Need advice: want to enter the Embedded field

• Keep looking. Getting that first job is hard, so don't get discouraged.

• 'Volunteer' may be the wrong word to use -- see if you can get an internship. These are usually done _before_ you graduate, but who knows?

• Try to do your web design for smallish high-tech companies, and hang out with the engineers. Make it clear that you wish you were helping them -- perhaps when a crunch hits you'll get lucky.

• Companies shy away from new grads because at first most of them aren't worth the paper their degree is printed on. Engineering degrees will serve you well to the end of your career, but they sure don't help in the first two years. So do something real. Start reading Servo, Circuit Cellar and Embedded Systems Programming magazine. Pick something you've always wanted to do and make it work with an embedded processor. Then put it on your resume under 'Experience' even if it wasn't for money.

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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

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I agree with Tim and would add that I when I look at a candidate, I rate interesting projects higher than university degrees. I don't care if you did it in school, at home, or at another job; I need to know you can follow through on the details and make something work. Repeating Tim: "do something real".

Bob

In article , Amir writes

Spend the 5K on doing some small projects of your own.... see if you can market them.

In 12 months remember where you were today and take on some new grads :-)

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\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
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I'd take some of your money and buy some development kits. You can get a PICDemo board with theri hockey puck debugger for pretty cheap

If you want, spend some extra bucks on a C compiler for it. Or you could go the similar AVR route There's probably tons of 8051 and 68HC11/2 boards as well. ARM is common for higher-end embedded systems. Pick a CPU and start working on small projects.

I see something of a contradiction here. You talk about your love for the embedded engineering field yet then you talk about jumping into a management situation. Most (but not all) embedded projects involve one or two engineers with only a small need for tech management. Much more appropriate than management skills are documentation, support and tech writing skills. I suggest you forget about the management goal until you've acually worked as a hands-on engineer for a few years.

Withdraw the $5,000 offer immediately. The business just isn't played that way and you stand a good chance of getting burned. Whereever you apply for work, you should ask for at least enough money to pay for your apartment, transportation, food and clothing. If you ask for less, you'll leave as soon as you find something better, and your employer knows that.

I'm going to go out on a limb here. Nomex flamesuit zipped up.

Unless you have deep religious or philosophical objections, consider using a "westernized" nickname. Something like Andrew or Andy for short. In some areas of the country, it won't make much difference, but in others, there is an anti-foreign sentiment that might very well work against someone named Amir. Don't worry about your last name or even legally changing your first name. Using a westernized nickname is an age-old tradition to symbolically indicate your desire to integrate into the US culture.

Other posters have made good recommendations about how to get experience. I'd add that at the very least, you should buy a dev kit for a popular microprocessor, learn the tools, and do a project that you can carry around in your briefcase and offer to show during interview.

I would be happy to hire you for a year. Of course I can only pay $5000.

:)

How do you know you love the field? In the same post you say "I need to have a career in technology before I can qualify for a management position." You say you love the field, but you are planning for your management career.

Not really true. The prime candidate has 3-7 years of experience.

What have you done that shows this passion? It appears to be just another box for you to check on your way to a management position. Did you do embedded projects for your BS/MS? If not, where was this passion?

~Dave~

You're sending out mixed messages. You claim a 'passion' for embedded, but clearly want to do something else. Employers look at an MBA and assume three things -

(1) you've got your eyes on the boardroom rather than the lab, and will job-hop to get there. (2) you've got heavy salary demands (3) your focus is on getting out of engineering and into management ASAP.

And here you confirm your mixed message again. You seem to regard engineering as a bridge to getting into general management, rather than a worthwhile career in its own right.

I'm afraid I've interviewed many candidates who send out the same messages you do - you can't fake an interest in this kind of work through the close and sustained pressure of an interview by a real techie; you have to be able to talk the talk. You might get through first interviews by gullible HR people, but the moment you're locked in a room with a couple of grizzled veterans they'll see right through you.

If you had a passion, you'd be doing something in the field already in your own time - there are plenty of cheap eval boards and cheap or free toolchains; what have you *built*? - what do you have that can demonstrate your "passion".

