Beginners, stay away from jobs in the electronic business,

[capt bullshot]

at least if you're interested in actual electronics and development.

There's a simple reason for this advice:
Nowadays, this job is all about (in descending order of importance) business, money, bureaucracy, policies, compliance, standards, ..., customer, knowledge, skills, electronics.

When I started my career in the electronics business about 25 years ago, my work was about developing a working system, consisting of analogue electronics, analog to digital conversion, a digital microprocessor system, power supply for the whole stuff, making firmware to get it running, doing the layout, assembling the first prototypes myself, testing the stuff and continuously improving the system according to the needs of the customers. There were good times and bad times, of course, business was sometimes good and sometimes bad, the boss managed to bring the small company through bad times and we all (about 10 employees) enjoyed the good times.

Today, I have a job in a larger company (maybe 400 ... 600 employees here and half of them doing real work, the others are managers  ). Some fourty to sixty developers around here. The stuff I have to deal with now is: Comply to corporate policies, take care to fill forms formally correct, for a single project I had to deliver a number of proposals that basically did the same thing but in a slightly different way to enable managers to (not) make decisions based on the estimated component cost of each proposal, sitting around and waiting for them bring up some requirements for the new product, transforming their poor quality requirements into formally correct requirements, throwing away these results because the managers decided otherwise, beeing forced to repeat some integration testing done four years ago just because the new applicable standards requires to use calibrated equipment that was calibrated by an accredited lab, not just calibrated as the former standard required, and so on.

I've done some "real" electronics development there, but on a specialized area, mostly subcircuit level (admittedly on a non-trivial level), not a whole product as before. I've got a good knowledge on a rather wide field of electronics, mainly because I refuse to stop learning, experimenting and designing stuff for my own, but it's not required to do my job. Once you are established in your special field, that's your job forever here. If there's appearing a new field of development, the company prefers to hire a new person over asking their employees (OK, that's the way I got my current job for a new field back then, but I didn't know about this practice then).


Looking around, and talking to friends that are also working in comparable jobs, apparently this is the situation nearly everywhere, so just changing the job / company doesn't look too promising.

[SiliconWizard]

Well... yeah. Unfortunately the alternatives are not many.

We could think of suggesting working in research labs instead, for those willing to do interesting stuff, but unfortunately that's not even always that interesting, means are often limited and those jobs are notoriously underpaid.

You can also try and target jobs in startups. Some interesting stuff to do but a lot of bullshit as well.

What you're describing is not just in the electronic business...

[tggzzz]

What on earth makes you think those phenomena are only found in the electronics industry? I suspect it is merely because (1) you have a limited breadth of experience, and (2) you are getting older. There's a reason the comic character Victor Meldrew has become popular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Meldrew

"The grass is greener on the other side of the fence". Discuss.

[Gyro]

Somebody call? 

[dnwheeler]

What on earth makes you think those phenomena are only found in the electronics industry?

I agree 100%. As a software engineer at a medical device company, I probably spend around 20% of my time actually programming. The rest is process, procedure, paperwork, blah, blah, blah.

The younger employees are usually shielded from a lot of that (they don't have the experience or domain knowledge necessary).

[james_s]

That has been my experience in software too, I think it's just corporate life. At a previous job they talked a lot about how agile isn't about process and tools and yet day to day life at the office was almost entirely about process and tools. Didn't matter if what we were doing made sense as long as we went through all the motions and used all the tools they had decided we would use.

[T3sl4co1l]

Excuse me,

I must disagree.

Your opinion, of course, is conditioned on your experience.  In a large corporation, office politics dominates, and you get that situation.  It's important to note that not all jobs carry that burden.

My daily activities are largely electronics and implementing specifications or standards.  Coincidentally, we have brought in potentially about half a dozen jobs from a local large corporation, within which, during a recent project with them, one engineer, and later one manager responsible for said project, coincidentally left to take new (presumably better) jobs elsewhere...

