Where Are Tomorrow's Embedded Developers?

An anonymous reader writes "In a similar vein to the previous discussion about the New York professors taking Java to task for damaging Computer Science education, Mike Anderson of the PTR group wonders why it's so hard to find good embedded developers these days. 'As for today's CS programs, it seems that long gone are the computer architecture classes, writing code in assembly language (or even C at this point) and engineering software economics. In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.'"

Comments

College Classes

[kmsigel]

I'm in my late 30s and have been doing embedded development since college. Back then we built finite state machines in PALs and complete embedded systems using microsequencers and UV eraseable ROMs. We both built (hand wired) and programmed the systems from scratch. Doing that gives you a very good appreciation for what's going on. That kind of stuff just isn't done much anymore in college. From what I can see, there aren't many good embedded programmers more than a few years younger than me. It looks like good embedded programmers (whatever their age) will be in demand and well paid for many years to come. :)

Re:College Classes

[adpowers]

Really? Cause I seem to remember creating FSMs using PALs just last year in my undergraduate CS program (in a required 300 level class). We also had a class where we put together a microprocessor, put it on an FPGA, and wrote low level code to run on it.

A number of my friends took the hardware capstone where you did even more of this type of work. It still goes on, perhaps you just aren't looking in the right place? It seems the CE and EE folks take more embedded classes than CS students, so that is where you should look. CS is a huge field, and not everyone is going to follow the story's author's preference of study.

Re:College Classes

[secondstory756]

I have to agree. I'm a computer engineer at the University of Illinois. It's the computer engineers that are doing the lower level development. I've had extensive systems programming (in assembly and c) and every CE here makes both an OS and a 16-bit processor. CS students don't see that stuff unless they elect to take it.

I haven't seen a speck of java (or even c++) in my ECE (Electrical & computer engineering) courses, but that's all I've used in my CS courses. Furthermore, I have a lot of friends in CS that know very little about what the actual computers are doing on a bitwise level. (I had to help one of them work on bit masking last weekend.)

If you're looking for embedded people don't look at CS, look at CE.

Re:College Classes

[turbidostato]

"It's the computer engineers that are doing the lower level development."

Of course!

"a large number of CS majors apparently believe that [...] both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.'"

That's the difference between a computer ENGINEER and a computer SCIENTIST. After all, complete turing machines *do* have infinite memory and cpu cycles. /me fastly ducks away

Re:College Classes

[xenocide2]

The trouble is, a great deal of CS graduates feel that Computer Science is the fastest way not to being an engineer or scientist, but to becoming a programmer. A disturbing number of my fellow students avoid classes perceived to be lots of work, which is exactly what this guy is asking for. Debugging embedded hardware is not easy or simple, and requires massive amounts of attention to detail to get anything to work at all.

Anderson's question might have been equivalent to "where are all the graphics programmers?" or "where are all the operating systems programmers?" but for one thing: this article presupposes a shortage to convince readers they need embedded skills, because PTR offers training in Linux embedded system programming. Frankly, the more important skill in embedded systems isn't pipeline stalls, but the Chinese language; most of the work has gone to where the embedded hardware is made: East Asia. Case in point: the only work this guy appears to get is defense contracting, where clients can't outsource / offshore the work.

Re:College Classes

[xenocide2]

This is what always bothers me about these "shortages" complaints: why do you feel the sample population you've encountered is a valid cross section? If you are a hiring manager, it could be that your HR dept. is failing you. Or it could be that your company's pay scales immediately dissuades talented programmers from applying. Can anyone honestly say they've accurately surveyed the graduating class of '0x?

Re:College Classes

[smellotron]

Some schools might offer good CS courses but the majority of grads I deal with know nothing more than buzzword garbage, and I am not alone in my views; I regularly hear associates complain that they can't get a CS person who knows their ass from an infinite loop.

I hear you, man. I am a recent graduate myself (UIUC), so I see this from the other side. Our program is pretty good compared to most things that I've heard on the net (and various people I've met from CMU/MIT/Standford/...), but a couple of things to point out:

