>be me
>decide to learn a shit load of electrical engineering
>finally decide to invest
>get copper wire, iron rods, a few magnets, etc.
>want to warm up with something simple before trying anything too complex
>time to try to get a current through some wire
>wrapped copper around the rod, spinning it around
>nothing
>okay maybe I just did it wrong, add more coils and even cut new wire incase somehow the first one was jacked up
>nothing
>add a literal battery to the wire and close the circuit with a bulb
>nothing
>try new battery
>try new bulb
>try new wire again
>tried to even break the circuit into more parts in desperation
>nothing
>about to completely give up in defeat
>the wire looks odd at the tip
>discolored bit
>look at the label and google it
>first result is someone suggesting you melt the enamel off the tips
>for three hours I have been sitting here with a perfectly insulated wire and never thought that the enamel coating was stopping anything
>three whole fricking hours of looking at these wires and components
>immediately fixed after melting it off
should I give up now anons
EE has a learning curve that looks like a unit step function so get ready for some bullshit
Learning is never about getting the circuit to work the first time. The real learning was going on in your head for the 3 hours you were desperately flailing about trying to solve the problem. When you learned about the enamel layer your mind "fixed" a bunch of neural circuits into place. You got that dopamine hit from the struggle.
You can't get that kind of knowledge from any book or professor.
Congratulations on learning the first lesson in EE, if something isn't working always check for continuity before moving on to other possible causes.
Those "wasted" hours just saved you countless more truly wasted hours in the future
The struggle is real but that's the point in learning new skills, if it was easy and you never failed you'd have learned nothing useful
Now buy a cheap multi meter and measure resistance before doing things
if I had to give myself advice for back when I first started EE, it would be "don't"
why
I just wanted to sound fatalistic. I actually quite enjoy it and wouldn't give it up for the world
One thing I would actually tell a novice really looking to get into EE, is to find someone who already knows EE well to guide you and offer support with the material.
It really does feel like a recursive rabbit hole of bullshit. Just as you think you learn enough to truly grasp the material, your new understanding just reveals even more shit you didn't even know you didn't know, and it just keeps happening, and happening, and happening... until suddenly it doesn't. But without guidance, that process is incredibly painful and time-consuming.
As long as you take it with a grain of salt, ChatGPT might be able to help with the simpler material. The more complex material is often riddled with very subtle errors that lead to big issues, though.
>is to find someone who already knows EE well to guide you and offer support with the material.
good luck with that. it's great when it comes together, but don't count on it. many brilliant guys simply cannot teach for shit. many brilliant guys worked hard to get there and aren't about to make it easy for some new guy.
the bottom line is that you have to be good, and once you have demonstrated that, some of the older guys will work with you, but in general it's up to you.
> But without guidance, that process is incredibly painful and time-consuming.
I think the gold mine here is some retired dude. Had a guy helping me with amplifiers for a while, and when I ran into walls he was incredibly helpful. Diy and forums are great, but it takes so much effort to get a single question resolved, and then you run into the next one.
how long it takes to be good at EE (from 0 to employable)
Right now I am in CS and this field has no soul and people in this field are insufferable.
EE to CS is extremely easy
CS to EE is about on par with (Anything) to EE. Balls fricking hard. It really depends on the instruction you get, and even then, you'll almost certainly only have academic knowledge of EE when you need both academic and practical EE knowledge to get hired. Unfortunately, it's just as difficult to build practical EE knowledge as it is to build academic EE knowledge. Once you have a bit of one though, the other isn't quite as difficult.
definitely true. All the EE kids at my school who 'dropped' to an easier major land on CS, and most of those who finish EE still seem to have a bit of a hard time with actually understanding what's going on. I had a pretty hard time with some of those courses, but looking back it seems like stuff that really wasn't that hard, but that first time going through it is still painful.
agreed, lol. EEs in my college dropped out and went to NYU a year behind, ended up making 5x as much as those of us who stayed
christ is the disparity really that bad? I'm about to graduate with an EE degree, Controls + Signal Processing track. It's definitely a bit more future-proof than other tracks and EE subfields that are practically solved, especially since I'm poised to do AI and ML from a very low fundamental level. Not your basic "we don't need no calculus" AI. I'm talking AI/ML-as-dynamical-systems-theory tier stuff.
I knew we got paid less than code monkeys, but I was at least hoping to break 100k eventually. 5x? frick me.
>since I'm poised to do AI and ML from a very low fundamental level
this is already way more CS than EE
I want to make it 100% clear, "Practical EE" and "Academic EE" might as well be two entirely different (albeit, closely related) fields in terms of breadth, depth, and scope of shit you need to learn to be proficient at either.
I started my EE degree with a pretty solid foundation in practical EE thanks to musical signal processing and synth design. I knew all about different power supply topologies and how they worked (buck, boost, buck/boost, linear, etc.), anything and everything about the frequency domain, power conditioning, transistors as both switches and amplifiers, you name it.
Even then, I wound up getting my entire ass handed to me by the academic EE classes, just because the sequence, presentation and elucidation of the material is so alien and foreign compared to what you have to learn from a practical point of view.
It was humiliating being able to wax eloquent on all kinds of (evidently "graduate level") circuits and electronics, just to scrape by with a C in my Electronics 1 (diodes + transistors) class.
It's like saying "oh I speak modern English, so Beowulf will be an easy read!"
no
no it will not
you solved the problem, you should feel happy