The Future of IoT is Embedded Systems and Real-time Operating Systems (RTOS)

Embedded systems are highly customized, developed and programmed as per user requirements.  Conventional embedded systems are electronic components that possess a microprocessor, peripherals, memory card, and software program that run instructions, operating system and tools (debuggers, static and non-programmable), and follows firmware programming embedded in the micro-chip.

Embedded systems will play an important role in Internet of Things (IoT) due to their unique characteristics and features such as real time computing, low power consumption, low maintenance and high availability are becoming the key enabler of IoT.  Major players in embedded system hardware and software developments are aiming to bring these transformations into their products to take advantage of growing IoT market. The areas that are going to transform are Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) and microprocessors and microcontrollers, followed by memory footprints and networking, open source communities and developers.

Smart embedded systems will require changing contemporary embedded system design and architecture to suit real-time operations, smaller size of the unit and lowered power consumption and become cost efficient. Use of microcontroller and technologies such as Systems on Chip (SoC) and Reduced Instruction set Computing Chips (RISC) will have greater scope in IoT.

Related to embedded systems is Real-time Operating Systems (RTOS), which is an OS that manages hardware resources, hosts applications, and processes data on real-time basis.  RTOS defines the real time task processing time, interrupt latency, and longer period reliability of both hardware and applications, especially for low powered and memory constrained devices and networks.  The key difference between RTOS and a general purpose OS lies within its high degree of reliability and consistency on timing between application's task acceptance and completion.

What is the future of a career in embedded systems engineering?

The field of embedded systems engineering has given me a good steady income since the 1970s, and it still does to this day.  The number of "intelligent" devices continues to multiply rapidly, and all of those devices are "embedded systems" (a device with a processor in it which is not considered a "traditional" computer).  All of those devices run on code, therefore needing software engineers skilled in the technologies of embedded systems to create that code.  As the number of different intelligent devices in the world grows, so does need for embedded engineers - it's that simple.  And since it appears that almost every technological device has an embedded processor in it, and the number and kind of those devices will only continue to increase there is most certainly a very bright future for embedded engineers.  Consider the latest tech "trend", IoT (Internet of Things) - it's all about embedded devices!!! 

A good analogy is cloud providers like AWS, GCE etc. Once upon a time, if you had to develop your application, on top of writing the application logic, you also had to configure DNS routing, load balancing, caching, data-store etc. Now that applications are getting hosted online via popular cloud service providers, most of this routine, non-creative but very-much-needed work is automatically given to you as basic platform services, leaving you with just the creative component of your unique application. This aspect of PaaS/IaaS providers is called as non-differentiated heavy lifting.

This is bound to happen in embedded systems engineering as well. As a matter of fact, its well underway with commodity hardware, off-the-shelf chips coming inbuilt with networking and routing, sensor and drones manufactured inexpensively in China/Taiwan with in-built MPLS, GPS algorithms, plug and play diagnostic routines etc, etc. You name it.

So the key is to have a unique value proposition for yourselves, beyond simply knowing to program in C/C++, experience in BIOS/PROM, SAS, PCI-e, I2C. That kind of job does exist very much in the market now, think IoT, connected cars, VR headsets or even the Pebble smart watch. It can be a niche role.