Is DSP a good field to have a career in?

On 30 Mar, 08:00, "steveu" <ste...@coppice.org> wrote:
> >On Mar 25, 8:03=A0pm, ste...@coppice.org wrote:
> >I see it quite differently.
>
> >I have been doing DSP for 25+ years and I do consider that I have had
> >a career in DSP. &#4294967295;Every job I have had, had to be primarily DSP
> >(except one that was supposed to be some really cool applications of
> >DSP, but I was mislead about, and was not happy). I have worked on
> >many different application areas, but it was applications of DSP.
> >Start a new job, learn the application and how DSP applies, do the DSP
> >along with some closely-related subjects.
>
> >Some of what I have done, an audio engineer that knew DSP might have
> >done, but had there been no DSP I would not have accepted the job. So
> >I find it hard to consider that I was an audio engineer, there is just
> >to much of that job that I am not interested in.
>
> >Just another view,
>
> I think you are talking from a different point of view. Its mostly the
> signal processing that has kept me interested in the work that I do, and I
> usually try to ensure my work includes a substantial amount of it. Over the
> last 30 odd years if you asked me what I am I would probably have
> consistently said a DSP guy. That isn't really what has been able to
> sustain my employment, though. A reasonably deep knowledge of killing
> people, telecoms, and sensing is what has done that.

I started out in a job where we used measured data as the basis
for making decisions. I never really was interested in DSP as such,
but in how DSP helped 'massage' the data to give a better
understanding of the system under study. As a side effect,
I gained some competence in DSP. Mostly, this competence was
gained by testing methods to destruction, to find out where, when,
how and why they break down, but also by stating various problems
and see how (well, if) they can be solved. Of course, most of the
time I discovered why problems can *not* be solved by DSP, but
there were one or two problems I managed to solve.

Unfortunately, after a while people started asking me (inasmuch
as bosses 'ask') to do impossible stuff. I just saw that a former
employer of mine is hiring people to do underwater acoustics
communications. I can come up with 5-10 reasons why it is
all but impossible to come up with acoustic comm systems
that work on longer ranges that a couple of water depths and
also have a useful bandwidth. All have to do with the physics
of the underwater comm channel, and can thus not be corrected
for. This is a very poor starting point - even if I am right - since
no one pay people to tell them why something can *not* be
done. The result is, of course, that this field is populated
by the people who, for some reason or another, do not say
that something can not be done. These people lack either
the competence or professional integrity (or both) to see
the reality, which in turn means that any DSP engineer,
however competent, is well and truly screwed from the
moment he signs the contract with these types of
companies or organizations.

Rune