Last week's article wasn't the first time that the New York Times looked at what it sees as women's retreat from the job market. What caught my eye this time was that the accompanying photo was of a "technology executive" (OK, former) looking anything but cutting edge. You have to wonder. Given that parity in education, at least in the U.S., is a given, or close to it, you can't fault preparedness. But it still is acceptable for a married woman to opt out of the workforce, especially if she's also a parent. It is not acceptable for a man: how many househusbands do you know? Even the word sounds a little strange.

But the grand thing about the Internet is that we all could be staying home—at least those of us not involved in 'grip-and-grin' professions that require 'face time.' Even teaching, which used to require a physical classroom, with a blackboard and chalk, inside a brick building with lockers and waxed floors and metal detectors, now requires a computer and Internet connection, videocam optional. Even Congress agrees, having decided to allow students at virtual colleges to qualify for federal financial aid.

Yes, we all make choices in our lives. But isn't success as much a matter of prioritizing as of skill, determination, and luck? Isn't it better to stop whining about how tough life is and just get on with it? Have well-educated middle-class-and-up women became as spoiled by a sense of entitlement as your average welfare recipient? So what's so tough about doing it all if you put your mind to it? - zander

There. Up on your screen. It's a story. No, it's an editorial. No, wait, it's . . . superblog! Not really. But Dan Mitchell makes some interesting points in the New York Times about the urge to diverge on matters whatever that leads both professional journalists (who traditionally hide, or are supposed to hide, their opinions behind facts, figures, and quotes from industry experts) and just ordinary folk to spew their every thought online.

Why not? It's cheap. It's easy. And somebody, somewhere is apt to read it (thank you out there).

But is there really all that much to say? How many blogs are worth the time it takes to get them up? And are they really just rumor mills? I sat on a media panel last year for a teen group and found that whereas the adults on the panel got their news from the Times, WSJ, National Review, etc., etc., the teens nearly all got theirs from Entertainment Tonight and their friends' blogs. Kinda tilts your world view, yes? Do blogs, far from spreading the word, only encourage state-of-the-art naval gazing? - zander

The writer Wendy Wasserstein died this week, and though she probably didn't give a hoot about the inner workings of software and hardware, her death from lymphoma brings home how close the limits of technology lie. Because we can turn out blazing fast processors and then a year later come up with one that's even faster, we can reassemble the genetic code of extinct viruses, and we can shoot a rocket and hit a minute target hundreds of miles away, but we're still basically helpless when our biology turns on us.

If Wasserstein had been a software developer, her programs would have been noted for their the clarity of the code and the quirkiness of the function - just as her plays helped people of her (and my) generation both see themselves more clearly and take themselves less seriously. Well, yes, that's a stretch, but you get the point. -zander

The politics around an issue like H-1B visas can provide any number of opportunities for noble sound bites and an equal number of opportunities for hidden agendas. This was painfully obvious in a recent article in EE Times, which discussed efforts to level the playing field for these immigrant engineers. The picture that was being painted was of robber-baron companies ruthlessly taking advantage of helplessly dependent workers.

The flip-side image of this, of course, is that companies invest significant time and money on these engineers, which they only hire because there is such a shortage of skilled engineers among the native population. They have a responsibility to keep track of these non-citizens, which they can only do if they are working for them. Salaries are, of course, negotiated individually, as is the American way.

Neither of these positions stands the real-world test. The pay and working conditions are far from the company-town images that are evoked by those who claim to be helping these workers, and the motives of the companies involved have more to do with keeping salaries down than they do with developing scarce talent resources. The comment in the article about how small companies are so much better to them than larger companies is, in my experience, exactly wrong. Small companies can get away with a lot more than large ones, which tend to have much more in the way of internal checks and balances.

The real kicker in the article is the fact that, if enacted, the reforms would effectively kill any reason for companies to bring in H-1B workers. Add to that the fact that unions are heavily behind the legislation, and it’s not too hard to figure out the real motivations.

