OT: Career prospects in Electronics?

Depends on your level of experience, and whether you have a fire in your belly. I've been blessed with probably five or six technician-level folks that I learned a lot from at various points. For instance:

1. The late lamented Brian Alexander Murray, who taught me how to tune filters among many other things ("First get the right number of bumps spread out over the right bandwidth, and _only then_ tune to get the right shape.")
2. A woman at IBM Yorktown (anonymous since she's still around) who both helped me and taught me a great deal about semiconductor processing. That's where I learned to write my own s/c run sheets.
3. A guy, also at IBM, with whom I did a lot of my early electro-optical work. He went the opposite way from you, and is now mainly doing I/T stuff.

I haven't had a lot of problems working with technicians, but throughout my career I've been blessed to be surrounded by good people.

A technician is to an engineer as a nurse is to a doctor. Both have important things to do, and in an environment of mutual respect, neither lords it over the other.

I've heard stories of bearded Harley-riding technicians with chips on their shoulders, who thought all the engineers were morons, and OTOH I've seen places where the MDs or astronomers were king of the hill, and the engineers and technicians who made the work possible were regarded as lower than whale droppings on the bottom of the ocean.

So the short answer is, it depends a great deal on where you wind up working. May you have great success in your new career!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Where are you located?

There are no formal educational requirements for "engineer", although most are BSEEs, but some have associates degrees, or no degree. I don't think Jim Williams had a degree (but sometimes that showed.)

I think there is an undersupply of analog electronics techs and engineers, at least on the west coast.

Self-taught is good, but some mathematical rigor, forced to learn in a classroom, is pretty much required for an engineering position. Some physics, circuit theory, Signals&Systems sort of stuff.

One interesting career path is to be an "application engineer" for some electronic gadget company, or for a distributor. An AS degree would probably be OK. You'd meet a lot of people and solve a lot of problems, and maybe meet and impress your next employer.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation

How much stuff have you blown up? As the saying goes, "Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."

It does give you a chance to play with a wider range of equipment, and some of the theoretical background will be good as well.

Depending on your budget, timeframe, location, etc, it might be an idea to at least look at the possibility of going on to get a BS Electrical Engineering. This traditionally takes at least two years longer than the associate's degree and will involve copious amounts of math and theory. But the pay can be a lot better when you get done.

The salary depends on lots of things including location. Here in the Midwest (Missouri, Kansas), right now, I'd ballpark in the $35-$40k/year range. Or, ballpark a 10% to 25% discount from what a new BS Comp Sci graduate makes, or maybe 20% to 30% discount from what a new BS Electrical Engineering makes.

Security is OK-ish. At a few jobs there were techs that had been with the company 20 years, but that seems to be the exception... 5 to 10 years is probably more common. More comments on this below.

Just as a background on where I'm coming from, I have a BS Comp Sci. I have mostly written software for embedded electronics; quite often I was writing the software in the same building that the hardware was being assembled, tested, and shipped from.

Some popular specializations or subdivisions of "tech" include...

Field tech. This can be for new installs or for repair work. It involves a lot of travel, and usually a lot of time pressure to get the thing working again, especially for repair work. New installs tend to come in waves - some company decides to expand into a few new states, or roll out the latest equipment to their existing sites, so they hire a wad of techs for several months. The pay is good while it lasts, but then everybody gets laid off when that rollout is done.

If you can handle the travel, this can be kind of fun. Having good support from the mothership (test equipment, spare parts) is also helpful. For some things you might need to work outdoors or in sketchy parts of town or at weird hours. One thing that you will run into is that the boss wants to hire dumb (cheap) techs that don't know anything, whereas the engineers on the mothership greatly appreciate smarter techs that check the obvious stuff before calling for help.

Production tech. Assembling and testing new devices. This doesn't exist for consumer goods in the US anymore. (And even if it isn't a mass consumer good, try not to pick a product that is in the process of being replaced by a smartphone.) It does exist for aerospace and defense, and for some industrial-controls stuff. The aerospace and defense market follows the wars (2003ish-2010ish was great for it), and the industrial stuff follows the general economy - are manufacturers building or overhauling factories at the moment or not.