• There were a good deal of idiotic undergrad slackers. I wouldn't trust these people to do anything except ride the wave of someone else's success. These were the ones who didn't understand why we used OCaml for one class here, or were expected to use Java at the drop of a hat (gasp, no hand-holding?).
• There were a few people that were adept at being thrown into a computery environment and just learning. This definitely isn't CS, but these people could set up subversion/trac/apache/whatnot on their home servers, or build a decent Makefile—in short, effective tools users.
• There were a few people (most of which ended up in grad school) who could really nail algorithms and "true" CS topics. Even though this is the heart of the program, I've met so many people who only came out with a weak grasp of the theory.
• There were a good amount of people who were capable of programming. Most of the good "true CS" people also fell into this category, since programming is the natural way to express an algorithm. These people showed up a lot in the higher level subject-matter courses, such as networking (yes, TCP/UDP/IP among other things), graphics (OpenGL, raytracing, general linear algebra), etc. Due to the nature of the program, there's not much opportunity for a lot of these types of classes unless you come in with a lot of AP credit or you stay an extra year. This set of people is probably the class of people that you've seen at interviews that seem like they have an OK head on their shoulder, but still don't seem to have a clue about developing software (which is OK, because it's a CS degree, not a 2-year trade school).
• No one touched assembly outside of the required MIPS coursework. My friends in Computer Engineering did a lot of low-level programming (mostly on x86), but the CS program only covered the bare minimum to understand the physics/logic of a computer, let alone be proficient in handling it.
• The only professor who cared about anything remotely buzzwordish was Ralph Johnson; that was essentially part of is role, since UIUC doesn't have a separate software engineering discipline. Even still, most of his focus was around architecture and decent real-world software design, rather than AJAX/Ruby/whatnot. Most of the people in his courses were the ones that had relevant software-development experience and would be excellent hires out of school... but they're still a different beast from the research-oriented curriculum that the rest of the school pushes.

Re:College Classes

[DaveV1.0]

They will come from people who bother to learn assembly and C and experiment on their own and can show their worth.

Used to, still could, but probably won't

[kninja]

Used to be an embedded developer for devices, but then I got interested in Ruby on Rails (it was much more fun).

I think there are probably more than a few people out there that have the skills, but have been moved into other paths by market forces. They will come back if you pay them enough, but that is unlikely to happen, so they will probably stay where they are.

There are not many Klingon programmers graduating

[arivanov]

The profession has become domesticated.

The new graduates are uncomfortable with: "Klingon multitasking systems do not support "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine." They have to use java, schedulers, vm protection, etc.

On a more serious note, to do real embedded programming you need to know data representation in and out because you tend to manipulate your data directly, no band-aids allowed. Until the embedded systems will support band-aids as used in todays college it will be a profession for the myopic geeks with grey pony-tails or the ones who are way on their way to well developed pattern boldness.

I've Heard of That Machine!

[chromatic]

In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.

Good for them; Alan Turing believed it too.

Re:I've Heard of That Machine!

[nogginthenog]

He was right. Until Apple came along.

Eh.

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'm neither surprised by this nor do I necessarily find it something to get up in arms about.

There's not really time in a 4 year degree (well, along with all the other crap that goes into it) to teach someone the kinds of things you need to know to be a good business application developer and to teach someone the kinds of things you need to know to be a good embedded applications developer.

A good embedded developer needs experience with languages that run "close to the metal" of the machine, needs to know how to manage memory, needs to know how the machine architecture works, needs to know how to perform optimizations within that world, etc.

A good business applications developer needs experience with languages that abstract or hide a lot of the above details in order to let them focus on business logic, needs to know a decent amount about databases, needs to know about software architecture and design patterns, needs to know about networking, generally needs to know something about UI design, etc.

Yes, there's some overlap.

Speaking as someone with a college education emphasizing the former and a career emphasizing the latter, I'm not convinced this is a terrible thing. There are a lot more business style applications that need writing in the world than embedded applications. That specialization and the need for it I don't see going away any time soon, but it's the exception rather than the rule, and I'm not convinced there's something holier about understanding the guts of the machine than in understanding how to design a complex system for extensibility, maintainability, high availability, or whatever best suits the project.

The problem isn't virtual machines

[PhrostyMcByte]

The reason for Java/C#'s popularity isn't because of the VM, it's because of the huge accompanying frameworks that allow for rapid development which is in most cases much more important than efficient cpu/memory usage these days. Build one of these frameworks for C/C++ and you will find it much easier to compete with newer langs.

how many embedded developers are needed?

[trb]

I'm an old school UNIX hacker, I worked at Bell Labs in the '70's. These days I hack software that controls robots used for rehab of stroke patients. It's not exactly embedded, since the code runs on an Ubuntu/Xenomai COTS PC, but it's similar in nature to embedded hacking.

The relevant question is, how many embedded-system hackers are needed? If only .1% of job opportunities are for embedded-system hackers, then there really isn't much incentive for people to learn to hack embedded systems. If embedded hacking is a lucrative field with attractive opportunities, then hackers will follow. We saw it happen with other forms of hacking, we even saw it happen with web-page hacking. If there is a need for embedded hackers, it will be filled (guided by Adam Smith's Invisible Hand).

