Power design engineers still rely on hardware skills – for the time being at least

I just read the first post by Bill Betts about his ongoing quest for his next EE job chronicled in the new blog Hire Ground, and he makes the comment that we should encourage tech-savvy kids interested in engineering to go into software rather than hardware because there are about 50 times more software than hardware jobs available in the Bay Area. [Bill also suggests that one reason for this may be that HW engineers are 50 times more productive than SW engineers, but that’s another comment thread for his blog…]  After reading Bill’s post I was musing that power system design is still, in general, the domain of hardware designers, but then I recalled an engineer I spoke with last week about Google’s announcement that it is funding alternative energy programs. I was encouraging this guy, who has about 20 years in all forms of power generation, both conventional and alternative, to apply for one of the alt energy jobs that Google has listed. He got back to me later and said that the Google job application form asks what software you’re a whiz with, the default apparently being C++. His experience with C++ is that umm, yes, it’s a programming language – he has no programming experience more recent than college. He was discouraged at the thought that Google would discount his years of hardware experience, including evaluating and then installing turbines running on a wide variety of fuels, just because he didn’t have the software/modeling experience apparently so dear to Google’s heart.

But software is Google’s world, and when it comes to this new alternative energy project it sounds like Google is acting more as a VC company and less as a project management/evaluation company. So I changed my tactics and suggested he contact eSolar, the company that’s actually doing the solar thermal work for Google, and may place a higher premium on hands-on experience with alternative energy. But the whole conversation served as a wake-up call that while hardware design still rules in power systems design, going forward, software experience — even in the world of power generation — will be a plus.