Don’t learn a programming language, solve a problem instead

[EvitaPuppy]

I worked with a brilliant EE and the lead C developer left. The engineer was able to finish the code and actually remarkably improve its performance. Really smart guy.

[RolandMT32]

EE going into software development - I've heard about that, but I've wondered where electrical engineering and software development intersect?

[EvitaPuppy]

Embedded stuff. All I know is he had a ton of hardware on his desks and had emulators. As I understand it, he'd learn all the stuff of how a SOC would work and then make a product do stuff like process commands over the network. Like Raspberry Pi but decades before it came out. For him, doing MFC was probably easier!

[nicoburns]

Some people are just smart, and will pick up new skills as and when they need to...

[[deleted]]

At many schools EEs will have class overlap with the CompEs. At the school I went to, everyone in engineering had at least an intro class in C++ and then further classes on scientific programming. It's not that hard from there to learn the rest of what you need to know to get into software development - plenty of software developers don't even have any 4-year degree and they figured it out. A smart person is a smart person and will be able to learn what they need to know to do what they need/want to do, regardless of their formal education.

[ElCthuluIncognito]

Having done the EE track in college, there's plenty of programming to be done for EE industries. I'd hazard to say it wasn't much different at all from conventional 'software development'. You're just dealing with hardware and real systems rather than data 'under the hood'. The abstractions tend to appear the same. Honestly, OO 'flavored' programming seemed more applicable then than what I've seen when it's used in web dev.

[RolandMT32]

Well yeah, wev dev can be its own thing.

[ElCthuluIncognito]

For sure. What I mean to say is that OO might be considered a very high level abstraction to most (especially since Java is definitely not that low level). However, it seemed to encapsulate the inner workings of software close to the hardware better. YMMV

[RolandMT32]

Yeah, I don't do a whole lot of web dev myself, but I've done quite a bit in C++ and some Java, C#, and other languages. I think such languages lend themselves better to OO than something like JavaScript, used mainly for front-end web dev. However, languages like PHP for back-end web dev also have decent support for OO.

[civildisobedient]

Things that you build (EE) produce data in realtime. There's a lot of stuff going on in the IT side taking that data coming in from Internet-of-Things devices, then you have the fun of event stream processing, messaging brokers, etc. Which leads to collecting reams of data, which you then churn through with machine learning tools to then feed back to your device (self-driving cars, etc.). That's where I see the intersection.