I’ve personally seen situations with H-1B workers that made me feel uncomfortable, but I suspect that even these immigrants would not like “reforms� that eliminated their opportunities. I do think there are home-grown engineers that would appreciate the elimination of competition, though. That’s what this is really all about.

Larry Mittag

I have noticed that there is a schizophrenic message being given out these days regarding employment situations. Headlines declare labor shortages while engineers complain about not being able to find jobs because they are being shipped overseas. Some companies seem to be crying about not being able to find people while others are laying off in droves. What exactly is going on here?
There is a clue in David Wessel’s column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The headline is “Behind the Labor Shortage – Layoff Paradox: Lack of Skilled Workers�, and the article describes two stories that literally ran on opposite pages of that paper last week. One talked about GM’s layoff of 30,000 workers while the other reported on a survey of manufacturers that described a lack of skilled workers. The key word, as Wessel points out, is “skilled�.

A company I am working with is going through this right now. They are facing cutbacks in existing contracts while new work requires networking expertise that most of their engineers simply do not have. They are trying to hire new people to allow them to get that work while scrambling to find work for their existing engineers. The long-term solution is, of course, to train their current workers, but they need to fill that gap in the meantime.

Yes, the company screwed up. They should have anticipated this situation and arranged for the required training long ago. On the other hand, the engineers could have seen which way the wind was blowing and taken it upon themselves to update their skills. They are the ones with the most to lose if they get too far behind, so they should be the most motivated to do something about it.

What do you people think? Is it the responsibility of the engineer to keep up-to-date or should the company be planning for its future needs more effectively?

Larry Mittag

A recent EE Times survey revealed a bleak mood among engineers, with many of them feeling unappreciated and undervalued. The current debate over the availability of H-1B visas certainly plays into that, as illustrated by an article that ran in a recent print edition of the Wall Street Journal. The article contrasted an engineering shortage with stories of engineers that had been searching for jobs for a long time. The picture that emerged was that employers largely had themselves to blame for not being able to find the right engineers because they are becoming too exacting in the requirements for positions. This leads to extended searches through stacks of “unqualified� candidates, leading them to declare a shortage of the right talent.

I have some personal experience with this, since I have been interviewing people for an open position for the last week or so. I am seeing resumes that are unclear, misspelled, or simply listings of technology buzzwords with no context. I am well aware that most engineers are proud of the fact that they provide substance rather than sizzle, but the reality is that a resume is a marketing brochure and an interview is a sales call. Engineers that have failed to get their foot in the door can either complain about external factors that are preventing their lives from being perfect or they can take a hard look at themselves and see how they are being perceived. The result may be surprising.

By the way, the boss may not be too happy either. Another article in EE Times says that apparently not too many people are keen on moving into the CEO spot, either. Sometimes the grass isn’t so green…

Larry Mittag

The debate on engineering outsourcing and competitiveness is raging on. The European approach is to fund megastudies like ITEA 2, which study the way the world is going – or, rather, the way the world has gone. They have just concluded that software-intensive embedded systems are the Next Big Thing, and they had better jump right on that. I hate to point out to them that FPGAs are taking a run at making software obsolete in some embedded applications.

Back here in the U.S. the debate goes on as to whether (or how much) outsourcing is really hurting people. A recent study by the ITAA trade group claims that outsourcing helps a local economy by creating more jobs than it destroys, although they do admit that there can be a lag in between the destruction and the subsequent creation. Countering that argument is a recent article by Jack Ganssle talking about how we are all going to be working at Wal-Mart.

The truth is probably somewhere in between these extremes. There are new engineering jobs coming online as companies are discovering that outsourcing is not a panacea, but a large number of those jobs seem to be going to new graduates rather than the experienced engineers that have been displaced. I haven’t seen serious studies to back that up, but I have seen anecdotal evidence that supports the idea. If so, it may very well be another set of shortsighted decisions as young engineers make the same mistakes that experienced engineers have already learned from.

