LTNS all.
After a long absence, I'm interested in hearing opinions - public or private - about how people here would perceive a career move that I'm contemplating.
I'm a senior-level engineer at BigCorp - technically I work in a firmware group, but I've been lucky enough to keep a generic design engineer title and of course as an embedded guy I am responsible for investigating, debugging and suggesting design ideas/changes in the hardware as well as the software.
Right now I have a one-time opportunity to transfer into Marketing as a kind of liaison officer - this is likely the best internal opportunity I'll have for several years (Engineering at BigCorp is very static). My actual title would probably be something like "product line manager" but the principal duties would be evaluating engineering's responses to proposals, sanity-checking timelines, developing specifications for hardware and software, as well as grunt- level marketing tasks (forecasting, presentations, etc). Basically a big part of why they want an engineering skillset in Marketing is so they have someone in-house to keep Engineering honest, and to provide some detailed design suggestions when Engineering gets into "we can't get there from here" mode.
Obviously I have my own opinions, but what does cae think about how this kind of title change would affect my hireability into engineering positions in future? The reasons I'm interested in it are partly because the career escalator moves faster in Marketing, and partly because I think that the department change will give me a chance to explore new challenges and basically exercise my brain more than I'm doing right now. (The industry in which I work in extremely conservative - engineering doesn't get to push any real design boundaries or do much that's "new"). Basically I'm grabbing at a passing helicopter to gain some altitude in order to evaluate and select a better mountain from those around me...
I fully intend to remain active as an engineer in the embedded field by continuing to write books and articles, and do consulting work, as well as my own personal projects - this will be helped by the fact that I'll soon[ish] be finished with school and hence will have a lot more free time.
I'd particularly like to hear from people who work at BigCorps, since realistically that's where I'm most likely to find future employment - SmallCorps tend to be very suspicious of BigCorp hires, in my experience.
All thoughts are welcome, including those of the "you fool, wash your mind out with MEK and get back down in the engine room" variety.