Electrical Engineering Jobs

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21
Well, red_conundrum may have stated it a bit harshly, but I agree with the point being made. I've spent 8 years in the Bay Area and now 5 years here. I do development work here myself, as well as using the services of outside companies. Several companies here that do testing and certification, are just implementers. They aren't proactive at all. The attitude is, well we will run the tests for you and give you the results. Back in the Bay Area, the same companies would come in, review your designs beforehand, and give advice up front as to how to do your design, in order to pass certification in the future. When I asked about there here, I'm usually greeted with looks like, hey that sounds like a good idea, but I haven't heard of anyone doing that?

When dealing with an up and coming contract manufacturer here (featured as a great Swiss success story in one magazine), they made so many mistakes, and then made so many promises to fix things, that they've become the running joke in our office. I ended up sending the work back to California, done for 20-40% less and in half the time. And, they respond to emails within hours, not days or weeks.

Also, many people here insist on doing things by phone, which I think I stopped doing about 10 years ago. It's just not efficient. No one is ever at their desk, and even if they are, they can't answer your question immediately anyway.

I'm also quite frustrated at how much things are accepted here. People just shrug their shoulders and say "Well, that's how it is. It won't change.". These are people working in "high tech". I feel like I have to be the annoying, demanding one who finds it amazing that these companies can even stay in business. I had to send a nasty email to one company, just to get them off their butts and get us a quote, for work they were doing to fix a problem they caused! We had a critical customer delivery coming and we needed to get the work started. It was a simple quote but we were waiting for several weeks. Suddenly after the email, the quote came within a day.

If you work for a Swiss company, make sure it's one with very high end, high performance products which have customers who aren't price sensitive at all. That's what Swiss businesses are good at and there are markets for those products.

That said, for the OP, it depends on what you want, but I agree, if you want to learn cutting edge technology, I wouldn't pick here. The pace is slower and people just accept the status quo. Breaking the rules isn't appreciated around here, both on the street, and in business.

Dan

22
No idea in Electrical engineering but in electronics and software there are little gems here and there. But certainly, if in Europe and looking for large creative ecosystem à la Silicon Valley - then maybe Cambridge area or Israel. What's the last time you've used a tool or product created in continental Europe for an "EE" job? CAD? Simulation? DB system? Compilers? Processors? Other chips? Read a cool, paradigm-shifting bok on EE subject authored here?

It is not that it is not done here, it is that the scale is smaller.

23
1. I have the feeling people are not comparing apples with apples here. A DB system or a compiler is nothing an electrical engineer would build in the European definition of electric engineering.

2. Could it be that you happen to not read German books? Maybe that's why...

3. The classic electric engineering from sensors over measurement engineering to industrial robots: D-A-CH is world leading and has so for decades, end of story.

The European industry tends to be less noisy as the silicon valley, the products are more boring, there are few teenage selfmade millionaires and you will need to worry less if you have the right facial hair of the season - but there are a lot of jobs in those less sexy engineering companies.

P.S> A lot of chips are developed and made in Germany, but they are usually the type you never worry about but simply do their job in your car... they are a big seller and you can find them in your car pretty much regardless if it is German or Korean.

24
I'm not mad at you, you're just obviously clueless to the fact that Swissmem (a good part of it involves eletrical engineering) exports more than 75% of their stuff. So really, not quite your version of Swiss buy Swiss stuff because they don't know better... 6% of Swiss exports are electronics, quite sizeable for an export oriented country like Switzerland, but surely that doesn't matter because you worked at a shitty company.

25
That, I think, should be a no-brainer. Working for a mediocre company with a local customer base is bound to leave you bored and frustrated. But again, Treverus talked about D-A-CH (Germany - Austria - Germany or more precisely Southern Germany, Western Austria, Northern Switzerland) this region is an industrial power house that has technology leaders in so many fields it's crazy. It doesn't stop at the border of course, but many German companies find it easier to recruit good engineers (even if they end up being German) in Switzerland and for that reason have subsidiaries in North-Eastern Switzerland or around Zurich despite the higher cost.

26
No. No, no, no, no, no, and a thousand times no. If you've only worked in Switzerland, have never been to the Valley, Cambridge, other European countries, you'd know.

Switzerland is AT LEAST 15 YEARS behind the rest of the world, ESPECIALLY in controls and sensors. (How do I know? Because I've worked in jobs doing controls and sensors, both in Switzerland and abroad. Have you?)

Their manufacturing processes are behind. Their design cycles are too slow, and sadly, for howevermany groans I will receive for this, their education level is VERY far behind too.

I can't tell you how many EEs I met in Switzerland who actually thought that whether a capacitor came "before" or "after" a resistor didn't make a difference in the functionality of a low pass filter!

