I'm an engineer at heart, but I do have bills to pay and I can become interested in basically any complex system.

If EE paid better, I would be an EE. EE is interesting. Neither SWE nor my chosen career are sufficiently less interesting than EE though so it's not like I picked an uninteresting career for financial reasons.

At the end of the day it's all just problem solving. If the puzzles are all fun and don't go against my principles, I might as well go work for the highest bidder.

Exactly this.

In uni I got offered internships as part of the course, to write my Master's thesis.

An engineering firm in Aerospace offered me a job doing something with airplanes. Pretty interesting, but paid £12K/yr, which really isn't much money, even for a student.

I kept my mouth shut (uni wanted us to take whatever came) and got offered a job at a major chip manufacturer, but in marketing. Also interesting, £15K/yr. I took it and learned a bunch about that business.

I went to visit a friend in London who'd gotten an internship working at an investment bank. £38K/yr.

What do you suppose I applied to when I graduated? It wasn't engineering or marketing.

As things happened, I'm still an engineer. I just make algorithms to move money around, and that's also got nerd value, since there's interesting problems in financial trading as well. I've literally has days where I made more money for myself than I would have gotten in a whole year at either of the other careers. I also ran into people who'd dumped those careers to work in finance, because the incentive is so strong (colleague directly told me he saw his boss's payslip, then decided to leave).

I had a professor who’s brother worked in finance and he openly admitted his brother sometimes paid more in taxes than he got in salary. So I understand where you’re coming from.

And I do think some of that finance work has value. But let me ask, if you had to put a percentage on it, how many of the best and brightest would you want going into finance vs say, medicine or physics? At what point does it tip to being a worse outcome for society? What percentage should go to ad-spend software jobs?

The problem as I see it is when we’re acting on a value system with the singular goal of making the most money, it can become a sort of prisoner’s dilemma where the rational choice at the individual level leads to worse outcomes for the group (to include the individual making the choice)

I don't know what the right amount is, but with the numbers being where they are, it just seems like doing any of the jobs that are considered socially useful (doctor/nurse/policeman/research/etc) is simply too big a sacrifice if you have the choice.

You might be right about the prisoner's dilemma: if you are an engineer and you get an offer from the cure for cancer research group, vs potentially 7 figures in a few years, it's going to be awfully hard to save humanity.

I agree with this. It's easy to get caught up in a very binary "in it for the money" vs "doing what you love" mindset, but I think the reality is a balance of both. Money is actually quite great and I am willing to compromise a little bit in my day job in order to receive more money. At the same time, there are some jobs I simply do not want to do, even if they may be higher paid than what I'm doing now.

This is exactly my point. The issue I was pointing out is that the comments only spoke to a single side of this, with none of the nuance you provided.

This is a very reasonable take. As you say, you can become interested in any complex systems to try and solve problems, so the main differentiator can become money. The issue I was pointing to is nobody else was pointing out that same context, they were solely about money. Not solving worthwhile problems. Not developing skill sets. Just the paycheck

> At the time of this comment almost all the top comments are about pay. No doubt pay is an important consideration, but it worries me when it’s the primary consideration. The best engineers I know like engineering because they have a natural curiosity to learn how things work, not because it’s the easiest route to riches.

This is not incompatible with what the comments are saying. I'm an ECE, I love hardware and working in VLSI, and I eagerly engage with the open hardware movement. I also love working with software, it scratches the same itch, hacking on multiplier layouts and hacking on SIMD accelerated code both involve the same type of analytical mindset.

And yet I work in software because it pays more. As always, these "this highly skilled occupation is collapsing" posts are linked entirely to pay. A talented EE or CE can easily transition to software, and they do.

I said it elsewhere, but I am not implying a false dichotomy. Indeed, I’m one of those engineers who took a software job in part because I get to work on more interesting problems. But it’s telling that the top comments are only about money and (at least at the time of my OP) not about “money and interesting/fulfilling work”

Used to be an EE and couldn't afford a house in a major metropolitan area. Went into FW/SW and now I can. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but that's what worked for me.

I’m not discounting anyone’s personal experience, but that saying something when the average EE salary is about the 85th percentile of salary. Maybe it’s indicative of how broken the housing situation is in cities (and I suppose it’s very location dependent - anyone outside of SW, law, medicine, or finance may struggle to buy a home in SV or Manhattan)

https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-2071.00

The housing market has a lot to do with it. In Canada, average home prices (all types) are up ~6x since 2000, and in specific cities like Vancouver and Toronto, even more so. Compensation has not kept pace. Back when I was a high school student, I didn't think pay was very important. Now I realize it's much easier to pursue one's curiosity if one can afford, say, a garage.

That leads to a follow up. Is the goal to have a home in one of those cities or is the goal to have a home? The first may require working in software while the latter could foreseeably mean you could be an EE elsewhere.

Everyone chooses their own goals and priorities of course. Where in Canada would you recommend for a young EE?

