I'm confused about the field of electrical engineering. What is it actually about? What are the main motivations to study it?

It seems that in the US it's one of the hardest and most prestigious degrees to do. Same e.g. in Switzerland. But in many other countries, EE is where CS dropouts go. This makes me confused about it because I think EE can actually mean different things in different places. What the fuck actually is it?

>>16646810 (OP)
Make electricity go good

>>16646810 (OP)
Both the US and Switzerland have many industries for EE grads to go to, other countries don't. I think it just comes down to that.

>>16646810 (OP)
It's a broad field, ranging from midwit-- embedded and digital systems designers; to midwit analog/RF hardware designers and power engineers; to midwit++ signal processing and control systems guys; to chad (computational) electromagnetics and semiconductor technology guys.
There is a big difference between these subfields, but in the early years of your studies you will have to attend the introductory courses of all of them in order to choose your specialization.

>>16646810 (OP)
You design circuits
That's all it is
Circuits

>>16646928
If you think real-time, mission-critical embedded system design is for midwids, you're a midwit.

>>16646810 (OP)
>What is it actually about?
Everything electricity is sort of a meme answer, but its true. It goes from stuff like circuit designs and embedded systems, to RF shenanigans and signal processing. Very broad field with a million and one niche specialties. The IEEE has several societies which sort of describe different missions, picrel.
>What are the main motivations to study it?
It's really cool, and the work is fun.

>>16646810 (OP)
EE is a huge field, mostly composed of various tiers of midwits arguing like this >>16646928 >>16647053 and then you have the information theory chads who get paid engineering money to do abstract math shit

>>16647053
>If you think real-time, mission-critical embedded system design is for midwids, you're a midwit.
I work in embedded and it is for midwits. Making mission critical real time embedded systems has been thoroughly figured out and doing it properly just requires covering all your bases, knowing a few tricks and avoiding blatant architectural mistakes. There's no real original though required, because anything you could possibly need to know has been put down in some boomers overpriced embedded systems book back in the 80s or 90s. There's no clever optimization tricks or truly novel approaches required when it comes to RTOSes or task scheduling because its easier to just wait 6 months for the silicon chads to pump out a chip that makes whatever you currently have run faster.

>t. went into embedded systems to have the time, money and leftover mental energy for computational electromagnetics related hobbies

>>16647065
It's worse than that. The median embedded programmer won't debounce inputs unless it's explicitly in a spec. (Maybe you should have that detailed a spec, maybe you should be hitting the basics fast and right so that you can have a short spec, that's a different discussion) And good luck getting someone like that to even merely implement a simple FIR or IIR filter or whatever.

A lot of EE jobs are basically technician level and a lot of overseas EE programs and third-tier US college programs are really BSET level. Most people with EE degrees in the US got them from second or third tier schools and rack and stack PLCs in factories elbow to elbow with BSETs. Not the worst gig and the truly excellent in factory automation do some really cool stuff, but be aware that's the modal EE. A lot of "embedded" is one-offs related to factory automation or similar too, basically a half step up from PLC work.

The EDA tool and semiconductor technology career paths are very selective but they're nerd traps that doesn't pay that well compared to dull CS jobs. Basically you get to brag you work for Intel or Synopsys or wherever.

Most engineers are midwits and if you're better than that, show up, do the work, try to excel, and so on, you will stand out wherever you land.

>>16647065
>>16647182
I agree with y'all. I worked mostly as an analog engineer (preamp for particle detectors) and besides some budget issues it is a field that is known well if you are not doing too crazy readout (talking about >50GHz). The HF field is quite known too and the amplifiers are expensive. But guess what I realized? Making the semiconductor devices, that's real engineering, real physics. You kneed to know a great deal about solid state (unless you are a CMOS digital designer like digital ASIC etc verilog, in that case kys) AND, go out of your way to find something useful while not relying on sentaurus tcad lol.

So I decided to go the real EE route, being a solid state physicist. Try doing some weird bosch process with superconduction and you have a never-before-explored subclass of devices or take metamaterials or skyrmions... the list goes on and on.

So motivate yourselves to study these devices. We as engineers have the balls to do what physicists can't do namely actually producing something useful for the world.

>>16646810 (OP)
it's basically applied electromagnetism.
however, since EM is the only force in common experience we can engineer, EE is VERY broad.
most people think of circuits or electrical power. sure, those are important. but so are semiconductor, computer architecture, imaging systems, communication systems, lasers, etc. etc. etc.

>>16646810 (OP)
Its a very wide field with many niches. There are some universal skills, but you will most likely specialise down a specific pathway at some point.
You will then graduate, and if you went down the right set of paths, you will end up in a job role which you never knew existed and make a shit load of money. Or if not, you will end up in one of the more obvious jobs and fight for scraps.

