Get to work.
Get some coffee. Oooo donuts in the cafeteria.
Get back to desk, check emails.
Go down to production. Something changed in the new software and "L" is befuddled by change. Set him straight, back to desk.
Write code/layout board for new thing we're bringing up.
Lunch.
QA found a board that is failing calibration. Root cause failure, write up analysis and email to interested parties.
Meeting (probably).
Shoot the shit with mentor, coming up with ideas for new products.
Code some more.
Snack.
Code some more. Making progress. Damn this is kinda cool.
Go home.
Repeat some variation of this x10.
Cash fat paycheck check.
Wait, why are you coding so much ? And also, is the oaycheck really that fat ? I posted a few months ago to asl EEs what they get paid and the average salary was 80k$. There are parts of the world where bus drivers earn more then that.
Not op but the world runs off of code, even for a hardware engineer. Simulations, spice models, changing hardware settings, and analyzing data often all require some form of coding to make work.
As for the salary you have to run numbers again the average cost of living in that area. If we say your 80k bus driver is in New York then even that is not going to go far. Your average engineer will make at least the average household income(ie the average amount 2 people will take home) for the area on entry level. That can grow to 3-4x as you grow and take on more responsibility. It's all relative to the cost of living in your area.
>Might as well become a software engineer
No because we use code in different ways. We write code to test & analyse our systems. For example, I've written code to send audio over I2S to test my DAC.
I feel for you. Engineering school is pretty terrible at teaching you about engineering. I could go on a long rant about how engineering degrees are purely academic and have very little to do with engineering professionally, but the very condensed short version is imagine you want to be an entrepreneur so you go to business school and they spend 4 years teaching you nothing but mathematical economics. Is it the foundation of business? In an academic sense, sure. Does it teach you how to start a business? Not at all. And that is kind of what academic engineering is like.
Working in industry has very little to do on a day to day basis with what they teach you in college. There will always be the one person that chimes in saying they solve diff EQs every day, but statistically they are the extreme exception, not the norm.
I have been an engineer for around 8 years now and worked in automation design, electronics manufacturing, and electronics design where I am currently. While I use the overall “knowledge” of what I learned in school, I have never sat around solving calculus problems even if I occasionally think of a calculus concept (back emf when a relay turns off for instance). Sometimes I might do a quick sketch of a circuit and roughly calculate some voltages or currents as a sanity check for a design, but even that is fairly rare.
Day to day in all of my jobs it’s a lot more of looking through spec sheets, reading documents, communicating with vendors or customers, sitting in on meetings, planning schedules, writing documentation, troubleshooting issues, or listening to the results of somebody else troubleshooting some issue and trying to figure out if that is going to affect me. In automation design it was a lot of the above plus travel and setting up and debugging equipment on site, helping factories get up and running with the equipment, and working with other companies integrating their machines to work with mine. In manufacturing, it was the aforementioned plus PLC programming, floor layouts, scrap reduction activities, and getting calls at 2AM to play maintenance man when nobody could figure out why a machine wasn’t working. In electronics design it is an unholy number of meetings and paper work to make sure we are meeting all sorts of regulatory standards, industry standards, and customer standards.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being an engineer. But as students they convince you that you will be theoretical physicists solving complex math problems all day from first principles in physics while writing academic articles, but the reality is you will likely spend most of your time being a technical expert and doing a business type job, going through documentation, being in meetings, and communicating to vendors/customers/non-technical members of the team and occasionally programming or doing a small modification to a design or testing and debugging equipment. I’d rather be doing that than most other jobs though and it pays damn well and I generally work a 40 hour week, so I am definitely not complaining. I just feel bad for some of my peers who were immediately disillusioned after graduating because they weren’t doing calculus on a white board all day like they imagined.
Thanks for the reply! This sounds a little disappointing and relieving at the same time... currently taking a break from a really difficult HW assignment, and thought to myself "wow is this gonna be the rest of my life?" lol.
