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Wayward EE lost and lamenting

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bd139:
Replying to original post. I bailed out and went to work in software. Money is good, jobs are plentiful, get to work from home, no relocation so you can establish a family easily. I do the EE stuff at home on my own schedule.

VK3DRB:

--- Quote from: bd139 on October 05, 2020, 06:17:56 am ---Replying to original post. I bailed out and went to work in software. Money is good, jobs are plentiful, get to work from home, no relocation so you can establish a family easily. I do the EE stuff at home on my own schedule.

--- End quote ---

You guys miss a big point. With so many of you bailing out of hardware, there is money to be made by good hardware design engineers because there is a shortage of experienced and skilful hardware design engineers out there. I am finding there is heaps of hardware development work that pays well. It is simply the law of supply and demand. I do not have to advertise to get work. In fact I am knocking back work, so I can select good companies that are prepared to pay my rates.

Why do you need to move location to do hardware design? Most of my work is done with Altium so I can do it all at home or in the office or at a client's location, just like software development. I also have my own hardware lab. Admittedly, a software "lab" can be very cheap in comparison. Altium is bloody expensive, but you do get bugs thrown in for free.

There is however, one huge advantage with software development over hardware development: Software engineers can make a small mistake, fix a line of code in a few minutes, compile and deploy the code, and everything is hunky dory. But hardware engineers can make a small mistake, resulting in a PCB re-spin with a massive impact to delivery time and budget, accompanied by very upset people. Added to that, you think you have finished your design and it fails the IEC 61000-4-2 8kV or 15kV air gap ESD test intermittently. Hardware development can be very stressful. Plus hardware development is always on the critical path in the early days of development.

As for boredom, hardware development can get quite tedious compared to software development. I have done both for many years. But I would prefer designing a PCBA any day to cleaning up, debugging and refactoring some clown's undocumented and badly commented software. (I did that on a complicated firmware project for 18 months some years ago. I vowed never again, unless the fee is $300 per hour plus costs like psychiatrist fees :scared:). 

coppice:

--- Quote from: VK3DRB on October 05, 2020, 10:54:54 am ---
--- Quote from: bd139 on October 05, 2020, 06:17:56 am ---Replying to original post. I bailed out and went to work in software. Money is good, jobs are plentiful, get to work from home, no relocation so you can establish a family easily. I do the EE stuff at home on my own schedule.

--- End quote ---

You guys miss a big point. With so many of you bailing out of hardware, there is money to be made by good hardware design engineers because there is a shortage of experienced and skilful hardware design engineers out there. I am finding there is heaps of hardware development work that pays well. It is simply the law of supply and demand. I do not have to advertise to get work. In fact I am knocking back work, so I can select good companies that are prepared to pay my rates.

--- End quote ---
Every organisation I've ever worked in, or observed from the outside, paid and respected mediocre software people better than the very best hardware people. It has just become a strange norm that software people get paid better. There is never a shortage of capable hardware people. There is only a shortage of people prepared to work for the pay that is on offer. Shortages self correct when the money is right, but the culture in many countries is to not pay what it takes to get the best people.

bsodmike:
I got mine about a month back but they seem to be out of stock again! https://www.eevblog.com/product/ucurrentgold/

bsodmike:

--- Quote from: VK3DRB on October 05, 2020, 10:54:54 am ---There is however, one huge advantage with software development over hardware development: Software engineers can make a small mistake, fix a line of code in a few minutes, compile and deploy the code, and everything is hunky dory. But hardware engineers can make a small mistake, resulting in a PCB re-spin with a massive impact to delivery time and budget, accompanied by very upset people. Added to that, you think you have finished your design and it fails the IEC 61000-4-2 8kV or 15kV air gap ESD test intermittently. Hardware development can be very stressful. Plus hardware development is always on the critical path in the early days of development.

As for boredom, hardware development can get quite tedious compared to software development. I have done both for many years. But I would prefer designing a PCBA any day to cleaning up, debugging and refactoring some clown's undocumented and badly commented software. (I did that on a complicated firmware project for 18 months some years ago. I vowed never again, unless the fee is $300 per hour plus costs like psychiatrist fees :scared:).

--- End quote ---

Very true! Right now I'm also taking care of my client's entire stack - this involves the deployment and CI stack as well.  Fixes are cheap, and there's very little to "break"; it's designed for high SLA and with Cloud providers that's pretty simple.

I can really appreciate the stress of being responsible for a PCB design; so much to go wrong and rather than doing `git blame` and applying a patch, that fault is yours and you'll have to own up to it one way or another.

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