For the defense stuff, it helps if you are a US citizen and can get a security clearance (no drugs, no big criminial record). You don't have to get the clearance on your own; if a company requires one, they will hire you conditionally while they do the paperwork for it. They may require you to reimburse them for some of the costs if you don't stay employed with them for a minimum amount of time.

There is kind of a subdivision of "production tech" into component- level assembly (which is usually little old ladies with soldering irons) and system-level assembly (getting modules from the little old ladies, building up the complete device, and testing it).

Repair tech. Repairing and overhauling devices either under warranty or not, but at pretty much the same place every day. This happens a little bit for consumer goods but a lot for aerospace/defense and industrial controls. Sometimes it is component-level repair, sometimes it is module-level, sometimes it's just dusting stuff off and recalibrating it. Can also be cyclical, but sometimes the reverse of "production tech" - if peace has broken out all over, or if the economy sucks, sometimes there is more interest in repairing existing equipment than buying new.

I hope this helps!

Matt Roberds

Thanks a lot you guys, this has been very helpful and (most of all) encouraging. Some more background on myself:

I turn 40 this year, which is why going for a BSEE seems a bit daunting. I'm single and work full time, and sometimes I worry that a "2 year program" might end up taking me more like 3 or 4 years as it is. I'm probably about average intelligence so I will have to put effort into it- no whiz kid coasting along.

I have no formal training in Comp Sci or any IT related stuff, so there are no breaks there. I've done various types of tech support, server administration, networking stuff and loads of refurbishing. Currently, I work for an electronics recycler, refurbisher and reseller. I'm the guy that removes all the previous customer data and returns the device (network, server, etc) back to factory defaults. I'm also the guy in the organization that figures out HOW to do all this when we see new equipment, and writes the documentation so I can train others. I do some module/FRU level troubleshooting but I haven't had to break out a soldering iron or anything there. It's not a bad gig at all, but I'm getting bored of it and I foresee changes in the industry that could eliminate guys like me in 5-7 years (and I don't want to move into management).

As John Larkin stated, the academic classroom drudgery of physics, circuit theory, (and some bolstering up of math skills) is something I could certainly use. I have blown some stuff up and in most cases I can figure out why, but not always.

At home, I tinker off and on when I have the time or desire. Most of what I do is guitar effects, amplifiers, filters and audio equipment. I've played around with some logic-level stuff and I have an interest in analog radio (though I bet that as time moves forward, radio installations will shift more and more towards digital/packet based). The other impediment I might have getting into radio is that I'm afraid of heights. I can code a bit in C but I haven't played around with any microcontrollers yet.

If I had had different luck coming out of high school (and had made some different choices than the ones I did) I probably would have had a decent shot at a regular Comp Sci degree or (better yet) something involving robotics and long range radio. The likelihood of me getting in on Mars Rovers and things NOW is pretty slim, but it's something I think about once in awhile. I live in Wisconsin now, but I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and I intend to return there at some point.

Another reason I was thinking "tech" level instead of "engineering"... I was told once that EEs mostly do pie-in-the-sky simulations on computers and never really touch any components themselves, whereas the techs are the ones doing all the hands-on physical prototyping, installing, testing, calibrating, etc. I don't know how true that is, but if I had to pick one or the other I'd probably enjoy the hands-on bit more. A mix of design and hands-on would be ideal, if it exists.

Thanks again for the responses.

-J

We don't have any engineering techs in our company. We engineers do our own breadboarding and testing.

I did these with a Dremel and solder and crazy glue and stuff.

It is satisfying to do stuff with your own hands.

A lot of companies do have development techs, who do stuff like building and testing prototypes for engineers. A lot of engineers, as you mention, do simulations and push paper around.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation

One job you might consider is engineering support at a university lab or department. This will not pay as much as industry, but can be very interesting due to the broad variety of needed support. In my case, I worked in a hearing research department. (I had a degree, but the department also included a technician and a non-degreed engineer.)

Since almost everyone else in the department had medical or biology backgrounds, they needed all kinds of help when it came to actually getting things done, like setting up sound transducers, stimulus signal generation, data acquisition, etc, etc. Always something new.

