Interesting job advert.

[paulca]

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Job/software-engineer-jobs-SRCH_KO0,17.htm

It's not for me.  Not enough embedded, no novel <- Bizarre ask?

But check the salary!  That's a pretty decent embedded programmer salary!

(In case it does not link through correctly.  "Embedded Software Engineer (UAV's)")

[eutectique]

At last.

Looks like the 20-year-long spell of "₤32k - ₤35k / yr" is over.

[krho]

This is really really bad for UK. Where I came from the average is around ₤24k/year. To get a senior embedded we had to get pretty close to the number in above advert.  ₤43k/year

[nimish]

£37K – £47K/yr

Man, that's a raw deal for the level of talent. Pay is well over 5x better, often 10x in the US. US tech firms offered far more than that to graduates a decade ago in London, for what it's worth.

[Benta]

But check the salary!  That's a pretty decent embedded programmer salary!

You forgot using [sarcasm] brackets around your post.   

[westfw]

>  £47K/yr = ~$58k
Man, that's a raw deal for the level of talent. Pay is well over 5x better, often 10x in the US.

Really?  Software Engineer in the US getting offered $300-600k ?

[tszaboo]

(In case it does not link through correctly.  "Embedded Software Engineer (UAV's)")

It doesn't. For me it opens this:

Evalian Limited
Junior Software Engineer

Your activities will likely include:
- Requirements gathering
- Documentation writeup
- Project management
- Development
- Testing
- Releasing
- Retrospectives
Pay: £25,000.00-£28,000.00 per year

But this one is good as well. Are you serious? Junior, supposed to do project management and other lead engineering tasks, gets paid 2000 a month.

[eutectique]

In 2007 I got contacted by an agent regarding a job in Glasgow. The role was "Innovative and highly mobile software deployment engineer with outstanding technical skills to develop and deliver enterprise-wide, mission-critical solutions for their global customer base".

The requirements, among "tenacity and professionalism" and "the ability to excel", had quite a remarkable line:

"Personality - emotional intellect, energy, optimism, flexibility, creativity, resilience, stamina, results focus, impatient/restless."

They were bloody serious.

[cfbsoftware]

The requirements, among "tenacity and professionalism" and "the ability to excel", had quite a remarkable line:

They were describing themselves and wanted to employ somebody compatible perhaps?

That reminds me of an organisation I worked at many years ago. My boss wanted to promote one of my colleagues but all new vacancies had to be approved by HR and the position had to be advertised publicly first. So he said to my colleague: "Write the job description yourself so that it fits you.". The result was the usual set of qualifications, skills requirements etc. but it included an additional line "Must have red hair and enjoy climbing mountains". 

[Bud]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

[DimitriP]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

The necessity for emotional intellect needed is inversely  proportional to the amount of inherent stupidity you are surrounded by.

So when it's actually mentioned, you have received fair warning.

Like when new cars have mutliple stickers "this car is equipped with run-flat tires".
Instead of a sticker that says "NO SPARE!!!"

[ejeffrey]

In 2007 I got contacted by an agent regarding a job in Glasgow. The role was "Innovative and highly mobile software deployment engineer with outstanding technical skills to develop and deliver enterprise-wide, mission-critical solutions for their global customer base".

The requirements, among "tenacity and professionalism" and "the ability to excel", had quite a remarkable line:

"Personality - emotional intellect, energy, optimism, flexibility, creativity, resilience, stamina, results focus, impatient/restless."

They were bloody serious.

I have and an issue where if I listed any specific technologoes on a job listing, it became an automatic prescreen handled by someone who didn't know what any of it meant, so they did a maddeningly exact string comparison.  Good resumes would get dropped without me ever getting to look at them.  Our listings aren't that bad but they are often pretty vague. 

[tszaboo]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

[paulca]

>  £47K/yr = ~$58k
Man, that's a raw deal for the level of talent. Pay is well over 5x better, often 10x in the US.

