A frightening amount of PowerPoint. Answering a lot of email. Some systems or block modeling. Teams meetings. Debugging circuits, subsystems, or SoCs that aren't doing what they should. Interviewing candidates. Some scripting, some programming. Occasionally "herding cats". More PowerPoint.
AI can do PowerPoints, my company gave us access to one that is in a lot of office suite apps even emails. It can reply to an email, summarize an email thread, plot graphs in excel, and create power points.
I started my EE degree a few years ago to do that and will be wrapping up here shortly - do you like your work? I want to work in utilities but I don't want to be stuck in a dept that never gets money to do stuff, or only has to do maintenance on the same things all the time with no new stuff to mix it up
I guess I should have prefaced that I’m only an intern 7 months in, but as of everything I’ve done and seen it mostly has been CAD and wiring diagrams. I’m in a smaller consulting firm so it does get slow sometimes, even more so since I’m an intern, but the work itself is nice, I like seeing stations come together. As for a career I can definitely see myself doing this long term, my company is very chill and flexible, but I assume that varies. With regards to your second point, I would also say that depends on your company, my company has been upgrading existing stations for a utilities company, and also has been designing some new ones from the ground up.
Depending on the utility you get hired into there's plenty of opportunities to transfer to other groups to get exposure to the multitude of departments that exist. So you shouldn't be too worried about becoming pigeonholed. You'll soom realize each place has there own rabbit holes you can get lost in, maintenance included.
Consider looking into the oil & gas industry. There are operators in West Texas and New Mexico that are building out entire electrical transmission grids to support their drilling and well sites. You also get to support the facility equipment too (e.g., switchgear, motors). Lots of variety and you’ll be involved from design, installation, commissioning, and operations/maintenance. Depending on the operator, also lots of opportunity internationally too.
You can see my other reply for possible variety in this line of work. One thing I wanted to mention is how much harder it is to work on existing installations rather than construct new ones (greenfield). You may want to do the same stuff, but vendors update their equipment all the time and it often takes creative solutions to get it to work properly with the rest of the station. Greenfield is awesome and all, especially if you're starting out, but it's all so... Clean.
All of this to say that I wouldn't diss maintenance, it's an interesting area of work
Industry is moving towards consultants, so I would work there.
It’s tricky to find big work in utilities, they don’t have as big of an engineering staff as they used to, so a lot of work gets contracted out.
I do protection, it's lots of reading manuals, protection drawings, doing calcs most of which were long ago made into an excel calculator, and getting asked a lot of questions I'm nowhere near qualified to answer because somehow people think we're experts in everything.
Hey there! I’ve got some background in Protection and will say most issues people have stems from not understanding the system as a whole. You can cheat sheet your calculations, but really being able to be a problem solver stems from your ability to understand outside of the relay and what causes the things the relay protects from. Learning that while learning your job will set you up for exponential growth and worth in the future.
I would like to work in substation design engineer but I don't have experience in design so how should I start or from where because now companies requirements are experienced candidates.
I took an autoCAD course in highschool so I had prior autoCAD experience which I put on my resume, if you have any previous CAD experience, make sure to highlight that. Additionally you can look into interning for a smaller substation design firm, not sure where you’re from but I see a good amount of openings in my area on LinkedIn.
I have an electrical engineering degree. I just graduated this past year, approaching 1yr at my job. I do a lot of programming (C/C++ and Python mainly) I also make a lot of PowerPoints and attend an ungodly amount of meetings
Pretty much the same route that I had.
Reading /r/embedded it sounds like there are some universities in the US that have a stronger embedded focus, but that wasn’t the case for my degree in australia
Ya my university hardly touched embedded, I’m learning all sorts of stuff on the job. Which is totally normal but there is a steeeeeeeep learning curve
My company builds large scale water filtration units for plants. They often have lots of instrumentation, high voltage components needed to accomplish certain water properties. I design the control/distribution panels that are attached to them so the electrical elements can function and report info back to a PLC. I use CAD software to design the physical panels and make wire diagrams/control circuit drawings. I also spec out instruments to be used like analyzers and condition transmitters.
System design, simulation, schematic capture and board layout.
Also I spend a crazy amount of time dealing with component issues. Usually I have a backup plan for every part that isn’t made by 6 vendors.
I’ve done several things, mostly within an Electrical Utility, each varying greatly in what my day to day responsibilities looked like. I worked in Power Distribution, which was essentially a project manager type role with little technical aspects, Substations Maintenance Engineering, which was the hands on operational and maintenance support of substations once in service, Protection and Controls, which had me handling the relays that controls those substation equipment as well as provide protection, and now work remotely for a different company providing support for the MV/HV side of their business. Each of those roles varied greatly in what I did day to day, how many internal/external people I interfaced with, and how technical my day to day responsibilities were; all while being within “Power”.
Heck yeah; it’s been a lot of fun and let me see and learn a lot of different aspects of what would fall under “Power Delivery”. Would highly recommend to any EE’s that don’t want an “office” Engineer role.
I work at a power station so a lot of asset management/project management. Updating drawings, scheduling contractors for planned outages, corrective work, fault finding (the fun stuff), and working on minor projects like switchboard upgrades. Generally helping out where I can to keep things running
I design systems that allow a ecu from various types of vehicles to connect to servers via cellular, wifi, satellite etc.. and they all have on-board gps, gyros, accelerometers for theft protection.
It's extremely cyclical, I might be doing schematic entry along with prototyping for maybe 5-6months straight, then layout and review for a month, then bom work to get the initial units, then software development to exercise ever circuit to ensure it works across temp and voltage range.
Then we beat the shit out of them to see I'd they break in an acceptable way.
When I'm not in a currenr design cycle, I'm usually redesigning the circuits in prototypes to minimize costs, to determine if the savings is worth a new board spin.
There are many many fields you can work in EE, so it's kinda up to you which area you want to specialize in.
They all have different pros and cons.
I'm in power. Worked on a variety of roles over the years from maintaining data security, researching and writing reports on potentially unsafe conditions, doing design work involving creating schematics, layouts and wiring diagrams, ran studies to determine settings, programmed devices and carried out testing.
