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Original thread:
Post 3 made on Sunday January 1, 2017 at 04:29
buzz
Super Member
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May 2003
4,366
MGregory,

Why is this career path attractive to you?

I don't know where you are in terms of age, skills, or requirement for current income. A good plan for a young person would be to adopt a remote control system as a hobby and program a remote. then try to convince someone to adopt this as their remote. Ask what is good and bad about your scheme. Try this with as wide an audience as possible. If you enjoy the process and the result is accepted by a group of potential users, you have a career path.

You don't need much remote hardware to do this. Global Caché offers a range of hardware interfaces for IR control and a growing number of products can be controlled over the home network without using any hardware "boxes". You can find very inexpensive software platforms that can send IP commands to Global Caché and directly to Receivers, Blu-ray, etc. For less than $150 or so you can get started. The user interface is up to you to work out.

What kind of human and machine interactions do you want? How confident are you in your own abilities? Are you a generalist or a specialist? Can you solve a wide range of problems? Do you want to be a super specialist or a generalist? An example of a super specialist would be someone who exclusively programs one system, such as Crestron, URC, RTI, or whatever. Do you want to work for yourself or someone else?

I have encountered programmers who never go to a site. They work with furniture companies and similar that deliver and hook up boxes, then contract with the programmer to stitch things together using online tools. There are merits to this approach. These are essentially "cookie cutter" systems and the programming can be done in a few minutes by an experienced person. The goal is to crank out as many installations as possible. While this is a perfectly acceptable business model, it is not for me. I am a generalist and prefer to be thrown into an unfamiliar environment and "shoot my way out." There are advantages to both approaches. The super narrow specialist is much faster at programming, but more limited in terms of problem solving. I can drop into a site, very confident that I'll be able to solve the problem, whatever that might be. In some cases, solving the problem for the customer involves calling in an appropriate specialist, such as a licensed electrician, HVAC guy, or plumber.

The disadvantage of being a generalist is that there is always a specialist who can be more efficient at each little task. The disadvantage of being a super specialist is that when technology changes, that specialty may become worthless in the marketplace.

A good approach to break into any career is to "sweep floors" for a while and learn as much as possible. A warning: If you are a formal software engineering type, I think that you will find this branch of "programming" irksome because there is a strong tendency to shoot from the hip.


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