kids, math

There shouldn't be any too late point. Most of the integrated circuits I designed into products hadn't been invented when I was getting my education, and every time I ran into a familiar problem somebody had invented a new part that let me solve the problem in a different way.

The thermostat circuit that's described in my 1970 Ph.D. thesis is wildly different from the one I published in Measurement Science and Technology in 1996.

Don't get me started on surface mount components.

The first time I used one is documented in

Ghiggino, K.P., Phillips, D., and Sloman, A.W. "Nanosecond pulse stretcher",Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments, 12, 686-687 (1979).

and ten years later I got stuck with introducing them at Cambridge Instruments because Gigabit Logics parts only came in surface mount packages.

Perhaps.

If they know enough.

Barry Gilbert went from being lecturer at a UK technical tertiary college to being the guru at Analog Devices. Bob Widlar started off teaching electronics to technicians.

Being an EE professor is a real job - Paul Horowitz is exactly that - and Horowitz and Hill's "the Art of Electronics" is very useful textbook.

It's not intended to. Education tells you what's available and how other people have exploited that. Design is about putting stuff together to solve new problems.

Copying other people's solutions isn't design, but any sensible designer exploits known solutions to solve specific problems if they can't come up with a better solution. Putting a bunch of known solutions together in a new way definitely qualifies as design, and usually involves coping with unexpected interactions.

Education is about giving people intellectual tools. Design exploits those tools.

Education is about remembering stuff, and knowing how that fits together. Design is about putting it together in new and original ways.

Horrible parents can have excellent kids - seeing how doing parenting wrong works badly can be informative.

I don't speak from direct experience - when I started to hear how other kids had been screwed over by their parents I got to realise that my own parents had been remarkably well-behaved.

Just a few hundred people who write purchase orders.

Who's paying attention to you?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

This is about the basic skills. Soldering, diagnosing, using oscilloscopes, doing the occasional McGyver thing. If you don't know that by the time you send out the first resumes your career will most likely be much less lucrative and less interesting than for the guy who knows. Unless you go into sales :-)

My first employer was an early adopter and so was I. 1986, almost all SMT except for what wasn't yet available in SMT. Never looked back.

There's one born every minute. You are getting to a very small proportion of your potential market

You, for one. You don't appreciate being told when you have got stuff wrong, so it isn't making me money. Past employers were happier to learn where stuff could be improved,and they did pay me.

Programing wasn't a basic skill when I was getting educated. I learned it as a graduate student because it was useful. Once you get into the habit of learning new stuff when it becomes useful, you do become more employable.

Like and said - and you snipped - my first SMT part got soldered down in

Math degrees are in high demand around here.

For what? Finance?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I don't remember, but I think so.

There was a short report on TV mentioning that the universities did not have enough capacity for so many people wanting to do maths, nor enough graduates for the demand.

ChatGPT confirms, and lists the areas in which they are wanted. Quite verbosely :-)