Now is a Golden Era of Electrical Engineering
I thought I chose a pretty good time in history to become an electrical engineer.
I was right, but I think it's gotten even cooler since then.
Why? A few reasons:
The whole of the internet is an absolutely capital resource for the field. You can trivially find PDF copies of all of the best references ever written on electronics design. (A few I can think of offhand: Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics, Johnson's High Speed Digital Design, Bowick's RF Circuit Design. Finding the actual PDFs is an exercise left to the reader.) This is in addition to all the great semiconductor application notes and forum posts. The rabbit hole is limitless.
The price of fabricating and assembling circuit boards has dropped to basically nothing. You can get four layer assembled boards from JLCPCB starting at about $30. That was unheard of even fifteen years ago. It's a huge boon to aspiring circuit designers. You can show up to a job interview with actual, functional circuit prototypes in hand, and use them to talk through design processes with your potential employers. I can't overstate what a big differentiator this is for prospective job candidates.
Really good test equipment is priced within the reach of a typical college student. I'd have killed to have a 250MHz oscilloscope available in my dorm room. Scopes aren't the only example of this: function generators, VNAs, power supplies, and multimeters are all cheap enough for a sole human to afford. "Cheap," of course, is a relative term. All these things put together used to cost about as much as a down payment on a house. What's amazing is that, these days, it's perfectly conceivable to supply a college student with all of these items for about $1k.
A wealth of professional grade CAD tools are free. LTspice continues to be the industry standard simulation package for analog circuits - and Linear Tech gives it away, to sell chips. KiCad has been at functional parity with Altium since version 8 or so. (It's also a damn sight more stable. Fix that, will you, Renesas?)
LLMs have removed most of the obstacles to writing software. This has made a huge impact on me personally - I always found the circuits portion way more intuitive and interesting. The software was a chore. Now, anyone who can read a datasheet can quickly generate and iterate on firmware. I wish I'd had this in college. The ceiling of my ambitions could have been set so much higher.
I have very little LLM doom, even after OpenAI's reveal of Astra's newfound PCB layout habit. OpenAI and Anthropic are each racing to build me the autorouter I've always wanted, for the low low price of $20 a month.
I can't wait!