Top 50 Employers for Electronics Design Engineers

Looks like its two for one day here on To the Rails! I swear I spoil you sometimes. 

For my second post tonight I just wanted to put up this graphic I came across in an article on Electronics Design just yesterday. If you checked out my updated links pages. you saw that I added Electronics Design News (EDN) to my list. Well, Electronics Design is a sister site to EDN and they publish nearly identical material -- to the point that I am not sure why there are two sites. Anyway, this article ranked the top 50 employers of electronics design engineers in the world. Take a minute and peruse the results. Think them over. Come to your own conclusions. 

 

Now throw those out and read what I have to say:

1.    I was horrified to see Apple ranked as #1. I hate Apple.....a lot. They are no friends to the hobbyist community and they have managed to build up this mystique that drives me insane. However, these are personal feelings and the reality is that Cupertino is gaining ground in nearly every facet of electronics design. The news that they are moving into making their own ICs (see Apple A5) has to have boosted the hiring of analog and digital IC designers in the last few years. It could also be they need slave labor to build that ridiculous "Mothership". Let my people go!

2.   That Texas Instruments was so low last year (60) is somewhat surprising. As the largest distributor of analog ICs in the world, and the recent acquisition of National Semiconductor doing nothing to slow that down, I would have thought they were at the top of the list. Instead, their meteoric rise of 25 spots over one year still only puts them at 35 overall.

3.    Interesting fact, I personally have job application rejection letters from five of these companies (I’ve only ever applied to five of them).

4.    It’s good to see Microchip making a move up. I really like their 16, 18, and 24 series of peripheral interface controller (PIC) microcontrollers. I have talked to some of their sales representatives before and even those guys are pretty sharp.

5.    I actually met Dr. James Truchard -- the CEO of National Instruments -- just two years ago. I was designing a data acquisition system in LabVIEW for some graduate students as part of an undergraduate research project at Virginia Tech when he came in for a lab tour. Supposedly the goal was to see how LabVIEW was being utilized in an academic setting (so hopefully we managed to score some funding in the process). I shook his hand and talked to him for a few minutes. He seemed like a really cool guy so I am glad to see them so high on the list (28), though they have fallen a bit from last year (8).