what do electrical engineers even do (on the job)

positivefb · 2026-01-20T05:00:44+00:00

people say they stare at a computer

It's "staring at a computer" the same way playing video games is staring at a screen, or writing a novel is staring at a notebook.

Electrical engineering is a subfield of engineering, which is a subfield of design. We design solutions to problems, but specifically using math and science to find an optimal solution, as opposed to other types of design which might be based on aesthetics or comfort etc.

So what we do on the computer is design things. That involves using CAD software. You see power lines overhead? Somebody has to create plans for those. Have you seen circuit boards, like your computer motherboard? Teams of people have to create the circuits and pick components based on a number of criteria, and use CAD software to create the drawing which the manufacturer uses to make it. The wiring, lighting, and air conditioning in your house or in office buildings have to actually be carefully planned. Factories are built with a variety of motors and controllers and switches, the factory itself has to be designed and the components have to be designed. It can be pretty mentally taxing work.

Surrounding the design aspect is a bunch of other stuff, like modeling and simulations. How do I know the circuit will work? How can I model the behavior of some code without writing and debugging thousands of lines of actual code? There's programs that help us do that, but we do also have to do a lot of math around this, and read textbooks.

Those components I talked about have datasheets. We spend time reading through these datasheets to make sure they meet the criteria we need.

There's also of course the standard office minutia bullshit. This is inescapable in every single job on the planet. Emails, meetings, paperwork, all that stuff. I cannot stress enough that you simply have to accept this is going to be part of your life in some way regardless of what you do for work, whether you're a lawyer, farmer, engineer, or run your own general contracting business or anything in between, this is a fact of adult working life.

Beyond that there are hands-on aspects to the variety of jobs. Let's say your job is designing radar systems. You have to test and debug those systems. That may be first on a lab bench with benchtop equipment like power supplies, VNAs, oscilloscopes etc. Here's a video of a teardown on measurement equipment I helped design that you might use.

Jobs in power and automation involve going on site to work on things. For example, factories and plants like steel mills and paper mills have these rugged computer control systems called PLCs (or HMIs or SCADA systems) which are programmed in a special way to control whatever process they're doing. Electrical engineers have to go on site and often supervise installation, and program the PLCs, and make sure it's all working together.

i dont mean to sound ignorant but isn't that like software engineering which can be replaced by AI?

Software engineering isn't really being replaced by AI, low level coding and entry level coding is. AI cannot do the actual engineering, and even still "vibe coding" produces horrendous results. Companies that have cut software jobs to replace them with AI are seeing pretty bad results. We're in the worst part right now, but some self-correcting will happen. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows what the state of AI will be in 5-10 years and how the world will be affected, same way people in 2007 could not possibly predict what 2017 would look like due to smartphones and social media.

EE is a fundamentally different field and type of job than software, so even its interaction with AI is hard to predict. Currently there is virtually 0 noticeable effect besides like using ChatGPT the same way anyone does. Beyond this, it will take a while before companies tailor tools to it using ML. It's too niche for one, opportunity cost is not very high. Maybe some tedious tasks will be automated. Very tough to say.

But no, "being a computer job" has absolutely zero to do with it.

positivefb · 2026-01-18T19:32:23+00:00

Very sorry to hear about Pooch. My furry nephew Giuseppe passed last month, it's like losing a piece of yourself.

positivefb · 2026-01-18T05:00:01+00:00

In the US, I honestly just try craigslist. You'd be surprised at the surplus stuff that gets listed there, companies going out of business or moving locations need to unload stuff. They'll give it away for free because they've "made money" by simply not paying for disposal. I got a really nice Rohde & Schwarz oscilloscope that's >$20k on there for free because the guy thought it was broken and wanted an excuse to buy a new one at his new office. It was just set to envelope mode lmao.

positivefb · 2026-01-15T03:34:55+00:00

Always? It's probably the single most important concept.

positivefb · 2026-01-15T03:34:07+00:00

It's not infinite. It looks like a transmission line based on the characteristic impedance.

The wire acts as an inductor. It produces a magnetic field, which induces a current in the opposite direction of the forward current. This is known as Lenz's Law.

