Does anyone know how many embedded engineers there are in the
U.S.?
That was the question posed in the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup
last August. My first thought was "no, nobody really does." But then I
saw that another poster, a frequent contributor to the group, had
already responded:
"There are presently over 2.4 million Embedded Engineers in the U.S.
This figure increases 21% to 35% annually."
The author quoted an analysis he had done himself as the source of
this information and linked to his website. But when I went to his
website I couldn't find any material related to this topic at all. So I
posted a response stating that I felt his figure was way off the mark
and asking to see his analysis.
If there were really 2.4 million "embedded heads" in the U.S., we'd
account for approximately one out of every 115 Americans. While a
figure like that is not out of the question for certain occupations-police
officers and teachers are even more prevalent in our society-it seems
at least an order of magnitude too big for embedded engineers. One
out of every 1,150-about 240,000 individuals-seems far more
reasonable.
Needless to say, after some back and forth (both public and private), it
became clear that the guy who seemed so confident that 2.4 million of
us are out there and so eager to announce this to the world couldn't
give any actual justification for his numbers. At one point he mentioned
that he "based the results on figures obtained from the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics." (He claimed to "have the raw data broken out
somewhere," but never did provide anything of the sort.) Judging from
two-year-old statistics I found on the BLS website
(http://stats.bls.gov), 2.4 million might be an accurate figure for the
entire category of "computer/hi-tech" workers. But that group also
includes every computer programmer, database analyst, sysop,
network administrator, web developer, webmaster, and many others.
We are certainly far outnumbered even within that subpopulation.
So what is the true number of embedded engineers? I don't know;
probably nobody does. What I can tell you is that an extrapolation of
1992 data from the National Science Foundation could put the "number
of engineers [of all types] in manufacturing" at over a million, and that
BLS reported about 350,000 "electronic/electrical engineers" in 1998.
IEEE-USA has about 220,000 members (including students), the ACM
has "over 80,000 worldwide," and ESP has 60,000 qualified
subscribers. My book aimed at embedded newbies has sold about
20,000 copies in two years-making it an all-time best-seller in the
embedded category. Finally, about 10,000 of us (not counting
exhibitors) are expected to gather at the Embedded Systems
Conference in San Francisco in April.
Mulling over all of these numbers and considering the likely weight of
each to the calculation, my mind keeps coming back to the figure of
200,000. Though by no means scientific and probably off by as much as
25% one way or the other, that's about the best estimate I can give
you today.
I'm not even going to discuss the ludicrous annual growth rate
suggested by the same poster. By no surprise, this guy is now in
marketing.
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