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I should have loved electrical engineering

(blog.tdhttt.com)
157 points tdhttt | 13 comments | 01 Sep 25 09:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.993s | source | bottom
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pclmulqdq ◴[04 Sep 25 10:58 UTC] No.45125831[source]▶
EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak.

Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits is extremely leaky, so you often learn to ignore it unless you absolutely need to pay attention.

Hobbyist and undergrad projects thus usually consist of cargo culting combinations of simple circuit building blocks connected to a microcontroller of some kind. A lot of research (not in EE) needs this kind of work, but it's not necessarily glamorous. This is the same as pulling software libraries off the shelf to do software work ("showing my advisor docker"), but the software work gets more credit in modern academia because the skills are rarer and the building blocks are newer.

Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE. Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. If you compare hard EE research to basic software engineering, it makes sense that you think there's a "wall," but you're ignoring the easy EE and the hard CS.

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carlmr ◴[04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC] No.45126357[source]▶
>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models.

Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

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1. sevensor ◴[04 Sep 25 12:42 UTC] No.45126604[source]▶
My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.
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2. carlmr ◴[04 Sep 25 12:44 UTC] No.45126618[source]▶
That's a good point, too, I had a bunch of abstractions without applications in my head.
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3. idiotsecant ◴[04 Sep 25 15:19 UTC] No.45128273[source]▶
There isn't enough time. A leisurely exploration from observations is what you do on your own time. School has a certain amount of material to convey in a certain time. That means learn the axioms and rules as best you can and get to work paying off that enormous student loan.
4. tekla ◴[04 Sep 25 15:35 UTC] No.45128460[source]▶
Massive waste of time. So much happens in a way that is not intuitive nor easily observable that starting from the math is much better.
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5. bee_rider ◴[04 Sep 25 16:10 UTC] No.45128847[source]▶
The blog post describes the problem with this strategy, I think—the author was already pulled over to the CS side because they could just throw together a web app that people could actually interact with, day one.

If you start with easy circuit models, at least the labs can put together something tangible in the first couple semesters, to keep people interested.

And, I mean, a lot of engineering students end up going into sort of technician-y jobs, so keeping the hands-on spark alive has a lot of value, IMO.

6. sevensor ◴[04 Sep 25 17:17 UTC] No.45129681[source]▶
So set your sights lower? A lot of BS EEs exit the process understanding neither Maxwell’s equations nor which end of a soldering iron to hold. The degree demonstrates that they are good at abstract symbol manipulation, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not very intellectually fulfilling and it filters out a lot of people who could be good engineers.
7. renox ◴[04 Sep 25 19:51 UTC] No.45131520[source]▶
I remember having two class about networking, the first one was top down, it was awful, the second one was bottom up, everything clicked.
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8. ahartmetz ◴[04 Sep 25 21:16 UTC] No.45132296[source]▶
Teaching solutions without even mentioning the problems, basically. I hate it.
9. wetwater ◴[04 Sep 25 23:55 UTC] No.45133587[source]▶
Its interestine, when you say abstractions. Could you explain what you mean by abstractions in this context and what do you mean by the underlying fundamentals.
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10. imtringued ◴[05 Sep 25 11:10 UTC] No.45137257[source]▶
Why is bottom up or top down needed? Why can't you just explain everything at a high level first and then get into the details?
11. carlmr ◴[05 Sep 25 11:36 UTC] No.45137388{3}[source]▶
One example would be resonant circuits. Ok great you can build resonant circuits, but what for? The fundamentals to understand frequency responses came later in signals and systems. The application came much later when I learned about electric motors, which basically behave like low pass filters (resonant circuits) which enables us to use PWM to generate sine shaped current curves by switching the input voltage on and off. The voltage signal is smoothed by the LPF circuit that is the motors windings.

I think it would have helped me if we talked about the motor or other examples first, and then did some math to show how the resonant behavior can be useful.

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12. korse ◴[05 Sep 25 20:49 UTC] No.45143424[source]▶
Don't forget, Faraday hated math.
13. sevensor ◴[06 Sep 25 04:11 UTC] No.45146544{4}[source]▶
It’s crazy that VFDs work! You have to have a really good ground though, or you get arcing through the bearings.