<p>Could anyone provide information on this field? Job opportunities, salary, future? Why students choose it and what attributes one must have to succeed.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, it's an interdisciplinary field of engineering in which one learns about principles which are common to different sorts of engineered systems, and often also the economic aspects of designing and producing them. Depending on the program, the student might need significant coursework in a particular field of engineering, or across various traditional engineering fields, as well.</p>
<p>It seems to be popular among big defense contractors right now, for whatever reason. I know that Raytheon has a bunch of positions open for systems engineers, and MITRE has paid for several dozen employees to get master's degrees in systems engineering through an internal program, and is encouraging more employees to do it too. I would guess that in general big companies are more likely to want systems engineers (but then again, a few of the software engineers and computer scientists at my small company come from systems engineering backgrounds).</p>
<p>I'd say that other than standard technical skill, you need the ability to be a generalist/interdisciplinary, to work with people from different disciplines, to be able to communicate technical information effectively to people in different fields, to be reasonably good at dealing with people, and to not be bored out of your skin by the more economics/management/leadership-oriented aspect of the curriculum.</p>
<p>I often answer questions on systems engineering and it's close cousin, operations research. But, Jessie did such a great job there isn't much else to add. I suspect that s/he is a systems engineer. My degree is in OR, but my old academic department now calls itself systems engineering. Often my business card has said 'systems engineer'. </p>
<p>The Washington Post has hundreds of job openings for systems engineers. The job outlook is nothing short of spectacular.</p>
<p>What attributes do you need to succeed? You will often be part of a team, where the other members are specialists. It will be your job to eke out what the system-wide requirements are, and to analyze the system design to ensure it will meet those requirements. This means you have to get along with and understand the work of the electrical, mechanical, computer, chemical, and other engineers who are part of the team. Their role is to be sure you build the system right. Your role is to be sure you build the right system. So, being a team player is critical. So is a thick skin (because all those traditional engineers love to look down on us). </p>
<p>My division is called the "Operations Research Systems Analysis" division. I have engineers, statisticians, and OR-degreed professionals of all stripes and all levels of experience. (Plus a number of really odd cats and dogs, like any good team.) In such an environment, systems engineers fit right in and are good to go from day one. If your university offers such a degree, I would strongly encourage you to look into it.</p>
<p>Thanks that was great</p>
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But, Jessie did such a great job there isn't much else to add. I suspect that s/he is a systems engineer.
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<p>Ha. I'm not (software engineer here), but I've considered getting a master's degree in it, and in my company I'm part of the engineering practices working group (requirements management) that seems to draw all the folks who come from a systems engineering background.</p>
<p>I'm glad to know that I got it right with the smattering of knowledge that I've gleaned. :)</p>
<p>The term "systems engineer" has many meanings and you need to look at how each company defines it. Sometimes it even has different meanings within the same company. For example, my company has SE as part of the product development process, but also part of the sales teams. The sales SE are typically responsible for the technical aspects of sales proposals. This includes understanding all of the componenets of the system (including those of third-party partners as well as existing systems that the customer already has) and how they are to be configured to meet the customer needs. It also involves knowledge of competitors' systems to explain why your solution is better (hopefully) than theirs.</p>
<p>Product development SEs in our company, as has been explained, are responsible for taking concepts that are loosely defined by product management and putting all of the technical meat on it in the form of requirements documents so that the hardware, physical designers and software developers are all singing from the same set of music and they all know exactly what is expected of the product. These requirements are then used at the tail end of the development process by the system test organization to draw up their test plans - they test the final product to make sure that all of the requirements that were specified by SE are met.</p>
<p>SEs need to have a good grasp of the underlying technology so that they know what the capabilities are and so that they can adequately spec the product; however, they don't necessarily need to know how to actually write the code or design the circuit in order to accomplish this. </p>
<p>From my experience, it is very hard to "learn" SE in school. While some SEs start that way right out of school, I think the optimal career path for an SE doing what I described above would be to start as a HW, ME or SW developer and then migrate into SE if that is what their inclination is. An ability to write clear, concise, and unambiguous requirements is a must.</p>
<p>In today's world of outsourcing, the one job that seems to be pretty safe is that of SE (both the product design side as well as the sales side). Companies may offshore the SW, HW and physical design to low-cost countries, but the need for very precise requirements documents telling these off-shore contractors what is expected is even more important now than ever. (One word of caution, however, when your development team is in a country 12 hours apart from you, expect to be making very early or very late phones calls. It gets real interesting when you have team member spread across multiple continents and they all have to be on the same conference call.) Once the product is developed, the sales SE are required for direct interaction with the customers, so they too are immune to off-shoring.</p>