19 Jun
2004
19 Jun
'04
3:26 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe R." <rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount...
;-))
At 04:37 PM 6/19/04 -0700, you wrote:
a
> It seems to me self-evident that *someone* does
> understand how any one of those chips works -
> they just didn't tell the rest of us.
It's worse than that. Most people in electronics today don't even have a
good understanding of basic components such as diodes, transistors,
capacitors etc. A good example was the guy on this list that claimed
voltage didn't matter in a power supply, only current. VERY few of the
people that I know that have Electrical Engineering degrees can even read color code or can identify simple parts such as a
resistor from a diode.
I
think it won't be long before there are a few
smart people working for big
companies that will design everything and then lots and lots of parts
changers that don't know anything except how to repalce parts. I guess the
current PC market place is a perfect example of that.
Joe
People get too specialized these days. If you ever worked for a process
equipment manufacturer of any type you will have been bombarded with calls
from well educated people asking the most basic
engineering questions
somebody without a finished degree would know. 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 best engineers
actually go on the floor sometimes and get their hands dirty. Small
companies allow a designer to be involved in every facet of design,
production, QC, and customer returns while in a larger company your
insulated from all of that unless there is a huge fuckup that somehow comes
back to you in the paper trail. 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. Too much time is spent on teaching how to use a complex tool
then what's going on inside of the process itself. When I was in college
studying chemical engineering I had to crawl around real heat exchangers,
learn how to play with live steam, work on a real 2 story distillation
column, run material through industrial dryers, read stripcharts, weigh
chemicals precisely before chucking them into a reactor, worry about
thermocouple placement (and what type to use), etc. People that graduate now
sit in front of a PC and play with ChemCAD and type in numbers.
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.