Or how many self-proclaimed senior engineers were teaching junior engineers to wire a prototype circuit board using gops of solder as a substitute for wiring.

Here are some pictures of actual abominations I have seen in Switzerland, and Switzerland only:

Nowhere in the world is this sort of stuff "cutting edge" or even workable design. I pity any engineer who has to be mentored under the engineers who actually think this crap hacking would be acceptable for a part-time electronics home hobbyist, let alone for serious industry. In the US, if a manager came across this kind of "prototyping", let alone actual products (these were!!), the engineer would get fired or, if a brand new grad 2 days out of school, be given a very stern talking to.

Don't even get me started with the quality of the software.

And, being an engineer who often has to program in assembly, I can also tell you, that their "cutting edge assembly" that some poster above claims is still 15 years behind. Not 1 year, not 2 years, or even 4 years. 15.

27
Absolutely. Of course there are mediocre or small companies that are not at the state-of-the-art in hard- and/or software development (as anywhere).

Why some employees of such companies seem to pop up here and complain about a general problem in Switzerland is beyond me.

Because, as mentioned before by others, there are of course a lot of highly competitive companies that work on the bleeding edge of technology located in Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria. Many of them are no household names, because they neither create fancy gadgets for Joe Sixpack nor are they very large by international standards. An interesting article on these "Hidden Champions" can be found here .

One might also gain some insight from the number of patent filings per country . But this is of course not EE centred and does not draw the whole picture for various reasons.

28
Let me ask you something. If you think looking at patent filings and other statistics gives you the true state of the industry in Switzerland (or any other country), this only tells me that YOU HAVE NOT WORKED IN THE INDUSTRY.

Therefore, sorry, but your opinion is just an opinion. And an unfounded one, at that.

29
I am an EE and work for an EE company near Zurich.

We currently have the following openings:

Software Design Engineer, Signal Processing

Services Software Engineer

Supply Chain Process Manager

Field Application Engineer EMEA

There are also 11 additional open EE positions at our offices in the UK, Italy and Belgium, plus 1 in the USA and 2 in Asia.

I left out the Sales positions, which also require an EE degree.

PM me for details

30
It's not Switzerland, but rather some crap companies that you've manage to find, which can be found anywhere in the world.

If Swiss companies are 15 years behind, how come they have no problems selling to the rest of the world?

The companies I've worked for exported 90+% of their production most of the time, clearly people in other countries weren't buying the product because it was cheaper.

Tom

31
Tom, can you please answer the following two questions about your company, since you appear to be happy with its pace of innovation?

1. How long does it take to develop a brand new product at your company, *from scratch*?

And what I mean is, from the time someone decides "we should build this new product that hasn't existed before", gathers the requirements, requirements are signed off, a team is put together, the design gets done, it gets implemented, debugged, tested, manufactured, and shipped.

and

2. Is your product more, or less complex than a smartphone?

Thank you.

32
Last one took about 2 months.

Sometimes less complex, and always much more expensive.

Tom

33
That wonderful productivity boost with EE spending time on the EF instead of being busy debugging their software. The turn around time is very flexy here

34
That's a good question and one I've asked many times myself, when I couldn't believe the stuff I was seeing actually went out to customers. From what I've seen, there are a couple of things going on.

1. Swiss companies that make crapware don't actually have all that many customers. If you manufacture only 10 products and 9 out of those 10 get sold abroad, that still doesn't mean that you're selling a lot of stuff abroad, by any measure. Percentages can be deceiving.

2. Out of the products sold, how many are returned with defects or for repairs, and what is their lifetime once they're out? From what I've seen...actually, quite a lot. Many Swiss companies make their money on "servicing" and they knowingly ship products that are defective. I have seen it in more than one company here. Customers sometimes buy the product because of the service guarantees can be deceivingly "reassuring".

3. Markets are not always perfect markets. That means, there's not always perfect information regarding the product. Marketroids are famous for selling smoke and mirrors, vaporware. A product may look good, but it doesn't mean that it actually *is* good.

4. A lot of sales happen to far less industrialized nations, where technology *IS* 15 years behind. My group at my current company, for instance, is currently aggressively chasing a customer in Pakistan. Not only is Pakistan very backwards in national infrastructure (internet at home? Are you kidding?), but also being able to say you "buy Swiss" is kind of cachet. And if you happen to hate the Americans, then you wouldn't buy US. There are lots of things like that that happen, people don't always buy products because they're the "best" or the "cheapest", there are often other factors at work.

I don't question that Swiss industry has customers, both internal and abroad. But that's not what I think would make that measure the only (or even an important) ingredient to determine "innovation" in an industry. (shrug).

