Engineer in a Box?

Posted by michael on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @11:54AM from the i-love-the-smell-of-solder-in-the-morning dept.

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?"

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Re:As any good engineer knows... by Usquebaugh · 2002-09-25 12:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.