India Does Not Have an Electronics Problem. It Has an Electronics Engineer Problem.

Author: Srihari Maddula  •  Founder & Technical Lead, Eurth Techtronics Pvt Ltd

Category: Smart Infrastructure  •  Estimated Reading Time: 18–20 minutes

Published: July 2026

The Talent Gap Nobody Is Talking About Loudly Enough

India is building smart cities, deploying IoT in agriculture, modernising defence electronics, pushing into semiconductor manufacturing, and developing an indigenous space programme. Every one of these initiatives requires embedded systems engineers — people who can write firmware, design PCBs, debug hardware-software interactions, and understand the physics of electronics well enough to make reliable products for harsh environments.

Ask any embedded systems company in India about their hiring experience, and you will hear the same story. The candidates are not there. Not in the numbers needed. Not at the level of practical competence required. The supply pipeline is a trickle for a demand that is a river.

This is not an electronics problem. India has electronics talent — the evidence is in the diaspora, in the engineers who trained here and now work at ARM, Qualcomm, Intel, and TSMC. The problem is structural. The incentive system, the curriculum, and the early-career environment have been systematically directing the best engineering talent away from hardware for two decades. The consequences are arriving.

How the Incentive System Redirects Hardware Engineers to Software

The incentive gradient in Indian engineering is steep and clear. Software — especially services, product companies, and now AI — offers starting salaries of Rs. 8–20 lakhs per annum for fresh graduates at good companies. Embedded systems and hardware roles start at Rs. 3–6 lakhs, with a slower growth curve in the early years.

For a student who studied electronics engineering but has developed some programming skill, the financial calculus is obvious. Take the software job. Pay off the education loan. Send money home. The hardware career — with its longer learning curve, tighter labour market, and lower starting compensation — is the less rational choice by every short-term metric.

This is not a character failure of the engineers making this choice. It is a rational response to the incentive structure. But the collective result is that the best engineers from electronics programmes migrate to software, leaving the hardware roles to be filled either by those who could not transition, by engineers who did not get the software opportunity, or by graduates from lower-tier colleges where software was not an option anyway.

The gap between hardware engineer quality and software engineer quality at the same salary point is significant. A Rs. 6 lakh embedded engineer is rarely as capable as a Rs. 6 lakh software engineer. Not because the embedded engineer is less intelligent — but because the incentive structure has filtered the top talent out of hardware before the hiring happens.

The Curriculum Gap: Where Practical Skills Are Not Being Built

Electronics engineering curricula in most Indian colleges teach theory at the expense of practice. A student completes a B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering with deep knowledge of transistor physics, filter design mathematics, and digital logic theory — and without ever having written 300 lines of C for a microcontroller, or debugged a PCB, or used an oscilloscope to trace a signal integrity problem.

The gap between what the curriculum delivers and what embedded product development requires is not marginal. It is large. A fresh graduate from an average ECE programme who is placed as a firmware engineer faces a learning curve of 12 to 24 months before they can independently contribute to a real product. During that time, they require mentorship and supervision that consumes senior engineer time — a scarce resource in small embedded companies.

The curriculum gap exists for structural reasons that are not easily fixed from inside the college system. Laboratories are underfunded. Practical equipment — oscilloscopes, function generators, soldering stations, development boards — is insufficient for the student intake. Faculty who have product development experience are rare; most have academic trajectories. The examination system rewards memory and derivation over experimental skill.

Industry partnerships with colleges can help but rarely do, because the economics of engineering education do not reward the investment. A company that spends time training college-level engineers is preparing them for their competitors as much as for themselves.

The Early Career Environment: Where Potential Is Either Built or Lost

The first 3 years of an embedded engineer's career are the most formative. The quality of mentorship, the complexity and breadth of products they work on, and the culture of the organisation they join determine whether they become genuinely capable hardware engineers or remain perpetual intermediates.

Many embedded engineers in India spend their early careers in services companies — doing firmware ports, driver adaptations, and legacy maintenance work. This is real engineering, and it pays the bills, but it does not build the product intuition that comes from owning a design from concept to field deployment. The ability to look at a field failure and know where to look — which design decision to question, which measurement to take, which component to suspect — is built only through the experience of having made those design decisions and seen their consequences.

Product companies that build and ship their own hardware are rare in India, and their capacity for junior hiring is limited. The apprenticeship pathway — junior engineer learns from senior engineer on real products — is available to a small fraction of the talent that needs it.

What Needs to Change — and Who Needs to Change It

The salary gap needs to close. This will happen as the demand for embedded engineers exceeds supply — which it already does. Companies building embedded products need to compete for engineering talent, which means paying competitive salaries. The Rs. 3 lakh embedded engineer is a false economy when the recruiting cycle takes 6 months and the attrition rate is 40% annually.

Curricula need practical reorientation. AICTE guidelines already include provisions for lab-based learning. The implementation at the college level requires investment in equipment and in faculty who have industry experience. Industry-academia partnerships that place working engineers as adjunct faculty — one day per week, on real projects — are a viable model that some institutions are beginning to adopt.

Embedded companies need to build structured internship and apprenticeship programmes that bridge the curriculum gap. An intern who spends 6 months working on a real embedded product — writing firmware, testing hardware, debugging field issues — arrives as a full-time employee 18 months ahead of one who did not have that exposure. The investment in internship mentorship is among the highest-ROI engineering investments a small hardware company can make.

EurthTech's Stake in This Argument

We are not writing about this from the sidelines. EurthTech has delivered many embedded products across aquaculture, poultry, dairy, industrial, defence, and medical sectors. Every product required engineers who could navigate the full stack — from schematic to firmware to field deployment. Hiring those engineers has been among the most consistent operational challenges we have faced.

Our response has been to build the team structure and culture that grows engineers who join us. Our onboarding philosophy is that a new engineer should be working on a real product within their first two weeks — not doing tutorials, not watching, but contributing to something that will be deployed and that real customers will use. The learning curve is steep. The accountability is real. The growth is faster than any training programme can produce.

India's electronics future depends on building a generation of engineers who choose hardware because it is intellectually compelling, financially rewarding, and offers clear career growth. That requires systemic changes to incentives, curriculum, and early-career environments that no single company can drive alone. But every embedded company in India that builds well, hires with discipline, and mentors deliberately is contributing to the supply side of a pipeline that desperately needs it.

If you are an embedded engineer looking for an environment that will stretch you technically on real products, look at what EurthTech is building.

We are always looking for people who take hardware seriously.

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