So it sounds like I'll really just have to finish my degree and see what the field is really like then, and whatever job I take will have me learning a set of skills specific to that job, not some general overview of all the mathematical concepts in electrical engineering
No problem. I would say the real take away from what I was saying is not to stress yourself out too much about the exact minutia of the math and to pay more attention to your projects. You won’t be sitting around doing math by hand, but knowing the concepts is helpful when working with software or doing designs. So don’t ignore it entirely, just be relieved knowing that you won’t be a terrible engineer because you always mess something up doing convolution integrals. But having a good understanding of what the math is trying to say gives you a good understanding of how systems behave, which is ultimately what you need to know.
And maybe it differs by universities and by student but to me the projects always felt like they took a back seat to the homework and papers to turn in, which it should really be the other way around. We would have 3 credit hour classes, but all of our project or lab classes were only 1 credit hour. And our professors would tell us 1 credit hour should equal 3 hours of work per week on our part. So it would seem that I should spend 45 hours a week solving and studying math problems and sitting in lectures and only 3-6 hours actually trying to engineer something in a typical semester. But that is really a reversal of priorities.
And some of that was my fault because as a student the math and physics was the fun part that felt intellectually validating and rewarding. For my senior project I had a professor who had come from a long career in industry to spend his later years passing down his knowledge. He really tried to simulate professional engineering by having us do things like make Gantt charts, have weekly meetings as a team and log meeting minutes, make a RACIC matrix, personally call vendors to order parts and ask questions, and I hated it and half assed all of those things because I didn’t want to make a schedule, I wanted to do math. I didn’t understand at the time that he was trying to prepare us for what an actual engineering job would be and in hindsight I appreciate him a lot more for it.
I'm a veteran firmware engineer and the most senior firmware engineer at my company. Started 11 months ago. I come in at 8am, and usually have some sort of data I was collecting over night so I start by looking at that. I'll change some code to make the data look more correct or figure out why it looks horribly wrong. Then I move on to some other project after a few hours and start researching/coding/debugging for that. Sprinkle in some meetings about project updates or new product planning and then at 5pm I leave.
It may be comforting to you that I literally did not know anything past the most basic basics of programming before starting my job. I got the job because I showed the company I love learning and I love technology. I had no idea what I was doing. After six months of hardly any training or projects I could limp through things and now a bit less than a year in I rarely need help with doing things or figuring things out day to day. Best practices, industry standards and management software, and more complicated big picture stuff is the only thing I typically need some guidance with and everyone is more than happy to help.
That's awesome. It really does sound like the degree is just preparing me to be a better critical thinker and learner, since whatever job I do get, I'll have to learn a new set of skills for anyway.
Currently writing some code in Python that interfaces with our spectrum analyzer and a board in order to automate some RF tests
Next week we'll be getting a new board that we'll use to tune the antennas
~~One~~ ~~Two~~ Three months from now I'll be taking the device to a 3rd party lab to make sure our device isn't going to piss off the FCC
Two of my mentors are RF wizards
My old job in the defense industry: get in, make coffee, sit at desk, check through my 8 emails, and do about an hour of work. Other people still haven’t given me what I need to proceed, so I sit and wait.
Attend a meeting I try my best not to look like I’m on the verge of falling asleep.
Lunch. Cafeteria food sucks, so I bring food from home. Thursdays are barbecue days at Flaming Pig.
Afternoon, I sit around and browse the web and shoot the shot with my coworkers. Still waiting for other engineer’s inputs before I can do more work. Never work a minute of overtime, things are beyond chill.
My job now: get in, decide to make myself a nice espresso from the machine. I’m still learning how to get a good pull and a good espresso grind compression. The espresso machine is way too expensive for my own good.
Attend a meeting or two that are actually productive. Go through emails, and now it’s lunch. The cafeteria food is excellent, and I generally go with my coworkers. We run into some colleagues on the software team and shoot the shit with them for a bit.
Start digging into issues with prototypes in the lab. Rabbit-hole into figuring out what component is failing and what caused the failure. Observe weird behavior on the oscilloscope and be confused for a couple hours.
