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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
... should it really be suprising that in an intro class you find yourself among inexperienced colleagues?
...
Uhhh
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.
Yeah, they might actually design circuits that do calculations correctly because they actually understand the calculations
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.
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
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.
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"
I am not saying you have to derive/understand/program every numerical algorithm and not use the packages, but at some point you are going to have to know, as a DSP person, some numerical algorithms and how to represent numerical algorithms in non-proprietary programming systems (such as C/C++/FORTRAN/Lisp).
OK, another analogy. I don't expect an engineer to design an op amp -- op amps are things you go out and buy. But op amps are unlike software: black-box IC like things are this 30-year-old dream in the software field, but interoperable software IC-like components only exist within various proprietary sandboxes (Visual Basic/COM/Windows, LabView, Cocoa). It is like to use an op amp you have to purchase one vendors circuit card substrates and power supplies. Maybe that's why Miguel De Izeca is so fire up about C#/Mono -- to come up with a non-proprietary component sandbox.
Also, op amps cost, say 50 cents a piece in small quantities, 5 cents a piece in volume. Is there a piece of commercial component software that can be reused with such generous terms? Oh, and the 741 op amp has been around for 30 years with the same specs. What piece of numerical software (apart from published source code form) has been around and conforming to its spec for that long?
And one more thing. The op-amp people may have patents up the wazoo on op-amps, but they will sell you the op-amp to do what you please with it. They are not greedy SOB's who say, "We hold the op-amp patent -- any thing incorporating the op-amp, even if you have bought the op-amp part, falls under our patent and you pay us tons of money.
... 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
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.