Guidance wanted

[lmagalhaes]

Hey there,

Don't know if this is the right place to post this, feel free to move it wherever it should be.

I have a masters degree in Electronics Engineering and started working almost 5 years ago. I've always loved electronics and really liked working on it in college. But I've had some weird/not so good experiences working with electronics that makes me wonder if I should go on/focus on other paths.

When I started working, I went to a company that was struggling financially to keep it's doors open. They had their own display technology and my job was just to develop electronics to show it off. But, since the financial side wasn't that strong, I mainly kept doing maintenance on old electronics or develop really simple, low cost things. There wasn't that much of a challenge there, not on the hardware side nor the firmware side of things. They didn't fully understand the technology but also didn't make the effort or work towards getting to know and really understand. The point is that for two years I wasn't really challenged nor got much advanced on electronics design/implementation and firmware development and never got a right pay at the end of the month.

During that, I started doing some side business to an assembling factory that needed help with some firmware for a project. Since I had that "customer", I grouped up with two university friends and we formed a company which provided electronics design and prototyping services. Since I felt comfortable writing firmware, I got really quickly focused on developing that part of projects and again, the electronics part fell a bit behind.

Life happened, we didn't get along and I left the company. Now I'm working for my first ever company again and for the assembler factory. What really annoys me with electronics development though is that it takes time. And apparently, bosses don't realize that. I said that I could design a simple board that would measure current flowing to the display and show it on the PC through USB and got the answer like "ok, that is cool but only if you can do that for 8 parallel displays, 100kS/s for each channel, with enough accuracy and we don't even know the bandwidth. Oh, also, if that could give us an instant report that would be great". When I told them that I would take 2~3 months to get a prototype, they went ahead to a commercial solution. On the assembler side, the bosses get confused as to why things take so long. One prototype takes a week to design, a week to manufacture the PCB and a couple of days to assemble it, assuming the shopping department did their part and purchased everything. If not, after all this time, we're still waiting for parts. And if there's a design issue, this cycle repeats, people get annoyed and don't understand why everything takes so much time.

Honestly, I feel pretty comfortable with just writing firmware and code but I really like the electronics part too. So I could just focus on that and forget the "why is it taking so long? why is it going to cost that much ? why are you estimating so much time?" and the never failing "is there something wrong with the design ? do we need to order it again?".

On the other hand, on the assembler factory I have been doing alot of repairs. The boards that get to the functional testing and fail usually fall onto my lap to understand what has happened and repair/analyze to see if there's something wrong with the process. I do like repairs alot because it's like a puzzle you need to solve. Even though I need to sit around and wait for the quality department to change the part that I identified so I can test the board again and see if it works. The thing here is that I'm not sure I'm good at it. There were alot of times where I said "change U8" for example, and it still failed because that wasn't the issue. Most of the times I'm working with the schematics and then everything gets easier, but when I'm not I get stuck. Is it just a case of practice or are we like formatted to work with schematics and it gets harder to work without one?

Guess the rant is over, I'm just wondering if I should move to repairing things or developing firmware instead of developing electronics and I'm not really sure I got that across. I'm just not that confident on my skills, either designing or repairing.

[james_s]

There's no money in repairing things, outside of a few specialized niches. I know quite a few degreed EE's working in the software industry not doing anything with hardware, so that seems to be the way to maximize income in most cases. I suspect a large part of your experiences have much more to do with the particular company/org/team you worked on than the specific type of work you were doing.

[vk6zgo]

Hey there,

Don't know if this is the right place to post this, feel free to move it wherever it should be.

I have a masters degree in Electronics Engineering and started working almost 5 years ago. I've always loved electronics and really liked working on it in college. But I've had some weird/not so good experiences working with electronics that makes me wonder if I should go on/focus on other paths.

When I started working, I went to a company that was struggling financially to keep it's doors open. They had their own display technology and my job was just to develop electronics to show it off. But, since the financial side wasn't that strong, I mainly kept doing maintenance on old electronics or develop really simple, low cost things. There wasn't that much of a challenge there, not on the hardware side nor the firmware side of things. They didn't fully understand the technology but also didn't make the effort or work towards getting to know and really understand. The point is that for two years I wasn't really challenged nor got much advanced on electronics design/implementation and firmware development and never got a right pay at the end of the month.

During that, I started doing some side business to an assembling factory that needed help with some firmware for a project. Since I had that "customer", I grouped up with two university friends and we formed a company which provided electronics design and prototyping services. Since I felt comfortable writing firmware, I got really quickly focused on developing that part of projects and again, the electronics part fell a bit behind.

Life happened, we didn't get along and I left the company. Now I'm working for my first ever company again and for the assembler factory. What really annoys me with electronics development though is that it takes time. And apparently, bosses don't realize that. I said that I could design a simple board that would measure current flowing to the display and show it on the PC through USB and got the answer like "ok, that is cool but only if you can do that for 8 parallel displays, 100kS/s for each channel, with enough accuracy and we don't even know the bandwidth. Oh, also, if that could give us an instant report that would be great". When I told them that I would take 2~3 months to get a prototype, they went ahead to a commercial solution. On the assembler side, the bosses get confused as to why things take so long. One prototype takes a week to design, a week to manufacture the PCB and a couple of days to assemble it, assuming the shopping department did their part and purchased everything. If not, after all this time, we're still waiting for parts. And if there's a design issue, this cycle repeats, people get annoyed and don't understand why everything takes so much time.

Honestly, I feel pretty comfortable with just writing firmware and code but I really like the electronics part too. So I could just focus on that and forget the "why is it taking so long? why is it going to cost that much ? why are you estimating so much time?" and the never failing "is there something wrong with the design ? do we need to order it again?".

On the other hand, on the assembler factory I have been doing alot of repairs. The boards that get to the functional testing and fail usually fall onto my lap to understand what has happened and repair/analyze to see if there's something wrong with the process. I do like repairs alot because it's like a puzzle you need to solve. Even though I need to sit around and wait for the quality department to change the part that I identified so I can test the board again and see if it works. The thing here is that I'm not sure I'm good at it. There were alot of times where I said "change U8" for example, and it still failed because that wasn't the issue. Most of the times I'm working with the schematics and then everything gets easier, but when I'm not I get stuck. Is it just a case of practice or are we like formatted to work with schematics and it gets harder to work without one?

Guess the rant is over, I'm just wondering if I should move to repairing things or developing firmware instead of developing electronics and I'm not really sure I got that across. I'm just not that confident on my skills, either designing or repairing.

I could swear that I had worked for that company!