Need advice: want to enter the Embedded field

I would agree completely here. I don't know ANY Embedded Engineer who does not love to play ^H^H^H^H^H evaluate equipment and try small projects. Most managers of embedded teams use ANY excuse to get their hands dirty on the bench. I even know one manager of a region who nearly lost his job because he kept working like an FAE rather than a corporate manager

Use the money to do some of your own small projects. This will give you some technical experience. With your MBA you might even make a business out of it but this is NOT a good idea. You really need a little experience working for some one else first.

I would say "Andy" not "Andrew" It is not uncommon to get called a short or informal nickname but not usually a formal name.

Yes I think lots of Chinese and other Asians with names that are not correctly pronounced by westerners have done this for years. Bruce Lee springs to mind. (Now some one will tell me Bruce is a Chinese name :-)

8051 AVR Pic ARM

If you have 5K USD I think you could do one of each. For tools I would suggest using eval versions of the better commercial tools. Demo projects don't have to be large and knowing the main industrial tools will help

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

In article , Isaac Bosompem writes

There is a LOT more to it than academic marks. It also depends on the company. Usually they want well rounded people and in small companies some one who will fit in.

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

It may be premature in your position, but it's also worth thinking about where in the embedded spectrum you want to be. For example, PIC and PowerPC are both "embedded" devices, but the systems (& software) they run are rather different :) As another poster wrote, invest some of your $5K in a development board. Answer the above question, & you have an idea of what CPU should be on that board. When you're paying yourself, pick a CPU that's supported by free software (that probably means GCC): the cost of proprietary embedded tools is a big turn-off if you're buying it yourself. (Infineon, are you listening regarding the TriCore?)

Good hunting,

The easiest way to get internships is through your college. Companies are /constantly/ feeding internship-available postings to faculty heads. Make sure you get on the mailing list. Also go to the job fairs that are advertised at your school. Every recruiter there will be offering internships.

You can also apply directly on the web site of companies of interest. But this is more labor-intensive.

I would say that lower marks are more of a factor amongst large companies where Human Remains drones receive your CV (résumé pah, rule Britannia!) and only skim it to get rid of candidates with obvious deficiencies, such as low academic scores (notably one delusioned hopeful I saw who'd had 12 jobs in two years and never managed more than 6 weeks in any one of them. He also managed to spell "Security Guard" differently in 6 of the positions listed.).

However, in smaller companies (or more enlightened larger ones) then the person who will be hiring you may get your CV first and actually read through and see what you've got. Personally, in a recent graduate, I would be looking for an interesting final project and evidence of an engineering interest outside of what you had to do to pass the course. If the role was likely to have you talk to customers then I'd look for something to prove you were human and had done something that meant interacting with other humans such as sport or membership of a club. Of course, sensible managers should not allow engineers to talk to customers as they are prone to compulsive truthfulness.

I must say I would be interested in the academic achievement as well but I wouldn't let poorer grades deter me from interviewing someone who was demonstrably passionate about engineering. A good friend of mine is an outstanding engineer and craps electrons on demand but he made a complete hash of his degree by spending all his time on other projects. He found it very hard to get a job but has now landed on his feet after a good manager spotted him.

For my part, I did a BEng degree in Computing Systems which is a good blend of hardware and software and is recognised ( in the UK at least) as being superior to Computing Science for embedded work . Whilst studying I worked at Maplin - the UK equivalent of Radio Shack - and also put together private projects, mainly for Maplin customers. One of these jobs turned quite big and I managed to base my final project around it which gave some good interview fodder setting me apart from some of the other candiates.

As I neared graduation I applied to a number of large companies and went through several assessment centres where I nurtured my long standing hatred of HR drones. I had to get through all those before I could get to a technical interview with someone who would actually be making the decision to hire me. Incidentally, all you have to do is waffle on about team-working, communicating and understanding your customer to the drones and they all get moist gussets and nod knowingly at each other. At this point an MBA would have been good as the engineering roles they were recruiting for were intended to be traning for management in the future. Plus HR know what an MBA is but technical degrees confuse and frighten them. If you ask them which development tools you might be working with they look at you like a dog being shown a card trick.

I don't know if it's the same in the states buts 2-year graduate training programmes are quite common in large companies in the UK. That was what I ended up doing and it gives you a good general engineering grounding (depending on the programme) and lets you stretch your management wings if that's what you want. They don't expect a lot of work experience but competition is fierce and anything you have will be a bonus.

And then once you've milked them for their experience you can go and get a real embedded job and substantial pay rise.

I had the same problem when I got out of school in 99!

