J
John Larkin
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Joerg said:Hello John,
Just don't believe everything like that without some serious scrutiny. I
have a lot of contacts into Germany and cannot confirm at all what that
paper says. There are lots of unemployed engineers and the total
unemployment rate is well over 10% AFAIK. That number alone tells a sad
story.
I have read similar sob stories here in the US. Not enough engineers,
can't fill positions, blah, blah, blah. Then you look at the job ads and
they are seeking dreamer combinations of skills that never existed.
Meanwhile a lot of high-credential technical folks around here in
California are hardcore unemployed.
Regards, Joerg
Hello John,
Just don't believe everything like that without some serious scrutiny. I
have a lot of contacts into Germany and cannot confirm at all what that
paper says. There are lots of unemployed engineers and the total
unemployment rate is well over 10% AFAIK. That number alone tells a sad
story.
I have read similar sob stories here in the US. Not enough engineers,
can't fill positions, blah, blah, blah. Then you look at the job ads and
they are seeking dreamer combinations of skills that never existed.
Meanwhile a lot of high-credential technical folks around here in
California are hardcore unemployed.
Regards, Joerg
John said:I think that, worldwide, lots of newly-minted "engineers" actually
have CS or IT educations, which both limits their utility to hacking
C++ and makes them prime targets for foreign outsourcing.
I work for a company that has a niche but valuable software product.
What I noticed is that quite a few of the software developers actually have an EE background.
Some work in C, some in C++ & some in Java.
Many I suspect would prefer to be writing embedded software. Perhaps we have sold our souls to commerce.
Perhaps this proves your point (?) that real engineers are more adaptable.
What I would say though, is that if one has talent and can persevere with something till it is complete, then someone will hire
you - in spite of all the outsourcing - even if you are a computer scientist. But there is no passport to prosperity, it has to
be earned.
I think that, worldwide, lots of newly-minted "engineers" actually
have CS or IT educations, which both limits their utility to hacking
C++ and makes them prime targets for foreign outsourcing.
John said:...CS or IT educations, which both limits their utility to hacking
C++ and makes them prime targets for foreign outsourcing.
Clifford said:What an ignorant attitude. The reason that EE is being hit so
much harder than software is that it's worked for 40 years to
make products that don't need support (repair and training) and
indeed most mass-market products aren't even possible to repair.
When you haven't got (and don't need) a support industry, you
lose the seeding ground for your product enterprises.
The same hasn't and won't happen with software, because support
is always going to be needed. Some software can be outsourced,
but there will always be smart local folk who can come up with
a bright product idea and make money out of it without being
immediately undercut by an Asian competitor. That's not to say
that broken software can be "fixed" - look at Windows! - but that
its failings are handled by better support, not by throwing it
away and starting again with a new model.
Clifford Heath.
Dirk said:Same here in Britain.
I'm thinking of joining the police force.
Terry said:Pah. John's bang on wrt CS/IT, although its not just foreign outsourcing
thats the issue
From an individuals perspective, I would
steer clear of this group, because there are more of them hence more
competition.
The "law" of Supply & Demand suggests this will drive wages down
....wrt the non-repairability of electronics, that is IMO mostly concerned
with fucked up economic models. When the assembly staff are being paid
Really? I would argue that "support is always going to be needed"
precisely because those writing the software are mostly talentless,
bungling fools.
...because it was well written and tested, by EEs.
Paul said:Dirkson of Dork Green?
It's just a pity they don't often have any software design skills.
I don't mean skills to make a chosen solution work or fit, but to
choose a solution in the first place. Too much emphasis on the
hardware, not enough on the user. The sheer percentage of badly
programmed embedded designs is staggering, worse even than the
software industry proper (if possible).
acbell.net> wrote (in said:No kidding, someone was looking for a chip designer at
$35k a year. Probably w/o benefits...
Maybe with free wine, Chinese food and personalized owl...(;-)
I read in sci.electronics.design that Joerg <notthisjoergsch@removethisp
Maybe with free wine, Chinese food and personalized owl...(;-)
I've got the owl, but I'd like to see your attempt to "personalize" him
;-)
John said:Disagree. Most embedded products - cars, appliances, calculators, home
entertainment stuff - just work. Most computer-level stuff is buggy
crap. I have scores of designs in the field, thousands of products in
total, that use an embedded 32-bit CPU, and we have zero known
firmware bugs, and all coded by EEs. My brand-new Dell/XP computers
had stupid software problems right out the box, like occasionally
insisting that floppies are write protected or unformatted (fix?
reboot!) or messing up the Zip drive fats or Word crashing when
certain graphics images are imported.
I've seen some Windows source code, and I understand why it's such
tripe. It's written exactly like the academics teach programming these
days: jillions of files, convoluted logic, abstraction for its own
sake, zero comments or visible context, all based on a language that
was designed to substitute sequences of punctuation marks for keywords
(which is literally why they call it "code").
Modern CS education scoops up masses of youngsters like herring in a
net, and teaches them how to code and how not to think. A Fellow of
United Technologies made that same comment to me two days ago.
John