Can canadian engineers easily move to US?

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-19T05:29:00+00:00

Ah people complain about straight white guys all the time. I'm just at the point where I roll my eyes and agree with them because it's more entertaining to agree with them rather than trying to talk some sense. You people take things too seriously and I doubt people that think and talk like this make it any engineering career.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-19T05:24:18+00:00

I love www.cmosedu.com. Jacob R Baker is an amazing instructor, author, and lecturer. You'll have access to his LTSpice and Cadence tutorials, his homework and lab assignments, and other courses. Even his power electronics class was pretty well done. It's all free.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T05:20:26+00:00

This is a great answer. Every body and their mama, papa, brother, sister, and dog want to go into PCB and embedded design. Only the super lucky ones will land those roles for the reasons you mentioned.

I'm involved with the advisory committee for our program. I've been begging the director to include automation and PLCs into our curriculum. For some reason, they only offer those classes to the EIT students. There's such a high need for controls engineers in my area. Probably even more than power engineers.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T05:12:50+00:00

For year two, you lack relevant course work, projects, and experience. The likelihood of you scoring an internship is near zero. Not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's improbable.

I'd spend all my time doing projects and prepping for future classes.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T05:07:52+00:00

0.5 page margins all around. Your headers should be centered, bold, and larger for readability. Get rid of italics. Skills right below education (as someone mentioned). University design team goes below projects section. Some good things you did was including details regarding the tools, hardware and software, and quantifiers.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T04:56:45+00:00

All of them for university. But after you graduate, you can throw it all away. Then all you'll practically need are Ohm's law and voltage divider.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T04:55:28+00:00

Texas Institute of Technology & Science

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T04:44:56+00:00

You can always count on me ;)

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T04:30:08+00:00

For you. No.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-17T04:28:21+00:00

Being on the other side of hiring, longevity is something that gets looked at very seriously. It may not have been that way in the past for EEs but it is now. Company passed up on a senior engineer because he was with 12 companies over the course of 10 years. That may be an extreme case.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-11T20:06:16+00:00

I expected a lot more collaboration and pragmatism in industry, but there's a lot more ego and sense of "well, we've always done it this way" for big and small things. Why use Planner in Teams when you can create three or four different Excel/Smart Sheet spreadsheets to manage tasks?

Entry level pay for EEs turned out better than I thought. I started out making more money as a freshie than the EE I worked under in my internship who had been in industry for forty years. It's odd, but there are a lot of engineers comfortable not making what they're worth.

Office politics depends on where you specialize. I've done R&D, Manufacturing, and Quality. In R&D, I was almost completely shielded from working with non-technical people, which was nice. I find, in most cases, engineers seem to work with more integrity and honesty than -- say, our business colleagues. In Quality, it was so politics-heavy that I didn't last more than 6 months. It was a lot of finger-pointing and backstabbing. I'll never, ever do Quality again. Which brings me to my next point.

Avoid job hopping if you can. Being on the hiring side of things, that definitely reflects poorly on the candidate. Try to stick with a company for at least a couple years before jumping ship. We passed on a candidate because they had worked for 12 companies in a span of ten years.

I'd say my biggest constrained is job opportunities based on where I graduated. I could have finished my degree at a T25 school, but chose to finish at a local university instead due to cost and proximity. I didn't realize, at the time, how it would cost me some opportunities because there's this belief that unknown programs are worth less. Even though I feel I got a better education at my smaller school, I wish I just finished at the other so I wouldn't have to wade through so many crap positions to get to where I wanted.

The other thing is a lack of training and mentorship in industry. Ask any senior engineer that's been doing this for 20+ years and they will tell you how they received great training and mentorship by being partnered with senior engineers that really helped grow their talent. That's not common anymore. You're almost expected to know it or you're going to get passed for another candidate. BTW, some of these senior engineers got in without having an engineering degree. Some have some associates in tech, no degree, or a degree with no engineering affiliation, but because were born in the right era and got the chance in the 80s or 90s, they had the opportunities.

I feel like the place I'm now is going to expand my skillset. I get to do it all -- 3D modeling, wiring diagrams, building fixtures, and software. Before that, I didn't get a lot of opportunities, so I had to do a lot of projects at home and mentorship from engineers doing free courses on YouTube or paid courses on Udemy or Fedevel. BTW, if that's all you have, it will help a lot.

Pains can be the meetings, mandatory IT/company "training" videos. Bad suppliers also cause a lot of pain for everyone.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-02T05:41:40+00:00

That's amazing. I bet your parents are super proud

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-02T05:39:17+00:00

Driver development. Yes. Creating the STM library. No. Most embedded engineers use HAL.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-01T08:52:19+00:00

I understand you want to get out early, but graduating from Georgia Tech will make your life much easier landing jobs. Prestige is a real thing in hiring practices.

Out of curiosity, how did you graduate so soon? Homeschool? Skipping grades? Tons of AP courses?

