How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees? | Hacker News Reader

How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

To set the scene: I wanted to build my own devboard for my own projects. I'm sat here looking at my screen after having opened KiCAD with some of the documentation for an STM32H7 MCU. It dawns on me that I have absolutely zero clue of what I am looking at and have no idea where to start beyond watching youtube. Here I am now writing this.

Now this would be fine under normal circumstances and I would be happy to learn, like I previously did with web dev. Nor would I expect to know how to do it intuitively. However I literally went to university for this subject, this stuff surely should have been covered (it wasn't)? Feeling illiterate, and missing foundational knowledge (and so often across many fields) can't be right?.

I don't mean to write this as a university is a scam type post ... but like is this normal?

Does everyone go through this?

Did their degree actually help them in any meaningful way? Assuming you stayed in the same field of course.

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Building your own devboard requires skills in many interdependent areas. Have you tried using an Arduino or similar first? Having built computers from TTL chips and wirewrap chassis, I can confirm that digital electronics field has grown massively and requires knowledge in many specialist areas. Even designing a PCB requires a great deal of knowledge. Tools like KiCAD are great, but they don't abstract out the requisite underlying knowledge.

A university degree in any professional field is only the starting point for a lifetime of learning. In my pre-internet days I spent several thousand dollars a year on books and professional journals all of which I read cover-to-cover. With the internet I find all the materials I need with some focused searching.

The only thing that you truly learn at university is how to research, ie ask questions and then find the answers. Being a professional means having the experience to apply your learning to specific outcomes.

For me learning is very much just-in-time. I stumble across something I don't have a clue about, so I research. Typically I come across something that I don't understand, so then I dig into that and so on. Generally I need to get down into the weeds until I connect with something I already know. Then I start building upwards. Pretty soon I hit another thing I don't understand and repeat the exercise.

Listen to this person, this is brilliant advice

>Have you tried using an Arduino or similar first?

That’s why I went to uni to do EE/Robotics. I wanted the next step, suffice to say I did not get the next step from university.

I see what you’re getting at though. Just in time learning seems to be the way it will be. It’s just frustrating I don’t even have a base to go off of. Pretty much all my background knowledge has come from stuff I learnt outside of uni.

I know your pain. I'm the person who tries a dozen things and when none of them work, then grudgingly reads the manual, etc.

If your base doesn't help you launch, even in a small way, then you need to go below that base, back towards the fundamentals. I'm sure you learnt about logic gates, digital signals, transmission line effects, power glitches, etc. Unless you went to one of the well funded universities with youngish academics, then what you learnt was probably 5+ years behind the current state of the art. Add to that the years since you graduated. That is the knowledge gap in years that you need to traverse to establish an up to date base.

Until recently, I taught post-grad EE/SE (as an ex-industry, adjunct) at one of the country's top universities. My colleagues were dismayed at the inadequacy of STEM education of the first-year students. Year 1 has become a remedial school. Starting from such a low-level of knowledge 2-3 years doesn't provide enough time to teach all that is required to be successful in industry. In the field of digital electronics you typically need 3+ years of industry experience to become competent. Of course, motivated autodidacts can accomplish far more in far less time.

I work in software now, but I was an accounting major, CPA, and worked in Public Accounting for 4 years before making the switch.

Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.

But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.

Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.

As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.

[0] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

We're actually in a the same boat, as I've recently fired up KiCAD for the first time. Keep in mind, I did not go to school for this type of stuff, but yes, I feel illiterate and like I'm missing all sorts of info. You're not alone in that.

But guess what? Because of my business experience, I love it. I'm incredibly excited about what the project (and potential final product) will be. So, I've been reading anything and everything, testing, exploring, learning. Can you believe we have the access to do this stuff today? It's incredible.

This is how the world works. For example, a few weeks back, I was under the hood of a steam-powered car, analyzing, looking, thinking about how they figured out some of the things they had figured out. What were they thinking historically? How did they feel about this design decision? Who taught them?

Moral of the story: Degrees don't teach this drive; you must nurture it. It's normal to feel lost at sea.

I think your university may have fallen short of its goals for the EE or robotics programs.

My EE major started with circuit theory, had labs with Arduinos and advanced to digital logic (embedded software) theory along with labs using professional-grade microcontrollers (TI MSP430, I think). Senior design capstone took us through schematic capture + PCB layout and getting a board fabbed. We did the soldering and populating components on the custom boards ourselves. Granted that was using Mentor Graphics and not Altium, which seems to be industry-standard, but it was still relevant and practical coursework.

