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Predicting the Future of Electronics and IT by Watching Component Demand (Video)
A big question college students should be asking is, "What IT and electronics knowledge will be most in demand five or six years from now?" In these fast moving niches, an answer is almost impossible to come by. But what if you were one of the people who supplied raw components to the electronics industry? Wouldn't you have a better handle than most on what kind of devices and components are becoming more popular among prototypers and engineers? And wouldn't watching those trends possibly give you at least a little insight into what the future might hold? Randy Restle, Director of Applications Engineering at component supplier Digi-Key Corporation, carefully tracks orders and tries to determine what's hot and what's not. His reason for doing so is to figure out what Digi-Key should stock in coming months and years. But his insights can also be used to decide what you might want to study or -- if you're already working in the field -- what products you or your company should consider developing. Digi-Key also has an online video library where they feature new products and give ideas of what you can do with them. Even if you're not an engineer or electronics hobbyist, it's fun to see what's available but may not have hit the mass market quite yet.
If so:
No
No
No
and No.
But thank you for posting a summary that's nearly 50% questions!
what products you or your company should consider developing
So you don't know what others are developing or why. You have no idea if it is a good idea or even how to determine if it is a good idea. But you absolutely must do it simply because you think others are going to do it. You are a fucking lemming.
ARM designs the most popular processor architectures in the world. there is an ARM core in literally billions of machines and i dont just mean cell phones. modern ARM chips run anywhere from 12 MHz to 2.2 GHz and they can scale to run much much slower to save power big time (there is an ARM chip that rivals the MSP430 chips). now with the ARMv8 arch, i think we will be seeing some serious inroads made on the server market. of course, ARM will continue to be in everything from your coffee maker to the chips that the NSA secretly implants in people. :P
the past, present and future is ARM.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How the hell am I going to pay off my student loans by entering an industry moving towards decentralized. lowest-bidder IT and commodity hardware, where the labor market is global and comprised of people who have either been in the field for decades or can live on peanuts compared to you, where the brighest minds of a generation are bent on extracting pennies from stock trading algorithms, or coming up with new ways to make you look at ads, or engaged wholesale invasion of privacy.
Do I really want to piss away the best years of my life writing code for yet another tech startup with no business plan beyond IPO, making billions for investors while getting nothing in return? To know that, in the end, I made no difference in the world?
My advice: Make computer science a hobby, not a career.
Amen. If I could start over again, same circumstances, I'd be a fucking lawyer in a heartbeat.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
A big question college students should be asking is, "What IT and electronics knowledge will be most in demand five or six years from now?" In these fast moving niches, an answer is almost impossible to come by
Actually, I believe there are good solid answers to this one that have been true for a decade and will likely be true for the coming decade.
First off kid, you have to understand that there are a lot of fields you seem to be lumping together. There's a difference between code-monkeys, sysadmins, network engineers, electrical engineers, embedded engineers, and web-devs.
For any programmer there's a big question of which programming language to learn. This is something that induces flame-wars and strong passions because everyone has an opinion and their own choice is best. This is because it's an inverse tragedy of the commons, everyone wants you to learn their language because it benefits them and their language to have more users. But a binary search tree is a binary search tree in any language. Some are more verbose. Some are cludgy. But if you understand binary search trees, or whatever, the language used to deal with them by and far doesn't matter. Knowing the syntax of a language doesn't make you a good programmer. Knowing how to use the language to accomplish meaningful tasks, that's what's important. It's a little easier if you learned C rather than IBM RPG back in the day, but if you could learn RPG, you can pick up C without serious problems.
For Web-devs, they'll fret over... let's say... which CMS project is better: Joomla, Sharepoint, Drupal, Django, Wordpress, yaddayaddayadda. Conformity is nice and picking one is important. But you're a COLLEGE KID, when you graduate you'll know what goes into a CMS, theoretically how to make one, and how they work. If you just wanted to learn how to turn it on, you should have gone to a tech school. They'll hold your hand and read the manual with you.
(By the way I also have a thing against "certification". It might make sense for the sysadmin types, but a cert on a programmers resume is a net negative.)
Sysadmins, network engineers, and the hardware guys all probably have similar stories. There are common tools out there you should know, but god knows everyone and their brother make a version of it. Try not to tie yourself to one particular set of tools least you suffer from over-specialization.
tl;dr: It doesn't matter what specific component, language, framework, or gadget is popular in 6 years. You're in college, not a tech school. Learn the basic fundamentals of your field and whatever the hip new thing is will fall nicely into place and you'll understand what it's doing and what's going on. You need to learn how to use a hammer and nails to build things, not fret over which hammer is the best bet.