Larry Mittag

PC programmers are beginning to catch on to the changes that are taking place in CPU architectures. A recent talk given at In-Stat/MDR's Fall Processor Forum was reported on by Computerworld. The speaker was Herb Sutter, a Software Architect from Microsoft who felt that CPU designers did not understand the plight of software engineers that were ill-prepared for multicore CPUs that are coming down the road. The tone of the report seemed to be that chip designers simply needed to understand that they were not serving the needs of programmers by following this path.

What the speaker apparently failed to understand is the level of frustration that has been building in the semiconductor design community. The sacred PC architecture has been the bedrock of software progress, but it also has been a millstone around the neck of hardware engineers that want to be more creative. I have spoken with more than one designer that is much more interested in FPGA-based application designs than creating yet another incarnation of a 20-year old platform to feed the needs of programmers. More than a few of them are talking directly to customers and building solutions that are breaking away from the traditional generic hardware / specific software model that has been the norm for the last few decades. If they can deliver cost-effective value in embedded applications by circumventing software, then all the better for them.

In the PC world it is a little more complex. CPUs simply cannot make progress the way they have in the past, so the alternative is to multiply the CPU resource. This will challenge software engineers, separating the ones that can adapt from those that can’t. The ones that can most effectively create software using the new rules will be able to demand a premium, whether they are in Indiana or India. This is not a good or a bad thing, simply a fact of life.

Larry Mittag

Embedded systems is about the chips embedded in any number of devices in our lives, but there are sometimes interesting things embedded in those chips themselves. A recent C/Net story revived some pictures I first saw many years ago and added several new instances of unauthorized artwork that has shown up over the years in the lithography of chip designs. The article points out how much harder it is to find these gems in current chips, but they have never been about being easily seen.

Any job that people are proud of raises the need to somehow sign the work. Software engineers embed Easter eggs, the first Macs actually formed the signatures of the team into the plastic cases of the computers, and on and on. Many companies don’t like this, because it glorifies the individual rather than the team effort – a situation that is normally reserved for the CEO rather than the engineer – but it puts a very human face on technology that I enjoy seeing from time to time.

Larry Mittag

The hue and cry about outsourcing to India is old news, but we may be quietly entering the next phase of that trend. A small item on the EE Times site noted that India is in the process of opening a technology center in Moscow. A large part of this smacks more of mutual political back-scratching than it does of a major trend, but it is notable nonetheless because it involves India reaching out to technical resources and touting their business acumen.

Eastern Europeans (and Russians in particular) have long been respected for their knack of getting the most out of scarce technical resources. This is also a part of the world that provides technical talent at even cheaper prices than India. This is particularly true given the fact that only about 6% of India’s population is college-educated. This fact is often forgotten in the panic over outsourcing. There are those that conjecture that a relatively fixed percentage of any given population is even capable of advanced engineering work, and the implacable law of supply and demand is at work in India, where turnover has approached 50% per year and salaries are quickly rising for a number of contracting companies. This speaks of a tight labor market, rather than the infinite one it sometimes appears to be.

This leveling still has a way to go, and India still enjoys such a lower cost of living that we shouldn’t expect it to reach parity with the US market anytime soon, but there is something comforting about the fact that in some places the outsourcers are getting outsourced.

The maquiladora manufacturing phenomena of the last decade is a good example of this happening. The factories that were built in Mexico suddenly got quiet when their costs rose above those in China. Many of these Mexican companies have adapted by emphasizing how close they are geographically to the US and concentrating on boutique-style low-volume manufacturing.

The one constant in the world is change.

Larry Mittag

The business exodus to the third world is continuing. Vitesse announced a new R&D center in India based on cheap engineers and round-the-clock capability while India itself is investing in building what they refer to as a semiconductor ecosystem. Meanwhile, IBM is firing here and hiring like numbers over there as reported by EE Times. Finally, Dell is hiring 1,000 workers in even more remote Oklahoma.

Wait a minute, let me check a map here...

That's right; Oklahoma is still in the U.S. Is this an anomaly? Not really. The interesting thing to note is that the India jobs I described are what are normally creative work that some seem to think are the God-given province of Americans while call-center jobs are the original outsourcing fodder. Dell is not hiring out of any "Buy American" ideals, they are doing so because those people have the language and technical skills that are necessary and are cheaper due to the (all kidding aside) relatively remote location.

