Upvoted. I definitely agree that many erstwhile "analog" functions have joined the dark side. ;-) And I've been programming digital / analog systems since the early 80s.
But I think that two challenges / opportunities remain for analog. The first is that advances in digital capabilities place new demands on analog. For instance, the possibility of higher sampling rates and bit depths requires us to go back and update transducer preamps.
Second, some archaic skills can still be lucrative if the number of practitioners decreases faster than the number of remaining applications. I'm still betting my career on the need for somebody to care about physics, while also knowing how to program. At my workplace, I am possibly the last remaining person who knows how to compute a noise budget that includes transducers, analog signals, and digital processing, in an instrumentation system.
Horowitz and Hill had a chapter, "Digital Meets Analog" that discuss ways that digital designers have to keep up with analog concepts. The ways that digital systems can go wrong are often analog.
I would still add another challenge for analogue: power harvesting. That's an environment where the amount of energy you can collect is so low that you can't simply afford to run a uC. However, you still need to manage that negligible amount of energy, because in the long run, it builds up, and then awesome stuff happens (switching a uC on, for example).
I bought the 2nd edition 15 years ago, I loved it, and I now cherish that useful book in my bookcase.
I work for a company that makes instrumentation. It's one of those "okay, now what am I going to do with a physics degree" kinds of things, but it suits me well. And I've bounced in and out of management. Today, there are engineers who are ahead of me in electronic design, but I'm good at figuring out the grand overview of how products work, and like to solve weird problems. Much of my programming is in the service of solving problems, rather than creating products.
But I think that two challenges / opportunities remain for analog. The first is that advances in digital capabilities place new demands on analog. For instance, the possibility of higher sampling rates and bit depths requires us to go back and update transducer preamps.
Second, some archaic skills can still be lucrative if the number of practitioners decreases faster than the number of remaining applications. I'm still betting my career on the need for somebody to care about physics, while also knowing how to program. At my workplace, I am possibly the last remaining person who knows how to compute a noise budget that includes transducers, analog signals, and digital processing, in an instrumentation system.
Horowitz and Hill had a chapter, "Digital Meets Analog" that discuss ways that digital designers have to keep up with analog concepts. The ways that digital systems can go wrong are often analog.