19 Jun
2004
19 Jun
'04
3:47 p.m.
People get too specialized these days.
These day, you have to be specialized. There is little in the market for
"jack of all trades" EEs. Those days are gone, except in very small
companies doing fairly simple devices.
The school I went to would
not pass an EE is he didn't know the resister color codes in his head, but
that was in the late 80's early 90's. To be honest most EE's today only know
a resister by the icon used in SPICE type programs, very few actually touch
the things anymore since that's all done by technicians.
The color code is obsolete. SMDs very rarely use color codes.
Someone wise once told me what engineering school is all about (yes, I
have an engineering degree, by the way, although I don't use it anymore) -
two things:
1) You learn how to be an engineer. How to think out a problem, how to
plan, how to execute it.
2) You learn how far you can push yourself. In my case, it was an
operating systems class (towards the end, you pull at least four
allnighters a week).
That is it. Everything else is just not very important.
The basics are important to learn, just so you can get by and have a clue
when you get out in the real world (and by basics, I mean *basics*). But
most of what you learn never gets used in the real world. The first year
or two in a real job, you start to "learn the ropes", doing relatively
unimportant tasks, often with an invisible (or visible) mentor. No
engineering firm in their right mind would put a rookie on an important
part of a project. By the second year, you make the jump if you can - all
of a sudden you are a "grown up" engineer (often reflected in a pretty
good raise). Also, by the second year, all that stuff in school just
doesn't matter anymore - grades, classes, theory, and so forth.
Every generation of engineer graduating
school has less overall knowledge then the ones before them since they have
more layers of equipment and software between them and the process they are
working on.
This is part of the "problem" (I don't see this as a problem, by the
way. The engineering field has changed in the past 20 years, Just as it
radically changed the 20 years before that, and the 20 years before that,
and the 20 years...). If we didn't have the tools, we would not have all
the neat-o gadgets we have today.
What you have now is allot of people who know allot
about their small chunk
in a device and nothing about what happens before or after their section.
Nobody knows how the whole completed device really works in detail.
For many things - nobody can know the "whole picture" in detail. Even
something as simple as a video card - how many gates are in the thing? A
million? Asking someone to know what most of them do is just
inconceivable. Anyway, once again the tools do most of the thinking. That
is what they are for.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org