Re:Nothing but a con job (Score 1)

Well, first I am partially responsible for those decisions. As a senior member of the staff, I and my colleagues pick the next processor, O/S and language. If you get to my age and you are simply a coder, then you are 100% correct. You are at the mercy of management. However, one would hope that after almost 20+ years in the business, that the developer was more of a design lead rather than a coding grunt. I've worked with Motorola, Nokia, TI and many others in their development projects as a consultant. What they're looking for are people who *understand* how things work. The specific processor is rather immaterial if you understand how registers work. The same applies to languages. Some are more restrictive than others, but if you understand the issues associated with programming constructs, Java, Python, C/C++ whatever, it really doesn't matter until you get to efficiency on the processor core. If you're always plugged into AC, then even efficiency can be ignored as long as memory constraints, fan noise, etc. don't come into play. Many of these companies that develop these systems at least *say* they would be willing to hire fresh-outs, if it didn't take so long before they could be useful on a project for more than getting coffee. That's why so many of these jobs require at least 2 years of experience. It takes about that long to learn all of the things they didn't teach you in school. So sure, there is always a possibility that I could be the next one on the chopping block. But, it's my decision to let my skills lapse and my decision to keep my head down, not pay attention to trends and let management make all of my decisions for me. I can certainly see your point, but I don't see that there are fewer embedded systems in the world anytime soon and if US schools can't produce folks who can develop these systems, then someone else will and we'll see more jobs leave the US.