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Career Path for Embedded Software Developers?
timmgrant asks: "Inspired
by a love of technology I have always wanted to develop embedded
software for consumer electronics. I have just finished a computer
science degree and have now been looking for work in that industry but
it seems that every job in this field requires previous professional
experience in embedded programming. For those that have made it into
this field (or any other specialised field) what path did you take?
What steps do you propose would take me closer to my ultimate goal?"
Maybe in an abstract/theoretical sense "previous professional experience" is required, but in practice I have found there is an open position to be filled and there is a hiring manager and people in the department, and maybe someone in human resources and/or a recruiter, and getting the job requires convincing them I am the best candidate and that I can do the job.
As far as "professional" experience, I think experience having done something which was real and actually used for something is often close enough to "professional" experience. Nowadays it is nice that there are some relatively high visibility "open source" projects which can be used to get something approaching "professional experience".
If there is a candidate who appears to be a better "fit" for the "need", they will get the job. Sales is sales. Getting hired for a job is making a sale.
Design your own USB coffee maker or animitronic toy. Put a real robot in robot wars instead of a glorified remote control car. Break in by doing not begging
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If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
No sane software architect is going to unleash a fresh college graduate on his multi million dollars worth of software. Expect to do relatively uninteresting work like e.g. testing for a while if you are hired by a company doing embedded systems development.
Only when you prove your skills internally will they let you do some more interesting work. Also keep in mind that for the more cool kinds of jobs in companies doing embedded development there is quite a bit of competition internally. Nobody wants to do testing forever and the more experienced people usually end up getting the more interesting jobs simply because they are better at it and know the system better (it typically takes years to master even modestly sized systems).
Jilles
I'm currently working writting embedded Forth. My previous jobs were C++ desktop stuff.
The things that I think helped me getting this job were a good level of hardware knowledge (I was a motherboard tech with IBM for a year) and specific skills relevant to the current position (Forth and good maths as I have a physics degree). It also helped that there are very few Forth programmers in Australia so my employers had few applicants, especially as the R&D office is in a rural area.
I hope to use this position to gain embedded skills that are transportable to future work, so I dont mind the daily 140km round trip.
I have friends who do embedded work, and most of them come from an electronic engineeering background. They have a much closer skill fit than pure CS degrees normally do.
Most of the embedded jobs advertised, when I was last looking, wanted Embedded C & Unix experience or experience with a particular technology (ie networking, phones, etc). They dont ever seem to advertise for graduate programmers.
From an employers point of view (I used to be R&D manager for a small company) new graduates are a risk. Some complete their degree, but dont really like to code and you only find out once you've hired them. Also there is a lot not taught about professional proggramming in Universities, so there will be a learning curve. For these reasons you try to hire experienced people for the more critical or demanding areas, and let graduates prove themselves elsewhere first.
With all this in mind you might do best to try and find a position where you can prove your programming skills, and pick up some technology
skills on the way, so your second job is in the embbeded area.
Small companies will probably allow you more scope for learning and taking on new duties, so a regular programming job with a small shop that also does embedded work may be good.
Hope some of this is helpful
Peter
You need more than a CS degree. Can you read schematics, use test equipment, fix/modify hardware?
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I'd see if you can get yourself in the door by doing other work for them besides embedded work. Do they have some sort of GUI front end that goes with their device? Diagnostic tools? Or even in house development aids? If you can get any job working for a company you like, your odds are better that eventually you'll get a chance to work on some of the embedded stuff, especially once they know you've got some knowledge of the subject (assuming in that degree of yours you got some embedded experience :)).
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I have no degree. I was hired for my current job because I had taught myself linux and C. They wanted me to do some application writing for an embedded linux box. Later on, some driver writing. True, its wussy as far as "embedded" is concerned, but it was a beginning. From there, simple knowledge of C and assembly fundamentals were all that was necessary to do some programming for 8051 microcontrollers, AD18xx DSPs, and soon I'll start work on some code to run on an ARM core. In the meantime, though, they have me learning more about hardware via soldering together my own ISA board, at my request. =)
My suggestion is to find a job which involves minor embedded stuff while not being the main focus of the job, so you can ease yourself into it. Knowing linux, java, or other highlevel constructs can get you such a job, but won't be used too much later on when you get to lower level things. I think knowledge of an assembly language or two is far more important. (I still don't know x86 very well, but I learned MOS6510 assembly a long time ago, which I haven't used directly, but the fundamentals have helped)
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
Can't say it enough, working in your chosen field during college gives you a huge advantage in this regard. I work in embedded development, and my work experience during school was invaluable in jumpstarting my professional career.
