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Engineer in a Box?
Dr.Luke writes "Robert Lucky in a IEEE Spectrum Online article laments the state of today's engineering as progressively more removed from the "real" reality of tinkering and soldering "in a big musty laboratory" like Thomas Edison as engineers become more and more reliant on software tools and simulations. He fears that "math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us" and that eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0. What do you think?"
"Help, let me out of this coffin I CAN'T BREATH!"
Arbitrary sig
I think it's a damn shame that we don't build everything by stacking up blocks of stone like our ancestors did.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And why should I care about his whining about some sci fi future where human labor and ingenuity is replaced by ungodly computer creations?
mje0w!!!1!
I think that most engineers would happily jump into a box if it said "Krispy Kreme" on the side. But that's just me. :)
hasn't this argument been going on since the disuse of the slide rule?
You can go with the flow, or you can fear the unknown.
What about the committees of suppossed scholars that protested against Edison's free form approach?
What this article neglects to recognize is that engineering things nowadays is vastle more difficult than engineering in the time of, say, Edison. You could engineer a lightbulb on the back of an envelope. Think you engineer a CPU like that ?
I've been an engineer in a cube for at least 10 years...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Day after day in the sweaty, cramped confines of a remote computing lab on North Campus at U-Michigan, banging out code on an oldish HP-UX box, telnet'ing to distant friend's computers (ok, they were only across campus at the newer labs, but whatever), and ever fearful that the weird dude who'd sit in the last row of machines and look at dungeon porn would show up and I'd get uncomfortable and have to leave.
...engineer, there's nothing wrong with the math. It's as difficult as ever.
What do you think?
I dont think! I bet Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0 could tell me though!
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
It was true for Windows (16bit) and Windows (32bit), too.
Doesn't an engineer more qualified than the users of Engineer-in-a-box 2.0 need to WRITE Engineer-in-a-box 2.0?
And do we still live in a capitalist nation where other real engineers will attempt to create Developer-in-a-can 2.0 to compete?
Did many developer tools obsolete many engineering fields, while closing that engineer off from moving on to other types of engineering?
These tools enable us to engineer, you will always need skills to make a computer do it's magic.
Computers will stop needing engineers and math skills when they are no longer operate on math-based principals.
# Erik
An engineer makes a $500 item with $50 worth of parts. A designer then adds $450 worth of crap.
People has always lamented the losing of skills, where have all the assembler programmers gone? The wheel wrights? Even machinists are going away.
But the ideas aren't disappearing, there will always be room for the people who do what others say can't or shouldn't be done.
Not that the loss of the chance to do a little tinkering in one's job isn't a sad state of affairs, it is. But if I was the guy who wrote the cheques at Boeing's R&D department, the word 'tinker' would probably send me into a conniption.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Sure, people can do all the advanced calculus really well, but to me that means jack squat. You know, it's pretty embarrassing when I can say that half of the people in my intro to EE class have never touched a resistor in their life, or even know what one looks like. These are the people that have trouble using Windows 98. What's pathetic is that we're moving farther and farther away from where we should. People were freaked out over an electronics lab practical --- yes this actually involved stripping wires and hooking up a working circuit, people. They studied off end and most didn't finish.
I was out in a half hour. I didn't even study.
Meanwhile I'm surrounded by them and they're getting better grades in math than I am. For God's sake don't let them be designing the circuits in the space shuttle.
Should Engineer-in-a-Box come out, I hope people would at least be sane enough to give it some time to stabilize. What's the last time you've seen software that's mature before a 3.x major version or so? What's the last time you've seen a major version that is clean and relatively bug-free before .2 or so (hint: look at Redhat 5.0 6.0 7.0 vs 5.1 6.1 7.1 vs the relatively-more-clean 5.2 6.2 7.2)? What's the last time you've seen any release, period, which didn't have at least a dozen patches or so come out before it got cleaned up? So if it ever comes down to Engineer-in-a-Box, I hope people will wait until at least EiaB version 3.2 patchlevel 15 or so to upgrade...
-zyqqh
// zyqqh
think of a few engineers I would like to see in a box.
besides, don't they already use software to conduct trains?
*ducks, runs off.*
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
all software has done is allow Mathmaticians and engineers to come up with more and more complex systems. if you remove the need to practice the basics (while still understanding them) then you allow for more time and resources to be spent on developing more complex ideas.
the same goes for software...whenb they jumpt from machine language to Assembly to High-level, each jump allowed more and better complexity.
True capitalism = lots of similar companies = jobs for everyone who wants one.
The computer is a tool but nothing more. For the most part, you can get yourself in the "ballpark" with good tools but nothing can replace real world testing. A good engineer will come home with their sleeves rolled up and their hands dirty.
I'm not sure why the collar is necessary at that point.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
As a graduate student working on my PhD in Biomedical Engineering who spent the better part of today evaluating various cost functions for a mixture model I can tell you that math ain't goin' to be done by no machine anytime soon.
Furthermore, for example, any basic course in signals and systems analysis will overwhelm even the best of students on a "good" day. Matlab's toolboxes might make the gruntwork easier, but the good engineers stand out from the sinkers in short order regardless of the help they get from "the machines".
They guy may be worried, but IMO he'll be long dead before the good engineers are replaced by uber-machines.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
What do you think?
I think Mr. Luck is wrong. Engineering requires thinking, which implies that a computer can never be an engineer, because computers can't and will never think. Just because engineers are using bigger and fancier calculators doesn't mean you have to write an article lamenting the demise of a profession. Seems like a whole load of rubbish.
If you don't know what Zoo Blacklisting is, click here.
eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0
Isn't that the goal? As a programmer, don't you want to be part of the team that writes that?
Of course, before engineer-in-a-box, we will probably see entry-level-programmer in a box. When analysts draw UML and get software (a-la rational stuff) that application gets pretty close.
Isn't the point of Engineers to think outside the box? *laughs hysterically*
This is why I switched from Computer Engeneering to Computer Science.
were the ones that were stuffed into lockers in high school, stuffing them into a box shouldn't be a problem...
I can think of two excellent examples, one where the engeneer was very good at both drawing and math, but neglected some fundamental requirements for the product (and therefore no one was happy with the result). The other example is of a person with a bachelors of physics, working as an engeneer. This person uses a quite a few computational and drawing tools, but does a wonderful job paying attention to the fundamental requirments of a product/project. Usually this engeneer completes projects quickly with inovative solutions. Point is, you only need so many people making tools (like CAD programs), if creative people can use them easily.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0
So now am I back to thinking inside of the box?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
When CowboyNeal 2.0 comes in a box.
At least it'll be Gnu/Linux based...
No one thinks that the calculator has hobled todays engineer simply because he no longer has to do long division. The calculator let's the engineer think about what the numbers mean without having to worry about whether or not he/she has remembered to carry the one.
Think it would be possible to program decency into them? Good. Then we won't have to deal with the misogynist and homophobic bastards on our campus.
What Future?
> I miss Heathkits and the smell
> of molten solder and burning
> insulation--the sensual aspects of
> engineering that have been replaced
> for many of us by the antiseptic,
> ubiquitous, and impersonal CRTs.
Molten solder vaporizes easily. Since many times solder contain lead, it leads to the growth of brain tumors.
This product seems very feasible and a great idea in fact. You enter in specifications, and it'll make it work. But the real engineer will still have a place, all of the true innovations, thinking outside of the box, using unconventional methods, etc. These are things that this kind of software would be very lacking in. Besides, with no engineers, what about software engineers? Write down a program's specs and have it written for you? Then who would write the engineer in a box program ;) ?
Close the world.
At first I thought there was some insightful point to this article; then I realized it was just another "Oh no, technology is making us feel old and forcing us to redefine our attitudes" speil. No, engineers aren't going anywhere. The reason no one tinkers anymore is because they don't have to. Engineering is, at it's heart, about solving problems and just becuase we now have tremendously powerful tools to aid us, doesn't mean just anyone can do it. There always has been (and always will be) "good" and "bad" engineers with that distcintion being made about how creatively and quickly an each can solve a problem. There will always be math becuase no honest engineer is going to trust a software package to such a degree that they can simply forget the underlying princples. New engineers simply don't have to depend on their ability to wire a breadboard or draft schematics by hand. They can foucus on design and effeicent instead of cold,hard basics.
Only the methods change. Engineering never gets easier or less intense.
Caffeine Good
As with any automation process, there is a side effect of commoditizing the target of the automation, but in nine out of ten instances it makes more sense to not reinvent the wheel in each little facet of a project.
