<p>At the engineering firm that I used to work at, I had a coworker who just had a BS in physics. He also happened to be a pretty good self taught programmer which made him a very versatile employee. We had a bunch of guys with physics backgrounds, but most had at least a MS. By the time I left the company, he had started going back to school part time (on the company’s dime) working towards an MS as well.</p>
<p>It think it really depends on the company. My previous company just hired smart people with a wide variety of backgrounds (science, math, engineering) and sort of threw a random group of us at any kind of project – that kind of mishmash inter-disciplinary approach didn’t always work, IMO. At that company, versatility was crucial because you had to be able to do lots of different things. My current company is very structured and everyone has a clearly defined role (software engineer, system engineers, test engineeer, etc). This company tends to hire people with specific “little e” engineering degrees for each position. Very few physics majors here, at least, not in my division. Maybe they have some in the chip division or in corporate R&D.</p>