This year has been like no other, but I can say the same for any year. Nonetheless, with COVID-19 still raging throughout the world, there’s no doubt the radical changes it’s induced are just the tip of the iceberg. The disruption has been across the board, from changing supply chains to how we interact with each other.
Not all changes were good, with the tremendous number of deaths at the top of the list. Even more people are affected by the long-term impact contracting the disease. Among the positive changes are an increase in telemedicine to reduce travel, which helps the environment, and better digital cameras and internet bandwidth have made video conferencing ubiquitous. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) continue to grow in performance and importance, too.
We now have Meta, formerly Facebook, with its Metaverse and NVIDIA and their Omniverse that push AR/VR and digital twins to the max. NVIDIA’s Omniverse Avatar is looking to provide 3D, AI-managed avatars that can interact with people in real-time (see figure).
The recognition of these and other changes shows up in the results of our annual engineer salary survey. This includes the desire for many to continue working remotely, which was often forced upon us by COVID-19. And the growth of virtual trade shows has been significant even as in-person events start to reappear. A lot of work still needs to be done to make these virtual trade shows better, but they will not be going away. Likewise, hybrid shows may become the norm as vaccinations make in-person events practical again.
The engineering salary survey also included questions like “What keeps you up at night?” The item at the top of the list was component availability. That’s not too surprising given the shortages and supply-chain disruption in our industry that have made headlines in the regular news. Car part shortages and consumer electronic shortages are just a portion of those problems.
Other trends have been long in coming, and they’ve been expected, even if many developers don’t put them high on their to-do list. Security is among the top items and artificial intelligence is another. One need only look at the current crop of processors to hit the market like Arm’s Cortex-M33 or Cortex-M55 families that incorporate secure boot and AI acceleration. Even FPGA vendors are getting into the fray with easier-to-use development tools that cater to secure AI applications.
All of this change leads to one of the major problems engineers and developers need to address: complexity. Complexity has grown significantly as the IoT wave came crashing down upon us well before the COVID-19 wave hit. Taken as a whole, this means that changes old and new are going to make our lives more interesting and challenging.