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some brief background
- I have a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from a generic state university in the US
- I have a little over 8 years of full time professional experience building bare metal firmware, 3.5 years at one company, 5 years and change at a second. both are small no-name companies.
- A small chunk of that 8ish years is actually in mobile app development, but I don't think it's enough to leverage into a mobile apps jobs, plus I don't think I like it enough to commit to it
where I'm at now
- I quit my job a few months ago due to burnout
- I don't want to go back into firmware for multiple reasons. I like low level programming, but I hate that doing it on an embedded system brings in a whole new troubleshooting domain (hardware). I also hate that the pay seems to be universally lower than other areas of tech, there's very little opportunity for remote work, and all the companies hiring for firmware in my area are "defense" companies. Last time I was job hunting pre-covid it seemed only FANGs were willing to fly people out for interviews, and I imagine it's even worse now, so I'd probably have to move to an area with a better market to even get interviews. also this is kind of embarrassing to admit but a lot of job descriptions ask for a broader skillset that what I actually know (things like RTOS or PCB design which I've never done, or linux which I have some "power user" experience with but none as an engineer targeting it as a platform), so if I'm going to have to do some self-studying to get back in the workforce, why not study something I'm more interested in:
- I'm interested in something more along the lines of being a network engineer or sysadmin, maybe even getting into cybersecurity in the long run. the way I plan on doing this is getting some IT certs, getting a help desk or some other entry level IT job, and working my way up. currently I'm studying for the comptia network+; at the rate I'm going I anticipate being ready to take the exam in about a month. I haven't committed to the point where I've spent $ on the exam voucher, but that's coming up soon.
why this might be a dumb idea (some of this is obvious to people who work in tech)
- there's gonna be a big pay cut compared to my previous job. I'd probably be starting out earning half of what I was getting in my last job. It may take 3-5 to get back to the salary I was previously earning, if it even works out.
- the conditions for IT workers are likely less lax than what I was used to as an engineer
- the IT job market is pretty saturated (possibly more than the software market?)
- the people who look at resumes might look at my background and just assume I'm a desperate person looking for a job to hold me over before jumping back to firmware engineering ASAP, or a desperate person spam applying to anything vaguely tech-y without even looking at the description
anyway if you read all this shit thanks I guess
Both actually but I just have bad memories with the places I worked with embedded systems and I feel pretty angry when I get freelance work for embedded systems but I have do it raging internally. I went into tech because I wasn't doing very well when I had to go to university and took it because I had already done some learning and working with it since my early teenage years and so I supposed it would be less effort than taking any other courses. I think I wanted to do something with biology or medicine back then and thought I would end up dropping out with the way I was. I also think about trying solo game development but it is too much work and I need to grind other skills. I can't see the freelance bit working out for much longer
and my health conditions worsening won't allow me to work the other jobs I did before so I can't think of many options.
That holds true here but includes embedded systems as well but I have heard that US is far better on that. Cybersecurity and network engineering here though is far worse in this case and it gets really difficult to find work or at least that is what the people in that line of work tell me here. Quite a few of them in the last few years ended up trying to switch to SWE, IOT and few of them working with tech tried to move into the country side and trying their hand at farming. Sys admin jobs pay abysmal here but I would prefer that if they took me. Also when it comes to the environment being lax with SWE (data science even more), I found that to be true in the large corporations work with everything being lose, cold and indifferent. I also often got a lot of free time and never had to overwork. In one of the places I had 4 bosses and they had that painful smile when I asked for work so I spent a lot of time on my phone reading and it gets boring but they don't want you working from home either. It was nice but when I looked for a new job and they ask me what I did at the last job, I sort of panic and I am bad at lying. I felt like I got worse at everything in companies like that and I was too tired to upskill when I got home.
This I think is what some of them recommend and grinding other certs while you are working. Some companies pay you to get certs while at work too I think?
Embedded systems I think though feels a lot more safe especially with your experience in the US but I get why you would want to quit. I don't know why but the workplace with embedded systems had a lot of
types and I hated every moment of it. They even made fun of me because soldering was so troublesome for me (I have MS). I was interested in working with RISCV and computer architecture too but it seems quite hard to get into with work and I all I could think of was messing around with fpgas.
oof
fuck those people. the culture in embedded is like that here too, tbh that’s part of why I suddenly quit without already having a new job.
It was quite the opposite with the other jobs I did. Everyone suddenly seemed too polite and nice although a bit indifferent and the environment was more comfortable so that one thing alone made me realize that I never wanted to go back to embedded.