r/ComputerEngineering

I am trying to learn testing. But this AI support is really making me feel like I am not learning anything. I don't feel right. And actually I am not learning. Because I am not able to write code from start to end. I am not sure if it should be like this. Before this, like 3 4 years ago, I was able to write my own codes with confidence. Now, I can not.

Considering the industry needs, how should I be? What you can suggest? Am I right to be concerned on this?

Is that true even at the same company? If so how big is the gap generally if you have switched from swe to a hardware role (like ASIC, FPGA analog/digital ic, RF, etc) or the other way around how big are the differences between pay and wlb? Do you notice more stability working in hardware

I kept seeing the same problem over and over when people prep for CS interviews:

They grind LeetCode or memorize behavioral answers… but they don’t actually understand what kind of job they’re aiming for.

When I was in college, I didn’t even know the difference between fields like backend, graphics, AI, or cybersecurity, let alone what interviews for those roles actually looked like.

So I ended up putting together a guide that tries to connect those dots:

• First section: behavioral interviews (how to actually answer without sounding scripted)

• Second: technical interviews (coding, debugging, how to think through problems)

• Then: breakdowns of different CS fields (AI, graphics, cybersecurity, etc.)

For each field, I included:

– what the work is actually like

– example roles (like cybersecurity analyst, etc.)

– job outlook / growth

– what skills matter most

The goal isn’t just “pass interviews,” but help you figure out which direction you even want to go before you invest months prepping.

I originally made it for students who feel overwhelmed or unsure where they fit in CS.

If that sounds useful, here’s the book (I recommend paperback version or ebook because the color version is way too pricey lol):

https://www.amazon.com/Interviewing-FieldGuide-Debugging-Coding-Interview/dp/B0GTGH64MJ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3BTYW94VGNVEE&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Wy4OPHipIe5ZyyEUKP2Y09b7SyOdxhP2W4maesjV3Pn158EtbTi_odWbnPM12TJg30UnEVAEYy95LJXOZHuE1LXenOY4Xh_oBGAHK4XeFnbXihhpZdUzYouSBRHzVGS4E3uiWi4PNV3CDx4flpjjwURahezguBD-44f8CM7dOq7-CgS2f0Y4oHIdP-_BMdKSKJY8m98HNK1MqgKrHFnEPQRAaxh9Oa4A6EuRPDraoJM.vhF4Os00uB0lq60G0uGktQpetZQob7J1xQT4y9YgEuo&dib_tag=se&keywords=software+engineers+guide+to+debugging+the+coding+interview&nsdOptOutParam=true&qid=1776798776&sprefix=%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-1

Happy to answer questions about interview prep or different CS paths too.

I kind of want to do both. Has anyone had any experience deferring a summer + fall to fall only? Very nervous to ask...

I frequent this subreddit a lot because I am very interested in pursuing a career in this field, but I know basically nothing about computer engineering, or really computers in general.

I am constantly seeing acronyms and phrases I'm not aware of and googling terms to keep up with the discussions here.

My question is can somebody with basically 0 knowledge on the subject still go to school and come out with the knowledge you guys have? Is there anything I should familiarize myself with before starting classes?

I’m currently a student, but am worried any good digital design, verification, or similar job is out of reach for my school? Especially at top companies like Google etc. I have a 4.0, some club officer positions, and projects, but the soonest I could transfer out is at the end of my sophomore year so I feel like transferring may be out of the question. Any advice welcome

I am really struggling in taking this decision, first of all I am a Muslim applying for electrical and computer engineering in HKUST, AI (Engineering/ track for MBZUAI.

I don't know how much the two schools different but I do know that MBZUAI is so focused on AI and have a lot of money to pay on its students, HKUST on the other hand is more known school, very challenging academically, and also a little bit of a reach school in terms of STEM majors.

Also the fact that I am Muslim makes me want MBZUAI a little bit more as it will be in a Muslims country and I won't struggle to get Halal food and prayers, but this isn't really me first reason, I think I may cope easily with this in HKUST.

So what do you all think?