I don’t know Canada unfortunately. But maybe Windsor? EEs working as control engineers across the river in automotive while I was there could easily pull surgeon-level salaries in an area that has a cost of living a fraction below SV

What does it matter if it's in the 85th percentile if they can get more money in another industry?

The question isn't, "can you survive as an EE?" sure, you can survive as fry cook at a fast food chain. The question is, "will headhunters poach this occupation and have a high success rate due to the salary delta?" And the answer for the EE -> SWE transition is obviously yes.

The question isn’t about which pays more, it’s about whether the best tack is to treat an occupation as an economic transaction where the sole goal is to be a mercenary to the highest bidder.

If someone finds can find fulfillment dedicating their life to making ad-spend software while getting paid handsomely, that’s wonderful. But the larger point is that the comments seemed to be focused exclusively on the pay with little consideration to the work.

I have a relative (now in his 60's) who is a globally renowned network engineer from Silicon Valley. He has many patents, worked on just about every protocol known out there, etc. Truly one of the people who made the internet what it is today. From what I can see, he was always equally interested in the money and changing the world. But now, he's in the luxurious position of being able to "work for free" if its a project that he believes will change the world for the better. Both factors have always mattered for him.

To be clear, I’m not implying they are mutually exclusive goals. But go through the comments and see how many people say “if EE had more impact or more interesting projects” vs speaking strictly about compensation to see my point

It doesn't really seem like a "hustle" thing. You have the choice in working one of two quite similar jobs, in quite similar fields, but one of the jobs pays far more.

You also may have a friend who's already made the move telling you to join.

>You have the choice in working one of two quite similar jobs

My issue with this take is that it’s also quite likely that the jobs are completely dissimilar. How long do you think it would take a front-end SWE to develop a 480kV electrical grid or vice versa? Both domains require specific skills and should be respected as such

You're maximizing the gap though. People go from doing EE work on some embedded device, to writing software for the same class of device.

Sure, because there is large variance in engineering. Not just EE, either. If your an ME you might design HVAC but it doesn’t mean you can take an ME’s role designing CFD models in aerospace applications. Pretending jobs are interchangeable is a disservice to the skillsets

It is not that an aspiring EE switches to become a lawyer. EE is often a special kind of software development. Switching to a "software" job often enough doesn't deeply mean a change of proffession. You are still an engineer (at least in the interesting software jobs).

And it is not about "hustling to make the most money the quickest way possible", if you switch to a company which pays a lot better for a similar job. And as a lot of those jobs are located in expensive places, an engineering salary doesn't easily pay for a nice house or any house at all.

>To paraphrase a professor of mine: “there are people who’s goal is to climb to the top of the world and those who’s whose goal is to build the world. Be careful not to confuse the two.”

The new goal is to have enough money for gas and healthcare while also paying off the student loans.

Before I moved to the technology sector, I worked in academia and earned a fraction of what I earn now. I loved doing research in my field, and now I'm moderately interested in my work. I don't hate it, but I don't wake up saying, " Man, isn't this great?"

However, I would not go back to work in research for the miserable salary I was getting. If they paid the same amount I make now, maybe.

The trouble with doing a low-pay career for the passion is that it's usually low pay because there are a million other people willing to do the same thing, so it actually does become a hustle.

I hear you, but I don’t think this is a fair assessment because EE isn’t a “low pay job” by almost any objective measure. I get that it doesn’t pay SWE money in many cases, but it comes across as somewhat out of touch, like saying “the problem with a Tesla is it’s a low end car” because you’re comparing it to a Maserati

You have to have some sort of scope for comparison. Here we're talking about engineeringy careers that the same person might want to do. So cleaner and sports star aren't relevant even if their pay is much lower or higher.

I am trained in electronics. I love it. I have never stopped messing with electronics and microcontrollers over my whole life.

(And how good is it these days with things like, the RISC-V ESP32 with wifi and cheap as chips, unreal little modules, for example measuring temperature to +/- 0.01C, air-born particles, radiation etc etc).

This said, I doubt I could afford a comfortable life with a house and family in a major city like Sydney on half the pay. I know as I have thought about switching from SE back to EE many times.

I love electronics and circuit building. I’ve been told that the compensation is shockingly poor compared to that of software engineers. This didn’t affect my college experience, as I was already well into my SE career when I finished my degree. As I recall though, the course load was harder and the opportunities fewer.

Incidentally, I had a friend who was an EE who went on to become a Patent attorney. He told me he did so because he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life maintaining a print server design.

Even firmware development in C is lower paid than almost any Java/JS conventional development role in Sydney. Having done both, the C one is much harder due to being in a much more resource limited environment.

The only real electronics roles I see outside the occasional advert for some of the bigger names maybe once every six months are uni roles paying 1/4 of the salary outside of unis (always boasting 18% Super/RRSP LOL)

>I doubt I could afford a comfortable life with a house and family in a major city like Sydney

I don’t think there’s any disagreement here, but it’s because you layered on an important constraint regarding location. Similarly, there are very few jobs that could support living in Manhattan or on a yacht, but that’s not really the larger point. The larger point being, the posts focused singularly on money. Like your location, if we narrowly constrain the problem, of course it means there are only a few options that make sense. If all I care any is money, there are only a handful of acceptable job prospects.