>>16646810 (OP)
I have a friend who graduated EE and started working as an electrician...

>>16646845
Sheeeit

>>16646928
I am on the Power side of things and I have a blast. I also do abstract math and FEM design as well for electric motors when I have time. It is the type of tismo that keeps me going. Though, K have noticed that here in the US the teaching side of Electrical Engineering concepts is plagued by Indians. Time to change that.

>>16646928
>midwit
>midwit
>midwit
Is this fucking EE dropout cope?

>>16646810 (OP)
I'm a PhD candidate at a top tier school in EE, mostly focused on information theoretic non-linear estimation and signal detection theory.

There's a ton of different sub-fields. The thing I like about EE is that you can basically do anything with it. If you like biology and biotech, there's a ton of EE's working in biosystems research. If you like infrastructure and power, you can work in power systems and grid management. If you like chemistry and materials science you can work on semiconductor chemistry and architecture (not my cup of tea, but I had a professor who was one of the key researchers on atomic layer deposition for semi-conductor fabrication, and that shit was cool). If you like robotics or mechanics you can become a roboticist or study mechatronics.

If you like math, you can do signal processing or information theory and you'll never run out of math to learn. If you like physics you can do EM or underwater acoustics.

There really is a little bit of everything with an EE degree.

What do you think about EE with a focus on control systems ?
t. Studying electrical engineering at German college with specialization in control systems

>>16649566
Learning programming will get you an easier and better paid job, so why bother?

>>16649604
>MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY
fuck off america-brained retard

>>16649604
Why should I learn something I'm not interested in just for the money? Are you a pajeet or some other 3rd worlder?
Not to mention people with engineering degrees can always take a shortcut into being a code monkey and can bust your ass anytime with their additional math skills.

>>16649629
>Are you a pajeet or some other 3rd worlder?
The most common people with that attitude are actually Americans, including Jews.

>>16649629
>>16649604
Why even assume I'm not interested in the topics ? I'm interested in many things, however time is limited, and so is my mental capacity and we had to make a choice in our college. RF engineering also seemed interesting, but also the hardest I m o
I might switch to something else in masters, though
In my college we can choose between power engineering, controls systems and communication engineering
In fact, in controls we have topics off all three specializations, but nothing too fancy in detail (except maybe things like Multivariable control)

>>16649623
>>16649629
Yeah I bet you will be real proud of busting your ass designing shitty PLC systems when you're older.
It's much better to have a fuck off job in IT and spend your free time and money on your passions.

>>16649667
my job is my passion, buddy

>>16649667
When I'm older I'll be retiring from crypto and stock gains and do some job that's pleasant

>>16649738
>Ah, I'm 70 years old, NOW I can enjoy life!
miserable existence

>>16646810 (OP)
Leave us midwits alone, and allow us sexo physics women

Thank you, majority of stuff we do is usually applied physics and other gay stuff, the conversations I've had with physics PhDs/master degree holders is that they usually regret not doing EE, only because EE is literally a covert maths degree with more hands on experience while physics usually gets stale by 2/3 year.

>>16647053
From my experience it is where the dumbest ones go into.
I've never encountered anyone smart in that field, which made me switch into RF immediately.
I trashed my transcript with a few embedded systems lectures but still recovered fine and got an RF job.

I think the taking just the engineering equivalents of the exact courses physicists have to take would be a really interesting course of study and would make you a very well-rounded engineer.

>>16649887
This sounds like complete bullshit. Physics massively expands around that time. The reason I regret not doing EE is because a physics PhD has been like getting shot in the kneecap in terms of employment prospects.

>>16647065
>>16647246
How do i become a silicon or computational chad. I have no idea what the path for that looks like and there's so many dead-end EE career paths it's difficult to navigate around them. What kind of job titles or companies should I be looking out for?

>>16650441
Honestly, I'd be okay with just doing field engineering too. Sounds comfy. Only problem is I don't know how to separate the shitty dangerous jobs from the comfy drive around the woods for most of the day listening to music jobs.

>>16650441
>How do i become a silicon or computational chad
Get good grades from a top 50 school through your master's if not PhD and interview well.

>>16647246
Cool. I liked doing research in my early life but got into product development and never looked back. I really prefer seeing what I work on go out into the world in a matter of months or years, not decades.

>>16646928
>to chad (computational) electromagnetics and semiconductor technology guys.
>chad
if they were really chad they would have gotten a physics degree instead.

>>16646849
In Switzerland EE is possibly the hardest degree.
80% of people fail at least one year.

