Thanks for that, gentlemen. I really enjoyed that interview.
As a mid-career EE (let's call it 20 years in for round numbers), I find both of your opinions on the career prospects for EEs very interesting. I came from semiconductor and processor design world, and frankly, that's not a growth area anymore. I'm newer to the board and system level world, and am not certain whether this is a great space for the next 20. Don't get me wrong -- we can do awesome stuff, and as a hobbyist it's super-exciting, but as a career, it's not clear to me at all. Highly integrated SoCs do so much for you, and when you need to go off-chip, you can usually use a reasonably painless serial interface of some kind to communicate with the next whiz-bang do-it-all part. For the majority of designs that don't involve lots of analog or mega speed, putting a modest board together isn't that big a deal.
That's good and it's bad. A lot of the complexity has moved into SW, and that's fine, but I still love the HW.