35
I do not believe you for a minute. If you actually believe that a product as complex as a smartphone can be designed and manufactured *from scratch* in 2 months you're very inexperienced indeed.

36

Smart phones can take much longer to develop (or rely on bigger teams) as there are so many considerations to take into account that just don't crop up in small-run, highly complex, niche-market electronic products.

Including:

Extreme reliability against knocks, vibration etc. Cool design. Design for minimum cost of manufacturer. Normally new (untested) silicon for the latest phone. Telecoms wireless approvals. SAR approvals. EMC more complex to fix. Battery stuff (design for minimal power requirements) Complex s/w and 3rd-party s/w compatibility. Bug-free s/w Design-for-high volume manufacturer. High-volume manufacture/Test set-up.

You don't get any of that in a new card that slots into a mains-powered rack.

37
Tom,

I realized that I misunderstood you. Let me rephrase my questions about your company.

1. How long did it take to develop, *from scratch*, the last product at your company that was about as complex as a cell phone?

2. How long does it take, *on average* to develop products from scratch at your company that are about as complex as a cell phone? Not your last project, *on average*.

You know, if it takes 2 months to develop a bug release from scratch, well, then we're not comparing apples to apples. What I'm trying to do here is to see if you're right, that I managed to only work at "mediocre companies" (not "average/representative" companies), where for some unknown and highly lucky (or unlucky) reason their development cycles for products far less complex than a smartphone took 2-5 years, when in comparison, in countries known for innovation, like the US, things like smartphones take around 1 year to develop and release.

Think of the "smartphone" as a kind of "McDonald's" index of innovation, used as a baseline to measure relative complexity. We could choose something else, but most people are familiar with smartphones and the kind of design complexity they entail. And also, most smartphones are released on 1 year *design* (i.e. *from scratch*!) cycles, and often even less, so they are a nice basis for comparison.

38
Indeed. That's why I chose it. And, amazingly, good companies actually put out products such as these on 1 year cycles quite easily. I myself have worked at several of them....but they're not in Switzerland. The culture here just simply does not support what is required to be able to produce such complex products with such high efficiency, because the efficiency part comes by innovation--individual engineer's rebellion and creativity, which is often discouraged by the corporate culture of Switzerland.

And hint: the size of teams has nothing to do with it. At a former company of mine, a GIS-quality GPS handheld unit with color touchscreen, back in 2001 (i.e. several years before the first color touchscreen smartphones) took a team of 3 engineers only 3 months to design and 6 months to develop (i.e. 6 months to gather requirements, put teams together, design, and pop out perfectly functional and debugged prototypes). The testing and manufacture involved more people and more time, but by the end of 12 months the product was out in boxes at customer's shelves.

39
I don't think you understood me.

The phones aren't actually that complex. They just need a lot of work to fulfill or the criteria required of them

A much more complex board slot-in card with DSPs, and numerous FPGAs can still, in a smaller team, be ready for market much quicker but still be a much more complex design.

40
You're the first person I've met who thinks that throwing a bunch of chips together and programming them is more complex than actually manufacturing a product involving mechanical engineers, RF engineers, SW engineers, manufacturing engineers, testers, marketing, and government approvals, like a smartphone does.

You seem to think that "complexity" is only measured by how "difficult" the algorithm inside the chip is (or in your words, "the design").

What I meant by "complexity" is how much communication is required between various groups of people so that they can actually crack out a product that works on time.

Give your slot-in card to a company that can pop out a smartphone in 1 year and most likely they'll pop it out as fast as your company if not much faster.

That's why we're trying (though you seem to deliberately miss the point) to compare things of similar complexity. Your company does not design things that are as complex as a smart phone. Thus you can pop them out faster. Fair enough. But my point is that most Swiss companies design things less complex than a smartphone, and still pop them out slower. Maybe you're right. I must be so crap that only crap companies hire me.

But I didn't work at crap companies in the US. So, the point stands that there are more crap companies that hired me in Switzerland than in the US. That is either because there are simply more crap companies here in Switzerland than there are in the US, or because I somehow became more crap as I came to Switzerland.

Either way, it doesn't bode well for recommending an engineer to enhance his carreer by coming here. I'm not the only one who has had this experience. If you got a company where you're happy, more power to you, but that doesn't discount the fact that many other people have had experiences where the pace of innovation in Switzerland, compared to many other places, was severely lacking. You can dismiss them as "mediocre" or whatever, but for some reason, there seem to be more of them here, than elsewhere.

I hope the OP finds that elusive "hidden gem" of world innovation in EE here in Switzerland. I truly do. Good luck OP!