One of the best analog engineers I worked with was not an actual electrical engineer in title. He was a technician without a degree of any sort that worked on electronics projects at home for fun. He’d often be frustrated at the solution the actual electrical engineers gave him to implement and test and would fix the design. Sure, he couldn’t program an FPGA or write DSP code, but he had a solid grasp of analog design that a lot of electrical engineers lack.
Oh yeah, we had this guy in enterprise. Total hardware wiz. Did horribly in college. All that homework-doing and test-taking got in the way of all his fun projects. So he just limped across the finish line and got a gig from a professor he'd worked with closely. Pretty cool technical work, guessing the pay was so-so, but doubt he gave a fuck.
Thumbs up to that engineer. How many of those people exist in the industry though? I would argue far far far fewer than the equivalent in software engineering.
