Re:What STEM shortage? Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jo...
by bryanlarsen on Friday January 17, 2014 @11:05AM
(#7076446)
10 or 20 years ago that electronic lock likely would have used a microcontroller too. The difference is that 10 or 20 years ago it was quite possibly the same person who designed the circuit that wrote the firmware. Back then the firmware might have been 512 bytes of machine code that required deep knowledge of the hardware. These days the firmware quite possibly includes Linux...
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Re:What STEM shortage? Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jo...
by smoyer on Friday January 17, 2014 @11:18AM
(#7076534)
I was an "Embedded Systems Engineer" (EE/CS combination) for almost 20 years, but as the hardware systems became more and more commodity, I ended up spending more and more time on software. I still do occasional uC projects via my consultancy, but my FTE has been software-only since 2001.
An interesting aside is that I think the type of software I'm writing benefits from having a deeper knowledge of the underlying hardware.