Also, solder fumes aren't toxic!
The only thing in lead solder fumes is the rosin, which is benign except being an asthma sensitizer, so you should probably take precautions if you have asthma. Other then that it's basically harmless.
That being said, you should wash your hands after dealing with leaded solder and consider some disposable gloves if you're going to be doing a long session.
If you think Orcad is good, you've never used Eagle.
So which one is better between Altium and Eagle?
I really just find it hard to do hobby projects in Eagle because I'm so used to Orcad's workflow by now. All the shortcuts are different. :(
For reference Altium is still around $7500 plus $1500 per year for updates and Eagle without board restrictions is $1600.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy2022BX6Eso532xqrUxD...
Edit: ...is that Chris Gammell? How did I not know this was a thing he made?
If the solder has lead the fumes are toxic. If the solder has a rosin flux the fumes are toxic, and the operator needs ventilation to keep exposure below recommended levels.
It's a bad idea to be breathing in the fumes, but obviously this depends on how much you're breathing. At most risk are people who solder all day everyday.
I encourage you to support this statement. Lead doesn't vaporize at anywhere close to soldering temperatures, and from what I have read there is no lead component to soldering fumes and consequently no exposure through respiration.
Rosin and particularly No-Clean fluxes do pose a respiratory hazard, so fume extraction is a good idea regardless.
¹) I don't expect to find a real EE job without a degree, more like a generalist who also has clue about electronics.
Computer Engineering at the intersection of EE and CS is all of both or nothing really, depending on your point of view. A respected man once said, every idiot can count to one ;) But then again, digital and analog with enough precision seem to be the same thing from different perspectives. So, I'm not sure whether it makes sense to look for differences between those.
I've been doing software dev for a little over 10 years now and recently I have been leaning more towards electrical engineering. Partly because I loved electronics before I knew how to code, but the main reason is that I have yet to find a software company that can make thought out decisions on languages, frameworks, listen to their devs, etc. Most companies I've worked at usually just pick the most common stuff and go with it because they either don't care or aren't actually the right fit for their position, only to realize waay too late that the software wasn't the best choice. And usually us devs get the blame because we are the magic people that can "make anything work".
The other part to this is that we always voice our concerns early on, but they fall on deaf ears because it is too much of a hassle for our decision makers to make more decisions, weigh pros and cons, etc. It gets really frustrating knowing a project is going to have issues down the road but nobody listens until it happens. If you were to look back on our slack chats at the beginning of most projects you would see many devs predicting the issues with almost perfect accuracy.
Where as, (imo without real world experience mind you), EE is fairly straight forward because there are only schematics and circuits and tangible progress. No hours long meetings on which of the hundreds of frameworks will guarantee success, PMs that don't really know much about proper project management, owners that think of themselves as the next google even though us dev grunts know that isn't true, etc.
I'm probably letting my frustrations guide this reply a little too much, but what i think im trying to say is that the grass always seems to be greener on the other side even if it's not.
While I started out doing software and love it, for me electronics is just a whole next-level of awesomeness... Altium is actually in many ways a really good piece of software (yes, there are also some annoyances, but they are minor compared to any other electrical design software). It's true that it's stupid expensive but given the other options it is worth the price to us at least.
But I get to work on really cool stuff (mostly satellite tracking antenna systems), and our labs are on the side of our building with a full-height window down the entire length, so your milage may vary.
I actually don't get the solder fumes either, because we have techs who are much better at reworking tiny surface mount parts than engineers tend to be!
After 1.25 years, I realized that I was spending all my life in a lab with no windows, to the smell of toxic soldering fumes, fighting against extremely annoying software (altium & other proprietary overpriced pieces of technical debt). Also, I realized whatever I created needed a lot of work for an unsatisfying outcome (A sound amplifier is less satisfying than some webgl stuff that moves [but it requires a lot more work]). The nice feeling of being powerful when writing software & the instant compiler/interpreter feedback is what I missed the most.
At least, when you are a software engineer, you have more odds of finding a nice workplace, with windows and software you can choose.
The part I miss from electrical engineering is the physics part (But we were only skimming this part anyway).
Finally, circuits are a thousand times less satisfying to me than code. I've seen people for whom it was the opposite. They did not get programming at all, but they were designing circuits at the speed of light with an intuition that I did not have.