Hi all! Hitting a roadblock in my career where I feel like I'm not growing my hardware skills as an early career employee. Could you recommend your top hardware companies for career development and learning hardware skills? Is it better to go to a smaller company or a larger, more established company for learning?
Big company in the beginning of career for resume building. Preferably move around teams and take on different roles while in big company. Then in mid career move to small company to take on more influential roles. Don’t stay in the big company for too long.
What are you trying to learn? Career goals 5/10 years from now?
Great point, this is definitely something I need to spend more time thinking about. I'm trying to get more design experience with embedded hardware which I don't think I am currently getting. My rough 5/10 year career goal would be to have developed enough skills and knowledge to lead the design of a product, or at least be able to pick up any aspect and work on it.
All big semi companies have stagnated recently....Join a startup, learn new things and move to a big company in managerial capacity and start driving innovation
Great insight on semi companies, seems like a good path to consider! Not in the semiconductor space at the moment but understand it's big hardware employer.
https://internalregister.github.io/2019/03/14/Homebrew-Console.html This was built by a software engineer with no hardware experience. You have no excuse
Very cool project! Provides me some inspiration to pick up some side projects and help grow my skills that way :)
go back to school
I think that if I wanted to change fields dramatically, this is what I would do. However on the job learning is so much different than academic learning in my opinion that I would want to try to learn by doing in most cases.
Big company. I would suggest Apple. You will be working a lot in hardware but also learning a lot.
Which group?
Will have to consider this seriously, seems to be a lot of votes for Apple in this thread!
Hardware = apple /endofstory
Definitely respect the quality of hardware they produce.
Nvidia
Would this be mainly for IC design / RTL level stuff or for board level design as well?
What do you think if the comments thus far? My $0.02 is actually the solution you need is to get multiple mentors preferably in areas where you'd like to take your future. They will be an invaluable resource when it comes to questions like these
Comments have been helpful so far as I go through them. I agree that having mentors would help a lot, thanks for pointing that out!
Take control of your career and teach yourself. Side projects.
Side projects are good to learn about technology, but here's why I'm not sure it addresses OP's concern to the deepest level 1) a real mentor on a real product matters 2) at scale, f**k ups and being thorough matters A LOT 3) checks and balances of design documentation (Making sure another engineer can jump right in with a week to read and fully understand architecture, calculations, data sheets, etc) 4) a lot of hardware "just works" aka, half a**ed jobs will let code run even if you mess up some fundamental things. Simple examples are routing, component selection, properly following application notes to the T, and certain techniques for noise mitigation that only combat high volume fallout 5) proper simulation and testing methods that incorporate the latest tools, equipment, and especially proper calibration. I've seen certain FAE's not quite understand too. Also, being thorough and understanding regulatory spec. To do side projects, you usually forgo a lot of the above steps just to get results
This is good advice, I definitely need to take it upon myself to learn myself outside of work! However I also think that if I'm going to spend 40+ hours a week in an area, it should promote growth at some level.