Embedded in Cork

Some more good news on tech jobs in the pipeline for Cork. This time Allen-Vanguard are expanding their R&D operations in Kilbrittain. I’ve never heard of the company before but apparently “Allen-Vanguard is a leading manufacturer of robots which are used by security forces to perform dangerous tasks”.

There are few details available at the moment but from Micheál Martin’s comments it sounds like some of the work is in software engineering coupled with electronics, RF and mechanical engineering.

There has been a raft of recent announcements relating to tech jobs in Cork. It would be unfair to suggest that they are all in response to the recent job losses in Cork, coupled with an upcoming general election and the fact that the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment is from Cork. No doubt these announcements would be made regardless. But it does some very coincidental.

Jeremy Faller’s neat little C++ logger reminds of a powerful logger that I’ve been using for Windows Smartphone. (Despite the fancy debug tools that come with the likes of Visual Studio for developing on Windows Smartphone the use of a whole IP stack over active sync is just a little too intrusive for real time debugging.)

On the subject of Windows Smartphone, Windows Mobile 6.0 comes with built in support for SD card encryption. WM 6.0 will also support remote and local wipe . Good news for the growing amounts of sensitive data being placed on smartphones.

Wouldn’t it be great to be working in Silicon Valley and be able to go the Embedded Systems Conference? You even get to hear Al Gore give the key note speech!

Jack Ganssle has some comments on comments and I don’t mean blog comments. The approach I adopt when it comes to commenting is to first of all write the function design using Program Design Language and turn the PDL into the comments.

Finally thanks to Damien Mulley for the plug on his excellent (and widely read) blog. Like many other bloggers in Ireland my interest in blogging owes a lot to his tireless (or tiring!) work.

S3 have announced 20 new jobs in Cork & Dublin. As previously mentioned they are actively recruiting for embedded software positions in Cork at the moment (and have already made a number of job offers already to some of the people leaving Motorola in Cork).

So how much is an Irish embedded software engineer worth? The web has a near endless stream of salary surveys. Here are some of the more relevant ones for those working, or considering working, in the embedded realm.

• Embedded Systems Engineers Salary Survey – The most embedded engineering specific survey I could find is carried out by the Ganssle Group. Includes results on age profile, hours worked and career happiness!
• Computer Jobs Salary Calculator – Generate a salary overview from the current salaries being offered for positions found on computerjobs.ie. It breaks down the results based on location within Ireland.
• IT Jobs Watch UK – This site offers a massive amount of specific information and trends on various embedded positions. Although it is specific to the UK it has the ability to filter on the type of embedded work you are interested in.
• Brightwater Recruitment Salary Survey – One of the more respected salary surveys provided by an Irish Recruitment Agency.

While searching for embedded blogs I came across the Low Country Software Ramblings blog asking the question Am I alone?

Thankfully Benoit was able to answer his own question and point to a number of embedded blogs via embeddedgurus.net.

My search continues and hopefully some more embedded web logs can be unearthed in the coming weeks. If you know of any please leave a reply.

Edit. – embeddedgurus.net seems to be inactive. The latest posts on the blogs are all 2006 and the forum is full of spam. However some of the old posts are well worth reading.

If you’re interested in how technology works, enjoy a tough challenge and want to mix science, programming, hardware, software and engineering discipline then embedded engineering may be the career for you.

The most direct route into embedded software engineering is through an EE (electrical/electronic engineering) degree. Every other approach will be harder.

A computer science related course will churn out graduates with some of the necessary programming skills for embedded work, but an EE graduate will understand the code and the layers below the code – from processor design, digital circuit design and semiconductors right down to quantum mechanics. In fact an electrical/electronic engineering degree allows for many different career paths, with various side way moves available into such diverse areas as management consultancy and biomedical engineering.

So if you’re an embedded engineer what was your route to getting there? Any advice for those looking to get into embedded work?

• For some great advice on how to become an embedded geek check out Jack Ganssle’s guide at http://www.ganssle.com/startinges.pdf.
• Study Electrical/Electronic Engineering at University College Cork.
• Study Electronic Engineering at Cork Institute of Technology

A growing community of ex employees from Motorola in Cork has been formed on Yahoo Groups. For any ex Motorolans in Cork you can check it out at

Ex Cork Motorola
Joining requires a Yahoo ID and approval by the group moderator.

Below are some unsorted links relating to the typical (and not so typical) C programming questions asked in interviews. The value of getting a prospective engineer to answer a C quiz is questionable, but C quizzes are still used to at least weed out the most blatant bluffer.
Regardless of the need to prepare for interviews the questions below are of use in helping C programmers to dig a little deeper into the language and understand the underlying programming and C concepts that are essential to the embedded software engineer.

C interview questions TechInterviews.com
Computer Software Interview Questions
Frequently asked interview questions and answers
Google Groups comp.lang.c
Programming Interview Questions

Edit: After looking again at these links (in order to prepare for having to attend interviews myself) the one set of questions that really stands out are those from com.lang.c.

Edit: An excellent list of 10 top embedded C interview questions is highlighted in EmbeddedSphere – Around the Embedded Net #6. These questions (with answers) are some of the best C interview question lists I’ve come across.

With the end of it’s mandatory 30 day consultation period Motorola Cork is announcing 330 job losses. Only 20 employees will remain with the company in Cork. The announcement was widely expected as the company had shed 90 jobs over two previous rounds of redundancy last year and they had announced a global cull of 3,500 jobs after their 4th quarter results from 2006. The main projects undertaken at the Cork plant (Telecomms Element Management Systems and SoftSwitches) were already being wound down and the redundancies should be complete by April.
I would imagine that the remaining 20 jobs are in the area of services, as they had a different funding and reporting set-up to the rest of the site and were in a profitable area.
The tone on RTE 1 news was somewhat upbeat in respect to the prospects of those lossing their jobs. The opinion being that their will be queues of employers lining up to offer the workers jobs. Time will tell, but the signs are promising with Havok apparently looking to set-up an operation in Cork. The recent announcement of 370 VMWare jobs in Cork may yield some positions for the departing Motorolans and there are rumours that Vivendi’s games division are to bring 500 jobs to Cork.

Bourns Electronics is to let 80 jobs go in Cork. Their resultant work force in Cork will be just 10 people. This is another blow to the Cork region with the impending loss of Motorola, which coincidently is located in the same industrial estate as Bourns. More information here.