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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Hard to admit: people like Bob Pease and Hans Camenzind would not find any much employment in today's industry even if they were back in their prime.

Work culture in America has changed since sixties.

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Actually, Hans Camenzind was pretty busy up until the day he passed away in 2012. He continued to do analog circuit design, among other things (like writing books). (Good) analog engineers are not that common these days. At one point in the mid-2000's he mentioned to me that of his 15 most recent circuit designs, not one had an issue post-initial design. I don't think a lot of analog engineers today could say that. I suspect if he was still around and looking for work, he would not have much trouble finding it.

Yes, and Bob Widlar too. That was the early days of integrated circuits though, and in the early days of any field it's often the mavericks and non-conformists who make the most progress.

why is that?

A paradigm shift. How it was: "make the chip, sell it later." How it is now: "sell the chip first, find out how to make it later if you did."

Companies now trust marketing/sales boys to know the market better than the very people who made that industry.

In sixties, a CEO comes to an engineer and asks what will be the "next bug thing" in one year term.

Today, a CEO comes to an engineer and tells him what will be the "next bug thing" in one year term.

How it is now: "sell the chip first, find out how to make it later if you did."

Taken to its logical extreme you get Theranos. Will lessons be learned? I’m not holding my breath.

Well you also have to remember that companies came and went faster than startups did. And consolidation happened quite quickly as well. Engineers made cool things but only a handful of the companies found a hit, and rarely did the same company consistently find the best. What ended up happening is the bigger companies just started buying the small company that had the hit that year. The old model was no more sustainable than the current model.

Along with what baybal2 says today they'd have to fit in to a corporate environment that rewards credentials over demonstrated skills, gladhanding and backslapping over geeking, financial engineering over the creation of tangible things.

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