Thoughts on the chip business

As a lifetime embedded engineer I have to agree with most of the points here.

The lack of new engineers learning this stuff is both encouraging and distressing from my POV, of course. I like knowing there's job security in the future.

However, that also means there are a lot of EE/CS/CE kids not learning any of this stuff. A few years ago I was going through a technical interview and the manager asked me "what's the easiest way to multiply a number by 8" and I instantly said "shift left 3" without thinking. He paused and said "everyone else I've ever interviewed for this job needed 20 minutes to get to that answer".