[HH] electronics hobby industry

[Tom Metro]

markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> If I may proselytize, this is our new economy. This is the next new
> exciting cycle of invention! In the next 10-15 years, the things that will
> be invented will be amazing.

The cliche response here is, "the children are the future." :-)

It will be interesting to see whether the kids raised playing with Pis
and Arduinos end up being more prolific at innovation than the prior
generation raised on Macs and Dell clones. Will more kids go into
engineering? (Supposedly the country is declining in graduating
engineers.) Or will the overall numbers stay the same, just a bit higher
percentage will choose EE over CS as their major.

The hardware resurgence is broader than just what's happening in the
electronics hobby industry. We're also seeing a growth of hardware
startups, as evidenced by the sort of projects showing up on
Kickstarter, where many of the products aren't aimed at hardware
hackers. Likely the two are interrelated.

But despite the growth, the newly minted hardware engineers will still
face the reality that for every engineer working on an iPhone there are
probably 10,000 working on apps. Hardware jobs just aren't as plentiful
due to the laws of general purpose computing.

 -Tom