Prospects for the profession of a microcontroller programmer?

Question

Electronics

Good afternoon. I do a lot of system administration. There is a craving for electronics, for MK. Now I work with AVR. In the future, I am considering a change of profession. One of the considered ones is the MK programmer. Are salaries comparable to IT? Are there real vacancies? What MK is more in demand at the moment?
What do you say in general? =)
Thank you.

Answer 1

- there is work, in terms of volume it is less than near-admin enikeystvo and shitty code on peychpi. foreign orders are many times more than "domestic" ones, it concerns all levels of complexity / money.
- on average, no one needs a "programmer" of microcontrollers, orders where there is an accurate and complete technical specification, a description of the periphery, external connections = very few, the very minimum is complete knowledge regarding the hardware, connection and strapping of the controller itself.
- a self-sufficient good administrator is a person + a laptop. a self-sufficient good "microcontroller programmer" is a bunch of additional non-obvious rubbish.
- if possible, in-line work (project maintenance) is on average somewhere between software executors and one-time hardware workers. finding a job where there will be one long project for design + support is quite difficult and you should not count on it in general.

Answer 2

Salaries are very high, because high qualifications are required even at the start. But not with us. And remote work is not at all as much as in IT, unfortunately.
We have few jobs, salaries are usually rather sad, compared to the same IT, most of the development of electronics, in general, we have, this is the defense industry, and there are some troubles ...
Cravings for electronics, and pampering with arduinos, is extremely little to start even in this area. There is very hardcore programming - you need to monitor resources much more seriously, know various algorithms, often serious mathematics, etc. Without a specialized education, most often there is simply nothing to do there.
In promising developments, ARM and FPGAs will most often be. 8/16 bit microcontrollers, although they are used in places, but more often due to inertia, or very specific peripherals.
PS By the way, I made exactly the opposite transition, and I don’t regret it at all. Now, if you live in Russia, unfortunately, the development of electronics is good only as an interesting hobby, and not as a profitable job.

Answer 3

Well, I saw Bosch vacancies in Germany. In Russia, no rather than yes. (except for any scientific research institutes for cutting)

Answer 4

Heh. I have been involved in electronics (including MK) for 35 years, I have the appropriate education. A couple of years ago, on one of the forums, a girl (apparently an HR manager) offered me a job programming industrial MKs (I don’t remember exactly, but very much not AVR). She wrote that they could not find a specialist for almost six months for a salary of $ 1,000. I was very happy that I was ready to take on this work, but I was very upset when I wrote that I had nothing to do with such iron. They need someone with experience. But she doesn’t know where to get that experience, despite the fact that those MKs start at $500, and the debugging stand costs more than $2000

Answer 5

Electronics is a circuit, board, code, debugging. For coding, at least you need to know and be able to use circuitry, be able to work with equipment + each project has its own specifics. Little is being done on the AVR now, as ARM and FPGAs wrote above.
According to the RFP, it depends on professional skills, you can get it at the IT level, but for this you need to know a lot and perform complex tasks. I don’t know how it is in Russia, but I monitor vacancies and some have not been closed for a year; I work as a freelancer, but there are some nuances.

Answer 6

In connection with the fashion for IoT, it seems promising to me. At the very least, many Rust programmers focus specifically on embedded systems - this language is well suited there.