Bob Bellinger left EE Times with a big hole to fill. He shepherded this section from a minor afterthought into a major force on the paper. But just as the name and logo on the section changed to TimesPeople at the start of this year, his decision to leave chilly New York for the beaches of Florida after 16 years here reminds all of us that not much remains constant anymore. If it ever did.
I'm taking over the TimesPeople section at a time when engineers have finally started getting some well-deserved attention, if not respect. We at EE Times hope to further that awareness by focusing more on the engineers behind the scenes. Whenever something big happens that has an electronics angle to it, we'll be doing our best to tell the stories of the engineers who made it happen. At the same time, we don't want to stop covering the ever-changing careers of electronics engineers. The rate of change in technology is swift, and the changes in careers are evolving just as quickly.
"Embracing Change" has to be one of the mantras of anyone in the electronics industry. I haven't changed employers in 12 years, but I've certainly changed jobs with fair regularity, as most of you have. When I joined EE Times, my beat was Midwestern companies. They made everything from Cray supercomputers to Control Data Corp. disk drives to Dale resistors to Chrysler's automotive electronics.
EE Times' editors made the wise decision that it wasn't feasible for one person to cover such a broad range of topics, so I started covering technologies, not geographies. I'm not sure if it's cause-and-effect, but none of those companies remained independent for long after that decision.
I've covered an even broader range of things since then, though thankfully not all at once. I plan to expand that even further in my new role at EE Times. I'm hoping to look at engineers who are doing all kinds of interesting things, whether they're creating products or standards. My associates on the paper and I will be talking to engineers who are pushing state of the art in their industries, making movies and changing the things we do in our everyday lives. In the latter case, we will be looking at the people who work on everything from our cars to the places we drive them.
In doing that, I'm also going to do my best to carry on Bob's role as EE Times' champion for you, the working engineer. And, I'm planning to follow another of his models: 16 years on this section and I'm out of here.
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