>>16646810 (OP)
they just die easily

>>16650724
That metric is meaningless. EE degrees here are not that harder than in any other country in the world.
The reason so many students fail is because there are no admission requirements (NC-free). Therefore, any high school graduate can study EE, regardless of their final grade in high school. So you will see more than 500 students in your 1st semester.
This applies to almost all engineering programs, also to Germany and Austria. Here students are filtered in the first year of their studies, not during the high school.

I've got an A in Signals and Systems and graduate with a bachelors in EE next may. I really like this signal stuff and am thinking about going into RF engineering. Is this a mistake?

>>16646810 (OP)

In my industry, petrochemical, electrical engineers get recruited in process control and power systems. Knowing how to competently program a PLC and spec the hardware is important. However, the real demand right now is power systems. Our EEs get poached by tech to design and manage their data centers.

Don't fall for the CS/IT meme and get outsourced to India.

>>16651137
How much experience do these poached EE guys have and do they have FE/PE certifications?

I'm starting to get skeptical about EE too. Lot of Indians teaching EE material on youtube. Not as much as CS, but enough to be a growing pattern.

You study different kinds of electrical devices, circuits, signals and computers
Signal processing, electronics (I found this to be the hardest somehow), control systems, embedded stuff, wave guides, engines, transformers, high level overviews of computer organisation, etc
I did my undergrad project on FEC
It's really quite fun and I say this as someone who went into it with absolutely no interest in circuits or electronics, nor programming and also happened to struggle with electrodynamics during high school
I remember during 3rd year taking an advanced electrodynamics class and just thinking to myself 'holy fuck I don't even remember any of this material and it's the first fucking class' but I needed it to graduate and man, once you get past all the gimmick problems and actually get to the applied electrodynamics it becomes a lot more fun
Btw I couldn't get a job in EE after graduating lol but I'm just a asocial autist who also happens to not be that smart
If you're decent at applied mathematics you will like EE

>>16651198
Btw don't let anyone tell you that it's super difficult
It's not, if you want to do it you can do it

>>16649453
Question about signal processing in general:
What is it about this topic that attracts such bad professors? I've taken 3 required classes involving signals and communications, and I found the course content was reduced into computing Fourier or Laplace transforms until my eyes bled. It was usually some old Indian prof that wasted all the lectures going through various techniques to solve problems, and he didn't care we knew what they were actually used for.

I go to a top 3 uni in Canada (I know it's still shit), but it baffled me how extremely boring these subjects were compared to how interesting they looked on the surface.

>>16651200
>Btw don't let anyone tell you that it's super difficult
It's not
4th year EE, and I completely agree. If my dumb ass can do it, anyone here can. Once you get into the swing of things it's all just problems you have to learn how to solve with many many examples to learn from.

>>16646810 (OP)
>What are the main motivations to study it?
The same as any degree: entirely disconnected from the course itself as you have to choose a course before knowing anything about it, let alone its job prospects.
>>16649604
>programming is easy street
2010 called, they said you need to look outside. The bubble has burst five times over.

>>16646928
>RF is midwit
Is that why other engineers call RF the black magic of Electrical engineering?

I do PLC work and it's fucking boring. I'm basically a technician. I get paid six figures though and it's my 1st job since graduating last year.

>>16653160
How big's your dick bro?

>>16649604
imagine believing this in 2025 geeeeeg

All I remember about the EEs at my school were how they would never stfu about how hard controls was, but they weren't even deriving their plant TFs themselves.
Like dawg you're just playing around with goofy ahh root loci whats the issue?
They don't even have to take their FE cuz they just get offers during senior year and they just go "tee hee i dont need a PE ill just get a MBA later :)"

I make $180k a year driving around the woods, looking at powerlines/substations, talking to contractors, drinking coffee, and sending the occasional email from my work truck. Talk to my boss maaaybe once a week and haven’t had to interact with office turds doing office turd things in over 4 months.

>>16655502
what job is that, thats my kind of work lol

>>16655545
Project management/Field Engineer. It might surprise you but having soft skills and physicality as an engineer is rare as fuck. If you have engineering knowledge and the ability to get up at 5am to be on the jobsite by 6am, don’t mind hiking around in 0 and/or 100 degree weather, and can do corpo speak as well as you can talk to tradesmen, you got something going on. I have almost zero paper deliverables. It’s awesome.

>>16655550
that sounds perfect, i can definitionally talk tradesman as ive been a mechanic for 12 years and am about half way done with my EE degree. Love the outdoors and would hate to be stuck in an office environment all day.

>>16655550
Hell yeah, doing my eng degree now and I was worried it would be all paperwork. I already get up for a trade job that starts at 6 AM so I think I'm golden on that front

>>16650775
Why is the system organized like that? Sounds extremely inefficient.

>>16647065
>computational electromagnetics related hobbies
Sounds cool, what projects do you get up to?

