It's hard to put this plainly without being insulting but I have to be blunt. EE is just 100000000000x harder to learn. The distance from theory to application for EE is especially gigantic.
Software development for the most part is extremely easy. It's one of the few "engineering" fields where you can go to a bootcamp and learn it in 6 months. You won't see this kind of thing for quantum mechanics or electrical engineering.
Also the gap between theory and application in software is miniscule. Instantaneous even. You basically learn software via application.
A lot of software engineers take pride in their jobs and in their intelligence but they don't fully understand just how easy software is. Like you guys (to be accurate: most of you guys, not all) have an easy job and you learned a easy field. EE is challenging. You don't like it because it's harder and the intellectual capacity to handle it isn't there for everyone.
There's a reason why all hardware development moved to Asia. Software is just too attractively easy and the internet boom made it lucrative. Asians took whats available while the west took what’s most fun. And now the skill gap is more evident and we can’t go back.
When MIT ran the first massive online course, 6002x, I found out that MIT 6002x was the electronics course I had wished for back when I was in high school. The high school electronics courses I took only touched upon analysis of the simplest of circuits, and there wasn't a lot of explanation of how the different kinds of transistors (NPN, PNP, MOSFETs..) are modeled.
But oh how much workload the 6002x course was... I needed 10-15 hours per week for all the reading, problems and labs, and doing that while working full time and commuting 2 hours a day was a grueling pace to survive!
Agreed, it’s a very hot take on this website, where everyone’s egos have been inflated to near popping, but I’ve long held that most software jobs are pretty easy.
But the cool thing about software is that it has paid so well despite its relative ease, it’s a well paying field that still secures a middle class life that’s resilient to inflation.
Once that’s gone, a whole lot of people are going to find themselves condemned to dropping an economic class or two.
Yep, it's insane that SWEs working on products like pinterest earn more than engineers working on major infrastructure projects. Honestly without direct government intervention I think market forces will always lead to this outcome.