The quality of university education varies greatly internationally as well as within the larger countries. Funding and the ability to attract top educators varies greatly.

It should be noted that Arduinos came about to greatly lower the cost of teaching embedded systems engineering. It really took off from there.

I studied computer science over a decade ago. What I learnt at the university was: 1) perseverance. I wanted to learn about writing programs and OS and hardware… but I had to first pass all the mathematical lectures. It wasn’t easy. 2) How to learn. I feel like I can learn any topic nowadays, And pretty much I have been doing this over all my career. I didn’t learn about Kafka or K8s or Go in the uni, but I learnt the fundamentals and got a grasp on how to learn new things. Invaluable I would say. 3) How to deal with people I don’t like. I didn’t like many professors but I had to pass the lectures the way they want it. Same for my professional career.

I pretty much study every week to keep up with the industry, but I like it, so it feels more like a hobby. I’m not sure I would have the same strength and perseverance if I had quit uni the first year (or if I had never attended uni). This is just me, so YMMV.

If any, I feel like primary and high school are the real “scams”. I think they waste so much time over and over the same topics without going deep into nothing. I think it could be cut by 30% without any repercussions. I don’t recall anything valuable I have learnt in school (all the great lessons were due to my parents)

Your comment about primary/high school is incorrect from my point of view. It's only evaluating that time on it being practical for your work (or CS study).

There's a lot of value on learning about Geography, History, Biology, the sciences, the social aspect of learning and going to a school and so on. It's hard to observe it after you have done it.

It can be possible you feel like you don't remember much, or don't find it useful, but in that scenario, I assume you'd easily be manipulated as you'd have very shallow knowledge about how the world works, despite perhaps having learned "30% more CS" because you just had less high school if it didn't exist.

Of course, there are improvements that could be made to the curriculum of schools, but I believe it's the most important learning lessons that set us up for life is there.

Fair point. Although I wasn’t thinking about the utility of primary/high school in relation with CS. For instance, I studied (I believe) over 6 years english (probably more) in primary/high school. I couldn’t maintain a conversation with a native speaker when I finished high school. Had to study it by myself during uni (thanks Youtube!).

Same goes for chemistry for example. Can’t recall much tbh. My point is that primary/high school could be way more efficient.

To be fair, the goal of school us not to be efficient. And I'd suggest that most attendees aren't all that interested in efficiency either. I certainly spent as little time on schoolwork as possible, and really didn't think much beyond the next exam.

Despite that I've found my schooling has really helped me along the way. Apart from the obvious (reading, writing, arithmetic). I took accountancy as a subject. When I started working for myself having that accounting knowledge was really helpful.

Physics slso played a role in life just after school. I spent some time in a "trade" type job (fire fighting) and high school physics (conduction, electricity etc) were all practical tools.

High school math helped with logic (that came in handy) and even algebra and formulas are good background and applicable to programing (and made it easier to learn.)

In hindsight I credit my English teachers with my communication skills- I have written text books and run training classes.

Its not like I "learned nothing since school" and its not like I was a model student at school, but I picked up skills when I wasn't looking.

As for Geography - well I don't know that that has affected my career, but it certainly gets the kids eyes rolling when I pontificate on rock types and magma intrusions. :)

I did a "Business" degree and sitting here in 2025 I could give you 12 LLM prompts that will teach you everything I learned, and in better quality than the textbooks or lecture notes. I don't regret it because it allowed me to get and keep overpaid so-called "bulls*t" jobs for 15 years, but I wouldn't start down that path today.

I felt the same thing in business school, I switched out after a year. The only useful thing we learned was excel (but holy fuck, excel is a rabbithole)

Do you mind sharing those 12 prompts?

I did a degree in Politics and then an MSc in International Relations, which are not subjects where there are definitive "canons".

To put it another way, you can go very far down the tech tree of one set of ideas without necessarily having to have the prerequisites from other courses, although you do build up your own inner library of useful tools, touchstone texts and concepts that stick with you for the long run.

I may never have directly put many of those into use in my career, but they've certainly given me a useful framework to interpret other things I've come across.

These days, I read a lot of effective altruist/rationalist discourse where they're reinventing very old social science concepts from first principles, and I feel it's a weakness of the monoculture that they have so little connection to what came before.

Life is too large. It's impossible to cover it all, but I get what you're saying. At this point, your best bet is to start asking questions online until you get the information you need.

I will say that my degree was useful but mostly because a 4 yr degree was required by my job. I could have gotten a 4 yr degree in pottery + 6 months of code monkey school and I could have gotten the same job.