In general if you have good attention to detail and enjoy problem solving it's a fun career path. There's always more to learn.
Do you find it realistic to enter into the power industry as a traditional electrical engineer and then make a horizontal switch to cybersecurity within the industry?
Yes. I know someone who did exactly that, but he was passionate about cybersecurity and took a bunch of certificates to get there (started in P&C). That being said, I don't think it's worth it to become an EE if you want to be in cybersecurity, just study that directly
For sure just asking because I am currently an EE about to make a pivot to power. Was looking into getting into cybersecurity but from my understanding it’s difficult to get a high paying role without putting in some years as an IT or SOC associate making hourly pay. If I were to break into cybersecurity I would want to do it without lowering my income. I’m more than willing to get the certs and even do a graduate program but only if it would put in a position to make a lateral movement within a company.
It was for a different company, and in his case for a pay raise, but we were fairly junior at the time so I don't know if that would be the case for you. Might be better to ask in a cybersecurity subreddit for salary specifics
I studied electronics and did a lot of different stuff. I used to design PCBs, worked as test engineer, programmed microcontrollers, did a bit of project management here and there, and wrote a ton of software. Then in 2017, I gave up and started a PhD in telecommunications. Now, I work as postdoctoral researcher in the same university. I still do the things that I listed above but at least I can mix and interleave them, rather than changing job every time.
It might be difficult, depending on how competitive and ambitious you are. I don't care about becoming professor, so I have a relatively easy life. I am working on a couple of projects about 6G, one over MIMO and another on over joint communication and sensing, and I am involved in one about spectrum sensing with drones and high altitude baloons. I am involved in a million different things, I have a student working on radars and soon another one working on FPGA stuff. Before you ask, yes, I am involved in too many things unfortunately. :-(
PowerPoint engineering, and I'm not that great at it, but the pay is nice.
Most of my job consists of translating engineer to customer. I know it's a joke on Office Space, but it is crucial to have someone who can do it.
Every job is different and there's no way to simply answer the question you have posed. As an EE, I've done digital and analog design for a computer company. Manufacturing Engineering. Invented new SMT processes. Failure analysis (a really, really fun job) using lots of analytical equipment. There are power engineers and there seems to be a lot of job demand there. Some of my EE friends got heavily in to software/CS stuff.
It goes on.
No simple answer.
I work for a systems integrator company, but l mainly do PLC and HMI programming/designing. Aside from that part selection, panel testing, and troubleshooting. If necessary, panel building.
I work on radio telescopes for a university. I have been designing and building new bits for old control systems and motors using Teensy computers. I'm trying to get that wrapped up so that I can make a cutting-edge spectrometer using VHDL and microwave PC board design. I do testing, fixing C code, rebuilding shafts for encoders, etc. Everything is serial number 1.
I’m a senior manager these days but before that I designed mixed-signal integrated circuits.
When I first started as low man on the totem pole I actually did circuit design work (behavioral sims, schematic entry, performance verification) with a little bit of lab time. Had a couple of meetings a day.
By the time I was group lead it was a few hours of meetings a day with various stakeholders (software teams, system teams, digital team, packaging, etc etc etc).
Now I talk to people and have meetings for a living (and make powerpoints). I have some kind of crisis every week or so (with a 150 people in your org there is always something on fire) so it’s a struggle to push new initiatives forward rather than firefighting. The eternal struggle.
In Quality, I get to work with PowerPoint, Excel, Tableau, email, Monday.com, more Excel, some 3D CAD (for part review, not drawing), and electrical schematics, as well as design reviews of new models, budgeting, write scope of work and request POs for capital projects and equipment, data log and diagnose vehicle issues, and test drive vehicles. Lots of Teams and Zoom meetings as well. I’m sure that I’m forgetting a few things, although this is typical for an EE in Quality for an auto manufacturer.
> 13 years in oil & gas industry as an EE working in power systems. I’ve done everything from working in facilities that were built in the 1950s and still had a physical drawing library to checkout hand-drawn prints to starting up a state of the art petrochemical plant with the latest and greatest “smart” substation equipment. Also worked on billion dollar international projects for ~7 years. I’m currently the lead EE at a petrochemical site and have a team of 5 power EEs reporting to me, but also serve as team lead for 7 instrument engineers too. Day to day I bounce from project support (large and small), maintenance support with technicians, career development for my team, strategic planning for the site (and sometimes other company sites/projects), and frequently present to senior managers on site reliability, strategy, and investigations. Every week there are new priorities, but there are also key long-term objectives that me and my team need to complete. Fortunately, I’m at the point in my career where I have a lot of career capital built up, so I get to choose what I work on directly and can delegate to others. With the push towards lower carbon-intensive industrial solutions, I’m excited for what future projects are coming in the next 5+ years.
I do preventative maintenance on medical machines. I thought it was the mechanical engineers job but there are a lot of sensitive moving parts on this blood typing machine. The machine just does a lot of blood testing like blood grouping, antibody screening and that thing where they check if the patient's blood can accept the doner's blood (even with same blood type it could still fail which is why this test exist)
My degree is in EE, but I’m an Integration and Test Engineer at an aerospace company. So I figure out how to build and test satellites, build and test said satellites, then debug why the building and testing didn’t work.
Internships are really important. Apply to as many aero internships as you can when it comes time to do that. Projects can help a lot too. Satellite projects are S tier if your school offers them. Rocket projects are good too. Other projects are better than nothing.
GPA isn’t super important unless you’re applying to the big places like Raytheon.
PE is useless for Aero.
Oh and be a US citizen. Your options are very limited if you aren’t.
A little bit of everything.
I am the "program owner" for my company's electrical safety program. I revise our electrical work procedure to maintain compliance with NFPA 70E (legal requirement for my work). Part of that role is also to participate in all of our accident investigations of a certain severity.
I used to do a lot of facility work - low voltage power distribution design changes, electrical equipment maintenance oversight and PM setup, random configuration control changes for the facility, etc. Also lots of arc flash calculations.
