THIS THREAD HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE OFF-TOPIC FORUM
[Moderator]

If you need an Electronics device, or the one you have is broke, just go out and buy another one
in this throw away world. The electronics recycle yards are filled with broken junk no one wants
to bother fixing so why should you?

If you are an Engineer with a college degree you can make a living perhaps
and if you have lots of free idle time, and are financially secure go ahead and tinker
around with making useless or near useless gadgets and basically "Toys" or maybe
you can build a HAM Radio to use in the next flood or earthquake emergency
which is another waste of time since you can buy already made HAM radios for
that same purpose instead of wasting hours and days of your spare time trying
to build a radio that diesn't come close to the ones manufactured in modern
factories, which are designed by electronics egineers.

Otherwise it's a waste of time nowadays to bother with learning it.
It's not like it used to be several decades ago where electronics knowledge
was a valueable and profitable skill set for the job market or small business person
like a TV or consumer repairman who nowadays is at about Welfare earning level if anything.

 

Pursuing something that is of interest to You is never a waste of time,
unless You personally think that it is.

Monetary profit is not the only source of wealth.
Your current high standard of living depends on the wide variety of interests of others.

Your current line of thinking will ultimately make the rest of your life miserable.
.
.
.

 

Rustywire,
I thoroughly enjoyed making a reasonable living with my electronic knowledge. I retired 20 years ago, but I still have an insatiable need to know how things work. If a day went by when I didn't learn something new, I would consider it a wasted day. You my call it pointless tinkering, but it all depends on your personal outlook on life. You may need to be entertained 24Hrs a day but I entertain myself.

 

Rustywire,
I thoroughly enjoyed making a reasonable living with my electronic knowledge. I retired 20 years ago, but I still have an insatiable need to know how things work. If a day went by when I didn't learn something new, I would consider it a wasted day. You my call it pointless tinkering, but it all depends on your personal outlook on life. You may need to be entertained 24Hrs a day but I entertain myself.

You must be secure financially and have lots of spare & idle time to tinker and pursue endless technical knowledge.

That proves what I said.

 

If you are an Engineer with a college degree you can make a living perhaps
and if you have lots of free idle time,

I'm retired and have a lot discretionary of time, but there are a large number of things that I won't waste my time or money trying to repair. Life is too short.

 

I know.

The Truth is not easy to accept, so you call it "Ranting and Raving" and to basically go away and don't come back.

A more thoughtful and intelligent response would be to prove me wrong.

Someone who didn't make the cut is whining about those that did.

Maybe you need a slump-buster to change your life.

 

Otherwise it's a waste of time nowadays to bother with learning it.

Your experience is not mine. Electronics has given me endless pleasure as a hobby. I enjoyed it when I was a teenager and had to mow two lawns to buy my next transistor, I love it now when I am retired, financially secure, and have all the free time the lovely wife Morticia grants me (just kidding.)

I am sorry you feel that way. Like everything else, electronics is not for everyone. I think playing golf is a stupid waste of time, so I don’t do it. You are welcome to do the same with electronics.

 

Most of the folks who quit engineering as undergraduates switched to Art History. They switched understanding for rote memory. Too stressful for me.

 

I'm not an engineer, I don't have mountains of spare cash laying around, and I don't have much in the way of free time. I still spend more than I should on parts and make time for a little tinkering now and again. I am more of a programmer than a circuit designer and enjoy the challenges of learning new concepts. There is nothing like the feeling of working through a problem and finding the answer. I'll admit it would be nice if one of my "toys" were worth enough to the general public to put the effort into finding a way to get it out, but in the meantime I'll keep "playing with them".

 

I just don't make it as an engineer, so I switched tracks and became a electronics engineering technician, where I could learn how to build this stuff and not necessarily design it. designing comes later . Meanwhile you learn .

 

If you need an Electronics device, or the one you have is broke, just go out and buy another one
in this throw away world. The electronics recycle yards are filled with broken junk no one wants
to bother fixing so why should you?

If you are an Engineer with a college degree you can make a living perhaps
and if you have lots of free idle time, and are financially secure go ahead and tinker
around with making useless or near useless gadgets and basically "Toys" or maybe
you can build a HAM Radio to use in the next flood or earthquake emergency
which is another waste of time since you can buy already made HAM radios for
that same purpose instead of wasting hours and days of your spare time trying
to build a radio that diesn't come close to the ones manufactured in modern
factories, which are designed by electronics egineers.

Otherwise it's a waste of time nowadays to bother with learning it.
It's not like it used to be several decades ago where electronics knowledge
was a valueable and profitable skill set for the job market or small business person
like a TV or consumer repairman who nowadays is at about Welfare earning level if anything.

I have seen your other posts about wanting to change careers (to electronics) at a later than usual point in life. This has always been your dream if I remember correctly. I think you were given a fair summary of the outlook for such a transition and it wasn't what you wanted to hear. I will say again what I said before, that it is worth pursuing even if you aren't likely to get rich. Yes, you'll be competing against people overseas and against the throw-away paradigm that we've adopted here, but if you're passionate about it, you will be successful. It will involve a lot of effort on your part but you'll finally be doing something that YOU always wanted want to do.

