| Episodes | 66 |
| Mentions | 84 |
| Cited here | 36 |
| First — last | #3 — #728 |
| Top guests | Jack Ganssle, Dave Young, Louis Rossmann |
| Related | engineering education · consulting · microcontroller · open source hardware · pcb layout |
An engineering career in electronics spans salaried employment, independent consulting and product ownership, with movement between them governed as much by labour-market structure and credentialing conventions as by technical capability. Falling entry into the profession compounds as the existing workforce ages, producing a persistent shortage that favours practising engineers and leaves employers competing for them.[54] Career planning changes shape with experience: a year or two out of school the plan is a specific job title to hold within five years, and after roughly ten years and several job changes that target is replaced by broader criteria such as being a capable and trusted resource.[670]
Education and credentials
Mathematics taught as central to an engineering degree may go unused in practice, with more than twenty years in industry passing without a single occasion to use an integral, the applicability depending heavily on the area worked in.[33] An engineer returning to a university department after years in industry found the curriculum unchanged from his own student years, with the same topics, the same designs and the same textbooks.[302] Engineering students build their picture of industry from fellow students and academic staff alone, and academic staff are unrepresentative of working engineers, so the picture is distorted until direct contact with practising engineers corrects it.[81] Where a degree course is taught theoretically and leaves hands-on electronics outside the coursework, practical experience has to be obtained separately; in one case it came from working at Intel, Fujitsu and several startups concurrently with study.[549] Completing a combined university and company training programme does not guarantee technical work at the end of it either, since the positions offered were office roles whose day-to-day content had little to do with electrical engineering.[284]
A graduate degree can act as an admission filter to the applicant pool rather than as a requirement for the work itself, and in engineering a bachelor’s degree is sufficient for most roles, whereas neighbouring sciences require a doctorate to be considered at all.[611] The absence of a degree cuts the other way. An unfinished degree, four years of electrical engineering stopped three courses short of completion, steered one career away from salaried employment and toward independent work on the assumption that employers would screen the missing credential out.[54] Entry into Silicon Valley engineering without any college degree has nonetheless been achieved through demonstrated delivery, by building a reputation as the person to approach to get a design finished.[394]
Access to the professional literature is itself tied to affiliation: the IEEE paper archive is normally bought by an institution, and an engineer without an academic or employer subscription faces a five-figure annual cost, so leaving that affiliation cuts off the literature.[4]
Hiring and the labour market
Large companies hire new graduates readily and grow more reluctant as a candidate’s experience accumulates, because the experienced applicant is more expensive and less easily directed, which is the basis of the route of taking the large-company job first for the training it provides and going independent later.[232] Graduates of the most prestigious engineering schools are largely absent from ordinary industry hiring pools, with none from Sydney’s flagship university appearing across an entire career of interviewing in that city, because those graduates are recruited separately through campus job fairs by employers competing for them.[496]
Short tenures count against a candidate when a resume is read, so engineers commonly stay in a poorly fitting job for at least nine months to a year before moving.[215] Roughly five years spent in a university post or other work isolated from industrial practice is reported to make a candidate unattractive to industry employers, and a full-time content-creation record carries the same uncertainty when presented to a company.[284] In an interview the question asking a candidate to describe their ideal job is scored against the role on offer rather than treated as an open question.[256]
Electrical and firmware engineering forms a small community within any one region, and the same people recur across a career, which is the mechanism behind referral-driven hiring and the reason a badly ended relationship follows an engineer.[458] Technical support has been a common entry route into engineering roles, at SparkFun because support work demands deep product knowledge, with the consequence for the employer that the support team continually loses its best staff to engineering.[157]
Where an engineer wants to move into a different area of electronics, the question of whether further study will open the path recurs, and the answer given from years of fielding it is that changing employer accomplishes the move while additional coursework generally does not.[14]
Skills and demand