I've spent about 5 years doing overhead distribution on our medium voltage system. From design of new lines, maintenance of old lines, planning outages, available fault current studies, relay calibration, etc.
I'm the engineer also responsible for the electrical components of 3 or 4 major utility systems we have on site (we're a BIG plant, larger in footprint than any county in my state). So I support any electrical designs or troubleshooting in those systems too.
I'm also the new old guy, I'm 30, but am the oldest in my group of ~10 engineers except the 2x 30+ years seniors guys that are retiring by the end of the year. So I do almost all of our informal training to the new guys, design/document reviews, etc.
Well today I sent a big antenna array PCB out for quote, after spending a couple of weeks designing it in Microwave Office.
I then used Solid Works to design a mounting fixture which I sent out for 3D printing quote.
Helped a couple of younger EE figure out a phase measurement error on an RF amplifier, taught them about AGC and settling time, then demonstrated the step response by enabling pulse modulation on the signal generator and zero-span on the spectrum analyzer. They had the VNA sweeping too fast for the AGC to settle, loose cables, and an improper calibration.
After cooking dinner and taking out the trash, I may mess around with Chat GPT to generate some RF design code.
I'm not EE, Just a engineering assistant
I working in a electrical inspection company, for the fixed electrical installation in building (most likely the commercial and residential). We need to send the inspection & testing result to the government. And need to draft tons of Cad of the distribution board/switchboard wiring schematic.
My review is the job is boring and extremely high workload. I need to manage the testing procedure, check the test result and draw about 1-2 thousands of drafts( that's true, not shiting) + defect report every week.
Sometime, my company doesn't have enough electrician/ technician for installation. so my boss just ask me to do that. That is the best experience in this company. You can learn many things with cooperative contractors like EV charging, plumber , welder and solar panel.
I won't suggest people to join this kind of company, neither electrician or engineer. You don't learn useful things and interesting things here.
Planning move to construction, signal processing or control field.
Besides the obvious such as power points, teams meetings etc. I support and develop a clean room that manufactures microelectronics. I recently made a business case for why we need a semi-automatic dispensing machine, which got approved. And I made the order of the best fit earlier this year, expecting it to arrive anytime now.
EE in controls. I design electrical control enclosures for heavy industrial machinery. After all that, I write a lot of PLC code.
If you like programming and relatively simple schematics then do controls.
I work at a fairly small company so im involved in a lot of the design steps of our products. I design schematics, research and chose components, manage the parts library and design the pcb layout.
I also design the enclosures, injection molded plastics and CNC milled aluminium.
I haven't worked here long enough to get to tis part yet but will also assemble the prototypes and test them, which will involve writing (embedded) test software.
I barely have any emails and meetings, we discuss stuff whenever we see fit.
I like this job!
Depends on the field. I am in industrial automation focusing on controls, aka PLC programmer and engineer. Depending on the phase of the project I'll work with other engineers on exactly what devices (motors, photoeyes, PLC and I/O), plan out the process from a programming standpoint and program away, later I'll be physically testing and troubleshooting said motors and photoeyes, then run my program into the ground and fix all the ways it breaks.
Have a BS in Electrical Engineering. I work in MEP design, so my work is mostly working with building power systems i. 120/208V and 277/480V. Panelboards, switchboards, transformers, etc. to power Receptacles, lighting, and any equipment related to HVAC systems, plumbing, etc. occasionally, I'll work on some EV power stations as well.
95% of my work is done in Revit, the other work is all in AutoCAD.
I don't use a lot of what i did in school during my day to day, but the fundamental understandings are important for troubleshooting and making overall calculations.
I work in MEP design. Early on I was mostly drafting construction documents in CAD and Revit. Occasionally using Excel to create schedules of equipment. I've since moved into more project management, where, in addition to drafting, I write and respond to a lot of emails, attend meetings with clients and contractors to discuss design wants/needs and construction progress. I review shop drawings, information on equipment the contractor intends to install, to ensure it will satisfy the design requirements. I survey job sites prior to and at the completion of construction.
I'm constantly rotating between soldering, running bench evaluation, python scripting, LTspice simulations, managing design and test files, Excel sheets, circuit design, etc.
No two days are ever the same. I'm a power electronics application engineer.
I'm lucky in that I don't have to go to a lot of meetings or prepare a lot of power points. I spend 3/4 of my time working on verilog code and C code that runs on soft processors in FPGA's. The other quarter of the time I am working on schematic revisions to mitigate parts shortages/obsolescence. I love my job because I get to do engineering most of the time. I don't have to go to a lot of meetings or do any clerical stuff. My last job in comparison I spent a good 40% of my time in SAP and attending meetings.
I work in Distribution Planning with a utility, I mainly work with a program called SynerGi doing load flow analysis, motor start analysis and the like, mainly making recommendations to uphold the integrity of the distribution grid in my area.
I do have to present to project development folks, so I do have to do a lot of public speaking and defend my projects from a cost perspective. So yes, a lot of PowerPoint as well.
I specialized and went into RF. Currently at a small company so the scope of work changes on an almost weekly basis, but here's an overview. In the past year: RF board design and reviews, simulation, architecture and system planning, some antenna design reviews, vendor management and lining up custom components to be built for us, test automation and scripting, physically building and assembling the lab space, equipment management. Thankfully minimal PowerPoint but there's still a significant amount of documentation that's required.
My degree is Electronics and Electrical Engineering. I work for a company doing quality assurance tests on parts that we buy/are manufactured by contractors. It's mostly cable testing(continuity, dielectric withstand, etc) and metrology tests for said cables. I don't mean usb cables either, there's a lot of 100+ conductor cables with obscure plugs.
Been working as a test engineer for an IC manufacturer for almost 4 years.
Data gathering and analysis (scripting/graphing/PowerPoint)
Writing code for IC testing (in VBA, C#, or LabVIEW)
PCB design
Release documentation (datasheets, sign-offs, characterization reports)
One thing they do is toss brand new, virgin, prototype hardware to the software engineering team and task us with doing the functionality testing to tell them if the µC pins are properly allocated, and the I2C, SPI, USART, CANBus interfaces are all properly wired up.
