4 ms·

When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career), I became an aged car

by mrlyc 10y ago

When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career), I became an aged carer for my disabled mum. I learned a lot about cleaning, gardening and adding subtitles to films as she is going deaf. I also learned a lot about editing spoken word audio files for pacing, volume and noise reduction as she wrote a memoir then recorded an audio version. In the future, I could be an aged carer as I really like looking after people, although it doesn't pay well and there can be a lot of poo to deal with. On the other hand, one of my former managers has been working at Google for about ten years and is quite enthusiastic about my working with him there. Unfortunately, they are in California and I am in Melbourne so I'd have to move.

kbart 10y ago
"When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career)" Strange, why do you say so? We live in the era of IoT and everything has at least one chip inside them. I also do system/embedded programming, but never felt the lack of possibilities to advance my career.
- planteen 10y ago
  I'm also systems/embedded and the OP made me a bit nervous. I have been primarily writing C (with some C++ and other languages) for my career of ~8 years. It seems like there are enough jobs available. Certainly not as many as web dev, but at the same time I have been able to work on things I consider interesting (spacecraft, MRI, automotive). OP, what do you wish you had done differently? Web? Enterprise Java dev?
  - mrlyc 10y ago
    It depends on where you live. Embedded and device driver jobs disappeared after Australia's electronics industry died and went to China. Six of my friends working in that area moved overseas, four to the States and two to England. I wish I had learned C++ but my KISS alarm went off when I looked at the language, which is a bit of a worry as we say downunder. I avoided learning C# as I found Microsoft's business practices to be utterly repugnant.
- kzisme 10y ago
  How did you get into doing system/embedded programming?
  - mrlyc 10y ago
    I did most of an electronic engineering course and discovered that I like software more than hardware. After programming portable barcode readers and interactive voice response systems, I wrote a Windows device driver at one company then applied to write Linux device drivers at another. I was strictly honest during the job interview, saying I wanted to write device drivers but I had done only one for Windows and none for Linux. The interviewer said "Writing Linux device drivers is exactly the same as writing Windows device drivers" and hired me. I found that it wasn't and faced the kind of learning curve that requires mountaineering equipment. I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own. Perhaps I haven't been reading the right software architecture books but it seems to me that very little mention is made of changing the design to suit the ability of the individual programmers, the way band leaders like Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller did with their arrangements.
    - saghm 10y ago
      > I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own. This is a pretty amazing way to teach someone something as complex as device drivers. It sounds like you did an excellent job mentoring him.
      - mrlyc 10y ago
        Thank you. Stephen was quite deaf (60dB loss) so we emailed each other all day, even though we were sitting together. When I noticed he was straining to hear during a conference call, I started summarising what each speaker had said. He thanked me afterwards. When he looked confused about something I said, I made sure to repeat it using the exact words I had used as he hadn't heard one or more of them. I noticed that other people thought he hadn't understood, not that he hadn't heard, and repeated what they had said using different words, which confused him even more. Stephen's deafness did not affect his work, of course, until management made him a quality engineer for our voice over IP project. With that kind of thinking, the company wasn't making any money and owed all of us six months wages. You learn a lot about motivating your team under those circumstances. I did it by emphasising the importance of what we were doing. Of the ten software and five hardware engineers, we were the only ones joining the software to the hardware. Apart from not being paid, it was a great place to work and I'm glad it gave me an opportunity to develop my management and people skills. Until then, I had been much better at programming computers than working with people and I was feeling a bit lopsided.
thecourier 10y ago
ETFPOS programmer here. yeah, it's easy to become obsolete in this area, considering most of the time we work with legacy code
- contingencies 10y ago
  We are currently conceptually iterating a user experience for a forward looking network of vending machines. The idea is the user buys food via smartphone app, pays via that, turns up just to pick it up (or a proxy delivery company comes and does it for them). So there's ~zero physical interaction, no cash handling, and like 10 different ways to pay, from digital currencies to credit card gateways to appstore in-app payments. We are very seriously considering completely avoiding NFC/contactless/stored value payment cards, which would essentially negate any requirement for payment hardware or related programming.
alexhawdon 10y ago
I'm hoping that this will be the 'solution' if AI eats many jobs. With an ageing population there's plenty of caring to be done. Hopefully society will figure out a way to value it more, so that it becomes a proper, first-class career-option/alternative rather than underpaid low-skilled work, or something that people find themselves obliged to do.
fjdlwlv 10y ago
Can you scale this to help other carers? Maybe a domain-specific website promoting ideas and tools

by mrlyc 10y ago

kbart 10y ago

"When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career)" Strange, why do you say so? We live in the era of IoT and everything has at least one chip inside them. I also do system/embedded programming, but never felt the lack of possibilities to advance my career.