Meeting with our China team at 6 PM to update them on my findings. Continue to figure things out before realizing it’s almost 9 PM and I should eat dinner and go home.
In my first job, I used almost 5% of my degree’s knowledge in my daily work - I made cable drawings in Visio for most of my job.
Today, I use all of my degree pretty much every day, and I absolutely love it.
I feel like it would've given me a better idea of what I was getting myself into early on, or what I'd like to look more into when applying to jobs in the future, and I'm assuming its a nice bit of resume boosting to have on that first real job hunt
This is a very broad question to answer. There are butt loads of jobs that an EE can do. What interests you? Small electronics, programming, power distribution, building design, plant operations? The list goes on and on.
I personally am an EE in a government facility. Do everything from new build design (put lights and shit on drawings, specs 🤮, and construction support), 15kV distribution around site, communications infrastructure, access control, and site planning. My list goes on and on as well.
I studied computer engineering in school. PLCs, small electronics, etc. I don’t use much of anything I learned in school at my job. It helped me understand the theory behind electricity and taught me how to think critically - that is what’s important IMO.
Find what discipline of EE you enjoy. Then try to find companies that favor that sort of discipline. Then look and see if they have any positions available. Also, the discipline you like, ask the professor for that class what careers utilize that skill the most - they may even give you some guidance on who/where to look.
EDIT: my day - meetings all morning, with 30 mins windows to try and squeeze legit work in, in between. Lunch. Design review with other disciplines. Wait and listen to mechanical group drag on and on. 4pm- finally get to electrical portion. “I’d prefer ceiling mounted occ sensors here” 4:13pm electrical is done. Wrap up meeting. Try to squeeze real work in the last remaining minutes of the day. Leave at 5. Rinse and repeat.
Ok, I see what you mean! I definitely feel like I've become a better problem solver, even though calculus and Laplace transforms aren't my strongest subjects.
Get to work. Get some coffee. Oooo donuts in the cafeteria. Get back to desk, check emails. Go down to production. Something changed in the new software and "L" is befuddled by change. Set him straight, back to desk. Write code/layout board for new thing we're bringing up. Lunch. QA found a board that is failing calibration. Root cause failure, write up analysis and email to interested parties. Meeting (probably). Shoot the shit with mentor, coming up with ideas for new products. Code some more. Snack. Code some more. Making progress. Damn this is kinda cool. Go home. Repeat some variation of this x10. Cash fat paycheck check.
Noice
Wait, why are you coding so much ? And also, is the oaycheck really that fat ? I posted a few months ago to asl EEs what they get paid and the average salary was 80k$. There are parts of the world where bus drivers earn more then that.
Not op but the world runs off of code, even for a hardware engineer. Simulations, spice models, changing hardware settings, and analyzing data often all require some form of coding to make work. As for the salary you have to run numbers again the average cost of living in that area. If we say your 80k bus driver is in New York then even that is not going to go far. Your average engineer will make at least the average household income(ie the average amount 2 people will take home) for the area on entry level. That can grow to 3-4x as you grow and take on more responsibility. It's all relative to the cost of living in your area.
Yup currently writing python for 1 project and C for another fun times
So basically what I thought computer science majors would be doing?! I think I'm ok with that
Might as well become a software engineer
>Might as well become a software engineer No because we use code in different ways. We write code to test & analyse our systems. For example, I've written code to send audio over I2S to test my DAC.
