I have an acquaintance whose company is looking for engineers, in Oregon. If anybody here is interested, email me and I'll get you in contact. The combination of a 6-figure salary and an affordable location is sort of unusual.
I liked the job description, very non-HR...
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Where I work we're rather in need of additional engineers, and I was hoping that one of you might know of someone who's looking for a job and would be willing to relocate (at least eventually, if things worked out) to the greater Medford, Oregon area (we're actually in Grants Pass -- 58 miles north of the California border along I-5). It's clear to me that all of you have a solid idea of what constitutes a good engineer, and that of all the people calling themselves "engineer" these days relatively few of them are worthy of the title. I respect your opinions a lot more than anything I might take away from reading an, e.g., Monster.Com resume, and would therefore greatly appreciate it if you could let engineers you know who about us if they seem like a fit.
What we're after is someone who possesses the following skills:
-- Solid basic digital background; knows his way around programmable logic using Verilog or VHDL.
-- Some knowledge of signal processing. For the project we're thinking of here, there'd be some basic matched filtering after correctly getting reasonably high bandwidth (tens of MHz) signals from the analog domain into an FPGA to do the filtering (i.e., should know after anti-alias filtering, sub-sampling, reconstruction, recall some bits of Laplace/Fourier transform theory, etc.)
-- At least some understanding of RF design. Should be able to "drive" a spectrum analyzer and network analyzer. Doesn't have to be able to design, e.g., RF amplifiers, mixers, etc., although it's great if he does. (Much of the work we do is at the "component" level using off-the-shelf mixers, attenuators, etc. Almost all of it is 3GHz and under.)
-- Programming experience of some sort is helpful. We tend to use LabView, C++ (which is really the "95% C" variety of C++), and Visual BASIC, but are pretty language agnostic so long as it gets the job done.
-- Knows which end of a soldering iron is which.
We have money (I'm not involved in money decisions, but I expect the ideal candidate could be looking at pushing six figures, and I think it's safe to say everyone here feels well-compensated), good benefits (well, OK, our dental coverage sucks, but medical is really good!), and generally good people. We don't generally care whether people have a PhD or came about their knowledge studying AoE by candlelight after picking berries in a field during the day, their age (being older probably helps!), etc.
We're looking to hire at least one and probably several people ASAP -- we've been looking for some time now, and depending on which project currently needs attention the official title tends to shift between "Digital Designer," "RF Designer," or "Test Engineer." The main sticking point is that Grants Pass, Oregon isn't exactly the best place to find technical people... although it certainly is a decent place for some of life's more social pursuits -- raising a family, hiking/boating/etc., being able to have a decent-sized chunk of land for yourself, etc.
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Sounds pretty good, except I already have a job.
John