Its almost like saying that we should reinvent calculus every time we need to do a calculation because its putting people who would do those measurements manually out of work...pure nonsense.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
reminds me of the story of the reited engineer. A company calls him after a year of retirement to repair a machine he designed and that the company relied on. He came back as a consultant and repaired it in a few minutes. Accounting dept freaked upon recieving a bill for $50,000.10 and said it must be itemized to justify such claims..
1 screw---0.10
knowing where to put it --- $50,000
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
Im an engineer, and I know that the type of people that take up engineering, for the most part, are not the type of people to sit by and let a machine do all the work. That is unless they know how the machine works. Any tools that are developed will be just that, tools. They may speed the development process, but without anybody who truly understands how something operates, you will get crappy products. I wont sit by and release crappy products, no matter how easy it was to design.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Edison's method of inventing generally meant creating any possible prototype and slowly working the bugs out. When working on the lightbulb, he sent people around the world to find any possible filimant, trying to find the best one that worked. Read Edison: A Life of Invention for more info.
From the article:
"Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations?"
They all learned the math.. But half of the reason of learning some of it is to realize that doing it by hand isn't feasable anymore. I don't think it's fair to compare engineering then to engineering now. A better choice may be to redefine the word "engineer" and what it means to "engineer" something.
Bob Lucky is retiring now, ending a great career with a telecom software company that had its roots in Bell Labs.
With the downsizing of corporate R&D he has seen, he has a reason to feel that the glory days of engineering are past.
However, I think engineering is just working at a different level of abstraction now. There are many less bench-top tinkerers now, because the tools are much more powerful. VHDL and ASICs have replaced circuit boards and wire wrapping. Finite element CAD systems have replaced machine shops.
Engineering hasn't changed, just the tools.
The proper role for the boxed software is to substitute for the slaving minions working under the tutelage of a chief engineer. The slaving minions traditionally grind out endless gruntwork calculations, while the chief engineer does back-of-the-envelope calculations. These back-of-the-envelope calculations are not accurate enough to base a design, but they tell the chief engineer if one of the minions misplaced a decimal or is way off in some kind of way.
I try to teach my engineering students to yes, use software to do the grunt work, but one needs methods to calculate by hand to at least 2 or 3 significant figures to check up on the software. The software can have bugs. Total reliance on software will breed a kind of innumeracy where engineers won't have a handle on what things should be.
My other gripe is, as a DSP person, the complete reliance on Matlab or worse yet, LabView. My own preference is to code stuff up in Delphi Pascal (I learned Pascal from a data-structures course taught by Pascal-partisan Brinch Hansen), but I teach DSP algorithms and filter design in C++ (OK, don't flame me that I should use C for efficiency -- besides, object-oriented programming is an degree program accredidation bullet point). I guess Matlab is OK because it has amassed the FORTRAN numeric libraries, and LabView, we can debate, but shouldn't engineers who use computers express themselves in C++? Especially DSP engineers who will go to work for Motorola to do things like implement GSM speech coders in firmware, and I am not aware that LabView is available for a mobile phone. Actually, such engineers should be able to go all the way through assembly language down to bare metal, but C++ is such a universal standard, and they probably have C++ for DSP chips by now.
My point is that not only are engineering students not soldering hardware, they don't want to be bothered programming anything more low-level than LabView, the Visual Basic of electrical engineering. Doesn't C++ experience look just awesome on the resume of an electrical engineer (much of what I have done in my engineering career is write computer programs of one kind or another, and C++ is the lingua-franca in this day and age)? Students seem uninterested.
where someone asked how he could gain some basic engineering skills if it wasn't his intent to go to school to become an engineer, just for the purpose of becoming more skilled than average at designing and making things about the home workshop.
.avi of "Galloping Gertie."
.didn't.
I advised him to go out on trash day and collect all the broom handles and angle iron ( bed frames) he could find and simply play about at making structures from them.
While a few people understood what I was about I was amazed, and somewhat distressed, at the invective I also received from that simple suggestion.
Engineering is about understanding structures, and the materials that make them, in every day use. There is no way you can learn this from a book. It requires that you " get your hands dirty" and build some actual structures, with actual materials. That's why engineering schools have programs like Formula SAE.
If you don't believe me have another look at your
It ain't all in the books, and it ain't all going to be in no software package.
When do you actually begin to be an engineer? Not when you get your degree. Not when you get your first job in the field.
You *first* begin to be an engineer when you design and build a project * and it fails!* And when the stadium dome or the car you designed fails and someone dies you damn well better learn to be an engineer in a hurry or it's the fry machine for the rest of your working life, and I defy any software package not simply being used as a tool by thinking, *experienced* engineers to figure out why something it said would work. .
KFG
future good ... core dumped
M$ bad
RH KDE
slashdot-poster-in-a-box 2.0
Edison was his day's equivalent of Gates. After a brief period of hands-on innovation, he left the lab to concentrate on capitalizing on the innovation of others.
In short, Edison was a businessman at heart, and Tesla- the example held up against him- was the epitome of a research scientist (albeit, one who could, and did, perform his own engineering). Neither make great examples for the point of the article, which would be best served by drawing from the obvious- the original 'engineers' were those involved in the operation, maintenance, and construction of engines. There's a *reason* many engineering schools were founded by famous railway barons.
'Real' engineers will always get jobs (or just become scientists) as simulations don't push the boundaries. 'Dumb' engineers who just push buttons and don't think about results will become extinct.
--Turvey
I had a flame... but she had a fire.
So you think it's actually news worthy to report that engineers might be replaced one day? Humans have been replacing themselves with machines for a long time.. and usually when a machine can simply do a better job. Like earth-moving gear that can move more earth than a man with a shovel.
Move on... I look forward to the day when no human needs to work. We can all play and sleep and have sex without the worries of money or work.
As an engineer working on ridiculously complex projects, I welcome sophisticated software tools that make my life easier.
Software should be developed to make engineering more efficient. If tools today are doing things that you would have done manually 5 years ago, and you can't take advantage of it to do better things, then you are probably a weak engineer.
Frankly, if the entirety of your job can be encapsulated in a software algorithm, I question your value as an engineer.
This sounds like the same argument as the "Well, back in my day we didn't have any of those fancy 'calculators.' We used our T-squares and liked it, by golly."
It's called progress... why must we lament the fact that we have advanced to the point where we need to use more advanced methods to work? Just because an architect uses CAD to design an enormous building, that isn't a hinderance -- that is progress allowing us to speed up the process.
Next thing you know people will be lamenting these newfangled "automobiles" we're using, since we could be traveling by horse and carriage.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
hehe...
if you want to see this in action now just look at the people that believe that you can be good at a complex computer system via an exam cram book.
go find a a certified person (novell, cisco, ms, rh, etc) that *didn't* do the classes, didn't do labs, didn't do real life work. if you look at them next to nothing else you'll see someone that knows *something*. hold these people up against those that had official curriculum, labs, real life experience and you will see just how sorry these pass-your-exam books really are! they teach you facts with training on *how to solve problems*!
raise your hand if you've ever had to clean up after someone who had all the knowledge, but lacked the ability to put the pieces together! this is troubleshooting, problem solving, creative though.
computers (programs) are lousy at this. and gonna be that way for a long time. it looked like there was gonna be progress on neural networks, but i haven't much about them in recently...
so i sit here and chuck (and cry) because i know the truth: it's easy to teach someone that 2+2=4, but it's harder to teach them *when* that's important!
eric
Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they?
I never experienced that kind of dissonance until I accidentally barbecued an Athlon XP chip a few weeks ago. The chip package cracked open from thermal stress, and I broke it the rest of the way apart with my thumbnail. Inside, there was... nothing. Just a featureless, amorphous gray substrate that might have been a rock from my driveway. Maybe half a million violated transistors lay along that fault line, but my crime against Messrs. Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley left not a trace of evidence to be seen.
At some level I was already aware that IC fabrication processes had reached the point at which even the largest features would be entirely invisible to the naked eye. But I never appreciated it until looking inside that Athlon chip. I don't know what kind of '1337 t3ch they found at Area 51 when that UFO augered in, but I'll bet when they cracked it open, it looked just like the guts of an Athlon XP-1800 some idiot tried to run without a heatsink fan.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
One interesting idea that David Brin put in his Uplift books is that his extremely advanced civilizations don't even have a very developed system of symbolic math. Since the computers of these civilizations are so fast, you can pretty much calculate a working approximation of anything for any practical purpose, and the idea of an "exact" answer is simply useless. Presumably these cultures "solved" math at some point in the distant past, but moved on once the intellectual challenge was gone.
I always thought that was one of the more interesting ideas of the books, and something that I could see actually happening in a few thousand years.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Engineer In A Box? Provided it actually works, hell yeah! If the computer can do 90% of the work and I only have to do the remaining 10%, bring it on! Hell, if I thought I could, I'd even write it myself.
