few thousands of boards per year, in consumer electronics one can easily be in a situation where we are running 50K to 200K boards per month. Bad designs can literally sink a company.

I understand though. From the frame of reference of a hobbyist or enthusiast everything can look simple. That's pretty much because they just don't have enough knowledge or information. This means they only have access to the most superficial of constraints, which makes PCB's seem easy, maybe even trivial.

As my wife likes to say: A google search is not a substitute for my medical degree.

[riskable]

> Yet, such PCB's are trivial to design.

No, analog keyboard PCBs are not trivial at all. You have to keep a lot of things in mind when routing your analog VS digital tracks. Especially if you've got per-key RGB LEDs right next to your hall effect sensors (can be a lot of noise if you don't do it right).

Not only that but you also have to figure out how to get loads of analog sensors into a microcontroller that may only have 4 analog pins (e.g. RP2040). In a way that can be scanned fast enough for 1ms response times (again, without generating a ton of noise).

It's not so simple like an electromechanical keyboard PCB which is quite trivial.

> For an example of complex design one can look at such things as almost any dynamic RAM implementation, from SDR to DDRn. Timing, signal integrity and power integrity are a big deal and can make a massive difference in performance and reliability.

...except 99% of all PCBs aren't that complicated. You don't need to know the specifics of RF in order to design a board that controls some LEDs.

[josephg]

Honestly all of that sounds like it maps pretty well to programming.

I sometimes run little 30 minute programming workshops where I teach people enough of the basics that they can walk away with something they’ve made. Give a novice 3 months to go through an bootcamp and they can become a half useful programmer.

But the “other half” of their knowledge will take a lifetime to learn. In just the last 2 weeks my job has involved: crypto algorithms, security threat modelling, distributed systems design, network protocols, binary serialisation, Async vs sync design choices, algorithmic optimization and CRDTs.

It’s easy enough to be a “good enough” programmer with a few months of study. But it takes a lifetime of work if you want to be an all terrain developer.

[SteveMoody73]

I design the majority of the electronics for my company and pretty much all the firmware as well.

Wages are not bad for the area i'm in, which is fairly rural, but could be a lot better for the work involved. Move to a big city would probably help but I like the quieter lifestyle.

I've not done any web development full time for close 20 years, first started writing JSP code. Dabbled with a few personal website designs since then. I'm sure if I went back to web development, it may pay more but I don't think it would have the same level of job satisfaction for me. I try to keep up to date on some of the technologies used but it seems overwhelming from the outside.

Part is resistence to change, but I do find the work for the most part enjoyable so it's a risk to change jobs as well.

[droopyEyelids]

The demand for EE roles is far less than the demand for Software roles.

For a simple thought experiment, imagine if you could get a good developer for $20 an hour. Every single company on the planet, from a mom and pop shop to big corporations could turn a profit off their work.

Now imagine you could get an electrical engineer for the same price. What percent of businesses could profit from electrical engineering? 2%?

[Aromasin]

My point wasn't about demand though. I'm well aware it flags behind SW companies by a staggering margin. A small team of SE's with enough money to buy some laptops between them can create multi-million dollars worth of value in a few years. It would take a team of EEs 5x the time and 25x the initial investment to create the same. Of course there are going to be 100's of SE companies for every EE one.

My comment was regarding supply. EE is an art that blossomed in the 80s and 90s in terms of practicing engineers, and has shrunk per capita since. This is largely driven by kids getting drawn into SWE over EE as people look at salaries and modern day billionaires, and figure it to be a no-brainer. Today EEs are a small fraction of the total engineering disciplines, despite being essential for the communication, power generation, distribution, consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, and of course, the computer hardware industry on which the software one is built; amongst many other growing sectors like robotics, medical, and IoT.

If there are a legion of EEs are set to retire in the next 5-10 years, and all the would-be EEs are now designing web apps, surely at some point the supply/demand scales start to tip one way? Many of the above industries are abstracting everything to software platforms as time goes on, but no amount of money can make a SW dev design a power-train for a car, antenna for a 5G device, or program an FPGA for silicon verification.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Bear in mind, though, that a lot of those EEs going into software are doing so not because they love software, but because they can't find EE jobs. Sure, many are no doubt doing it for the money, but if they really wanted to be programmers, they'd have majored in CS.

[gryBrd1987]

The context OP setup was “when grey beards retire.”

The ideas being demand is low as the senior EEs stay put.

Mom and pop shops could use Excel and did successfully for years. Big banks even ran on gigabyte sized Excel sheets before the 2010s hype bubble (Source: direct experience working in fintech 2010-2015)

Anyone in tech believing the last 10-15 years was about anything but the US government juicing its economy to stay relevant, titillate, and ingratiate itself on now 30-40 something college grads is fooling themselves. All those students are now bought in to keeping the dollar alive.

Software has gotten so over thought and bloated given a “too many cooks in the kitchen.” situation. Templating a git repo with appropriate dep files given mathematical constraints is not rocket science. The past needed to imagine software as out of this world to gain mindshare. Correct and stable electrical state is what really matters.

We are entering a new era of tearing down the cloud monolith for open ML libs that put machines to work, not people.

Behavioral economics has been running the US since before Reagan.

