EXPOSED
The desk half of this job — datasheet trawling, block diagrams, component selection, SPICE setup, register maps, test plans, compliance paperwork, and glue firmware — is exactly what current models do at usable quality, and EDA vendors are shipping AI layout and verification assistants into the tools. The half that holds is bench reality: an analog front end that oscillates, EMI that only shows up in the chamber, a thermal problem in the enclosure, a board that passes sim and fails at -40C. Licensure is a weak moat here because the industrial exemption means most electronics engineers never stamp anything, so protection comes from debug skill and owning safety-critical design calls rather than from a seal.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Schematic capture from a known topology, BOM selection against datasheet parameters, SPICE sweeps, register-map documentation, and DO-160/61000 test-plan drafting are already being generated at usable quality, but bringing up a switching supply that ripples at 300kHz, chasing a ground-loop that only appears with the motor running, or correlating a failed radiated-emissions scan to a specific clock harmonic still takes someone at the bench with a scope probe — that split is why this sits at 11 rather than in the resistant band.
Some physical or field component. You are not in a trench, but you are also not screen-only: probing a live board, reworking 0402s and BGAs with hot air, sitting in the anechoic chamber with a spectrum analyzer, running thermal chambers to -40C and 85C, and crawling into an enclosure to find where the harness couples noise are recurring days, and that intermittent-but-real hands-on load is a 9 rather than a 15 because the environment is a lab you control, not a rooftop or a refinery.
Certification preferred, not legally required. The industrial exemption in nearly every state PE statute means the vast majority of electronics engineers design, release, and ship products without ever stamping a drawing, so the enforceable barrier is your employer's design-review process and standards like IEC 60601 or ISO 26262 — the 6 credits the fact that safety-critical and utility-adjacent work does occasionally demand a licensed signatory, not that most of you carry one.
Some relationship component. Your output is a board, a spec, and a test report that has to work regardless of who authored it, and the customer usually never meets you; the 7 reflects the real but bounded relationship capital with the fab, the contract manufacturer's process engineer, and the certification lab that gets your unit re-tested quickly rather than queued for six weeks.
Meaningful discretion. Deciding a derating margin, accepting a part with a 20-year EOL risk, signing off that an isolation barrier meets creepage under pollution degree 2, or calling a field-failure root cause fixed are decisions with recall-scale consequences and no procedure that settles them, which puts this at the top of the discretion band — short of 14+ only because those calls typically pass through a design review board rather than resting on you alone.
Avionics Technicians SAFE
Has AI actually changed your work?