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I'm a 29 years old CS graduate and I have about 5 years of experience. So far I only worked on web application projects, which are not the pinnacle of computer science. I'm slowly moving away from coding web apps to more advanced topics like machine learning and distributed systems.
I was very much interested in electronics from childhood. I used to make various hobby circuits at the age of twelve, like DC motor-AC generator-Transformer to produce AC from batteries. Or various simple radio circuits. Or microphone to speaker sound circuit.
Why did I get a CS degree? I just ended up with it after studying 3 years for college entry exams. I was hoping it would give me a similar thrill to fiddling with electronics.
To this day, whenever I watch an EE related hobbyist video, or read through an EE textbook, concepts feel so clear and natural to me. Coding or CS is something I'm just able to do, but electronics feel like second nature. I feel software engineers are just exaggerating what they do, high level of engineering is only marginally required for maybe %0.0001 of projects. Just writing clear code and being reasonable solves nearly all problems.
But with EE, even a simple circuit shows some creativity and requires good knowledge of its parts. No subject of CS I came across gave me the same tingle. Even the AI is just some boring math and pre written algorithm libraries when you understand how it works.
I want to get somehow involved in electronics beyond a hobbyist level. It's a personal dream of mine which I don't want to go unfulfilled. Getting a second degree may be very hard with the life going on and my current job but I don't know. I just feel I need to do it.
I come across too many electronic or mechanical engineers interested in CS and I find it puzzling btw. Your field is much more creative and fun to do.
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I'm a mechanical engineer and always fascinated by CS.
I'm in a very conservative field (offshore construction) and all the companies really protect their ways of working. All the knowledge is situated in old farts, that you manually have to question. Often, clients don't care about the physics behind your solutions, they just want it to be done according to this or that building code. Nothing new ever gets build. A lot of the solutions from today had already been invented in the sixties, but people just forgot about them.
I see CS as a field where knowledge spreads freely out of companies. There is this thing called stack overflow. You can google any problem and get help, it's like humanity finally is working together. I get that the top dogs keep some of their knowledge to themselves in CS too, but in general eventually this knowlede is spread, a few years after the fact. It seems like solutions are shared, also into the future, so that you don't have to repeat the past so often.
But when I talk to friends in CS, they have exactly the same gripes as I do.
I'm trying to get the automated and knowledge sharing that I like from CS into mechanical engineering, but our product is not so easily transferable. A CS product is text. A mechanical engineering product is a drawing and some proprietary database made in any of the hundreds of engineering software there is.
There must be big overlap between coding and electrical engineering though. Something with embedded systems maybe? I'm not sure though, cause in the triangle of electric-mechanical-software, you're right opposite me
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You are right about knowledge being freely available. Actually I took an EE class back in school and was surprised how hard it was to access knowledge or reach people who has it. There was not enough examples, free books or tutorials on the net. It's possible I didn't know where to look though.
If you write a library you must provide documentation and examples because otherwise no one will be able to use it. It's a sealed black box. But with electronics my guess is as long as you know the fundamentals well, rest is science so you can work it out on your own. And there comes the creativity. CS is mostly putting together things that are already prebuilt. Trick is to know as many tools as possible and choosing the most sensible one for the requirement. Rest is just legwork. At the end there's little creativity Creative part is to find a product idea and that's not engineering but being a businessman.
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I worked as a EE doing circuit design for 8 years, and now work as an embedded SW engineer. Not sure what info you might be looking for, so just PM me if you have any questions
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