Embedded Head Count

“Does anyone know how many embedded engineers there are in the U.S.?”

That was the question posed in the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup last August. My first thought was “no, nobody really does.” But then I saw that another poster, a frequent contributor to the group, had already responded:

“There are presently over 2.4 million ‘Embedded Engineers’ in the U.S. This figure increases 21% to 35% annually.”

The author quoted an analysis he had done himself as the source of this information and linked to his website. But when I went to his website I couldn’t find any material related to this topic at all. So I posted a response stating that I felt his figure was way off the mark and asking to see his analysis.

If there were really 2.4 million “embedded heads” in the U.S. we’d account for approximately 1 out of every 110 Americans. While a figure like that is not out of the question for certain occupations—police officers and teachers are even more prevalent in our society—it seems at least an order of magnitude too big for embedded engineers. One out of every 1100—about 250,000 individuals—seems far more reasonable.

Needless to say, after some back and forth (both public and private), it became clear that the guy who seemed so confident that there were 2.4 million of us and so eager to announce this to the world, couldn’t give any actual justification for his numbers. At one point he mentioned that he “based the results on figures obtained from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” (He claimed to “have the raw data broken out somewhere”, but never did provide anything of the sort.) 

Judging from two-year old statistics I found on the BLS website (stats.bls.gov), 2.4 million might be an accurate figure for the entire category of “computers/hi-tech” workers. But that group also includes every computer programmer, database analyst, sysop, network administrator, web developer, webmaster, and many others. We are certainly far outnumbered even within that subpopulation.

So what is the true number of embedded engineers? I don’t know; probably nobody does. What I can tell you is that an extrapolation of 1992 data from the National Science Foundation could put the “number of engineers [of all types] in manufacturing” at over a million, and that BLS reported about 350,000 “electronic/electrical engineers” in 1998. IEEE-USA has about 220,000 members (including students), the ACM has “over 80,000 worldwide”, and ESP has 60,000 qualified subscribers. My book aimed at embedded newbies has sold about 20,000 copies in two years—making it an all-time best-seller in the embedded category. Finally, about 10,000 of us (not counting exhibitors) are expected to attend the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco in April.

Mulling over all of these numbers and considering the likely weight of each to the calculation, my mind keeps coming back to the figure of 250,000. Though by no means scientific and probably off by as much as 20% one way or the other, that’s about the best estimate I can give you today.

I’m not even going to discuss the ludicrous annual growth rate suggested by the same poster. By no surprise, this guy is now in marketing.