Originally posted by: beer
CHAPTER ONE: SAY WHAT?
This is, by far, the longest post that I have ever written, and although I spent little time on AT these days, I keep on seeing this theme pop up - and even though the demographics have gone through several changes since 2000, this belief has always pervaded ATOT's postings and I want to throw in my opinion. Yes, this is long, but if you are thinking about declaring EE when you go to school or when you apply, you really should read this.
I joined OT in 2000, as a freshman/sophomore in high school, back before reddit/digg and youtube/facebook became time sinks for the web 2.0 generation. In other words, there was a lot of traffic, and I used OT to frame certain things in my life certain ways. And I've more or less read OT at least once a week for the past couple of years after spending an hour daily or so while I was in college, getting my EE degree, at a top ten school.
Everyone -- and by that, I really, in fact, do mean virtually everyone here -- seems to think that an EE degree is the best thing that anyone can study, and that anyone who doesn't study EE is somehow both intellectually and professionally inferior and errored in their judgment, because there's nothing more useful to have.
CHAPTER TWO: MY STORY AND WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME
I've been out of school for three years now, and I work at a tech company in silicon valley that makes certain categories of peripherals that are in pretty much every laptop of every person reading this, making, no matter what you compare it to, significantly more than the average EE doing significantly more interesting work. In other words, by how AT defines success, I've done fairly well, which is why I think my opinion that the "EE is god" opinion is a big pile of steaming horse-shit should carry at least some weight.
Not only do I think the degree is a steaming pile of horse-shit, I think that it has few redeeming paths for leading to fulfilling careers and I wouldn't recommend anyone at any American school actually pursue that as a degree here in 2009. When I was reading ATOT for a couple hours a day in high school, it wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination to argue that the prestige that this community holds EE degrees to be had at least some - if not a significant - impact on my decision to declare an EE major. After all, the mentality at the time was more or less the same as it is to day, which is, summarily stated, that only the smartest people can get an engineering degree and of the engineering degrees available, EE is the hardest and by getting it, while you are not guaranteed a job without strong internship work, there are few other options to a decent amount of success in your mid-20s and anyone studying anything else clearly hasn't gotten the message that EE is what you need to have if you want to go places.
CHAPTER THREE: WHY I THINK YOU SHOULDN'T STUDY EE - A PROFESSIONAL CASE STUDY
Still with me? Good. So, why do I think this mentality is horse-shit, you ask? In a sentence, it simply doesn't give you the necessary training to get in with any of the A-level companies in silicon valley today, which is, or at least should be, the desire of most people here if they want to achieve prestige and wealth while at the same time doing fulfilling and potentially socially valuable work. The companies that it does qualify you for, given will pay you a decent salary, but are so focused on (and have been perpetually focused on) cost-cutting and cost-savings and gross margins for virtually an entire decade now that there is little that you get out of working for even the "A-" level companies.
Note that I'm really talking a strict "EE" degree here; that is to say, if the degree has a computer focus, the computer focus is on low-level work, either digital systems design (verilog, vhdl), compilers, and computer architecture or optimization. Certain schools have the concept of an EECS degree, which I'm not necessarily directly referring to, because I think the material being put forth in CS programs is significantly more relevant and, judging from the career paths of my friends that have pure CS backgrounds versus though that have EE backgrounds, much more financially rewarding and enjoyable. Abstractly, EE teaches you hard work, and it does teach you complicated things that few others know about - but the reality of the situation is, they don't particularly care to know about what you know about because it's wildly useless and not worth the time spent at it.
CHAPTER 3.1: SPIT IT OUT. WHAT ARE YOU REALLY SAYING?
