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Comment by rhymer | Hacker News Reader

I'm grateful for leetcode. Despite my background in electrical engineering, where I specialize in statistical signal processing, I never had the opportunity to delve into algorithm or data structure courses during my college years.

In my field, understanding signals and systems, probability, optimization, and numerical computing is very important.

Leetcode, in comparison, offers a more confined scope, making preparation more manageable and systematic, ultimately helping me break into software engineering.

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We might also ask why EE specialists (and indeed half of STEM) needs to fall back to software engineering to get meaningful and stable employment, but capitalism probably does not like us asking these pesky questions.

"capitalism" Is it in the room with you? Do you need assistance? Did the evil capitalism touch you in your naughty place?

But seriously... everything uses computers and programming ties everything together. I don't think you have to be a grand master programmer but having those skills make you a better employee.

The real pesky question is why do you think socialism, communism or the alternatives to "capitalism" wouldn't benefit from having people able to use better tools? Productivity multipliers would help "The People" and The Masters in charge of the authoritarian dictatorship alternatives to "capitalism"...

It's not that EE *needs" to fall back on software for stable employment, it's that software pays more, and ridiculously more at big tech companies.

I have both EE and CS degrees, but I make literally more than double in CS-type jobs than I would back in EE. Even though back in the day, I was definitely better at EE stuff than CS stuff.

This was true very early career, and for now at least continues to be true.

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I'm still of the opinion that software will eventually revert to the mean, comparable to other engineering compensation... some year. It probably won't happen until there's significant regulatory and liability burden that doesn't really exist in software yet. Like some in software complain about GDPR or DMA or whatever, but crank that up orders of magnitude and then add career-and-company-ending lawsuit threats on top, and then you have real engineering. Then it becomes much more expensive to do things, profit margins go way down, and pay does as well.

Who knows when that'll actually happen. For now, software is bonkers profitable.

(When software engineering becomes real engineering, I posit that it will also cease to be as highly paid)

I love hardware and EE, but most of my friends that do it hate it and work on power lines only. I wish hardware was as good, but it's not as in demand and it's harder too!

If you don't have the background, to me you would be a risky bet since you may be missing some fundamentals. But I'm not sure what niche you're specializing in, or if you could provide some social proof that you've otherwise picked up the requisite software engineering skills.

If sounds like gatekeeping, it kind of is.

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