Internships? Yeah, nah. TSMC doesn't hand out technology NDAs to interns, which makes them kinda useless.<p>All in all, the IC design field is a decade or two behind software dev in terms of ergonomics. They're not going to attract a lot of talent, if the tooling remains as kludgy and unreliable as it is. What if GCC or Clang crashed on you once in a while "just because"? That's the reality of IC design flow.<p>On the flip side, the world at large has just realized the importance of chips, which makes the outlook mildly positive.
Entry-level web dev interview: "Can you center things using CSS? Can you reverse a linked list? You're hired, here's 75k/yr, go write some Python"<p>Entry-level EE interview: "What is Ohm's law? What are sources of noise in an electronic circuit? Are you okay relocating to Guangzhou?"<p>This is a weird US-centric article. There are tons of microelectronic engineers in places where a low cost of living makes microelectronics a viable career. If you go looking for PCB design training online, it'll be almost exclusively from China, India, and eastern Europe.
Obviously money is a big factor, software engineers are reputed to earn large starting salaries, like medical doctors and lawyers.<p>Another factor is that after sports stars, the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc are associated with programming and that's where so much of the startup action is too.<p>So then why study electrical engineering, which is heavy on theory, calculus, minimal lab work and a Dilbert-like reputation?<p>Disclaimer: I have an EE degree, worked as a certified engineer for 10 years and then defected to the <i>dark side</i>, PhD in SE and 20+ years in IT. When I look at returning to EE design work & project management (which I really did enjoy) the salaries being offered immediately dash any further interest.
“It is simply not viable for us to pay entry-level engineers on large hardware teams that kind of money.”<p>Then they will go to CS fields. It's not all about money but if a person is interested in two things and one pays higher, guess where they'll go?
Would not surprise me that EE is also way more offputting it due to the amount of rigor, and dedicated practice required to get anywhere with it - just to graduate is a serious undertaking.<p>Contrast this with bootcamps and everything else that is involved when it comes to software jobs. I've seen many people weaseling through this. Maybe it's the same with EE to some degree, but I imagine these people get filtered out at a much greater pace than their SE/Web Dev counterparts.
> Students hear about software grads getting tremendous starting salaries. Why should they choose hardware engineering?<p>I didn't. They shouldn't either. It's a harder job, with less perks, for less money. The real question is why do the existing hardware engineers keep doing what they are doing when they could be making double just by picking up the phone and talking to a recruiter?
EDA drowns all the entry-level logic and placement skills, presumably.<p>MEMS, NEMS is out of scope, for virtually everything.<p>Display tech is out of scope.<p>Architecture was set in stone decades ago, shows obvious signs of pipeline issues, with speculative execution vulnerabilities.<p>Everything in hardware is either so difficult as to require a PhD from a program that doesn't exist, or it's solved already.
EE, a lot of us work as automation engineers for the controls industry. I went the cyber security route. Job opportunities for doing EE work isn't the most entry level friendly option in the US. Not to mention the pay elsewhere is more competitive.
Recently on the topic of FPGA, there are comments questioning the value for the acquisitions of Altera and Xilinx by Intel and AMD, respectively [1].<p>Apparently these acquisitions are inevitable and the writings are already on the wall due to some strategic reasons. One of the main reasons is that there's significant shortage of talents in the electronics industry.<p>[1]FPGAs in Client Compute Hardware:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=teleforce#31975094" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=teleforce#31975094</a>
EE is interesting for CS too. I studied technical CS and we had a lot of EE theory. But I cannot layout a board at all, just pick components and letting people do the layout and routing. I would have loved to have a module about the latter even if that may not fit university too well. I wasn't too interested in permanently exited asynchronous motors with constant stator voltages. I'll buy the next servo I find in a catalogue for all my needs anyway.
As someone who went to school for hardware design, but graduated and immediately went into software, while money is a big factor, the bigger factor was the development lifecycle of hardware. It's much slower and more cumbersome.<p>That being said, this is starting to change with companies like Flux.ai and Breadboard.com (Shameless plug as the CEO of Breadboard). I expect this trend to reverse course over the next 5-10 years.
I know this may come as a shock, but people are attracted to industries with good pay and job availability. People leave industries that underpay, do not have availability and burn them out.<p>The whole STEM push of the last 20 years has been ridiculous. Expecting debt-amassing students to suddenly change the face of industry simply by increasing degrees is expecting the tail to wag the dog.