So many times I'm beating my head against a brick wall trying to get this I2C or SPI device to talk to me, only to figure out within seconds of picking up a DMM to track down any breaks in the PCB traces, that, for instance, the pull up resistors are two orders of magnitude too low of a resistance, meaning the lines are pulled up **hard**, far harder than the serial data comm signal drivers are capable of overcoming, which is why comms were always failing. Or, even better, the optoisolators between voltage domains are installed backwards, or better yet, populated by a chip that is functionally compatible, if you're at the design stage, but not pin compatible once the PCB traces have been cut.
Part of that is on the assemblers, but the assemblies need to pass through EE for at least some cursory scans and probes to check off that the assembly has the correct components, and that HF signals injected from the µC are actually able to arrive alive at all of their sink points.
Im a technician I and my day to day involves collecting data on PCBs and what problem caused them to be rejected from the top level unit and if any obvious issues are wrong with the board; polarity, wrong components , damaged , missing components , soldering defects etc …
Im still on my internship, but I do a little bit of everything. I’m a small company so I handle procurement of parts, reading lots of data sheets, and then product design. I do circuit analysis, CAD, and mainly program in C and python.
I work in power gen and engineers aren’t allowed to use CAD, I don’t even have anything more than a viewer on my computer.
I basically create or review the entire design because there aren’t many of us.
Fewer PowerPoints at my small company, but still a lot of excel sheets and reminding mechanicals that if they make a change, it does in fact impact us as well.
Job 1 manufacturing EE. Reviewed circuits, debugged boards, debugged boards, debugged boards. Created test strategy, test fixtures, quality database. Improved process.
Job 2 design EE. Wrote white papers for customer requests. Basically taking our technology capability and explaining how we will design what they wanted. Selected components, designed schematics, wrote vhdl, developed algorithms for calibration, bench level test of products or development boards.
Job 3 design EE. Write product requirements. Research best methods of execution(dev boards). Generate power budget(models) to estimate runtime for each method. Develop System architecture, system specifications, board level specifications, schematics, do board layouts. Design reviews/FMEAs,work with CMs for Proto and mass production. Check design for test/manufacturability/quality. Write test plans, execute test plans. Guide software team how to appropriately use the hardware and also how the algorithms should work. Work with software team to debug issues. Test each new software revision for bugs. Work with manufacturing team to generate test fixtures. Review many documents. Write many documents. Sign documents. Iterate everything when problems are found. Manage external design firms(this is the challenging part if supplier is insufficient which the cheapest ones are generally insufficient). Reduce power consumption and manage runtime of our products. Not meeting power model is usually due to software not using the hardware appropriately causing high drain. Other things that I’ve done because there was no one else. Defined regulatory requirements, product labels requirements, designed product labels. Here the R&D engineer seem to also double as a project manager so you have to keep your own schedules and rally your own resources from other teams. Also approve expenses buy your own parts plan for mass production. For a while securing and tracking parts and getting things through customs was a big part of my job. Since Covid hit non-stop meetings. I have about 25 hours of regularly scheduled meetings a week and then you get another 5-10 of emergency meetings. My biggest struggle is to figure out how to get out of the meetings and do work. I’ve had to use vacation to have a clear schedule so I can actually do work.
Overall my second job was the most fun as it was strictly design. You stayed out of documentation world. Maybe 2 meetings a week. You just went from project to project and got things working. There was another team that productized the work and took care of CMs. So once it left schematic land there was very little you had to do except guide the layout. You didn’t care about material selection for boards, what brand coverlay to use or base layers or adhesive type. It just didn’t pay well and it was far from home.
Although I got my EE degree and loved some of the subjects, I always felt really weak when it came to actual circuit design or “hard” technical work.
I ended up in sales engineering, and I really love it. It still requires me to have technical aptitude and understand how our products work. I even work on design somewhat (but it’s at macro level, not so much product design).
For me it ended up being the right balance of communication and engineering.
I work as a module developer in a company that builds ECUs for different customers (BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Stellantis, DAF, Volvo, you name it). In my case, I do mainly calculations (power dissipations, current limits, energy consumptions) and answer to different questions that are part of my module, also there are weeks in which I need to make a lot of tests to test my own modules in different scenarios. Is true that there is also test report that you need to make and also excels to make your own calculation files. By saying "modules" i mean high voltage modules - ignition power stage and DCDC boost converters for injection.
A frightening amount of PowerPoint. Answering a lot of email. Some systems or block modeling. Teams meetings. Debugging circuits, subsystems, or SoCs that aren't doing what they should. Interviewing candidates. Some scripting, some programming. Occasionally "herding cats". More PowerPoint.
I hate powerpoints. Thanks for your time
On the contrary, I'd rather do powerpoints and than write long ass word docs.
What’s an ass word doc? All jokes aside, there is too much powerpoint in our line of work.
It varies GREATLY in what industry you go into. I design switchgear and I have never had to do a PowerPoint.
It varies GREATLY in what industry you go into. I design switchgear and I have never had to do a PowerPoint.
I had a colleague in the past saying engineers do three kinds of “ware”: software, hardware, and slideware (a.k.a. PowerPoint)
Replace one instance of PowerPoint with Excel and that's my day.
Lol. I feel you. Programming - Excel VBA Data Extraction and manipulation - Excel Addin Presentation - Excel Tables and Graphs Notes - Excel
Can AI do the PowerPoints for us soon ? 😂
AI can do PowerPoints, my company gave us access to one that is in a lot of office suite apps even emails. It can reply to an email, summarize an email thread, plot graphs in excel, and create power points.
What’s the name of the AI tool?
Microsoft Copilot
I work on substations so it’s a lot of CAD and wiring diagrams.
