What do computer engineers do ?

Computer engineers are hardware hackers who work on making hardware "Do things." For example, they can program the thermostat in your house to be remotely controlled via your iPhone. They are heavy on the programming side and on the hardware side. They work with chips, IC's, and other gadgetry. They tinker with things. Soldering, oscilloscopes, bread boards, and getting zapped by electricity are just some of the fun things we get.

If you want to get started in computer engineering, you should take a look at the awesome freedom-loving folks over at Arduino. http://www.arduino.cc/

See that thing in the palm of that dude's hand? Yeah, that's what they play with on the side. Using that little thing and plenty of reading, amateur's such as yourself can make earthquake detectors, lawnmowers, credit card readers, and all kinds of other fun stuff. The most fun part is playing pranks. I built this device in high school that made cricket chirping sounds and put it in the teacher's room. She couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. The Principal called in the exterminator 4 times and they still couldn't find it. It was great. After doing it for about 5 years, Intel will look at you and go, "oh wow."

Computer engineering is the creation and improvement of hardware/software interface, chips, memory, FPGA, and the "architecture" inside your computer. Computer engineers work many capacities in designing computers (including desktop computers, mainframe computers, routers, smartphones, and any specialty devices), improving performance for computers, or helping companies make use of computers.

For additional information, you can check out the "computer engineering" entry in wikipedia here, and this nice explanation of the difference between computer engineering and electrical engineering in this Quora post: here.

I was an engineering major in college and now I hire computer engineers for my businesses.

There are different types of computer engineers. Some computer engineers spend a lot of time designing hardware and chips, and they spend a lot of time with advanced (and very exciting to use) tools like CAD, circuit design and circuit layout tools. These are typically programs that run on high performance computers and sometimes supercomputers. Other computer engineers focus on the low level operation of the semiconductor chip itself, and design arithmetic logic flows and design chip building blocks like Flip-Flops, NAND memory cells, ALUs (arithmetic logic units), and advanced building blocks like pipelines, carry look-ahead logic, and multiprocessor RAM synchronization. All of these concepts sound big and complex but when you visualize them and start playing with them, they're fascinating and very approachable.

You can also find similar answers on the question: "What does a computer engineer do on a day-to-day basis?" http://careervillage.org/questions/694/what-does-a-computer-engineer-do-on-a-day-to-day-basis?page=1#736

well i'm a 7th grader at Oms north in Kentucky and Computer engineers they make and work through the computer system using many things.

Computer is very much useful but really dumb , so computer engineer makes it intelligent , so that it can perform the required task in a perfect way . Way to make computer smarter is by programming to do some work .