My friend (electrical engineer) is saying MCU's are kiddies toys and are not legit. and that it is mean't to be used in prototyping. My logic is that mcu's are legit and they are used to prototype in dev boards but can be used in real projects. But he insists that you must afterwards build the circuit in real components without microcontrollers? opinions, ideas etc?
Tell your friend that microcontrollers in the form of embedded controllers are in far more products and far out number the number of PCs in the world.
Exactly. it is much simpler and if you use a processor you need a lot more chips to do certain functions
ilovearduinosomuch:
My friend (electrical engineer) is saying MCU's are kiddies toys and are not legit.
Your friend is either lying about his "degree", or if it is real, it should be revoked from him (and he should be fired from his current employer and never be hired in that capacity again).
I mean seriously - this would be akin to someone claiming to be a plumber (or worse, being employed as a plumber), yet not know how to sweat (solder) a hose bib onto a pipe.
It's complete ignorance and disrespect to the profession - and should not be allowed!
cr0sh:
Your friend is either lying about his "degree", or if it is real, it should be revoked from him (and he should be fired from his current employer and never be hired in that capacity again).
I was about to say something along the same lines. He must be profoundly ignorant about MCUs and probably of Google as well.
Should you choose to believe Wikipedia,
About 55% of all CPUs sold in the world are 8-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors. According to Semico, over four billion 8-bit microcontrollers were sold in 2006.[4] More recently, Semico has claimed the MCU market grew 36.5% in 2010 and 12% in 2011.[5] A typical home in a developed country is likely to have only four general-purpose microprocessors but around three dozen microcontrollers. A typical mid-range automobile has as many as 30 or more microcontrollers. They can also be found in many electrical devices such as washing machines, microwave ovens, and telephones.
Tell him it takes a real engineer to develop microcontroller solutions. Getting these little bitty computers that can cost less than a buck to do useful things is not for sissies! 
My friend (electrical engineer) is saying MCU's are kiddies toys and are not legit.
Wrong verb. "used in kids' toys" rather than "are kids' toys".
"not legit" simply makes no sense.
They can also be found in many electrical devices such as washing machines, microwave ovens, and telephones.
Air conditioners, heaters, shredders, clocks, thermometers, weather stations, children's toys, shavers, light bulbs... We are gradually reaching the point where everything that operates on electricity includes a microcontroller.
Perhaps what he actually means is not "Microcontrollers are kiddie toys" which would basically be the same as saying
"I forgot how to electricity....", we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "Microcontroller development boards like the arduino are kiddie toys, and nobody should put an entire arduino to control a toaster.", which would make much more sense.
Commercial electronics projects don't include control boards like the arduino or the msp430 launchpads anymore than an android phone uses a raspberry pi. But the raw atmega328 found in an uno is also found in probably tens of thousands of products.
EternityForest:
Perhaps what he actually means is not "Microcontrollers are kiddie toys" which would basically be the same as saying
"I forgot how to electricity....", we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "Microcontroller development boards like the arduino are kiddie toys, and nobody should put an entire arduino to control a toaster.", which would make much more sense.
Ok...OP stated that his friend "...insists that you must afterwards build the circuit in real components without microcontrollers..."?
If his friend thinks "microcontroller" means "development board" - again, how has he gotten this far as a supposed degreed "electrical engineer"?
I can understand a lay-person or some other individual not educated about the difference between a microcontroller IC and a development (prototyping) board it is a part of; for such individuals, it is the same thing.
For anyone with a title of "electrical engineer", though - it should be understood there is a difference...
Unless of course this is yet another one of those cases where to such a person, a PLC (likely using ladder logic!) is some kind of mysterious "black box" and the understanding of the components inside and their function is rudimentary at best. It's akin to a programmer who is educated in C++ but has no clue about how a CPU actually functions at the register/machine-code level (and there are a ton of them out there), while making statements indicating such ignorance.
In other words, it's the bane of being "specialized" in an educational and career-oriented fashion. This isn't a bad thing, normally - as long as one has enough intelligence not to postulate on that which they do not understand (but then...humans).
you must afterwards build the circuit in real components without microcontrollers
Words fail me.
Rob
Words fail me
Well maybe not. Note that the guy is an "electrical" engineer, not "electronics", still that's no excuse because if he has no experience with "electronics" he shouldn't be making such ludicrous statements.