Over three decades ago I worked for a minicomputer manufacturer (sometimes known as Data Who?), in Field Service support and later in Systems engineering. Those of us in the field were able to put together a very good idea of what new products were going to be released, not from listening to the rumor mill, but by looking at the parts lists that were being published internally and seeing what components were being bought and assigned internal parts numbers. It's amazing what you can learn about supposedly secret projects just be seeing what the company is buying.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I was particularly struck by the cost per unit he cited for 32-bit processors: $0.49/processor. At that cost profile the possibilities for DIY swarm and fabrication projects is compelling; a vision of autonomous mesh nodes spreading throughout our cities, powered by ambient backscatter chips, and forming the ultimate redundant network danced through my head.
Exciting times.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I watched component suppliers to know how to make my stock investments. Knowing who is sucking up SRAM and flash memory is a good indicator of who's going to report good results a quarter or two in the future. The easy way to find out the availability of components is to put in some RFQs and see what lead times are given.
Scrap metal prices are a good indicator for the economy as a whole. When the spot scrap iron price falls, a recession will be declared about six months later.
Oh, I'm sorry. You were wanting to know what education to get? I was thinking you wanted to know how to make money. Entirely different question. Steady employment != good income.
Resistor sales are up. I don't know what that means for electronics and IT, but I predict the future will be warmer.
I'd be a fucking lawyer
That's a bit redundant. Aren't they all?
These days, even the law school grads aren't doing so well.
time to rethink college it's to long and can be theory loaded where the people coming out can have big skill gaps.
Real engineers use Arch Linux.
If I was a young double E student I would focus on analog electronics. Designing analog electronics is a dieing art. And it is art as much as electronics. Simulation only goes so far. Then you need to know the tricks of design and layout.
The old school analog electronics engineers are retiring and there is not a new crop of young engineers to take their place. While more and more things are going digital we will always need analog electronics to interface with the real world.
Analog electronics will become a specialized niche that will command big bucks. Kind of like COBOL programming. Neither of which are very glamorous but both of which are all around us.
I know this will sound like an ad for the company, but it isn't meant to be, just my personal experience with Digi-Key.
I was able to tour Digi-Key in Thief River Falls, MN when I was getting my electronics degree. It was incredible what they were doing there. We got to sit in on calls from customers asking just about any question you can think of when it comes to electronics, visit with their product specialists who get to play with the latest and greatest stuff all day long and see just how a company should ship stuff out to customers. That is probably what was the most amazing.
When you call in an order, their goal at that time (5 years ago), was to have the order picked and on a truck within 15 minutes of the call. Many times, people will place a phone order, call back 30 minutes later to change something and be told, 'sorry, its already on its way to the airport'. They even have their own hub there for a few shipping companies. Very impressive place. If you were to order a single resistor, they actually have them pre-packaged that way. A runner finds the box with them, pulls one, scans it and sends it to the person who puts it in an envelope then onto the conveyor. Even their conveyor line was very interesting. Next to every motor they had running the conveyor, there was a spare motor already waiting and ready to go. Even back then I think the starting wage for someone with an AAS electronics degree was about $18.50 with full benefits.
Because After the Crash someone's going to need to be around to rebuild, and lowest bidder IT won't make sense because the most expensive employee is the one who does not care.
Or, don't focus solely on computer science - i.e., being a code monkey. Instead, understand the underlying hardware and create tightly coupled hardware/software solutions - embedded software.
For instance, the video discusses GaNFETS, and the new power density they enable. Become a controls engineer and you can end up using these devices to make world-class power supplies (not to be confused with wall warts) that are used in electric vehicles, industrial robotics, and renewable power. There is still a ton of software that goes into those kinds of things, software development that can't easily be outsourced.
Start coding on microcontrollers. Master the ARM architecture. Understand embedded Linux and wireless networking. You can make (or at least start) an intellectually satisfying, remunerative career in this way.
...hope they (and Mouser) keep a good stock of Low ESR capacitors for some time to come, due to "capacitor plague".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Amen. If I could start over again, same circumstances, I'd be a fucking lawyer in a heartbeat.
You may be on to something there... a prostitute that also does estate planning? That's gold, Jerry!