In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China. It's very difficult to find a company in the west where you could go to do an engineering apprenticeship and learn how to build cool stuff, because all of them outsourced their "building cool stuff" operations years ago. And designing things when you cannot try out your design (or when you need to wait 2 weeks for a parcel from China for each attempt) is really difficult and demotivating.
I graduated a double degree of EE and Comp Science. My final year thesis was a project with a local company integrating their custom designed GPRS module with a GPS module to demonstrate mobile tracking tech (it was 2003).
Because of the project I went straight into a hardware design job out of uni. I was designing boards for mobiles! Working on circuit design, prototyping PCBs, I was psyched!
Problem is the company was run _terribly_. 3 months in we all got put on 2 weeks forced leave and then given redundancies. Aside from dinner pretty terrible management, the economics of doing mobile hardware design in Australia just didn't stack up (we were the only company trying).
In the end there were probably 10:1 software jobs for every hardware job. Given my experience so far, I opted for software.
It has been great, I love software, but I sometimes wish I had lived somewhere that had a higher critical mass of EE work.
Very similar to me! Double degree in EE/IT, my first job out of uni was with a small company building gps chips. I actually spent a lot of time writing testing software. A couple of years in it went down the drain and I just naturally transitioned in to a software role (paid a lot better).
Funnily enough, there are quite a few Australian (and a few Kiwi) companies in the telematics space these days. Not sure how many of them are designing hardware from scratch though, versus off the shelf devices with custom firmware.
The job I used to do as a C/EE at Intel decades ago is now currently being done by PhD physicists. I think the knowledge requirements have changed quite a bit now that everything is running in quantum level problems.
I still build audio amplifiers, filters, and dabble in RF, but my day job is mostly administrative, now.
The impact of not having local apprenticeships available cannot be overstated.
I see this within regions of the US in regards to software. If you grow up in a tech hub(even just your local state one) it can seem like it was "easy" to get into computers and mod games. But the farmers son's who are technical near me where I live now go and tinker with cars and diesel engines the way I did with my dad's old 286.
> In my opinion, the issue is that all of the EE work went to China.
This is what I was thinking. There are few fabs in North America anymore, so SMD work requires a lot of shipping and patience. You can also outsource EE work to China very easily and they have a long history doing this stuff, but outsourcing software is not so easy for some reason (yet).
It happened with a fair bit of mechanical engineering stuff too. (Or it went away.) For example, there used to be a huge disk drive industry in the US. Not just the big "commodity" drive suppliers but every minicomputer company used to design and build its own disk (and tape) drives.
Yep. I was about to ask this question: suppose I was born 20 years ago in a > 0.5 M people city in Europe or North America and I'm into an EE course. I'd be considering my job options for when I graduate. Which companies need an EE around me? As a non EE engineer I can think of one (STMicroelectronics is not far away from where I live.) As CS graduate: almost infinite (of which only slightly less than infinite shitty jobs, for sure.)
