Outsourcing to United States

[dhs]

I am working on a startup, outsourcing AI and IoT focused on embedded systems, from South America (Argentina) to the United States, we are looking for a beachhead market, I have a few questions, any advice will be very appreciated:

- What ecosystems, IDE+ Agile tools + standards + others, are commonly applied by development companies of the US?

- I was talking with some engineers from HP who used QT Creator and TDD, Agile is a must in big companies, what about midsize companies?

- What standards we must pay attention to first?

- I performed a little of research of TI and STM32 ecosystems, I didn’t get to much information about Agile, this confused me a little, I think these companies sell a lot of microcontrollers on Automotive and other high-quality focused industries, TI and STM32 is a good place to start?

[Tesla DeLorean]

>> I didn’t get to much information about Agile, this confused me a little,..

Well it's probably because embedded draws a lot of non-traditional engineers from electronics, hardware, chip design and hard science backgrounds rather than pure SW and CS types. Backgrounds where the limitations of the technologies are understood, and what you ship has to run for years without constant updates, or require massive amounts of resources.

It depends on how complex your problem actually is, and whether that problem can be understood completely by a handful of people or if its one that needs vast armies of people. It's been my experience that companies with a handful of very competent engineers can out execute those with hundreds.

What you might need is a very large army of support technicians, the US market for products is very large, many foreign companies underestimate the scale of inventory and support required, and this will obviously be compounded if the product is complex to use/install, has weak documentation/examples or is buggy.

STM32 MCU's typically aren't running Linux or Java. There are STM32 MPU class devices which can run Embedded Linux, but I'm not sure those are better than a Broadcom RPi type approach.

Top notch engineers will be expensive and hard to hire, mediocre ones won't be cheap.

If the traffic on LinkedIn is indicative, a lot of medium sized businesses in the US are bring teams back in-house.

[TDK]

Tesla's comments are great here.

Agile is preferred in large companies because it allows status and progress updates to be communicated upwards in a structured manner. The larger the company, the less likely those reports are to reflect the actual progress being made. Agile is less common in electronics, but it is still used, in my experience.

I'd just like to add that if you don't hire the right people, it's not going to matter what sort of framework you go with. AI and IoT are complicated, and are hugely popular now, going to be hard to find the right people. Hire smart and motivated people and get out of their way. Easier said than done.

> high-quality focused industries

Because everything can now be updated remotely now via a firmware update, we have shifted from quality-focused to feature-focused. Quality takes time to develop, and the culture of technical design (electrical, software, whatever) doesn't allow for it. We're constantly chasing the next press release or feature announcement.

[dhs]

Dear, at the very beginning systems will be 50k LOC or less, I am the chairman of a company devoted to flow computers, I am working on this new startup because:

• I would be part of the AI and IoT revolution
• We have access to high-quality engineers

I understood I shouldn't worry about Agile, it will be not a must to work side to side with I+D, right?

I am thinking about a Business to Business model, I would like to choose one of the "most popular" Microcontrollers and tools chains used on I+D departments in US companies. by sure we will start with small companies, but we plan to move fast, so in not much time go for bigger clients, select the right tools is my actual research.

ST looks like are doing great with STM-cube.AI

Texas has a lot of work on Simple link, SDK and related tools

My goal is to hire a couple of engineers in a couple of months and start with one of these families.

In my actual company, I already have a few engineers trained in analog&digital electronics, MSP430, IAR, Altium, STM32 cube, KEIL, Code Composer, but I don't know if US companies follow these ecosystems or use a more advanced cross compiler.

Any advice will be appreciated.