planteen 10y ago
I'm also systems/embedded and the OP made me a bit nervous. I have been primarily writing C (with some C++ and other languages) for my career of ~8 years. It seems like there are enough jobs available. Certainly not as many as web dev, but at the same time I have been able to work on things I consider interesting (spacecraft, MRI, automotive). OP, what do you wish you had done differently? Web? Enterprise Java dev?
- mrlyc 10y ago
  It depends on where you live. Embedded and device driver jobs disappeared after Australia's electronics industry died and went to China. Six of my friends working in that area moved overseas, four to the States and two to England. I wish I had learned C++ but my KISS alarm went off when I looked at the language, which is a bit of a worry as we say downunder. I avoided learning C# as I found Microsoft's business practices to be utterly repugnant.
kzisme 10y ago
How did you get into doing system/embedded programming?
- mrlyc 10y ago
  I did most of an electronic engineering course and discovered that I like software more than hardware. After programming portable barcode readers and interactive voice response systems, I wrote a Windows device driver at one company then applied to write Linux device drivers at another. I was strictly honest during the job interview, saying I wanted to write device drivers but I had done only one for Windows and none for Linux. The interviewer said "Writing Linux device drivers is exactly the same as writing Windows device drivers" and hired me. I found that it wasn't and faced the kind of learning curve that requires mountaineering equipment. I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own. Perhaps I haven't been reading the right software architecture books but it seems to me that very little mention is made of changing the design to suit the ability of the individual programmers, the way band leaders like Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller did with their arrangements.
  - saghm 10y ago
    > I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own. This is a pretty amazing way to teach someone something as complex as device drivers. It sounds like you did an excellent job mentoring him.
    - mrlyc 10y ago
      Thank you. Stephen was quite deaf (60dB loss) so we emailed each other all day, even though we were sitting together. When I noticed he was straining to hear during a conference call, I started summarising what each speaker had said. He thanked me afterwards. When he looked confused about something I said, I made sure to repeat it using the exact words I had used as he hadn't heard one or more of them. I noticed that other people thought he hadn't understood, not that he hadn't heard, and repeated what they had said using different words, which confused him even more. Stephen's deafness did not affect his work, of course, until management made him a quality engineer for our voice over IP project. With that kind of thinking, the company wasn't making any money and owed all of us six months wages. You learn a lot about motivating your team under those circumstances. I did it by emphasising the importance of what we were doing. Of the ten software and five hardware engineers, we were the only ones joining the software to the hardware. Apart from not being paid, it was a great place to work and I'm glad it gave me an opportunity to develop my management and people skills. Until then, I had been much better at programming computers than working with people and I was feeling a bit lopsided.

thecourier 10y ago

ETFPOS programmer here. yeah, it's easy to become obsolete in this area, considering most of the time we work with legacy code

contingencies 10y ago
We are currently conceptually iterating a user experience for a forward looking network of vending machines. The idea is the user buys food via smartphone app, pays via that, turns up just to pick it up (or a proxy delivery company comes and does it for them). So there's ~zero physical interaction, no cash handling, and like 10 different ways to pay, from digital currencies to credit card gateways to appstore in-app payments. We are very seriously considering completely avoiding NFC/contactless/stored value payment cards, which would essentially negate any requirement for payment hardware or related programming.

alexhawdon 10y ago

I'm hoping that this will be the 'solution' if AI eats many jobs. With an ageing population there's plenty of caring to be done. Hopefully society will figure out a way to value it more, so that it becomes a proper, first-class career-option/alternative rather than underpaid low-skilled work, or something that people find themselves obliged to do.

fjdlwlv 10y ago

Can you scale this to help other carers? Maybe a domain-specific website promoting ideas and tools