OT: Career prospects in Electronics?

[Jurd]

Hey guys,
Frequent lurker, infrequent poster here. After almost two decades of
doing IT-type work, I'm considering making a jump into something
different. Electronics has been a hobby of mine for some time, and so
far I'm mostly self-taught with books, the Internet and experimentation.
My local community college has an Electronics Technician Associate's
Degree program which I think could fill in a lot of gaps. Obviously the
school is selling it as a springboard into a growing, exciting field,
but bls.gov doesn't exactly agree.

What do you guys (in the trenches) see as far as career opportunities,
salaries, job security and so forth at the Associate Degree level in the
Electronics industry? What other job descriptions are there besides
"Electronics Technician" and where are those folks typically employed?

Thanks. I'd buy you all lunch if I could.

-J

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 4/26/2014 1:08 PM, Jurd wrote:

Hey guys,
Frequent lurker, infrequent poster here. After almost two decades of
doing IT-type work, I'm considering making a jump into something
different. Electronics has been a hobby of mine for some time, and so
far I'm mostly self-taught with books, the Internet and experimentation.
My local community college has an Electronics Technician Associate's
Degree program which I think could fill in a lot of gaps. Obviously the
school is selling it as a springboard into a growing, exciting field,
but bls.gov doesn't exactly agree.

What do you guys (in the trenches) see as far as career opportunities,
salaries, job security and so forth at the Associate Degree level in the
Electronics industry? What other job descriptions are there besides
"Electronics Technician" and where are those folks typically employed?

Thanks. I'd buy you all lunch if I could.

-J

Depends on your level of experience, and whether you have a fire in your
belly. I've been blessed with probably five or six technician-level
folks that I learned a lot from at various points. For instance:

1. The late lamented Brian Alexander Murray, who taught me how to tune
filters among many other things ("First get the right number of bumps
spread out over the right bandwidth, and _only then_ tune to get the
right shape.")

2. A woman at IBM Yorktown (anonymous since she's still around) who both
helped me and taught me a great deal about semiconductor processing.
That's where I learned to write my own s/c run sheets.

3. A guy, also at IBM, with whom I did a lot of my early electro-optical
work. He went the opposite way from you, and is now mainly doing I/T stuff.

I haven't had a lot of problems working with technicians, but throughout
my career I've been blessed to be surrounded by good people.

A technician is to an engineer as a nurse is to a doctor. Both have
important things to do, and in an environment of mutual respect, neither
lords it over the other.

I've heard stories of bearded Harley-riding technicians with chips on
their shoulders, who thought all the engineers were morons, and OTOH
I've seen places where the MDs or astronomers were king of the hill, and
the engineers and technicians who made the work possible were regarded
as lower than whale droppings on the bottom of the ocean.

So the short answer is, it depends a great deal on where you wind up
working. May you have great success in your new career!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:08:30 -0500, Jurd
<guitardorkspamspameggsandham74@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey guys,
Frequent lurker, infrequent poster here. After almost two decades of
doing IT-type work, I'm considering making a jump into something
different. Electronics has been a hobby of mine for some time, and so
far I'm mostly self-taught with books, the Internet and experimentation.
My local community college has an Electronics Technician Associate's
Degree program which I think could fill in a lot of gaps. Obviously the
school is selling it as a springboard into a growing, exciting field,
but bls.gov doesn't exactly agree.

What do you guys (in the trenches) see as far as career opportunities,
salaries, job security and so forth at the Associate Degree level in the
Electronics industry? What other job descriptions are there besides
"Electronics Technician" and where are those folks typically employed?

Thanks. I'd buy you all lunch if I could.

-J

Where are you located?

There are no formal educational requirements for "engineer", although most are
BSEEs, but some have associates degrees, or no degree. I don't think Jim
Williams had a degree (but sometimes that showed.)

I think there is an undersupply of analog electronics techs and engineers, at
least on the west coast.

Self-taught is good, but some mathematical rigor, forced to learn in a
classroom, is pretty much required for an engineering position. Some physics,
circuit theory, Signals&Systems sort of stuff.