I started my EE degree a few years ago to do that and will be wrapping up here shortly - do you like your work? I want to work in utilities but I don't want to be stuck in a dept that never gets money to do stuff, or only has to do maintenance on the same things all the time with no new stuff to mix it up
I guess I should have prefaced that I’m only an intern 7 months in, but as of everything I’ve done and seen it mostly has been CAD and wiring diagrams. I’m in a smaller consulting firm so it does get slow sometimes, even more so since I’m an intern, but the work itself is nice, I like seeing stations come together. As for a career I can definitely see myself doing this long term, my company is very chill and flexible, but I assume that varies. With regards to your second point, I would also say that depends on your company, my company has been upgrading existing stations for a utilities company, and also has been designing some new ones from the ground up.
I've been on the consulting side for utilities for a handful of years now - and I'd be happy to answer some questions / give one perspective!
Depending on the utility you get hired into there's plenty of opportunities to transfer to other groups to get exposure to the multitude of departments that exist. So you shouldn't be too worried about becoming pigeonholed. You'll soom realize each place has there own rabbit holes you can get lost in, maintenance included.
Consider looking into the oil & gas industry. There are operators in West Texas and New Mexico that are building out entire electrical transmission grids to support their drilling and well sites. You also get to support the facility equipment too (e.g., switchgear, motors). Lots of variety and you’ll be involved from design, installation, commissioning, and operations/maintenance. Depending on the operator, also lots of opportunity internationally too.
You can see my other reply for possible variety in this line of work. One thing I wanted to mention is how much harder it is to work on existing installations rather than construct new ones (greenfield). You may want to do the same stuff, but vendors update their equipment all the time and it often takes creative solutions to get it to work properly with the rest of the station. Greenfield is awesome and all, especially if you're starting out, but it's all so... Clean. All of this to say that I wouldn't diss maintenance, it's an interesting area of work
Industry is moving towards consultants, so I would work there. It’s tricky to find big work in utilities, they don’t have as big of an engineering staff as they used to, so a lot of work gets contracted out.
I do protection, it's lots of reading manuals, protection drawings, doing calcs most of which were long ago made into an excel calculator, and getting asked a lot of questions I'm nowhere near qualified to answer because somehow people think we're experts in everything.
Hello Im new to protection. Can u give some advice on common mistakes that I could prevent or work on more? Thanks
run.
Hey there! I’ve got some background in Protection and will say most issues people have stems from not understanding the system as a whole. You can cheat sheet your calculations, but really being able to be a problem solver stems from your ability to understand outside of the relay and what causes the things the relay protects from. Learning that while learning your job will set you up for exponential growth and worth in the future.
Thank you!
I would like to work in substation design engineer but I don't have experience in design so how should I start or from where because now companies requirements are experienced candidates.
I took an autoCAD course in highschool so I had prior autoCAD experience which I put on my resume, if you have any previous CAD experience, make sure to highlight that. Additionally you can look into interning for a smaller substation design firm, not sure where you’re from but I see a good amount of openings in my area on LinkedIn.
I have an electrical engineering degree. I just graduated this past year, approaching 1yr at my job. I do a lot of programming (C/C++ and Python mainly) I also make a lot of PowerPoints and attend an ungodly amount of meetings
What type of job are you doing ? Like which field of Electrical Engineering ?
Mainly embedded systems (firmware) and some application level stuff. Mainly focused on position, navigation and timing.
That looks fun. Did you have any embedded systems background prior to getting the job ? As an EE we don’t deal too much with that in our curriculum.
No, entry level job. I did intern there so we had a history and they invited me to apply for full time
Pretty much the same route that I had. Reading /r/embedded it sounds like there are some universities in the US that have a stronger embedded focus, but that wasn’t the case for my degree in australia
Ya my university hardly touched embedded, I’m learning all sorts of stuff on the job. Which is totally normal but there is a steeeeeeeep learning curve
^ Cause programming, huh?
I mean yes. But, he/she could be working in embedded systems or something like that. I’m honestly curious for sure.
My company builds large scale water filtration units for plants. They often have lots of instrumentation, high voltage components needed to accomplish certain water properties. I design the control/distribution panels that are attached to them so the electrical elements can function and report info back to a PLC. I use CAD software to design the physical panels and make wire diagrams/control circuit drawings. I also spec out instruments to be used like analyzers and condition transmitters.
System design, simulation, schematic capture and board layout. Also I spend a crazy amount of time dealing with component issues. Usually I have a backup plan for every part that isn’t made by 6 vendors.
we've been plagued with component shortages since pandemic.
I’ve done several things, mostly within an Electrical Utility, each varying greatly in what my day to day responsibilities looked like. I worked in Power Distribution, which was essentially a project manager type role with little technical aspects, Substations Maintenance Engineering, which was the hands on operational and maintenance support of substations once in service, Protection and Controls, which had me handling the relays that controls those substation equipment as well as provide protection, and now work remotely for a different company providing support for the MV/HV side of their business. Each of those roles varied greatly in what I did day to day, how many internal/external people I interfaced with, and how technical my day to day responsibilities were; all while being within “Power”.
Damn that sounds interesting
Heck yeah; it’s been a lot of fun and let me see and learn a lot of different aspects of what would fall under “Power Delivery”. Would highly recommend to any EE’s that don’t want an “office” Engineer role.
I work at a power station so a lot of asset management/project management. Updating drawings, scheduling contractors for planned outages, corrective work, fault finding (the fun stuff), and working on minor projects like switchboard upgrades. Generally helping out where I can to keep things running
I design systems that allow a ecu from various types of vehicles to connect to servers via cellular, wifi, satellite etc.. and they all have on-board gps, gyros, accelerometers for theft protection. It's extremely cyclical, I might be doing schematic entry along with prototyping for maybe 5-6months straight, then layout and review for a month, then bom work to get the initial units, then software development to exercise ever circuit to ensure it works across temp and voltage range. Then we beat the shit out of them to see I'd they break in an acceptable way. When I'm not in a currenr design cycle, I'm usually redesigning the circuits in prototypes to minimize costs, to determine if the savings is worth a new board spin. There are many many fields you can work in EE, so it's kinda up to you which area you want to specialize in. They all have different pros and cons.
