[nascentmind]

What will be the impact of this on jobs? I see a lot of layoffs in the semiconductor industry. I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.

[bsder]

> I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer.

Moore's Law slowing down is good for firmware people. Optimizing, by hand, for 10% matters when you can't just get a factor of 2 automatically every 18 months.

> I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.

The embedded space is power and cost constrained. Power constrained because of batteries and their inability to deal with RF. Cost constrained because memory now makes up 75% plus of chip area which defines the cost.

IoT is a lot of hype. The problem is that IoT is LOW VOLUME, and nobody wants to deal with that. So, everybody wants you to adopt their "highly scalable" (har har) backend and extract rent from the people doing the real work who are creating and marketing the application device. And, everybody decent at producing devices is also smart enough to realize that the money is in the backend so they refuse to play along.

The company that is willing to slog through the swamp of low volume will be the one who stumbles into the high volume application. Think Qualcomm getting started by tracking trucks and stumbling into cellular phones.

[ghaff]

>IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else

You have to distinguish between the wearables/smart home stuff and industrial IoT that has a real impact on cost saving and efficiency. Much of the former is idiotic. The latter is a huge market even if a lot of the details are still being worked out.