Demand for one engineer’s work changed when microcontroller programming was added to circuit building: discrete-logic and analog projects drew no paid requests, while the ability to program in assembly produced paid odd jobs and eventually an offer of employment.[194] Analog and integrated-circuit designers are both scarce and comparatively well paid, and a completed silicon design presented at interview is decisive portfolio evidence in that specialism.[15] PCB layout capability, by contrast, is becoming widely available, which improves access but weakens it as a differentiator when selling engineering services, with firmware judged to hold the harder remaining problems.[631]
Free or cheap design tools and low-cost prototyping have raised the output of a single engineer to what was previously ten people’s work over the same period, which masks a workforce shortfall rather than removing it.[302] The United States responds to its engineering shortfall by importing engineers and exporting jobs, but the same shortage is reported in Australia and Western Europe, so the labour is not simply relocating between regions.[302]
Compensation
United States compensation as stated around 2011 had a senior engineer earning a six-figure salary against a median family income of 51,000 for an entire household, while in Australia six figures was attainable but marked out an engineer as doing well rather than typical.<sup><a href="#ref-54" title="Ep 54: An Interview with Jack Ganssle - Embedded Elchee Epexegesis">[54]</a></sup> An Australian engineering pay slip from about twenty years before 2011 recorded an hourly rate of 11.6396.[56] Degreed engineers with around three years of experience expect between 200,000 a year, which places board-level consumer repair below the wage they will accept and leaves that work to trained non-engineers earning 50,000.[311]
Sales roles are paid a commission on each unit sold while the engineer who designed the product has no equivalent share of its revenue, so earning materially more than a salary from engineering work requires owning and selling the product rather than being paid to design it.[5]
A reported 40 percent of women holding engineering degrees either leave the profession or never enter it; no comparable figure for men was available, and a control group is needed before the number can be interpreted.[213]
Working conditions
Workload expectations differ sharply between engineering employers and circulate by reputation within a local industry, with the difference appearing in hours worked rather than in output delivered.[215] Toy design at one employer ran at roughly eighty-hour weeks sustained over several years.[194] Defence work carries documentation and procurement overhead that consumes the engineer’s time in place of design, with two weeks spent specifying a single screw given as representative.[491]
In-house product development frequently ends in cancellation, so an employed engineer may spend six months or more on work that never reaches a market, and the stated reason for one departure from employment was that independent work produces output that actually ships.[140] Work prepared before it is formally requested lets an engineer deliver immediately when the request arrives, and internal standing at an employer is set by a small number of such visible events and persists for the remainder of the engineer’s time at that company.[116]
Taking electronics as both hobby and occupation removed the hobby in one account, because the working day consisted of the same activity that had been the recreation.[435]
Progression and transitions
Engineers move into management to gain control over decisions they watch being made badly, and the move trades away the hands-on technical work that motivated it.[140] Running a funded company likewise means taking on the work of raising money, which cannot be combined with continuing to practise engineering.[267] A company that completed a commercial product still failed to sell it because none of the people running it could sell, and the missing commercial function rather than the technology ended the business.[424]
Independence has its own preconditions. Clients hire consultants on the strength of accumulated employed experience, so consulting is not an entry-level path, and experience of both large and small organisations broadens what the consultant can offer.[588] A consulting practice can nonetheless start as moonlighting alongside employment: two years of part-time work for a single client, carried out with the employer’s knowledge, preceded one move to full time, with the work priced well below its market rate throughout that period.[624] The practice does not sustain itself without time allocated to it, and a consulting side business goes dormant when its principal holds a full-time job and is also studying.[583] The test proposed for going independent early in a career, around the five-year mark, is whether mentors and people to learn from remain reachable outside an employer, since access to them is the main thing employment otherwise supplies.[541] Choosing career moves primarily by the people available to learn from is offered as the most reliable single criterion, explicitly qualified as coming from someone late in career with choices available, since a person starting out who needs the income takes the income first.[701]
Self-employment is not automatically an escape from salaried hours. Hand-packing and shipping kits maximises profit per unit but converts the business into a twelve-hour-a-day job with substantial revenue and little margin.[142]