Of course, the problem is that there's always that remaining little 1% the computer can't do. For instance, I use a calculator where my dad used a slide rule. That specific task is relegated to an artificial aid, while we retain capability for general problem solving - and we do know how to do things that the aid does, if necessary. On the rare occasion where a calculator is unavailable and I am too distracted or fried to just quickly compute sums in my head, I still do resort to long form addition when necessary. But it's very rarely necessary.
There is a fundamental difference between never needing a skill in practice, and almost never needing a skill in practice. Where decent software exists to do a task I do, I find myself in the latter category. The only time I find myself in the former category is with needs that are ultimately provided by other human beings: (mostly corporate) farmers, with tons of agricultural machinery, grow my food; shipping companies run by people ship it to market by plane, boat, truck, and rail; I write scripts whose services other people sell, so there will be money in the bank when I cash my paycheck; et cetera. But the bits I manipulate, I know how to manipulate from the ground up - on the silicon if necessary. On rare occasion, the system fails so hard that - or merely fails to anticipate my needs so that - I must do so (and the bits involved so valuable that it is worth my time to do so).
This frees me to concentrate on those bits I must do. I need not know the exact angle and force with which to use a soldering iron, for a robot can weld a circuit faster, cheaper, and better than I - so I use the robot to do that task, saving myself time, money, and aggrivation at my own incompetence. I remember, in my very first job in my early adolesence, I used to trace circuits by hand: they had no software to do the task, but the circuits were simple enough that even a child (by their standards) could do it - and better to pay a child minimum wage, than to take their own time. (I suspect those circuits I traced have long since fallen prey to Moore's law, if nothing else.) If faced with the same task today, the firm could buy chip design software, and cycle through several combinations of inputs and outputs to find the optimal design in the same time it used to take me to trace out one chip...but you know the software will have an option to delve into the design, in case it faces some circuit so intricate, or dealing with poorly-emulated quantum features, where human assistance is again required.
To believe that these things don't exist because the machine takes care of them is mere solipsism, just like walking around on a moonless night in a poorly lit city and believing that nothing, aside from those areas close to the street lights, truly exists. (This is a well-documented psychological disorder in certain Scandinavian villages, where such conditions do exist during winter.)
There is certainly a lot of engineering that would otherwise be very tedious without our design software. But when I'm coming up with new ideas I don't go right off and simulate it on my computer. I estimate whether it is realistic in a ballpark sense (using my mind). Anyone who doesn't is wasting time. There is no reason to put any work into a solution if you can convince yourself it won't work just by thinking about it.
This estimating capability requires one to have a good intuitive undestanding of the underlying physics/logic of what you are working on. It also helps to have a large memory of magnitudes and orders. So one checks the high order terms, and not some lowly constant factor.
It seems like every few months someone bemoans the death of "real" engineering. But hey, idiots are born everyday, we just don't do a good enough job weeding them out before they get published.
For the definitive answer to this thread, see "Profession" by Isaac Asimov. If you search, the text is available on the web. I won't ruin the story by giving away the ending, but it is one of my all-time favorites.
As an "engineer", I welcome the updated software release, but I don't expect to run out of things to do!
were going to replace software engineers.
It will not happen any time soon. Unless the entire human population geneticly changes to some other kind of animal that actually sits back and says. "Nah, that's enough, don't need to pursue anything more... ever." or AI actually becomes a reality.
Humans have always and will always be looking for the next thing in the unknown. As soon as engineers are freed of the deugery of re-doing what has been done before counteless times, they will move on to new things. Let the computer do the drudgery of wing design or component layout. We'll just get more interesting work done!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I started to witness this decay while in engineering school, 1987-1992. Things were pretty lousy back then, I don't want to imagine how worse they are now.
I was probably in one of the last classes that actually learned drafting first, then CAD later (this is at the School of Engineering, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez). Drafting was a pain but it really taught us the beauty of CAD/CAM and not to ever take it for granted. Same for numerical analysis: numerical analysis becomes a thing of beauty after you have spent two years getting HAMMERED with advanced calculus courses.
Now every mickey mouse NT admin is calling himself an engineer. It is a shame. Engineers are supposed to be able to build stuff, to apply science to resolve problems, but we are raising a new generation that is being trained to use software packages and that's about it.
Of course, generalizations are not good, and I am in awe of the next generation of hard core programmers that are being exposed to real programming languages and real world problems like building a kernel, not us that were writing stupid little Fortran (WATFIV!) programs on a freaking VAX.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
One thing is for sure:
:-)
If the great engineers of the world were replaced by software the beer companies would suffer the most!
Have one on me....
Zakias
An Engineer is someone who can make for 10 cents what any damned fool can make for a dollar.
Yes, someday that damned fool will be entirely replaced by computer software. The engineer never will be.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
What really matters, IMO, is the deliverable. If the degree of entropy introduced by a decline in real testing and development methods (to say nothing of basic skills) fails to deliver useful products, then the system fails.
Those things already exist. They're called cubicles.
But this is revision 2 of engineer-in-a-box...maybe it includes a door this time.
They've already got the hardware version
I'm Engineer-in-a-Box 1.0 Cubicle Edition
It seems strange that when we think about engineers, we forget about the politics behind them. Engineers may make the best tools and technologies, but if policies and law prevent those technologies to be used to the fullest extent, then it's really a shame.
Take Internet radio, for example. What a wonderful technology. But it's gonna be axed, not thanks to the RIAA. Well, good news is that some politicians know the importance of this technology and have introduced the Internet Radio Fairness Act. Please, support this act by sending a fax to Congress. You can do this at Voice of Webcasters. Time is running out!
What's wrong with that? Engineering, like most other things humans do, is something that can be done faster and better by properly programmed computers. I say go for it!
When software starts to become usefull people say "Engineering and Math will become obsolete, programs will do all the thinking for people".
And when computers first came out "Computers are going to replace people in all sorts of jobs, soon a computer will be doing YOUR job, better than you do it!".
Anyone remember when Robot's were popular? People were saying that robots will take over all our jobs. Soon robots will do all the thinking, and man will become obsolete.
The industrial revolution, I wasn't there to experience, but anyone suppose there was similar paranoia about large machines? Printing presses? Automated factory machines?
Finally I vaguely remember a quote from history class. It was something along the lines of: "This new invention will be the end of us. Man will no longer have to think for himself, it will all be done for him" and you know what they were complaining about.... THE WRITTEN WORD.
Come on, as long as there is a need for people to know math, and engineering skills (which there always always will be) there will always be engineers. My computer isn't quite perfect yet. I still need to be able to put my stick of memory in, or have some engineer soder a new capacitor in when a chronic blue screen keeps appearing.
those whose jobs it is to innovate and make the impossible possible, and those who just turn and crank. One innovator can't be replaced by 100 turn and crank guys just because the ability to innovate doesn't follow a statistical bell curve. Its not like after you get up to some obscene number of turn and crank guys, your chance of developing an innovation will reach 90% or something. It will still be at zero.
I think what this guy is lamenting is an adjustment in the ratio of innovators to turn-and-crankers that has been brought on by the anti-innovator prejudices of the SEI and other "everything must be predictable" initiatives. Very large projects that couldn't hold innovators because management was threatened by them and wouldn't pay them the six figures that they were worth were collapsing (as they should). The world reacted by saying that we can't depend on heros instead of recognizing that they needed to pay the heros more. Now all the heros, those that just instinctively know the aspects of "right" that aren't teachable are disappearing. Big surprise.
The result is that true innovation and accomplishment of the "impossible" has been going away and our economy is suffering because of it. What truly new classification of software have you seen in the last few years? I don't know about you, but the world in CompUSA has been looking pretty stagnant to me for quite some time. Mostly incremental advances, not the type of true innovation we were seeing in the late 80s before these things had really taken hold. Sales are down because the next blockbuster reason to use more CPU cycles, more RAM, more disk space, more pixels, more polygons/second, etc. hasn't been appearing.
Also, I saw several posts on here about this being because people can't do it all anymore. Bull. Some who could have done it all are being hampered by the education system telling them that they can't, others aren't allowed too, and others just stay quiet about it to avoid the backlash from those who've been brainwashed into thinking that we know such a vast amount of things that noone can do it all. It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
This has been said above, but it deserves another voice. My 1971 Opel GT was engineered by some smart German fellow or several at at drafting table, probably with a sliderule. It runs great (still) but is not fancy, and it does not have any parts that cannot be fixed with hand tools. A modern roadster, any of them, was designed mostly on a CAD system and largely fabricated and assembled the same way. It has more computers than the US space shuttle. Now, the roadster of 2015 will contain a lot of AI and will be designed and coded by machines, because the complexity of the task will be beyond human comprehension. In fact, the car will code itself on-the-fly using integrated sensors and neural networks.
