His may not be a familiar name 'round these parts, but Jack Ganssle is a legend in the embedded systems industry. And he's very helpful to boot. Many lifetimes

His may not be a familiar name 'round these parts, but Jack Ganssle is a legend in the embedded systems industry. And he's very helpful to boot. Many lifetimes ago, as a freshly baked software engineer, I had a strong interest in Embedded Systems. Juggling interrupts, wrangling registers, counting clock cycles, banging bits, reading sensors, often in raw assembly so as to fit into limited flash memory was my idea of fun. So much so that I was contemplating doing a Master's degree in that area. However, I couldn't find a US University with a good program for that. I had seen Jack being very active on a few embedded-related forums, and on a lark, I emailed him for advice. And he responded! He gave me very sound advice, effectively explaining that graduate research in Embedded Systems is quite distinct from the actual low-level work that happens in the industry. This explained why I hadn't found any of the programs appealing. I took his advice gratefully and pursued a different area for my Master's, which shaped the rest of my career. Thanks again, Jack! I always intended to come back to Embedded Systems at some point, but unfortunately it never worked out. Partially because embedded engineers are criminally underpaid for the complexity of the work they do. As the article hints, writing software that runs reliably in arbitrarily harsh environments on low-cost, cheap, quirky hardware with extremely constrained resources is a different level of challenging.