When I was at my folks place yesterday, they told me that the local JVS - the school where I spent my last two years of high school in the electronics program - was discontinuing said electronics program because they can no longer find anyone that can teach the new stuff. My schooling was all 555s, 741s, resistors, and 12AX7s. Now it's signal goes in on silicon, demodulated data comes out on the other side. Programming. The person that was teaching the last class was an electrical (electrician) guy, and while that kind of person is more than capable of teaching you things like ohms law, he's not going to give you the fundamentals you'd need to do VHDL or switching supply layout.
Along with that, I have two anecdotes for the situation. First is a friend that I used to work with, he still works in the RADAR industry. We go to shows together because we have similar interests. I'm more into the older general equipment, he's into older audio - we complement one another. He mentioned that the new engineers coming in to the RF side don't know hardware, and won't touch it. To them, an RF circuit is what I said above - antenna goes in to a pin on the chip, demod data comes out the other side. It's all silicon except for the clock, some bypass and glue, and a power supply. He stays there because he knows the hardware and he's the one that does the work - everyone else in our field that knows this hardware is either dead, retiring(ed,) or has a job they aren't going to leave for a little company run by a geriatric that may die because it's Tuesday and he woke up dead.
With that, and in-hand with that, are plenty of companies that want people who have hardware experience, that grew up with the old stuff and gained that knowledge of how it actually works with passives and an op-amp. I get calls all the time for companies that say "We could really use the skills you have listed on your profile." And then they say they are paying less than what I made (adjusted) in 1995 at my summer intern job that turned into a 3-year stint. Why do you think anyone is even going to be interested? "We're a small company..." No, that doesn't cut it. "Well, market forces..." No, that doesn't cut it either. You need this skill, and you can't get it because you aren't paying enough for someone who has that skill to live in your area. There are jobs in the Columbus Metro area that have been open since 2017 because the company simply won't pay. You could argue that they don't need that filled, but I know the people there were doing double duty when I looked at the place (I had an insider connection.)
I was going to just present the two, but one other one popped up as I was writing this - I post things on a professional forum that are related to my job. Some of that is what you see here, my old technology exploits. I have a device on the bench, it's probably got two bad, kind of unusual tubes. Not a big deal, I can get them, it just takes time and effort to find them. Someone goes "Well, how about just programming a chip with a transfer function..." That's kind of the whole of electronics right now. People have forgotten how to do the hands on box of parts work. You don't just program a chip for a device that runs on 700VDC and needs to drop 3A of heater current, it just doesn't work. (There are people who make FET replacements for battery set tubes, but those are relatively low voltages.)
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that as we forget more and more, the older skills will be more in demand to maintain this old stuff - but the maintainers aren't interested in knowing why they can't find someone to do it. It's all chips and programming, and we're going to have an entire generation of engineering people who know nothing about the hardware itself - it's just data in a pipeline for them.
When I was at my folks place yesterday, they told me that the local JVS - the school where I spent my last two years of high school in the electronics program - was discontinuing said electronics program because they can no longer find anyone that can teach the new stuff. My schooling was all 555s, 741s, resistors, and 12AX7s. Now it's signal goes in on silicon, demodulated data comes out on the other side. Programming. The person that was teaching the last class was an electrical (electrician) guy, and while that kind of person is more than capable of teaching you things like ohms law, he's not going to give you the fundamentals you'd need to do VHDL or switching supply layout.
Along with that, I have two anecdotes for the situation. First is a friend that I used to work with, he still works in the RADAR industry. We go to shows together because we have similar interests. I'm more into the older general equipment, he's into older audio - we complement one another. He mentioned that the new engineers coming in to the RF side don't know hardware, and won't touch it. To them, an RF circuit is what I said above - antenna goes in to a pin on the chip, demod data comes out the other side. It's all silicon except for the clock, some bypass and glue, and a power supply. He stays there because he knows the hardware and he's the one that does the work - everyone else in our field that knows this hardware is either dead, retiring(ed,) or has a job they aren't going to leave for a little company run by a geriatric that may die because it's Tuesday and he woke up dead.
With that, and in-hand with that, are plenty of companies that want people who have hardware experience, that grew up with the old stuff and gained that knowledge of how it actually works with passives and an op-amp. I get calls all the time for companies that say "We could really use the skills you have listed on your profile." And then they say they are paying less than what I made (adjusted) in 1995 at my summer intern job that turned into a 3-year stint. Why do you think anyone is even going to be interested? "We're a small company..." No, that doesn't cut it. "Well, market forces..." No, that doesn't cut it either. You **need** this skill, and you can't get it because you aren't paying enough for someone who has that skill to live in your area. There are jobs in the Columbus Metro area that have been open since 2017 because the company simply won't pay. You could argue that they don't need that filled, but I know the people there were doing double duty when I looked at the place (I had an insider connection.)
I was going to just present the two, but one other one popped up as I was writing this - I post things on a professional forum that are related to my job. Some of that is what you see here, my old technology exploits. I have a device on the bench, it's probably got two bad, kind of unusual tubes. Not a big deal, I can get them, it just takes time and effort to find them. Someone goes "Well, how about just programming a chip with a transfer function..." That's kind of the whole of electronics right now. People have forgotten how to do the hands on box of parts work. You don't just program a chip for a device that runs on 700VDC and needs to drop 3A of heater current, it just doesn't work. (There are people who make FET replacements for battery set tubes, but those are relatively low voltages.)
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that as we forget more and more, the older skills will be more in demand to maintain this old stuff - but the maintainers aren't interested in knowing why they can't find someone to do it. It's all chips and programming, and we're going to have an entire generation of engineering people who know nothing about the hardware itself - it's just data in a pipeline for them.
(post is archived)