>>16655550
Are there similar roles for structural engineers (especially with respect to transmission lines)? That's something I've been looking to get into. It seems like it's one of the relatively unique areas where there's overlap between structural & electrical.

I think I just failed my Electrical Power Systems course. I can't fucking cope. I studied so fucking much for this test and then froze up at the test. I had a Signals and Systems final literally five minutes before so I couldn't mentally switch gears, it's fucking ridiculous to have two finals so close to each other like that. It's not like I'm an idiot either, I have an A in Mechatronics, Microprocessors, and Signals and Systems, but this Power Systems class is kicking my ass because the professor tests us using multiple choice tests, only they have 20 questions and the problems are long as fuck with multiple steps, meaning one fuck up means a missed problem with no partial. I did all the Bonus HW and HW. Never missed a class, I can only hope he shows mercy and rounds me up so I don't have to take it again.

>>16656350
Multiple choice is professor laziness. Part of the point of paying $2k per class at college is to get detailed feedback on your thought process a few times each semester...to have an expert show you exactly where you're slipping up, or to recognize the significance of a creative approach & encourage the student to think further down those lines.

>>16657542
None yet. I dont think final grades go in till Tuesday. I can only despair until then. On another note I got my signals and systems finals back already and I did excellent there. So at least there is something good these past few hell days...

>>16657781
Thanks anon. No internship, every company ghosted me sadly, applied to an absurd amount and ended up getting passed over everytime even after several interviews, fucking lying HR cunts. I'm at least going to TA for Signals and Systems over the summer so I can compound that material a bit more because it interests me, and I can put that on my resume.

>>16646810 (OP)
I have a BS in EE, there are two or three main areas of focus depending on how you divide it up. There’s high voltage applications (power stations, power lines shit like that), low voltage applications (consumer electronics) and maybe the computer science aspect where you start blending micro electronics with firmware and low level coding (assembly language programming or C/C++ stuff)

Which subfield in EE has fewer females?

>>16655485
I'm in doctoral candidacy at the moment. Professional Engineer licensing only really matters if you're working on the infrastructural/power systems side of the field.

I work in sonar and know dozens of people with doctorates and masters that work in the field. None of them have a PE, and I've never seen it as a requirement for any of the defense/signal processing job applications I've seen. It does seem to show up if you want to work on the power grid or industrial EE for factories though.

The universe owes me a high end oscilloscope

>>16646810 (OP)
Swiss electrical engineer here. EE is one of the three prestigious / respected engineering degrees (ME, EE, CS). Also I don't get the hate on CS on this board. CS is hard, useful, future-proof and pays well.

>>16663985
You can actually learn all of CS on your own

>>16646810 (OP)
In my cunt we divide the fields between Electric and Electronic Engineering so that makes it less 'confusing' as to what you're getting into, ig

>>16646810 (OP)
EEs are all fucking weirdos.

>>16665132
I concur
>t. EE student

>>16646810 (OP)
>EE is where CS dropouts go
lol? Its the opposite. CS is easier & gets paid more.
> What the fuck actually is it?
Its a broad discipline. One example is antenna design.

>>16666611
what zero pussy does to a mf

>>16665132
I'm not weird, just autistic.

>>16666894
You sure? Do you like control theory or power systems or ASIC design?

>>16667839
I do sonar. It's signal processing and stochastic processes.

>>16646928
I was going to ask a serious question about your reply, but then I noticed the several other responses you got that have gone unanswered, so this must decent bait I'm looking at.

>>16667991
I downloaded this book in your honor

>>16668119
That's a decent one. I personally really like Doug Abraham's Underwater Acoustic Signal Processing (which is springer so it's not too hard to find), and Urick's Principles of Underwater Sound. Urick is a classic but a bit harder to find and a bit outdated (and also uses imperial units, which pretty much nobody uses nowadays). Burdic's Underwater Acoustic Systems is also great, but it's unfortunately out of print so it can be hard to get a hold of. I've never found a PDF of burdic either, which is a bummer. I guess I could spend a few hours making one with my scanner, but that would be a pain.

>>16668254
>I guess I could spend a few hours making one with my scanner, but that would be a pain.
Would you perhaps like to scan and upload 1 or 2 of your favorite pages instead? And sorry for the stupid question, but are you in the defense sector or an engineering officer in the military?

>>16646810 (OP)
Programming Microcontrollers and FPGAs for various Kinds of Devices, Ranging from coffee machines to industrial cameras and microscopes is among the things an EE can be employed in.

>>16646810 (OP)
Here in Brazil, EE is one of the hardest degrees, alongside Physics and Pure Maths. I considered applying for it (because i had a genuine interest in worki g in the field as a proper engineer), but once i found out that it's practically unviable to do any work in the field and that a very large percentage of graduates just flock towards jobs related to consulting, data science/analysis and anything related to the financial market, i just didn't bother pursuing it.

