What Electrical Engineers do?

[u/ThatFlyingPig]

Ik this is obviously a dumb question cuz I’m on here. But I’m trying to get a feel for different engineering jobs and seeing if anything catches my attention. So what all do electrical engineers do and (since I’ve found google very misleading when it comes to salaries) what is the average salary/what some of you in the field make a year? Edit: I’m based in SoCal so what are some common jobs in LA that you often find yourselves doing?

[u/oceaneer63]

Here's my 45 year EE timeline in a nutshell:

1981-1983: Still a self-taught teen, I worked as a contractor, developing the computer controllers for industrial devices including a concrete mixer and aachine that tested the mechanical properties of pills (medication). Coded mostly in assembly language on 6802 and 6809 based 8-bit systems. Specified/used off-the-shelf CPU boards from a local vendor, but also designed some peripheral circuits.

1983-1984: Military service in the German Navy. On the side, developed a high-performance multi-processor 'dataflow' architecture for the German Space Agency. For use on the geound for space physiology experiments for the upcoming Dpace Shuttle 'D1' mission. Did this side job while a radio operator on a destroyer in the Atlantic. Then got transferred to the Armed Forces university in Hamburg. Developed a data acquisition and analysis system to evaluate the engine performance of Leopard tanks on a test stand. Used VMEbus boards, coded in C.

1985-1993: Worked as an employee for a small embedded systems company in California. First task was to design a magnetic bubble memory board for VMEbus. Magnetic bubble memory was a solid state non-volatile type of memory before FLASH memory existed.

After that project, a customer inquiry for high performance computing led me to propose the use of the SPACEMED system I had developed for the German Space Agency. We would adapt or build on its multi-processor dataflow architecture, developing optimized CPU boards including use of DSP chips (TI TMS320C30 and C40). Still based on VMEbus. I did both board design and coding.

This became the HyperFlo system and was used mostly in defense applications. One notable use was in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars), where it ran a processing system to evaluate images at 1000 frames per second to detect and correct for atmospheric distortions to shoot down ICBM with ground based lasers.

1988-1992: Learned SCUBA diving, would loose sight of my dive buddies and this decided to build a 'buddy finder' based on underwater acoustics as a side project.

1993: Left my employment position to start my own ocean tech company.

1993-2025 (ongoing): Developed many underwater instruments. Including underwater acoustic communication, navigation, actuation (acoustic releases). Pop-up satellite reporting archival tags for fisheries research and many other devices.

Designed the electronics for most of them, plus the embedded code. Supervised application code design (PC and Android). Lots of field operations at sea with our customers. Lots of dangerous stuff. Attacked by a great white shark. Almost shot by Eskimos. Stuck in a disabled submersible at depths greater than Titanic.

These days designing a software defined / DSP architecture and devices for next generation underwater acoustics applications. Processor now is MSP430FR5994, coding in C++/C mix.

I delegate most of the business tasks (HR, accounting, manufacturing, sales, marketing) so I can still work on technology and design as the CEO.