Can you just imagine prototyping with a mega328 then building the product with NAND gates. The mind just boggles...hang on, maybe it will be cheaper...a 74HCT00 (quad NAND gate) costs about 14c in 1000 quantities. I don't know how many gates in a 328 but let's say you would need 1 million '00s to replicate the processor, that's $140,000 but of course you would get a much better price for a million of them, so let's round it down to $50,000.
Not too bad really...but hang on, there's the PCB. You can't really have a 10-metre square PCB made so you would have to make boards say about Euroboard size and have maybe a 1000 of them. Plus a 100 19" racking cabinets.
You know the more I look into it the more feasible it sounds, although to be honest it might be cheaper to gang together a few PDP-11s for your glasshouse watering controller.
On second thoughts I'll just buy an ATmega328 for $3.
EDIT: Actually I can sympathise with his point of view, many many years ago we got the data sheet for the 4004 processor at work, this thing was the ducks guts at the time but I was used to using discrete logic and said "These processor things are useless, what the hell could you do with one?" The joke was certainly on me 
Rob
Honestly, reading between the lines, I think the OP has probably juxtaposed "Arduino" and "microcontroller". In that context, an engineer saying "build the circuit in real components without microcontrollers (arduinos)?" makes a lot more sense. You don't build real products with a development board flapping about inside the product for both cost, reliability, and I can even think of a couple more reasons. This is admittedly a wild guess on my part, but it makes a lot more sense than an engineer saying you never use the one component that is always used for almost every application these days (unless this guy was cryogenically frozen in 1970).
When I worked in microcomputers the first 10 years or so, the big computer people looked down on us. Is there a mainframe operating today without some desktop and laptop PC's also there? Now count the MCU's in the average new car or appliance.
These ATMega chips outperform the old $2000+ w/floppy drive ~4 MHz S-100 8080/Z80 computers used in serious business and manufacturing 30 years ago. An AVR with some add-ons and 1+ terminals could do the job, I know because I wrote a good bit of that stuff.
And now we have MCU's that go all the way up to 400 MHz Pentium On a Chip with pins and shield connectors.
Not just toys but they do make neat toys and cost a lot less than cars.
In my early years working for a large manufacturing company there was a gentleman in another division that was responsible for a minicomputer, in the era when the mainframe was king. I didn't get a lot of details but I got the definite impression that it was pretty much a continuous battle to resist political pressure and justify the mini because the powers that were thought the job could be done on the big iron. Near as I could tell, the little machine was doing the job and doing it well, and probably in a much more responsive manner than a mainframe would have.
Anyway, he had an analogy that I just loved. He told the people that didn't like small computers that they should also go down on the shop floor and tell people "We're getting too many of these small electric motors around here. We need to take them out, run a big shaft across the ceiling and wherever we need power, we'll just attach a belt." Of course mainframes are still around, but he was certainly seeing farther ahead that a lot of the management!
If your friend is an expert with programmable logic controls or field programmable gate arrays, and uses them a lot, he may think microcontrollers are for those that don't do serious work. PLCs are for industrial controls. If I understand correctly, they resist interference better than microprocessor-based solutions. I don't know enough about FPGA though. In space industry, maybe they value microcontrollers less than other solutions since radiation can easily flip bits and render a microprocessor useless. Any type of shielding is insufficient or too heavy I suppose. Plain logic circuits on the other hand can do a lot better in this situation. There should also be some electrical engineers that don't use microcontrollers or PLC or FPGA but design "real circuits". I just don't know them. I'm not in the EE field.
If he's that sure about micro controllers, challenge him to not... use any system with micro-controller for just 2 weeks.
My bet is that he'll adjust his opinion within 2 days 
my first thought was, "How would I build a USB Mouse without a microcontroller"?
I've built UART's in 74x and 4000 series, but a more complex circuit is a nightmare!
This is coming from someone that REALLY likes building big, complex things out of 7400 chips!
When you consider that "Pong" was a single board, about 16"(?) square, PACKED with 7400 TTL, that drew around 5A!!
I can now haz "Pong" with a single 324, a couple of resistors, 2 pots and a speaker.
Succinct and completely valid point, but not exactly how I would approach trying to dissuade someone from thinking of them as toys. XD
SirNickity:
Succinct and completely valid point, but not exactly how I would approach trying to dissuade someone from thinking of them as toys. XD
Absolutely true ....
It is so easy to mix up the billion dollar gaming industry and "toys" ]
Best regards
Jantje
Especially when so many professionals not in gaming still consider gaming to be one area where cutting edge programming is often being done.
This article is maybe the shining example of why that is: