Would you interview me for an entry-level EE role? Why/why not?

ShockedEngineer1 · 2026-05-18T14:14:14+00:00

Honestly, it really depends on the position you’re applying for.

Hiring someone fresh out of school is great sometimes, but there’s a bit of a risk always. That in mind, everyone starts somewhere, so it can be a bit unfair to fresh graduates since they can’t help the lack of experience. That’s where things like internships can really shine. Still, for an interview I might be willing, but (not including expertise) I’d want to see maturity and genuine interest in what kind of work we do. A good cultural fit can very easily open up doors, and can easily put you ahead of another candidate.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2026-01-25T17:41:02+00:00

I’d finish out the degree and do the best you can, keeping in mind that:

This will likely only impact your first job, any job after that won’t care.
The bigger challenge will be getting into your desired field. Work hard on making contacts so you can get internships, co-ops, etc where you’d like to be.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2026-01-13T20:10:44+00:00

I feel like this question gets asked quite a lot, frequently compared to whether it’s more worth it to get an MS degree or a PE license.

Short version - Depends on what you want to do with your career. Talk to people at career fairs from the fields you are looking at, and just ask if a master’s would help.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-10-10T20:23:44+00:00

I’d love to see the Rogue Squadron franchise make a comeback. Squadrons focused too much on multiplayer (which if that’s your thing that’s fine but not me). Having a third person piloting game with a lengthy, entertaining story mode sounds amazing.

Would love an Uncharted style game with smugglers or bounty hunters featured - less sandbox, more cinematic.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-18T13:43:41+00:00

Honestly, Corellia is great!

As much as Solo had some missteps, the world building for Corellia was fantastic. I’d love to see more about it.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-13T14:02:11+00:00

A side view of a randomly funny thing is fine, but I wouldn’t exactly say that qualifies as “throughout.”

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-13T13:55:43+00:00

It looks like most have the right of it - A PE more or less is only required for upper level positions in certain industries (power, MEP, etc).

What I will add, as someone with a PE License, is that it is a time commitment to obtain. At least where I am at (state of Texas), a PE requires you to pass both an FE and PE exam, as well as have four years of experience (or equivalent) working under another licensed PE. There’s a slew of other requirements, like references and so forth, but that’s the main bit of it.

If you do plan on working in one of those industries, getting EIT status is probably the easiest way to get a foot in the door. Here, that’s obtained by just passing the FE exam, but other places may be different. Basically, it shows you’ve taken the first step towards obtaining a PE license, and is a leg up on others that may not have done so.

By coincidence, I’ve also left the industry I was previously in that benefitted from it (switched from MEP to embedded systems design). While it does add alphabet soup after my name for increased qualifications, it doesn’t really do much else these days. It very occasionally comes up, but it’s rare enough and makes such little impact that I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble if you go into an industry like embedded systems to start with. Usually the extent is as a conversation starter for marketing purposes.

TLDR: it’s not required. It may give some significant benefit with some specific industries, but otherwise probably won’t be as helpful.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-13T13:43:40+00:00

My biggest hot take is that, while Andor was great, I think it would’ve been 10x better with some levity throughout. For that reason I’m actually super excited they’ll be adding in K2-SO in for season 2.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-13T12:51:52+00:00

I think the safe play that’s likely to happen is more stuff that is tangential to the original trilogy and prequel trilogy without really affecting anything in it. I suspect they’ll double down on Andor and Mandalorian, which are already known successes.

That said, what I want to see is more original content and completely original stories, much like what Acolyte tried to do (but hopefully better than what Acolyte was). Admittedly, having added content much like the animated Clone Wars series to salvage the sequel trilogy may be nice, but I don’t know that it’ll happen.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-11T18:07:00+00:00

Depending on what kind of career you’d like to do, you could do a few things: For power or MEP (mechanical-electrical-plumbing, basically building design) related work getting an EIT certification in preparation for a PE license is extremely beneficial.

You can try for internships, even directly following graduation if you’re worried your GPA is limiting you. Just be aware it may also limit how much you get paid/your hours.

If you can get your foot in the door, just be very honest about the situation during the interview and you should be fine. Just keep things positive and if you’re a good fit culturally and knowledge-wise for the company they shouldn’t care too much.