Perhaps you are contemplating a similar path?

Tim

[floobydust]

I totally agree with OP.

Electronics engineering is a terrible profession. I regret choosing it. Beginners, pick something else for a career.

It is great fun at the hobby and home workshop level, but at the corporate level it's just too stressful and no fun anymore.
Don't have your heart in it, as something you love.

Electronic Product Development fails at over 90% of the companies I've worked at. For many reasons:
The project management basics are never in place, one example is the Requirements. You never really really know what exactly is to be designed and built, it's always up in the air. Or build every possible feature every competitor has.

The Project Schedule is as aggressive as possible and a fantasy. "we want it as quickly as possible" "is there any way to speed that up?". Projects are always late and in crisis.

Resources: Hiring more people is not possible, we'll just expect the engineers to work free overtime and make up for it. Push the engineers harder.

Efficiency: 33% of your time will be wasted doing Admin stuff- meetings, mandatory corporate safety, ethics courses, scorecard/performance reviews, paperwork for buying a resistor from Digikey etc.

Reward: If you do an outstanding job, your paycheque stays the same. Sales get commission and a bonus but engineers are flat, there are no incentives or rewards or recognition for doing well.

Support: Supply Chain is inept and can't find parts, component shortage. "Can you find alternate parts for us?". Manufacturing can't look after the builds so you have to deal with the mistakes, the test fixture, the stuffed boards that aren't working.
You need need new test equipment? "Oh it's not in this year's budget. Can you just use a scope to measure EMC at your desk?"


Now I'm finding most product development has moved to Asia, few employers are doing electronics unless you are in the big core cities with their higher cost of living.
Prove it by looking at job postings and seeing how many EE's were needed in the past couple years in your locale.

Corporate employees are fine to be paycheque players- get your paycheque regardless if the project succeeds or not. So people don't care that the project is a failure, going in circles and burning out the engineering team. I've seen it happen many times.

My last job they fired two engineering managers and three engineers. No new products for over 10 years.
Job before that, they fired three engineering managers and two engineers and four techs. No new products for over 8 years.

It's a steady revolving door and ultimately companies give up trying to build anything because they keep failing, due to their own leadership incompetency. And the engineers get blamed for it all.

[dmills]

And here's me trying desperately to HIRE someone with a reasonable mix of small core software and medium speed digital (Think SDI-HD video), ideally with some VHDL nous, fecking nightmare it is.

Plenty of work out there and it is not all dilbertesque by any means.

Regards, Dan.

[james_s]

And here's me trying desperately to HIRE someone with a reasonable mix of small core software and medium speed digital (Think SDI-HD video), ideally with some VHDL nous, fecking nightmare it is.

Plenty of work out there and it is not all dilbertesque by any means.

Regards, Dan.

I know a guy who fits that description, he's in the Seattle area, dunno if he's still looking for a job or not.

[Wan Huang Luo]

Specifying anything is a nightmare. I need cULus and cCSAus and CE and CCC and every other regulatory approval/listing/recognition under the sun to spec parts.

[dmills]

I know a guy who fits that description, he's in the Seattle area, dunno if he's still looking for a job or not.

Seattle won't work for me, UK based, so that is out.
You would have thought that with the recent purchase of SAM by Grass Valley/Belden there would be people out there it it seems not so much.

Regards, Dan.

[Mr. Scram]

Specifying anything is a nightmare. I need cULus and cCSAus and CE and CCC and every other regulatory approval/listing/recognition under the sun to spec parts.

That's what always struck me as surprising. In electronics you have massive amounts of regulations to follow and you can pay dearly for not doing so. In something like software you can test in production and nobody cares. At worst a customer sues you.

[dmills]

That's what always struck me as surprising. In electronics you have massive amounts of regulations to follow and you can pay dearly for not doing so. In something like software you can test in production and nobody cares. At worst a customer sues you.

