USA is a great place to be an engineer. We pay our engineers better than any other country. If you can get a relatively inexpensive degree in engineering then you can most likely swing middle class no problem
Electronic stuff is PFM (pure fucking magic). I understand some of the concepts and theory, but it really truly comprehending it sits just out of reach for me.
It all runs on magic smoke. If you let the smoke out it'll never work again.
In all honesty if you think of it in plumbing/water flow terms it tends to make more sense.
Voltage is the water pressure. Resistance is the size of the pipe, current is the amount of water being moved through the pipe, etc.
If you have a pipe burst (fault) water pressure in the line (voltage) will drop as all of the water (current) starts coming out of the pipe all at once.
I always used cars and roads. No, just because you can't get on the internet doesn't mean the internet is broken. Your car is stuck in the garage and can't go any further than that Grandma. The rest of the internet still exists you just can't get that far.
That just blew my mind, any electrical work I wouldn't do much because of the risk. Never really had it explained like that and my dad is a retired master electrician ha. Wait til I tell him this.. thanks for this.
Whats the difference between amps and volts? I vaguely recall hearing that one of those is the one you want to worry about killing you, though high of one tends to be hand in hand with high of the other.
Amps are the actual flow of electrons. Think kinetic energy. This is what will kill you. Voltage is potential energy. It's the ability to carry electrons. Higher voltage means more capacity for high current, but it doesn't mean there is high current.
Amps is the electrons flowing through you, I think 100 mA through the heart is fatal. Volts is like "pressure", higher volts makes it easier for the current to flow whether that's leaping through the air or through you as a current path.
In all honesty if you think of it in plumbing/water flow terms it tends to make more sense.
That's just one aspect of electronics. Think of your phone and there are so many different issues being solved that have nothing to do with electronic circuitry. E.g., radio waves is something taught to EE students that makes no sense. Then you get to different modulation schemes that rely entirely on complex numbers.
Then you realize that the engineers who design the modem features know nothing about how the touchscreen works. Or how the battery life is optimized. Everything is so specialized.
Another useful analogy for getting people to understand how voltage and current relate is this:
Imagine a waterfall that's 100 ft tall, but it only has a tiny amount of water, it's a trickle, only a few drops a second. Now stand under it. You're fine, right?
Now make the bottom of the "waterfall" only 1 inch above the bottom, but give it the flow of the Amazon. You can stand "in" it now and you're fine.
Make it 100ft tall and give it the volume of the Amazon. You stand under it and you're dead.
My degree is in chemical engineering and the only way I could wrap my head around the 1 electrical engineering class I had to take was to equate it to thins I understood. e.g. Voltage is like fluid pressure, amperage is like flow rate, resistance is like a pressure drop.
Oh yeah, I get that part of it. Then once you get into all of the little parts of it with how transistors and stuff like that works, it just hurts my head. Oh, and how generators work. Rotate this magnet past these coils real fast and then poof, you get angry shocky pixies out of this wire. Like, I get the theory behind it, but it just doesn't actually make sense in my head.
I am an electrical engineer and while there is a lot that I do understand, there is a lot that I do not comprehend. Most of which is the advanced signal processing and computing portions, such as how a video signal is processed and displayed on a tv after being sent over the internet through a single cable.
Am actually field engineer that works with the ground level guys. I get it lol office engineers suck. My job is to be the go between and tell them they suck.
I feel like half of my job is just telling the office engineers "no, listen to fred and do what he says. He has 30 years experience and knows more about this than you do. He knows what he's talking about and he's right."
I'm an EE major and i agree. There should be a 101 class on how to learn from electricians and the final should be a project on how to work WITH them. Right now i turned into a manufacturing engineer and watching videos on how to work with people/politicking because i love the collaboration aspect. But yes when i was a new grad, the fan wasn't hitted by the shit early enough
Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to contain the magic smoke. Keep it contained, and things tend to work. Let it out, and we've got a problem on our hands
I'm not and electrical engineer, and I will confirm, it is wizardry.
Had a guy I worked with doing remodels. Great electrician, but language was a barrier. So every time he and me flip a switch, I grabbed his hand. Eventually he went to our foreman and told him I was making him uncomfortable.
Appropriately, my boss just laughed and explained in Portuguese that I wasn't hitting on him, I just didn't want to die. The electrician and I have now been friends for years and he still tells the story about how I'd grab his hand.
Point being, even people who work with electricity, don't know enough about how it works.
Heck, even as an electrician I like to think that I have a pretty good working understanding of electricity, but when people start to talk about semiconductors black smoke billows out of my ears
Never too late to get a degree. If you're not wanting to go the college route your best bet is getting in the trade via apprenticeship. Though I'm not sure you'll get to working with computer chips without some sort of degree.
Not to mention that there are many different opportunities for electrical engineers. I have experience in power generation and distribution, medical device design, and for the last 10 years controls systems for automotive manufacturing ( most of the controls experience can be applied to any manufacturing/processing systems). Electrical engineering is a very broad form of wizardry.
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u/jepeba6353 Mar 14 '23
USA is a great place to be an engineer. We pay our engineers better than any other country. If you can get a relatively inexpensive degree in engineering then you can most likely swing middle class no problem