>>16668301
How is it unviable? There are a fuckton of companies EE can work here that is not related to the financial market.

>used to work at high voltage transmission lines and now work at building and maintenance of tugboata

>>16668328
I suppose what he's saying is that the (starting) salaries for proper electrical engineering positions are really bad compared to finance, le data and consulting, which is probably right. And if you want to live in the really only economically relevant city in Brazil, you basically need to go to these fields.

>>16646928
At first I thought it was a little funny you called embedded and digital systems midwit, but then you spoke about signal processing and semiconductors, and I then realised, yeah, I'm in the midwit range. That other stuff is kinda too hard to enjoy.

>>16665147
>CS gets paid more
CS actually gets paid less by mid-career and has 3x the unemployment rate of EE. The unemployment rate for CS majors is actually higher than the total US unemployment rate https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market?mod=livecoverage_web#--:explore:outcomes-by-major

>>16663985
I think most honest and informed people are capable of respecting CS as a field. Much of the resentment/mockery is generally aimed st the stereotypical "i just wanna make money bro" college students that graduate, do poorly in the field and brcome unemployed (or simply begin unemployed).

>>16656272
Yes, look into power generation and stationary gas engines. There is a lot of field work needed.

>>16663985
CS itself is pretty useless, jobs are in software "engineering" which is a lot of shite these days.

>>16668257
> Are you in the defense sector or an engineering officer in the military.

Not in the military. I guess you could say I'm indirectly in the defense sector, but I'm primarily an academic researcher.

>>16672403
Computer Science Engineering is not Software Engineering
CSE chuds let the term be muddled because they wanted fast paying SWE jobs which rightly should be offered to ISE graduates

>>16646810 (OP)
Electricity is evil black magic that you would be wise to approach cautiously.

>>16649374
How do I dip my toes into power engineering if I am from a CS background?

>>16660959
>Has anyone done FPGA work in HFT?

I looked into it for a while and got quite close to getting a job there once. From what I understand it's not hugely different than most FPGA roles in the types of skills that it requires, just more competitive.

>>16662776
>Which subfield in EE has fewer females?

Not sure, but the biotech+medical imaging side of EE seems to have many females. VLSI + computer architecture seems to have very few.

>>16673528
Have you done some basic signals and Systems/signal processing work? If you have, pick up really any "Modern Power Systems" work and maybe an applied EM book to learn about transmission line effects.

From there, it just depends on what you want to learn about. I'm a signal processing guy, so I know more about the signal processing and control theory parts of power than any other part of it. However, it seems like a lot of it uses the same sorts of linear/non-linear programming you'd learn in CS for things like optimal power flow and node placement optimization.

>>16673537
In undergrad I mostly focused on computational biology. There's a ton of female BME and EE students that end up in biophysics/comp bio. There's also a surprising amount in the hardware side of communications and sensor design.

>>16646810 (OP)
It’s probably gonna be one of the biggest fields in the future

>>16655999
Boomer blank slate theory.

What do you EE homos think about Ulf Leonhardt and his applications of EE to GR?

>>16646810 (OP)
I can promise you there is no area on the planet where CS is considered harder than EE.

>>16647065
>has been thoroughly figured out and doing it properly just requires covering all your bases, knowing a few tricks and avoiding blatant architectural mistakes. There's no real original though required, because anything you could possibly need to know has been put down in some boomers overpriced embedded systems book

Yeah wait until you realize this is every single field at every single level other than PhD

Literally everything is just various degrees of a qualified trade.

>>16647319
>You will then graduate, and if you went down the right set of paths, you will end up in a job role which you never knew existed and make a shit load of money
And those are?

>>16649667
>he thinks designing and installing PLC systems is “busting your ass”
lol

>>16679020
Contracting with the DoE or other glownigger agency or defense contractor

>>16679341
Most defense contractors pay good money but not really a “shit load”. Comfortably above the median American salary but FAANG or even higher half million dollar starting comp at Citadel/JS/Optiver is where the real “shit load” is.

Studying EE was the first time in my life I could just show my bros a graph of societal progression, and watch them conclude the exact same problems as I've deduced, it's truly freeing to be around people like that. I can highly recommend it.

