Ask HN: Is there a hardest type of engineering or is it all easy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a hardest type of engineering or is it all easy?

14 pointsuptownfunk24 comments

Dear experts of HN: What would you say is the hardest type of (computer) engineering that is also in high demand?

I’m paid handsomely to dance with one foot in the EE world, one foot in the software world, and one for managing people and system design. It’s fun! There’s been a lot of linear algebra and partial derivatives lately. I sadly learned that Excel has an “only 8kB of equations per cell” limit the other day.

So I'm impressed people are taking you seriously.

Engineering is hard. All of it. It's all a lot of work and a lot of complexity.

No, there is no easy route to a big dollar, high demand job that is easy.

There definitely is, and not all engineering is hard. Maybe creating react is hard, but using it after reading the docs and practicing is not, though it is a developmental process.

There's this weird idea in America that using your brain at all to learn something is "hard work". Yes if you go into deep research you will work hard thankless hours, but up until recently and still in some cases there are many handsomely paid front end and back end devs who are little more than number changers.

I'm not an expert (sigh...) but the hardest work I had to do was implementing a computational geometry library. For the first time in my career I had to buy text books. Looks like the closer you are to the hardware, harder it is. If I could go back in time and pick a field I'd choose from OS/runtime development, HPC, CAD, graphics, compilers, scientific computing (this feels a bit dry and too hard, so, perhaps not \0/), network security/protocols.

Always re-writing your codebase using the newest JS framework without falling behind.

Warning - Grumpy old man on a rant --- I've engaged asbestos underwear

Engineering is the practice of applying science and discipline to solve real world problems where the health and welfare of people and society will be directly effected by mistakes. Engineers are licensed by the state of Indiana, and many other states. Some states are Particularly aggressive about prosecuting anyone not so licensed using the term in a professional context.

-- So... if you're designing software for, lets say, a petrochemical refining complex, nuclear reactor control systems, actual rockets... those are the most mission critical examples I can think of.

--- However... there is something that slipped through, even more dangerous, that is "The Algorithm" used to modify human behavior to increase "engagement" at all costs.

--- Next most destructive to society... the software used in High Speed Frontrunning, er... Trading

The question is a bit overloaded. How do you define hard? Mentally taxing? Time consuming to figure out? Requires collaboration with cross-functional SMEs to build a robust solution?

I work in a distributed systems role. There are many things to consider all the time when building high throughput applications with multiple layers of concurrency, caching, micro services and points of failure. While I’m not proving the Hodge Conjecture, I’m still pretty beat at the end of the day constantly keeping up and learning things.

People who claim things like front end is easy, then why are they themselves not the number 1 best front end engineer in the world? Because it’s hard. Everything has complexity.

Software only? Otherwise I'd say semiconductor engineering.

There may be a hardest type, but it's all hard. If it was easy, they'd hire high school kids to do it, and they'd pay them minimum wage (as Steve Hanka used to say).

Different kinds are hard along different axes. Semi engineering is hard because of physics. Medical devices and avionics are hard because of safety issues, and because of regulation. Web programming is hard because of tons of fiddly human-factors issues.

to cut to the chase: hardest != highest paid

Interesting, which is hard and which is higher paid?

Games is hard, and I don't expect it's the highest paid

In the UK banking is highly paid (relatively) and can be hard or easy (I have worked in investment banking risk/liquidity/regulatory)

FANG in the US is highly paid and can be hard or easy according to this group

Starting your own company can be highly paid, if you're lucky and is likely to be lots of work, but that work may not be hard.

Research can be hard and is unlikely to be highly paid.

Quantum engineering is both easy and hard.

Electrical, chemical and combustion are the hardest branches of engineering in my observations, mainly due to the abstract nature.

But they are especially hard if you are doing them for any other primary reason than a love and curiosity of the subject.

Hardest === Whatever type of engineering I happen to be doing that week.

Getting single core performance in league with multicore performance.

Without being lazy like me and using a bunch of fire-and-forget code that causes race conditions.

Debugging old shitty code written by the incompetent.

where "incompetent" == "you 6 months ago"

Or me writing Bash 3 weeks ago.

3 weeks?!? Good for you!

It's me writing bash this morning :P

I wrote a variable in a library to store a string that sends output to null.. Because I hate remembering things.

Programming FPGAs for Machine Learning and Data Science?

Political engineering is hardest.

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