[skoocda]

I have a degree in EE (2016) and am doing mostly ML engineering with a considerable amount of SWE tasks in my day-to-day.

Of my graduating class, very few are designing hardware. Most are writing code in one form or another. There were very few jobs available in EE that didn't underpay and lock you into an antiquated skillset, whether in renewables/MRI/nuclear/control etc.

We had enough exposure to emerging growth areas (computer vision, reinforcement learning, GPUs) to learn useful skills, and those all had free and open source systems to study after graduation, unlike chip design.

The company sponsoring this article is a contributor to that status quo. The complete lack of grassroots support for custom chips in North America, including a dearth of open source design tools or a community around them, has made it a complete non-starter for upskilling. Nobody graduates from an EE undergrad with real capability in the chip design field, so unless you did graduate studies, you probably just ended up learning more and more software skills.

But the relentless off-shoring of hardware manufacturing is likely the ultimate cause. These days, most interesting EE roles I see require fluency in Mandarin.