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"Historically", electrical engineers were the software engineers. You picked from a small collection of available parts which met your cost and design goals, a
by 01100011 6y ago
"Historically", electrical engineers were the software engineers. You picked from a small collection of available parts which met your cost and design goals, and you put up with whatever horrific software tools supported the platform. This was my experience as an EE grad doing embedded SW work in the late 90s. Embedded back then didn't get anywhere near the attention that desktop processors received. Toolchains, debuggers, emulators, library support... all poor. Expectations were low and remained low. They could be, because most embedded stuff was handled by EE folks who didn't know any better and often weren't interested in the potential overhead of any 'better' ways. Embedded margins were always typically tight, so there really wasn't a bunch of money sloshing around to fund improvements. You're talking about an industry where fractional cent savings mattered.
- joezydeco 6y agoVery solid point, and something I should have said earlier. I'm a computer science major that went into embedded by circumstance of working in a particular field, but we were always kind of rare. (I should have gone into CE, which in my school was a hybrid of CS and EE and would have been more valuable). The influx of CS majors into embedded now is creating a new field of innovation and also a new field of problems, like people trying to cram node.js into microcontrollers. But, if you saw the actual code that EEs would write, the past was way way worse.
- 01100011 6y agoHaha yeah, I was the young guy working with a lot of senior, senior engineers. The code was often atrocious. Those guys had a ton of knowledge, but software was just an afterthought to them. On the plus side, it kept things simple. Definitely a new world these days.