I have the same gripe about k-12 school. !2+ years of school and most people by far can't get a decent paying job once out of school. That's the real scam from my view.

You make a great point about K-12 school. That’s a lot of time invested, but what job skills do almost all high school graduates have? It’s not nearly good enough return on investment.

I studied civil engineering at an ok engineering school however I was lucky to be there in the “golden era” of the department. I caught the very best professors before they retired. They were old school and really pushed us without worrying about the drop out rate. They took cheating and academic rigor very seriously.

After graduation I got a job at a top 10 nationally ranked engineering firm which has a very strong reputation. My coworkers were the top of their class coming from much better engineering schools. Compared to them my education was better as judged by the number of calculation mistakes in my work vs theirs. I also had a better understanding of some core concepts. So comparatively I do not regret my degree given I landed where they did, with fewer student loans and a comparable education but I definitely got lucky.

Overall I would say my studies prepared me very well for certain things like working hard, preserving through difficult problems, learning how to be more analytical etc but it really didn’t prepare me for basic usage of the tools, learning the building code or working professionally with a manager or on a real engineering team as opposed to a team of students working on a BS design project in some engineering class where the professors don’t really grade the final output.

I think your experience is similar to mine. University teaches a “foundation” level of basic understanding and leaves out a lot of the basic professional skills or when they do try to “simulate” real work it is extremely phoned in. At first I did feel some amount of regret that my degree didn’t “fully” prepare me for professional working life but I think that’s just a result of dealing with “gaps” in development since we can’t possibly learn everything in our degree. If I had gotten internships during my undergrad degree then I think I would have probably had a more complete education with less buyers remorse.

As universities become more market as opposed to academic dominated I think this dynamic might invert.

The real regret came when I saw my paycheck and when I heard what software engineers make. I later switched into software and have never looked back.

My degree is in English (mostly creative writing).

I went when college was cheap (graduated around 2005 w/ $20k in loans and consolidated at 1.8% interest). Paid it off over the next 15 years or so. Never felt the cost of it influence anything in my life.

College was a pretty fun 4-year vacation. I played poker, disc golf, and read and wrote a lot.

I was aimless when I entered and aimless when I left.

Did it help me in any meaningful way? I’d say yes. Now 20 years after I’ve graduated, I’ve continuously improved my ability to read and communicate based on the foundation I got in college.

Could I have developed that foundation somewhere else? Almost certainly, but I didn’t.

Would I recommend an English degree today? Probably not. It’s a different world now and school is more expensive. But I wouldn’t have listened to me 20 years ago and nobody should listen to me today.

I don't have a degree, and I'm relatively fluent in both EDA tools and web dev. Don't despair, you can self-teach.

I will self-teach of course, my issue is why do I have to do it from absolute scratch if I literally have a degree in the field.

Look at CircuitMaker [1]. It's a simplified free version of Altium and will be more accessible than KiCAD (not to bash that, KiCAD is crazy good nowadays). Maybe start with one of the existing public designs and modify it.

I have an MSEE. The only reason I learned the board design process in school is because my office mate convinced the department to let him teach the class completely out of his own generosity (he still had to TA like normal). The class was well attended, universally loved, and only ever offered once (the guy understabaly thought it was too much effort to do it again). It was a huge benefit to my career.

Board design is so accessible these days. Circuit design and debugging boards is still a steep learning curve.

[1] https://www.altium.com/circuitmaker

Everyone must learn new things after university. For example, LLMs, blockchain, and new frameworks likely weren't covered. This is why they say in university you learn how to learn.

My personal opinion is that universities should teach things that would be useful to an expert which you won't have time to learn at a job. Like math and gaining deep understandings of things.

That said, I'd assume if you went to university in computer engineering (i.e. embedded systems/digital electronics), you'd have numerous labs and projects designing and using microcontrollers.

In CS, you might have one lab/class on CPU architecture/assembly but I'm guessing this would be a specialized focus area.

My degree is in cybersecurity. But the education was so bad that I filed a defense against repayment claim and won. So not really sure how I feel about that one… lots of wasted time which I made up teaching myself. Degree looks good on applications at least.

Bottom line I suppose is that I’m a network engineer working with a variety of clients. I enjoy the work for the most part (could do with less after hours stuff) and have fun interacting with the end users to fix their problems. The education might have been bogus, but I put in the work to learn it myself and am happy with where I’m at.