During my junior and senior years, I worked at a laser printer manufacturer, maintaining and upgrading code for older products. It wasn't super glamorous, but I also wasn't just getting coffee for people, and I learned more in that year and a half than I did in the entire rest of my academic career.
After graduation, I had no trouble getting exactly the kind of work I wanted. I went to work on transportation projects at a major defense contractor for a few years, went back into the printer industry for a few years after that, and am now a senior engineer at a consulting firm working on several traffic management and wireless messaging solutions.
When I graduated in 1994 the market was already fairly competitive, and someone who had real experience working in a team with other engineers, burning ROMs, documenting software, and producing embedded code which ran in real products, had an obvious advantage over someone whose experience consisted solely of implementing linked lists and writing papers on finite automata. With today's large numbers of out of work developers, and the proportionately larger number of CS graduates entering the market, it's incredibly important to distinguish yourself.
Get a computer engineering degree with a focus on hardware (in the later years you can take specialized classes,) and while you're in school enlist in the cooperative education program and do your co-ops with hardware companies.
~ now you know
There is a catch 22 with embedded software design in that the development hardware is essentially unavailable outside of the industry. You can't just go buy eval boards on your own.
However, you can learn to write your own boostrap loader, and you can work with some of the free OS's.
OS work, porting, bootstrapping and driver engineering force you to work hands on with the hardware. Plus, the components are available off the shelf. I'd get involved in any of the driver or porting projects with NetBSD or Embedded Linux. This will give you a needed skill set for alot of embedded companies that are putting full OS's in their boxes. They are good stepping stones to the "for-loop" OS or the embedded OS's like QNX and VXWorks.
Someone you trust is one of us.
My education was specifically in embedded micro processor systems and it took me over six months to land a job in the area.
As mentioned elsewhere, even if they are asking for certain experience send you resume anyway. Many times what is listed in a job posting are what the ideal requirements. Often they will not find anyone that meets all of them. This was true in my case. They told me I didn't get the job offer because of my lack of experience. They ended up calling a month later to offer me the job after the two people ahead of me on the list that they did offer the job to didn't work out. One didn't show up, and the other was found to have 'imbelished' their resume a bit more then they could accept.
Finally, as mentioned elsewhere as well, embedded systems development is as much hard knowledge as software. You may not be designing the hardware yourself, this was true for my, but you had better have a real good understand of the underlying hardware and how it works. This also includes being able to use scopes and logic analysers.
I had a big advantage in that I originally trained as an electronics technician (with an A.S.) before going for my C.S. degree. The best thing you can do as an embedded guy is to know hands on hardware. I don't know how many C.S. grads I've interviewed who literally could not change a fuse, to say nothing of reading schematics.
When interviewing, I found many HR types separated the wheat from the chaff by seeing what test equipment you know. Here are some gizmos you should (eventually) be able to use:
- An oscilliscope.
- Logic analyzer.
- Protocol analyzer.
- In circuit emulator (even though other emulation technologies are squeezing them out).
- Voltmeter.
If you take any hardware classes or do any hobbyist stuff, beg your instructor/mentor to teach you how to use these toys. Often, the type/model of tool is irrelevant if you know why it would be used and what its limitations are.Even if you don't assemble or repair complex computer systems for a hobby, any sufficiently complex mechanical work can help show your ability to learn (knowing how to lift and strip a VW engine indicates you can take apart something complex, diagnose a problem, put it back together, and handle the myriad of unexpected problems that crop up in such an operation).
If you're looking into the hobbyist route, Windows CE (yes, the one from that company) is available for a free 60 day trial here. It would show a lot of initiative to grab the eval edition, play with it, and build and boot an old 486/Pentium CEPC (PC running windows CE). Don't start pitching yourself as a CE expert, but indicate you have "recreational experience" with it.
Finally, embedded development is (by definition) a multi-disciplinary exercise. Having some chemistry gives you a leg up in interviews at a company that makes blood analysis equipment, mechanical skills helps in printers, motion control and other stuff. And understanding how to work with marketing guys instead of against them lets you write requirements that mean something to a customer instead of just being an empty document.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."