Also I got bitten by parasitics in capacitors very early in my career: capacitors of different face value will resonate with each other to effectively kill the decoupling network at a specific frequency (resulting, for me, in an amplifier with a nice hole in its frequency response).
Phil also recommends this lecture in one of his videos [3], which is still one of my all time favourite lectures ever.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@PhilsLab
It will probably have been taught.... but very briefly. Before going go back to analysing circuit schematics, where connections between components don't show resistance or inductance, and the capacitance of two parallel capacitors sums.
With sharp rise times, synced up to a common clock, even after soldering in a whole bunch of capacitors, you can still stick a probe pretty much anywhere and see switching spikes all over the place, from power rails to completely unrelated signals that are supposed to be stable. Using actual TTL, there was another funny lesson what this weird "fanout" value in the datasheet meant.
A similar lesson I learned that way (and a very memorable one :-)) was about flyback diodes.
You learned when analogue circuitry was the norm. I learned when digital circuitry was simple enough that you could readily take something apart and understand it.
Now, EE courses often start with cad, simulations, digital electronics, and you end up with people building ziggurats atop an ocean of incomprehension.
It’s exactly the same thing with software.
I don’t scorn people for this, rather I see myself as fortunate for having learned in a time when the more fundamental knowledge was still worth learning - and that’s the rub - for a vast majority, it simply isn’t worth the time or energy to explore the full stack, when there’s so much to learn atop it.
What's not taught properly these days is that ALL electronics is analog at the physical/circuit level.
For you digital types that's OSI Model Layer 1 — Physical layer (look it up on Wiki). Nothing in electronics works unless that's working properly—ICs, tunnel diodes, transistors, inductors, resistors, capacitors, cables and antennas are all analog devices at that level. That includes the heart of the most advanced digital ICs. For example, the upper clock speeds in processors are limited by transit times/electron mobility, inter-electrode and stray capacitances, unwanted inductance, etc.—all of which are analog effects and they must be accounted for.
Like it or not, the physical analog world is alive and well! The Noughts & Ones Brigade unfortunately seems to have forgotten that fact.
Everyone does. There's probably a layer below for everyone but the most theoretical physicists. I don't know where the leaks in electronics engineering's abstractions are, but I'm pretty sure they exist.
It probably doesn't help when you have a circuit diagram that while topologically correct doesn't show the relative positioning between components. The first time I saw all the decoupling caps rendered in a single chain on the side of the diagram I was mightily confused. It seemed like utter nonsense until I realised where they actually went.
If you've read my other comments here you'll realize I'm concerned that these days EE training doesn't place a strong enough emphasis on shielding, ground loops, decoupling and such that it ought to. For any electrical/electronic engineer these are critical concepts.
By way of stressing that I'd like to take a sojourn into history and refer you to probably the greatest set of electronic engineering books ever produced: the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series — a massive 28 volume set written nearly 80 years ago to document electronics and microwave/radar research done during WWII.
Anyone seriously interested in electronics should be aware of this series. Yes, it's dated, heavily weighted towards vacuum tube technology (although klystrons and magnetrons are still current), and it lacks modern semiconductor tech, however this truly remarkable set contains a huge amount of information that's still very relevant today. Moreover, whilst it covers the topics in depth it does so at a level that can be easily understood by undergraduates (explanations are more general than today's very specialized textbooks).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Radiation_Laboratory_Serie...
Here you'll find links to the Internet Archive where the volumes can be downloaded. Specifically, I would refer you to Volume 23 - Microwave Receivers, — Chapter 6 Intermediate Frequency Amplifiers p155. Now turn to p182 and read 6-10 Practical Considerations.
Here's the PDF of V23:https://archive.org/download/mit-rad-lab-series-version-3/23...
This section on decoupling, shielding etc. is just as applicable to today's high speed digital circuits as it was back in WWII. Sure it needs updating but the fundamentals of screening and decoupling have not changed. What's important here is that these physical (analog) effects are set by the fundamental laws of physics, and circuits that do not take them into account will fail to work correctly.