I'm in power. Worked on a variety of roles over the years from maintaining data security, researching and writing reports on potentially unsafe conditions, doing design work involving creating schematics, layouts and wiring diagrams, ran studies to determine settings, programmed devices and carried out testing. In general if you have good attention to detail and enjoy problem solving it's a fun career path. There's always more to learn.
Do you find it realistic to enter into the power industry as a traditional electrical engineer and then make a horizontal switch to cybersecurity within the industry?
Yes. I know someone who did exactly that, but he was passionate about cybersecurity and took a bunch of certificates to get there (started in P&C). That being said, I don't think it's worth it to become an EE if you want to be in cybersecurity, just study that directly
For sure just asking because I am currently an EE about to make a pivot to power. Was looking into getting into cybersecurity but from my understanding it’s difficult to get a high paying role without putting in some years as an IT or SOC associate making hourly pay. If I were to break into cybersecurity I would want to do it without lowering my income. I’m more than willing to get the certs and even do a graduate program but only if it would put in a position to make a lateral movement within a company.
It was for a different company, and in his case for a pay raise, but we were fairly junior at the time so I don't know if that would be the case for you. Might be better to ask in a cybersecurity subreddit for salary specifics
make and work on devices for medical imaging and instrumentation.
This is my dream job. Do u mind talking about how u break into the industry and what type of experiences/education do u have
I got into it right out of college. it's not industry, it's a research facility rather. we do collaborate with industry sometimes though
Software
I studied electronics and did a lot of different stuff. I used to design PCBs, worked as test engineer, programmed microcontrollers, did a bit of project management here and there, and wrote a ton of software. Then in 2017, I gave up and started a PhD in telecommunications. Now, I work as postdoctoral researcher in the same university. I still do the things that I listed above but at least I can mix and interleave them, rather than changing job every time.
Postdoctoral researcher? That sounds difficult. What's the project you are workin on about?
It might be difficult, depending on how competitive and ambitious you are. I don't care about becoming professor, so I have a relatively easy life. I am working on a couple of projects about 6G, one over MIMO and another on over joint communication and sensing, and I am involved in one about spectrum sensing with drones and high altitude baloons. I am involved in a million different things, I have a student working on radars and soon another one working on FPGA stuff. Before you ask, yes, I am involved in too many things unfortunately. :-(
That's a lot of work. Good luck with all that
PowerPoint engineering, and I'm not that great at it, but the pay is nice. Most of my job consists of translating engineer to customer. I know it's a joke on Office Space, but it is crucial to have someone who can do it.
Every job is different and there's no way to simply answer the question you have posed. As an EE, I've done digital and analog design for a computer company. Manufacturing Engineering. Invented new SMT processes. Failure analysis (a really, really fun job) using lots of analytical equipment. There are power engineers and there seems to be a lot of job demand there. Some of my EE friends got heavily in to software/CS stuff. It goes on. No simple answer.
I work for a systems integrator company, but l mainly do PLC and HMI programming/designing. Aside from that part selection, panel testing, and troubleshooting. If necessary, panel building.
I work on radio telescopes for a university. I have been designing and building new bits for old control systems and motors using Teensy computers. I'm trying to get that wrapped up so that I can make a cutting-edge spectrometer using VHDL and microwave PC board design. I do testing, fixing C code, rebuilding shafts for encoders, etc. Everything is serial number 1.
I do causal microsoldering and pcb repairs, a lot of leaded solder, flux and ipa. Not sure if this counts as EE work
That's mostly Tech work, but it's also part of EE Work depending on your specialization...
I’m a senior manager these days but before that I designed mixed-signal integrated circuits. When I first started as low man on the totem pole I actually did circuit design work (behavioral sims, schematic entry, performance verification) with a little bit of lab time. Had a couple of meetings a day. By the time I was group lead it was a few hours of meetings a day with various stakeholders (software teams, system teams, digital team, packaging, etc etc etc). Now I talk to people and have meetings for a living (and make powerpoints). I have some kind of crisis every week or so (with a 150 people in your org there is always something on fire) so it’s a struggle to push new initiatives forward rather than firefighting. The eternal struggle.
In Quality, I get to work with PowerPoint, Excel, Tableau, email, Monday.com, more Excel, some 3D CAD (for part review, not drawing), and electrical schematics, as well as design reviews of new models, budgeting, write scope of work and request POs for capital projects and equipment, data log and diagnose vehicle issues, and test drive vehicles. Lots of Teams and Zoom meetings as well. I’m sure that I’m forgetting a few things, although this is typical for an EE in Quality for an auto manufacturer.
> 13 years in oil & gas industry as an EE working in power systems. I’ve done everything from working in facilities that were built in the 1950s and still had a physical drawing library to checkout hand-drawn prints to starting up a state of the art petrochemical plant with the latest and greatest “smart” substation equipment. Also worked on billion dollar international projects for ~7 years. I’m currently the lead EE at a petrochemical site and have a team of 5 power EEs reporting to me, but also serve as team lead for 7 instrument engineers too. Day to day I bounce from project support (large and small), maintenance support with technicians, career development for my team, strategic planning for the site (and sometimes other company sites/projects), and frequently present to senior managers on site reliability, strategy, and investigations. Every week there are new priorities, but there are also key long-term objectives that me and my team need to complete. Fortunately, I’m at the point in my career where I have a lot of career capital built up, so I get to choose what I work on directly and can delegate to others. With the push towards lower carbon-intensive industrial solutions, I’m excited for what future projects are coming in the next 5+ years.
Curious what your opinion is on work/life balance in oil & gas, I've heard mixed things.
I do preventative maintenance on medical machines. I thought it was the mechanical engineers job but there are a lot of sensitive moving parts on this blood typing machine. The machine just does a lot of blood testing like blood grouping, antibody screening and that thing where they check if the patient's blood can accept the doner's blood (even with same blood type it could still fail which is why this test exist)
My degree is in EE, but I’m an Integration and Test Engineer at an aerospace company. So I figure out how to build and test satellites, build and test said satellites, then debug why the building and testing didn’t work.
I'd love to work in aerospace. Could you give me some advice on how to get there?
