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Comment by uvnq | Hacker News Reader

I wish I understood this stuff more; it seems like there is probably much wealth of knowledge in electrical engineering that I wouldn't learn anything remotely similar to in other fields of study

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I think any subject will be much deeper than your current superficial language of it is once you dive into it; the STEM fields are one of course, but otoh there's for example my girlfriend who is / was a gardener, which is something many people pull their noses up at because it's just menial work involving a shovel and a lawnmower right? Except it's not, you get to deal with the wonderful worlds of soil composition, soil ecosystems, drainage / hydraulics, microbiology, entomology, lots of Latin, geometry and measurements, and in her case, running a business as well so financial administration and tax laws and the like.

TL;DR I think you vastly underestimate other fields of study because you've never looked into or considered them. I get that you're in awe of this particular page and want to express it, but be aware that you kinda come across as dismissive of everything that isn't electrical engineering or your own particular field of study.

Sometimes it's for stupid reasons too. I was trained as a mechanical engineer before getting into software and I thought data structures wouldnt be interesting because data didn't seem interesting. Boy was I wrong.

It's sometimes interesting to see how many people repeat things like "computers only see 1s and 0s" and at some point after working through all kinds of topics between CPU pipelines, data compression etc. one can (re)discover this truth from the other side, realising how amazing it is that all this knowledge and structure can be encoded in just 1s and 0s.

And I'm sure other fields have this too, where to the outside it's "just atoms and molecules" and then the scientist chuckles and says "indeed".

Power engineering is vast. Machinery, generation/transmission/distribution, high voltage are the main topics. They're very much intertwined with each other so maybe it's pointless to divide it into topics. Of course it's still part of the broader electrical engineering subject.

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