The Uneducated Industry

In many cases professional embedded developer has never attended a single programming course at any level. Further she may have never opened a book on even the most fundamental programming practices. She does not read professional magazines. Embedded programmers are often electronics graduates. Even more scary is that the same applies to managers of embedded developers. They have never attended a single programming course at any level, NOR any managing course at any level. Embedded development department managers have just become managers because they have earlier been successful in programming (and designing the HW) with those 1kB micros solo virtuoso and ad-hoc.

Imagine that. In the past years we have reached an era where a light switch has more bit crunching power than Commodore 64. In few years a key chain, a pen or your T-shirt may out power the old 64. The complexity of these devices is exploded by the communication capabilities which enables distributed intelligence. These increasingly complex systems need to be developed within ever shorter time-to-market by team(s) of embedded software developers co-designing the system with teams from other disciplines. Members of such teams need to have proper skills for development, but even more challenging is that developers and their managers need to have social skills in order to keep the whole development ecosystem fit.

These skills are now been teached in programming and management departments, books and articles, and then tuned and learned within methodologies like agile development. However getting these next generation people into industry is a slow process.

It is essential to teach the existing people in the industry to learn.