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Engineer in a Box?

Posted by michael on 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?"

6 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. What do I think? by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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
  2. Engineering is more difficult now by tmark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ?

  3. As any good engineer knows... by swordboy · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:As any good engineer knows... by Usquebaugh · · 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.

  4. What are we building, anyway? by John+Miles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  5. There have always been 2 types of engineers by RhettLivingston · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.