There are humans at all stages, but the engineering they are doing suits the work of the moment. From designing bolts to designing electronic components to designing...what would you call it? Expectations? Models? Moral values? I don't know what you call it in 2015 when the cars design, build and program themselves. But I bet you in 2015 BMW will still be "The Ultimate Driving Machine" and high performance cars will still be marvels of...engineering.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Everyone knows that Engineer in a Box 2 is crap. It always takes until the third release to get anything right.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Since the computers of these civilizations are so fast, you can pretty much calculate a working approximation of anything for any practical purpose, and the idea of an "exact" answer is simply useless
Actually, this is already true for many purposes. While symbolic software like Mathematica and Maple of course exist, numeric tools like Matlab are much more commonly used by engineers
I'm a computer science manjor... they do need someone to program engineer in a box 2.0 don't they ;)?
If they acurately simulated a human engineer, can you picture any company that would be willing to take on the liability of all the times engineers screw up?
Either that, or can you picture anyone agreeing to the MSEngineer EULA?:
Microsoft shall not be held liable for: buildings falling down; bridges collapsing; unaligned railway tracks leading to derailing; subsidence; big spikes left sticking out or any other failings in design created by this product.
The user accepts that anything designed with MSEngineer 2.0 remains wholly the posession of the Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft retains the right to ammend the software or anything designed, tinkered or maintained by it at any time, and the rights pertaining to such products.
Should the user contest any of the above, or have any reason to challenge Microsoft in any way, they agree that all cases shall be heard in the state of Washington by Steve Ballmer dressed as a clown. Steve's decision shall be binding unless Bill tells him otherwise.
*rolls eyes*
- I am made of meat.
As far a computer-aided engineering and mathematics is concerned the emphasis should always be placed first on pencil and paper. You may not every solve enterprise or grand challenge level problems this way but you sure won't have a chance if you haven't thourghly understood the fundementals of solving the smaller problems first.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
...about his generation?
"Kids these days, they don't grind their own components, just go to a hardware store and pick them up. X and Y and Z are readily available and you don't have to make your own any more. And when you don't make your own, you lose some of the beauty of the profession and some fundamental understanding of Q, R, and S."
If you look back, you can find examples of this, how peole depended on X technology instead of computing square roots by hand.
Here is a general purpose response:
"Don't worry. There will still be cool problems to solve, and people will still get into solving them. We solve problems because we are human, and we can't not do it, just like we write and make music because something inside us is screaming at us to be expressed."
It's not that I don't think he has a point--there is some intrinsic value in doing things the old way. People still bind books by hand, just because they want to. People quilt and can food and all sorts of things for the enjoyment of it. , or when prepackaged solutoins just don't meet their needs. It is possible that a way of life is fading, but there is cool stuff in the future.
What we should focus on is learning how to solve problems, learning how to show kids how fun solving interesting problems is, and how to show them how to do it. Then there will be a steady suppoly of people ready to tackle whatever comes next. But the good thing is, no matter how hard we try to do that wrong (school), we still end up with people who want to solve problems! Just like no amount of bad piano teachers will prvent te emergence of future garage bands.
We're still humans, and all in all that's a pretty cool thing to be.
Liberty uber alles.
there are those that only got their degrees for show, and basically just know their way around a very simple set of "recipes" and yes, software tools. These can be substituted by engineer-in-a-box 1.0.
Now, the kind of engineer that really does creative thinking to solve problems and is much more comfortable with actually building/programming stuff rather than just simulating/prototyping, will not go away, because a) it's much more fun! and b) this is the kind of people that will get everyone else out of trouble when engineeer-in-a-box 1.0 fails to run.
This is very true, i am an IEEE engineering/physics major at Georgia Southern University. The professors at the university criticize those who whip out their calculators at the words of "What Is..." Now a days this is 90% of the lecture hall. We (engineering students) need to stop being so reliant on computer programs and Whizzy Wig calculators to do our math, yes it is true that some of the calculus formulas are EXTREMELY labor intensive without calculators or some other computer, but we as a whole need to learn how to use our brains, after all we are engineers right.
Power users with Excel and Access do plenty of things that would have been just as impossible with good programmers 20 years ago as they are today, but the power users don't know this, so demand for programmers declines. In-house development now is only for things that don't even pretend to come in a box or from third-world outsourcers.
I've seen help-wanteds for project managers who must be PMI certified (takes years) and must have 2 years experience with MS-Project 2000 (takes hours to learn). I've seen help-wanteds for MD's who must be willing to do medical research data entry into Excel. I've seen ads for executive VP's who must have ten years of management experience and know MS-Word and Powerpoint. Human knowledge is degraded in comparison to knowledge embedded in software.
There is off-the-shelf software you can get now to design your own house. This is a combination of architecture and engineering, but simple enough that the program can do it. Money talks. The domain covered by the programs will only expand.
I use Band in a Box 9, and it's great; but I real band is better in Oh so many ways. I would imagine the same of Engineer in a box. Such a thing could be very helpful for simple or repetative(?) designs, but when you get down to the serious stuff you need humans to make real progress.
_____
What is the difference between carry and overflow?
-----
For great justice!
There's no doubt that engineering has changed. Along with more knowledge and capabilities comes more specialization and compartmentalization. The renaissance age of engineering, when one could do all things, is over.
The problems being solved today require software tools and simulations because they are harder problems than the ones that engineers tackled years ago. Without the power of modern tools these complex problems could not be solved. Just imagine trying to design and layout a modern CPU using the tools of twenty years ago!
Math skills have not slipped away but they certainly have changed. The math skills of engineers that grew up with slide rules are strong in the areas of estimation and in-the-head calculations because it was a necessary skill. With calculators and computer that skill is no longer very important and has not been developed in younger engineers. However, if one looks deeper, the math skills are still there: just in a different form. The skills are now stronger in the area of modeling systems, writing mathematical models for computer simulations, and solving more complex analytical models. These are the skills that are important today and they enable complex systems to be designed...systems for which years ago solutions could not be obtained.
The basic function of the engineer hasn't changed. That job is to solve problems by thinking, utilizing appropriate models and applying common sense (another name for learned data and experience). It'll be a l-o-n-g time before Engineer-in-a-Box can perform this task.
But you can play quake on it in your lunch time.
...The more you do it, the more you forget it's not real :).
Seems I've forgotten where I heard that.
Seriously, though, I don't think engineering is going away antime soon. For the last 20 years, I've been hearing that software is going to replace engineers, and yet I still have a job. What's really happened is that the software has let fewer engineers tackle much larger and tougher tasks, but in the end, you still need the judgement of the engineers to make sure the software has done what you wanted.
This is true especially in the area of analog design, where software to automate design has moved ahead much more slowly than in the digital realm. There are some very expensive programs out there that will attempt to optimize simple and medium complexity analog circuits, but they are still nowhere near replacing analog engineers. You still have to give them a circuit topology, they only optimize the device sizes.
Even in the digital arena, while the tools for synthesizing actual transistor level circuits are fairly mature, and digital designers by and large don't have to deal with transistors or gates anymore, they still have to design the algorithms and check the results of the software synthesis. Basically, the digital designer's job still exists (and will for some time to come), but it has just moved up a level or two in abstraction, from transistors, to gates, and now to algorithms.
I think, for their time, various projects from the past were just as difficult as the ones solved today.
The interesting issue is that 100 years ago we might have needed 10,000 engineers and of that only 1,000 were talented and today we need 1,000,000 engineers but again only 1,000 are talented.
Knowledge is spread thin these days.
And the quality of the results that Engineer In A Box (EIAB) will give you will be directly proportional to the skill of the Engineer using it.
In any technical magazines, you'll find these software commercials telling you that any moron can just build a model using some tool and get meaningful results. Why pay for an engineer when you can just get a software for a fraction of the cost.
At my last job, I found a huge bug in a commonly used engineering software. The results of finite-element anaysis for composite materials just didn't make any sense. I did some simple tests and figured out that the bug came from a grade school math error. After speaking to the company in question, it became clear that their personnel was uniquely based on computer scientists that had no clue what the software was going to be used for. They just took a couple of books and plugged in formulas to get numbers out. I sent them a lenghty e-mail basically describing how to solve the quadratic equation the problem was boiling down to and they just would not get it.
The best was that I even got them to spit out that some of the material info I had to type in was not actually used. It was just asked by the tool because a competitor's product asked for it and their product had to look like it could provide the same feature.