Really?  Software Engineer in the US getting offered $300-600k ?

It depends greatly on region and the local "cost of living".  I probably live in the cheapest of locations and get roughly $90k.  However.  It also depends greatly on your sector.  Financial sector is where the $$$ are.

I only posted it because the last time I went digging to see if a career change from financial sector to IoT/NoT and embedded was an option.

Hell no!  Not unless I want to halve my salary it isn't!  I switched internally to government/civil service work instead   Same salary!

[coppice]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

They like to ignore the obvious key form of intelligence that is clearly separate from IQ. What one might call wisdom, or even common sense. Many people with high IQ manage to reason themselves into the most bizarre claims, while many people quite poor at intellectual skills can spot an overall stupid idea from a mile off.

[coppice]

>  £47K/yr = ~$58k
Man, that's a raw deal for the level of talent. Pay is well over 5x better, often 10x in the US.

Really?  Software Engineer in the US getting offered $300-600k ?

It depends greatly on region and the local "cost of living".  I probably live in the cheapest of locations and get roughly $90k.  However.  It also depends greatly on your sector.  Financial sector is where the $$$ are.

I only posted it because the last time I went digging to see if a career change from financial sector to IoT/NoT and embedded was an option.

Hell no!  Not unless I want to halve my salary it isn't!  I switched internally to government/civil service work instead   Same salary!

A few years ago there seemed to be some engineering job ads in the UK, mostly in telecoms, that quoted world class salaries. Browsing recently, all I see is the kind of job ads that have been populating the rest of the world with the UK's most talented people for the last 60 years or more. I wonder what caused that period of higher quoted salaries?

[IanB]

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

There was a rather good illustration of this on "Young Sheldon" (TV show), comparing the abilities of Sheldon and his twin sister Missy in a test of perception. Although Sheldon has a high IQ, he completely failed where his sister excelled. I know it's fiction, but it makes a point that can be very true to life.

There are dimensions to smartness. (And some of those dimensions will directly affect how well you succeed at work.)

[rstofer]

Burger flippers in California make $40k minimum wage.  The payback for a BSEE gets to looking pretty grim...

Of course, Biden is cancelling all of the student debt (at taxpayers expense).

[tszaboo]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

They like to ignore the obvious key form of intelligence that is clearly separate from IQ. What one might call wisdom, or even common sense. Many people with high IQ manage to reason themselves into the most bizarre claims, while many people quite poor at intellectual skills can spot an overall stupid idea from a mile off.

It's not really ignored, it's called crystallized intelligence by the psychology field. The general consensus is that high IQ with enough conscientiousness (another psychology personality trait) produces wisdom or crystallized intelligence, this has been measured to correlate between r= 0.4 to 0.6. Yet IQ doesn't tell you how "intelligent" someone is, because it's described much better at learning or reasoning speed and capability. So someone with a lower IQ at the same job for 20 years might be better at the job than someone with a high IQ but for a short amount of time. But after a year, this might be the opposite already.

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

There was a rather good illustration of this on "Young Sheldon" (TV show), comparing the abilities of Sheldon and his twin sister Missy in a test of perception. Although Sheldon has a high IQ, he completely failed where his sister excelled. I know it's fiction, but it makes a point that can be very true to life.

There are dimensions to smartness. (And some of those dimensions will directly affect how well you succeed at work.)

I mean, evidence from fiction... Characters are only going to be as smart as the screenwriters. Plus it's a clear tv trope of a girlboss, politically motivated screenwriting that makes me puke.

All this "alternative to g or IQ" comes from very motivated self pity from people who try to invent new ways, that they are "smart differently". In reality IQ will have very strong correlations with many cognitive tasks and results, and all this EQ SQ and other measures will be statistically insignificant. And in my opinion that's a tragedy, since there is no real method to positively change someone's IQ.

[IanB]

I mean, evidence from fiction... Characters are only going to be as smart as the screenwriters. Plus it's a clear tv trope of a girlboss, politically motivated screenwriting that makes me puke.

