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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

Mine was terrible value for money. Went to a red brick in the UK and studied electrical engineering in the early 90s. My first job on the market was a start from scratch experience. I learned almost nothing of value at university and my personal experience as a hobbyist was far more useful. Turns out 95% of EE work is gluing bits of data sheets together and scratching head over problems where the idealistic mathematical models don’t work out. I found this depressing and ended up slipping out the side into the IT industry which was full of charlatans which were easy to get an advantage over.

My only saving grace was it was free at the time. If I’d had a (larger) pile of debt placed in front of me I’d have done something else with my life.

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Discussing value for money on a free degree aside, I'd argue that the value of an EE is immense. I graduated last year studying EEE at a UK red brick uni, had the best time of my life, and learned a good number of skills that have come in handy in the last year having been employed as a professional engineer.

The debt question, at least in the UK, is more academic than anything - I'm currently earning 30k a year (which is already more than I need to live comfortably) and I'm paying £20 a month back on my loan. In 30 odd years the debt will be wiped off and given that you only pay back 6% of income above 27k it's not really like you'd ever notice it. FWIW my friends that went to uni and ended up with non-vocational degrees are earning around the 20k mark if they're working full time so chances are they won't even get close to having to consider their student loans for a good while.

In terms of the specifics I learned on my degree I would have to agree that not much of what was taught is actually helpful in my career but having four years to mature as a person, especially in an atmosphere where you're surrounded by other people who are happy to discuss engineering and related projects, has helped in a way I could never put a price tag on.

That debt is only part of the student finance picture. It’s difficult paying off a credit card, overdraft, commuting, potentially car insurance and rent at the same time. That £20 is a fairly significant amount of cash when you’re in that position. Most people end in that situation and some never escape it.

My daughter is hoping to study medicine next year. That’s going to be interesting on the finance front.

The UK system is more of a graduate tax than a loan unless you're lucky enough to get a seriously well paying job (at which stage you probably don't care).

The repayment terms are not set in stone though, the govt can change it at any time. Also if you want to leave the uk and live somewhere else you are in for a world of hurt.

Are UK salaries really that low? I checked the current exchange rate and £20k is what you can get working a minimum wage job at not even full time hours

A full time job on minimum wage will pay ~18500£. £20K pa is the salary of an entry level not qualified accountant in London (my partner’s first salary some years ago) or of a bar tender. In London, a decent developer may earn in the low 6 digits as an employee. A half decent flat would cost in excess of 2000£ per month, so £20K pa is a very low salary in London.

But if you remove London and 2-3 university towns, what is left of the UK is more similar to an Eastern European country than to Germany or France. Salaries are extremely low, but cost of life is low as well.

As someone that studied computing and electronics I'm surprised you found electrical engineering useless.

I found the vast majority of my computer science courses a waste of time, stuff I could have learned by myself. But the electronics stuff was very useful as I had access to labs and equipment I wouldn't of otherwise had.

I don't think you should expect your university education to prepare you to hit the ground running when you get your first job. It teaches you the foundation so that you can then learn to do your job.

Of course I don't know what you were taught in university nor which field of electrical engineering you went into, maybe you truly got nothing out of it.

I have an MSc in microelectronics. All transferable professional knowledge could have been self learned in about six months from a book. They didn’t teach us how to learn. They didn’t give us any guidance on that front at all in fact. It was just lectures, material (some incorrect!) and a framework in which personal growth was entirely restricted. Tutorials were rushed and incomplete, staff were rarely available for help and a lot of people flounced loudly in the first year over it.

As for incorrectness, to this day I am pissed off that one of the principal lecturers who had precisely zero industry experience shot down an email I sent privately to ask for some material to be corrected. How dare I submit errata! When I landed in industry I took this to a senior design engineer who explained to me in simple terms that the guy was a “jobsworth cunt”.

> I found the vast majority of my computer science courses a waste of time, stuff I could have learned by myself. But the electronics stuff was very useful as I had access to labs and equipment I wouldn't of otherwise had.

As another point of view, my university courses were useful to someone who had jsut tried it out the spring before their freshman year. It introduced me to concepts and put me against (at the time) difficult problems that I could tackle along side my peers. My Data Structure and Alg class was the most useful since it allowed me to restructure the way I way I saw CS as a whole. The things I learn now are entirely structured based on how I learn CS and would not be the same had I learned it on my own.

