You kid, but; from the supply-side perspective, when I graduated 15 or so years ago in Electronic Engineering, job options in the field weren't great, and salaries were much lower than I'd been led to believe they would be, with much harder work and more numerous hoops to jump through than going into the software field.

I had been passionate about programming since single-digit age and decided to go into that field and am now an experienced developer of 15 years, starting client-side on "modern" smart phones (early Android, iOS and even Windows Phone), eventually moving to back-end where I've found my home.

That said, I do still love electronics, and a book like this could probably help refresh my memory of much that I learned back then so I can get deeper into electronics for fun. Much of what I have done since university has only been tinkering, prototyping on veroboards etc, lots of MCU stuff, and the usual sort of build/repair of electronics you'd expect of someone with a cursory understanding.

At some point I'll probably want to be designing/building my own PCBs; that's become a lot easier than it was back then when OSHPark was the only real contender, so I didn't get beyond some very basic PCBs with just a handful of components on a single or double layer back then; but this will be for "fun" and personal projects where I want something custom but more polished.

I've never looked back when it comes to the Electronics as a career (profit) and I'm happy with that, but I would very much like to make use of those skills I did learn to a greater extent than I have (passion).

Yeah it's sad because hardware is mostly competing with software for talent nowadays (EE degree's are easily acceptable for SWE work), and software work just blows EE work out of the water on pretty much every front. I cannot see right now how electronics in the US has a viable path forward, everyone in the industry who knows what they are doing is pushing 65-70 with almost no fresh blood taking the $75k/yr electrical engineering jobs to learn the craft.

The pay is low because the margins are low, and the margins are low because...hardware is a money pit. The only reason I am here is because I have a passion for hardware that I don't get from software.