Well, sorry to hear that. It's entertainment, and is meant to be entertaining. However, good entertainment often has relatable truths behind it.

You don't think that in real life women often display more developed interpersonal skills than men?

All this "alternative to g or IQ" comes from very motivated self pity from people who try to invent new ways, that they are "smart differently". In reality IQ will have very strong correlations with many cognitive tasks and results, and all this EQ SQ and other measures will be statistically insignificant. And in my opinion that's a tragedy, since there is no real method to positively change someone's IQ.

Fiction or not, the fact remains that there are skills that will allow some people to do better in the workplace than others, and those skills are not always technical skills.

[coppice]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

They like to ignore the obvious key form of intelligence that is clearly separate from IQ. What one might call wisdom, or even common sense. Many people with high IQ manage to reason themselves into the most bizarre claims, while many people quite poor at intellectual skills can spot an overall stupid idea from a mile off.

It's not really ignored, it's called crystallized intelligence by the psychology field. The general consensus is that high IQ with enough conscientiousness (another psychology personality trait) produces wisdom or crystallized intelligence, this has been measured to correlate between r= 0.4 to 0.6. Yet IQ doesn't tell you how "intelligent" someone is, because it's described much better at learning or reasoning speed and capability. So someone with a lower IQ at the same job for 20 years might be better at the job than someone with a high IQ but for a short amount of time. But after a year, this might be the opposite already.

Crystalised intelligence is just fluid intelligent that has moved on from the learning phase, as that learning has reached equilibrium on certain topics. There are plenty of older high IQ industrious people who have crystalised total BS, because they the lacked common sense to see their thinking had gone off the rails.

[tszaboo]

I mean, evidence from fiction... Characters are only going to be as smart as the screenwriters. Plus it's a clear tv trope of a girlboss, politically motivated screenwriting that makes me puke.

Well, sorry to hear that. It's entertainment, and is meant to be entertaining. However, good entertainment often has relatable truths behind it.

It's not entertainment. It's social engineering, woke ideology, destruction of our values.
It's definitely not entertaining anymore, and I don't know how many movie franchises or TV shows have to be sacrificed for the church of wokeness.

[IanB]

It's not entertainment. It's social engineering, woke ideology, destruction of our values.

If you can be socially engineered and have your values destroyed by watching a comedy TV show, you have greater problems than worrying about woke ideology.

[tszaboo]

It's not entertainment. It's social engineering, woke ideology, destruction of our values.

If you can be socially engineered and have your values destroyed by watching a comedy TV show, you have greater problems than worrying about woke ideology.

Me? No, I grab the remote and turn off that thing. But you just brought up a TV show as some sort of evidence of something. What do you think Jane Average will do?
If this all goes way over your head, here is a small thread, you can start pulling on it:

[SiliconWizard]

What the heck is "emotional intellect" 

There is this theory, that next to IQ, there is AQ and and EQ, where EQ is emotional intelligence.
It has been disproven as pseudoscience as far as I understand, made up by journalists to sell books.

I think "emotional intelligence" is a misnomer anyway. Emotions and intelligence are pretty much orthogonal features of our brain. Sure there can be feedback loops between the two, but still, the term is pretty bad.

What, I think, they usually mean by that is more like "social intelligence". Which is not quite the same thing, even if emotions are more involved when it comes to social interactions.
The other problem is naming this a "quotient" - the purpose of IQ, however flawed it may be, is quantifying intellectual abilities. Quantifying your social abilities is a lot harder, if impossible.

One fun anecdote with the Big Bang Theory sitcom is that from what I heard, its authors have repeatedly denied the fact that they explicitely made the Sheldon character with an Asperger's syndrome (probably they denied it to avoid being accused of poking fun at it), while it was obvious from the start that the character was portraying, in a nearly textbook (and caricatural) fashion, all known characteristics of Aspeger's.