5 ms·

I think the principal problem is: who the hell wants to work with embedded systems? I'm a CS graduate student and I don't see any reason why you would want to g

by faal 17y ago

I think the principal problem is: who the hell wants to work with embedded systems? I'm a CS graduate student and I don't see any reason why you would want to go in to that field. As far as I'm concerned, let the Chinese do it.

bmj 17y ago
Because there's lots of good, interesting work available, primarily because of attitudes like yours?
- faal 17y ago
  Yes, but from what I've seen the pay is bad. Also, requirements on large initial investment makes it hard to create a startup. Sure it might be fun to tinker around with that kind of stuff, but it's no a field I see a promising career in. I might be wrong though.
  - phugoid 17y ago
    Please provide some examples of job postings for low paid embedded system dev jobs. Or was that speculation?
phugoid 17y ago
I do. Spend your time working with black boxes like I do, and you might dream of throwing away the technology stack to start talking to a processor directly. Why do you feel the Chinese should do it? Because they're smarter than everyone else? Or because they should be doing the jobs no one else wants?
- Herring 17y ago
  comparative advantage?
__david__ 17y ago
I love working with embedded systems. The nice thing is that it's usually embedded for some reason--it's talking directly to some hardware and that makes it interesting--motors, switches, leds, accelerometers, DACs ADCs, etc. Quite often those are hooked up to physical things so the program you end up with is controlling or is controlled by cool tangible things. Then add to the mix that since embedded things are custom you generally get to drill all the way down to the processor itself to make it boot up correctly. When you are done you've generally got an app layer and hardware layer and a processor interface layer and it's all code you wrote yourself (since everything can be completely customized it's really hard to write reusable generic code and have it small and fast). There's something really satisfying about standing back and realizing that nearly every piece of code running on the processor is yours.
- joe_bleau 17y ago
  Damn straight. If the project is small enough, you might even design the hardware and write all the code. Nowhere to hide and all the bugs (and glory) are yours.

by faal 17y ago

bmj 17y ago

Because there's lots of good, interesting work available, primarily because of attitudes like yours?

faal 17y ago
Yes, but from what I've seen the pay is bad. Also, requirements on large initial investment makes it hard to create a startup. Sure it might be fun to tinker around with that kind of stuff, but it's no a field I see a promising career in. I might be wrong though.
- phugoid 17y ago
  Please provide some examples of job postings for low paid embedded system dev jobs. Or was that speculation?

phugoid 17y ago

I do. Spend your time working with black boxes like I do, and you might dream of throwing away the technology stack to start talking to a processor directly. Why do you feel the Chinese should do it? Because they're smarter than everyone else? Or because they should be doing the jobs no one else wants?

Herring 17y ago
comparative advantage?

__david__ 17y ago

I love working with embedded systems. The nice thing is that it's usually embedded for some reason--it's talking directly to some hardware and that makes it interesting--motors, switches, leds, accelerometers, DACs ADCs, etc. Quite often those are hooked up to physical things so the program you end up with is controlling or is controlled by cool tangible things. Then add to the mix that since embedded things are custom you generally get to drill all the way down to the processor itself to make it boot up correctly. When you are done you've generally got an app layer and hardware layer and a processor interface layer and it's all code you wrote yourself (since everything can be completely customized it's really hard to write reusable generic code and have it small and fast). There's something really satisfying about standing back and realizing that nearly every piece of code running on the processor is yours.

joe_bleau 17y ago
Damn straight. If the project is small enough, you might even design the hardware and write all the code. Nowhere to hide and all the bugs (and glory) are yours.