Change of field

gooch2k9

Hi folks!

I'm just hoping to tap into peoples advice or experiences for the situation I find myself in.

I've been a electronics test engineer for the last five years, since graduation. To be honest it's very repetitive and I've learned pretty much all there is at this point. I'm fairly sure of this as I've not learned much the last year or two.

I always liked doing embedded software at college and I would like to move into that area. The testing I have been doing has been at the HW/SW integration level, so I basically have no industry software experience.

I have been in contact with recruiters but they have mainly sent me other test jobs which I'm not really interested in. I understand why they send these jobs. As a result of this am I looking at applying for graduate software roles? I'd expect and to be willing to accept a drop in pay with a move like this.

Has anyone found themselves in this position or have any advice?

Turbulent Bill

Dropping back to graduate level just to get a SW job sounds a bit drastic. Could you not leverage your experience to go into embedded SW for testing, rather than starting from scratch? Keep the job and learn as you go.

G-Man

Thats great, you recognize you want to move on - but I wonder have you fully leveraged your hardware knowledge to enable transition to a more software development career.

Have you written an automated test program and used some software to present or analyse the values.

Have you used Python to read values from serial port or PCIE or whatever and display them in a GUI..

Have you written or debugged a driver to do HW bringup and software initialisation..

Those and others like are ways to leverage your hardware knowledge into software development. You could get good at C for the drivers and maybe Python or TCL for the GUI for the automated side.

Or indeed skip the SW altogether and start developing more complex hardware test circuits and probes