Is microcontroller worth learning? What kind of job can you find if you know how to use a microcontroller?

I learned microcontrollers by myself in 2011. My major is electrical engineering. After 2 years of studying, the entire department was forced to major in elevators by the school.

When I was about to graduate, I realized how pitiful this major was. The working environment was harsh, the work was physically demanding, you had to be held responsible if there was an accident, the work mode was on call 24 hours a day, and the saddest thing was the pitifully low salary.

After studying hard for more than 20 years to do this kind of work, I am not willing to accept it.

So before I officially graduated, I decisively changed my career, and later I accidentally came into contact with embedded development.

I also learned about microcontrollers from embedded development, because it is relatively easy to get started and there is little to learn.

It was also from that time that I solved my question about how smart hardware is made.

After studying for more than 3 months, I controlled every hardware on the 51 development board, and made a small electronic clock project based on the development board.

Then I went to look for a job. Because I was changing careers and I had no project experience, companies basically didn’t want me.

Later, I bought a smart car DIY kit from Moubao. I first bought a set without welding, and then started to build the project step by step starting from welding the boards.

When I welded a board for the first time, I had no experience, and it was my first time to use old iron, so I failed at welding, but I have gained more and more experience in welding.

I was too lazy to bother with it later, so I just bought a soldered set and started learning the program from the beginning.

After finishing it, I felt that it still lacked some technical content, so I taught myself VB and used VB to build a host computer to control the car and read parameters such as the speed of the car.

The whole project took nearly a month, but my level has indeed improved a lot through this project. At least my code integration ability is still no problem in handling a 51-level project.

Later, I took this project to an interview and found a job very quickly. It was a Hong Kong-funded company in Huaqiangbei. The company was not big, with a total of about 20 people.

Therefore, no matter what your academic qualifications are or whether you are a major, it will not actually be the threshold for this industry. There are not many requirements for going to a small company in the early stage. It mainly depends on your ability.

Of course, that company was willing to hire me. On the one hand, it was a cheap labor force. On the other hand, many of the company's products were made of 51 microcontrollers, and customers often had needs to change their functions.

Most of the newcomers in this company are fresh graduates who have done a few small projects on their own, which is a bit basic.

In that company, I mainly maintained the code of previous products and upgraded functions according to customer requirements. The company generally did not allow newcomers to participate in the development of new products.

At that time, the salary was only about 1.8K. After working for half a year, I only received a few hundred yuan in consolation payment at the end of the year. Then I quit my job without mercy.

After changing jobs, my salary increased to more than 5K. Later I helped the company make some small products, which was also recognized by the boss. Later, I basically participated in the company's main R&D backbone.

Since then, I have been taking root in this industry for 10 years.

There have been times when I regretted it in the past 10 years. When I saw how high the salaries for pure software companies were, I regretted not switching to pure software in the first place.

There are also times when I feel grateful. When I see the students who are still struggling in the elevator maintenance industry, I am very glad that I made the decision to change careers.

Therefore, the development of single-chip microcomputer is not enough compared with the above, but more than the below, so it is at a medium level.

Compared with pure software, the salary is lower, but in recent years I have also found that this industry is slowly rising, first of all, the salary increase.

Secondly, despite the increase, many companies are still unable to recruit people. A friend of mine’s company is even willing to accept fresh graduates.

If you think about it carefully, this is also a normal phenomenon. My personal guess is that it may be due to the following reasons:

1. Many people prefer to make pure software

2. The Internet of Things has spawned more new applications

3. There are many ordinary developers, but few truly experienced ones.

Therefore, I think the future prospects of this industry are very good. Don’t limit your vision to microcontrollers, but use microcontrollers to create products to solve user pain points.

Let’s talk about what kind of jobs can you find if you know how to use a microcontroller?

Generally there are two positions: microcontroller engineer and embedded engineer .

Nowadays, many people will learn by buying development boards. I have been in this industry for 10 years. I have interviewed some engineers and been interviewed by many companies. Let me share my thoughts on finding a job in this field.

If you only know how to develop the board, it will be more difficult to find a job, because after learning the development board you will find that you still don't know how to do projects.

This is because you lack product thinking. You must first have product thinking, that is, if you are given a function, do you have an idea in your mind to implement this function?

First of all, you must have this idea. After you have this idea, you still have to know how to implement it through code, which will test your coding skills.

After implementing it through code, all functions are finally integrated together. If the project is slightly larger, this will test whether your program architecture is well written.

Therefore, this knowledge is what real enterprises need, rather than just using a development board to use all the peripherals. This can only be regarded as an introduction.

This is why our Wuji microcontroller programming is project-driven and leads students to learn the technology of microcontroller development.

For our senior engineers, microcontrollers are just tools. The real core is your product thinking and programming level.

After exercising these two, whether you are doing microcontroller development or pure software development, your thinking will be the same, but the language will be different.