What's the Toughest Branch in Electronics?

:-)))

However, I have met people who started an electronics company and later sold it. Then bought themselves a nice big airplane and all that.

I'd rather have the electronics company.

John

Actually one of them went back. He didn't sell, just had enough money, kept the company, hired good managers and retired at around 45. He told me that playing golf and stuff didn't cut it. Said you meet a lot of older people who talk about ailments a lot.

Yeah. You could pay to play golf, and never be as good as the pro, or get paid to play with electronics, and be very good at it.

John

Interesting that you brought that up. I knew a guy who was just retired and played golf regularly. Not someone famous whom you see on the golf channel all the time, or ever, for that matter. He signed up at all the local tournaments and said that this is part of his stream of retirement income to be able to allow "extras". IOW golf winnings were a budget line item. It worked.

D from BC wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Exactly. The actual electronics are usually pretty fundamental. The work is done in software.

Nowadays, yes.

If you're arrogant, or bored, it's whatever you're doing. If you're modest it's whatever the fellow in the next cube over is doing, if you're conniving, it's what your boss is doing.

Hey! I use DSP to implement communications and control systems.

You may be right, although I would characterize those as being "most intensely mathematical" rather than "most difficult". They are going to be difficult for people who aren't intensely mathematical, or who have trouble pulling theory and practice together, but if you can do both of those they aren't too bad.

I did. I lived in Santa Cruz back then too.

Paul Baran is semi-famous. Unlike Al Gore (spanish pronunciation of "G"), Baran really did invent the internet. Bob Dilworth took Metricom into the wireless ISP business and Baran was gone by then. Dilworth went onto the BOD, and was replaced by Tim Dreisbach. Some folks would say Dreisbach ruined the company. I suppose that could be partly true. Be he was following the marching orders of the people who put him there: Paul Allen and MCI. Ironically these major investors shot themselves in the foot by making unrealistic short-term growth demands of a small Los Gatos company as a condition of major investment. Essentially, the conditions attached to their investment was a poison pill. They just didn't know it.

Is RF the hardest? Well it is more in my comfort zone than other areas, but engineering is like bike racing: it is as hard as the racers make it. _Any branch_ can be hard given the proper constraints.

One can make arguments whether NIH is good or bad in general or specifically. But that is quite explicitly _not_ what killed Metricom, not did it contribute in any way that could be identified. The technology worked. (It still works, although it won't be around for too much longer as the companies Ricochet has bounced (pun) around to since the ch7 are not inherently technology companies; they are service companies.)

"Little things" didn't kill the company. One big thing did.

It's just a definition, but I'd suggest that if the work doesn't involve working with electricity (which programming doesn't) than it's not "electronics." Programmers don't have to understand anything about electrons or fields or things like that, and often don't.

John

Absolutely true.

As a member of the Rand Corporation in the late fifties. His concept

Credit Dr. Rand, not Al Gore.

They do if they are programming the control of over 800 channels that all have to be 100% synchronized. They are right there with the hardware engineers examining network analyzer output, and spectrum analyzer outputs.

THEN, they code.

At first, I was thinking, "Of course, it takes place on an electronic thing, the computer", but then the Jacquard loom came to mind...

Cheers! Rich

If it needs power...it's electronic (or electrical) :) D from BC

designing something so simple it becomes universal.

outwitting Steve Jobs or the cloners

predicting when humanity will be able to really do time travel

inducing your two year old girl to follow daddy into electronics design

I still have the steam powered numarical I was helping Babbage with. It isn't electrical.

It was too bad we got our funding yanked but that brwon haired girl he was fooling around with turned out to be the earl of something's kid.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

It involves working with the hardware though.

Sometimes software can make the hardware easier (read cheaper) to build.

For microcontrollers and embedded systems, the software engineer needs to know about the hardware system to write their code, for the most part.