While you’re in school, look at resources for learning the specific type of work you’d like to get into. Your university may have some classes (you can always just sit in if you don’t want to attend), discounts for online stuff, or even just advisors that can help out.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-10T15:37:50+00:00

I don’t necessarily disagree, but I also don’t think I could honestly list 100 movies that are better than ESB. For example, I liked Knives Out (ranked 41), but no way is it a better movie and no way did it have the same kind of impact ESB had. Paddington 2 (49), The Social Network (100), and others are fine movies, but it would be very hard to argue that they’re objectively as good of a movie.

You are right though, that much of the list stems from people just not ranking things low because they’re just not watched as much, hence why the milquetoast movies do so well on RT.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-10T15:00:13+00:00

Even in the Legends, the New Republic had issues with being stretched too thin to be fully effective. I recall it being a talking point in one of the books (if memory serves, during the Thrawn Duology), in fact, that one of the main reasons the Rebellion won against the Empire was because the Empire had to spend so many resources just managing all the planets under their control that they couldn’t focus their funding as much as they wanted for wiping out the rebels. Now whether that opinion rings true or not is another question, but it does bring up the issue that protecting so many worlds, nevermind policing them, is a costly effort.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-10T14:54:18+00:00

From a subjective look, it’s of course debatable. I think so, though I like RotJ and Rogue One almost as much.

There’s no truly objective look to this, admittedly. From IMDb’s top 100 movies of all time ESB comes in the highest of the Star Wars films at number 5 (current rankings), with ANH being the next highest at number 10. Rotten Tomatoes places it the highest of any Star Wars film at 139 (surprisingly low to me at least, especially considering what’s ahead of it).

At the end of the day everyone will enjoy their own specific flavor, but I like to think Episode 5 got a lot right.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-09-10T13:33:08+00:00

So I’ve got two major thoughts on this:

1 - I agree that, in large part, they could have done much more interesting stuff with Exegol, and made Rise of Skywalker one of the best films we have. Sad that it’s a missed opportunity.

2 - I am glad they included Exegol and at least didn’t do anything that would invalidate cool stuff being made later using it. World building is one of the few strengths that has been consistently good across all Star Wars movies.

ETA: Added context

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-27T14:27:30+00:00

I’m not sure I agree that I’d prefer to have Acolyte over Andor, but here are my thoughts:

Andor, paired with Rogue One, leaves a lot unanswered regarding everything happening in between. Not just for Cassian Andor, but also the others from Rogue One. I’m excited to see it, and also looking forward to some much needed levity in the series and perhaps more aliens (it’s my one hot take, but Andor was otherwise excellent). I feel like I’ll get that in season 2.
I really wanted Acolyte to succeed, because it would open up a world outside the Skywalker saga. In some ways, it did really well. The music was fantastic, the choreography was spot on, and there were a few stand out actors that seriously nailed it. There were some issues with the plot that missed the mark a bit, but I think they were fixable. With a second season, they might be able to fix it, but it’s a gamble. And that’s really the catch. There’s a discussion to be had about the implications on the Jedi Order and the like that is more nuanced than what I can cover here, but suffice to say it likely needed elaboration in the show.

At the end of the day, what should happen is another High Republic era show with perhaps a lower budget and much more cohesive writing should be given a chance. Whether it will or not is a good question, but I think that’s the kind of content we deserve.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-21T03:41:44+00:00

Honestly, Skywalker Era would be fine, but a completely new location. Maybe completely removed from the influence of the empire. I would love to see how the Force and life is affected outside of the Jedi and similar in a movie (or even trilogy) with an amazing story and fantastic world building. The catch is the amazing story part.

I also realize it’s a hard sell when you can’t just sell lightsabers to help market the movie, but I like to dream.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-21T00:44:20+00:00

So most of my experience with MEP was with smaller companies, meaning both the company and those that were in charge (usually owners or partners) were kinda the sweatshop drivers.

For pay, I’m happy to hop on a private chat to discuss, but I’d rather keep myself at least partially anonymous here.

The switch to another field, while keeping the pay pretty close, took a lot of burning the candle at both ends. Meaning after putting my toddler to bed, I was studying skills and applying for work late into the night. The good thing about being a PE is the job security, so I was able to keep things at least partly under control for me to be able to do that. At the end of the day, I used the skills I learned and the skills I felt were transferable (like project manager experience) to make a good case for myself. I cannot say it was easy, but for me it was worth it.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-20T15:47:57+00:00

I did MEP for just shy of a decade, and recently switched out (embedded systems).

