Ask HN: How to keep “hard” skills as an electrical engineer working in software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to keep “hard” skills as an electrical engineer working in software?

5 pointshazrmard6 comments

I studied electrical engineering in college. I'm finishing grad school now. My work for the past several years has been at the intersection of classical control and machine learning. More of the latter, actually.

I can pick up new, and maintain old "soft"-ware skills (programming languages, algorithms etc.) pretty much by reading online and running demos on a computer. I feel like I can keep abreast of latest skills needed to hire a software engineer.

How do I do the same with "hard"-ware skills? I studied VLSI design, circuits, and embedded systems programming in college. Many of these require expensive software or bespoke apparatus or a longer setup. Unsurprisingly, they do not have the same amount of flashy online demos that more web-dev-adjacent fields like CS have.

This question was prompted by the recent article here[1]. It talks about the decline in EE graduates over time, in favor of more software-oriented fields.

Any time-tested advice?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32142711

You're not (likely) going to be working casually on VLSI design, but for basic circuitry and embedded design you can work on hobby projects. I wouldn't compare that to having a fulltime job working on complex systems where you're going to be exposed to more elaborate challenges, but you can at least avoid letting hardware skills atrophy over time by using them for comparatively simple tasks.

Yes working on hobby projects. Get an FPGA kit, implement the RISC-V ISA in RTL. Use all the formal verification tools. Then move on to compliance and tape-out (just joking). But seriously, you'd be wasting time if you didn't do anything meaningful while trying to maintain your skills. And have to think about the motivation as well.

You'll never hold on to everything, but if you achieved understanding once, it will come back pretty quickly. The good news is that what you know/knew about electronics doesn't age as badly as what you know about SW.

Buy some FPGA’s and commit to spending some money at Digikey every few months.

There’s a lot of work to be done creating open source tool paths for hardware you could contribute to as well.

Use it or lose it. There is no other way. Either get a job as EE using these skills, or do some projects using them in your own free time.

If you get a software job at an IoT device maker, you might be able to finagle access after hours to their equipment and EDA software?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com