Ask HN: Do electrical engineering majors work harder than CS majors?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36947006

by hiAndrewQuinn • 3 years ago

11 17 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I finished my EE degree back in 2020, but I never really got the sense I was working harder than my friends in CS. If anything I felt we sparkies had it a bit easier, because although the computations could be tricky and precise, we didn't usually have classes that required proof-flavored thinking similar to those infamous data structures and algorithms classes the CS kids did (well, okay, most of us did, but that was by elective choice and a minor in math in my case).

Some chatter on Twitter is making it sound like most people believe the opposite to be true. So I pose it to you, hackers: Which one do you think requires more work, and under what circumstances/presuppositions?

nullindividual• 3 years ago

Who works harder:

a) The person flipping burgers for 8 hours a day on their feet

b) The guy sitting in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals all day at home in front of one or more monitors tapping away at a keyboard

Prior to a few years ago, being the guy under category b), I would have said a). And yes, a) puts in more physical labor, but b) puts in more thought, which itself requires (real caloric) energy.

Obviously both of those professions you brought forward require extensive knowledge. But to my point, comparing difficulty of professions, especially ones you haven't even entered, is pointless. Not all professions are alike, and not all jobs of the same profession are the same.

You might have a go-easy CS or EE job while your neighbor has to hustle in their CS or EE job.

Do what interests _you_. Don't listen to other's opinions. Both degrees can get you very far in the world. And after you have work experience, your degrees are simply paper to hang on the wall.

muzani• 3 years ago

I used to barista 14 hours a day on my feet, and honestly it's less tiring than sitting in front of my computer writing code for less than 8 hours. I enjoy both, but there's something simply exhausting about the nature of code.

Also did manager+QA work from morning to night at one point and it was far less tiring than both of the above. But I hear Sam Altman used to send 1200 emails a day (about 2-3 per minute at 8 hrs??) and I could never do that level of managerial work.

hunkins• 3 years ago

Electrical & Computer Engineering Undergrad to CS M.S. Graduate here.

Hardware in general requires a rigor and knowledge of math and science that just isn't as present or necessary in computer science. However, I would argue that computer science requires more abstract and creative thinking.

To each their own. I moved to Computer Science and A.I. specifically because my brain enjoys abstract logic puzzles more than the required precision of a physical system.

fgeahfeaha2• 3 years ago

Obviously it depends on the person but I did 3 years of an EE degree then switched to CS so I've experienced both

EE was definitely harder to me mainly just because engineering had you taking a lot more credits at once compared to science

And doing vector calc/electromagnetic field math is way harder than proofs IMO

Also debugging software is so much easier than hardware/circuits. The real world is so much messier compared to computers where stuff is cleanly true/false.

You can put together a circuit perfectly but it turns out some component you ordered was busted or the tolerance is wrong or something got fried accidentally and it can be really painful to track it down with a multi meter/oscilloscope.

Whereas that doesn't really happen in software. You don't have a program that works one day and then and then suddenly the next day "if statements" aren't working. So much more stuff can go wrong in the physical world.

My main job now is pretty high level C++ but I don't regret doing the EE part though because it forced me do a few courses in Verilog and there's no better way to really understand how a computer works than building a simple CPU on an FPGA

huehehue• 3 years ago

You don't have a program that works one day and then and then suddenly the next day "if statements" aren't working.

I know you're talking about the fixed nature of programming logic, but this phrase is surfacing some repressed timezone debugging memories.

jelan• 3 years ago

What do you do now that involves C++ if you don’t mind me asking? I too have a EE degree but have been doing web dev for the last few years, I would like to get back into maybe doing lower level software development or work on something I can use my degree somewhat on.

fgeahfeaha2• 3 years ago

I do graphics programming on a game engine

hiAndrewQuinn• 3 years ago

Oh yeah, those Verilog courses are like the next level up from nand2tetris in wrapping your head around those kinds of things. I got a lot of mileage out of writing some automated scripts to run through Xcelium's interactive shell so I could get a faster debug loop going with them.

atomicnature• 3 years ago

The craziness in software starts at the systems level, especially distributed systems. The madness of debugging distributed systems (at present) shouldn't be underestimated :)

itake• 3 years ago

EE undergrad from GaTech here.

