Ask HN: Advice on breaking into embedded programming?

16 points by psyc 8y ago ↗ HN

I have ~20 years of various application programming experience, from desktop, to web, to mobile. I'm primarily a game programmer, and have done optimization work on fairly high-profile mobile games. I'm good at asm, C, optimization, logic, and all things low-level.

For whatever it's worth (?) all my Shenzhen I/O scores are all the way to the left :)

I'm open to relocating anywhere in the U.S. Any advice on how to approach this would be appreciated.

3 comments

[ 36.4 ms ] story [ 1237 ms ] thread

itamarst 8y ago ↗

1. Try applying to an embedded programming job. Or a dozen, better yet.

2. Take an "adjacent" job. I.e. find company that has both embedded jobs and non-embedded jobs; apply for the latter. It's easier to transfer within a company, because they know you and say "oh, psyc is smart, he/she can learn this" as opposed to "who is this psyc person? they don't know embedded". So it's a good way to get into jobs you can't otherwise get.

danielvf 8y ago ↗

A local company that designs embedded hardware and software was looking for a developer last time I talked with them. Email me at com leancoder daniel (reverse and add punctuation).

atroyn 8y ago ↗

Game programmers are generally quite well regarded in 'physical computing' disciplines, because there's so many moving parts and edge cases to take care of - just like hardware.

Do a couple of real embedded projects for yourself (not just Sketch on Arduino, but grab say an ARM dev board and hack something together) then start applying. Good embedded people are in relatively short supply.