eet.com
3/25/1999
To hear the folks at Wind River Systems tell it, embedded software has, well, soulful beginnings. You see, back in the 1980s, the company's founder, Jerry Fiddler, was fooling around with a way to make his computer play jazz. He succeeded — well enough, it turns out, to interest his East Bay cronies in their own copies of the software. An operating system was born.
Nearly two decades later, Alameda, Calif.-based Wind River is now the top dog in the hunt for market share in embedded software, a sector that has been growing "exponentially" of late, said Laurie Harper, the company's staffing manager. "There's still a lot of market share to be had," Harper said, but added, "It's going to be harder to find people with embedded skills — I think the market's growing faster than people are being educated in it."
Even so, Wind River said it hopes to grow its staff of 380-odd by between 25 percent and 30 percent this year, and perhaps by as much as 40 percent in 2000. "Our primary emphasis is in hiring engineers who know Unix and C and have some embedded background," Harper said. The company has a few listings now, for a software designer with chip-level experience, embedded or OS on their resume, and familiarity with Ethernet and TCP/IP; a senior software engineer with a bachelor's degree and five-plus years' experience with C++, Win32, API, MFC and Unix, as well as fault-tolerant, resilient system design; and a senior TCP/IP internal software engineer with a master's or bachelor's degree in computer science.
One of Wind River's biggest rivals, Integrated Systems Inc., is also hiring. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company needs a slew of software engineers to work on everything from device drivers to object-based debugger products for its embedded-tools group. ISI needs consultants as well, preferably masters'-level EEs or computer scientists. Those positions are kitchen-sink posts, requiring a strong foundation in problem solving and analysis, along with savvy in the company's core technologies.
Mentor Graphics' Microtec group (Santa Clara, Calif.) is also looking for a number of workers and development engineers for its RTOS and X-ray development tools. A background in programming or specific embedded fields is always helpful.
In Canada, QNX Software Systems Ltd. (Kanata, Ontario) is looking for
software-development engineers. There are open spots in many areas: R&D, embedded and the telecommunications. Further highlighting the international flavor of the embedded software market, Swedish RTOS developer Enea Ose Systems has openings throughout Europe and in the United States.
Intevis Corp., which has both full-time and contracting positions, advertises a few embedded jobs on its Web site, including opportunities in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Express Logic Inc., a real-time company in San Diego, also needs a senior software engineer. The ideal candidate has extensive assembly language and C experience, as well as ThreadX, VxWorks, VRTX or pSOS.
Bigger companies also have a need for embedded programmers. Hewlett-Packard has about 30 openings in California, Idaho and Massachusetts for people with that skill set, in units ranging from medical technology to laser printers and Java virtual machines. |
