> Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE
But aren't there a lot of actual hardware products that are "simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller"? Like a toaster, shaver, keyboard, etc. If that's not "work in EE" then what is it classified under? It's not CS either.
That would be Computer Engineering. Its somewhere between EE and CS.
The actual electrical engineering involved there is the sort of thing that an early-career engineer could bang out in an afternoon. Maybe a day or so for the PCB designer. The more time consuming part might be managing the regulatory compliance testing.
Most of the orgs I worked in building simple circuit blocks connected to a microcontroller either farmed out the actual EE work to contractors or design houses or had 1 EE for like 20 different projects.
It would have been better phrased as "research in EE." There's no research involved in building a toaster.
Another commenter pointed this out, but those products take about 1-2 days of engineering time.
Computer engineering is the degree for that.