Should i look for only internships? Or job experience ?(IT support maximum lol),make connections from now like join uni clubs?have an active linkedln and github from now? Learn skills that help my cv ? I feel like i am lost at the engineering sea right now and I don’t have any guidance will you more experienced Engineers help me out (Cs engineering btw next year i will be picking a speciality from cloud/cybersecurity,embedded systems,data if you also have advice on that please do tell)

Hello everyone!

Currently deciding on accepting my offer to Cal Poly SLO for Computer Engineering or UC Berkeley for Statistics/Data Science.

Leaning towards Berkeley because of the “prestige” but Cal Poly would probably provide more job security because of the hardware aspect. I’m worried about the data science roles being automated by AI in the years to come.

Also not sure how necessary grad school is coming out of cal poly or Berkeley to land roles.

Any advice on choosing a school is greatly appreciated, thank you!

Hello, guys. I'm 4th yr college student, ComEngTech. Baka alam niyo pa'no ma-read ng raspi yung bill acceptor. Di ko kasi alam anong voltage nung pulse 1. Ni-try ko gumamit ng transistor pero di pa din na trigger yung base ng transistor huhuhhuhuhuhu baka lang may nakakaalam

Rotating 3D objects in game engines has always been a math-heavy process. In the Initially, using Euler angles (Pitch, Yaw, Roll) seems easy, but we must strictly reject them. Their biggest flaw is Gimbal Lock a condition where your rotation axis collapses and the entire math breaks. After rejecting Eulars cause of this failure, an engine architect is left with only two hardcore ways to handle rotations: Quaternions and Rotation Matrices. The Quaternion (which is king of Rotation fro me), are preferred because it's math formula is flexible, Gimbal-lock safe, and it can be made cache-friendly. But on the other hand, the standard 3D math and rendering world runs by default on Rotation Matrices. The problem is that when you put these matrices into real-time physics and high-performance computation, then a new engineering horror starts.

This engineering horror first comes forward in the form of Non-Orthogonal Drift. In a rotation matrix there should always be three orthogonal axes means all axis should be on 90 degrees. When floating-point math is repeatedly multiplied in the entire frame, then due to rounding errors those axes do not remain at strictly 90 degrees. The result is this that your perfectly square character starts looking squashed or distorted or like a skewed box. To fix this drift Re-orthogonalization is needed. The new object became skewed, now the CPU will have to stop the game and make that matrix straight again with math. This CPU Penalty makes the game slow, especially then when you have 1000 objects on the screen.

This overhead of math is only half the story. The real bottleneck is hit then when the CPU has to read the data of these 1000 objects from memory and after fixing write it back, because from the perspective of memory a matrix is very heavy. Think, a standard 3x3 (f32) rotation matrix takes 36 bytes (288 bits). But in reality for the entire mathematical rotation the matrix is only 3x3, whereas in Game Engines we always use a 4x4 Matrix, so that along with rotation in that matrix Translation (movement) and Scaling (size change) can also be saved. Its total size becomes 64 Bytes. This is that very number which fits in an L1 Cache line and blocks the CPU bandwidth. Hearing this it feels like okay, a 64-byte matrix will perfectly fit into the 64-byte cache line of the CPU, so what is the problem in this? The problem is this that in engineering when the size of any data becomes exactly equal to the memory container, then the margin of error becomes absolutely zero.

If the starting address of this matrix in memory is not precise (aligned), then this perfect fit suddenly becomes a hardware nightmare. Understand this with the example of a bare-metal memory address: suppose the first Cache Line of the CPU is from address 0 to 63, and the second Cache Line is from 64 to 127. If your entire 64-byte matrix is perfectly aligned (means it starts from address 0), then it will fit inside 0 to 63 in a single shot. But if the memory allocator shifts it even a little bit and starts it from address 16, then the data will cross the boundary. Result? The initial 48 bytes of the matrix will remain in the first cache line, and the remaining 16 bytes will spill and go into the second cache line. To process this unaligned data now the hardware has to pick up two separate cache lines in a single fetch and stitch them. If you are using SIMD instructions, then upon not having strict alignment either the CPU will straight give a Segmentation Fault (crash), or if you used an unaligned load instruction (movups), then the pipeline will stall and the load latency will double. And if by mistake this unaligned data crossed a 4KB Page Boundary, then a TLB miss will trigger and the CPU will have to do a page walk which can literally drop your speed up to 100x.

