Advice requested - electronics/ software development as a second/ part-time job?

[leo938]

Hello all,

Firstly apologies if this a frequent question!

Like many others I currently find myself affected by the current pandemic & while we can keep the wolf from the door I thought I'd use the extra time I currently have to investigate something I've considered for a long time, turning my hobby interests into a second job. Ideally I would be doing something I enjoy while bringing in some extra income. Perhaps I'm being very naive!

My formal education is engineering, I hold both aeronautical & electronic engineering degrees, although my current career is not engineering based. My hobby interests are in embedded electronics (PIC, ARM) & I enjoy repairing electronic devices (including phones, tablets etc..). Like most others I've turned out PCB's & my soldering skills are decent. From research it seems difficult to earn anything decent repairing electronics so I thought software development (particularly embedded) might be the way to go. My software skills are reasonable but far from proficient.

I'm living in Europe but ideally all of the job could be carried out online or remotely. My current job generally keeps me quite busy but I do have quite periods where I could devout time to this second job. My last formal education was about 8 yrs ago.

I'd appreciate any advice from others as to what areas they'd suggest to explore & how to develop or update my skills.
Also what is the best approach at establishing ones-self on the market?

Many thanks,

Leo

[maxpayne]

Looks like you are very similar to me.

I am an airliner and currently doing electronics as part time job. Now a days I am thinking to make my part time job full time and leave the airline job. I have few clients from Silicon valley, for those I work.

maybe you can participate or increase your forum activity, you may end up finding some good regular clients from there. I found couple of clients this way.

Best of luck.

[leo938]

Many thanks for the response.

Any particular area that you focused on or found more demand for?

[maxpayne]

Many thanks for the response.

Any particular area that you focused on or found more demand for?

There is a good demand for embedded programming, I can see. however I am doing mainly hardware design.

[rhodges]

There is a good demand for embedded programming, I can see.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[winniethepooh_icu]

You need to define what you mean by "embedded" when seeking opportunities.

If you are speaking of "new-world embedded", using these large, heavy toolchains to do higher level development for ARM processors and the like (for instance, the IoT craze in silicon valley), I think this could easily be accomplished remotely, and there should still be a lot of opportunify for some time as this IoT group has not yet come to reality and does not appear that they will for some time - So there should be money to be made.

If you are speaking of *real* embedded - Low level, specialized, highly efficient development for a real embedded application, this will be much harder to do remotely as you would need to have a significant lab at home and depending on the scale of the product, would likely need to be in-office in order to be an effective team member.

The latter ("real" embedded developers) are in extremely high demand, very rare, and very well paid, but it would take many years to get enough experience under mentors and with significant enough projects to be taken seriously, so I would recommend you look at the first one.  It will not pay as well, and many of the opportunities you find will be short term contract based opportunities, and almost always from a small startup type company that could be gone tomorrow, but it should be an easy path to start building a resume.