I graduated in 1989 with an Electrical Engineering degree and three semesters co-oping at AMD in a project on one of their Intel drop in replacement processors.

I graduated in 1989 with an Electrical Engineering degree and three semesters co-oping at AMD in a project on one of their Intel drop in replacement processors. My ancient experience coincides with your more recent experience - it taught me that a.) the really interesting stuff to me personally was going to require a Ph.D. to get in the door, they had extremely bright people working on lower level projects but everyone I talked to on the top projects had advanced degrees b.) each chip iteration was a huge process involving lots of different people at each stage with different expertise so each individual contribution was going to be tiny c.) the software we used to make/design chips was a lot more fun to work on and iterate and didn't require nearly as big of a capital investment/gamble, even back then.