I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead.
Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...
I have a suspicion that your experience is representative of a general attitude in embedded engineering compared to other software disciplines. Embedded engineers usually still keep to proper part numbering, testing before shipping and working with greater platform limitations, all virtuous activities that are harder to find in other fields. I like to think this culture bleeds into other parts of the business such as implementing reasonable hiring processes!
I'd chalk it up to embedded not being a field you can hop into after a 4 month boot camp without prior Computer Engineering education. Of course, there are exceptional people who manage to do that, but they aren't the norm
<Warning - rant ahead>
Contrast that to the overglorified code monkeying that is present-day software development... You got react monkeys hard-coding every single width and height for every button and div in a webapp... And they get paid for it... And then someone like me will have to clean up this shit and explain to the client why the billion features he wants won't be ready in 3 months.....
Then you have AWS monkeys coding everything in lambas and amplify, instead of "if conditions" you got "Step functions" and instead of a function you got a lamda, and instead of async/await you got SQS queues and shit.
</Rant>
As a result, legit Engineers/excellent developers resumes get swallowed up in the raging ocean of noise, and a ton of those noise-resumes aren't distinguishable from legit-resumes due to resume generators being dime a dozen.
This is me, I'm a renter and my complex will never install chargers. I've tried, it's a no-go.
That said, 50MPG vehicles are common these days. My '07 Prius gets 48, measured, a newer Camry/Accord/Sonata hybrid will get ~50MPG as well. Add an openpilot driving system and it's almost like a private train car.
I drive 80 miles round trip, 5x a week for work. That works out to ~$2000/yr for gasoline. That's really not that bad at all! Just don't drive a crossover or truck as your daily.
I'll probably never buy electric, because I don't want to buy a house (just not for me) and I don't think apartments will install a charger-per-spot (personal requirement). That's OK, hybrid is pretty great.
On the heat pump side, I only have to heat 700 sqft - it requires little energy and is so little cost-wise I don't even track it.
I'm a simple man, and did something similar but with bash+mosquitto+imagemagick running on a Kindle. That's boring/been done, but what I want to talk about is screen burn-in.
I've been displaying slight variations of the same image on an old Kidle paperwhite for a bit over 5 years! I've noticed NO burn-in at all. I'm doing partial updates every refresh (30 second refreshes), so the display will go 1+ years without a full refresh (~1 million partial refreshes a year). There's some retention when I first work with it, but clearing the screen and showing a full-screen pattern is enough to remove that retention entirely.
Pretty impressive, and I am also impressed the old firmware stays attached to wifi for the whole time as well! Sometimes it can have trouble reconnecting (power outage, dog unplugged wifi, whatever), that's when I'll see if there's burn-in, probably once a year(ish).
I unfortunately stopped daily driving gentoo right as core counts in consumer machines started to go above 1. I have played around w/ it a few times since, and was blown away by how much faster emerges go when you add ever increasing numbers to -j in your make opts.
Building large software is consistently the only useful thing I can do that will fully utilize all CPU resources. Seeing all the bars in the red in htop on a box with a lot of threads doesn't get old.
There’s a few threads linked in the top discussion (you may need to expand the massively downvoted responses, and some are deleted), but Mazda is known to use tracking data to deny warranty claims and share that data with insurers.
I was also stunned to learn salespeople’s commission is denied if they don’t get you on the app! Absolutely wild.
I got my first job by walking in. It was at a medical center, and I just asked the receptionist for the IT department. Got routed all over the med center. When I got to IT I found the telecom manager was way over worked and needed help, but had no time to search. So he interviewed and hired me on the spot. This was in 2007.
I wouldn’t do that today, you won’t get past security at most places. It does happen, though.
I got my first real tech job in a similar way. I was moving into a dorm at a state university (1999 or so) and the network was not working. No one around, so I went into the unlocked networking closet, found the IP for my floors switch, realized the ports were all disabled, got them enabled and passed out static IP information by the time the dorm networking manager got there. Was also hired on the spot!
The key distinction is “take-homes as the first round”. IME OP is right, do not do a take-home as a first interview round before you even have any chance to ask them questions. They’re not serious and will likely ghost you.
Even if they are serious, and you ask questions after the take-home then find out they don’t believe in version control and testing, you still wasted your time!
People always bring this up like it’s a big deal, but most users aren’t interested in starting a business. We just wanna play with LLMs.
Frankly, I’m glad we don’t have a bunch of llamas in different skins being hawked like the current crop of “AI” startups that are just thin layers over OpenAI’s API.
Sure, it's most dependent on the age of the company/software. The older, or lower level the code, the more hacks and workaround that appear in a codebase.
Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...
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