2013年4月28日 星期日

Not A Hardware Company Anymore

Chinese People prefer to change their job after Chinese new year. Not only because it implies a new beginning of one year but also many companies pay bonus to their employees before that. During this period, you can see a lot of people leaving their old position and going to a new one. I think people make decisions by their own criteria, but salary is just one of reasons.

Last April I came back Taiwan and join this company. My job is very interesting. My first assignment in this company is to develop AEC via Android. This is a process of acoustic signals which can cancel echo coming with a hand-free phone. Now I am responsible for porting  Bluetooth and Wi-Fi drivers used in Linux.

In this job I can accumulate more experience of software development in Linux and Android, I also learn a lot of knowledge about Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the meantime. Because of these reasons I'm very happy working in this company.

In our company's Year-End banquet at February, our CEO told us that "our company is a software company". Why is it so important to us? Our business is selling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules to our customers. Then these products will be integrated in automotive systems. It seems like a business about hardware selling, however, almost 90% is about software development.



Once a new project being to start, of course, the first step is to choose Blueooth/Wi-Fi module.  Then sales representatives will negotiate about how to develop software components.

Normally, in a Bluetooth project,  there are many components need to develop. Such like Bluetooth driver, audio drivers, Bluetooth middle-ware, audio middle-ware, Bluetooth applications(profiles) and audio applications.

However, customers usually outsource some software components to another third party. For examples, GUI and navigation are those components usually be outsourced. Outsouring will increase the complexity of a project. So there are much work to do with software engineering such like analysis, integration, version control, refactoring and regression testing.

About three years ago, the business is fairly easy: engineers only need to check signals of chips and then things are done. But now it is changed. Our company is not a hardware company anymore.


2013/04/16
O.T.

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