My Karma is so low that even my own postings are beyond my current threshold
I'm a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned the classic 1950s sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet, the plot of which includes several examples of Engineer-in-a-Box technology. I won't spoil it for those who want to check out the video at the local rental store, but I'll just say that the movie makes the point that Engineer-in-a-Box is NOT necessarily a good thing. P.S. I worked with Bob Lucky many years ago. Hi, Bob, congrats on your retirement!
Who wrote the software?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
As in, "What would Turing do?"
For the same reasons that we will never be able to say
if (program)
then return 1;
return 0;
we'll never have software that can design entire circuits or write entire programs automagically.
*sigh*
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
There! I've created the first intelligent computer program, now to ask it to create an engineer.
"Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations?"
I have to take three semesters of Calculus, two semesters of Statistics, four semesters of physics (all without a calculator, I.E.: Show all work) to become an engineering major at Nevada...I know that I won't miss the nourishment I'm going to need after doing hours of homework every night.
... but it's not limited to engineers. Many scientists are the same. Story time...
In undergrad, I worked with a physicist and an engineer on some Fourier analysis homework. I was a math major (and a meteorology major also). (No, this is not one of those jokes.)
I distinctly remember once when we reduced a problem to a very simple integral: the integral from 0 to 2*PI of 3 x cubed minus 4 x, dx. What do both of them do to finish this problem? Pull out the calculators and begin to type it in... I just watch in awe... they didn't even want to attempt this basic integral without the "comfort blanket" that the calculator gave them. Never mind that thanks to a typo one of them got the wrong answer.
Even in my field (atmospheric science), the "simulation bug" is prevalent. They're great tools, but it's rather annoying when you ask one of these simulation people to explain something that they're pointing out using basic physics that they frequently can't, even when the basic theory has been there for decades.
Scientists and engineers need that strong mathematics background. I personally think that calculators should be outlawed from classrooms until high school. People are frequently too dependent on those tools currently (had one guy in math help session in undergrad who used a calculator to figure out 3 minus 2... I kid you not). You always should learn the basics and the hard way before being given the tools for the easier ways. Anything else is bass-ackward.
-Jellisky
We have better and more efficient tools now days. Work smarter, not harder. I applaud all of the accomplishments of the brilliant mathematicians of the past, like Tycho Brahe or Frink, but there are ways to get this done faster now.
Who says that real engineering can only be done by soldering physical components? I do "today's engineering" professionally, and while it may be easier for a clueless engineer to bullshit his way through the job by just learning how to crank the EDA tools, I guarantee he or she won't last long.
Let's face it -- today's hardware is so complex that there's no possible way that a single person (or a group of people) could "tinker" an Athlon into existence. And yet, an engineer has to be able to visualize this design as gates and wires, and keep control of the design even as he hands it off to an EDA tool to process.
In ASIC design (the field in which I have the most knowledge), you have to know enough about how to design Logic to know when the tools are doing a good enough job putting things together. A monkey can run a script, but an Engineer must know what all the commands really mean and what needs to be run to processs the design. You have to be able to visualize how the design might end up, and figure out when the tool is lying to you.
You think Windows crashing while you're playing Warcraft is bad? Try finding a bug in synopsy^h^h^h^h^h^h^h any EDA tool during a critical time in the project! These tools are big and complex, and can't help but have bugs, and since the user base is smaller than most commercial software, when you find a bug, it's entirely possible that you're the first one to encounter it. A "real" engineer will be able to find these bugs when the gates and wires don't turn out the way they're supposed to, and someone who can't visualize the design independent of the EDA tool will be up a creek...
The whole idea of teaching rigorous calculus, ODEs and PDEs to engineers was to help them develop the right intuition for doing good back-of-the-envelope calculations of things like bridges and airplane wings. The focus may have shifted from these areas of math to functional analysis (Fourier transforms, wavelets, signal processing) and probability theory, but the fact remains that a new idea begins with a simple estimated computaion of something quite complex and fundamental.
This part is indeed slipping, because math teaching has been taken over by people who have no idea what math is about and how it is applied, a natural consequence of encouraging the division of mathematicians into "educators" (those who are concerned only with "pedagogy", "technology in the classroom", "inclusion" and suchlike crap, and never advance or understand the state of the art) and researchers, who actually do math, but have little or no influence on the curriculum because "the educators know teaching better". Of the researchers, a sizable part has a good handle on applied math and should alone be teaching the engineers, which is how it used to be when any engineer was supposed to be able to do the math and could not rely on canned solutions. The only reason why the present situation is tolerated is that a lot of common engineering tasks are well-understood and enough canned solutions were developed, and applying them is still an engineering position.
Unfortunately, the educator crowd has lowered the math and science standards (in the name of inclusion etc) so much, that when a real researcher tries to insist on the correct pre-requisites and the right amount of work necessary for understanding the material , he is promptly hushed up by other teachers, gets low student evaluations etc etc until he withdraws in horror and disgust, and everybody is back to dumbed-down, feel-good, easy-to-pass, practice-the-rote-don't-think math, which is not really math, by any standard.
What use is being able to take integrals if you don't know why they were invented in the first place? What use is doing logarithms if you don't know how and by whom they are used? What use is any theory if you cannot pose a real problem that it can help you (and was designed to) solve? The worst happens when educators with no idea of real applications try to introduce "real-life" projects. Most of what is nowadays called the "Caclulus Reform" and is a multi-million dollar business in govt grants and publishers' texbook profits makes no sense whatsoever. Read Richard Feynmann's books ("Surely you are joking..." and "What do you care...") to understand how "school science" can be completely nonsensical and can actually debilitate students' thinking, even though it has all the trappings of real science.
One the other hand, engineers who taught themselves the basics need not worry -- as long as there's a demand for new technologies, they will have their place. So too will good engineers from developing countries -- as long as American education is managed by the same people who manage it now.
In the 1880's, every saloon and salon had a piano (see any old movie) and a skilled professor of the keyboard. In the 1890's, the player piano was introduced. Today we have neither. The automaton destroyed the knowledge and trivialized the skill and removed the art so as to destroy their value. Can't find a decent ash-hauler anymore, either.
Until we have computers which can be creative (decades away, IMO) we won't see any such thing happen. Moreover, any such computer will have to be provided with the lifetime of experience from which we draw when doing our jobs. That'll take time, more than it takes for us to gain that experience.
I think the real question is, when will it be easier to make a real engineer out of Engineer-in-a-Box than it is to make them out of raw freshmen? (Or raw graduates, if you're so inclined.)
And when it does? Engineering will change again, just like it always has.
HTML is simple. The what you see stuff, is for those that aren't going to make a career or a hobby out of it to make something that will "work".
If you are a web designer, you BETTER know HtML
It's easier, you'll actually SAVE time knowing it.. Then learn perl and php.. and you'll be yet..
Otherwise, Don't quit your day job.
This is the same old crud just retreaded into new fields. Everyone complained that when robots replaced factory workers and computers became common that we'd have massive unemployment. Employment has stayed more or less the same as workers who used to weld joints are replaced with technicians who build, watch, and repair the robots.
Now, engineering software is now replacing a lot of trial and error work. We can produce better products now because of these innovations, yet we have people whining that engineers are losing touch with the math and that sooner or later these tools will replace jobs. How exactly do these tools get written without people who understand the models and the math? Perhaps some irresponsible engineers will be able to stay that way, but it's been my experience that the irrisponsible ones can't operate the software tools any better than they can operate a pencil and paper.
I don't see any major worries here. A consideration to be sure, but let's be objective please.
I went into the profession when we still used slide rules, soldering irons, and graph paper. I'll take the way we do things today. It's just as satisfying to me to prototype a circuit via a simulator, plot a graph using a computer, and calculate via a ... well, calculator. I remember punching those damned Hollerith cards to input one stinking line of code and submitting the job to the acolyte that tended the computer, then coming back a couple of hours later to get my compiler errors. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum. The joys of engineering are the satisfaction sussing an elegant solution to a problem and having it work. Thank God modern tools have made that so much less tedious.
Who's going to code Engineer-in-a-Box? The previous beta version?
