←back to thread

157 points tdhttt | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.2s | source
1. Aurornis ◴[] No.45128820[source]
I think this article has a much simpler explanation than a lot of the points being made in the comments: When it came down to it, the author was more excited about software than hardware.

Contrast this:

> One of the EECS professors was kind enough to offer a RC car kit to his students to program it. I decided to give it a try. Maybe the toy car wasn’t exciting or maybe I was pre-occupied with other course work during that summer, I didn’t even open the box.

With this:

> Writing web applications blew my mind. I can just write some code, click a few buttons and boom all my friends and family across the globe can just see it! This feels like magic.

Anecdotally, I saw this a lot in college. Students would start out in electrical engineering because they thought hardware was really cool, but when the time came to do the hard work they didn't have much motivation. They wanted to be a hardware engineer, but putting in the work was unappealing. Software has a wider range of job opportunities from intense FAANG-level jobs down to being the person who pokes at a company's old PHP website long enough to keep it serving pages. You can jump in and find a level that matches your motivation. With hardware, you have to clear some hurdles to begin being useful at all.

To my surprise, I think Arduino and Raspberry Pi have made this worse. I talk to a lot of people who see themselves as amateur EEs because they bought an Arduino and used some jumper wires to connect some sensors to the right pins. It's exciting. Then they lose motivation when they encounter a problem that requires doing anything more complex or custom. These people often overlap with the CS students who think the entire world of software engineering is writing CRUD apps composed of APIs connected together.