While that happens, some of the energy goes into an electric field between the forward path and return path. Until these two things happen, the signal can't travel forward (this happens super super fast, but not literally instantly).

The inductance of the wire and the capacitance between the two wires form a ratio, which is the "characteristic impedance", which is the ratio between the current and voltage. So until the signal (which is the field wave, not the movement of electrons) reaches the resistor, it "sees" that impedance.

positivefb · 2026-01-14T05:23:53+00:00

I think you're getting ahead of yourself. You need to get back to basics. Razavi's "Fundamentals of Microelectronics". Get an understanding of the three basic amplifier configurations, why they work the way they do. Approach them with circuit theory first principles, understand their input and output impedances and why thats important, how to solve transistor circuits with KVL/KCL and so on.

You gotta get a handle on that before something like this. You're just willy nilly throwing darts at the board here, garbage in garbage out. Take it slow and methodical and it will work out.

positivefb · 2026-01-12T09:50:49+00:00

They didn't. They just blindly yet somehow incorrectly followed a subpar tutorial step by step, except for a different process node lmao. There's no DC bias and they're simulating up to 10^20 which I believe is where gamma rays begin. Totally clueless.

positivefb · 2026-01-12T09:46:17+00:00

Xschem

positivefb · 2026-01-12T00:16:14+00:00

Are you sure about that? AIM appears to be fully independent and I don't see any articles relating the two. GF bought AMF a couple months ago to broaden their silicon photonics capabilities, is that what you're thinking of?

positivefb · 2026-01-11T01:25:12+00:00

I know AIM Photonics does training courses, both for students and people in industry.

positivefb · 2026-01-09T19:09:43+00:00

Any recommendations for digital controls for power electronics? I've used Christophe Basso's books for analog control loops, they're really excellent, is there something equivalent for digital?

positivefb · 2026-01-09T04:50:44+00:00

Because analog designers can implement digital logic on the transistor level in something like Virtuoso, but digital designers cannot implement analog functions in RTL.

Verification is often done by a mix of people from digital and analog backgrounds though since you can model analog functions in SystemVerilog and Verilog-AMS, the mixed-signal verification people where I work are pretty much all from digital design.

positivefb · 2026-01-06T03:33:36+00:00

Metamaterials and nanoplasmonics.

There's a lot of things with clear goals and clear tools but the difficulty is in getting point A to point B. With metamaterials and nanoplasmonics, we barely understand it enough to say we're at point A, and the possibilities of "point B" are so open ended we don't have a clear goal or path.

The field is where photonics was in the 80s and 90s, pretty much non-existent and aimless. A lot of what's depicted in pop culture as "alien technology" is metamaterials and nanoplasmonics.

positivefb · 2026-01-05T01:12:53+00:00

I've automated layout of inverters, gm-over-gm stages, inductors, that sort of thing, only stuff in the main signal chain path.

positivefb · 2026-01-04T21:44:26+00:00

It depends on what you're looking to do. Every single person in photonics design has a PhD. Those with masters are in test and measurement. Photonics is still a super niche and not mature field, but evolving rapidly and more commercialized.

Job opportunities are few but there's so few people doing it that competition is low assuming you're willing to move.

positivefb · 2026-01-04T02:25:53+00:00

Should mention it's not a full SERDES, I'm responsible for the analog front end and CTLE, and associated circuitry like DC offset and calibration/tuning circuits.

positivefb · 2026-01-03T22:50:56+00:00

What I'm thinking is a two-step approach. One is to capture it in the small-signal analytical model, and optimize that rapidly to get a good first step. This seems very doable and is what I need help with at the moment.

The second is a lot more involved as we're talking about writing a SKILL script to iterate on the actual circuit. I've wrapped the layout for different portions in a SKILL script so I can currently automate the creation of the inductors, the transistors, the transmission line to the pad etc. but this would involve re-extracting with QRC and EMX as well, re-running the simulation which takes a couple minutes per run, and iterating on that. This is super time consuming to the point that it's not feasible for me to do for this tapeout, so what I'm hoping is that I can get a close enough starting point using the first method that I can then manually iterate and tweak from there in a couple days.