Not working for the highest bidder (money, status, time etc) can be seen as a form of charity. Which company deserves the donation of your life energy?

This confuses the point with “doing work you may not want to do”. I’m saying there are multiple dimensions of finding fulfillment, with money only being a single dimension. The idea that anything outside that single dimension would be considered nothing but charity is telling.

Every single company I joined that promised a stress-free environment has outright lied to me to the point that I will find it suspicions if HR mentions how happy and balanced the work is. It is a huge deal for me but HR will never be honest about it to me because if they did they wouldn't hire much and would be replaced by someone who says "Working here is a fun challenge where you will be tested for your vast knowledge, quick understanding of complicated subjects, reason about its working and explain it to superiors, quality and fast deliveries of working products, and will certainly grow like no where else!"

This reminds me of the author of "Man's Search for Meaning" who wrote a international master piece while on a concentration camp. Yes, growth is there to be had, but that is an experience I would rather avoid, thank you.

Believing HR is like asking a barber if you need a haircut. You already know what the answer will be. I think it’s easier to get an accurate answer by asking tangentially related questions in the interview.

>This confuses the point with “doing work you may not want to do”

No. An example: Maybe you find “fulfilling” work but the pay is half what you could make elsewhere in your job market.

In that case, you should be certain that you are somehow compensated non-monetarily for that “missing half” of your salary. Otherwise you are simply making a donation to the company by working for much less than market-clearing salary.

Indeed. The internet helps bring up shades of these egos under the cover of anonymity, and SWEs are not immune to it - just check the anonymous forums to see what I mean. Leetcode overemphasis, holding someone in awe because he has a fancy title or once presented at some convention are traps most humans fall into.

When the CS pay is double EE pay, if not more, it's a non-starter.

If your primary goal is to make money as fast as possible. As said elsewhere, EE salary is roughly the 85th percentile in the US. If that is enough, there may be other social/psychological issues going on that skew the calculus.

Surely, there’s jobs that pay double SWE. And ones that pay double that. But I think most people would agree, there’s a certain point where it becomes absurd to focus solely on that.

It’s understandable when a physicist goes to work for a hedge fund, but when it becomes the prevailing track for degreed physicists, it might say something about our collective value system

I think the pseudo-moralist argument you are making is really cringe, as it's often the type of language the professional managerial class uses to shame employees into accepting less than they are worth. "You're not here for the money. You're here to make a difference." People work to live, not live to work, and so long as people trade their precious time for money, they will go where their skills are highly valued. Or if they want to make a difference they will remain in academia or work at a nonprofit. There really isn't an excuse for Intel not to pay their EEs a competitive wage when they made $42B in profit last year. Same goes for the rest.

I am not an advocate for that in the least. If it’s what you want to do, there’s no reason that means you shouldn’t be paid market rate. But that’s entirely different than distilling everything down to a single monetary dimension, which was my original point. What’s “cringe” to me is when all work is reduced to transactional measure of time and salary, implying the only measure of work is economic. That makes you nothing more than a wage slave in every sense of the word. There are certainly cases where that’s warranted like when it’s necessary to survive but if we’re talking about the difference between a SWE and EE that’s just not the case. That singly-focused economic mindset also seems to correlate with misery. My position is actually the opposite of the exploitative one you’re framing it as. When you are working solely for the paycheck, it’s easy to exploit yourself, foregoing a fulfilling career chasing dollars. Again, my point is people only talked about money. Not that SW providing them with a lower stress life, or the ability to work from home so they can spend more time with family, or any other reasonable goals. Even money is worthwhile if you frame it as a means to a good end, but I didn’t that. It was treated as an end unto itself.

We already know this isn’t intuitively rational. Why aren’t you spending all your free time taking side jobs? Presumably because you realize there’s an opportunity cost that is not merely economic. I’m saying the same thing, only people often somehow have been duped into thinking their 9-5 is somehow different.

Do you not think capitalism might drive most humans to think that way? Looking at most of your replies, it's definitely not a simple conclusion that "pay is a primary consideration".

Pay is the primary consideration because capitalism forces us to make it the primary consideration. Most folks would rather it not be, but when our survival depends on it, this is the result you get.

I think maybe you’re onto something. It reminded me of the parable of the NYC businessman who met a Mexican fisherman and was taken aback by the fact that the fisherman spent so much time drinking wine with friends and sitting in the sun on the beach. The businessman said “Well, it’s a disgrace that you’re leaving so much on the table. If you worked harder, you could get a fleet of boats and eventually make millions.”

The fisherman said, “After I make millions, then what will I do?”

And the businessman said, “Well, then you can spend your time drinking wine on the beach with your friends.”

To your point, I think a lot of people act like optimizing for wealth is the main goal simply because that’s what society has trained us to do.