General > General Technical Chat
Starting a new CompSci/Electronics career -need advice!
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on September 07, 2022, 08:17:11 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on September 07, 2022, 06:07:19 am ---
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on September 03, 2022, 04:49:17 pm ---CS (Computer Science) is about software.
EE (Electrical Engineering) is about hardware.
If you want to do programming, then continue with CS, otherwise for electronics and hardware you may want to switch to EE MSc.
--- End quote ---
Yep, basically this.
--- End quote ---
Except when it isn't.
--- End quote ---
Of course. As a general rule though it's true.
It always comes down to the individual course, any strand options chosen, and the school in general.
One schools EE degree may be completely different to another schools, even though they are both accedited the same Washington Accord level internationally.
University of Western Sydney for example have (or had) basically the same frist two years for EE/Civil/Mechanical degrees "just in case" you wanted to change your mind ::)
AFAIK no other Sydney based university EE course makes you take civil engineering classes "just in case".
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on September 07, 2022, 01:21:10 pm ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on September 07, 2022, 08:17:11 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on September 07, 2022, 06:07:19 am ---
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on September 03, 2022, 04:49:17 pm ---CS (Computer Science) is about software.
EE (Electrical Engineering) is about hardware.
If you want to do programming, then continue with CS, otherwise for electronics and hardware you may want to switch to EE MSc.
--- End quote ---
Yep, basically this.
--- End quote ---
Except when it isn't.
--- End quote ---
Of course. As a general rule though it's true.
It always comes down to the individual course, any strand options chosen, and the school in general.
One schools EE degree may be completely different to another schools, even though they are both accedited the same Washington Accord level internationally.
University of Western Sydney for example have (or had) basically the same frist two years for EE/Civil/Mechanical degrees "just in case" you wanted to change your mind ::)
AFAIK no other Sydney based university EE course makes you take civil engineering classes "just in case".
--- End quote ---
I gather I was unusual in that I knew what I wanted to get from a university course, and discovered enough to select the right course at the right university. It seems most people aren't like that.
The issue of breadth-vs-depth is an interesting one, with no right/wrong answers. I chose to avoid courses that made you choose, e.g., telecoms engineering vs something else before entering. I thought - and still think - that was ridiculously narrow for an education that should set you up for the next 40 years.
OTOH, I knew I was interested in electronics and computing, so I wasn't interested in anything much more general than that.
On the third hand, I have a relative that is in the final year of a systems engineering course. While I don't know the details, that doesn't seem stupid.
Nowadays I'd choose the life sciences, for the same reason I chose electronics and computing: the fields are at the same stage for both professionals and hackers.
fourfathom:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on September 06, 2022, 11:48:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 06, 2022, 11:00:21 pm ---Hardware != Software, but there is a huge overlap.
--- End quote ---
Some Dunning-Krueger candidates believe there is a fundamental difference, and that they can distinguish between them. |O
Such people don't know what is inside a modern x86 processor or an FPGA, amongst many things.
--- End quote ---
I was going to walk away from this stupidity, but I just can't seem to let it drop. You claim that there is no "fundamental difference" between hardware and software. How far down are you going in order to make this claim? Yes, they are both called "engineering" and both require some common skills, but they diverge rapidly above that level. Are you talking about the activities, or the education?
As for the activity, here are a few design examples from my career, roughly ordered from all hardware to all software (not in time sequence):
* Hearing aid design (audio amplifier, filter, compressor), all analog circuitry
* "Wireless microphone" style radio transmitters and receivers
* EMI design and mitigation
* Switching power system noise analysis and cure in a timeslotted multiplexer
* Acoustic test equipment (some analog, some digital, no software)
* DS1 and DS3 framing, synchronization and switching ASICs (are you calling Verilog "software"?)
* 6800 processor board hardware
* Bootcode (68HC11) for system linecards
* Analysis of digital clock generation methods and time/spectral performanceSure, some of those things could be done better digitally now, using software, but that's not an argument that there is no difference.
And I agree that a useful engineer should probably get experience in hardware and software, and avoid early specialization (I managed to avoid it my entire career).