>>16679522
What

bump

>>16650775
wait does that mean that u have a bunch of retards at EPFL and ETH zurich since its nc free?

bump

>>16679488
I would personally rather make less and do cool glownigger things. I know the contractor types that do Tier 2 subcontractor work for Tier 1 glownigger contractors can indeed make a shit ton of money. The ability to get and maintain a Q clearance can indeed be worth a lot of money. A lot of these guys also have secret royalty deals on patents they have filed (and were subsequently gagged by Group 220) with the federal government for all kinds of things. Unfortunately, you can't really even see the number of gagged applications, let alone the application content.
>t. knows glownigger patent attorney that has a TS/SCI and Q

Guys I've always wanted to electrical engineering but in my university, which is a top US university, you have to have like a 3.7 GPA per term in super difficult courses to even bother applying, so I'm stuck with CS and Applied Math. After I graduate how could I get into EE? PhD in EE? What would you guys do about it? Thank you

>>16681906
Just swap to electrical engineering. What math do you know? The hardest classes are Electromagnetics and signals and systems. If you could do Calc1/2 you’re not far off from having the math necessary to be able to understand those courses.

Learning calculus 1/2 is usually the filter class for most engineering degrees, if you can pass those with an A the rest are hard as well but will be doable if you put in the effort and time.

>>16682673
>Just swap to electrical engineering
I can't that's why i'm asking if i could maybe pursue a phd later? i have physics 1 and physics 2 credit and also credit from differential equations and calc 3?

>>16682859
There’s a whole bunch of other classes like signals and systems, electromagnetic, and stuff that is required but you would have to check out the application requirements to the masters program or phd that you want, and see if they would let you take “catch up” courses.

I’m not understanding why you couldn’t switch but Phys 1/2 and calc 1 to linear algebra should be a big portion of an EE degree already

>>16655502
What state do you work in? I have a relatively similar job, but in urban settings, and on top of which I have to do standard engineering design/analysis and it doesn't pay anywhere near as well. Then again I've only been working for 2 years, but not really sure if it gets any different as you climb the ranks.

>t. geotech

>>16646845
This

>>16682884
>I’m not understanding why you couldn’t switch but Phys 1/2 and calc 1 to linear algebra should be a big portion of an EE degree already

My university needs you to get A's on these classes if you want to get into EE and I got B's. But how about taking a masters in EE after my CS and applied math bachelor's degree? Thank you

>>16683573
What sub-field of EE? It's pretty common for people to go from the algorithms side of CS/comp-E into the robotics side of EE. It's also quite common for people who did an undergrad physics degree to get into the RF side of EE.

Signal processing and control theory will present themselves with more challenges if you're looking to start a master's with a bachelors in really anything else. Signal processing uses a lot of the same disciplines as an applied math for business (e.g., we both use Markov chains at some level), but the language and level of depth in certain topics will be very different. For example, a signal processing EE undergrad will have far more exposure to Fourier analysis than most applied math majors (and all CS majors). This can be learned as you need it, but it will be an uphill battle.

>>16646810 (OP)
>EE is where CS dropouts go.
Probably true. But EE at the end pays more than CS.
You don't really think about Power Systems as a field you want to work, circuits, communications (me), or information theory before CS. That's why EE might be where CS dropouts go. But then, a lot of people go to CS so there's a lot of demand for EE professionals.
Think about it. If you need electricity to make things work, then you need EE.

>>16646810 (OP)
Engineers are basically technologists. Like a mechanic. Anyone can apply formulas and do basic calculations.

>>16684153
EEs are also applied physicists in some sense

>>16646810 (OP)
>EE is where CS dropouts go
Other way around

Electrical Engineering is fucking voodoo magic. How the fuck are graphics cards made??

Where the fuck do I find RF attenuators that aren't total ass at handling high peak power.
The newer ones that are just chip resistors or small MMICs fail after only a few shots so I've just been trying to scavenge the coaxial ones with disk resistors from the 70s and 80s, but it's hard to find them anymore.

>>16660959
>Has anyone done FPGA work in HFT?
No but Jane Street pays their FPGA Engineers over half a million in total compensation, it's competitive as hell

bump

>>16646928
>midwit-- embedded
Rude!

Is going into computer architecture and chip design a bad choice for my career considering jobs don’t exist for it in the states? Is it useful if I am a businessman and want to make handheld devices and games since I would know what my vendor would be doing and what I want from them?

silicon photonics is great

>>16694399
Chip architecture jobs exist in the states. The issue is more that the fabrication (and the sub-industries that support fabrication) are mostly in Taiwan and Korea ATM. The actual design generally still gets done in California before getting sent over to Taiwan to have wafers cut.

>>16690652
IMC is actually better for hardware

>>16695691
Sauce?

>>16695562
carbon photonics when?

>>16695562
How about just photonics?

>>16646810 (OP)
I’m an engineer in Canada but a mechanic in the US. And I’m the same guy!

>>16646810 (OP)
in school theyre like youre going to be working with AI!
In the field you're worrying about which bit is set in which register when the next mov function happens.

If your professor has never had a real job outside of teaching, or its been decades since really doing the work, you can ignore all of their perspective on what the market, and field is like.

