I've often wondered if some lost arts represent niche opportunities. My username is apt. I'm keenly interested in analog, particularly precision and low noise circuits. I have a side business that makes a niche market product based on an analog circuit.

At my day job, I'm one of the few people left who is capable (or maybe just willing) to compute a formal noise budget for an analog circuit. At least in the instrumentation business, there will always be a need to get the analog signal from the sensor to the analog-to-digital converter with dignity. And understanding analog issues is sometimes vital to resolving those issues using digital processing.