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<p>Oh, I don’t know, I think it sure beats just working as a production engineer who is on the shop floor supervising the same assembly line every day. But then again, some people seem to enjoy that work, so to each, his own. </p>
<p>I believe the key is to be constantly designing different projects. I can agree that if the designs are basically the same thing, with just a few changes here and there, then sure, that can get pretty boring. But if there are a lot of degrees of freedom: i.e., if you have to try out a lot of different ideas and piece together numerous different modules, then that is quite interesting. </p>
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<p>One of the most interesting features of human beings is that there are never satisfied. There is always some demand out there that is waiting to be filled. And if that demand gets filled, then some new desire will be created. Often times, people don’t even know what they really want until they see it. </p>
<p>For example, who knew that people instead of playing highly photorealistic and fast-paced first-person shooters involving killing enemy soldiers and/or aliens, people actually just wanted to play a relatively simple game that only involves pressing buttons in synchronization with their favorite rock tunes? Yet Guitar Hero is now one of the most popular video games in history. Who knew? </p>
<p>The point is, there is always so much demand for innovation and new products that it’s hard for me to see how engineers can ever diminish their own demand simply by designing more products. If anything, more designs would create even more opportunities for innovation as more products means more opportunities to combine technologies to create still more products. </p>
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<p>And then some other new problem will crop up which the engineers will need to work on.</p>
<p>Heck, that’s happening already, to follow your example. Right now, the microchip industry has become less interested in scaling down its chips more and more because doing so has created ever more problems with heat dissipation. Hence, the focus is less on scaling the chips down and more on how to create energy-efficient chips, i.e. chips that actually shut down a portion of their transistors under low loads, or through dynamic voltage/frequency throttling, and obviously the new trend towards multicore/multi-thread chips, which then introduce their own design problems regarding workload balancing and cache coherency. Once we solve these problems, then other problems will surely crop up because, like I said, consumer demand is never fulfilled. There is always something that the consumer wants that companies cannot (yet) provide. </p>
<p>But again, that emphasizes the importance of learning flexible skills and of keeping up with new trends. 10 years ago, Google didn’t even exist. heck, 15 years ago, nobody outside of academia had heard of the Internet. Surely in 10-15 years in the future, there will be other new technologies. The key is to be constantly learning new skills and reading about new technology.</p>