to you all electrical engineers.

[calexco93]

hello,sorry for the bother i am a senor in high school on his way to graduation. my english teacher gave my a final project which is about the career we'll be doing once in college which in my case is electrical engineering and part of it is to interview a person who is actually in that kind of field. so umm here are the questions that i would like for you to answer to help me with my project.

Questions:
*name
*position
*how long have you been in this field?
*what are the positive aspect of this job?
*what are the downsides/negetives of this job?
*is it a growing field? what is the outlook for high school or young college graduates over the next few years?
*how do you improve/develope yourself for the work that you do?
*how are you evaluated (quaterly, annually, etc)?
*what is the most intriguing aspect of this profession?
*what is the most tedious aspect of this professon?
*is this profession growing or declining ? why?
*where do you see the profession in the next ten to twenty years?
*is this a field that you would recommend to someone else? why?

thanx for your time and your coorporation in helping me complete this project.


you can contact me/email this little survey at Calexco93gmail.com

[A-sic Enginerd]

See my reply embedded below. My answers are very specific to the nitch of the industry I work in.

hello,sorry for the bother i am a senor in high school on his way to graduation. my english teacher gave my a final project which is about the career we'll be doing once in college which in my case is electrical engineering and part of it is to interview a person who is actually in that kind of field. so umm here are the questions that i would like for you to answer to help me with my project.

Questions:
*name Tony the geek
*position ASIC Engineer (I'll leave it up to you google what an ASIC is)
*how long have you been in this field? 15 some odd years
*what are the positive aspect of this job? design bleeding edge technologies. Solve fun / interesting problems. (all the usual stuff that every engineer loves doing). Often have fairly flexible hours. Pay is decent. Too many others to list.
*what are the downsides/negetives of this job? the hours. If you divide down what my hourly wage would be, it would be pretty meager.
*is it a growing field? what is the outlook for high school or young college graduates over the next few years? Fewer and fewer companies are doing their own chips. Largely due to cost. Hence, the majority of the companies that do make chips still are making kitchen sink chips (one chip can do a LOT of things) that they then sell to other companies that design the end product.
*how do you improve/develope yourself for the work that you do? Not sure of the question. What I do now? or what did I do to get here? To get here I took all the math and science I could while in HS. Life experience is: in general always have an interest in learning how something works, or how to build something to solve a problem. In college, majored in Computer Engineering (CSUS actually has it as its own curriculum), however many of my peers went to school for EE.
*how are you evaluated (quaterly, annually, etc)? Annual. The three companies I've worked for all did it annual.
*what is the most intriguing aspect of this profession? It's never static. The one constant is - change. People ask when I'll be done with school, and my answer is "when I retire".
*what is the most tedious aspect of this professon? Running regressions. In my nitch of the world, a large part of the job involves running simulations and debugging those sims. The ugly part is when you have a batch of tests that gets run on a daily basis and someone has to go in and manage them, triage the failures, generate summary reports, etc.
*is this profession growing or declining ? why? Kind of shrinking actually. (see my prev note above)
*where do you see the profession in the next ten to twenty years? Anyone doing this work will be limited to working for companies that are the likes of Intel, Microchip, IBM, etc.
*is this a field that you would recommend to someone else? why? Not really. It's on the decline. It does take a special breed to do this type of work because you need to be able to sit in that middle ground between pure hardware engineers and pure software engineers and as such it can be very rewarding (especially when the chip actually works after you've been toiling on it for 12 - 18 months), but the entry cost to do a chip is huge dollars so not many companies do their own chips now. A spin-off of the field does get into putting designs in FPGA's, but that's kind of a different animal. A lot of similarities, but just as many differences as well.

thanx for your time and your coorporation in helping me complete this project.


you can contact me/email this little survey at Calexco93gmail.com