Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a self taught-programmer, I'd be interested in why HN thinks >it's on the short list of exceptions, not the rule. As an example, I've fiddled around with circuit design. I'm not good at it, but I can make some basic stuff. It feels a lot like fiddling around with linux early in my career, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill. It's just a bit harder to get…
>, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill. In terms of pure theory, I can see what you're saying but a lot of STEM curriculum includes lab work that's hard to replicate for an auto-didactic. For applied sciences like biology, electrical engineering, applied physics (not theoretical physics), the universities will have expensive equipment that students can use…
Something interesting to think about is as a hobbyist I'll be buying that $100K scope at a hamfest or off ebay in about 10 or 20 years for basically the cost of shipping. Then at home purely as a hobby I can entertain myself cheaply and endlessly doing stuff that was cutting edge in 2016, which is still going to be an enormous market in 20 years.
There are two problems. One is that companies like to think they're cutting edge. So gaining expert level skills on, say, late 70s high speed TTL is not interesting to hiring managers. The second problem is companies that like to think they're cutting edge, almost always are not, unless they're household names. Everyone knows google uses go and python but "the rest of the real world" runs on perl and cobol, like it or not. Oddly enough the hiring managers often don't know how far behind the times they are, so you get the equivalent of an interviewer bragging about the EE equivalent of planning to implement CVS someday soon, or trying that newfangled agile design methodology someday, not knowing their plans for the future are already obsolete in the market. Half of companies are below median, after all.
TLDR is there's a lot of posing in stem, and at least some of the people doing the loudest posing are actually doing stuff right out of 1975, if not earlier. Usually because if something makes money there's no need to fix it solely to strike a stunning pose. In public of course the image will always be that theres no way we couldda dunnit without that $500K budget, partially to intimidate competitors, partially to appear more powerful, mostly just traditional neophilia.