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 07, 2022, 04:07:05 pm ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on September 06, 2022, 11:48:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 06, 2022, 11:00:21 pm ---Hardware != Software, but there is a huge overlap.
--- End quote ---
Some Dunning-Krueger candidates believe there is a fundamental difference, and that they can distinguish between them. |O
Such people don't know what is inside a modern x86 processor or an FPGA, amongst many things.
--- End quote ---
I was going to walk away from this stupidity, but I just can't seem to let it drop. You claim that there is no "fundamental difference" between hardware and software. How far down are you going in order to make this claim? Yes, they are both called "engineering" and both require some common skills, but they diverge rapidly above that level. Are you talking about the activities, or the education?
As for the activity, here are a few design examples from my career, roughly ordered from all hardware to all software (not in time sequence):
* Hearing aid design (audio amplifier, filter, compressor), all analog circuitry
* "Wireless microphone" style radio transmitters and receivers
* EMI design and mitigation
* Switching power system noise analysis and cure in a timeslotted multiplexer
* Acoustic test equipment (some analog, some digital, no software)
* DS1 and DS3 framing, synchronization and switching ASICs (are you calling Verilog "software"?)
* 6800 processor board hardware
* Bootcode (68HC11) for system linecards
* Analysis of digital clock generation methods and time/spectral performanceSure, some of those things could be done better digitally now, using software, but that's not an argument that there is no difference.
And I agree that a useful engineer should probably get experience in hardware and software, and avoid early specialization (I managed to avoid it my entire career).
--- End quote ---
Overall all you have done is mentioned a few spot examples; you have failed to supply a test that can be used to distinguish between hardware and software. Without such a test the differences are small
Apart from that, you have made many wrong and strange statements...
I've never thought of an electromagnetic field as "hardware"; it is physics! Even then, software is used to mitigate radio EMC problems and some EMI problems.
As someone that wears a hearing aid and expects to be eligible for a cochlear implant in one ear, I a, familiar how much you don't know about hearing aids. My first hearing aids had very limited "programmability"; my current has stunning capabilities partially implemented in "software". Cochlear implant controllers are even more sophisticated.
Is a neural net with all its internal weighting factors hardware or software? Consider Igor Aleksander's WISARD and Tesla's car controllers - especially the "prototype <cough> full self-driving" system.
I'm not familiar with the details of verilog, but VHDL certainly is software by most people's definitions. As wackypedia puts it "The VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is a hardware description language (HDL) that can model the behavior and structure of digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from the system level down to that of logic gates, for design entry, documentation, and verification purposes. ... The key advantage of VHDL, when used for systems design, is that it allows the behavior of the required system to be described (modeled) and verified (simulated) before synthesis tools translate the design into real hardware (gates and wires). ... VHDL is a dataflow language". To aid that, VHDL has many attributes not associated with hardware, e.g. constructs to create/read/write files in an operating system.
As for 6800s, why not consder the contemporary AMD2900 family where microcode is a key implementation concept. Is the microcode hardware or software?
For a more modern example, consider Intel x86 processors from the P6 onwards. How do you think Intel changes the operation of its processors in installed systems? Is Intel Microcode hardware or software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Microcode
If you think x86 processors are hardware, how do they, when powered down, detect and respond to "wake on LAN" packets to apply power to themselves to start operating again.
Analysis of clocks and time/spectral performance is no more hardware than systems modelling.
nctnico:
Moving goalposts again...
In the end you can apply 'engineering skills' (=define the problem, split in sub-problems and find solutions to each sub-problem) to every problem out there. But that doesn't mean a good hardware engineer is a good software engineer or a good chemical engineer by definition. Or your goal is to be a jack of all trades, master at none.
The reality is that there are many fields you can specialise in but acquiring the necessary knowledge takes time to learn and time is limited for everyone. So you have to pick your areas of expertise carefully. In the end you can't know everything up to an expert level.
During the past decade I have been involved in various projects dealing with time & frequency transfer. I've had the pleasure to work with various people that have devoted their careers (or may I say: lifes) to this subject. They are pioneers in their field and extremely knowledgeable. But they know sh*t about software engineering.
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