Re: ADA experienced software engineer - great employment opp...

["Howard W. LUDWIG" <howard.w.ludwig@lmco.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> In article <cUsa5.11077$7%3.784289@news.flash.net>,
>   "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote:
> > You want a real-time software engineer, but (s)he has to have a degree
> > in electrical engineering?
>
> I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one bothered by this. An EE major
> is no more qualified to do serious software development than a CS major
> is for doing serious circuit design.

Funny, it didn't bother me a bit--perhaps because my Ph.D. is in physics :).

I also beg to differ with your comparison.  Software development is much
more than just writing code--even more than designing and testing code.
The software serves a purpose for some application domain.  It is very
common to have in the real-time environment rather mathematically,
scientifically, or technologically complex domains, which most CS majors
were not trained to handle, but the EE, hard science majors, or
mathematicians were.  Some CS majors do have a strong background in
the heavier technical areas because of interest, previous experience,
or choice of electives, but most don't and will look at you totally
cock-eyed when you try to explain image processing techniques, Kalman
filters, coherent signal processing, ...

I am a bit surprised, though, that an advanced degree is not desired.
The experience at many companies producing high technology products
is that you can much more easily teach software development to somebody
who has a demonstrated ability to think than you can teach CS majors
how to think.  That is certainly an overgeneralization, but has some
element of truth to it, where a lot of CS majors graduate from some
podunk college that thinks it has to provide a CS major because that's
the wave of the future but doesn't know what an appropriate CS program is.

Not everyone working on a hard-real-time embedded program needs to
understand real-time operating systems.  I hire a mix, because some
people do need to know that; others need real-time architecture
experience; still others need domain and algorithm experience.
Perhaps the company in question has enough RTOS people and needs
the domain experts.  (Of course, the company may also be SEI Level 1
and not have any idea what they are doing or what they really need ;-).

> Sure, EE's have traditionally been hired to do software development
> anyway, and many are good at it. But they had to learn just about
> everything on the job. The degree itself no more qualifies one for
> software development than a degree English or Music would.

That was before the era of separate CS majors, when everything involving
computers, whether hardware or software, was taught in EE.  At that time,
such a person would be more qualified than an English or Music major.
However, a lot of English and especially Music majors can run circles
around CS majors from schools with bad CS programs (of which, there are
far too many).

> --
> T.E.D.
>
> http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html
>

Howard W. LUDWIG