One interesting career path is to be an "application engineer" for some
electronic gadget company, or for a distributor. An AS degree would probably be
OK. You'd meet a lot of people and solve a lot of problems, and maybe meet and
impress your next employer.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation

 

Jurd <guitardorkspamspameggsandham74@gmail.com> wrote:

Electronics has been a hobby of mine for some time, and so far I'm
mostly self-taught with books, the Internet and experimentation.

How much stuff have you blown up? As the saying goes, "Experience is
directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."

My local community college has an Electronics Technician Associate's
Degree program which I think could fill in a lot of gaps.

It does give you a chance to play with a wider range of equipment, and
some of the theoretical background will be good as well.

Depending on your budget, timeframe, location, etc, it might be an idea
to at least look at the possibility of going on to get a BS Electrical
Engineering. This traditionally takes at least two years longer than
the associate's degree and will involve copious amounts of math and
theory. But the pay can be a lot better when you get done.

What do you guys (in the trenches) see as far as career
opportunities, salaries, job security and so forth at the Associate
Degree level in the Electronics industry?

The salary depends on lots of things including location. Here in the
Midwest (Missouri, Kansas), right now, I'd ballpark in the $35-$40k/year
range. Or, ballpark a 10% to 25% discount from what a new BS Comp Sci
graduate makes, or maybe 20% to 30% discount from what a new BS
Electrical Engineering makes.

Security is OK-ish. At a few jobs there were techs that had been with
the company 20 years, but that seems to be the exception... 5 to 10
years is probably more common. More comments on this below.

Just as a background on where I'm coming from, I have a BS Comp Sci. I
have mostly written software for embedded electronics; quite often I was
writing the software in the same building that the hardware was being
assembled, tested, and shipped from.

What other job descriptions are there besides "Electronics Technician"
and where are those folks typically employed?

Some popular specializations or subdivisions of "tech" include...

Field tech. This can be for new installs or for repair work. It
involves a lot of travel, and usually a lot of time pressure to get the
thing working again, especially for repair work. New installs tend to
come in waves - some company decides to expand into a few new states,
or roll out the latest equipment to their existing sites, so they hire
a wad of techs for several months. The pay is good while it lasts, but
then everybody gets laid off when that rollout is done.

If you can handle the travel, this can be kind of fun. Having good
support from the mothership (test equipment, spare parts) is also
helpful. For some things you might need to work outdoors or in sketchy
parts of town or at weird hours. One thing that you will run into is
that the boss wants to hire dumb (cheap) techs that don't know anything,
whereas the engineers on the mothership greatly appreciate smarter techs
that check the obvious stuff before calling for help.

Production tech. Assembling and testing new devices. This doesn't
exist for consumer goods in the US anymore. (And even if it isn't a
mass consumer good, try not to pick a product that is in the process of
being replaced by a smartphone.) It does exist for aerospace and
defense, and for some industrial-controls stuff. The aerospace and
defense market follows the wars (2003ish-2010ish was great for it), and
the industrial stuff follows the general economy - are manufacturers
building or overhauling factories at the moment or not.

For the defense stuff, it helps if you are a US citizen and can get a
security clearance (no drugs, no big criminial record). You don't have
to get the clearance on your own; if a company requires one, they will
hire you conditionally while they do the paperwork for it. They may
require you to reimburse them for some of the costs if you don't stay
employed with them for a minimum amount of time.

There is kind of a subdivision of "production tech" into component-
level assembly (which is usually little old ladies with soldering irons)
and system-level assembly (getting modules from the little old ladies,
building up the complete device, and testing it).

Repair tech. Repairing and overhauling devices either under warranty or
not, but at pretty much the same place every day. This happens a little
bit for consumer goods but a lot for aerospace/defense and industrial
controls. Sometimes it is component-level repair, sometimes it is
module-level, sometimes it's just dusting stuff off and recalibrating it.
Can also be cyclical, but sometimes the reverse of "production tech" -
if peace has broken out all over, or if the economy sucks, sometimes
there is more interest in repairing existing equipment than buying new.

