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Comment by quinta1k | Hacker News Reader

It would be their dream come true if the hw oss community (very small) takes this up and develops it into something huge like for sw projects. There is so much manpower needed to develop these kinds of things - what better way than oss.

However, too little, too late, ee industry. An entire generation of top tier college students have pretty much skipped ee.

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Nowadays the Computer Engineering degree lets those of us who were torn between EE and CS get both. At least at Virginia Tech, CpE(Computer Engineering) easily outstrips CS and teaches the basics of CS and EE fundamentals as well as practical application of both of them.

Sure, that makes sense in theory, but of the computer engineers I've known, they prefer one end or the other and aren't as good at either as someone dedicated to just one.

However, this is a pretty small sample size (I helped interview at a small company), so I'm not sure if it's a trend.

Ya most of us tend to prefer one side or the other but this system tends to be a good way to get create would be EEs with a decent bit of exposure to CS and vice versa.

It doesn't create perfect mixed skills but give a working experience with both sides. For example I hate semiconductor work, dislike circuit analysis, and much prefer software but I enjoy working with VHDLs and embedded software. I'll take Rust or Haskell over Verilog any day but I have no problem working with VHDLs given the need.

Lots of unsubstantiated claims here. WD doesn't need the OSS community, the community won't make or break the project. They're a 'nice to have' at best. Remember, if this really means savings of $X (that goes to ARM ??) per unit of storage shipped, given their volumes, they'll gladly fund this to the finish line. Claiming WD needs the OSS community is like claiming chrome/Google needs the community. Sure, the community contributions are valuable, but the core funding and heavy lifting is always in-home.

As for a whole generation skipping EE, no evidence.

Looks like royalties are somewhere in the 2% range for ARM[1]. There's also whatever markup companies like Marvell charge to WD. It sounds like WD sells around 40 million drives per year. So, even a savings of 25 cents per unit would be $10M/year.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...

> An entire generation of top tier college students have pretty much skipped ee.

Umm, what? I just looked at MIT's statistics (the registrar publishes them online) and sure, there are a lot more CS students, but there are certainly a lot of EEs.

I would think MIT might be a bit special, given that both EE and CS are Course 6 - some other schools have a similar setup (i.e. one EECS department), but many do not.

From a cursory look, it appears there were around ~55,000 CS graduates in 2015 the US, ~11,000 EE, and ~5,000 CE.

I don't agree that a "generation have skipped EE," but I do think it is probably true that CS graduates in general now probably have much less hardware experience/education than has been the case historically (no comment from me on whether that is good/bad).

The institute breaks out 6-1 and 6-2 (took me a while to figure that because the registrar writes VI-1 :-).

I’ve seen feedback correct this — shortly after I graduated analog fell out of favor (for jobs) so almost all the analog engineers in industry were old guys....so when the worm turned there was a shortage of experienced analog EEs.

I assume this reversion to the mean will happen more broadly for EEs. Then again, China and Europe are graduating a lot of EEs so it’s not like EE won’t be done, just not in the US.

Supply and demand. FANGs vertical integration. No more Moore.

The number of EE grads is going down in Europe too.

In Eastern Europe students still study it but then move to software as Web Dev pays 2x as much. In Western Europe students gave up on EE completely since since SW companies make HW ones look archaic.

No grad wants to work for us when he comes for the interview and sees only old guys. My boss has only hired Eastern Europeans, Indians and Chinese lately since he couldn't find any EE. Also, him and other companies not offering competitive wages to EE while complaining of a shortage is the true problem.

Offer competitive wages and grads will flock to this field.

This was clear 10 years ago when ee and cs salaries started diverging significantly and ee companies remained fairly stingy, even with food and drinks and perks at the workplace, let alone salaries.

It will end up costing them faaaar more than the salaries and benefits that were saved. Gg

I graduated CE and worked for 11 years with digital design and FPGAs in silicon valley. The salaries haven't kept up. I transitioned to SW and I'm not going back.

Top tiers. Proportions

There's alot less jobs in ee than there is in programming/IT. Half of the ee's I know went into programming due to not finding jobs in what they wanted.

Most of the ee's I knew went into banking, because money (I assume) .

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