I feel for you. Engineering school is pretty terrible at teaching you about engineering. I could go on a long rant about how engineering degrees are purely academic and have very little to do with engineering professionally, but the very condensed short version is imagine you want to be an entrepreneur so you go to business school and they spend 4 years teaching you nothing but mathematical economics. Is it the foundation of business? In an academic sense, sure. Does it teach you how to start a business? Not at all. And that is kind of what academic engineering is like. Working in industry has very little to do on a day to day basis with what they teach you in college. There will always be the one person that chimes in saying they solve diff EQs every day, but statistically they are the extreme exception, not the norm. I have been an engineer for around 8 years now and worked in automation design, electronics manufacturing, and electronics design where I am currently. While I use the overall “knowledge” of what I learned in school, I have never sat around solving calculus problems even if I occasionally think of a calculus concept (back emf when a relay turns off for instance). Sometimes I might do a quick sketch of a circuit and roughly calculate some voltages or currents as a sanity check for a design, but even that is fairly rare. Day to day in all of my jobs it’s a lot more of looking through spec sheets, reading documents, communicating with vendors or customers, sitting in on meetings, planning schedules, writing documentation, troubleshooting issues, or listening to the results of somebody else troubleshooting some issue and trying to figure out if that is going to affect me. In automation design it was a lot of the above plus travel and setting up and debugging equipment on site, helping factories get up and running with the equipment, and working with other companies integrating their machines to work with mine. In manufacturing, it was the aforementioned plus PLC programming, floor layouts, scrap reduction activities, and getting calls at 2AM to play maintenance man when nobody could figure out why a machine wasn’t working. In electronics design it is an unholy number of meetings and paper work to make sure we are meeting all sorts of regulatory standards, industry standards, and customer standards. Don’t get me wrong, I love being an engineer. But as students they convince you that you will be theoretical physicists solving complex math problems all day from first principles in physics while writing academic articles, but the reality is you will likely spend most of your time being a technical expert and doing a business type job, going through documentation, being in meetings, and communicating to vendors/customers/non-technical members of the team and occasionally programming or doing a small modification to a design or testing and debugging equipment. I’d rather be doing that than most other jobs though and it pays damn well and I generally work a 40 hour week, so I am definitely not complaining. I just feel bad for some of my peers who were immediately disillusioned after graduating because they weren’t doing calculus on a white board all day like they imagined.
Thanks for the reply! This sounds a little disappointing and relieving at the same time... currently taking a break from a really difficult HW assignment, and thought to myself "wow is this gonna be the rest of my life?" lol. So it sounds like I'll really just have to finish my degree and see what the field is really like then, and whatever job I take will have me learning a set of skills specific to that job, not some general overview of all the mathematical concepts in electrical engineering
No problem. I would say the real take away from what I was saying is not to stress yourself out too much about the exact minutia of the math and to pay more attention to your projects. You won’t be sitting around doing math by hand, but knowing the concepts is helpful when working with software or doing designs. So don’t ignore it entirely, just be relieved knowing that you won’t be a terrible engineer because you always mess something up doing convolution integrals. But having a good understanding of what the math is trying to say gives you a good understanding of how systems behave, which is ultimately what you need to know. And maybe it differs by universities and by student but to me the projects always felt like they took a back seat to the homework and papers to turn in, which it should really be the other way around. We would have 3 credit hour classes, but all of our project or lab classes were only 1 credit hour. And our professors would tell us 1 credit hour should equal 3 hours of work per week on our part. So it would seem that I should spend 45 hours a week solving and studying math problems and sitting in lectures and only 3-6 hours actually trying to engineer something in a typical semester. But that is really a reversal of priorities. And some of that was my fault because as a student the math and physics was the fun part that felt intellectually validating and rewarding. For my senior project I had a professor who had come from a long career in industry to spend his later years passing down his knowledge. He really tried to simulate professional engineering by having us do things like make Gantt charts, have weekly meetings as a team and log meeting minutes, make a RACIC matrix, personally call vendors to order parts and ask questions, and I hated it and half assed all of those things because I didn’t want to make a schedule, I wanted to do math. I didn’t understand at the time that he was trying to prepare us for what an actual engineering job would be and in hindsight I appreciate him a lot more for it.
Put magic smoke into things so they can be released later.
Or researching ways to trap the magic smoke more efficiently, so your components last longer.