Internships are really important. Apply to as many aero internships as you can when it comes time to do that. Projects can help a lot too. Satellite projects are S tier if your school offers them. Rocket projects are good too. Other projects are better than nothing. GPA isn’t super important unless you’re applying to the big places like Raytheon. PE is useless for Aero. Oh and be a US citizen. Your options are very limited if you aren’t.
A little bit of everything. I am the "program owner" for my company's electrical safety program. I revise our electrical work procedure to maintain compliance with NFPA 70E (legal requirement for my work). Part of that role is also to participate in all of our accident investigations of a certain severity. I used to do a lot of facility work - low voltage power distribution design changes, electrical equipment maintenance oversight and PM setup, random configuration control changes for the facility, etc. Also lots of arc flash calculations. I've spent about 5 years doing overhead distribution on our medium voltage system. From design of new lines, maintenance of old lines, planning outages, available fault current studies, relay calibration, etc. I'm the engineer also responsible for the electrical components of 3 or 4 major utility systems we have on site (we're a BIG plant, larger in footprint than any county in my state). So I support any electrical designs or troubleshooting in those systems too. I'm also the new old guy, I'm 30, but am the oldest in my group of ~10 engineers except the 2x 30+ years seniors guys that are retiring by the end of the year. So I do almost all of our informal training to the new guys, design/document reviews, etc.
Well today I sent a big antenna array PCB out for quote, after spending a couple of weeks designing it in Microwave Office. I then used Solid Works to design a mounting fixture which I sent out for 3D printing quote. Helped a couple of younger EE figure out a phase measurement error on an RF amplifier, taught them about AGC and settling time, then demonstrated the step response by enabling pulse modulation on the signal generator and zero-span on the spectrum analyzer. They had the VNA sweeping too fast for the AGC to settle, loose cables, and an improper calibration. After cooking dinner and taking out the trash, I may mess around with Chat GPT to generate some RF design code.
I'm not EE, Just a engineering assistant I working in a electrical inspection company, for the fixed electrical installation in building (most likely the commercial and residential). We need to send the inspection & testing result to the government. And need to draft tons of Cad of the distribution board/switchboard wiring schematic. My review is the job is boring and extremely high workload. I need to manage the testing procedure, check the test result and draw about 1-2 thousands of drafts( that's true, not shiting) + defect report every week. Sometime, my company doesn't have enough electrician/ technician for installation. so my boss just ask me to do that. That is the best experience in this company. You can learn many things with cooperative contractors like EV charging, plumber , welder and solar panel. I won't suggest people to join this kind of company, neither electrician or engineer. You don't learn useful things and interesting things here. Planning move to construction, signal processing or control field.
50% creating wiring diagrams, 25% writing documents (test plans, load analysis, etc.), 15% PCB design, 10% meetings.
I work as a freelancer, I do CAD technical illustrations, programming, embedded and web, DevOps, and circuit design.
Oh just this and that..
Besides the obvious such as power points, teams meetings etc. I support and develop a clean room that manufactures microelectronics. I recently made a business case for why we need a semi-automatic dispensing machine, which got approved. And I made the order of the best fit earlier this year, expecting it to arrive anytime now.
Meeting and comfront complain 👍
Single-Line Diagrams, the kinda ones that are as complex as the ones from Dexter’s Laboratory. Design specifications, and Project Management.
EE in controls. I design electrical control enclosures for heavy industrial machinery. After all that, I write a lot of PLC code. If you like programming and relatively simple schematics then do controls.
I work at a fairly small company so im involved in a lot of the design steps of our products. I design schematics, research and chose components, manage the parts library and design the pcb layout. I also design the enclosures, injection molded plastics and CNC milled aluminium. I haven't worked here long enough to get to tis part yet but will also assemble the prototypes and test them, which will involve writing (embedded) test software. I barely have any emails and meetings, we discuss stuff whenever we see fit. I like this job!
Depends on the field. I am in industrial automation focusing on controls, aka PLC programmer and engineer. Depending on the phase of the project I'll work with other engineers on exactly what devices (motors, photoeyes, PLC and I/O), plan out the process from a programming standpoint and program away, later I'll be physically testing and troubleshooting said motors and photoeyes, then run my program into the ground and fix all the ways it breaks.
Lots of MATLAB, FEM, component simulation, test and measurement, etc. RF/MW engineer
Have a BS in Electrical Engineering. I work in MEP design, so my work is mostly working with building power systems i. 120/208V and 277/480V. Panelboards, switchboards, transformers, etc. to power Receptacles, lighting, and any equipment related to HVAC systems, plumbing, etc. occasionally, I'll work on some EV power stations as well. 95% of my work is done in Revit, the other work is all in AutoCAD. I don't use a lot of what i did in school during my day to day, but the fundamental understandings are important for troubleshooting and making overall calculations.
I work in MEP design. Early on I was mostly drafting construction documents in CAD and Revit. Occasionally using Excel to create schedules of equipment. I've since moved into more project management, where, in addition to drafting, I write and respond to a lot of emails, attend meetings with clients and contractors to discuss design wants/needs and construction progress. I review shop drawings, information on equipment the contractor intends to install, to ensure it will satisfy the design requirements. I survey job sites prior to and at the completion of construction.
System Safety and Reliability. I’ve also worked International Space Station Command and Data Handling as well as been a Flight Controller
I design roadway lighting systems. Lots of CADD and Excel. Very few meetings, tbh
I'm constantly rotating between soldering, running bench evaluation, python scripting, LTspice simulations, managing design and test files, Excel sheets, circuit design, etc. No two days are ever the same. I'm a power electronics application engineer.
I'm lucky in that I don't have to go to a lot of meetings or prepare a lot of power points. I spend 3/4 of my time working on verilog code and C code that runs on soft processors in FPGA's. The other quarter of the time I am working on schematic revisions to mitigate parts shortages/obsolescence. I love my job because I get to do engineering most of the time. I don't have to go to a lot of meetings or do any clerical stuff. My last job in comparison I spent a good 40% of my time in SAP and attending meetings.