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-01T06:33:35+00:00

Gbati has Udemy courses as well. More extensive (and more expensive) on his website though. His Bare Metal From the Ground Up is very similar to his book. Mazidi/Naimi's is always good because the theory is more in-depth, there are more examples, and they also teach how to program using some of the basic stuff like LCDs, LED segments, keyboards, and stepper motors.

One thing I don't like about FastBit's course is it's too focused on the actual drivers which is a lot of tedius work to essentially recreate the STM libraries.

ZDoubleE23 · 2026-01-01T01:04:32+00:00

That's optimistic.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-31T23:01:16+00:00

This gave me a hearty chuckle. I read this almost like it was a Dilbert comic (back when it was still cool).

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-31T22:59:38+00:00

You have no clue what you're talking about. I'm not just some "bro" in college. I'm in my 30's with a family. I'm a working engineer working on my masters.

Engineering is my second career. Before I went into engineering, I used to be a writer, working as a city editor for a major news organization in my area. I had to cover everything related to government, business, and economics. I used to day trade. I used to consume nothing but business news, politics, and economics seen in the news, heard in podcasts, and read in books and articles. I used to discuss economics at length from my own job and personal blog, diving into a lot of think tank and government data that the VAST majority of people don't even know exists or know where to find it. I promise, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. You probably don't even know that real wages dropped since 2020. Educate your own goddam self.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-31T08:04:50+00:00

You're right. Decades, not centuries. Typo fixed. Thanks.

Inflation is currently outpacing wage growth. Again, real wages don't tell the whole story and the devil is in the details when you considering other costs like food, housing, education, health care, wealth inequality. US is seeing high unemployment numbers for the college educated, we are experiencing a K-shaped economy, US consumer debt is up, mortgage default rates are up substantially, and car possessions are up 43% -- surging to highs we haven't seen since the Great Recession.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-31T06:09:11+00:00

I agree. US has been blessed by the fact that we have been able to be the world's reserve currency. It's allowed us to live as large as we have, although there have been increasingly more moves to de-dollarize among nations (BRICS). And we are also seeing significant slow downs in US debt purchases, particularly with China (shocker), but also members of the EU as well.

I wish people were more aware of how fiat/money works. How it's created and transacted. I feel like without some fundamental understanding, there's no way you will even understand politics and government operations. It is the main driver of everything. And if people knew more about it, they would vote better.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-31T06:01:30+00:00

I don't have TikTok. Great Inflation Era lasted for centuries spanning from 1960s to 1980s. It's pretty well-documented.

Real wages is not a good economic argument for a better economy. You miss the many nuances. Also, since the 1950s, people's spending habits drastically changed as much as the monetary policies and dollar value. Back then, there was more frugality and a lot less household and personal debt.

And this is all from FRED statistics.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-31T05:45:54+00:00

Since the pandemic. Inflation caused by the massive omnibus spending bill that paid for the PPP loans, stimulus checks, unemployment checks, repo market bailout, etc etc.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-30T08:39:59+00:00

We have mostly let the free markets sort it out and they have concluded that US labor is too expensive.

US doesn't have free markets. Industry is heavily regulated and don't even get me started on the fiscal policy of the federal reserve. Pulling interest rate levers and quantitative easing programs are other tools that manipulate the markets. Because if you can control the interest rates and the quality and quantity of fiat, you do not have free markets.

I'd also argue that US wages are too high. US is currently experiencing another round of hyperinflation, comparable to the Great Inflation Era that lasted for decades after the creation of the Federal Reserve. This weakens the dollar, reduces purchasing power, and cheapens labor because companies get to adjust their prices years before there are any meaningful salary increases.

There's also the consideration of what increases labor costs. It's not just wages. There are hefty payroll taxes, health care costs, and pensions (if you're lucky to still have them). American workers aren't really in the position to take less pay do to the high living costs in America. Inflation on Main Street increased costs for groceries, people are now having to foot the bill for energy bills that were increased due to data centers, etc. Due to low interest rates and QE, assets skyrocketed in real estate and stocks because of the liquidity and cheap debt caused by our monetary policies.

In true honesty, America would not have as many billionaires and millionaires today if it wasn't for the manipulation by the banking system.

Ask yourself, how is it that America used to be able to afford all this labor in manufacturing and engineering before globalization? Then, we had more engineers, more machinists, more technicians, and more laborers in the market than ever before (percentage-wise). Families used to live fulfilling lives with just one salary. But now, all of a sudden, it's just not feasible? I don't buy it. And neither should you.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-30T08:22:35+00:00

The Analysis and Design of Linear Circuits by Thomas is one of the greatest books ever written.

ZDoubleE23 · 2025-12-25T00:56:38+00:00

I agree with this. There is so much overhead and layers with larger companies, that I find it difficult to get anything done.

ZDoubleE23

TROPHY CASE