Page 211 - The Art of Designing Embedded Systems

198 THE ART OF DESIGNING EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

In my career I’ve worked with lots of engineers, most with sheep-
skins, but many without. Both groups have had winners and losers. The
non-degreed folks, though, generally come up a very different path, earn-
ing their “engineering” title only after years as a technician. This career
path has a tremendous amount of value, as it’s tempered in the forge of
more hands-on experience than most of their BSEE-laden bosses.
Technicians are masters of making things. They are expert solder-
ers-something far too few engineers ever master. A good tech can bum a
PAL, assemble a board, and use a milling machine. The best-those bound
for an engineering career-are wonderfully adept troubleshooters, masters
of the scope. Since technicians spend their daily lives working intimately
with circuits, some develop an uncanny understanding of electronic
behavior.
Some companies won’t let engineers touch a product. A tech is the
developer’s hands and senses. Though the engineer knows more about
what the system should do, I imagine the techs have a deeper understand-
ing of what it does do.
Too many of us view our profession parochially, somehow feeling
that college is the only route to design. Part of this probably stems from the
education itself, where instructors without doctorates cannot become full
professors. Some comes from our fascination with honors and fancy cer-
tificates. Doctors and lawyers plaster degrees and awards over the walls to
impress clients . . . which implies that we, the public, are indeed impressed
by these paper honors.
These same doctors and lawyers have very effective professional as-
sociations that limit entry into the field to those people with a degree-
from a school approved by the association. It’s a clever way to maximize
salaries through anticompetitive measures.
Electronics is very different. We’re in a much younger field, where a
bit of the anarchy of the Wild West still reigns. More so than in other pro-
fessions, we’re judged on our ability and our performance. If you can crank
working designs out at warp speed, then who cares what your scholastic
record shows?
And yet, our creations get more complex every day. A 1975-era em-
bedded system pushed the edge of technology at 4 MHz, yet required little
of the theoretical knowledge we got in college. One needed the ability to
read a data book, the experience to know how to create circuits, and the
ability to make the silly thing work.
Today’s designs are different. We battle Maxwell’s equations every
time we propagate a fast signal more than a few inches. Our products’