[georgeburdell]

EE won’t go higher, SWE will go lower

[Retric]

Alternatively, web is generally more valuable. You don’t buy a new washing machine because the current firmware sucks, but you will shop somewhere else if Newegg’s website is terrible. That relationship is generally true where people rarely test embedded software until after a purchase, but people tend to jump ship more frequently online.

Net result a lot of critical infrastructure and devices suck as much as possible while still getting the job done.

[Negitivefrags]

I’m building a house at the moment and I have been insisting that I am able to actually test all the built in appliances with power to see if the software is garbage.

I have found that most of the high end brands have a completely horrible user experience. Miele is the worst I’ve tried, and I found that as you go up the price range even inside that brand the experience gets worse.

The top end Miele induction cooktop takes over 5 seconds to boot up before you can even turn a hob on. The interface has a second of latency on presses. It took me probably 20 seconds to work out how to turn a hob on. I happened to be with my mother at the time and I asked her to try to work out how to turn a hob on and she had failed after 1 minute of trying and gave up and asked me.

It looks nice though.

The thing I find the most infuriating about it is that my attitude towards this stuff is just not understood by designers at all. They complain at my choices because the Miele appliances which they specified are “better quality”. And yet I feel like they can’t have actually tried to use them because as far as I can tell the quality is total garbage.

[ryandrake]

The mere idea of waiting for a kitchen appliance to "boot up" makes me angry. How did we normalize this madness? Telephones, TVs, car engine instruments, HVAC thermostats, why can't any of these be instant-on like in the 80s? Apply power and it starts working is a basic design principle.

[riskable]

Meh. Bootup time is irrelevant if the thing is always on. Many "dumb" microwaves won't let you use them until you set the clock after a power loss which creates an artificial "boot up time" of 5-120 seconds (depending on how complicated the procedure is; I remember microwaves that had absolutely obtuse clock-setting procedures).

[Negitivefrags]

In the case of this cooktop, it was not always on. You have to boot it up every time you go to use it.

[VBprogrammer]

Slightly off topic but imagine an induction cooker with the original iPod control wheel as it's power control.

We opted for a gas hob when we installed our kitchen. Mostly because I like the controllability when cooking. Obviously it's a nightmare for health and the environment but man it makes cooking easier.

[robocat]

Touch controls on induction cooktops/hobs are almost ubiquitous, and they have extremely poor usability in my experience. Liquids cause problems, and you need to be very careful not to move a pan or any utensils over the controls, or brush against them while concentrating on cooking. Apart from the other awful usability issues with the UI or icons.

I did a survey of all the cooktops/hobs I could find in my city, looking for something that would suit my elderly mum, and I didn’t find a single unit that was usable. Fortunately a salesperson knew of a recently developed “cheap” model from a noname brand, which had individual knobs, so I ordered that, it arrived an month ago so I got it installed, and it has worked very well for my mum.

Usability is not something that most people know to look for when making purchases, so most whiteware ends up with a hideous UI. People will buy shit, then complain, but it doesn’t change their future purchasing habits (e.g. looking for features, especially useless features!)

I bought a middling brand microwave with knobs that has reasonable usability, despite providing all features. The iPhone is another possible counterexample, although I fucking hate many of their usability decisions (remove all multi-tasking shit from my iPad - I only ever initiate it by mistake and I always struggle to revert my mistake - fucking floating windows and split windows and fucking ... at top of the screen).

[VBprogrammer]

The ability to clean the cooker is the only advantage of touch controls. I don't know how well the original iPod touch wheel would hold up in that environment but from a usability point of view it was excellent.

[dudeofea]

how is it a nightmare? if you aren't getting that energy from natural gas, you'd mostly get it from a CO2 producing power plant, with efficiency losses going from heat (steam) -> electric -> heat (cooktop)

[cameronh90]

Because about 45% of our (UK) electricity doesn't emit carbon. Gas is also really terrible for indoor air quality.

[Retric]

Even Gas cooktops without a pilot light are surprisingly inefficient with under 40% of the energy ending up in your pan. (Which is why the air several feet above the pan is so hot.) On top of this you end up venting air your HVAC system just used a lot of energy to make pleasant outside and/or breathing noxious fumes from incomplete combustion so Carbon Monoxide, NOx, formaldehyde etc

Induction stoves powered by natural gas power plants are more efficient than directly cooking with natural gas plus you can use clean solar/wind/nuclear/hydropower or oddballs like geothermal.

[WanderPanda]

Same goes for car MMIs. Tesla is almost fine when it comes to the latency (still far behind an iPad e.g.) but other manufacturers are just atrocious in this respect

[KerrAvon]

Good to know about Miele ranges -- this would certainly infuriate me. I wonder if their higher end dishwashers have the same usability problems.

[pencilguin]

Most dishwashers stay on all the time, drawing watts 24/7. That could be microwatts, but that might cost an extra dollar.

Probably the cooktop boots up anew each time because otherwise you would have to be able to reset it when it crashes.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

The industry will do just fine. In all my years assisting in the hiring process (I'm software, but due to my EE background I was often asked to help with interviewing EEs), I've never noticed a shortage of EE applicants. OTOH, we had a lot of trouble finding enough software people to hire.

The reality is that EE jobs are a small fraction of the software ones and supply is keeping up with demand, so there's no upward salary pressure.