Salary Survey

3/17/2010 5:53 PM EDT

If engineers enter the field at a constant rate after graduation, most work to retirement age, and there is a little loss along the way, you wind up with an average age around 40. A lower average age would indicate either high growth or a lot of loss.

3/18/2010 2:53 AM EDT

I for one am hardly surprised by the age differences. I have watched first manufacturing, and presently product and test engineering slowly but surely being outsourced to India and China.

>Engineering undergraduate enrollment in the USA continues to decline, which, when one considers how the firmware content of products is growing, worries me.

I don't find this surprising, given the crippling effect of the recession, notably in California. I know many engineers still searching for positions 6 months to a year after being laid off. I personally believe there is a psychological effect working here as well. When children of engineers see their parents laid off, it does tend to sour them on pursuing a career in the engineering field. My own son has already decided he wants to be a doctor, and I most certainly respect his choice. But his reason did not startle me, because he stated he will always be employed in the medical field.

3/22/2010 1:32 PM EDT

Jack,

Your articles are always so timely to my life… Maybe I should search my office for a listening device!! {lol}

My son is a US Marine and he just returned from his second deployment in Afghanistan. His commitment to the Corps. is up in a couple of months and he has a decision to make, stay in the Corps or start his life in the private sector.

As such, he has grown up with his Software Engineer dad, and has picked up a lot over the years and is considering going to school to become a software engineer, he is intelligent, has the "right stuff" and his passion for the job is evident.

So I had him work with me on a few little tasks of a current project so he would get a feel for the job. The project has since fallen apart due to business mistakes made by the client, so he got to see the frequent outcome for an Engineering project, namely being canceled due to poor project management at the business level, even though the Engineers did everything right.

Given the hideous economic climate in the US with darn little hope of any form of recovery, coupled with the obvious mistakes make by the client in this project, he is now considering re-upping his commitment with the Corps.
That's right, young people view being "shot at" as a better, more promising career path than being a software engineer!

Sadly, while I hate the prospect of him returning to a war zone, I can’t fault his logic.
Over the years, we have allowed our government to export all the profitable jobs to other countries leaving us with a decision of poverty or working directly for the government, we have done a huge injustice to our children. (Not to mention the quality of the new products that are created, see Jack's previous column on quality).

Would I go into this career (that I have done for the past 37 years) if I was a young person today? Probably not.

3/31/2010 1:10 PM EDT

I guess I fall into the lower percentage category of embedded engineers aged under 25. I've been out of college for two years now, graduated with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Almost everything I know about embedded engineering I learned on the job. Some very generous veterans put the time into coaching me.

There might be other good reason why there aren't many younger people in embedded. In my shallow experience, it seems to me that embedded engineering is an art that comes with the years, not with knowledge of code or coding practices. I once spent three hours on a bug, digging through code from C++ down to assembler statements. My coworker (20+ years experience) took 5 minutes to show me that I was passing around a null pointer.
No matter how much code someone knows, embedded engineering is about the subtleties in the code which you can only learn after being confronted by it or coached in it.
People can't be taught this in school.
Sometime I look back at some of the code my classmates wrote in college, and compare the style to the code I see in the industry. I can’t understand the latter without some help.

In my first embedded engineering role I worked, it was difficult to get some coaching. And it's understandable at some levels; people are busy at their own jobs and so on, etc. But they knew I was no embedded expert and needed some coaching.
I didn't last very long in that role.

My job search that started after this was totally devoid of any desire to go into embedded, despite my passion for learning about it. When I was contacted by a recruiter for another embedded role, I half-heartedly agreed to an interview after I made it clear I was a newbie to the field.

The interview went great, and I ended up with the job, and I'm learning embedded RTOS's now. In the first three months of the job, I learned more about embedded than I ever had through my schooling or my last role.

At the risk of sounding like I’m calling all embedded engineers to babysit, I’d like to say that the working world of embedded should be nourishing to the new people. The honorable gray hairs out there who have 20+ years experience should look to take someone under their wing.

That’s just my two cents, and I might be totally wrong.