After this battle of cache lines, when the data comes inside the CPU core for final execution, then another limit of hardware is hit: Registers. We have XMM registers which are only 128-bit wide. This directly means that in a single register only 4 floating-point values can come. When you sit to process a 4x4 matrix with 16 values, then you will have to do messy loading between multiple registers, which makes the pipeline slow.

On the other hand, how clean and fast Quaternion is in memory, this in itself is a masterstroke. In a Quaternion the range is absolutely precise: [w, x, y, z] together make 4 floats, and its size is exactly 16 Bytes. This very compact size saves us memory fetch. With this we avoid Gimbal lock anyway, but also use the L1 Cache very efficiently. In reality, the entire [w, x, y, z] (all 16 bytes) is a Native Hardware Fit. Modern CPUs have 128-bit registers (like SSE registers XMM in Intel, or NEON registers Q in ARM). Because 4 floats multiplied by 4 bytes = 16 bytes, and 16 bytes are exactly 128 bits. This directly means that the CPU in a single instruction can load the entire quaternion into the register and multiply it. Therefore its math is much faster than the Matrix.

But here is a very big catch. The perfect loading of data in the register is only an advantage of storage and bandwidth, but when it comes to computation like doing quaternion multiplication (qvq^(-1) - The Sandwich Approach) to rotate a 3D vector then the game changes. For multiplication the hardware has to do cross and dot multiply of w, x, y, and z among themselves. And right here memory layout becomes our biggest obstacle. When you fetch XYZ values, then hopping has to be done in memory because the data is in Rows (which we call AoS layout). You will do branchless programming by using SIMD, but if you started Horizontal processing (data manipulation inside a single register), then its overhead will be so high that the purpose of using SIMD itself will be finished. To solve real-time physics we have a window of only 2ms. There is only one way to hit this frame rate: ending the overhead of shuffling and aligning the data through swizzling in such a way that it can stream straight into the registers.

Efficient data alignment and SIMD execution itself is that bar which separates an average engine from a high-performance bare-metal engine.

Hi in recent interview there was one constraint question, which says generate all 1's in the diagonal elements(by using system verilog randomisation, constraints concepts), where can we find more such question

I am a high school student and I plan on going into computer engineering in college. Other than basic computer science classes at school, I basically have no foundation and don’t want to go to college not knowing what I’m getting into. Are there any jobs for minors with after school hours that will help me prepare? I’m totally willing to learn more coding languages, get any certifications I can while still in high school, etc. I am not trying to find a job opportunity through this post I just want to know what jobs exist.

Hey guys, so I am finishing up my freshman year taking Computer Engineering. Through a connection, I have the opportunity to have an internship with a mechanical engineering company doing CAD work among other things.

Should I take this or seek other things out more related to my major?

Hi, I’m a sophomore in college and I’ve been going back and forth. Currently, I’m a cs and math major, but I wanna learn something that’s hard to learn outside of school. I feel like math is easier to learn independently than say CE or EE. Right now, I for sure wanna work in AI/ML — whether it be pure software or working with hardware such as robotics. What would be the best major combo to achieve this, CS/CE or CS/EE? If I do the former, I’d graduate a semester late. If I do the latter, I’d graduate a year late. But I also wanna study abroad which means for both I’d graduate a year late.

Also, is it bad to graduate a year late if I switch to CS/CE or CS/EE?

Thanks for your advice.

I am a beginner and I want to learn this before this subject starts in my college.

I will learn this subject for the very first time.

Hi everyone,

I’ve got a bizhub C360i that is going to be E wasted, I took the operation panel to see if I could use it as a LCD screen for various home projects. I tried hooking it up to my computer/power source but it won’t turn on and wont read under device manager. Anyone know if there is some way to bypass this? Not sure if it’s a power issue or a data breach issue.

Any help would be great.

