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Comment by rockemsockem | Hacker News Reader

One thing I wonder about is how applicable your statement about web apps is to something like lamps or lighting generally. How many electrical engineers have re-designed a circuit that turns on/off a light? Are EEs who wind up doing mundane engineering like this still engineers?

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You don't need to be an "Electrical Engineer" to do simple design work like this.

Professional Engineers are qualified to take on more liability than just creating a design. So you don't need an Engineer to design a product, but (depending on jurisdiction) you will need an engineer to certify that your product won't hurt or kill people.

If you do a lot of design work, then you may want to hire a Professional Engineer in-house so that your company has more confidence that they will produce compliant designs with fewer iterations.

Engineers are often the best people to work with if you need to do things that are done infrequently since theoretically, they're trained in the prerequisite first principles so they can make judgments that are rooted in rigorous analysis in addition to their practical experience.

"electrical engineers" aren't usually the ones making a lamp though. If you're paying EE wages to add a light switch to an Edison socket you're massively overpaying.

Lots of things have lights on them though. I'm thinking every status light on every piece of hardware.

Edit: also, I'm not exactly filled with knowledge on new lamp design/construction, but I have seen startups/kickstarters that make new lamps that seem like redesigns from the ground up.

Most hardware tinkerers are not EE's. But will rely on EE's to certify that their electronics are safe.

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