Oh look a plc. PLCs are a computer from the 50 years ago. are they in everything yep? are they easy to use? only if you're doing simple shit. Are they well documented since they've been around so long? Nope! If they suck, why are they still around?
well, theirs a good chance the actual code is obscure, or not understood.

Ive spent 2 weeks debugging PLC 130K rungs code and its a nightmare. oh look comments! but the comments are wrong.
we read 2 sensors, but then some twat wrote the second sensor value to the first sensor value memory address, rendering the AB logic useless. Or you want to do a math. any math, convert a float to an int. your looking at 3 lines min.

or you get if A>B and B<A then some condition where A=B and the whole system starts oscillating.

Here is a protip:
Avoid PLCs.
If they say youre going to decode binary values in real time, say nope and bounce. is it that hard? no, not really. Is it tedious, every fucking time? absolutely.

bump

>>16647057
The photonics society seems intriguing

>>16647053
mission critical. sad

EEs are freaks. MEs are sane.

>>16679522
What do you mean, specifically?

>>16697160
lol

Anyone do ASIC design in the defense sector?

bump

I like CMOS, simple as

>>16646928
Signal processing is the most math heavy, the most pure, and the hardest to find employment in.

>>16647060
>then you have the information theory chads who get paid engineering money to do abstract math shit
Would this require a grad degree at minimum?

>>16708294
A masters is expected, postdocs will be sought after

>>16646810 (OP)
In Australia retards study CS. Big brains usually do a 5 year double bachelor in EE and CS.

>>16655999
>>16678773
Because high school is for retards through and through and the likelihood that a high performing high schooler ends up doing anything great is exceedingly low.
You want to drag out the guy that has interest but wasn't about to do his faggot ass easy as shit homework given to him by an obvious retard.

It's like panning for gold. You have to scoop up a bunch of shit to find the gold.
If you only select a few particular rocks and some select dirt that another retard, HR equivalent, academic functionary, then your odds of finding gold are basically zero.
They will choose other try hards that aren't actually intelligent.

>>16681796
It's a club and you aren't in it and you aren't going to get it in retard.
Stop dreaming of destroying everything just so you can finally feel "cool."

Any photonics researchers here that want to talk about their work?

High level CS like the technical parts of cybersecurity or AI are much more difficult than EE.

>>16646810 (OP)
It's a broad field nigga

>>16665147
>Its the opposite
yep, CS is the pleb league and EE is pro level

>>16650909
Are you still considering going into RF engineering?

>>16710636
Semiconductors and electromagnetic field are more difficult than everything there is in CS

>>16655999
inefficient, but fair

Don't enough about everyone else, but in the U.S, math education is fucking terrible, so wanting to be an engineer requires
>Luck in childhood school system
>Young Tenacity
>or Autism

Wanted to be a Biomedical Engineer out of high school, but poor so I had a shitty community college to transfer out of and I dropped the courses I had when a professor go off about slitting Micheal Jacksons ballsack and how he hated him so much (he was reading the syllabus), so I took Legal Sociology to become a lawyer because it was then an easier career route, now I just tinker and want to get my masters in Data Science to pivot professionally

I wish I had better options then, EE is hard enough, but having a solid school or educator will make or break you career wise - not everyone gets that it in high school and by college you want to try, but its too late to keep up with your more fortunate peers

EEs who specialize in power systems are the purest EEs?

>>16708294
You can do a decent amount of it with a master's degree. I'm doing a PhD focused on info-theoretic signal processing ATM and there's no shortage of work left to be done. Just be prepared to self-teach a lot of math. No matter what kinds of problems you're going for, you're going to be spending time learning real analysis up to measure and some basic functional analysis, as well as probably some measure theoretic Fourier analysis, PDE's and differential geometry.

>>16714082
Yes we are, we're the OGs.

>>16707067
Signal processing is what I currently enjoy the most atm, why is it the hardest to find employment in, and what can be done to obtain an advantage?

>>16663985
Is it feasible for an American EE to leave the country and seek employment in Switzerland? I hate it here.

>>16714290
Idk about Switzerland, but I got a job in northern Italy pretty easily. I could have stayed there, but the pay was shit and I didn't like being so far from home.

>>16714290
Absolutely. There's only a small language barrier since most people speak English, the employee benefits are much better and the salary is higher compared to the US. Go for it

>>16714290
yeah

Am I midwit for going into civil so I can just play with blocks all day.

>>16715987
What are your favorite types of concrete?

why don't cs majors just double major in ee and math instead? it's the cooler option

I’m from Argentina. Every EE major here moves either to Chile (PLC, power, industrial mining, etc.) or to Spain (FPGA, embedded systems, semiconductors, circuit design). Therefore, everybody tries not to go into EE and instead majors in CS, because the only industrial things produced in this shithole are IT products and startups.

