When you are a beginner you learn by building using other people's designs. As you acquire knowledge and experience you then become more capable of designing on your own.

My first build as a teenager was a light-beam interrupter burglar alarm for our family grocery store. This was a design straight out of the Phillips Electronics Engineer kit. My next build was a darkroom timer from Practical Wireless magazine using an 6SN7 twin triode. In both cases I could not analyze the circuits on my own though I understood how the circuits worked.

By the time I reached 4th year college I was able to design my own circuits. I designed and built a digital darkroom timer and a digital frequency display for my Realistic DX150B MW/SW radio.

 

@tindel, I'm very much on the same page as you -- a lot of factors are working against today's engineering students (and some of those factors were well at play as I went through my education and I suffered accordingly).

As you noted, "we" had a lot of opportunities to learn the hard way as we grew up. We could tear something apart and get at least an inkling of how and why it did what it did (being able to put it back together successfully was a milestone event that came later, much to the relief of our parents). We also had lots of opportunities to figure out how to fix things that weren't working and motivation to do so, since we generally couldn't afford to just go buy another one -- it was fix it or do without it. Today, if you tear most things apart you get to see a bunch of tiny parts on a circuit board connected to some black blobs here and there.

A LOT of EEs started out in ham radio and only built their gear because it was the only way to afford it -- they didn't start out wanting to build electronics, they just wanted to be able to talk to people thousands of miles away. Back then you could often build gear that was better than what you could get off the shelf and do so at a fraction of the price. Today it is the opposite -- you can often buy something off the shelf that's a fraction of the price and will work much better than anything you could build. Not to mention that if you want to talk to people anywhere in the world, you just need to make sure to choose the right calling plan.

Similar situations existed in most engineering fields, and as a result a large fraction of people that entered an engineering education had a background that lead them to choose it out of personal interest and prepared them to do well at it, Today you are much more likely to find students entering engineering programs that have zero relevant background and in many cases have chosen engineering only because some survey or some councilor has convinced them that if they get that sheet of paper that they will make all kinds of money.

On top of this, today's "traditional" education is doing a poorer and poorer job of preparing students to pursue a design engineering path (and this is a trend that has been going on longer than I've been alive). There are numerous factors for this, most of them pretty innocent and largely inevitable and reflective of the fact that we are victims of our own technological success. The simple fact is that the vast majority of people do not need as strong a grounding in the fundamental math and problem solving skills in order to get by in a modern society -- we have lots of tools to use as crutches. Unfortunately, the rather small fraction of people that really do need those strong fundamentals often don't have the opportunity to get them. The end result is that the fraction of students in an engineering program that start out in a position to really excel is a lot smaller and, to add insult to injury, the engineering programs they are enrolled in have been watered down to accommodate the level of preparedness of the bulk of the enrolled students -- not to mention always being mindful of the need to attract future students to the program, many of which are going to shy away from any program that has a reputation as being "hard".

 

@dl324, I don't know you personally, so maybe these points don't apply to you, but the fact that you got an engineering job with an AE degree tells me you are either the rare person that accomplishes this or that you're likely about WBahn's age.

I've got a decade on @WBahn. When I started working in electronics, there wasn't so much emphasis on degrees. If someone gave you a chance and you did well, you had a lot of opportunity. Before getting the job at HP Labs, I spent a year as a technician building HP3000 Series III computers and troubleshooting them to the component level. While I was at HP Labs, I took evening classes to work towards a BSEE.

I got the job at HP Labs because my boss's boss knew the hiring engineer and suggested that I apply. He may have noticed me because I was good on all of the stations and a product engineer would pull me off the line to work on some special projects.

I submit that both of you had already had a lot of EE experience before you went to undergrad.

When I started my associates degree, I had no experience in electronics other than swapping tubes in TV's. I had problems with series and parallel, but a classmate who was an electronics tech in the Navy gave me some advice and I worked hard to understand the things I was being taught.

 

It's all part of the Cash Register Syndrome. I came up with that back while I was an undergrad, long before the movie Idiocracy came out, but that movie illustrated it beautifully.

 

I'm currently reading a book called "Practical Electronics for Inventors" but I got bored. It just explains how circuits like filters work and not how to design them yourself.

You said: "How can I learn analog circuit design if I already know circuit analysis?"
It sounds like "How can I compose music if I already know musical notation?"
At first, as in any art, you should be talented, else after learning courses you became fake composer or fake circuit designer.
And you always will boring at your work.
Talented people never ask "How to learn", they created something instead.

https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-art-of-electronics-d33411099.html
https://www.pdfdrive.com/learning-the-art-of-electronics-a-hands-on-lab-course-d185792951.html

 

It's all part of the Cash Register Syndrome. I came up with that back while I was an undergrad, long before the movie Idiocracy came out, but that movie illustrated it beautifully.

I would argue that this is generally good for humanity. Each generation is smarter than the last and able to make decisions more quickly. Those that can't keep up are filtered out (natural selection), making humans smarter and more productive in the long run. Eventually nobody will design circuits, they will simply be generated based on needs.

Today, nearly nobody uses Maxwell's equations, but we all have a basic understanding of them - even if we don't remember the mechanics to solve problems with the equations.

 

I would argue that this is generally good for humanity. Each generation is smarter than the last and able to make decisions more quickly. Those that can't keep up are filtered out (natural selection), making humans smarter and more productive in the long run. Eventually nobody will design circuits, they will simply be generated based on needs.

Today, nearly nobody uses Maxwell's equations, but we all have a basic understanding of them - even if we don't remember the mechanics to solve problems with the equations.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I have a hard time concluding that engineers that can't design a resistive voltage divider or store managers (let along clerks) that can't figure out what to do when you give them an additional $0.27 after they have put in the $20 you gave them for a $10.27 bill is a good thing.

I have no desire to live (or for my daughter or her kids to live) as an Eloi.