My “one trick” though is that I have a drawer full of different coloured highlighters. When I encounter a “badly drawn” schematic, I pull out the highlighters and start colouring the nodes in the circuit and working through what functions each part may serve. One common thing I’ve seen, which I consider very sloppy, is that a circuit can still be made up of common topologies, but the designer didn’t put a lot of effort into making them look like their textbook versions; they realize “I need 4 resistors, a transistor, and a diode”, plop those down, and then draw wandering connections between them. It’s still correct and functional, but not very ergonomic for the user. Sometimes the parts are a long way from each other with big long nets drawn between them (or worse! Labelled nets that don’t actually draw a full line)
And writing all of this, I’ve realized that it’s exactly the same as code. High cohesion and loose coupling and all that :)
Very true. This is exactly like spaghetti code and very hard to make sense of for somebody lacking experience.
That's odd. EE students in any ABET-accredited program should be formally trained to identify discrete analog design patterns like this without the aid of functional outlines. I know I was (even if I don't design analog circuits for a living). It's also standard practice in industry to segement a given system into simpler functional blocks as a first step in any analysis, discrete analog or VLSI alike.
Like an experienced developer who can often infer design intent by looking at a few lines of well written code, so too can a professional analog designer with circuits that look like magic to the untrained eye.