The lesson here is that you adapt or die. There aren't many safe places to hide anymore.

Larry Mittag

It seems that someone is thinking about the downsides of outsourcing. A recent interview with none other than Bill Gates included a warning about the potential loss of core knowledge is outsourcing is done do excess. Gates goes on to extol the virtues of internal R&D investment in the article, which is a quantity many companies have been cutting back on seriously these days.

This lesson was learned fairly recently at Microsoft. The Xbox 360 design is an example of this, given that previous hardware designs were outsourced without Microsoft owning the IP. It costs less to do it that way in the short run, but you can lose control of the platform. Case in point: The original IBM PC and the company to which they outsourced the operating system. What was the name of that company again?

Besides control issues there is also the simple fact that outsourced projects still need to be managed. This point continues to be missed by most cost-cutting advocates of the process. Outsourcing is not a replacement for requirements definition, design, and team communications. It just moves the mess further away.

Larry Mittag

The path to success often lies in figuring out which way the wind is blowing and then turning directly into it.

Case in point: The current wisdom is that you would have to be a fool to study to be an engineer. The headlines have been flooded for years with news of layoffs in the tech sectors and the shipping of what few jobs were left overseas. More recently, the backlash against outsourcing has begun in the business press. It turns out that badly-managed outsourcing projects succeed even less that badly-managed inhouse ones do.

The other shoe of this public perception has begun to drop as well. A recent article at CNN Money CS Degrees Article describes how computer science is becoming less popular as a major for new college students. This bodes well for the few that buck this trend and go into technical fields, because they will find less competition for jobs when they do graduate.

Jack Ganssle's latest column on Embedded.com extolls the virtues of engineers as politicians and describes how Congress would be much more effective if it were populated more fully by engineers. Sorry, Jack, but where you see utopian efficiency I see dysfunctional interpersonal communications and lack of negotiating skills. The engineers I know who have achieved local office rarely rise above the status of troublemaker.

Granted, Jack’s point that the current Congress is deadlocked to the point of ineffectiveness is well-taken, but why does he assume that this is a bad thing?

It has always seemed like a good idea to do online training, but in the past it has been a secondary option to traditional methods like conferences and classroom-style training. Reduced training budgets have forced companies (and engineers) to get serious about it lately.

Internal online training programs still suffer from the usual problems in terms of not being up-to-date with the technology topics that engineers need, but online vendor-sponsored training is beginning to fill the gap. So far this is happening quietly, given that there is an existing training business that they are trying to protect, but I suspect it will grow quickly and become less of an online event and more of an online process.

It seems to me that the majority of this type of training can be automated, with questions handled on an email basis. This makes more sense than the traditional event format, where a relatively large number of people have to coordinate a synchronous meeting and at any moment 80% of them are wasting their time. One advantage of such an event is to generate the source material, but it is more efficient to search that material after the fact than to experience it in real time.

A recent Forbes article exposed squabbling among open-source *NIX versions that would look right at home on Jerry Springer. This is not altogether surprising, given the ego gratification and altruistic ideals involved in open-source development, but it does expose a problem with the genre. The loosely-coupled nature of the developers can make it difficult to create products with a strong, consistent design vision and implementation.

This is hardly surprising. It is always hard to coordinate creative people. There are always more than a few ways to implement an idea, with few objective ways to judge the quality of the result. There will be disagreements whenever people are working together, whether it is within the walls of a company or not. I have seen code that simply didn't work come out of both environments.

There are two ways to avoid this situation. The first is to use design tools like UML that can communicate a consistent vision of the system being designed. This type of rigor can be hard to enforce in an open-source environment, but it really does raise the level of communication.

The second solution is the empowerment of the individual. The best software I have seen is generally written by a single programmer. This is not always because the individual is an uber-programmer, but the simple fact is that it is easier to communicate with yourself than with others.

Larry Mittag