Gateway Parts

can a degree in Computer Engineering be able to build a Computer from the Hardware parts to the Software?

lol ummm question sorta covers this part

Public Comments

1. yup!! Im doing that same degree right now and you start making around 60,000+ with no exp right out of college!! Its awesome!! Be ready to take mega insane calculus classes though.
2. You should be able to build the hardware and write programs. But you could be able to do this with no degree if you can read spec sheets and diagrams. As for writing the Operating System, thats ussually a Graduate level class. As for making 60 + thousand in your first job out of college, I can say...hahahahahahaha.....Ive been in IT for 12 years and it takes a while to get to that salary unless you are an excellent C# programmer, or are working in some out of control inflation area like NYC or Chicago or California.
3. Depends on what you take. Local company wanting people to work in assembly language with data structures went to colleges with offers of $75,000+ benefits and when asked if they could do it, they couldn't. They wanted to work in object oriented languages and SQL and push things around on the screen. Building a computer and installing software is trivial. Designing advanced processor chips is not. Designing operating systems is not. Designing and writing major applications is not.
4. Computer Engineering is split between Hardware and Software. The Software part originated in Math Depts. The Hardware part originated in Electrical Engineering. The Woz at Apple learned both as a hobby computer person. There were a ton of hobby magazines when the Microcomputer was starting up. Byte Magazine was King-of-the-Hill and told people how to assemble and program their own 8-bit computer. http://www.byte.com/ The magazines out today mostly push already made programs. There used to be Compute Magazine where you could type in BASIC programs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPUTE! There is a lot of joy in building your own Microcomputer and programming it in Hex. You can do it. Today. Cheaply. Here's an article by Al Williams that tells how to build an 8-bit computer from scratch and how to program it in Hex. http://www.hotsolder.com/labels/1802.html For more on how to write your own programs for the above, try: http://www.sbrune.com/COSMAC/Questdata_Vol_1_Issue_1.pdf
5. I actually studied this field for a while (before switching to software only) and I would answer with a very hesitant yes. Designing a computer from the ground up would take a single person a very long time. Someone mentioned writing operating systems in a graduate level course...uh not exactly. You might perform heavy maintenance or right a very small portion, but writing an entire functional OS takes a lot more work than can be done in a single course. Since some people mentioned pay, I'd like to point out that IT is not comparable to engineering in terms of salary. I received a double digit number of full-time offers by Thanksgiving this school year. The range was 55k - 77k including base salary and guaranteed bonus. The 77k position was in the midwest doing C# development. I know of no one from my school who accepted less than 55k, and I have some friends making 80k-100k . We're all bachelor students with no experience beyond internships.