I get dirty looks from the software team for referring to them as the 'typing pool' 

The difference between an Engineering discipline and being a typist is that the Engineers understand that crashing after a months runtime is NOT acceptable, doubly so if you cannot explain what went wrong.

Regards, Dan.

[Brumby]

Another vote for the software industry parallel.

The primary issue I see (which applies to both electronics and software) is that these are technologies that have evolved past the handful of languages/components with a vastly expanded range of use cases.  Capabilities of the technology have increased exponentially with the complexity of nearly every element following suit.  As a result, work environments have shifted to ones of specialisation - out of simple necessity.  Only a specialist in a certain area will be able to have the breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to best implement the capabilities available.

I have seen this principle extended to the point where the "big picture" is totally lost.  I came from environments where I was involved with a project from the first discussions, through design, coding, testing and implementation.  This gave clarity as to what was required from each step and by understanding the big picture, many small decisions could be made that would keep the objectives on track.  The responsibility also fell upon me - but that was OK, since I had a handle on what was happening and the authority to act.  This end-to-end responsibility gave the best chance for the solution the customer was seeking at one end was delivered at the other.

Or so I thought.

Enter the compartmentalised specialist approach.  Take each stage in the project and employ specialists within that scope, then pass on the results to the next.  The only communication is the receipt of the results from the previous step and what is passed onto the next.  Certainly, these points of communication are meant to be well documented - but the reality is that they are exceptionally well crafted ass-covering, with project objective information almost a footnote.  Continuity of thought does not exist and what gets pumped out at the arse end will have all the documentary support to prove that's what the customer ordered - even if it is barely recognisable.

While I might be overstating things a bit, there is still a lot of truth in it - but what does get lost is all the nuances and variations that can add richness to the product which come from the many little decisions that are made during development.  For a PCB it could be the routing of a couple of traces which will enable a simple break-out connection later on, but has no impact if this is never taken up.  The same sort of things can be done with software.  But with no "big picture" available, such opportunities will never become apparent.  Add to this the defensive nature of communication and the sheer havoc that would be created by a trivial amendment to the specifications and you have somebody who might detect such an opportunity who will have zero motivation to raise it.  Taking this to the extreme, if something doesn't work, then as long as they can refer back to their arse-covering documentation, then someone else can get blamed.

I enjoy the end-to-end process.  Start out talking to the customer and understand what they need.
 Communicate throughout the project and then provide them with something that is at least as good as they wanted.


I know.  I am a dinosaur.

[coppice]

You would have thought that with the recent purchase of SAM by Grass Valley/Belden there would be people out there it it seems not so much.

SAM doesn't seem to have been a very stable company in recent years, and certainly wasn't the Quantel of old. Perhaps Belden is currently making them look like a better place to be.

[nctnico]

Looking around, and talking to friends that are also working in comparable jobs, apparently this is the situation nearly everywhere, so just changing the job / company doesn't look too promising.

You need to become self-employed. I don't like to do the same thing forever and being self-employed seems to be the only way to achieve that.

[Homer J Simpson]

"Looking around, and talking to friends that are also working in comparable jobs, apparently this is the situation nearly everywhere, so just changing the job / company doesn't look too promising."


Any company or business that is large enough irregardless of the field of work is going operate the same In my experience. The larger the company the worse it gets.

It's interesting to hear friends of mine vent their frustrations with their employer / company. Its all very consistent but the  nature of their work is completely unrelated.

Unfortunately its the way it is. I have been with the same company for 32 years. I am not in the tech field, this a hobby for me. Every year this kind of stuff gets worse.

They have treated me pretty good. I just look at as part of job to follow the policy, programs and procedures and do the best job I can within their box.

The only thing consistent is change.

Don't forget to watch the movie Office Space and make sure you fill out your TPS reports.

-K

[tggzzz]

Looking around, and talking to friends that are also working in comparable jobs, apparently this is the situation nearly everywhere, so just changing the job / company doesn't look too promising.

You need to become self-employed. I don't like to do the same thing forever and being self-employed seems to be the only way to achieve that.