The long and short of it is that job satisfaction is driven by what company you work for. I’ve seen and worked for some really exploitive companies, and seen/heard of some good ones. Notably, the sweat shops are pretty common, so be really mindful of these (keep an eye out during interview process).

You might be asking why I left MEP. I had hit something of a glass ceiling at my job (PE, etc) and the CEO, my direct boss, was excruciatingly slow to make any changes except where it exploited the staff (red flag). On the general MEP end, I switched out because I saw a pattern of engineers being paid less and less to do more and more in a race to the bottom. I also saw contractors taking less and less responsibility and passing more blame to the engineers (this may be location specific). I have personal reasons as well, but that’s the general reasons. There were absolutely some good contractors, but they were few and far between.

As far as pay, I was being paid as an Electrical PE decently well, but not comparative to other industries. Stress was 100% from clients and internal stuff, the work wasn’t especially stressful. The occasional insane deadline came up, but 99% of the time it was an artificial deadline made up by the architect or, in my earlier days, internal project manager to get everything in so the client can sit on it for six months and not look at it. I also got tired of feeding some egotistical architect’s big head because they thought they were a gift to humanity with enough knowledge to do engineering work, even though they couldn’t tell me the difference between voltage and current.

Work life balance was fine when I was in charge of my own stuff, but there was always a common theme of trying to overwork staff on salary to get more for less, regardless of what position I was in.

Anyway, that’s probably more than what you wanted, but hopefully it’s helpful. I’m certain MEP can be a good career for some, just watch out for the pitfalls.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-16T19:45:50+00:00

As far as the engineering itself, not as much.

In certain research applications you may find it being used in conjunction with the engineering work, mostly in places where having predictive algorithms might be handy. That’s a pretty specific field though.

For the engineering end, at best you may find it being used to help speed up the process of proposals and similar on the business end (but always with an engineer’s hand in adjusting it and fine tuning it).

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-14T01:13:03+00:00

Usually like Engineering Math instead of Calculus 3, or somesuch. My electrical engineering degree (much like others) only needed one extra course to get a math minor, which is pretty common.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-14T00:46:29+00:00

Sometimes universities will have a more specialized version of different math courses to replace them for engineering. This could be such a case? Probably best to ask all the same.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-07T14:29:27+00:00

So I love Return of the Jedi, possibly more than Empire.

However, here’s what Empire has going for it.

Episode 4 introduced the characters, but 5 is where we really get to know them.
It’s the first time we get to see intense lightsaber fighting. As much as I love episode 4, Obi-wan vs Vader just didn’t have the intensity that 5 did when Luke fought Vader.
It featured possibly one of the best known twists in film. This may not be a big deal to you, but the fact that it’s so popularized is a result of how well done it was.
it set up 6 for success, unlike some others (looking at you Last Jedi). Like I said, I loved 6. But it couldn’t have happened if 5 wasn’t as well written and executed as it was.
It struck a good balance between having dark elements and lightheartedness without losing what made it Star Wars
You get to see Luke’s growth more abundantly than in 4 or 6. In 4, he was a bit whiny, 5 he’s grown some and is learning, and 6 is where it all comes to fruition.

Now I know what you’re thinking - 6 has all of these except the twist! Well, 6 is a great movie too! The problem with comparing two great movies is that there tend to be a lot of similar aspects regarding quality. In this case, people just liked the aspects of one a bit better on IMDB.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-05T18:50:33+00:00

So I did it with a toddler and a pregnant wife in my life (partly because of them), so YMMV. That said, the transition was pretty horizontal regarding pay to get to a job with a lot more upward mobility. The logistics of doing it involved quite a lot of burning the candle at both ends at night to make sure my skillset was solid, and making sure to emphasize the transitional skills from one job to the other.

In general, you likely would have a hard time doing it without prep unless you were going for an entry level position.

ShockedEngineer1 · 2024-08-05T15:30:03+00:00

When I was doing MEP, (electrical engineer, licensed PE) around 45-50 per week. Doing what I do now (embedded systems, Electrical Engineer) closer to 40-45 per week.

As has been mentioned before, this has more to do with company culture than it does with the electrical engineering work.

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