I hope this helps!

Matt Roberds

 

[Bob Masta]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:08:30 -0500, Jurd
<guitardorkspamspameggsandham74@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey guys,
Frequent lurker, infrequent poster here. After almost two decades of
doing IT-type work, I'm considering making a jump into something
different. Electronics has been a hobby of mine for some time, and so
far I'm mostly self-taught with books, the Internet and experimentation.
My local community college has an Electronics Technician Associate's
Degree program which I think could fill in a lot of gaps. Obviously the
school is selling it as a springboard into a growing, exciting field,
but bls.gov doesn't exactly agree.

What do you guys (in the trenches) see as far as career opportunities,
salaries, job security and so forth at the Associate Degree level in the
Electronics industry? What other job descriptions are there besides
"Electronics Technician" and where are those folks typically employed?

Thanks. I'd buy you all lunch if I could.

One job you might consider is engineering support at a
university lab or department. This will not pay as much as
industry, but can be very interesting due to the broad
variety of needed support. In my case, I worked in a
hearing research department. (I had a degree, but the
department also included a technician and a non-degreed
engineer.)

Since almost everyone else in the department had medical or
biology backgrounds, they needed all kinds of help when it
came to actually getting things done, like setting up sound
transducers, stimulus signal generation, data acquisition,
etc, etc. Always something new.

And of course there was often a need for troubleshooting
equipment (besides that which we built in-house). Some
engineers may look down their noses at this "low level"
stuff, but it made a nice break from long-term projects and
was often fun puzzle-solving. You also got to see the
innards of a wide variety of equipment, which was also
educational. Plus, there was a nice ego boost pulling
someone's fat out of the fire, keeping their experiment
running right. (Even fixing boring stuff like "the guinea
pig chewed through the electrode cable and we're right in
the middle of a critical experiment" could be pleasant when
the animal technician was cute!)

Best regards,


Bob Masta

DAQARTA v7.50
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com
Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter
Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI
FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator
Science with your sound card!

 

[RobertMacy]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 17:14:09 -0700, Jurd
<guitardorkspamspameggsandham74@gmail.com> wrote:

snipped

Thanks a lot you guys, this has been very helpful and (most of all)
encouraging. Some more background on myself:

I turn 40 this year, which is why going for a BSEE seems a bit daunting.
I'm single and work full time, and sometimes I worry that a "2 year
program" might end up taking me more like 3 or 4 years as it is. I'm
probably about average intelligence so I will have to put effort into
it- no whiz kid coasting along.

...snip to keep Aioe happy...

Like my father always said, "Find a hobby that some one pays you for, and
you'll never have to work a day in your life."

Or, like my grandfather said, "Learn and keep learning. It's the one thing
they can NEVER take away from you. And if you do lose it, well it won't
matter much anyway." He also said, "Sell knowledge. It's the one thing you
can sell and still keep."


That said, if you go to school [you already have taught yourself a lot]
here were three tips that helped me:
1. Do not learn from the standpoint someone is pouring knowledge into your
brain, but learn as though you must go home and teach somenone else. That
samll 'twist' to what you hear in class will make a lot fo difference.
2. Read the lesson ahead. Even if it makes NO sense. Read it. Then, when
you go into the lecture about the subject and listen to the Prof; it's
like you're putting information into 'empty' cubbyholes your brain created
the night before as you read ahead. Rather than listening to the lecture
and your brain must make cubbyholes and THEN fill them, much slower.
3. write copious notes. then transcribe those notes into legible form
later the same day. While it's still fresh in your mind, you'll be
surprised at all that you missed. [I actually developed the ability to be
writing almost five minutes behind the prof in attempts to keep up, wasn't
really listening at the time, only paid attention during the transcription
process. Once after a class, a student lamented at missing several
lectures and asked the prof for notes, which he didn't have. I volunteered
my rewritten notes, which he jumped at, but what caught me off guard was
the prof wanted a copy too, ...so he could write a book.

