Was this professionally or in school? I still did this in an EE program 15 years ago and I can't imagine things have changed since then. I think kids still have to do lots of ugly math in EE classes.

Undergrad. Mid-late 1980s.

I wasn't making point about mathematics qua mathematics. Was thinking that if I were doing EE undergrad today, I'd use SageMath or Mathematica to crunch the mechanical algebraic manipulations involved in doing a z-transform.