CNN article on 50 best jobs -- #1 is software

Larwe,

What is the title of the book that you wrote? I am interested.

Regards Tom

Reply to
Teece
Loading thread data ...

International? You mean people outside the UK read this NG too? :-)

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Chris Hills

In article , nappy writes

Likewise FOX from what I have seen.

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Chris Hills

Thank you. My first job out of the USAF was "Engineering Tech" - I'm only certified as a Tech, but we did some stuff that could be construed to be engineering - but that's not the point. One time, a couple of the guys from the production line were passing by "the lab" (manned by me and two other Engineering Techs), discussing some sort of snafu, and of them said to the other, "Oh, check with one of these train drivers."

I thought it was rather cute at the time. :-)

Cheers! Rich

--
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Rich Grise, but drunk

[snip]

Didn't you hear that Fox is "fair and balanced" ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jim Thompson

I used to watch FOX news in the morning because Jillian Barberie is hot, but they've started playing that "rap" noise for background filler, so it's pretty obvious what demographic they're targeting. And I hate rap even more than I hate opera, but I hated opera first. ;-)

Thanks! Rich

--
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Rich Grise, but drunk

Pharmacist??

--
  Keith
Reply to
Keith

The "best job" is the one you enjoy doing and pays well enough to support yourself and your family.

I've known people who thought driving a truck was the best job in the world. My father was a trainman and throughly enjoyed it most of the time.

The real problem is not finding the "best job". Most of us Old Farts have already made good choices and are reasonably secure and happy. The problem is the current crop of kids struggling to get through college and then trying to figure out how to buy a $500,000 house on entry position wages.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

That's FOX11LA. Jillian is a miserable nutcase. Sometimes she looks hot but she's unbalanced and .. goofy.

Reply to
nappy
[snip]

Absolutely!

Just learn how nice it is to live somewhere other than in the middle of a major metropolitan center. Then nice big houses on nice big lots can be had for $150K ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jim Thompson

Sorry to be nit-picking, but you are misspelling it. It is not "FOX", but "FAUX", "Faux News", etc.

Reply to
Roberto Waltman

Well, some parts can get tedious, depending on your preferences, but the only ones that really annoy me are parts lists and test procedures.

Actually, some interesting things can be done in FPGAs alone these days, without procedural programming. Interesting and stunningly fast. That's one of the options a design engineer can consider.

But if all you do is program, you have no say about the other things. Indeed, you have no say about the program itself, except the implementation details.

And most anybody can do embedded programming... it's sort of routine.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

It's currently catalogued as "So, You Wanna Be An Embedded Engineer" based on the quarter-in-advance pre-shipping EDI stuff that went to amazon.com et al.

Read the blurb,

(be advised I didn't write this description but it's factually correct if rather more effusive than I would have written myself :)).

Reply to
larwe

You are making the important argument for why I think that embedded programmers need to have at least some passing understanding of electronics, as well as mathematics, as well as numerical methods, as well as signal processing, as well as sensor and transducer physics, as well as....

In order for someone who's more primary responsibility is writing embedded code for what is otherwise just an electronic device to an end-user, they must be able to accept specifications from physicists, electronics designers, etc. and to be able to understand the deeper intents. A physicist is not going to fathom well the numerical details of floating point, nor really care that much about the exact implementation details of his or her equations. But the programmer must be able to accurately reflect them in the resulting code. An electronics designer needs to be able to pass along a schematic and expect that the embedded programmer can navigate it with reasonable proficiency, as well as understand other specifications. Details about the physical model of transducers often are reflected back into details of software design to cope properly with them. And it is the embedded programmer which has to take in all this information and is often the last step in fusing all of this information into a final product that works as expected. They are at the center of this integration step and it takes a fair degree of knowledge to keep things from "falling through the cracks."

Often enough, this job falls upon an electronics designer. But it doesn't have to, if the embedded programmer has broad enough knowledge and experience.

I am not a designer, I'm an embedded programmer. But I continually study sensor physics, mathematics, signal processing and closed loop control methods, optics, and electronics, as well as the usual material associated with the core programming skills or required for current projects at hand. It's part of what keeps things interesting.

Much of it is, for an electronics designer. There are facets of it that may not be, but are easier for someone with broader experience in programming. For example, I can whip up a very fast multi-process operating system, with inter-process messaging, sleep and run queues, dead accurate delta-timing queues, etc., customized to the application in just a matter of hours. I just had to do this, recently, in fact. Not all electronics designers will have that experience to rely upon.

One uses what tools they know. "To a man with a chainsaw, everything looks like a tree." If you only know some programming skills, you will apply them to every project ahead of you and you won't even know what other tools might exist to improve the project. Someone who specializes on the embedded side, but with good familiarity on all the same issues that an electronics designer must cope with (however, with a different emphasis), can apply a broader range of tools to the trade and, in some cases, help make a better overall product working as part of a team.

There remains a lot of creativity available on the programming side, but I think the real fun comes in always finding new ways to stretch yourself. In my case, it's learning about what surrounds embedded programming work. And that's not so routine.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Right. The more narrowly you define your function, the less control and creative influence you have. If you like that, fine. Some people like to add layers of abstraction to further restrict their range of vision.

Agreed. I think it's fun to research the application's science or construction or cooling or whatever, and it certainly makes for better hardware and software designs. This is "engineering" in the broad sense, understanding and solving the true problem, not just grunting out a box in compliance with some requirements document.

Yeah, we just run dumb little state machines.

And if you do that well enough, we'll call you an "engineer."

John

Reply to
John Larkin

how trendy.

Reply to
nappy

You "design" maybe 10% of the time, while Firmware Engineers design an overwhelming majority of their time. Design is fun whether its software or hardware.

Bottom line is that hardware designers spend very little time designing anything.

Reply to
dungaree

You assume a *lot*. You don't have meetings to go to, bosses to report to? I've never seen *anyone* doing design an "overwhelming majority of their time". ...unless you're a droid and consider implementation "design".

Spoken like a true M$ software "designer".

--
  Keith
Reply to
Keith

Never worked for MS. Don't do windows. I'm a Firmware Engineer for last ten years with a hardware background. Worked in R&D labs for ten years.

Long ago I noted how little "design" BSEE's actually do, and changed my direction from BSEE to firmware.

I work for a small company with little red tape to waste my time. I "design" firmware the majority of my working hours. I've got large backlog of projects to complete.

Another thing I've observed ... one hardware engineer designing 10% of his time can keep 3-4 firmware engineers busy fulltime.

Reply to
dungaree

If you mean actually drawing original schematics, that's about right.

If you mean sitting in front of a PC and typing code, I doubt it. Most programmers spend most of their time debugging, which is hardly "design." I've heard that numbers like 20/80 coding/debugging is about the norm, but I suspect that a lot of that "20" is less than original creativity. Figuring out how to bit-bang a weirdly structured and badly documented delta-sigma ADC isn't high on the creativity scale, and they're all weird and badly documented. So most programmers are likely in the 10% boat too.

If it's fun for you, then it's fun. I probably spend about as much time writing embedded code as I spend designing hardware, but I personally find the hardware part to be exciting and the coding to be mainly tedious. I hate to debug, so I use methods that require very little debugging of either.

And somehow manage to design everything.

Racecar drivers spend very little of their time racing, trial lawyers spend very little of their time in court, and bulls spend very little of their time making calves.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.