I initially was sending out resumes to the big ones (Motorola WindRiver,...) and though I got a few responses at the time, they all wer looking for at least 2-3 years experience. Today, the market is gettin similar again with many openings for experienced engineers (albei compensation is not as exciting as it once were, ie: stock options!). However, it is getting tougher for small businesses to find and retai quality engineers. Over the last few years, many mid-level EE/Embedde guys had to survive a layoff by taking lower paid positions with smal companies that hardly offered decent benefits, if any. Today that th market is switching back to an employee market, those guys are gettin substantially higher offers from the big ones (it happened to me), leavin unfilled positions in those small organizations. If I were you, I'd tak the following approach:

- look locally for small engineering companies. Maybe, driving aroun the business parks and going door-to-door to introduce yourself and dro you resume (talk directly to the owner/president and/or to the hea engineer)

- find a couple tech. temp agencies and let them find you a short-ter contract (it worked for a friend of mine: got a 3-month contract and go hired full-time at the end. or you get another contract and on and on.. some like it and make great money)

One thing, make sure you know your market value (salary.com) and do NO cheapen yourself! it doesn't create a productive employer/employe relationship to do so. Sooner or later, if you get paid peanuts, you'l be thinking of leaving (~6 month later). And the initial idea that you boss will eventually see your worth and dramatically increase your wage i usually not the way companies work. Be warned!

Good luck to you, and don't despair most of us went through this!

P.S: At this level, you should NOT have to pay anyone to find you a job! As an engineer, experienced or not, you will bring in value to you employer (they won't hire you otherwise. no matter what!): the more wit the experience but then the higher the compensation too. In the embedde world, I've seem many fresh out-of-school becoming more productive in n time than the typical 10+ engineer because they're dying to learn more an spend countless hours getting up to speed, and more often than neve exceeding expactations! So YOU are already worth the money you'll get.

Start working on projects and get your name out there. Invest in one of the small development kits. I like the atmel as you can get the starter kit for under $80. Get free web space and document what you do. If you can not think of gizmo's to make for yourself, have a look at any of the robor, rocket or other tech SIG newsgroups and offer to help on some of the projects for free. The idea is to build up a bunch of solid from concept to finished product threads. Submit your web page and the projecs to places like makezine.com for example.

If you are really stuck I will be ahppy to give you a few of my little pet projects. Many of them can be implamened on even the smallest micro, yet solve "real world" problems.

*** Free account sponsored by SecureIX.com *** *** Encrypt your Internet usage with a free VPN account from ***

Well, when you get a bench of resumes from prospective students, whith no relevant experience, the only way to differentiate them is their grade sheet. Everybody can and will say that they are "fairly good at stuff and have somewhat of interest in it". At least, good grades, especially at specialty classes, show a motivated hard-worker with interest in his domain.

Most newsreaders (even tin and pine) thread messages properly; the issue really isn't Google Groups. I really object to the copious and gratuitous quoting of long messages in each and every reply. We archive newsgroups, and message volume and size is an issue not to mention how annoying it is to see long multi-indented quotations on each and every reply in a long thread.

Regards,

Michael Grigoni Cybertheque Museum

Hello Bob,

Yep, that's how I landed my very first job about 20 years ago. In a field (medical ultrasound) that I had not even heard about and certainly didn't have the foggiest idea about until a couple days before the interview. IOW, when I saw the ad and mailed my application.

I brought a big binder full of schematics and photos of my hobby and university projects. About 50 or so. Lots of folks at the university said that would be stupid and ridiculous. Luckily I did not believe any of them. One of the interviewers was really interested in those schematics. Later I found out they had already put my name on a meeting agenda before I had even accepted the job offer and they had decided that I am going to finish their beamformer front-end board.

Regards, Joerg

DAMN! note to self!

Speaking as someone who handled recruitment for a while, I regard the ability to start and complete a degree at a good university with reasonably good marks as evidence either of the ability to work hard for a prolonged period or the natural talent to think of ways to avoid having to work hard -- both of these are useful traits and having people like that on board is always handy.

When my present workplace was coming out of its startup phase and we were hiring people we didn't already know (which is how we started off!) we generally tried to hire people with a 2i or above in their undergrad degree (someone else can translate into American ;P), and/or some postgrad education.

No degree, a Pass or a Third would invariably consign a CV to the bin the moment we saw it; a 2ii with good experience was usually considered worth looking at more closely. When you've got dozens of CVs a day coming in for one or two positions at a time, you need to have a fairly objective set of pre-filtering criteria. We were also fairly choosy as to *where* people studied and what the content of their course was -- a lot of CS degrees are getting either very soft or very formal-methods; our targets were people with "hardcore" CS-taught-by-engineers, Computer Engineering/Software Engineering, or EE degrees.

pete

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

I once had a CV on my desk from a candidate who managed to spell the name of his university differently in four places.

I've also seen people claiming experience in "Visible C+", "Intel 68000 Assembling", and one guy who claimed to have studied "Astrology" as part of his "Physic Degree". And the guy with 20 years of UML? Er, no thanks.

Mind you, the CV from a wannabe technical author that had 18 typographical and formatting errors on the first page caused a few chortles.

