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Before I start, let me state that I am familiar with the notion that there is no such thing as "digital" electronics: everything, ultimately, is analog. I'm focusing on what I have observed in over 4 decades of segregation among engineers, but students and professionals.

Considering the typical dichotomy of circuit types: memory, ALUs, VPUs, state machines on the digital side, vs. sense amps, VCOs, filters, PLLs, linear control on the analog side. I worked at HP and Intel for a total of 32 years in both test equipment and CPU design. Digital designers outnumber analog designers by nearly 100:1. And the disciplines seemed unidirectional: analog designers could shift in and out of either role, but digital designers seemed pigeonholed.

At first, I just chalked this up to %age of silicon dedicated to each discipline. But when I think back over it, it was roughly equal across functionality (excluding large registers and memory arrays, which can be considered a single circuit).

Going back further, this was true in college in the 80's: digital electronics classes were "easy As" and analog circuits classes were dreaded.

On its face, I can see that an AND gate is far simpler to understand than an Op-Amp, but why did we end up in this place? Is it the abstractions? Or how things are taught?

What do you think, HN? Why such a big difference?

I've been programming with promises for several years now, and I find myself using a common pattern of adding a race timeout promise. It seems like a useful feature, why isn't it implicit when dealing with deferred execution? I run into very few cases where an infinite timeout period makes sense.

For years, I have spent countless hours in and out of work learning new computer and electronics skills. From embedded control systems and building op-amp PID filters, from signal processing circuits to learning every new JS framework and boutique language like Go, Swift and Rust; frontend, backend, devops, AWS, digital ocean, Azure... to re-reading new versions of books on the Linux kernel and crypto and networking... just... everything.

I do it partially because it is interesting, but in the past few years I've come to realize I do it out of fear. I read articles on online forums like this one and I'm terrified of being turned out to pasture without enough skills, so I focus dedicated effort on learning as much as I can because I'm scared of being destitute in the future. Despite no evidence.

Am I alone? Has anyone overcome this career-related hyper-FOMO? Is this a common anxiety?