I did 2 semesters of EE internships at a small electrical and hardware engineering shop that built custom devices for the military and police. I currently am a software engineer.

My sense is that it is about the same. In my internship, I remember the senior engineers waiting around for parts to be delivered, taking unnecessary day trips to local fab houses to check on orders, and waiting around for MIL-STD-202 (military electrical testing that can take 12+ hours per test) to complete.

It didn't seem that much different.

luizfwolf• 3 years ago

EE Power systems Graduate but only work with power systems projects, migrated to CS in the middle of the course, but I come from Brazil (one of top 5 of Brazil) so be aware of that, Course completion total 5 years but average was 6.5 years with 70% dropout.

The think about electrical engineering depends a lot on what field you work, the "projects field" are easier and more hands on, there is actually in my opinion very few eletrical engineering knowledge in here, on the other side everything that is affected by electromagnetism is very abstract and hard, almost a religion.

Also debugging software is way more easy then debugging harder + software which is more common on electrical engineering like embedded systems for measurement. If you work with electronically devices which is a common think your problems can be related to external effects of electromagnetism that are generating impulses on the system, I don't have any experience on that but I have friends who work on development of electronics for power systems.

CS for me always felt way more easier and practical, computers you can most of the time validate and check based on coding, it's easier to find errors, being that assembly, python, javascript. Also the community is so much bigger you can find so much stuff in the internet.

So basically eletromagnetism is a religion that makes EE so hard, because it's highly abstract and is the responsible for generating tons of unpractical effects on EE daily life of work making hard to understand the daily problems in my opinion on the opposite side CS is coding and coding is executable and viewed in a computer with tons of tools to facilitate that. The problem with CS is not CS by itself but the quality of the professionals while in eletrical engineering I believe the trade by itself is already hard.

smcameron• 3 years ago

I started off EE and switched to CS (ended up with a minor in EE anyway), and I found EE to be much much harder. Specifically the math was harder, specifically differential equations. I remember just doing hours and hours and hours of transforming circuit diagrams in to differential equations and then attempting to solve those differential equations which, as I barely recall, amounted to doing a Laplace transform, then thrashing around haplessly in algebra-land for ages trying to get the thing into some recognizable form be able to do the inverse transform, but ultimately failing because I made some small unrecognized error in my thrashings, or just happened to thrash in an unfruitful direction.

The digital side of EE wasn't so bad, though I didn't do very well at debugging wire-wrapped boards (not that anybody does that anymore).

peruvian• 3 years ago

Computer Science degrees depend on the university and department offering. I can safely say my university's program (a liberal arts school with no engineering department) was on the easier side. I generally had good grades without breaking a sweat, few hard math classes, and had ample time to learn to code practically on my own.

magic_man• 3 years ago

For ee you need to know programming plus all the engineering math. If you do chip design you need to know computer architecture. EE is probably a harder major, and is probably one of not the hardest majors there is. Maybe physics or abstract math is harder.

leros• 3 years ago

I double majored in EE and CS. My personal experience as well as observing others is that EE curriculum is "harder" in two aspects. First, EE students seem to have a more difficult time grasping advanced EE concepts than CS students do grasping advanced CS concept. Secondly, EE students spend more time in the lab working on projects.

What I found interesting is the contrast in perceived difficulty where the two majors overlapped. I'll give two examples:

1) Digital logic design was both an EE and CS class. Literally the same class taken by both majors. For EE majors, it was one of the easier classes that people breezed through. For CS majors, it was considered their most difficult class. I remember seeing CS t-shirts with jokes about taking this class 2-3 times.

2) EE had a single required programming class, which basically covered programming from the ground up and finishing up at the topic of loops. That's probably the equivalent of the first week of the CS introduction class. So many EE students found this class almost impossible to wrap their minds around.

Not sure what my point is, but obviously different people have an easier time grasping different concepts.

Perhaps another interpretation is that people go into EE who should not. I saw many people who wanted to go into CS but didn't because their parents pressured them into a "real career" like engineering or medicine.

faangiq• 3 years ago

CS is quite trivial.

shortrounddev2• 3 years ago

DS & Algo classes never required us to prove anything. There was an algorithm analysis class which did, but DS & Algos is basically about memorizing the implementations and big O notation for future job interviews

Ask HN: Do electrical engineering majors work harder than CS majors?

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