I’m currently in first year engineering at the University of Western Ontario. The all-important decision of which discipline I want to go into is coming up. For me, it’s a toss up between electrical and SW eng. Yes, Western offers an accredited SW Eng program that meets engineering requirements!
Personally, my “dream job” would be doing high-voltage research for particle accelerator and experimental fusion labs
We have a new program starting up, "Power Systems’, and the prof said this is the field to get into if its the above that I want to do.
Having said all that, I’ve heard that there have never been more unemployed electrical engineers now than ever before, and that because of modern software (think: SW Eng??) much EE work is no longer necessary.
Acck, good golly? Whatever to do! Any advice?
PS. I’m new here…not sure if this is the appropriate thread. Not really about clearing up any myths is it?
Y’know, I’m not sure which board this one should go in either.
Personally, I think I’d go into the field that needs more people rather than the one that doesn’t. Not only will this benefit you personally, because you’ll have an easier time finding a good job, but you’ll be able to make a bigger contribution to society. Also, while hardware is important, you should really go into software if you want to be among the elite few who shape the ultimate destiny of the human race. (Seriously.)
I should point out, however, that I find programming easier and more interesting than EE, and that I switched my major from Electrical Engineering to Computer Science, and that I did so partly because I sucked at the early engineering courses (Statics and Materials Engineering).
So my opinion might be a tad biased by all that, although I don’t think it is…
(By the way, could someone tell me what difference, if any, there is between “Computer Science” and “Software Engineering”?)
Computer Science = computational science - the study behind the logic (ie, math) of how computers work. Computer science is algorithms, maths, logic, algorithms, logic…and of course, coding.
Software Engineering = applying principles of engineering to bring about the successful creation of software products.
Now back to my question…I will likely be doing a concurrent degree in CS, along with whatever engineering I take.
I do hardware and software both so maybe I can give you some comparisons. I originally ended up doing mostly software because the market for hardware engineers was really really bad in the early 90’s. Since I haven’t looked lately I can’t tell you what it is like now, but there were some definate trends that I was seeing. One of the main ones is that a lot of hardware design was being done overseas where the labor rate was cheaper, and the manufacturing was being done there too. Software sometimes gets dumped overseas, but more of it stays here just to avoid the “all your base are belong to us” type stuff (if you are going to write software the english speaking people use, it is much better to have english speaking engineers write it).
I’ve been involved in 5 hardware designs over the last year. Of those, one was a traditional microprocessor based thing with a lot of stuff hidden in an FPGA, one was completely stuffed in an FPGA with only some buffers on the outside, one used a microcontroller to replace a couple of dozen components, one was a conversion of an old ISA card to PCI which was mostly hardware, and one was a complete hardware design. So, while a lot of the traditional EE stuff has been replaced by VHDL and firmware, there is still some hardware design done.
The company I work for employs about a dozen software engineers and only two hardware engineers. In my experience that’s roughly equivalent to what is in the job market out there, meaning that software jobs outnumber hardware jobs by a fair amount. I can also tell you that having both skills puts you in kind of a niche market. Jobs are really hard to find where both skills are required, but if you can find those jobs usually you are one of very few people applying for it and the salary etc. is pretty good.
The more people who go into SWE and logic design, the fewer analog EEs and high-voltage experts there’ll be. Software engineers are a dime a dozen, and companies hire lots of them, but the “wizards” are the analog people.
Me, I started out as a digital EE, then learned C and moved to much higher pay as a software engineer. But in the crunch times when the SWE ads dried up, I still saw lots of ads for analog designers, especially RF people. I suspect that the EE surplus is mostly a surplus of logic and software experts.
For particle physics you should constantly check the employment websites of all sorts of university physics departments. Try to get involved anywhere, then move up to interesting projects. I lucked out and actually interviewed for the tokamak project at the U of Washington, only because I had high voltage experience from hobby work and from science museum devices. If I had specialized in analog and high voltage in school, I probably would have got the job.
I’m with bbeaty here – if it’s the high voltage & experimental stuff you want to do, definitely stick with EE and the Power Systems curriculum. You will probably be required to take some programming classes as well, so if for some reason you want to go back to school to switch fields later, you’ll have a better base than if you went the other way 'round.
While it’s true that a lot of stuff that used to be done in hardware is done digitally in firmware/software, that particular field is going to be around a lot longer. Simply because there isn’t any current or currently foreseeable replacement for high voltage electronics, and the requirements for experimentation in quantum physics will remain the same for some time (you still need a lot of energy to create/blow stuff up). If anything, it might even get better in the future. And you’ll probably learn a fair amount about power distribution, too, which is another area that isn’t going to dry up – it’ll be a long time before everyone gets a Mr. Fusion in their own home.
I work for a company that makes specialized test instruments – we do a lot of analog stuff, and other things involving high voltage and high current pulsing. (Even then I still do a fair amount of FPGA design & assembly coding.) There’s not a ton of people doing the jobs on that end, but if you learn it, you will most likely be able to get a job doing what you want to do
