19 Jun
2004
19 Jun
'04
4:49 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Donzelli" <aw288(a)osfn.org>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 11:47 PM
Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount...
; -))
but
have
chunk
Tools are great, I use them myself. But you have to have some knowledge of
what's going on to know when the answer the tool gives you is wrong (maybe
you didn't feed the tool enough information, forgot something, or there is a
bug in the program, etc). Lots of solutions that look good on a computer end
up not working great in the field because of many things that are not
modeled in your tool. Bridges fall, roofs cave in, microchips short out, etc
not because the tools were wrong, but because when things get too big or too
small other forces that normally don't matter come into play. The only thing
that really changes in engineering is we have new materials, controls, and
better detailed models to play with, the basics you learned in school don't
change much if at all. Without the basics the tools are just a good quick
way to make a mess of things. Somebody who knows what's going on can jump
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,
> 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The color code is obsolete.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 > 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 > 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
from tool to tool, if you just know how to use one
particular tool then your
in trouble.
The most important things I learned in college is how to deal with people
you might not like but have to work with, the basics of the field I was in
(that you DO use believe it or not for the rest of your life), and how to
solve problems you never seen before in a logical way. The fringe classes I
took in college might not have been directly used by me in my job, but they
were useful in giving me a perspective of what the other disciplines needed
to know from me to get their part of the job done.
Specialization is ok if you like doing just one thing and don't mind being
out of a profession when your specialty is obsolete (especially in any
programming or electronics field).
A few people do know what the chip in a video cards does step by step, if
they didn't they could not design the part to begin with. Just because there
are a million gates in the part doesn't mean each one is doing something
totally different. Tools just do the time consuming calculations, you still
have to tell them step by step what to do so I would not say they do all the
thinking. Then you have the fun of taking your model and figuring out a way
to build, control, repair, and package it which is a whole job in itself.