You don’t fall for marketing gimmicks.

Another thing is you know the relative price (ballpark figure) of the technology, as in how much it costs to make something, often just by eyeballing the actual product or by looking at its specifications. Sometimes this translates to more abstract and somewhat unrelated fields such as medications (if you read the patents and study them).

It's an easy leading indicator of who has their shit together.

It's probably at the same level of complexity, give or take.

Not to dunk on the rest of your reply, which I agree with, but there is a humongous overlap between your typical undergraduate physics and electrical engineering degree, and I think you're able to be successful because they're so similar. Academically, the required courses are mostly identical until your 3rd year and if you choose an RF, microwave, or semiconductor physics specialization it's just more of the same applied physics, so it would make sense you would easily be able to pick up the concepts necessary with experience.

New graduates in EE also can't do the things you listed :)

That was the spirit of my point, yes :)

More than once I've heard a coworker complain that "I wish I had learned about that in school instead of [filler course so useless that I forgot what they said]."

The Z-transform is much more related to the others than is clear at first glance. This post on transforms [0] from the The n-Category Café is fascinating, and my go-to for understanding what the Laplace transform really is, even if I don't quite grasp many things in the post. (And I also have a math degree! But not a graduate one in active use, as most of the people around there do.)

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2019/07/what_is_the_lap...

I understand some of these words... they're very familiar to me...

I'm saying this as someone who's dealt with the discrete and continuous time Fourier transforms, and Z-transform, and wants to get into Laplace transforms.

it might as well be from a random text gwnerator

“Avoid for new designs”

I even went a step further with how involved with physics I was during the EE degree and specialized in RF; hardly any of that was covered in my physics degree.

As someone who has a degree in both: Hard disagree. The physics curriculum had one course on circuits/electronics combined, and they covered almost nothing practical when it came to tools like oscilloscopes, etc. Few physicists I know have heard of "3db point". No statistics in the physics curriculum (no, quantum mechanics and stat mechanics don't count). Absolutely nothing with regards to digital, communications, or control theory.

The only real overlap was math, EM and semiconductors. Most people who get an EE degree are not targeting that world.

Like others have said, there's a lot of overlap, especially for experimental physicists, which is what I studied. The stuff that makes studying engineering hard for a lot of students is the math and physics.

There are subjects that we don't learn in physics, such as control theory. Yes, that's worth learning. I defer to engineers for really hard feedback control problems. My approach is instead, to design the hardware so its physical characteristics make the control problem easy. That's not always possible.

One reason why we can find a way to fit in, is the huge diversity within engineering itself, leaving some niches that look a lot like what physicists do. When I taught in an engineering department for one semester, the professors always had their latest papers posted outside their office doors, and I noticed that one prof seemed to publish everything in Physical Review.

Out in the work world, a lot of people with engineering job titles don't really do engineering: They can be quite busy and productive, and rewarded, for basically arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, dealing with vendors, and so forth. In fact, they can get so busy at that stuff that they forget their math and theory, leaving the physicist as the go-to "math person" when a quantitative problem needs to be solved.

Then there are what I call the real engineers, for whom the engineering skill is accompanied by an attitude and discipline about making things safe, reliable, maintainable, and traceable to documented and published information. These are the ones who won't accept a measured value, but need to see it guaranteed on a data sheet. I'm not that kind of engineer, and I admit it. And we definitely need that kind of engineer for systems that potentially involve public safety or massive economic liability.

In my work, the title "manufacturing engineer" title goes to people that work all day (and at a hard pace) doing nothing other than working in the PLM system, orchestrating ECO bureaucracy, and BOM work. To them, the actual products are nothing more than a collection of part numbers and rules applied in a cumbersome framework. I almost feel sorry for them. The sad thing is, there's an increasing population of these types, along with product/project managers and supply-chain specialists, while at the same time a decrease in engineers and techs.

I also have a physics educational background and make my living doing a weird mix of EE, software, and failure analysis work. I love my job, I see myself as a kind of general purpose problem-solver. Unfortunately actual hands-on technical generalists, IMHO, are in a downward spiral these days as far as status within large organizations goes.

