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In 1965, Bob Widlar was designing op-amps at Fairchild Semiconductor.
He was told the math didn’t add up, the gain calculations were wrong, the frequency response would be unstable. All by PhD engineers who “ran the simulation”.
Widlar looked at his breadboard, looked at the oscilloscope trace, and told them they were overthinking it. "The circuit works because it wants to work," he said, and shipped the μA709 - which became one of the most successful op-amps in history.
Bob Widlar on the cover of the book, “Every Idiot can Count to One.”
While his colleagues spent weeks running SPICE simulations and filling whiteboards with equations, Widlar was building circuits based on what his gut told him about how electrons actually behave. He could smell a bad design before the first prototype was built. He knew which corners could be cut and which couldn't, not because a textbook told him, but because he had failed enough times to develop an instinct for what works.
The best engineers don’t have the most letters after their name, but they are the ones that have the most scar tissue.
Your gut develops through a thousand small failures. The power supply that oscillated because you ignored the loop stability your instinct warned you about. The PCB layout that radiated EMI because something felt wrong about that trace routing but you followed the design rules anyway. The thermal analysis that looked perfect on paper but failed in the real world because your experience whispered that the heat sink wasn't big enough.
Every burned finger on a hot component, every debug session that went until 3 AM, every "that's weird" moment when the measurement didn't match the theory - these build the pattern recognition that separates good engineers from great ones. Your subconscious processes thousands of variables that no equation captures. It knows when something smells wrong before your conscious mind can articulate why.
The MBA, PhD, ABC, 123-chasing engineer stops trusting their gut and starts trusting frameworks. They stop trusting their instincts and starts trusting models. But the engineer who learns to listen to that little voice saying “this doesn’t feel right”, that’s the engineer who finds the bugs everyone else misses.
Trust your battle wounds. They’re worth more than any diploma.
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