>First and Most Important Lesson: If You’re Here for the Money, You’re in the Wrong Place
It's worth reiterating this for college students, etc. considering going down the hardware path. While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS or even CompEng one, that was because I realized CS was the kind of thing I would end up in anyway and would gladly study on my own terms. Numerical methods in differential equations, not so much.
If you do decide to do EE in 2023, I strongly recommend you break the mold of sparkies being atrocious coders. The skills are natural complements, even if for some reason most people like to pretend otherwise. But one is much more lucrative on average.
> While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS
I find this interesting. Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction?
I found CS fascinating. Of course you get to choose your own path through CS and could possibly avoid most of the major breakthroughs, but to do it in earnest is revelatory. There is Godel’s Incompleteness restated/rediscovered through computation; the church-Turing thesis, Curry-Howard correspondence, graph theory, etc. I never did EE, but I did some math in my past and CS felt closer to pure math than anything else I’ve studied.
>Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction?
No, but we could always flip the question since we know you didn't do EE. ;) I did however slap on a math minor and find out I'm way better at abstract algebra than I have any reason to be.
I'll sum it up as "I'm just more of a frog than a bird", but I don't really think that's it. I think relevancy selection is just an inherently hard philosophical problem and it's really hard to actually grok the internal or aesthetic kicks smart people get at different things.
Dynamical systems tickle my fancy, so do group actions and finite fields and generating functions, the incompleteness theorems don't, go figure - at least not present day me, a depressed teenager me looking for philosophical solutions in all the wrong places ate that stuff up.
If you choose a field and career simply for the money, you are bound for rather sad life. There should be at least some personal interest behind that choice.
It's worth reiterating this for college students, etc. considering going down the hardware path. While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS or even CompEng one, that was because I realized CS was the kind of thing I would end up in anyway and would gladly study on my own terms. Numerical methods in differential equations, not so much.
If you do decide to do EE in 2023, I strongly recommend you break the mold of sparkies being atrocious coders. The skills are natural complements, even if for some reason most people like to pretend otherwise. But one is much more lucrative on average.