What exactly do EE's do during their day of work?

[Liam Semeniuk]

First off: Hello everybody. I'm new to this site. I'm approaching my second year in the engineering discipline. I've decided to go to the EE Co-op route (which basically means EE w/ job experience over work terms).

My first question to you is an easy one, I hope:

What exactly do EE's do during their day of work? Do they head projects? Or do they watch monitors and make sure everything is working? Or is it a combination of both, depending on your level of experience? Do EE's design circuits all day? Any help would be appreciated because I don't know any engineers and can't ask anybody in my personal life. Thanks in advance.

 

[berkeman]

You will get many different answers to that question. There are many different specialties in EE, and several levels within each specialty. For myself, I have worked at several different companies, generally in the R&D Lab section, designing and developing new products. The groups are project-based, with each project developing one or more products at a time. The product design cycle starts with an investigation, then development, then construction and testing, documentation, and release to manufacturing. After that release, there is typically some level of support that we provide to our Sales and Applications departments, answering customer questions and helping to debug any field problems.

You can typically be involved in several different projects at the same time, but other times you are focused on a single product. I am typically split among several projects, and those projects are typically at different stages. So in one of my days, I might be doing SPICE simulations of a new analog circuit, and running a reliability test of a different circuit in an oven chamber, and writing some manufacturing test code in C or Tcl for a different product that is getting close to release, and writing some documentation for an upcoming developer's conference. And then after lunch...