Your posting was rather odd; I could've replaced "embedded" by "COBOL programming", "tax law", "plumbing", "orthodontics" or indeed any other specialised discipline and it would've read exactly the same. There was no evidence of any actual interest in embedded in it.

pete

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pete@fenelon.com [Support no2id.net: working to destroy Blair's ID card fraud]

Oh boy, do I disagree with this. It is /often/ the case in small companies, where everyone is highly cross-functional, but it's emphatically not the case for large companies. You need a tech manager just to keep track of the schedule and ISO paperwork (a secretary won't do - you need someone with the authority to whip engineering for deliverables). That's not counting the need to manage across departments. Average engineering project here - for small products - is one SW eng, one HW eng, one mech eng, one PCB eng, one mfg eng, one test eng, one HW QA eng, one SW QA tester or eng, plus disciples in some cases. These people need to be supervised, and it must be by someone who understands at least the rudiments of what the supervisees are doing.

However, I do agree with this:

OP should work as a real engineer before presuming to try to manage them. I'm lucky that almost all the mgmt hierarchy above me is real engineering people. Occasionally a non-engineering MBA intruder sneaks in and chaos ensues!

Shucks Jim, this was reverse spam on his part and inoffensive from where I sit. If someone says "Hi! Please fleece me!", you leave him alone. He wants to pay $5,000 for a learning experience - well, he WILL, one way or another! :)

Your point and experience is well taken.

I've mostly worked for small companies. The one medium-sized one I worked for pretty much let the engineers self-manage.

True enough. And ack the smiley.

Nonetheless, every time I've taken in an employee that said he'd work for free for the experience, I got *less* than I paid for. That was a learning experience too. I hate to think what it would cost if I

*took* $5k :)

OTOH, I now have a very gifted and talented engineer that came in the door wanting to work for free. His resume showed no engineering experience, but very good academics, good social skills and the interests of a born engineer. I told him I would not hire him for free, but I would for $15/hr. I dare not say more about the situation except that he's kept me happy with his work and I've kept him happy with increased compensation.

Hi,

I have a question to ask to employers (I believe it may help you Amir).

I am a student who will be looking for a job in this field as well later on.

I am not the greatest academic :), but I would say I am fairly good at stuff and have somewhat of an interest in it.

Do you guys actually take the students with the highest marks? Or is it simply a myth that has been circulating amongst my peers?

Thanks,

-Isaac

Speaking for myself, I'm more interested in attitude and desire to improve than marks. I've interviewed academics with high marks who had turned off, and non-academics who showed interest, enthusiasm, self-motivation and aptitude - guess which interest me most ;).

Academia and engineering are different pressures. When I see a CV for someone who's done well academically *because* of self-motivation etc, I'm interested. High marks are a part of it... not all of it.

Steve

Non-engineering managers may use GPAs to filter prospects. HR staff who have been asked to select five top-tier candidates from a pool might do the same. So it doesn't /hurt/ to have high marks. But you will not automatically see doors opened on the basis of a few numbers.

These two quotes (related to, though not 100% on-topic for your question) might be of interest:

#1:

"Note that there is a surprisingly wide variation in coursework offered or required by BSEE degree programs at different colleges. In particular, quite a few schools are much heavier on computer science than the simulated curriculum I provided above. Degrees that mandate a large amount of computer science (more than eight credits or thereabouts) tend to be hybrid qualifications with names like "Bachelor of Science in Computer and Electronic Engineering". People who take these sorts of degrees might have a very slight head start (versus holders of standard BSEEs) working on the firmware in relatively high-end embedded systems. Regular BSEE holders might be very slightly advantaged in dealing with fine-tuned systems that have significant hardware issues to be solved, and perhaps a lot of hand-massaged time-critical assembly language to tweak1.

This possible difference is, however, really only going to affect your first job when you get out of school2. After a year or two in the workforce, your useful and marketable skillset will be determined almost exclusively by the field in which you work unless you make a determined and objectively demonstrable effort at self-improvement (for example by publishing technical articles) in some other field. There are two major reasons for this. Firstly, and most importantly, once you start working in a "real" field, your learning and experience will obviously be focused into that field. You'll find that the skills you exercise in the pursuit of your day job will improve exponentially over the baseline competence level you learned in school. Skills that you aren't using will inevitably atrophy. (This will to some degree be offset by the fact that your general problem-solving abilities will increase dramatically).

