Job opportunities as a computer engineer

ClassicRockerDad
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:27:57 +0000

There is a continuum between computer science and electrical engineering. In schools like MIT it’s all in the same department.

Computer engineering lies somewhere in the middle and contains significant elements of both. You could certainly go toward either direction in your career and the opportunities should be excellent. I would say that most electrical engineers end up doing work that would be appropriate for computer engineers.

Relative to electrical engineering, computer engineers will focus more on the “digital” aspects of electrical engineering such as digital logic, ASIC or FPGA design, VHDL or Verilog, etc, rather than electromagnetics, analog circuit design, semiconductor physics, etc.

Relative to computer science, the computer engineering degree will focus less on application programming and theoretical computer science, and probably more on “systems” things like computer architecture, operating systems, programming languages, etc, distributed computing, parallel programming, etc.

The three majors should contain a pretty good deal of overlap and it should be easy to switch into one of the others if your interests take you more in one direction or the other.