Slashdot Mirror
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
I think that most engineers would happily jump into a box if it said "Krispy Kreme" on the side. But that's just me. :)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Bob did a lot of datacomm science behindo ral_histories/transcripts/lucky.html for details.
the major modem advances that came out
of Bell Labs. See http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/
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.
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.)
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.
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.
No kidding. It seems Henry was sorta wacky that way.
Carry on. I'll edit as required.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
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.
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
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.
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.
A hearty amen, I was just one of the many who proved that lim(gpa->0)engineer->business major. After I somehow passed DifEQ II, I realized that engineering was not for me and to studied finance, I saw that on a shirt that the MEs were selling. I almost got one as a joke to wear to business classes. Almost all the finance majors had begun in engineering.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
...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.
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
Who wrote the software?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
... 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
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...
Old lady: "Tell me, Dr. Hathaway, what's Professor Einstein really like?"
Dr. Hathaway: "Dead."
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
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.
What do you mean we don't have either? I don't know about player pianos, but real pianos are still all over the place. Furthermore I'll take a human playing a piano over a MIDI electronic keybord playing itself anyday.
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.
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!"
Is the engineer alive or dead?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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
> Think it would be possible to program decency into them?
It depends on who you recruit into the programs.
Another lifetime or two ago, I worked at an engineering company that specialized in pulp and paper manufacturing. One of the engineers was a woman who catagorically refused to ever specify the product of a certain manufacturer for any paper mill she worked on. The reason for this was that the manufacturer (who made a bed or mat upon which the paper pulp would be laid, dried, & given a texture) advertised its product wrapped around unclothed female models.
Yes, she thought the ads were sexist. But the true point was that the material is as comfortable to the skin (roughly speaking) as the pink fiberglass used to insulate houses in the US. If you've never touched it, fiberglass insulation causes itching almost immediately & can leave a rash on the skin! She argued that the material this manufacturer had the same effect on human skin, & that she had sent a petition with several dozen signatures -- including one faculty member -- to this manufacturer -- to discontinue these ads.
Aw, this post doesn't flame Microsoft, so probably no one will read it & think about this issue.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Verilog bigot! *grin*
Bah, I still can't get even the simplest logic to compile. High school flunkies just shouldn't be allowed to play with PLDs, I suppose.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but stock prices of companies that still fab 74xx logic are slowly rising. Blame me.
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
I'm calling bullshit on this one. Look at something as mundane as your average automobile. Back in the 40's and 50's they had low horsepower, crappy gas milage, broke down a lot, had high maintence requirements, were dangerous, and expensive. The cards were relativly simple to engineer however, becaue there wasn't enough man hours available and the tools were too primitive for the kind of sophisticated vehicles we manufacture today. What these people are lamenting isn't the loss of knowledge or the lack of engineering skills, it's that all of the accomplishments they made in the past with blood sweat and tears are now handled much more efficently with a computer. It's a sobering though that a computer chip that required thousands of man-hours to lay out by hand in the 70s can be designed by a college student in his spare time today. It makes your accomplishments seem kinda pointless.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, if Engineer 2.0 is any good, you should be able to use it yourself to engineer Engineer 3.0
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?
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.
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!