And of course there was often a need for troubleshooting equipment (besides that which we built in-house). Some engineers may look down their noses at this "low level" stuff, but it made a nice break from long-term projects and was often fun puzzle-solving. You also got to see the innards of a wide variety of equipment, which was also educational. Plus, there was a nice ego boost pulling someone's fat out of the fire, keeping their experiment running right. (Even fixing boring stuff like "the guinea pig chewed through the electrode cable and we're right in the middle of a critical experiment" could be pleasant when the animal technician was cute!)

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v7.50 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator Science with your sound card!

Like my father always said, "Find a hobby that some one pays you for, and you'll never have to work a day in your life."

Or, like my grandfather said, "Learn and keep learning. It's the one thing they can NEVER take away from you. And if you do lose it, well it won't matter much anyway." He also said, "Sell knowledge. It's the one thing you can sell and still keep."

That said, if you go to school [you already have taught yourself a lot] here were three tips that helped me:

1. Do not learn from the standpoint someone is pouring knowledge into your brain, but learn as though you must go home and teach somenone else. That samll 'twist' to what you hear in class will make a lot fo difference.
2. Read the lesson ahead. Even if it makes NO sense. Read it. Then, when you go into the lecture about the subject and listen to the Prof; it's like you're putting information into 'empty' cubbyholes your brain created the night before as you read ahead. Rather than listening to the lecture and your brain must make cubbyholes and THEN fill them, much slower.
3. write copious notes. then transcribe those notes into legible form later the same day. While it's still fresh in your mind, you'll be surprised at all that you missed. [I actually developed the ability to be writing almost five minutes behind the prof in attempts to keep up, wasn't really listening at the time, only paid attention during the transcription process. Once after a class, a student lamented at missing several lectures and asked the prof for notes, which he didn't have. I volunteered my rewritten notes, which he jumped at, but what caught me off guard was the prof wanted a copy too, ...so he could write a book.

Not often US students, but foreign students know how to form great study groups, go for it if you can. It seemed the US students could never form effective groups, because they had the idea 'me' against 'you', whereas the foreign students had the idea of 'us' against this 'wall of knowledge'. Competition has its place, but not relative competition in school.

Also, when selecting a career, think in terms of supplying something that cannot be gotten from another 20 miles away. THEN you'll always have work.

Neat pics of neat stuff! I hope that by me referring to Engineer's work as "pie in the sky" that it didn't sound pejorative. I didn't mean that way, I was just stating which of the two I would enjoy more.

-J

If you're single and have no kids or significant debt, then you might be able to afford to quit work and live in student housing while you're getting a 4-year degree.

I'm not saying you _should_, or even that you should tell me why not, it's just something to think about.

If you're not exaggerating what you're saying about yourself you're good engineer material, and there's always a place for an engineer who's got good hands-on skills.

--

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

Understood. If you end up having a choice of Associate's programs, and one offers some amount of credit transfer to a place where you can get a BSEE and another one doesn't, it might be worth picking the credit transfer one. That way at least the option is there.

The march of the tablets? Warranty/licensing/upgrade-prevention timers built into the UEFI BIOS? :)

If you 1) get your tech degree, 2) get a PhD in writing advertising copy, and 3) have absolutely no ethics whatsover, one can apparently make a lot of money selling gold-plated speaker cables and stuff to audio piles. :)

Cell phone and two-way radio companies often just hire out the tower work. Somebody else puts up the tower, climbs the tower, hangs the antennae, and runs the cables down to the shack at the bottom. It might be your baby to figure out that they labeled the cables wrong, but you can do that with test equipment in the shack and/or by walking around. So not liking heights is not an absolute impediment to radio.

In my experience, this depends heavily on the size of the company. Some big companies work as you describe. At mid-sized and small companies, the EEs spend time on the simulator, schematic capture, and board-layout programs, but they also help the techs build test fixtures, go out and fix problems in production, etc.

It also depends somewhat on the "culture", which is a little bit harder to define. I have had to explain to the senior EE why it was a bad idea to put male plugs on both ends of the power supply cord. At a different company, I watched the senior EE having a lot of fun in the middle of a pile of signal generators and spectrum analyzers, tweaking his new RF design.

Matt Roberds