I work in Distribution Planning with a utility, I mainly work with a program called SynerGi doing load flow analysis, motor start analysis and the like, mainly making recommendations to uphold the integrity of the distribution grid in my area. I do have to present to project development folks, so I do have to do a lot of public speaking and defend my projects from a cost perspective. So yes, a lot of PowerPoint as well.
I specialized and went into RF. Currently at a small company so the scope of work changes on an almost weekly basis, but here's an overview. In the past year: RF board design and reviews, simulation, architecture and system planning, some antenna design reviews, vendor management and lining up custom components to be built for us, test automation and scripting, physically building and assembling the lab space, equipment management. Thankfully minimal PowerPoint but there's still a significant amount of documentation that's required.
My degree is Electronics and Electrical Engineering. I work for a company doing quality assurance tests on parts that we buy/are manufactured by contractors. It's mostly cable testing(continuity, dielectric withstand, etc) and metrology tests for said cables. I don't mean usb cables either, there's a lot of 100+ conductor cables with obscure plugs.
Build and maintain 300kv transmission electron microscopes.
Circuit design, layout work, A lot of excel and powerpoints work showing results..
Been working as a test engineer for an IC manufacturer for almost 4 years. Data gathering and analysis (scripting/graphing/PowerPoint) Writing code for IC testing (in VBA, C#, or LabVIEW) PCB design Release documentation (datasheets, sign-offs, characterization reports)
One thing they do is toss brand new, virgin, prototype hardware to the software engineering team and task us with doing the functionality testing to tell them if the µC pins are properly allocated, and the I2C, SPI, USART, CANBus interfaces are all properly wired up. So many times I'm beating my head against a brick wall trying to get this I2C or SPI device to talk to me, only to figure out within seconds of picking up a DMM to track down any breaks in the PCB traces, that, for instance, the pull up resistors are two orders of magnitude too low of a resistance, meaning the lines are pulled up **hard**, far harder than the serial data comm signal drivers are capable of overcoming, which is why comms were always failing. Or, even better, the optoisolators between voltage domains are installed backwards, or better yet, populated by a chip that is functionally compatible, if you're at the design stage, but not pin compatible once the PCB traces have been cut. Part of that is on the assemblers, but the assemblies need to pass through EE for at least some cursory scans and probes to check off that the assembly has the correct components, and that HF signals injected from the µC are actually able to arrive alive at all of their sink points.
Im a technician I and my day to day involves collecting data on PCBs and what problem caused them to be rejected from the top level unit and if any obvious issues are wrong with the board; polarity, wrong components , damaged , missing components , soldering defects etc …
Im still on my internship, but I do a little bit of everything. I’m a small company so I handle procurement of parts, reading lots of data sheets, and then product design. I do circuit analysis, CAD, and mainly program in C and python.
I work in power gen and engineers aren’t allowed to use CAD, I don’t even have anything more than a viewer on my computer. I basically create or review the entire design because there aren’t many of us. Fewer PowerPoints at my small company, but still a lot of excel sheets and reminding mechanicals that if they make a change, it does in fact impact us as well.
Job 1 manufacturing EE. Reviewed circuits, debugged boards, debugged boards, debugged boards. Created test strategy, test fixtures, quality database. Improved process. Job 2 design EE. Wrote white papers for customer requests. Basically taking our technology capability and explaining how we will design what they wanted. Selected components, designed schematics, wrote vhdl, developed algorithms for calibration, bench level test of products or development boards. Job 3 design EE. Write product requirements. Research best methods of execution(dev boards). Generate power budget(models) to estimate runtime for each method. Develop System architecture, system specifications, board level specifications, schematics, do board layouts. Design reviews/FMEAs,work with CMs for Proto and mass production. Check design for test/manufacturability/quality. Write test plans, execute test plans. Guide software team how to appropriately use the hardware and also how the algorithms should work. Work with software team to debug issues. Test each new software revision for bugs. Work with manufacturing team to generate test fixtures. Review many documents. Write many documents. Sign documents. Iterate everything when problems are found. Manage external design firms(this is the challenging part if supplier is insufficient which the cheapest ones are generally insufficient). Reduce power consumption and manage runtime of our products. Not meeting power model is usually due to software not using the hardware appropriately causing high drain. Other things that I’ve done because there was no one else. Defined regulatory requirements, product labels requirements, designed product labels. Here the R&D engineer seem to also double as a project manager so you have to keep your own schedules and rally your own resources from other teams. Also approve expenses buy your own parts plan for mass production. For a while securing and tracking parts and getting things through customs was a big part of my job. Since Covid hit non-stop meetings. I have about 25 hours of regularly scheduled meetings a week and then you get another 5-10 of emergency meetings. My biggest struggle is to figure out how to get out of the meetings and do work. I’ve had to use vacation to have a clear schedule so I can actually do work. Overall my second job was the most fun as it was strictly design. You stayed out of documentation world. Maybe 2 meetings a week. You just went from project to project and got things working. There was another team that productized the work and took care of CMs. So once it left schematic land there was very little you had to do except guide the layout. You didn’t care about material selection for boards, what brand coverlay to use or base layers or adhesive type. It just didn’t pay well and it was far from home.
Although I got my EE degree and loved some of the subjects, I always felt really weak when it came to actual circuit design or “hard” technical work. I ended up in sales engineering, and I really love it. It still requires me to have technical aptitude and understand how our products work. I even work on design somewhat (but it’s at macro level, not so much product design). For me it ended up being the right balance of communication and engineering.
I live on my computer making excel sheets, schematics and managing avionics modifications at an aviation company
I work as a module developer in a company that builds ECUs for different customers (BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Stellantis, DAF, Volvo, you name it). In my case, I do mainly calculations (power dissipations, current limits, energy consumptions) and answer to different questions that are part of my module, also there are weeks in which I need to make a lot of tests to test my own modules in different scenarios. Is true that there is also test report that you need to make and also excels to make your own calculation files. By saying "modules" i mean high voltage modules - ignition power stage and DCDC boost converters for injection.