Re: careers in embedded engineering


Steve at fivetrees wrote:

Also agreed. Furthermore, my experience has been that PC programmers have
far less of a clue about the rigours of true embedded design, which includes

God, yes. From section 4-1, in chapter 4 ("Teaching Yourself, Top-Down
(Large Embedded Systems)"):

"The previous chapter dealt with people who have hardware experience
and want to start learning about microcontroller programming, or a
"bottom-up" approach to embedded engineering. At the other end of the
spectrum, we find people who have considerable experience programming
application software in high-level languages, and who now want to
extend their reach into embedded systems. These people will typically
have what I would describe as "IT" qualifications (database
programming, HTML design, Java development and so forth), rather than
engineering experience. Computer science majors quite frequently fall
into this category.

There is an immediate difficulty in adapting these people to embedded
environments, and this is that pure software projects for mass-market
operating systems (Windows, MacOS and so forth) are typically designed
with an acceptance of enormous variations in performance margins due to
variations in customer hardware. Furthermore, PC hardware is
sufficiently expandable and inexpensive that it is realistic for an
application software developer to require that the user provide special
hardware features such as additional memory, 3D accelerated graphics,
and so on. Neither of these two assumptions are remotely acceptable in
embedded environments.

The embedded software developer must be able to:

a) characterize and control the resource utilization of the software
exactly. This includes being able to specify how much RAM and secondary
storage space the software will require under all conceivable execution
conditions, with explicit safeguards in place to prevent the software
from overrunning those limits under unusual input circumstances. In
most cases, it is also necessary to provide some guarantee of real-time
performance (though the limits here are often quite loose enough that
people don't take explicit notice of them).
b) develop the software in such a way that it utilizes available system
resources efficiently, and
c) design the software to perform deterministically under specified
input conditions.

None of these skills are apparently in great demand in modern consumer
applications software development(1); hence, they are not well taught
in computer science degree programs. Also observe that the scope of the
word "software" in this context explicitly includes the operating
system running on the target device; it isn't normal for application
developers on PCs to have to guarantee the behavior of the underlying
operating system.

(1) - Engineers generally have a very special view of the deplorable
state of consumer software development. This is one reason why you'll
find a disproportionately high number of engineers running open-source
operating systems. They've got bugs, just like commercial software, but
at least there's the opportunity for a user to fix the bugs (even
though most engineers would never have enough free time to start
tinkering with that code)."

.

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