I apologize in advance for this question but I am totally new to Arduino. I am eventually looking to do projects as a contractor or an employee using Arduino based hardware/software. I have over 2 decades of coding in all things Microsoft .NET and more in older technologies. I have 2 decades of electronics but spent most of my career writing yet another "financial calculator" and am looking for something more rewarding.
Thank all who may read this, any guidance or suggestion is most welcome.
Perhaps post your inquiry in the Jobs and Paid Consultancy section.
I can give my personal experience and it is not promising.
I owned an electronic assembly service for 20 years. During that time we built board for many different customers. The majority had a microcontroller of some type. Only ONE time did we do anything with an Arduino board, a Nano, and that was a 30 unit build of prototype boxes.
Those boxes were so the customer could gain experience with timing and various LED mixes to eventually produce a custom grow-light system.
When they were ready, someone designed an entirely different box using an entirely different processor for volume production. We did not do the new version, so I don't know what it was.
In all the years of building, the primary processor was a PIC of various types. Some source programs were C, but the majority were assembly language.
Good luck in your search.
Paul
I think you're gonna find this difficult, but you might be able to establish yourself a niche in academia or in the maker community.
If you want to have an attractive set of skills for the more general electronics industry, you're better off focusing elsewhere. You should really start with the basics, such as how software interacts with hardware through registers, etc. etc.
I work for a company where we design and build battery driven LoRaWAN devices, and even though I rarely write code at such a granular level, it's absolutely a necessity to understand how it works.
The only stuff we use Arduino for is quick proof of concepts and testing rigs.
Knowing assembly is absolutely a plus, but nowadays you can get by fine with just C (depending on the company of course).
I think that will be hard to find. There are some people that post here who do one off builds on a contract basis - @cedarlakeinstruments is one I think. Sometimes that build may include an Arduino.
But companies using Arduino hardware for production work would be rare or non-existent. I'd expect them to use Atmel chips directly if they were appropriate. The skillset would be similar of course, but you would need to be looking for a job in industrial controls or the like, rather than anything Arduino specific.
The only kind of place I can think of that might work, would be a company like Adafruit or Sparkfun.
I think you mean Microchip... Cough, cough!
Jokes aside. If I were to start from scratch today I would probably focus on STM32. Perhaps using 8 bit PIC's as a stepping stone since they're absolutely everywhere.
There has been recently the Arduino Pro initiative. Look at some of the case studies to get a feel.
I would see Arduino as a way to quickly prototype ideas and explore your creative side or fix a small scope problem. Employers might be interested in that skill, but I would not expect this to lead to full time employment just on this - except may be if you manage to carve a spot in one of the creative digitisation design studio of the leading consulting firms, but that's pretty niche.
Its one skill to have in your bag of tricks that could help not work on the next financial calculator when it comes to choose team members.
You will have the greatest chance of success if you consider Arduino to be just one more tool in your toolbox. Get experience/market yourself as someone who can do electronics/firmware/controller project development and go from there. I've had people (on this board actually) who said they wanted an Arduino project done and the final implementation had nothing at all to do with arduino -- one of them in fact ended up as C# code on a small PC connected to some off the shelf industrial hardware.
With the exception of those who are specifically trying to learn about Arduino, my experience has been that people really don't care what hardware you use to solve their problem as long as it's solved satisfactorily. The nice thing about arduino is that by using the ecosystem, it can often turn what would otherwise be a $5,000 problem into a $500 problem and then everyone's happy.
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Out of pure curiosity, the projects you work on I figure is more in the bespoke category?
I'm not sure how they could be anything but. Can you give me an example of a client project that would not be "bespoke?" Or perhaps we're using the term differently.
Yes, except that they were originally hoping to pay $50 
Ohhhh! Don't get me started!!!!!
Well when you put it that way! I might be mixing together terms here, english is not my first language. We do have "portfolio" products that we build to order and help our customers integrate.
What I was curious about was whether it was something like that or more customized. I can definitely see something like Arduino being very useful for something like that.
If even that! We sometimes have people asking us to develop a product for them and expect us to pay us with "a share in the profits".
The projects I get involved in tend to fall into one of two categories.
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Completely unique: these are often artistic or to fix a problem no one else would be expected to encounter such as a specific kind of workflow.
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Variation on an existing product. An example would be someone who purchased a machine, but it's missing a feature that only exists on a more expensive version of that machine, but an arduino and a small bit of code could add that feature very inexpensively. These are usually the easier kinds of projects, both in complexity and client satisfaction. If the person paying knows that in order to get the machine with the feature they need, it would be an extra $5,000 and a whole lot of additional "baggage" they don't care about, but I can add the feature for just $300, the cost savings is immediately obvious and they're glad to go for it.
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