Re:CS != Programming

[debatem1]

Yet I wonder - what is computer science without the ability to actually program the computer? Consulting.

Where are the jobs?

[Stevecrox]

As someone who finished whis BEng in Computer Engineering this year I have to ask, where are the embedded jobs?

I hunted around looking for any assembly/vhdl/c job I could find and only found one which didn't require 2 years expearence, they didn't get any message back to me until 2 months after I'd applied. I applied to roughly 35 "entry level" jobs dealing with embedded devices. None were interested because I lacked two years expearence. In the time it took the only one to get back to me I'd been contacted by a C++/Java company had a phone interview went up and been personnally interviewed and been offered the job.

The real kicker is the embedded jobs paid less, didn't mention any benifits and wanted more work out of me. I think the real issue is most companies aren't willing to invest in graduates unless its for business positions. It is difficult to get 2 years expearence when everyone demands 2 years for their entry level jobs. Which leads to a shortage since no one gets offered a embedded job so Universitys don't bother going into too much detail since 99% of their students will never use it.

Re:Wouldnt'cha know..

[Grishnakh]

I wish I could jump on something like that too. As it is, I have a CS instead of EE, and no real embedded experience. I did want to pursue embedded systems early on, but as my first job was a .Net related job, I'm pingeon-holed into .Net jobs.

This is a hard lesson to learn in technical/engineering jobs: be extremely careful what job you first take, because it will go a long way in determining what you do for the rest of your career. Employers always pigeon-hole people based on their previous experience. So if your last job was a .Net programming job, your next one probably will be too, because it'll be extremely difficult to convince anyone that you'll make a great Linux kernel programmer, for instance.

The industry killed the golden goose.

[GrpA]

What happened to the embedded developers? The industry got rid of them...

So if it doesn't have any now, then it really can't look elsewhere to blame anyone.

I started out as a R&D engineer working with video game technology, but essentially, it was all embedded work... I lived and breathed machine code and logic - to me software and hardware were one in the same, a symphony of technology with blurred distinction between the two. I remember sitting down with six spare GAL16v8s and a couple of low-power walkie talkies and a spare afternoon and built myself a radio modem for fun. That was the sort of work I used to do.

But there weren't many people like me - Assembly programmers were hard to find, even back in the 80s and most engineers fresh out of university just didn't know how to write real-time code in assembly language properly - didn't know how to write fault-tolerant code or build a spinlock as the starting point for your application. Didn't understand the necessity of understanding how many cycles an instruction took or how to watch for errors by measuring the duty cycle of the interrupt pin with a logic probe.

So the people who employed hardware designers (back then, if you knew machine code, you usually had a hand in the design of the system as well) found that it was difficult to get replacement engineers. As a result, they couldn't employ similar salary replacements and as old engineers got tired of being mistreated and poorly paid, they simply left and went off to do something different.

Industry responded to the lack of engineering by eliminating the need for the machine code engineers - they moved away from the embedded design with assembly to embedded design with C or even to outsourcing the product they needed, and the hardware got designed by dedicated hardware engineers.

Once again, any real skill in the area was lost as employers wouldn't pay for experience and the best engineers realised they would never be paid what they were worth, so left to do something else.

Then the industry got around this constraint by using really powerful embedded devices - basically a complete PC ready to run whatever PC programmers could write for it.

That's where we're at now. The skills left the industry because the industry wouldn't pay what they were worth... If you can make more money at another job (in my case at the time, selling PCs and Journalism) then why would you keep on developing hardware for a company that doesn't want to pay what you're worth?

I'm seeing the same thing now in Network Analysis... The world is full of network technicians (and I include many people who consider themselves engineers in that description, but don't really know how to actually measure things or understand the technology they work on) but has very few network engineers.

The solution for me? I got smart and moved to management.

I'm a lousy manager ( really, I suck at it ) but I try hard and for once, my contribution is recognised by the company I work for financially... And I have a family to look after.

Would I even go back to engineering or even embedded engineering?

I would love to go back, I really would. I can sit in front of circuits all day and build something and I enjoy every second of it, but I can't afford to do company critical work that won't feed my family or pay my bills.

So unless the industry is prepared to pay for skilled people, and by pay I mean pay them more than they would get being a manager or an accountant or even a journalist, then they will leave.

The other embedded engineers I know all did the same thing... One works on an offshore oilrig, another as a miner, one went to a call centre. One even opened a grocery business. These are all smart people and although they all miss working with electronics and embedded designs, they have families to feed too.

GrpA.