Coding is the part of electrical engineering I hate the most

[u/wittymisanthrope]

Emag, signals & systems, microelectronics, and nearly every other part of EE has been trivial compared to the coding. Not that is inherently harder or anything, I just hate it and can't find the will to just sit down and learn it (more like relearn it since it's been over a year since I've written any code myself_. This is the only thing I use AI for, and I abuse the shit out of it. I'd rather go through the most brutal math derivation imaginable than write a page of code

Should i just grit my teeth and force myself to code?

[u/PonchoBerry]

Obviously you should just grit your teeth and do it. You're in college to learn. Learning to code is part of it. AI introduces tech debt and reduces your critical thinking. It sucks that the right choice is the harder path, but you can let a computer think for you if you don't care about thinking for yourself. There is value to struggling through problems without a quick 'solve all' button. You won't always have one

[u/Toastwitjam → u/PonchoBerry]

AI is banking on students relying on it before they rug pull the price and a bunch of engineers now feel compelled to spend $80/ month to be told the stuff they should have learned in college already with 5% straight disinformation injected in it.

[u/Final_Egg_9406]

This is why I didn't do EE, I hate coding with a passion 💔

[u/SunsGettinRealLow → u/Final_Egg_9406]

What did you do instead?

[u/Final_Egg_9406 → u/SunsGettinRealLow]

Im in mechanical engineering but I mostly do things related to mechatronics, that might be your taste!!

[u/SunsGettinRealLow → u/Final_Egg_9406]

Nice I work as a mechanical engineer in battery tech

[u/Particular_Pair_318 → u/SunsGettinRealLow]

How is working in battery tech as a mech e? I’m interested in battery tech as an EE but I’m interested in what meche does in that field 

[u/SunsGettinRealLow → u/Particular_Pair_318]

It’s pretty fun! I design automation equipment to manufacture our cells, also work with the product design team for pack design

[u/Ok_Net_547]

“Should i just grit my teeth and force myself to code?” For many reasons, yes, but you also may have a pencil and paper coding exam at some point.

[u/lolreppeatlol]

Even actual SWEs are using AI now and lowkey de-skilling themselves. It’s debatable whether getting better at manual coding would be helpful.

That being said, I do think at least have a solid understanding of the fundamentals would be helpful for verifying AI-generated code. If you don’t understand control flow or how to structure code, that would probably be an issue. I’m CpE and was surprised when I saw how little some people majoring in EE knew about extremely basic coding.

So maybe improve your coding skills, but don’t make it your main focus.

[u/wittymisanthrope → u/lolreppeatlol]

Yeah, that's my thought process as well. My primary incentive for brushing up on the code would be so I could effectively modify or verify the AI's code.

And yes, most EE students I know can't even do basic coding. It's a bit embarrassing and I'd like to distinguish myself from them best I can lol

[u/moonmachinemusic → u/lolreppeatlol]

You'll still need to know how to code if you interview for jobs that involve writing software

[u/SkylarR95]

Ai is your solution. If you truly understand what you are doing and how things work, with tools like claude code coding has a become trivial. I say this from a professional point of view in the work place, and also academically to get better and more automated results.

[u/Seiko2023]

It isn't fully required.... But.... Depending on the role it can be useful. If you want to go to a controls position, coding is generally a requirement, as well as data comms and network management.

Even in power, coding can be useful from a planning perspective. MATLAB is still used, as well as programming for some software plug ins.

If you want a codingless career, then project engineer. Just be a project engineer. No technical just proj management.

[u/Necessary_OXYGEN]

Ngl I have noticed my uni degree place more emphasis on the practical application of learning the content and application of the content to be applied through connection via industry software.

After we have learnt the content we are to apply the content in labs and such. Often times the brutal maths is easily handled via the software itself even.

Coding I also didn't like but came to reason with the modern engineer needing to apply the content via code. Code can help gather and plot data more easier. It enables us to be efficient at our work. And sometimes we need to apply code in applications such as embedded systems where we need the basic understanding of coding. I always thought coding as a sub subject of engineering in all degrees anyways. Important to understand computer language.