All jobs have their positive and negative aspects to them.

Each individual needs to assess their current situation, and act accordingly.

[james_s]

I loathe being self employed. I'd take a steady paycheck and the ability to let someone else deal with all the boring business stuff over the added flexibility any day. I've done the self employed thing before and didn't like it at all.

[Wilksey]

I would say true of corporation, but if you can get into an SME then you have a better chance of doing real work.

Corporate morons do not understand what is required, how many times have I heard the phrase "it's just a processor in a box". 
Corporations are about policies and meetings and who can come up with the new wank word of the week "innovation", "cloud", "connected", etc, the outcome is the same, they don't understand what it means but think they look intelligent by saying them.

Interestingly I never realised until I was staring at some 24V relays wondering why they wouldn't switch at 5V ( ) that OMRON is an anagram of MORON.

[schmitt trigger]

And with the hyper connected, globalized economy, you are expected to be available 24/7.

Right now, as I type this, I’m preparing for a meeting with our Chinese factory, and it will last until midnight.

[vk6zgo]

"Looking around, and talking to friends that are also working in comparable jobs, apparently this is the situation nearly everywhere, so just changing the job / company doesn't look too promising."


Any company or business that is large enough irregardless of the field of work is going operate the same In my experience. The larger the company the worse it gets.

It's interesting to hear friends of mine vent their frustrations with their employer / company. Its all very consistent but the  nature of their work is completely unrelated.

Unfortunately its the way it is. I have been with the same company for 32 years. I am not in the tech field, this a hobby for me. Every year this kind of stuff gets worse.

They have treated me pretty good. I just look at as part of job to follow the policy, programs and procedures and do the best job I can within their box.

The only thing consistent is change.

Don't forget to watch the movie Office Space and make sure you fill out your TPS reports.

-K

Even fairly small  companies can be bad that way.
The smallish company I worked with was much worse for that sort of nonsense than the large organisations I had previously worked for.

Dumb things like incorporating automotive type "multi-function switches" in the final assembly without checking if the bloody things worked first, continuing to build and incorporate a relay panel which no longer served any purpose, holding up production for a couple of days because they didn't have a particular ( non- critical) resistor value in stock, useless, endless unproductive meetings, having standby CSRs who were IT people, when the software was a solid as a brick dunny, & most faults were electronic or mechanical.---aaaaarrrrgggghhhh!

[SiliconWizard]

That's what always struck me as surprising. In electronics you have massive amounts of regulations to follow and you can pay dearly for not doing so. In something like software you can test in production and nobody cares. At worst a customer sues you.

Well, that's still pretty rare for stand-alone software. Most software EULAs clearly state that the company can't be held responsible for any damage, direct or indirect.

For software as part of a safety-related system, yes. But then this is usually a regulated field anyway and the whole system is considered pretty much at the same level, software included.

[Mr. Scram]

Well, that's still pretty rare for stand-alone software. Most software EULAs clearly state that the company can't be held responsible for any damage, direct or indirect.

For software as part of a safety-related system, yes. But then this is usually a regulated field anyway and the whole system is considered pretty much at the same level, software included.

EULAs aren't worth shit in a lot of places outside of the US. It's just scaremongering.

Even in safety related fields there's a lot of handwaving going on when it comes to software. We do the things we do because it's how they're always done and nobody wants to assume the risk of not doing it any more. In many cases there's little to no evidence that something like a line by line code review actually makes things safer or better. More modern techniques like fuzzing seem to be slightly more effective, but there too there's a distinct lack of industry standards. The whole sector is quite immature and nobody really knows what he's doing.

The fact that the software industry seems to be tripping over itself to create or pursue the latest fad, instead of doing things considered and properly isn't helping either. Doing things right means falling behind, so everyone seems to be dedicated to producing poop at breakneck speed. We've had decades or even centuries to learn the lessons that make up our electrical safety standards. We've had nothing of the sort in software and it shows.