You're probably romanticising it too because it's a hoby of yours, which just leads to skwes in your perception.
Source: studied EE, after realising I wouldn't like my career paths, I switched to CS. Mostly worked as SWE tho, but I did work in ab unusual and creative EE role first, before realising that most EE jobs wouldn't be so engaging
ha ha wait until you find out about microwave engineering.
Does a software engineer have perfect grasp and understanding about every subfield in SWE? Ranging from DX to writing compilers or designing languages, SWE is an extremely broad field.
EE is no different.
Free climbing a 5ft rock wall is not different than a 50ft one, etc.
I find most of these comments against my original points as me not explaining myself so well. And, I can say one thing for sure, EE's are good at downvoting! ;-)
I'm trying to say that EE, like MechE is not especially complicated. You have your theories you need to know but that's it. Yes, you can be inspired, you can figure out some trick. But: how often does an ME invent a fundamentally new mechanism? Pretty much never. How often does an EE invent a fundamentally new circuit? Pretty much never.
Now, how often does a CS person have to solve some nasty problem that has never been solved before --- every day!
I have done microwave engineering for over 20 years. I know what it takes. It's NOT Rocket Science, I assure you.
My degree (6-3) is in EECS from a small technical school on the banks of the Charles River.
So I'm not full of it when I make my statements; they come from over 50 years' experience.
> EEs just learn altium, read some data sheets, and poof, out pop the circuits.
Initially I just thought you were a troll, but with this kind of experience and education now I just know you're vicious liar. I'm sure every time you made a microstrip filter, feed ramp, or antenna you just poof from Altium after looking at a datasheet and it just worked. Not to mention a great deal of microwave engineering now happens in other tools like microwave office and ADS, I'm not sure Altium is even that great or useful for relatively common microwave stuff like designing say a microwave horn antenna.
EE is in a different ballpark, imagine if you had to explicitly pay attention to write software that didn't melt your CPU.
But that's not even the tip of the iceberg in the EE world. To name a few: high speed digital (Gbps+), ASIC (digital vs. mixed signal, RTL vs. physical design, ...), RF, precision analog, both very low and very high power, photonics, EMI... Each of these subjects require deep, arcane domain knowledge on top of physics, AND lots of grinding + experience + tacit knowledge + know-how, much more than SWE.
Source: Electronics/Embedded hobbyist with an SWE day job.