Just to clarify, I do agree that what they taught is useful to know. Just that the barrier to entry to learn it by yourself is much lower.

To experiment with software concepts "all" you need is a computer and a compiler. Experimenting with electronics required power supplies, signal generators, FPGAs etc. The barrier to entry is much higher in my opinion. I'm grateful I got access to those labs during my study and felt like it was worth the money.

> The things I learn now are entirely structured based on how I learn CS and would not be the same had I learned it on my own

I didn't have that experience. My lecturers were a bit shit in my opinion, and I ended up learning everything from watching recorded lectures from MIT/Stanford/anywhere I could find. Had I not gone to university and watched those lectures I would have ended up with the same knowledge. I felt like the point of my CS modules at university was entirely just to get a piece of paper confirming what I managed to teach myself.

I studied EE in Canada as well in the early 90s. My tuition was less than $2500/year but I had a scholarship that paid for it.

For me it was worth it. I immediately went into programming, and taught myself everything. While being useless for programming, my EE degree gave me a foot in the door and I made the most of it. I started in a bank in IT but was able to move into programming by lying and saying I was a full time programmer. I was doing programming on my own at home so I could legit program (they didn’t have interviews like Microsoft or Google back when I was starting off).

Soon after I moved to Silicon Valley and it’s been pretty good ever since. I’m mostly retired now after 25 years and the pandemic was the thing that convinced me into retirement.

This is my experience too. The best EE I know dropped out of university but knows more about it than anyone I have met. He builds radios, phones and antennas from parts as has since he was a kid in the 1950s. I think the same applies to CS. The best ones have been writing games and code since they were kids. It's something that they love to do.

I'm confused. As someone who dabbled with a basic PCB design. There are a lot of simple circuits that require a lot of theoretical knowledge. Designing the circuit is one thing as you can always copy paste existing designs and modify them. Picking and rating components is another as it requires a complete understanding how your circuit actually works and I was hoping that an EE degree would have helped with that.

I guess there is no need for that and I should just "grind" practical circuits until I understand them.

This is surprising to me because the nature of imperfect components makes EE far more complicated than software development where you do not have to care about choosing a for loop manufactured by Samsung vs Panasonic that is good up to 1000 iterations or that it is polarized so your for loop can only increment, not decrement. Add a hundred components each with their own characteristics and your head will split.

Well realistically you tend to start seeing patterns after a bit. Then you end up redrawing everything as those patterns in your head. Then you develop an intuitive model of what is sensible and what is not.

This is not something they teach you at university. It’s all narrow forward engineering and simple theoretical analysis.

There is a better education in having a pile of broken shit with incorrect service manuals and fixing it when it comes to EE. Test gear is fun because you get it for nothing, fix it and then use it to fix the next thing.

EE drop out here:

An EE degree will absolutely help you pick out components for a circuit.

Computers and digital logic lend themselves towards a sense of everything being deterministic and understandable.

Analog electronics, radio waves, radio wave propagation- I've heard all of those described by EE's (with degrees) as essentially black magic. It isn't black magic obviously, but I think much of those issues end up driving people to experiment with physically building things instead of relying solely on paper. This is just my impression. I think antenna simulation has gotten better recently for example.

Another weird thing about EE, that seems to break what many (including me) expect it to be.. it feels like assumptions and approximations layered on top of one another. Take a simple diode. It has a certain current/voltage curve, but what I was taught about designing with them, is that generally you would use an approximation of the curve. Not the actual curve. Oftentimes, in lab, we would treat the voltage drop across a diode as being independent of current, which is absolutely false! But that is the way that EEs think of diodes, because it works! It's a game of learning what assumptions can be made to simplify analysis.

You might want to try this for learning about electronics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics

another good example of how EE's reduce more complicated circuits down to simpler approximations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9venin%27s_theorem

> But that is the way that EEs think of diodes, because it works! It's a game of learning what assumptions can be made to simplify analysis.

I think you are generalizing too much here. There's certainly some cases where a simple model of a diode works, but aren't there other cases where a more exact model is beneficial. I find it hard to believe that EE's graduate believing that one model fits all, unless its a pretty poor curriculum (for whatever reason). I'm not saying it is impossible to find a poor EE program, but we should be blaming those institutions instead of electrical engineering in general.

I went to a UK redbrick too but didn't finish.

If I was 18 now I wouldn't bother going, I would admit that I'm lucky in how much my parents and grandparents could teach me.

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