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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?"
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
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 ?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
A great engineer will have done this before and know what goes where and why. Testing should be confirmation of the design not fault finding.
I see this everyday where I work. The good engineers think they are breaking new ground and working all the hours to achieve this. The few experienced engineers go home at 5 and always hit their deadlines.
For most engineering endeavours it's all been done before. We turn out systems not inventions.
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.
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"
Do you really think there's that much difference between drawing your schematics by hand and using a computer? In both, the same mental processes take place, you're just using a better tool in the latter case.
Computers do number crunching, not thinking. And they do number crunching thousands of times faster and to a degree of accuracy that no human could ever hope to approach.
Engineers are still taught all the gory details of mechanics, and believe it or not, the current generation DOES understand the underlying concepts. The way mechanics is taught has not been changed in ages. It's just that today, when we need to apply these principles on a large scale, we're spared the trouble of going through hundreds of pages of calculations. Yes, this means that we'll use a numerical method to any arbitrary degree of precision rather than an ingenious manipulation of equations to yield an exact answer. With enough time spent in the real world, you may even forget how to do those ingenious manipulations. You will still be an engineer, because you will still design a system, from the ground up, based on the principles of science and the real world.
You're right about one thing: Engineer is a term that's often too broadly applied: network engineers and sanitation engineers can call themselves that but that doesn't make them so, and this is where professional certification comes in. The university education behind that certification is still solid.