Outcome of Study EECS?

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
1

<p>As you know, in the computer industry engineers are divided into two fields - software engineers and hardware engineers. In the US Department of Labor there is no such job as “Computer Engineer” (Engineers that do both).</p>

<p>So if no one could do both things at the same thing, what is the purpose/outcome of study EECS? </p>

<p>Thank you very much!</p>

2

<p>You can choose your upper division courses from EE, CS, or any combination.</p>

<p>Some computer professionals do both software and hardware.</p>

<p>Note that EE includes other areas, such as power systems, device electronics, signals and communications.</p>

3

<p>and you don’t need to do one of those two either. You can do pretty much anything with a EECS/CS degree</p>

4

<p>Thank you for replying. But what I want to ask is, if a person wants to work at Google as a “software engineer”, should he just perceive a CS degree, or should he perceive a EECS degree.</p>

<p>Because there is no such thing as “Computer engineer” who engineers BOTH software and hardware, so why should I study both if I want to go in the technology industry?</p>

<p>Thanks for replying anyway!</p>

5

<p>Both L&S CS and EECS majors went to work at Google and other employers:</p>

<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2010/CompSci.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2010/CompSci.stm&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

6

<p>

As someone said above you don’t need to study both, you can choose your courses. No hardware courses (except EE40 which is very basic) are required if you want to focus on software.</p>

7

<p>I wonder, CS may be ideal for a software engineer, EE may be ideal for a hardware engineer, so what is EECS for?</p>

8

<p>Some of us from the old school disagree with the idea of CS being clubbed with the discipline of engineering, but the bucks are in CS areas - the wizards that can start and sell a startup without any revenue or even a revenue model. More jobs as well in that area as it requires very little investment to start a software company compared to a semiconductor one (where we employ the EEs). At the firmware or embedded software level, it is useful to have some computer hardware knowledge even though you are writing software and so it makes sense to have such CS folks study some hardware aspects of the computer. Even though more CPUs are sold today in the embedded systems than your general computers, the need for software developers in non-embedded areas is far higher. Just my $0.02</p>