I work in Broadcast Engineering, which is managed by clueless ex-salespersons who wouldn't know what a tower was if it fell on them! All they know is that they pay me way too much to be the only engineering person at a major market 50,000 watt AM station. I manage a 40 computer network here, do the studio work, the transmitter and all the remotes. I work like 50+ hours every week, yet I'm yelled at if I'm not in every day at nine AM sharp (I have to stay until at least 7 PM). I get chastized for every failure, but hear nothing for (my many) successes. For example, a few Sundays ago (labor day weekend) the station went off due to the failure of a circuit breaker in the 40 plus year old transmitter plant (that they refuse to upgrade and the manager has never been to). I was called on the carpet because: "Nothing should be able to take us off the air". These idiots can't fathom that equipment occasionally does fail. Even four nines reliability (99.99) means almost eight hours a year of outage, yet this idiot expects perfection. A while back, my wife bought me a T shirt that said: "I'm a can of tuna". When I asked her why she said that in her opinion, managers hired Engineers as if they were shopping for a can of tuna. They go down the supermarket aisle where they have the choice of premium or inexpensive, national brand or house brand and they pick based probably on what's on sale that week (in other words, generally they shop for the lowest priced tuna). That's what we are: a can of tuna to these clueless jerks! They have no idea of what we do, and don't care. All they know is that we cost them way too much. Am I looking? You betcha! Problem is from what I can see, 95% of the places out there are as bad (or worse) then things are here.
The problem with current state of engineering education is that there is an incredible amount of informations out there, and the universities are trying to cram at least the basics of what will keep you current into 4 years (along with all the other requirements). Therefore, something must be eliminated, which is usually the hands on courses. All the theory is important not from the "I can solve a math problem" point of view, but that it teaches you the limitations of the theory, which form the the foundation for all the sophisticated tools engineers use out in industry. But this comes at a loss of other skills only learned from hands on work. It's easy to design something that looks good on paper, but is next to impossible or impractical to build.
As a TA in several engineering courses I've seen students plug numbers in to formulas, and get answers that made no sense, but they were perfectly happy with them since they didn't understand what the numbers ment physically. One of the best grad courses I had blended theory and application, maybe that approach will help balance the theory-practicality problem, and address issues like interpretation of the results obtained through analytical models.
I'm not certain where this concept of "Engineer in a box 2.0" comes from. Perhaps it's because
the really difficult engineering problems are being solved by a smaller subset of people in any given organization. Plus the people ill-equipped to deal with the complex problems are using these software apps to try and compensate for their lack of technical skills. Regardless, I think the article is a little ( alot ) off base.
Engineers will never get away with not knowing how to apply math / science concepts. The really useful work requires that you know how to apply the theory with some creativity to solve the complex problems. Cookie cutter software applications will never replace a human armed with applicable booksmarts.
If you look at all of the advances in technology we have today, I don't forsee the technical requirements of engineers in the future decreasing, no more than I see anyone distilling that intelligence into a small perl script.
I recall reading a short story by Isaac Asimov where there was a guy who was discovering there was this thing that ancient people did called math and that people didn't need calculators to do it. Apparently computers go so smart they started designing themselves. I forget where I read it though... I think it was in one of the old Asimov collections my dad had sitting around.
My father is a Professor of Electrical Engineering over at USC. Today I asked him if he ever actually builds anything, and he told me all he ever does is software simulations. It's a wonder anything is ever reliable at all, considering that no one seems to know anything about the randomness of real, not simulated, stuff.
- Peter
It's a penis stretcher. Wanna try it?
Question: And who is going to use this software package?
Answer: Engineers
I use all kinds of software to get things done (I'm a 4th year EE), but that software isn't going to do crap without me using it. This is kinda like saying photoshop is going to replace photographers.
Life is too short to proofread.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
technology development leverages technology development. that's been the history of mankind. the fact that engineers no longer need the skills of the previous generation is not something to be sad about, it's something to rejoice!
I would be pretty p**d if s/he spent time working things out on paper.
They teach computer programming here to write code without teaching then to use de-buggers, color coded editors, etc.
And the grads. need at least 6mos of 'on the job' training to learn how to use modern programming environments efficiently.
Someday perhaps educators will learn that there is nothing wrong with teaching students to learn the best tools for the job at hand. Of course theory is important, but teaching theory should not require making students spend hours scratching away with the primitive tools that the theory was originally figured out on!
Ahh well, folks said writing was dead with the advent of the fountain pen (you have to cut your own quill and mix your own ink to understand how to write a _real_ letter, sonny!). Then it was the typewriter...
And so it goes, I expect in fifty years, profs will be saying "Stay off the neural net! You can't really get the answer in holo space! Use your your calculator like a real engineer!"
Who's going to write a piece of software like that, and what would the requirements be?
First, you'd have to have a piece of software which can automate design processes. But it will have a lousy interface, makes no sense to the average user, requires at least four engineers and three IT guys to keep it running, and constantly gives wrong or incomprehensible output.
Oh, wait. We already have software like that. It's called Synopsis Physical Compiler.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
obsoletes the profession.
Is the engineer alive or dead?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So, who does he think will be writing the Engineer in a box software? Marketing? 1,000,000 monkees?
Hope they use lint...
To pass my physics test tomorrow, to maybe get laid this month, and to find enough money to buy beer this weekend.
Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder?
Ya, I am an undergrad in EE, that is all I do all day.
Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations?
Not around here anyway, i saw a guy tell a professor to shove an equation the other day.
Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane.
Well come down from the trip and help me solve this integral.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
and that eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0....
ah, but who engineers Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0? "and thus, because you have to walk across an infinity of smaller and smaller distances, you can never touch this wal*thwack*... aww, crap.."
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
The thing that causes me the most concern is the lack of basic troubleshooting and "thinking" skills that a lot of engineers seem to be lacking today.
I am only 30 myself so I am not an "old codger", but many of my peers (and superiors!) continually seem to forget the basics when designing things.
One recent example is a multi-media exhibit we were doing. The other "engineers" on the project didn't see any problem with having 1500 customers access a 600Kbit/sec. video from a single 100Mb connected server. If you do the math, you see that those users would require a 1Gb connection, or nine 100Mb servers (minimum!). Even after explaining the math, they were still skeptical that I wasn't "blowing smoke"... AARRUGH!! [Insert Dilbert comic here...]
No competent engineer is going to design something expecting to find fault later. However, assumptions are made during design. Component availability changes. Marketing requirements change. So, you push the corners, almost daring the design to brake. It's not because you're expecting failure, it's because you want to 1) Make sure it exceeds the (revised) set of requirements since you believe in putting out a quality product, and 2) You want to see just how far you can push it.
Software is an invaluable tool. Faster, better, more, in less time. You can't afford to do trial and error. When developing a product, the software TOOLS aid the engineer in design. Would you scoff at using a signal integrity tool to check those 533MHz front side bus traces, preferring to get down to the "resistors" when the board comes back? "Inventing" will always require some tinkering. That tinkering, however, is no longer limited to resistors, capacitors, inductors, and TTL logic parts. In additon to those parts, you've got FPGAs, microprocessors/microcontrollers, and software. Why are more tools/choice at your disposal a thing to be lamented?
All you need is Verilog!
...or VHDL, but Verilog is better.
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
Jeeez, pad're the auto was intoduced into cities NOT to go faster, but to eliminate horse-crap from the streets! Yeah ... the city auto/bus was to eliminate environmental pollution. Big advance, huh ... and now in big cities - 6AM -> 6pm a horse would make better time !!
I never made it to official engineer status, but I've worked for a good telecom company, I've been designing test jigs. I was as close as I can get to being an engineer as you can be without the degree.
I no longer work there. The continuous sitting in front of a computer killed me.
"Robert Lucky in a IEEE Spectrum Online article laments the state of today's engineering as progressively more removed from the "real" reality of tinkering and soldering "in a big musty laboratory" like Thomas Edison as engineers become more and more reliant on software tools and simulations. He fears that "math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us" and that eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0. What do you think?"
He's right.
Since it will most likely be purchased, polished, and marketed by Microsoft, we've got at least until version 3.0 until it's any good. Let's not waste that extra time!
Who wants to lay out millions of transistors by hand? Things have gotten pretty complex; there are so many variables to control. Complicated engineering tools take the drudgery out of design, leaving your higher-order brain functions free for more interesting (innovative?) pursuits.
The author is worried that complicated software will devalue the engineer. I agree it will, and curriculums have been softened. I don't need a degree in electrical engineering to use Cadence, or be a mechanical engineer to use Pro/E, and schools know it. But wasn't it the same with computer programming? It was a mystical art way back when, but it has since become accessible to everyone, and the level of abstraction has increased. Engineering was always something you needed lots of formal schooling in, and that's changing.
I'll neatly leap over the question whether or not system admins are engineers *leap*, and address the problem of MCSEs.
As someone who is interested in both unix and microsoft systems, the current state of MCSEs is damaging to honest admins. A network is no more easy if its windows 2000. Setting it up may appear easier, since windows will try to hold your hand, but that doesn't make debugging easier. (In a way, its harder, since windows likes to hide scary information that has the potential to debug). I've worked with windows machines for 5 years, and I take pride in professional setups of workstations and networks, regardless of the underlying OSes.