The reason why I don't think EE is a particularly good choice of a degree is that its curriculum teaches you things that have already been solved and are now in a mode where they are being solved in lower cost or more cost-efficient manners, which, effectively, makes your particular skillset a commoditized item, which makes more senior engineers, marketing people, and managers with engineering degrees just slightly older than you, that remember the dot-com days, more money. Yes, you *could* do a strictly research track. But I work with Stanford Ph.Ds that work weeks at a time at 12-13 hours a day to make $150K, maybe $175K, that have few hopes of escaping the reality of the situation which is that for the number of problems that have yet to be solved are far outnumbered globally by the number of Ph.Ds and other "really smart people" that are trying to solve them. That's not a lot of money in the top echelon of this country and these people are many orders of magnitude more textbook-smart than other people that are making more doing less, or at least less complicated, work.
CHAPTER 4: WHY I'M WRITING THIS REALLY, REALLY LONG POST
I spent a lot of time and effort to get my EE degree in four years with a high GPA while doing a co-op and having a really, really good internship, and I have done better than virtually all of my peers at the state school in which I attended. And there are people out there that chose different tracks, doing easier things, that are able to make far more money working in far conceptually simpler jobs.
The reality of the current economic conditions - and really the long-term trend that started shortly after the web 1.0 crash - is that problems that have already been solved to the average consumer's satisfaction rarely pay you well for improving. The executive management of all the top companies that produce a physical device really, at this point, only care about gross margins, because that's all wall street wants. And what does studying EE teach you to do? Solve problems and create products. It's what separates an EE degree from a CS degree or a business degree. It's also why it's potential upside has been dwindling for over a decade while people that study CS or business, or that go into things besides engineering, are, seemingly, doing better.
In other words, people here like to champion the fact that EE degrees teach you to actually solve problems and actually create and do things, along with teaching you work ethic. But that's exactly why I think it's a horse-shit degree - the industries behind creating physical products now only seemingly compete on gross margins, whereas companies that create more intangible things or manage services are able to pay employees better and offer better and more flexible working conditions, and that the strict EE degree doesn't prepare you for those jobs.
CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS AN "A" COMPANY? WHAT SHOULD I STUDY?
I define an "A" company as a company that provides good working conditions, flexible scheduling, with a high potential benefit for you (monetary and prestige) and offers an exciting mission to be solved or valuable career experience that would be very useful in future endeavors.
After being out of school for a number of years, I have no choice but to think that my friends that chose to study Finance or Computer Science are given much better skillets that lead to more interesting jobs.
Yes, finance is in a contracting state currently, and the brunt of the downsizing has been on the junior-level staff. But if you choose to study finance, you're never working in a job where you're working so strictly to one goal at the expense of all else, as you are in most engineering companies (gross margins, in case you missed it). A computer science degree teaches you far more abstract things that get you into door at the hot companies, like Google. EE degrees don't teach you these skills. Learning to work with the modern web frameworks allow you to work where the interesting and creative problems are currently being solved, and where the long-term trends dictate they will be. Learning computer architecture, or digital layout, or electronics and pspice, or even digital communication equips you with the ability to solve things that have already been solved for the majority of applications and at the same time takes your time away from other things that you could be learning.
Or, you could learn to apply your CS mathematical work to financial companies. Or you could choose to work for consulting companies and get an MBA.
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION
I've been wanting to write this for a long time. My friends in finance make shit-tons of money doing conceptually simpler things that I could have easily done had I known that working in the EE field would have been so frustrating. The work environments are sterile and while you do get paid a decent amount, there's little vertical movement because few companies that hire lots of EEs are expanding fast enough to give staff a chance to move up any any appreciable rate. The bottom line is that most of my EE friends are at or about the $100K level and none of them are happy because the work sucks and there doesn't seem to be any way to move up, short of jumping companies, because the churn rate is so low because there are few jobs with better companies that are hiring large amounts of EEs. Some of my friends that work in Finance are getting laid off, but they all find work that pays significantly better than EE doing significantly simpler work and it's frustrating, because the time I spent in AT while I was in high school led me to think that an EE degree would be the best thing to study.
It wasn't.
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