Ask HN: Why are there so many more digital experts than analog experts?

10 points by 0x0aff374668 6 years ago | 4 comments

Before I start, let me state that I am familiar with the notion that there is no such thing as "digital" electronics: everything, ultimately, is analog. I'm focusing on what I have observed in over 4 decades of segregation among engineers, but students and professionals.

Considering the typical dichotomy of circuit types: memory, ALUs, VPUs, state machines on the digital side, vs. sense amps, VCOs, filters, PLLs, linear control on the analog side. I worked at HP and Intel for a total of 32 years in both test equipment and CPU design. Digital designers outnumber analog designers by nearly 100:1. And the disciplines seemed unidirectional: analog designers could shift in and out of either role, but digital designers seemed pigeonholed.

At first, I just chalked this up to %age of silicon dedicated to each discipline. But when I think back over it, it was roughly equal across functionality (excluding large registers and memory arrays, which can be considered a single circuit).

Going back further, this was true in college in the 80's: digital electronics classes were "easy As" and analog circuits classes were dreaded.

On its face, I can see that an AND gate is far simpler to understand than an Op-Amp, but why did we end up in this place? Is it the abstractions? Or how things are taught?

What do you think, HN? Why such a big difference?

sansnomme 6 years ago |

Because digital is easier and more productive. Why code in assembly when you can code in C? Why code in C when you can code in Rust? Sure for edge cases analogue is still important. But the market for that is small. The true experts are hired and paid well by big corporations who don't go on FAANG type hiring-sprees for senior stuff every 6 months, new entrants need years of experience to reach their level versus just going with digital and working with some IoT startup for similar or better compensation (these days EEs often skip that entirely and just go straight into software engineering). How many RF experts (the epitome of an analogue specialist) do you think a company like Anki need versus generic EEs to build and iterate fast (akin to your usual startup code monkeys). The economy cares not for what's "elegant" or what's "efficient and beautiful". The invisible hands pushes towards what's productive and cheap. Mastering analogue requires a good intuition for physics and math and a ton of other interrelated subjects that doesn't pay well either like nanotechnology & material science. Digital is easy, just look at what people have built in Minecraft.

Ever wondered why so many people would learn React rather than build GUIs in C for embedded? Because the money is in the web. It's like Electron vs Native UIs. You can rant and rave about Electron's inefficiencies but that still doesn't change the fact a flashy UI like Material Design or yet another Stripe theme can be built faster and easier in web technologies than Gtk.

Look at the 3 editions of Art of Electronics. You can see a clear trend towards digital if you look at the technologies that gets removed and added in later editions.

0x0aff374668 6 years ago | |

Yeah, I agree with you. I had a sneaking suspicion.

Funny you mention Electron: my company switched from Qt to Electron because it opens up a larger pool of developers with instant cross-platform portability with a fraction of the debug overhead.

unlinked_dll 6 years ago |

Just about everything in analog was replaced by digital systems because it does it better, cheaper, faster, and smaller. There are a handful of places where analog design chops matter, but they aren't the majority of jobs (or even the best paying ones!)

poi8765 6 years ago |

Who is Eric P. Dollard? You're welcome.