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(6) Electrical Engineering: Why do most electrical and electronic engineers often forsake their primary calling (hardware) and end up as a thorough soft

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Why do most electrical and electronic engineers often forsake their primary calling (hardware) and end up as a thorough software programmers? Edit
This question has been troubling me for some time and it's time for me to source for opinions. The probability is that 5 out of 10 software engineers started as electrical engineers. But gradually and consistently they drifted away from their first call and wander into the ocean of software engineering. Can it be that hardware is hard indeed, and that software is soft and that's why the trend has been the way it's been? I'm not just curious...!
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Eric Nelson, C/C++/Ruby programmer Votes by Sudharshan Visu and Prasan Dutt Raju. Too many hardware engineers for too few jobs IMHO - software job growth is higher and there are more job openings. Hardware design is more automated than is used to be, so that fewer people are required. All the hardware engineers that I know that went into software did it because they couldn't find a job, or could find a higher paying job in software. I have seen a ton of bad code written by former hardware engineers (and no doubt, I would do a bad job designing hardware), so I have no idea which is more difficult. I have a feeling that analog hardware is much more difficult than digital, though, based on what I have heard from hardware people. Comment Share Thank Report 1 Sep, 2011 Anonymous

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Question Stats Latest activity 12 May, 2012 This question has 1 monitor with 8043 topic followers. 231 views on this question. 11 people are following this question.

As others have pointed out, the market appears to be demanding more software professionals than hardware (geographically dependent). Unless you're interested in control systems or power, you may be better off with a Computer Engineering degree to make yourself more versatile. And quite honestly, for technically inclined people, it shouldn't take very long to get "good" at software - especially for Electrical Engineers these days that typically have one or more of the following as required courses in their curriculum: data structures & algorithms, software engineering, or operating systems (my school required two of the three). However, to get really good at software is going to take time and many lines/years of code and that fact applies to anyone regardless of degree. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 21 Mar, 2012 Armin Bourne, Fashion-Tech; Consumer Electronics; A... Votes by Bill McDonald, Eddie Xue, Mikael Bengtsson, and 2 more. Very Simple: OFF-SHORING! Almost 90% of hardware jobs are now in Asia, and a large percentage in Taiwan. This started when the Laptop PC makers (especially Dell, but others) turned to Taiwan to pump out products cheaper and cheaper and quick to market. At that time, it was companies like Asustek, Compal, Acer,etc, were only ODM's (original design manufactures). So if you were an OEM like DELL, you would turn to the ODM to do the design and manufacturing as a one-stop shop... This slowly migrated more and more hardware jobs offshore, and at the end created the current market in Taiwan (and China). The RESULT though was the ODM's recognizing that THEY can be the OEM! So Asustek put out their own products, and so did the rest, made them cheaper and me-too. Dell was killed from this.

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9/29/13

(6) Electrical Engineering: Why do most electrical and electronic engineers often forsake their primary calling (hardware) and end up as a thorough soft
As you know by now, Dell suffered tremendously from this fall out, and have since opened a design center in Silicon Valley (2011). So the answer to your question lies in what happened during the internet boom of the late 90's, hardware became secondary and the software became the 'special sauce.' APPLE is a perfect example of this, although they put out their own designs and showed that the DESIGN aspect of hardware was not lost. But recently at the 2012 CES show in vegas, everyone was putting out these new 'ultrabooks' to go up against the Apple MB Air. SO... most of us in EE migrated to Software or took what we could get, although I remained in the combination (firmware). TODAY, there are more stable hardware jobs in the US, but the reality is that even companies like Intel, NVidia, Apple, Dell, HP, etc... all the large companies you might think DESIGN hardware, lean more on software than anything else. Conclusion for you: GET a CompSci degree, you're almost there with an EE degree anyways! 1 Comment Share Thank Report 15 Mar, 2012 Monish Manwani
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