Shortage of Electroncis staff in UK....same in other countries?

[VK3DRB]

...Last point is spot on. Most of my IT peers are engineers from other fields as well. Skills are VERY transferable.

Not really, without further training. From my experience, most electronic engineers cannot write decent embedded code for a complicated system because they lack the training to do so. Some don't know how interrupts work and how to use them efficiently; many do a shabby job at commenting their code etc etc. About 5 years ago, after having to refactor/rewrite 50K lines of C "code" written by an idiot, I decided it would be better to be in jail than inherit such bad code again.

Even with training, some engineers lack the discipline or the time resource to write good embedded code. One engineer I worked with in a company was very good with hardware design but said to me he did not care what his code looked like or how badly it was written, as long as it worked. He clearly had no idea.

I am an EE who did further professional study in embedded coding and OOP at a university in 2002. It was worth the pain and effort, believe me.

[coppice]

...Last point is spot on. Most of my IT peers are engineers from other fields as well. Skills are VERY transferable.

Not really, without further training. From my experience, most electronic engineers cannot write decent embedded code for a complicated system because they lack the training to do so. Some don't know how interrupts work and how to use them efficiently; many do a shabby job at commenting their code etc etc. About 5 years ago, after having to refactor/rewrite 50K lines of C "code" written by an idiot, I decided it would be better to be in jail than inherit such bad code again.

Even with training, some engineers lack the discipline or the time resource to write good embedded code. One engineer I worked with in a company was very good with hardware design but said to me he did not care what his code looked like or how badly it was written, as long as it worked. He clearly had no idea.

I am an EE who did further professional study in embedded coding and OOP at a university in 2002. It was worth the pain and effort, believe me.

Many of the software houses who recruit from a broad selection of backgrounds, and train people to do software development, put computer science graduates through the same training program as anyone else. Experience has taught them that computer science graduates are no better prepared to do serious professional software development than anyone else.

Most people lack the discipline to write good solid reliable and maintainable code. This is more an issue of basic talent (or lack of it) and character than any training.