The results of Barr Group's 2017 Embedded Systems Safety & Security Survey are in (free PDF available at: https://barrgroup.com/Embedded-Systems/Surveys/2017-embedded-systems-sa…). More than 1,700 active, professional embedded systems designers from around the world participated.
With respect to the demographics, there's something interesting about embedded systems designers: As a group, we're old (or shall we say "experienced")! Especially experienced are those of us in the United States.
Although the largest percentage (36%) of respondents were in a group in the first decade (1-9 years) of paid embedded systems design experience, the average respondent had a long design career spanning 16.7 years. See Figure 1 for the distribution of ages. Assuming that the median designer started getting paid for his work shortly after earning an undergraduate degree and that 23 is a typical age for that, our average age is nearly 40 years.
As shown in Figure 2, the average number of years of paid experience was much higher in the
United States (20 years) than in Europe (14) or Asia (11).
The experience distribution in the U.S. is basically flat, with a slight bias up toward 20+ years of design experience. This combined with the higher average likely reflects both the aging of embedded systems designers as well as that younger American engineers are more attracted to other high-tech career options--perhaps where they can use modern programming languages instead of C!