In theory, the MCSE program is not bad. The business world benefits from being able to tell a professional Microsoft administrator from the boss's nephew whose professional skills involve setting up a half-life server. However, MCSE seems to be one of the cash cows out there, computer training centers and Microsoft is pimping out the certification for money. There are plenty of 'paper' MCSE's out there - people who have passed the test and have the certification, but lack the real-world experience they need.
Linux zealots shouldn't be smug, because as linux becomes popular (to the public and management), expect the same thing to happen to the Linux+ or RHCE exams. There is nothing preventing the schools that teach to the test for MCSE exams this week to teach to the test for RHCE exams next week. Instead of having poorly running windows networks, there will be poorly run linux networks. Instead of Nimda attacking unpatched IIS servers, there will be the latest $LINUX_WORM attacking unpatched apache servers. THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT LINUX THAT WILL SAVE IT FROM THE STUPIDITY OF POOR ADMINS!
Just my $.02
This is no joke. I work as a graduate student research assistant in engineering. Industry types are always telling us that they need more experimentalists. There is a big shortage of experimentalists right now. If you know how to build and run an experiment, you're golden.
I have an enginner title but my degree is in Physics. I actually get my hands dirty plugging away everday making the packages that these "half-million transistors' ABSOULTELY have to have to be able to be useful. It's not just the fab processes that bring these marvels to to become the tools that all those pseudo-engineers in their little boxes have their flights of transcendent fantasy about the real real world. We who slave away at testing the reliability and manufacturablility of extremely dense IO structures don't worry about losing anything 'real'; we live it every day. In my early career there were the mechanical guys and the electrical guys (insert proper gender neutral terms, if you so choose). Now there's the third world so-called 'software engineers'. Bleaugh! Just tweekers of the latest rage applet juggling patterns and sucking off the teat of industry like a swarm of parasitic trend-followers. "Though my view is as spacious as the sky, my actions and respect for cause and effect are as fine as grains of flour" - Padmasambhava
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
Tinkering and soldering has it's place in the world, but that place doesn't pay the bills. Some of our best stuff has probably come from tinkerers, but The Man isn't gonna pay you to tinker until something works. I think there are a good nubmer of engineers (like myself) who do the corporate-style engineering at work, and come home to do tinker-style engineering on their own projects...
Engineers spontaneously generate... like mice from dirty shirts, artists, and lawyers...
They are compulsively curious people whose use their intelligence to try to mold the physical world for their own, and others, benefit. They will use the tools they feel that fit the job best, even if they have to invent their own... like gcc...
When I was in Eng-gin-eer school, (VietNam era,) I was told, that if I was still screwing with wires after ten years after school, and not in management, I'd have missed the boat....
After thirty years, I'm still hired primarily to screw with wires, and I manage people just for shits and grins to buy better toys and test systems... G. Harry Stine's "Benders of Tin" are a self-appointed meritocracy. This author's point of view presupposes a university academic-credentialed mindset.
Edison invented himself... as did Farnsworth in my industry..
Wow and I thought I was the only person to design better when drinking. Once the drinking starts the big problem of the day is solved and the next morning no one including myself can figure out how or why it works.
I'm using examples from my grandfather's engineering days, rather than modern nanometre engineering, but its all about the same thing.
Engineering has always been about taking known solutions, and putting them together in known ways. The "art" of engineering comes from taking these known structures, and putting them into unusual environments. This is where experience, through testing, makes a difference.
An apartment block has little (if any) "art" to it, while a massive-scale project (say, a dam, mine, or smelter) has oodles. All are using the same known materials and techniques, but are solving very different problems. An apartment engineer will have no chance of designing any dam wall, without a serious amount of simulation and testing. Fortunately, engineers with the experience of having built dam walls have already put their knowledge into the design and simulation software, and so little is lost.
Or is it? What if dam walls have always been built of concrete, steel, and stone, but along comes a radical who thinks he can build one out of a plastic? There is no body of existing knowledge to fall back on, and so the company can either spend a fortune on testing (making ever-larger models, perhaps), or it can insist the design stick to "existing methods" - all able to be simulated with their existing software.
Hmmm... "Existing Methods" is never going to produce another Thomas Edison. And software will always be limited by current experience.
Idle musings...
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
Robots. Sure, the software isn't real, but the fun little parts all are. And there is great demand for all sorts of little robots to do all sorts of crazy crap.
Finally, about the coolest thing ever ... computerized fabrication. The whole 3D printer thing.
But if you sit around looking at disciplines that have been around for several billion years ... of course everything's going to be computerized. But that means you get to have fun stuff like automatic theorem provers, anyway :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
design considerations
too bad you odt find that in computer science
case in point.. the king... microsoft
Good Riddance. Engineers blow goats. Any piece of equipment designed by an engineer is doomed to have components that look great on paper, but are physically impossible to repair without sawing said equipment in half in order to get to them. I'd rather have something created with the assistance of software, by someone who actually gets their hands dirty, than some yahoo who thinks that just because he made it through physics with calc and had a nifty graphic calculator that he knows what the hell he is talking about.
This is a classic complaint that things aren't as good as they were in the Golden Age - which almost always turns out to be the complainer's college days, or possibly his first job, when he was young and burning with enthusiasm. We have always built new tools on top of the tools our predecessors have built, and abandoned the tools they used in favour of the better ones - which, maybe, they built for us.
George Stevenson, the railway builder, judged the underlying quality of an engineer by his ability to file things out of raw metal, at a push. "Real Engineers", in his opinion, could file a threaded bolt our of bar stock if they really had to - not that they had to, because mass produced bolts were available, but a "real engineer" kept in touch with basics. How many of us would pass that test?
So what if some of the tools we use are software? While marketing may label the whizzy program "Engineer in a Box", it won't be - it'll be a new set of tools, better than the last but no panacea (anybody remeber "The Last One"). And many engineers will use those tools in stolid, unimaginative, ways, just as they do now. Don't tell me that every engineer in you plant ia imaginative and original. Most engineers, most of the time, are pulling on a few design patterns and a few tools to do essentially predictable jobs. Some of them, some of the time, do get original. And the more powerful the tools they have, the more creative they can get when the lightning of inspiration strikes.
This sort of thing has been said so many times that there is a Monty Python sketch - which I won't quote. In the early days of COBOL, it was supposed to de-skill programming. The manager would write down the business logic, a typist-class drudge would translate it into COBOL, and the compiler would do the rest. Assembler programmers complained that their craft was being destroyed before it was ever born. Is that the world you are living in?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
"Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyse so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance."
- Dr AR Dykes, in an address to the British Institution of Structural Engineers (1976)
"Engineering is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on the paper. Then it moves to realisation in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings homes to men or women. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. This is the engineer's high priviledge."
- Herbert Hoover, U.S. President (1929 - 1932)
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
C'mon, you CPU hardware guys haven't come up with anything new in, like, decades. One guy came up with the transistor - props to him. Some other guy came up with the CPU - good work, that man. Then after that, all you little clone drones carried on just making the same thing over and over, getting smaller and faster on each iteration. Kinda like the Swiss watchmakers. Ooh! It's a millimeter thick, and it still tells time exactly the way the one we made 200 years ago did! Woohoo!
The least you could do is come up with a decent silicon-level execution model (Von Neumann is so twentieth-century) so us parasitic trend-followers don't have to waste our time dealing with a teensy array of "registers" and the like. I dunno, native chip-level lambda calculus support might be nice, for a change.
Anyhoo, wake me up when you guys actually come up with another invention, willya?
This might be controversial but my view point has always been that an engineer needs to be good at math, but using calculators or computers for pure number cruncing is OK. Don't confuse them. As an engineer you need to understand underlying principles, but you are not required to exercise simple craftmanship each time you need something done.
;-)
It's like CAD and drafting. Nowadays (almost) everybody works in 3D, which enables one to do the creative part (concept modeling) without the need to think of the actual drawing part (perspective drafts). Once you model is done, you let the CAD system derive 2D views, to which you attach dimensions etc. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a revolution in engineering. Sure, old guys moaned about the "lost art of drafting", but for the first time en engineer could be creative without the need to bother with technicalities right from the start. Does it mean that every idiot can be an engineer now? Heck, no!
Enter MBS (multi-body systems). For the first time you can simulate dynamics on 3D models without the need for complicated 3D matrix operations or graphical methods. Sure, we lost focus on those methods but that does not mean either, that you can start right away without having a clue of how it works under the hood.
