[dmcdm]

Ha, so I work in embedded too, and I was definitely one of the oddballs when I explicitly set-out to land a job in systems out of college. Now I'm a bit older, but I still remember my hiring manager's glum face light up when he asked me what I was "into" at a career fair and I replied with "C and Linux, FPGAs, etc." Now I go to career fairs, and I can certainly empathize - there really aren't a lot of new college grads who have any interest in systems work. In fact, 9 months ago we hired a new college grad and they left after about 6 months to go do some data science thing for an insurance company (sounds boring to me).

Something I've heard discussed in CS education, and experienced myself to an extent (I'm a part-time adjunct faculty teaching Operating Systems), is how the more recent generations of students are, in-spite of the ubiquity of computing in their daily lives, purportedly entering programs "less computer literate" than previous generations. I don't believe "computer literacy" accurately captures the nature of the nascent deficiency - it's really about "_systems_ literacy".

I imagine what's happening to "systems" ownership is a lot like what happened to car ownership between the 1950s and the 1970s - people forgot how to fix them because they got more complex and needed less maintenance. I think for some of us older folks who experienced early home-computing, this isn't all that counter-intuitive of an analogy. In the old days, to play a computer game, it usually necessitated some amount of "tinkering around" under the hood of the "system" - possibly changing settings, maybe you needed to install more HW, maybe you had to manually fix some corner case overlooked by the errant programmer. I've heard that people who were young adults in the early-80s to late-90's were in a "sweet spot" for systems - people had easy access to them, but they also had to "repair" (modify, configure, augment, etc) them a lot.

Today, we're trying to fill-in the sweet spot with things like the RaspberryPi and the myriad of similar educationally-oriented embedded systems / home computers, but somehow I don't feel like most of those capture the "frustration" factor - they're well documented, and pretty regular.

So, while it may be hard to find people in their 50's who can create a multi-platform responsive app using whatever "cutting-edge stack" Medium is swooning over, it's been my experience that it's even harder to find someone in their 20's who can write a device driver, or even a halfway-decent C program.

[x0x0]

I left that space (writing code to drive biotech instruments) because, frankly, engineers were viewed -- and treated -- as cost centers to be minimized. Software companies ime tend to view software engineers as sources of competitive advantage.

[pimmen]

I work in the media industry, which is in full panic mode because of the competition from Facebook and Google. They have viewed software as an investment, we’re hiring more and more devs but we’re slashing the newsrooms and ad-sales departments every year.

[badpun]

I think young people don't go into systems/embedded largely because of the pay. The median pay in those fields is just lower than in web/distributed systems. I for one would love to hack on a compiler (for example), but not at a 50% paycut.

[nitrogen]

Same here. I focused on embedded systems in school and had a related internship before dropping out to start an embedded systems-related automation startup. When I later returned to the workforce, and every time I looked for jobs afterward, I tried finding any kind of embedded systems job but always end up in web development where the pay is better and the hiring easier.

I like the teams I work with, but if any systems company can match pay relative to CoL and is looking for experienced engineers who know how to understand systems from hardware to human, look me up.