Hey I’m majoring computer engineering in one of the best universities in Turkey. But we take a lot of electrical and electronical courses. Topics are like introduction to electronics ( pn junctions , bjts, mosfets etc), electrical circuits ( mesh analysis, inductors, small signal analysis etc) . And were solving real hard problems. How is these stuff gonna relate to my software developer side? I can’t see the connection and benefits of learning the page long formulas about drain currents. What do you think about them?

So i'm not up to date on the university terms but 'computer engineering' would to me include some info on hardware and circuits and etc.

Transistors = Logic Gates = ALU + Stuff = CPU

@N00bPancakes yeah hardware and software at the same time. Like I’m taking OOP and FPGA design and digital electronic circuits and formal languages and automata and computer organization in the same term

@Ranchonyx yeah it all comes to that at the end but what were using is the switch property of transistors. Why do we need to learn about their drain currents and how internals work

These days most devices that have electronics also run some code that controls them.

@borabinary because that's what computer engineering is about. It's hard to appreciate modern computer design without knowing how stuff works at the analog level, since digital is just an abstraction over analog. If you don't know that you'll have just a basic mental model of things and you'll limit out pretty fast (eg. analog electronics and device physics explains all of chip fabrication and also with that knowledge it's easy to explain chipmaking trends like interposers, TSVs, 3D integration, and chiplets). Also gives you a firm understanding of memory systems (why do we care about drain currents? Check out for eg. DRAM sense amplifiers and how critical they are to understanding DRAM performance, or SRAM buffer electronics) and buses, NoCs and other signaling hardware/standards (like pcie).

These are just examples, if you're working in computer engineering, knowing how stuff works will help you. I work with comp. arch. and FPGAs and it definitely helps me.

@RememberMe thanks man I’ll remember you! I don’t think I have seen DRAMs and SRAMs in a course yet. But when I do I will remember you and comeback

It is definitely an advantage if you know something about the circuits behind the CPU and get a feeling for electronics. But you are certainly right that some curricular are a bit unbalanced.

I had to learn a LOT of stuff at university that I deemed completely irrelevant for my later life.

I found use for every last bit of it in my later life.

5 years ago I’d have said this won’t help you at all. But there’s so much work in IoT right now it can’t hurt.

You’d be able to program end-to-end on a device to app solution.

Wake up and smell the academia. It doesn't mean shit. Back about 25 years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in uni, it went like this: electrical eng. made comp. sci. suffer through analog circuits class. Comp. sci. made EE suffer through C programming. Why? Enrollment numbers. Neither activity did shit for either major study student. EEs fucking hated having to learn C programming. CS students fucking hated learning a bunch of analog bullshit. It didn't matter. Both departments got to show they were "needed" and should be highly funded based on required enrollment numbers. Wake up and smell the bullshit.