Of course, some people just want to mislead you. The guy who claimed to have done his HNC in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cambridge was shooting a line - what's wrong with Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology? Similarly, I've seen several candidates who neglected to put "Polytechnic" or "Brookes" after their Oxford degrees ;P

That, to me, is an indicator that when he's on the payroll he might well do the same. ;)

I deliberately avoided large companies -- I was sponsored by one on my MEng and spent too many summers working in groups doing tedious engineering that taught me nothing that I ever took forward with me. I don't like the "big company" ethos and their round-the-departments training -- it's useful if you aspire to general management but I think it's better to be thrown in at the deep end, myself. I knew I wanted to either be in academia or a startup - I did the former for six years and have been doing the latter for the last decade.

The

pete

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

Another alternative would be to come up with a product idea to work on and just hire yourself to design it. Save your $5,000 for a computer, a development system, and a soldering iron.

Why do I need a soldering iron? I am doing software......

:-)

I thought I had better ad that! :-)

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

On Sat, 1 Apr 2006 19:04:32 +0100 in comp.arch.embedded, Chris Hills [...]

The three most frightening things in the world: A software engineer with a soldering iron, a hardware engineer with a C compiler, and a manager with a big screwdriver.

Regards, -=Dave

--
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

Hi all, Thanks for all your interesting responses! I'll try to respond to all messages (there's 38 in the thread!) in a single message instead of replying to each message separately. I hope this is a good way of replying here.

Tim Wescott: I subscribed to the Servo magaz> I brought a big binder full of schematics and photos of my hobby and

50, wow. I dont think I could manage to bring that many on the table. Impressive!

Jim Stewart wrote:

about

I mentioned that because someone might suggest I move into a management position. In truth I like hands-on technology. I dont know if I would be a good manager (why did I do MBA? To stay in school). I would be a good engineer because I'm innovative and tech-minded.

your

I agree, I've thought on it before but cant seem to make up my mind. Maybe there's a way of getting a nick name without changing my real name. I'll think more about it.

Dave wrote:

I did do a project in the BS but that could be justified as requirement for a degree. I dont have anything else to show my passion, except! I've always had a soldering iron and multi-meter in my room :) hehe. I played with my walkman to turn the Bass button into a faster Forward/Rewind button, but that was just luck - no electronics involved. I love working with my hands, I used to open my toys (but maybe all boys do that). Here's something crazy I can share, sometimes I've imagined a little self-supporting robot buggy that stays with me like a dog. I have to work at home now at these projects all of you are suggesting I should, that will prove if I'm really passionate or not. It looks like that seems the step I should take. I would work on an Embedded job at $2/hour less than what I'm making right now because it would be more interesting. And atleast right now I seem to think I would not want to move into management - infact I've expressed this to friends before - What if I was experienced and they wanted to move me up, but I didnt want to leave my current tech job? I fear that happening but I think I'll be able to deal with it when the time comes; maybe I could keep myself involved still somewhat in tech and still be in management - thats for later on to think about. Right now as others say, I should focus on being techy.

Hi snipped-for-privacy@dogod.com I would love to hear your project ideas and start work on them. Many have suggested different ideas on what type of Dev kits to buy or CPU's to work on, so I dont know which one to chose. I want to chose the stuff that's being used in industry commonly as well so I can slip in when the time comes.

Is there no Embedded engineer working to implement new ideas? Seems like a good business idea to me where any civilian has an idea but would pay to have it implemented.

Ok so I guess at this point the only path that would work is for me to start building stuff: I have to decide which CPU's and systems to work on. I would like to chose those which are being used in the industry commonly. Sorry if you've already suggested some ideas but could you suggest again? I'll then start buying this stuff. I already subscribed to "Servo" like Tim Wescott suggested so I'm very willing to learn from you all.

Thanks again to all for responding!

Amir (or Andy :D )

Depends what one means by "management". I worked with a guy who was passionate about managing quotes and budgets; he was great at it, but it left me cold - my least ideal career move. However: if you're good at what you do, and can see "the big picture" clearly, other folk will look to you for guidance. If your superiors notice, they'll provide you with help. This kind of management is quite different... the ideal is that you do the planning, and your minions (under your guidance and your mentorship, and with your carefully-disciplined style ;)) actually do the work. This can be fun ;).

Careful. I've been there. "Civilians" tend to have grandiose and impractical ideas, and rarely have the budget. OTOH, occasionally one runs into someone with big plans, and a gift for securing real funding. My view: *never* accept loss-leader projects. They either pay the going rate (with/without incentives), or they find someone else. It's very rare for an engineer to invest work and see a realistic payback. It *can* happen, but I'd be wary.

Currently I think the Rabbit modules take a lot of beating. But: what floats your boat? What turns you on? What do you want to get involved in?

Steve

-snip-

your

That's easy -- just do what everyone here does, and start using it for all but legal documents. There are any number of names that get shortened -- that guy saying "hi, my name's Fred" could really be Winnifred Murgatroyd Flogbottom Smyth-Hyde IV, but he's not going to bother telling you that.

So do the same, and if anyone asks just say 'oh, my given name is Amir, but I go by Andy'.

--

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

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/