The OP, I hope, is aware of this. He might be happier specializing in his interests and teaming up with other specialists who focus on EE.

Outside of engineering, a lot of people with "manager" titles are similarly engaged. Their supervisory work, while important, is about 4 hours of work per week. The rest of the time is spent on tasks assigned to them, such as creating a new process for replenishing the hand sanitizer, or approving documents.

It's just that we believe that by now we should have eliminated clerks, so to make ourselves seem modern, we re-title them engineers and managers.

I'm not saying that's a bad development. It's just what it is, probably follows a smooth bell curve distribution of expertiese. The hard stuff is just, like, really hard (as is English!)

This makes total sense to me. The bulk of time I’ve spent on many projects goes into supply chain management and factory coordination. I can easily see how the work of one engineer can keep 10 people like this busy full time.

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/edu/harvard-lab-kit

The more recent versions bring it up to date well, it's a dense book but one I find myself coming back to more than any other for the incredible depth of practical engineering knowledge.

Here's the website for the book https://learningtheartofelectronics.com

EE is a vast field that encompasses everything from high power transmission to designing semiconductors. Even full course work from undergrad to PhD in EE is going to be fairly specialized.

All that being said, I agree that if you just want to learn how to build a catalog of reasonably simple circuits, learning academic EE is a waste of time.

Can you expand on how analog electronics benefits in particular from a formal EE education? I build analog circuits (amplifiers, filters, power supplies mostly) very frequently in my job as a physicist. We have to care about noise so I've picked up a knowledge of how to deal with it in analog circuits. Is there some other area of analog electronics that "hackers" like me might not get exposed to, compared to an EE undergrad? I'm thinking of moving into EE and would like to work out the gaps in my knowledge. I also ask because I can see obvious reasons why your other example - RF electronics - would benefit from formal training but none for analog electronics.

More advanced stuff that you probably lack vs a practicing EE or an EE graduate education is going to be edge cases, advanced stability analysis, translinear logic and exposure to all the different types of component design. There are tons of different types of say amplifiers used in specific applications whereas most people working in a lab just slap opAmps on everything. A lot of advanced analog design is just applied control theory. Also keep in mind that these days Digital, RF, and Analog all blur a lot in a cutting edge design environment.

Quick Edit: A lot of the more traditional EE design companies will consider someone with a physics degree to be equivalent to someone with an EE degree unless they are looking for a very specific niche.

But if you can design an amplifier or power supply, you probably already understand how to think of all the basic circuit elements and write down a differential equation modeling the circuit behavior.

With respect to RF, it's also a large field. In lower frequency regimes you can model everything as a lumped circuit element. As you get into higher microwave frequencies, you start needing to worry about modeling things as a distributed circuit. If you are focusing on things like antennas then you need to know more about electromagnetics. These days practicing engineers dealing with things like antennas and feedlines typically model them with computers. In some ways RF analog circuitry is disappearing as ADCs and associated digital circuitry are becoming advanced enough to swallow large bandwidth signals.

In many ways EE is pretty close to "applied physics", just focusing more on emag and less on mechanics.

My main concern with EE is that once I'll get to the brain-computer interfaces, I'll be in a situation where there aren't many off-the-shelf components/solutions available, and at the same time I'll likely need to know how I can push physics closer to the edge. I suspect I may need a better theoretical foundation to do that.

That said, I definitely like the idea of focusing a lot on hands-on projects.

First make your thing do something, anything at all. Second, make it do something useful. Third, make it do the right thing, the thing you need, your goal from the beginning. Only then should you optimize it, making it smaller or cheaper or lower power or prettier or.... This is the road to success in the "R" phase of R&D.

And +1 for Art of Electronics, it's the bible for physicists working with electronics.

Brain-computer is going to be very tough, even ignoring all the safety and physically wiring into a brain stuff. The signals are irregular, weak and fast which makes them very difficult (but not impossible obviously) to measure.

I studied EE, and got on better with the the more theoretical textbooks than I did practicals ('huh, ok.. why?!').

You dont know what you dont know. Its better to at least read all of the coursework even fast and without understanding than go green and make basic I didnt know that existed mistakes.