You pay vendors only so far as you think their people are smarter than your people. Once you get past the generic PC with off-the-shelf software that does 95% of what you need, there is no such thing as plug-and-play. If you believe you need that last 5%, then you can't be lazy about it and throw cash at a vendor. They can, and do, promise you the moon, and more often than not come back with a hunk of green cheese. You only outsource things you do not have time for yourself, but never things you don't know, because if you don't know what the end result should look like, and how it should be done, the vendor can sell you anything. Yes, digging around for a week to make a band-aid fix may not be the best use of your time when it takes four days to return it and buy something else, but if it takes four months and you have no more confidence that the replacement won't have the same problem, maybe you should take the week.

That's the number one issue with so-called over-qualified candidates. They're trained as scientists (vs as engineers) who have picked up just enough "software skills" to get by. Ask them to actually build (for example) and experimental setup, and they can't because in grad school they had some undergrad ME do it for them. Ask them to make a custom SCADA system to run on your embedded device, and they can't because in grad school they did it with LabView, and they couldn't even spell real time software if it interrupted them on the ass. These people are trained to think shit up rather than to execute, and quite frankly not being able to find a job is nature's way of telling them they wasted their educations.

Nope. Too many people were told "educate yourself" and heard "go to college and get a degree in underwater basketweaving." That's problem 1. Problem 2 is a persistent cultural cancer in academia that declares and academic job as the only kind of job there is. Maybe the problem is worse in the squishier sciences, but in engineering, you can't simultaneously have "not enough highly qualified candidates" for jobs that typically start at 70k+ and a glut of PhD's unless those PhD's restrict their jobs search to academia where tenure track positions are nearly nonexistent and post-doc the pay tops out at 50k. The solution isn't to change the funding model, it's to make students aware of the fact that the world doesn't begin and end at the borders of campus.

Apply tape directly to the camera.

My phone also makes phone calls, and occasionally it will also take a phone call.

The moon won't move, but the earth will spin merrily along at 15 arcsec/sec and change the orientation of the ring relative to the moon.

I did pay attention in high school, and college, and grad school, and I know exactly how peer reviewed science works. I've seen and read enough Peer Reviewed Publications to be able to say with certainty that 95% percent of them read as follows:

1. Define a Grand Problem, or, alternatively define a Problem and spend the first section convincing your reader that it is Grand
2. Spend about another section trying to convince the reader that your Noble Struggle Against The Unknown, as it relates to your topic, is part of the great scheme of the universe, on par with the toils of Newton, or Feynman, or Wiles
2a. Flatter your friends and colleagues who will be reviewing your paper
2b. Bash young-earth creationists, anti-vaxxers, and maybe Wall Street bankers. Not because it's relevant, but because you need be percieved as a little left-of-center in order to avoid inviting silly nit-picks from your reviewers.
3. Recycle some figures from old lecture notes or homeworks (depends on who's the lead author) and some equations that kinda relate to them that you finally got around to typesetting after they've spent a good year on the back of an old envelope or a post-it note
4. If so inclined, spend a section making wild-ass claims and extrapolations about how something you typed up in the wee hours of the morning before the submission deadline is ground-breaking and earth-shattering, and the ignorant masses should be grateful that you deigned to solve their problems for them
5. Pointedly thank your sponsor in a way that implies you want more money, and the world depends on you getting more money
6. Cite a whole bunch of past publications, possibly your own, which relate to your topic in any way more than none.


The good papers on the other hand, tend not to make wild-ass claims and extrapolations, and at worst only suggest possibly unfruitful avenues of further investigation, and above all, do not give you a plot of 150 years' worth of noise and with a straight face tell you that there is absolutely no uncertainty in future predictions.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong. The KGB/FSB had two deep cover agents living in Cambridge, MA, whose only job seemed to be to rub elbows with students and faculty at Harvard/Kennedy. They were arrested two years ago after spending most of the 90's and 00's making friends and influencing people.

Go to a zoo or watch some PBS shows on apes and then look me in the eye and tell me that humans are completely past the instincts they evolved with. They haven't. What they've done is gotten smart enough to understand that you don't piss off the biggest badest ape unless you're interested in a world of hurt, and they've invented guns that make any gunowner the biggest baddest ape. Peace through superior firepower and mutually assured destruction.

No, they're on the municipal utility pole at the corner of your property.

Ah the one who thinks he's the shit just because he can use other people's code. Very easy trap to fall into, because with all the shrink-wrapped software out there, both proprietary and open-source, most people never have to pop open the hood. Heck, most people don't even have to step outside the box of user-space batch programs or event-driven GUI's built on someone else's framework.

I've been doing embedded software in and out of school for about seven years. I can count on two hands the number of times I've had to step out of that box, I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to do any kind of kernel hacking, and I can count on one finger the number of times I've actually had to write a kernel module (for Linux) from scratch.

Maybe a few more fingers come up if I get to count writing cyclic executives for microcontrollers, but that's really not too different from a while loop inside a vanilla hello world program from CS101.

And I've got a very nasty suspicion (which I don't necessary want to see vindicated) that I'm one of the more experienced embedded systems guys in my organisation.

Speed enforcement on rural highways? Possibly cheaper than having manned aircraft do it.

Interesting. Do you take shots at stationary security cameras as well?

Which do you want: stupid and violent or smart and violent?

...without even knowing it.