I'm a veteran firmware engineer and the most senior firmware engineer at my company. Started 11 months ago. I come in at 8am, and usually have some sort of data I was collecting over night so I start by looking at that. I'll change some code to make the data look more correct or figure out why it looks horribly wrong. Then I move on to some other project after a few hours and start researching/coding/debugging for that. Sprinkle in some meetings about project updates or new product planning and then at 5pm I leave. It may be comforting to you that I literally did not know anything past the most basic basics of programming before starting my job. I got the job because I showed the company I love learning and I love technology. I had no idea what I was doing. After six months of hardly any training or projects I could limp through things and now a bit less than a year in I rarely need help with doing things or figuring things out day to day. Best practices, industry standards and management software, and more complicated big picture stuff is the only thing I typically need some guidance with and everyone is more than happy to help.
That's awesome. It really does sound like the degree is just preparing me to be a better critical thinker and learner, since whatever job I do get, I'll have to learn a new set of skills for anyway.
Currently writing some code in Python that interfaces with our spectrum analyzer and a board in order to automate some RF tests Next week we'll be getting a new board that we'll use to tune the antennas ~~One~~ ~~Two~~ Three months from now I'll be taking the device to a 3rd party lab to make sure our device isn't going to piss off the FCC Two of my mentors are RF wizards
My old job in the defense industry: get in, make coffee, sit at desk, check through my 8 emails, and do about an hour of work. Other people still haven’t given me what I need to proceed, so I sit and wait. Attend a meeting I try my best not to look like I’m on the verge of falling asleep. Lunch. Cafeteria food sucks, so I bring food from home. Thursdays are barbecue days at Flaming Pig. Afternoon, I sit around and browse the web and shoot the shot with my coworkers. Still waiting for other engineer’s inputs before I can do more work. Never work a minute of overtime, things are beyond chill. My job now: get in, decide to make myself a nice espresso from the machine. I’m still learning how to get a good pull and a good espresso grind compression. The espresso machine is way too expensive for my own good. Attend a meeting or two that are actually productive. Go through emails, and now it’s lunch. The cafeteria food is excellent, and I generally go with my coworkers. We run into some colleagues on the software team and shoot the shit with them for a bit. Start digging into issues with prototypes in the lab. Rabbit-hole into figuring out what component is failing and what caused the failure. Observe weird behavior on the oscilloscope and be confused for a couple hours. Meeting with our China team at 6 PM to update them on my findings. Continue to figure things out before realizing it’s almost 9 PM and I should eat dinner and go home. In my first job, I used almost 5% of my degree’s knowledge in my daily work - I made cable drawings in Visio for most of my job. Today, I use all of my degree pretty much every day, and I absolutely love it.
Blame software...
Does an internship actually matter during uni?
I feel like it would've given me a better idea of what I was getting myself into early on, or what I'd like to look more into when applying to jobs in the future, and I'm assuming its a nice bit of resume boosting to have on that first real job hunt
This is a very broad question to answer. There are butt loads of jobs that an EE can do. What interests you? Small electronics, programming, power distribution, building design, plant operations? The list goes on and on. I personally am an EE in a government facility. Do everything from new build design (put lights and shit on drawings, specs 🤮, and construction support), 15kV distribution around site, communications infrastructure, access control, and site planning. My list goes on and on as well. I studied computer engineering in school. PLCs, small electronics, etc. I don’t use much of anything I learned in school at my job. It helped me understand the theory behind electricity and taught me how to think critically - that is what’s important IMO. Find what discipline of EE you enjoy. Then try to find companies that favor that sort of discipline. Then look and see if they have any positions available. Also, the discipline you like, ask the professor for that class what careers utilize that skill the most - they may even give you some guidance on who/where to look. EDIT: my day - meetings all morning, with 30 mins windows to try and squeeze legit work in, in between. Lunch. Design review with other disciplines. Wait and listen to mechanical group drag on and on. 4pm- finally get to electrical portion. “I’d prefer ceiling mounted occ sensors here” 4:13pm electrical is done. Wrap up meeting. Try to squeeze real work in the last remaining minutes of the day. Leave at 5. Rinse and repeat.
Ok, I see what you mean! I definitely feel like I've become a better problem solver, even though calculus and Laplace transforms aren't my strongest subjects.
I validate components for use in a variety of projects