Which university produces good analog EEs?

It's amazing what a W-2 form can do to motivate someone--ask me how I know, I've lived in NY for 20 years now.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Same is generally true of SBE (Society of Broadcast Engineers). Obviously, with the advent of digital television broadcast and HD Radio technologies, many older engineers either can't (or choose not to) keep up and make the transition. So, they become dinosaurs too. It also seems the "replacement" engineering staff members are less visible (which perhaps they are from being overworked?), so the whole "migration" tends to look more unbalanced that perhaps it is in real- life.

I suspect you could extrapolate this to just about any industry these days, particular those more impacted by the arrival of the Internet.

-mpm

Has to have the right numbers in there. Big bucks will motivate. It's just that in the Bay Area it needs to be really big bucks.

It's also a matter of lifestyle. Country folks (like me) may tough it out for a while but many of our neighbors are Bay Area transplants. People who packed it all up the millisecond they retired.

Some people would give a kidney to get a good job in San Francisco or New York or London. Some people just like cities.

John

Except that the analog board level guys haven't become dinosaurs. There just aren't any left. They have usually kept up with technology. Transistors came, they learned. ICs came and they learned those. Other stuff like switched capacitor filters came and vanished into the dark. MMICs came and they adapted to those. It's not an unwillingness to learn, the schools don't spit out many good ones anymore.

I like some, too. Up to pop 30,000 or so :-)

I like city conveniences, just not the density; which is why I live at the outer limits ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I hate the Bay Area--I went to school there, and very nearly went to work at HP Labs on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, which was about six blocks from where I lived at the time...but fortunately IBM's offer came through before HP's. If I believed in chance, I'd feel lucky. As it is, I feel blessed. ;)

Cheers,

Phil "Same lab for 18 years now" Hobbs

Poughkeepsie? That's where my father had to go, looong flights back in them days. He worked at IBM in Germany.

It would definitely be too cold up there for my wife. Her ideal place would be where winter simply doesn't happen. Like Hawaii, but there is no work for me and getting to clients would take forever.

I worked in Fremont at first, and it's the pits. I don't like the business or personal culture of Silicon Valley... too burby and too predatory at the same time. San Francisco is a beautiful town, lots of different cultures and neighborhoods, lots of parks and beaches and trails and cliffs. I live a block from an actual canyon and a mile from an almost-official (930') mountain. After growing up in New Orleans, I'm blessed too.

Pic I snapped this morning, fog moving into the Alemany Gap.

I interviewed at HP once. It didn't go well. The guy looked at my resume and said, in a sour voice, "Look, you've got to make up your mind whether you're an engineer or a programmer." I said "No, I don't" and left. What a jerk.

John

Are you sure that it isn't the 'Twilight Zone"? ;-)

Nah, the Watson Lab in Yorktown Heights. Best sandbox in the world at one point, still very very good (and improving since the low point in about 2000).

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Well everyone ultimately wastes their lives somehow, might as well be happy doing it.

That hill on the left somehow looks man-made. Is it?

Sounds like it was either not an engineer or an armchair-engineer.

Do you still have some of the first transistors?

Got a CK722 ? Someone said they've gone for > $700 on E-bay. (I find that very hard to believe.) Anyway, you might be sitting on a goldmine. :-)

Ed

I never interviewed a Georgia Tech grad, but Marshall Leach, Jr. certain has the credentials.

I've interviewed plenty of UC Berkeley grads, and you could find an analog designer there.This doesn't mean every grad from UCB will know analog. The worse Ivy League has got to be hands down MIT. I assume it was a good university at one time given it's reputation. But I interviewed undergrads that didn't know basic s-plane stability issues, as if they don't teach classic control theory anymore What little analog they knew was bipolar.

A real surprise are the University of Toronto grads. These guys know analog and signal processing.

The trouble with low power (assuming you mean micropower) is you really need to be a careful designer, especially if the chip is designed to have low quiescent power but handle high current. You also need the benefit of seeing a few designs that didn't work, hopefully not your own but from the company portfolio of goofs. One of the classic bugs is designing micropower bandgaps, only to have them get pumped from an on-board switcher. You have to throw in all sorts of parasitics to make sure nothing sneaks into your reference.

Yep. CK722, CK760, CK761 plus a number of the GE vacuum "pinch" tube sealed devices.

I'll give them to my kids before the tax man tries to "death tax" them.

...Jim Thompson

Probably only the duds applied to your company ;-)

However I never had control systems, per se, undergrad... just a very good math background to understand it if I needed it. (and that was more than 45 years ago.)

Took non-linear control systems in grad school. Instructor scared the piss out of me by announcing that, to weed down the class size, he was giving an exam in undergrad control systems... pass or walk :-(

I got the best score, and "A" as my final grade ;-)

I don't know any of those.

Yep :-(

...Jim Thompson

Bingo! That's exactly where one of my clients finally got they analog guy from. Now he has to get used to the fact that there is no more ice skating because it's Southern California.

It takes experience. But most importantly it requires to say good-bye to the temptation to use chips in the can or digital processing for everything that looks complicated. It's often back to transistors and you've got to know those things inside out.