But hearing this tone from you makes the whole situation make more sense. You're a defeatist. That's why you spent all those years doing unfulfilling work. How many times did you talk yourself out of taking the plunge because it would be too hard or too risky? This is just one more time. It's not for everyone and apparently not for you.

 

During my electronics career, the value of my home increased 14 times in the 38 years I owned it. I payed off the mortgage early then gained some wealth on investments for down payments on homes for my kids.
My retirement provides lots of time for me to fiddle with new circuits and chat on the web.

 

During my electronics career, the value of my home increased 14 times in the 38 years I owned it. I payed off the mortgage early then gained some wealth on investments for down payments on homes for my kids.
My retirement provides lots of time for me to fiddle with new circuits and chat on the web.

Getting rich quick is difficult and fraught with peril. Very few can do it successfully. Getting rich slowly is eminently doable, but it requires patience and forethought. For me, it was a mixture of real estate, stocks, and fixed income investments. Diversification was essential to avoid the market crash of '88, the dot com bubble of the early 2000's and real estate bubble of 2008. In each case I was wounded but not destroyed.

 

You must be secure financially and have lots of spare & idle time to tinker and pursue endless technical knowledge.

That proves what I said.

I made a living by doing what I love doing - tinkering and persueing endless technical knowledge. I'm certainly not going to stop, just because I retired. I don't have to prove to anyone that I am right or wrong. Life is what you make it. You do what ever you want to with your life and I hope it makes you happy.

 

Electronics knowledge has given me an ace in hand, as I negotiated my career as an industrialist. Im now comfortably retired, which gives me more time to further explore leveraging that knowledge in other fields.

Your right though. It doesn’t have to be electronics, which can be a curse for many. The trick is to accept who you are, develop the skills that are unique to you, then leverage those skills to advance your lifestyle.

 

I made a perfectly good living designing & building mostly low-volume custom solutions for aerospace and defence projects ending up with a high-6-figure salary and my own business before semi-retiring on medical grounds. Now I teach electronics to MSc students as well as design/build one-off custom prototypes for research projects. Occasionally I fix stuff that simply can't be thrown away - as often they are one-offs or simply too expensive not to repair even though they might be decades old.

I agree some consumer electronics may often not be worth the effort, but there are plenty of examples on YT of people that do make a living doing it - Rossman, NorthridgeFix, iPad Rehab, etc etc

 

This thread was created as a critical observation of working in electronics, nothing more, nothing less. It's not about me.

Sitting around all day, looking at scopes and meters, analyzing, figuring and troubleshooting to make a living.
then coming home and going into the garage and tinkering with cherished gadgets doing the same thing.
For one thing, that kind of a life is unhealthy. Sitting around all day, sedentary like that will get you diabetes or some other
health condition eventually. Engineers make sense as they are creating devices that hopefully advance human living
but developing countries have picked up the slack there and have taken over those jobs and careers.
Other than that, spending so much time sitting around trying to figure out what's wrong with a circuit is a job for robotics
nowadays or as I said just throw the damn thing away and buy a new one. Sitting around making hobby toys or redundant little
gadgets is a waste of time. The days of Tubes (valves) where it made some sense to fix electronics devices or even communicate
with distant people in other lands via ham radio is long gone. There is no need for that anymore except as an idle past time.
Modern electronics is cheap and can be built by robots and worldwide communication is as common as turning on a lamp
or toasting bread.

As far as getting rich in electronics, that is irrelevant. Maybe a high end electronics engineer or scientist can do it but there
are better ways and even easier ways than learning Kirchoffs law and other circuit analysis and advanced mathematics. in order
to become wealthy. Electronics is not a path to get rich which makes it a moot point. If you don't have much expense and
responsibilities maybe making a modest income working as a tech or low end electronics worker "figuring out" circuits makes sense
but still look out for the hazards of sedentary work and resulting diabetes and health problems sitting around all day.
There will probably be a need for people to fix select critical electronic devices for medical or military defense but everything else
is not that important to bother fixing except as someone said for rare "one-offs" which falls into the same category as fixing
rare classic cars.

 

"Sitting around making hobby toys or redundant little gadgets is a waste of time "

Reading this thread was a waste of time.

 

My whole working life has been in Industrial electronics, both problem solving and design, and I have rarely been sedentary at any time.
In fact for the most part it has been the opposite,
In most large city's where industrial electronics abound, the business owners bank on someone being local in order to repair, modify and design for them., the alternative is to wait to have a tech flown in from some distant part of the country which can cost expensive delays in production. , therefore, once you have established a reputation and rapport with said community, you should always be in big demand.

 

Maybe it makes us feel good. People do all kinds of destructive things in pursuit of a feeling.