Not often US students, but foreign students know how to form great study
groups, go for it if you can. It seemed the US students could never form
effective groups, because they had the idea 'me' against 'you', whereas
the foreign students had the idea of 'us' against this 'wall of
knowledge'. Competition has its place, but not relative competition in
school.

Also, when selecting a career, think in terms of supplying something that
cannot be gotten from another 20 miles away. THEN you'll always have work.

 

Jurd <guitardorkspamspameggsandham74@gmail.com> wrote:

I turn 40 this year, which is why going for a BSEE seems a bit
daunting.

Understood. If you end up having a choice of Associate's programs, and
one offers some amount of credit transfer to a place where you can get a
BSEE and another one doesn't, it might be worth picking the credit
transfer one. That way at least the option is there.

It's not a bad gig at all, but I'm getting bored of it and I foresee
changes in the industry that could eliminate guys like me in 5-7 years
(and I don't want to move into management).

The march of the tablets? Warranty/licensing/upgrade-prevention timers
built into the UEFI BIOS?

At home, I tinker off and on when I have the time or desire. Most of
what I do is guitar effects, amplifiers, filters and audio equipment.

If you 1) get your tech degree, 2) get a PhD in writing advertising
copy, and 3) have absolutely no ethics whatsover, one can apparently
make a lot of money selling gold-plated speaker cables and stuff to
audio piles.

The other impediment I might have getting into radio is that I'm
afraid of heights.

Cell phone and two-way radio companies often just hire out the tower
work. Somebody else puts up the tower, climbs the tower, hangs the
antennae, and runs the cables down to the shack at the bottom. It might
be your baby to figure out that they labeled the cables wrong, but you
can do that with test equipment in the shack and/or by walking around.
So not liking heights is not an absolute impediment to radio.

Another reason I was thinking "tech" level instead of "engineering"...
I was told once that EEs mostly do pie-in-the-sky simulations on
computers and never really touch any components themselves, whereas
the techs are the ones doing all the hands-on physical prototyping,
installing, testing, calibrating, etc.

In my experience, this depends heavily on the size of the company. Some
big companies work as you describe. At mid-sized and small companies,
the EEs spend time on the simulator, schematic capture, and board-layout
programs, but they also help the techs build test fixtures, go out and
fix problems in production, etc.

It also depends somewhat on the "culture", which is a little bit harder
to define. I have had to explain to the senior EE why it was a bad idea
to put male plugs on both ends of the power supply cord. At a different
company, I watched the senior EE having a lot of fun in the middle of a
pile of signal generators and spectrum analyzers, tweaking his new RF
design.

Matt Roberds

 

[Jurd]

On 4/28/2014 11:25 PM, John Larkin wrote:

It is satisfying to do stuff with your own hands.

A lot of companies do have development techs, who do stuff like building and
testing prototypes for engineers. A lot of engineers, as you mention, do
simulations and push paper around.

Neat pics of neat stuff! I hope that by me referring to Engineer's work
as "pie in the sky" that it didn't sound pejorative. I didn't mean that
way, I was just stating which of the two I would enjoy more.

-J

 

[Tim Wescott]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 19:14:09 -0500, Jurd wrote:

snipped

Thanks a lot you guys, this has been very helpful and (most of all)
encouraging. Some more background on myself:

I turn 40 this year, which is why going for a BSEE seems a bit daunting.
I'm single and work full time, and sometimes I worry that a "2 year
program" might end up taking me more like 3 or 4 years as it is. I'm
probably about average intelligence so I will have to put effort into
it- no whiz kid coasting along.

If you're single and have no kids or significant debt, then you might be
able to afford to quit work and live in student housing while you're
getting a 4-year degree.

I'm not saying you _should_, or even that you should tell me why not,
it's just something to think about.

If you're not exaggerating what you're saying about yourself you're good
engineer material, and there's always a place for an engineer who's got
good hands-on skills.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com