Such a shithole we don't even have FPGA boards on local marketplaces.

Sry for my rant

bump

What I don't understand about electricity is wires. Why do we need wires?

>>16719457
conductive medium

>>16719457
It's easier to model electric circuits at low frequency when you use wires.

>>16718134
>startups
What kind?

>>16720411
Nothing outstanding, just the regular IT startups: fintech and the banking sector, various services, e-commerce, agriculture, and healthcare.

bump

>>16714427
ayyyy the apizza pie pasta espresso back at the ol country eh badda bing badda boom

>>16719457
Same reason you need pipes to move water.

>>16702891
This.

>senior project time
>smelly EE nerds are fiddling around with some circuit boards that make lame graphs or some shit
>ME chads are ripping around campus in a souped up go-kart.

>>16647246
>So I decided to go the real EE route, being a solid state physicist
Did you transition from being in the industry to postdoc or are you still in the industry?

>>16722848
ME has some top tier girls.
All the EE girls in my uni are short or fat....meanwhile some of the ME girls are literally like top models

>>16646810 (OP)
>>16646845
Electrical Engineering basically ranges all the way from glorified electron-plumbers with a shady bought diploma up towards self-taught factory-line designer, coder, chemist, physicist, ground-based astronaut in full hazmat carefully planning the invention, ordering, assembly and installment of new high technology onto old high technology public infrastructure that needs 105% uptime with guaranteed risk of mass human lives when causing system failure.
EE is the greatest sieve field out there, where the biggest multifield chads keep the world running behind a humble diploma shared in name and title with otherwise incomparable peers.
for every 1000 worker-bee electrical engineers, there are a handful electrical engineers in every country that in reality keeps that country from falling apart in a kafkaesque clusterfuck of mismanagement.

>>16724815
>there are a handful electrical engineers in every country that in reality keeps that country from falling apart in a kafkaesque clusterfuck of mismanagement.
Then why do the sleezy bureaucrats get all the credit?

>>16646849
whats the lowest EE i can be or whats the lowest school degree i can get to live a comfy life and know how to fix everyday shit. im in a Trade that deals with electricity. but i wanna know how to automate shit and invent crap etc.
im also a lazy fag and dont wanna go to uni for 6 plus years

>>16646928
Signal processing belongs in a realm of it's own, you pseud.

>>16651202
It's not the professors' fault you get filtered by their course.

>>16656381
>Part of the point of paying $2k per class at college is to get detailed feedback on your thought process a few times each semester
Nigga, students refuse to write down their thought processes, so how the fuck are we supposed to give you any feedback?
On every exam I have ever given, there will only be 2 or 3 students who actually write coherent answers - and they happen to get perfect grades, so don't really need feedback - while everyone else will either not write down a single word, and just leave a random mess of symbols that I'm supposed to decipher, or if they do write words, it's just completely incoherent.

>>16651202
Somehow I missed this one.

Basically, there's a lot of things in signal processing and control systems that are pretty difficult to make practical without either a ton of added math (that you won't really get until grad school) or a practical lab setting.

For a little while, I was very fortunate to teach an elective senior level controls course that actually has a lab component where we had physical robotics experiments students could use to develop practical PID controllers and some basic SVFB controllers. I found students that took that course learned so much more than the students who didn't take the lab and only took the lecture only introductory course that was required. The mathematics was a lot more motivated by the actual experiments that the students needed to design controllers for (and by design controllers, I mean generally pick between a few different variants on PID/LQR control depending on what kinds of sensors were available to them).

Without teaching it almost like an art form, you don't have much of a way of dealing with the inevitable problem of noise in the system. This usually requires stochastic processes experience to really teach to students at a meaningful level, and most EE students don't take a rigorous stochastic processes course until their first year of grad school.

>>16726490
Got any other textbook recommendations?

>>16727305
oppenheim if you are smart
lathi if you are midwit (like me)

Thanks but what do you suggest for mentally handicapped dimwits (like me)?

>>16727329
Thanks but what do you suggest for mentally handicapped dimwits (like me)?

>>16646810 (OP)
>What is it actually about?
Essentially just the math and physics behind electricity
>What are the main motivations to study it?
Electricity is cool

Recommend some good books for a noob who is scared of math

>>16647065
Silicon cuck more like it.

>>16729259
The Art Of Electronics by Horowitz Hill

>>16727382
"DSP first" was written by Georgia Tec professors for first year students... it is supposed to be very beginner friendly.

>2D Transistors Could Come Sooner Than Expected
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cdimensions-2d-semiconductors

>>16731015
>making commercial-scale 2D semiconductors
>CDimension has developed a process for growing molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)
Layman here. Is this black magic?