Well put. I absolutely loved my CE work in university. I loved doing digital logic design, living in state machines, and programming in VHDL. I loved how highly deterministic it all felt. I loved the Mentor Graphics software and seeing a visual representation of my code.

For me, on the East Coast of the US, there didn't seem to be many jobs at the time and I wasn't feeling moving to the West Coast where I assumed the jobs would be. In the end I went down the software track for my career and feel like it would be impossible to get back into this. I can probably get my kicks by playing with a Raspberry Pi but I always wonder what that alternate universe would have felt like going down the CE career path.