A few days ago, I was talking with the other Electronic Design editors about trends in engineering careers for the magazine’s June 30 "Megatrends" special issue. I’d already put in my usual two cents about analog and power—the supply of engineers is low, but look at what you have to go through to be one. While CS grads can be productive almost from the time they first sit down in their cubicles, analog and power engineers generally must serve some sort of apprenticeship before they can pull their own weight. The outcome is that a limited number of companies work with a limited number of schools to make sure that analog/power engineer wannabes are properly educated. So the number of non-CS engineering graduates is limited by the number of companies that can afford to nurture them. On top of that, with the best of intentions, the corporations can’t help focusing on problems that offer fast return-on-investment, so if research is your thing, good luck.
But we’d all heard me say that before.
Well, there were ants at the picnic, but for something created by politicians in a hurry in an atmosphere of panic, what they came up with was pretty good. And it involved throwing a lot of money at a problem and realizing that the results would not be distributed perfectly evenly.
As the discussion wound on, I started to remember a time when opportunities for all young engineers seemed endless. A time when it seemed there were tons of people that were trying to help you understand engineering as a profession of boundless possibilities.
By sheer accident, I hit high school at a time when there was a tectonic shift in the whole educational establishment, a shift that, luckily, favored the nerdy and the math savvy. (Actually, I was more of the former and less of the latter. That’s why I mostly write about engineering.) The shift was not without its downsides, but, oh, it was glorious if you were a crew-cut white male with a slide rule flopping awkwardly on your belt. Every class I took had new equipment, new books, and motivated teachers who weren’t forced to coach some sport to keep their jobs. Let me crank up the wayback machine and go back to the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, and the almost concurrent birth of NASA and the space program.