Hey everyone, I really need to vent and maybe get some advice. I'm a Y1 CE student in university, and the second trimester just ended, and, honestly, I feel overwhelmed. I switched over from a diploma in mechanical engineering after finishing my two years of national service (i.e., just following orders with no real thought to it). The reason for the switch is because of how versatile the computer engineering field is to me. However, due to my university’s curriculum structure (1 trimester = ~3 to 4 months with 2 to 3 weeks of break), the pace here is absolutely brutal.

It always feels like I’m just chasing deadlines instead of actually learning. I’m still struggling since everything is still very new to me and the recent second semester was worse, on top of how intensely packed the scheduling was. It was so bad that I had burnout from studying, especially during the examination periods. Now that it's trimester break, I'm starting to feel a little bit more alleviated. However, my incoming third semester is going to be mostly group projects, which require us to create a functional system (based on the problem statement given to us).

I've been finding it incredibly tough to keep pace with the modules. Even after allocating time and trying to stay consistent with a timetable, I've always had to sacrifice programming modules more than I’d like because the engineering and physics modules are both examinable and project-heavy. They ended up being so much more demanding compared to the programming modules, which are mainly project-based. Also, irritatingly, the programming modules like DSA force us to create projects using AI, e.g., interacting with it to implement an application.

My grades are decent, but it feels like a lie. Theoretically, i can grind and memorize definitions and practice sample questions, but hands-on projects are my Achilles' heel, which i'm sure are more important in the industry. My teammates are great; they’ve basically "carried" me through the heavy technical projects because they are happy to tank them, with each member handling different aspects of the projects. In my Digital Systems project, they contributed with the logic while I sat there comprehending what was happening with the connections on the Basys 3 board as well as the logic in the Vivado software. In Programming Fundamentals (and similarly in DSA), a guy single-handedly wrote the core Python and C code while the rest of us handled the report.

I’ve become the "report specialist" in technical group projects, and I hate it despite it being my strength. It’s killing my coding/programming development. Then again, if I want to contribute to the team, what can I really contribute? I want to get my hands dirty with the logic, not just summarize what they did. Yet, I'm always constantly battling myself. If I actually sat down and constantly practiced and focused on coding, I'm sure I'd be competent, but it’s at the expense of deadlines. I’m terrified I’m going to graduate without actually knowing how to build anything. What's more scaring is in my final year, i'd obviously have to come up with something from scratch and that's the impending doom that'll come in about 1 year's time (my course is ~2 years 8 months) and that would require more technical knowledge and expertise

Questions:

• Is Arduino worth the time?

When doing the Digital Systems project with my team, it sparked some interest experiencing hardware-software interactions. Seeing code translate to physical movement intrigued me, since I kind of want to work in the semiconductor industry. Personally, it seems more fun than creating a stock market app or handling databases. nonetheless, i do want to keep my options wide instead of sticking purely to hardware. I want to start side projects, but I’m worried Arduino is seen as a "toy" in uni.

• Is it worth revisiting basics to build my confidence?

I'm struggling with basics eight months in, which means I need more self-directed practice, but with three weeks, how can i recap 8 months' worth of programming knowledge (Python and C were split into two-halves during the first trimester). i'm the type of person that needs to master one aspect of a topic before moving on to the next instead of "feeling" for everything.

• How do you prioritize foundational learning when deadlines are constant?

How do I transition from "report specialist" to the technical core without risking the grade?

i value everyone's feedback, and i appreciate your time coming to the end of this post. i apologize if i sound whiny, as i've genuinely tried my best on my end, but it seems that nothing is coming into fruition, especially the programming/coding aspect. Do let me know how i can improve myself and how to better prepare for the fast-paced curriculum. :)

I’m planning to take Computer Engineering in college, but I’m feeling a bit hesitant because of what people online are saying about the course.

Should I continue or look for another course I can take?

Edit: I’m worried about people saying that since CE is a combination of EE and CS you only get mediocre at both, and don’t actual excel or specialized in one. Making it harder for you to compete in the very competitive job market as you don’t specialized in any of the two.

As someone who don’t know what I want to pursue in the future I am worried that if by chance I want to pursue software I might fall behind others that took CS and the same can be said if I choose hardware