More Embedded Engineers, Please
Proving that snail mail is still good for some things, I found an excellent article in the March, 2008 issue of IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer I just pulled out of my mail box. In the article Help wanted: Embedded Engineers , Mark Anderson describes embedded products, their development and what it takes to be a good embedded engineer. He goes on to explain that few universities prepare their engineering and computer science graduates for these jobs leaving that task up to embedded product industry. The net result is that there just are not enough engineers who “understand the effects of memory management units (MMUs), caches, instruction pipeline flushes, scheduling policies, context switches and the like, to be effective in creating working embedded systems.”
Mark’s call to action is for industry leaders to work with universities and organizations like the IEEE and the ACM to develop embedded curriculum. He also suggests that the government should “encourage younger students to enter engineering.” This final point, I believe, can and should also be taken up by the same industry leaders and professional organizations. Not to brag, but to stimulate fellow industry leaders, here are some of Microsoft’s outreach programs:
· DreamSpark program for students
· Hunt the Wumpus (a local high school outreach program, use your imagination)
So, if you know of any industry outreach programs, feel free to post them. But more importantly, make sure your favorite educational institution knows about them.
-Jim
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