I'm not sure I understand the point here. Are you complaining that your training as a software engineer didn't prepare you to be a hardware engineer?

I'm in software and have made very basic PCBs for some projects. I have never used KiCAD. I'm sure the learning curve would be steep. But I expect that as my classes were focus on software design, not hardware design.

It’s covered if you major in computer engineering rather than CS

Digital circuits, FPGAs, microcontrollers, basic electronics, lots of making stuff on breadboards

One of my big undergrad projects was to build a CPU from scratch on an FPGA and write an assembler for it

Hot take: CE is a better foundation for programming than CS

I ended up doing more actual programming in two of my Computer Engineering classes than I did in most of my computer science classes. We actually learned about structuring programs and adding useful abstractions to our microcontroller code, something that was only touched on in some of my early CS assignments.

I feel like so many CS classes are all about theory while a good chunk of CE classes actually have you writing code. I should have taken more CE classes, but I at least feel like I got to take some of the fun ones.

>Hot take: CE is a better foundation for programming than CS

Not at my uni for sure. First (and only) microcontroller that we actually programmed that wasnt an arduino was in the final semester of the entire degree.

I work as an intel analyst, and my degree is in criminal justice. It’s outdated work and my degree serves no purpose except to show I paid an awful amount of money for a piece of paper.

It's hard to think of much from my 4 year SE degree that is ever relevant to my work in JavaScript programming.

Very occasionally a data structure or understanding O notation.

Certainly none of the maths or electronics stuff.

There is an online tool Tinkercad, specifically the circuits one, where you can build and play to figure out your circuit board.

I didn't add the Ask HN thing, my bad. I'm still getting used to the site.

I’m a non-software engineer, here’s what I think:

I think of bachelors degrees, or undergraduate degrees and diploma’s as being like little samplers. There is advantages to getting a degree, like showing you can finish something you started, and I definitely think you do learn some skills, but I wouldn’t expect to gain mastery of a subject from just doing a degree. A degree might provide a good foundation, but you really have to build on it, either by doing more study, or working in a relevant industry that provides opportunities for growth, rather than just sitting there with your degree that will most definitely become outdated if you fail to keep up with the pace of change. Everything changes, even stuff that was considered true facts on the nature of the universe have been revised over time. (Not sure this was a good example since we know shit all about the universe actually.)

I’m currently completing my 5th and 6th degree’s at the moment (one is my second masters degree) I don’t feel very smart, and sometimes I don’t feel like the knowledge I’ve gained is that useful, except what I’ve noticed is that I listen more carefully to what other people say now, especially when they’re spouting their opinions on hot topics and often I just find myself noticing that people don’t actually know that they’re actually quite uneducated. In fact, I’d say the danger of undergraduate degree’s is that people think they’re educated by having a degree, and it’s great that they do have a degree, but there’s a lot more knowledge they don’t have, they just don’t know that they don’t know.

After doing my numerous degree’s, what I’ve learned for certain is that I could spend my whole life studying and I’ll never know everything there is to know, I find it humbling, but equally, my attitude every day is that I’m probably going to learn something new and I’m open to that. I guess some people might call that a growth mindset or something. I think others might just think I am a weirdo.

Yeah, we all go through it. I got a degree in economics and we used a program called SPSS developed by IBM to do regression analysis. No one in the industry uses it and it was very frustrating looking for a first job and no one was wanting the software I learned in university. But university isn’t about leaning to uses tool and apply it somewhere else, it’s about the underlying concepts and the people you get exposed to. I don’t use regression analysis in my job any more, but I’m much more prepared in doing numerical analysis than my co-workers who have traditional CS or marketing degrees.

>But university isn’t about leaning to uses tool and apply it somewhere else, it’s about the underlying concepts and the people you get exposed to.

You’re not wrong at all on the software side. With regards to the concepts though, we did a whole bunch of theory, but fairly often we did not do even the basics of applying it. I mean we literally did not do any, we did zero circuit/PCB design (the thing I’m trying to currently learn).

Not even design? This was a EE degree?

Outside of the dissertation no not really. Best we did was in the group projects where at most we attached a couple sensors and maybe a motor to an arduino.

*Technically I did a robotics degree but the difference between mine and the EE degree at my university was at the most 5 modules, roughly 60 out of 360 credits.

The replacement modules certainly were not in anything to do with design or fabrication either. No soldering, no CAD, no ECAD.

You could have got through the entire degree without having once picked up a soldering iron or built a circuit. As long as you were good at maths you would get through, nothing else meaningfully mattered, except the dissertation of course.

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