Secondly, while your attention is focused on your field of choice, not only is your memory of those general college courses fading, but the practical state of the art in those other topics is moving ahead without you. For example, if you did any college-level computer science in the 1990s, you probably learned Pascal. If you then went away and took a ten-year sabbatical working on a farm, you'd have come back to the engineering workforce to find Pascal almost dead and buried3, even as a teaching language. This is perhaps a silly example, but it should illustrate to you that if you spend any significant time - two or three years at most - away from an engineering topic, you'll have to put in an appreciable effort to re-climb the learning curve if you come back to that topic."

1 - Note that I'm not considering here whether a prospective employer will see a difference between the two qualifications.

2 - Of course, it can affect your postgraduate study path, but I'm assuming you thought about that when you were selecting undergraduate coursework.

3 - No hate mail, please. I'm well aware that Delphi still exists, for example. However, Pascal's primary purpose was as a teaching language

- in which role it has been almost completely overthrown, mostly by Java."

#2:

"One parenthetical note about postgraduate study: The utility of higher education with respect to landing a good position is not merely asymptotic; it actually has a turning point. It's a good thing to have a bachelor's degree. It's a great thing to have a master's degree. Technical certificates, industry-specific qualifications and other addenda are fine (although not usually very valuable by themselves). However, it can actually be slightly harder to get practical engineering jobs if you have a Ph.D - even to the point where some people intentionally leave them off their resume. The stated reasons for this odd prejudice vary, but they include pay scale requirements (Ph.Ds are expensive), perceptions about Ph.D holders being best suited for pure research and development positions, and the belief that Ph.Ds are "professional students"."

Nice.

Steve

I'm trying to persuade Elsevier to print an edition of the book on janitorial-size rolls of toilet paper. Then I can arrange to get it put in the bathrooms at colleges and corporations.

You're quite, quite mad, and (from an earlier thread) you should be working (if nothing else, tasting all that wine).

I approve ;).

Steve

No, no, no; where's your English? ("People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse???") That's an irregular verb, and you're not declining it correctly:

I have a creative mind. You (singular) are eccentric. He is insane. We are losing sight of reality. You (plural) are smoking crack. They are certifiable.

Mmmmm. Wine.

There are six four-packs of Guinness waiting for me downstairs. I'll broach one to celebrate once a couple of my todos are out of the way, which won't be tonight unfortunately.

Pete,

You said some very profound things. I STRONGLY agree:

...

...

Eric

If you get straight 'A's that means you're good at studenting.

Employers want people who are good at working.

The people who will interview you will be selected because they are good at working -- and most of them have seen people good at studenting hired, only to do poorly at working. After you clean up some of the resulting messes you tend to get cynical about good grades.

I think your best bet, if you can swing it, is to get an internship. I have no idea how, because when I was in school I worked for my dad's company. This turned out to be a liability because, well, who's going to believe that a dad's going to fire a son? Unfortunately, I have no idea how one goes about this internship stuff -- perhaps offers of large checks to HR people?

At any rate, at worst an internship on your resume shows that you already have relevant experience starting out. At best you'll be useful enough that you'll have a job waiting for you when you get out.

If you can't get an internship, try _very hard_ to get a related job -- even if you're just a stock clerk, just as long as it's at a site that's doing design work _right there_. Once you've demonstrated competence at what you were hired to do, start angling for a job that's closer to engineering. The worst you'll do is piss of folks who weren't going to hire you anyway. At best maybe it'll turn into a real, or at least unofficial engineering job -- or you'll find out that you never wanted to be an engineer because all the pretty girls are in marketing communications.

If the job thing doesn't work out, build stuff. Nothing impresses me more in a new college grad than hardware. It means that you can make things work outside of a structured lab. It means that you know what the little '-' sign on an electrolytic cap means. It means that if you work for me I can sit you down and know that at the end of the day you may have actually delivered positive value -- which is the whole point, after all.

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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

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