Enter FEM/CFD. There are now packages available that focus on design engineers rather than calculation engineers. Everything is a little less complicated but still truely useful. Guess what, you still need to know how it works and what the best practices are. Or you will get yourself into deep trouble.
Enter packages like MATLAB, Mathematica, MAPLE, MathCAD... Powerful, yet you need to have profound knowledge in math!
See my point? Sure, today's engineers have less knowledge of yesterday's graphical methods for solving kinematics or statical problems. But they have a lot more knowledge of sophisticated calculation types like FEM, CFD, Dynamic Simulation of whatever type. Being an engineer today is more than just being good at producing 2D drafts of the 3D world. All those number-crunching packages free us engineers and give us the time to examine more sophisticated problems. In my mind, we have evolved, rather than degenerated.
My guess about Mr. Robert W. Lucky: He is about 60 years old and deeply frustrated because on the one side he doesn't want to learn those new things (so he declares them unnecessary and distractive) but on the other he is envious of not being young again (and able to play with all these cool toys)...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
When Engineer-in-a-Box can:
1) Build me a bridge while compromising with designers.
2) Write me a better 3D physics engine for my new game.
3) Show me where to set the charge to destroy a target best and decide in a short amount of time (blast engineers rule)
4) Make me a better alloy for whatever I'm doing.
This concern also exists within the computing industry at large. Perhaps one of the most insane things I ever heard someone say was It is a good thing they are teaching microsoft in colleges now so students will be up to speed - I am not kidding, I heard someone say that.
The schools I went to for Electronics, Digital Electronics, and then programming all stressed understanding how to do things the old way and made me do them that way, a few times. Not unlike learning how to divide by using subtraction (ironically how most ALUs do it), understanding how principles work goes a long way.
A case in point, I am very familar (as are most of us) with how chips work. I understand the sparc, ultra, and intel chips, how their registers work, how to use them, and what they are for, so, the insight that gives people like us is when we read technical documentation about a new chip, we can discern the capabilities down to a very low level.
In a nutshell, if it is still taught and practiced (not used necessarily) then it is fine by me.
Is it just me, or did dude mean 50F? "...Welcome to Death Valley International Airport. Please remain seated with buckles fastened while we taxi to the gate. Ding. Buh-bye."
There was a time when printing a page of text required specialized skills, manual labor, and artistic ability. Computers fixed that right up. Why is it such a stretch that engineers can or should be replaced by software? You say it's a shame, but it actually acts as a force multiplier. Those who are inclined to be engineers can redirect their efforts to being creative and coming up with new ideas. As a cartographer, I am very glad that I dont have to pen and ink every map I do, I'd never get it done. I now have the time to try exciting new things in the blink of an eye. I say power to the programmer.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Not every engineer is an Edision. It doesn't mean they aren't important to the process.
Computers are a tool. Does anyone think that the printing press will replace engineers? Even though it made it possible for many more people gain the knowledge to be engineers and scientists. Computers just make it easier for your average person to become effective in the engineering process.
Two things come to mind that thwart tinkering: teaching that science, math, engineering, and invention are hard, and, "don't do that, you might break it."
With advancements in "building blocks," the amount of information you have to learn to do something cool is dropping. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980's, I wanted to do all kinds of cool stuff with electronics, but I didn't have the degree in electrical engineering to figure out how to bias a transistor. Now I could--but I'd rather just go to Radio Shack and buy a 555 timer and a 741 op-amp to tinker with. They're cheap and have well-defined behaviors.
If we'd only teach our kids that these building blocks are available to them, maybe they could do great things. For goodness sake, though, don't tell a kid that something is hard. To them, hard means toil, difficulty, and no rewards. Building a tree-fort is hard, but kids can focus on the results of the work and get down to it. Nobody tells their kid that they need a degree in architecture before they can hammer some scrap lumber together--why should we say the same thing about building an amplifier?
The other thing is that we yell at kids for using a device in a manner other than its intended purpose or when they try to figure out how something works--all in the name of not breaking it. Despite the amout of stuff we throw away, it's a sin today to break something. Why do we teach our kids that going to McDonald's and throwing away 50 grams of waste for 500 grams of food is a good thing, but chastize them for taking apart their remote controlled car? It'd probably be more educational to risk breaking a US$40 toy than spend those same 40 bucks on carefully designed educational stuff ... heck, the kid is curious so fan those flames instead of stomping them out.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Actually, this is no different than studying EE 20 years ago, as I did. Virtually none of the students in my EE program could strip a wire, solder, or design anything. It was entertaining to watch them blow up meters trying to measure current across a resistor...
It was funny even back then: a lot of time spent on analysis, which even then could be done better by SPICE than could ever be done by hand. But only a little work on design, which is what real engineers really do, and almost no opportunities to actually build realistic circuits using realistic parts to learn about real-world issues.
Some would say that the real-world stuff should be kept out of a university, that it is the stuff od trade schools. If that's the case, then we'd better abolish all engineering curricula, and have students major in something more purely academic, like Physics. Engineering IS the application of science. Unfortunately, the applications taught are typically of no worth.
The only thing that's worse now is that students pay more than twice as much for the honor of being taught stuff that is of zero use. They graduate with a miserable debt into a world where it is virtually impossible to afford a middle-class existance. Shame on the schools and their faculty! Shame! Shame!
How about CEO In A Box?
C*O In A Box?
Hey, can I get a discount if I buy all those boxes together? Why not bundle them all together into a single package? Corporation In A Box.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
As long as there are geeky, curious, humans, I don't think this will be a problem.
I have had plenty of friends who are working engineers. Most of them tell me that the stuff they learned in school 20-30 years ago had little to do with their working life. In school you learned all this advanced calculus. When you went out to build a bridge, you pulled out the books and tables of empirical knowledge for almost everything you didn't calculate it from scratch. Similarly the guys today in school are just jumping through the hoops getting little REAL preparation for working life. And professors and high-minded whiners like whoever inspired this Slashdot drone on about how nobody today can understand everything about everything.
I am not yet a licensed P.Eng, but I would like to think I'm qualified (it's a matter of opinion without certification, as far as I'm concerned) in my field of Mechanical Engineering.
A lot of things we deal with in the Mech. field really require scale model and real world testing. There are very few packages available outside of an NCSA facility to accurately model real world gas flow characteristics -- you can get a pretty good approximation, but beyond that, testing is the best way to make final conclusions.
The same holds true for a lot of stress modelling, and things like Finite Element Analysis. There are some really good tools, but they're still only a decent approximation.
I know that without actual testing, there's a very good chance I'm gonna have a connecting rod or an entire piston blast out through the hood of a car. It seems to me like Mr. Lucky[1] seems to be struggling with some greater issues than a decline in other engineers' math skills.
I've sat and thought for quite some time about the advances in simulation and modelling, and the quality and quantity of tools that are available in Engineering. But I deal with "real"[2] things -- cranks and pulleys, gears and levers, heat transfer and fluid flows, forces and moments -- and they're not going away any time soon.
[1]I feel really bad about it, but I laughed when I typed out his name. Man, I hope these named anchors work.
[2]I mean no disrepect to engineers in other fields (software, electrical). What I mean is they deal in far more intangible concepts than I ever come across.
-- The One and Only NotMike.
After I saw BladeRunner I dreamed of creating my own puppets...
Because I have too much work now I've pre-ordered my copy of Visual Genetics.
Can't wait.
All Engineering is a by-product of our knowledge of math.
I have no more doubt as to the knowedge base of this author.
I think I'd wait for Engineer-in-a-Box 2.1...
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I believe the full title of one who runs a train is "Locomotive Engineer". Locomotive Engineers were so named because they were supposed to know how the locomotive worked so they could run it effectively. While positions like fireman and breakman were in charge of specific components of the train, the locomotive engineer was in charge of the train as a whole. It was his job to ensure that all the components worked together efficiently like a well oil ... er, train. As such, your typical locomotive engineer had extensive domain knowledge, and the application of that knowledge was a (very limited) form of engineering.
"Perl 6 will give you the big knob." -Larry Wall
But can it consume the same amount of caffeine {candy|porn|mp3z|warez} that an engineer would consume?
Industry types are always telling us that they need more experimentalists. There is a big shortage of experimentalists right now. If you know how to build and run an experiment, you're golden.
What industry is this?
foog
OS/2 Beer: Comes in a 32-oz can. Does allow you to drink several DOS
Beers simultaneously. Allows you to drink Windows 3.1 Beer simultaneously
too, but somewhat slower. Advertises that its cans won't explode when you
open them, even if you shake them up. You never really see anyone
drinking OS/2 Beer, but the manufacturer (International Beer
Manufacturing) claims that 9 million six-packs have been sold.
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