Once upon a time, there was a huge hobby interest in Electronics. Kids were building Radios and Stereos, and then studying for their Ham license and building Tr

Once upon a time, there was a huge hobby interest in Electronics. Kids were building Radios and Stereos, and then studying for their Ham license and building Transmitters, etc. Many of those kids went on to a professional career in Electronics. For a while there was huge interest in building small microprocessor systems, but then along came the desktop PC revolution and this attracted a completely different crowd. A distinct separation developed between homebrew electronics and computer hacking. The saying, "Beware computer programmers carrying a screwdriver" was only half in jest. So today the Hacker movement is starting all over again, but they seem completely unaware that a generation or two of Hardware Hackers already exists. Me, I'm retired now. I started out as a Ham radio enthusiast, later became an RF Engineer, then went on to Circuit design and PC layout, then DSP and Assembler language in Embedded systems. But towards the end of my career I found it harder and harder to find employment as manufacturing dried up. Eventually I just gave up and retired. Bottom line is that Electronics is an interesting hobby, but I wouldn't recommend it for a career. Just one further note: Lately I've been spending time in Asia: If you go into the smallest bookshop (eg in rural Thailand) you'll see local electronic magazines, complete with free kits and PCBs etc stapled on the cover. In Asia, Electronics is now a very trendy subject with schoolkids. Here, kids are labelled as "nerds" if they show an interest in any science based hobby. Perhaps that is beginning to change. I do hope so.