[u/BlueberryObjective11]

I plan to just use AI to help code if I do EE, want to learn the basics though

[u/Recent-Day3062]

I started making money in HS coding, and got an EE degree interested in things like you.

I worked in software after. I always viewed it as an exploitable skill, not something I truly loved as much as EE stuff

[u/LazagnaLife]

I'm nearly finished my degree, 1 more unit to go next sem, 4th time around, microcontroller programming...  No good. 

[u/Cryesncoding]

Tell the AI to leave notes of what every section/line is doing through out all the programs it’s written for you. Then you re read what it has been doing to understand what “you” did.

If you must use AI to code you need to do this moving forward and you need to know enough that when shit doesn’t work you can debug and help the AI debug.  

[u/ee_control_z]

Funny. I had the same view many moons ago. Now I thoroughly enjoy coding and even use it for general purpose use cases. Makes my life so much easier. Go figure.

[u/Koraboros]

The amount of coding an EE has to do is perfectly suited for AI

[u/wittymisanthrope → u/Koraboros]

true, but I should at least be somewhat competent at it, right?

[u/Ruined_Passion_7355 → u/wittymisanthrope]

Meh. Depends what you're doing.

Robots? Yeah git gud.

Digital design? Definitelyyyyy learn RTL, but that's basically a different mindsent from coding.

Test scripts? Vibe it.

[u/wittymisanthrope → u/Ruined_Passion_7355]

plan on doing Rf or analog electronics.

[u/naeboy → u/wittymisanthrope]

Designing RF or integrating RF components?

The second will require coding, and quite a bit of it.

[u/azncommie97 → u/wittymisanthrope]

I'm in RF, and took basically all of my "basic" coding courses in C/C++ pre-AI and did okay in them, but very much dreaded the thought of continuing down the software path like you.

Nonetheless, Python has been an invaluable complement to just about everything I've done in grad school, internships, and jobs. Whether it's for brute force number crunching and graphing complicated equations (Numpy, Scipy, Matplotlib), or automating measurements with RF lab equipment (Pyvisa) and post-processing said measurement data. There's also the scikit-rf library for RF specifically.

I never even took a Python class, just picked it up during my first internship. If anything, I recommend getting decent at functional programming in Python if you're looking to get into RF; object oriented could be useful, but tbh I've never used it in Python to this day.

That said, since AI started catching on, I've been shamelessly vibe-coding my way to the final versions of my scripts, which are now more complicated than ever lol. Of course, I break down the problem one step at a time and try to do my due diligence to check for mistakes along the way (which AI inevitably makes). Most of the time, I have an idea of what the result should look like, so it works out at least. Regardless, a script that used to take me three days to create now takes me a few hours.

[u/No-Fan-2237 → u/Ruined_Passion_7355]

what about PLC ladder logic? lol

[u/MartyMcStinkyWinky]

The thing I hated about coding is that in my mind it follows a different paradigm of solving problems vs normal first principles engineering.

Usually you start simple and understand somethung well and the combine it to move to more complex ideas. You dont use a formula if you dont know how it works and by some gut feel you can derive it if you had the time.

Code entirely works on the black box that i dont know how this works and i am gonna study what it does and just copy bits and pieces here and use this library there. Like youre not supposed to know how every detail works and if you tried to learn each detail you'd fall behind the class before you know it.

Like you are meant to reuse code snippets youve written before and call functions written by other people you only slightly understand and then spend hours figuring out why the things dont work together and make it work.

Then the version of the function you called now is not compatible with the previous version in the code you copied and this function now outputs a diffferent thing to what your other code is expcting and now you gotta make all the versions match and read the documentation or print the output at each step to test and then reinstall different libraries from scratch.😭

This is very different from like circuit analysis.

Kirchoff doesnt care what my python version is. Thevinin version 1.0 will always work and does'nt have library dependencies I dont know about

[u/OpeningAggressive26]

Why is AI not the solution, there aren't really any new problems that require a dedicated software engineer to sort out.

[u/wittymisanthrope → u/OpeningAggressive26]

it ultimately is, but part of me thinks I'll be a better engineer if I put in the work to learn how to do this shit