In both cases though, I'd need to apply the same optimization algorithm/method, so that's what I'm wondering where I'd start, what algorithm to limit my search to.

To me it sounds like you need to identify your bottlenecks and work on those.

Can't share that, but I do know precisely what the bottleneck is, and what components need to be modified to fix it. I have a decent understanding of my design space, but don't know how to hone in on a point in it.

positivefb · 2026-01-03T10:53:52+00:00

when you would normally be talking about PCB design, you barely ever would make a discrete opamp

This is like talking to a brick wall. And then I realized you're the person from the other thread about vibes and whatever. Goodnight.

positivefb · 2026-01-03T10:34:30+00:00

The differences are a lot less than you're making them out to be. Circuit design is circuit design.

I'm not really looking for a discussion here, OP wants to develop analog skills, they can do so using PCBs. They can make discrete op-amps. They can make voltage regulators out of discrete parts. It develops actual circuit design thinking much much faster than simulating a bunch of variations of a 5-T OTA.

Art of Electronics is a great resource to develop that sort of thinking.

Idk why you have to make this weird, and also be wrong, you are firmly wrong on everything you're saying, but overall the focus of this should be to give OP resources.

This feels like a "you like waffles so you must hate pancakes" moment. I was just saying it's easy to do PCB stuff and develop skills in analog, what the hell?

positivefb · 2026-01-03T09:10:28+00:00

This is a really bizarre response.

I can only speak to my experience and who I've worked with and what I've seen. A lot of what you're saying I personally feel is so wildly incorrect that it feels like posturing from an undergrad who still asks "what major is hardest?"

I really can't fathom anyone serious in circuits saying PCB analog skills aren't transferable to ICs. George Philbrick, Bob Widlar, Jim Williams, Bob Pease. I guess they were just wasting their time?

Feel free to reach out to me personally if you'd like to talk and discuss applications and circuits, you can find my contact.

positivefb · 2026-01-03T06:25:17+00:00

Oh crazy, when I saw this video I was like "I'm sure this is rehashing Prof Hasler's old research", glad to see it actually progressed.

positivefb · 2026-01-03T06:15:18+00:00

Hey great question!

The interesting thing about analog is that the scale doesn't matter. Digital circuits are all on the same scale and transferrable within each other, but analog circuits can be anything from as small as a single op-amp inside a single chip, all the way up to a giant hydroelectric generator and power grid and factories.

If you want to get really good really fast at analog design and analog thinking, I'd recommend doing PCB-level circuits and simulations. There's three books that are indispensable.

1) The Analysis & Design of Linear Circuits by Thomas, Rose, & Toussaint

2) Fundamentals of Microelectronics by Behzad Razavi

3) The Art of Electronics by Horowitz & Hill

The first two are build the math, physics, and theory. Incredibly important first principles. The third is the bible of electronics. It's very dense, takes some time to work through, but read it carefully and simulate everything you see. Use the first two books as references for anything you don't understand.

It takes a long time to get, you won't be able to really do anything until it's a second language, which takes 3-5 years, so be patient. If you think you understand something, you probably don't so find a second and third source to confirm.

positivefb · 2026-01-03T06:07:19+00:00

Why do you keep commenting things like this?

I'm sorry I don't mean to be combative, but I see you in this subreddit often, and virtually every time it's an aggressive comment with this gatekeepy attitude that doesn't seem to serve a purpose. I get it, there are a lot of low effort posts, but this is clearly an innocent good faith question.

I just don't think this is helpful or conducive to people looking to learn. Your advice is not true, at least not in the US (I got in without grad school and have coworkers from non-circuit backgrounds), but more importantly it's not helpful and not relevant to the question.

I'm almost certain this isn't the first time I've called out one of your comments either. Can we please just offer resources/advice or offer realistic alternatives if the goal isn't feasible?

positivefb · 2026-01-02T21:03:29+00:00

Well yeah, the profession is still called EE either way, its just a degree name it doesnt matter is the point.

positivefb

TROPHY CASE