I think that even when the VAST majority of jobs are gone I will still be trying to turn research into practice. Honestly even if I didn't really have a better reward from society (other than the tools necessary to do the work) I would not mind. I like the challenge of figuring these things out. If someone else wants to paint all day, sing (as long as they are not around me all the time:) ), take walks, just sit and watch TV etc that is fine with me. I am okay with a post scarcity society.
I do think there is a lot of work to be done that can't be done under our current economic system though. In a post scarcity system I think more people would be able to be scientists and engineers and contribute to needed things that are not viable right now.
I think this person is also in a field that doesn't involve physical engineering so they don't have all the high costs of chemical reactors, consumables etc.
Worse a lot of programmers think they are engineers. I don't think most have any concept of what software, consumables etc cost. If you are trying to turn a lab bench drug into an actual shipping product just the cost of the software and consumables in a pilot plant to figure out how to make the drug at an industrial scale can easily cost millions of dollars. If you create a new biomaterial the expense of all the testing to get FDA approval is extremely high. There is really no comparing the costs related to software programming and physical engineering.
It is almost scary to see the costs of some engineering software packages. $100K/year and to know it is cheap for what it does and how much time it saves.
Marketing should never set deadlines but they should be able to communicate outside realities. There might be some external date that needs to be hit and they should be able to see we need this by this date for this external reason and why it is so important to hit that date. That way engineers can access if that can be hit and work with marketing about what features can be removed in order to hit that date.
Neither marketing or engineering should set dates for each others but external realities have to be accounted for in both.
All of that stuff certainly racks up serious dollar amounts very quickly. That is one thing I understand from having worked for 10 years before going back to school to become an engineer that most students have no concept of.
I was just making the point that you can't compare engineering expenses to marketing expenses if you don't know the industry. Although I don't think it is really far to call most programming engineering. Most software is not engineered.
This seems to be entirely based on what market you are in. If you are doing software programs in a small company then this seems very reasonable. If you are doing something like pharmaceutical drug creation this would not be even a tiny bit reasonable. Based on the dollar values involved I would guess this is a software company and not actual engineering. Having been a programmer for 10 years and now becoming an engineer there is a huge world of difference.
Most engineering software apps I have run into (process simulation, fluid dynamics, materials etc) cost $10K-$100K per year which would completely wipe out that budget instantly and that is a per engineer cost. Most of these apps also have no free software counterparts. These apps are also updated frequently (as new materials and the simulations for these get entered into the system) so these costs are recurring. This software is hard and expensive to develop and requires actual lab work to create the software simulations.
I agree with all of that. I was trying to make a point that this considering a degree worth almost nothing is mostly only valid in fields where obtaining the knowledge and practical experience is not hard to come by. If something requires a lot of specialized equipment to learn and the act of learning can be dangerous without professional supervision then the degree matters more.
I would put my knowledge of programming up against any CS degree. I am a self taught programmer. However I would not trust a self taught chemical engineer. I would absolutely not trust a self taught engineer doing bioengineering. The tools you need, experience etc are just not really available outside of a university for those. That is one reason I returned to a university to change my profession. I wanted to do something I am finding more interesting and that requires knowledge I can't just gain on my own. Over the summer I will be doing some actual creation of customized bacteria to create specific enzymes and proteins for a project. That is not really knowledge you can gain on your own and trying would be be expensive and dangerous.
This attitude is common in programming mostly because the field changes so quickly and schools still do a poor job among other things. However you DON'T see this attitude for hiring chemists, biologists, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers etc.
It might be okay to be a self taught programmer and writing some software but a self taught bioengineer that will be creating custom bacteria in a multimillion dollar reactor to create some new drug is another matter entirely.
You might trust a self taught programmer to write your webpage, would you trust a self taught aerospace engineer to design a plane?
There is a large difference between real engineers and most programmers, a lot of that is the responsibility that goes with it.
I definitely don't agree with this. I love reading and I read a lot of scifi and fantasy in addition to technical papers/books. Actually many engineers and scientists I know are the same way. They like reading scifi and fantasy, watching it and reading technical books.
These are the stories I love to hear and why I went back to school to help turn those lab bench drugs into industrial scale drugs. We have the technology to cure many of these problems now or at least almost cure them to the point where a LOT of time is bought but making the drugs is very difficult. My goal is to work on making these drugs. A cure without a means of production is not much of a cure.
Yes and that treatment is looking very promising. The problem is that when I last read up on it the issue is that it is very hard to make. We have an interesting problem right now. We are discovering some miracle level cures but not the miracle level abilities to make them at industrial scales. So some of these new things do work but take several people a year to make one dose so... That is a major reason I am changing my profession. I plan to be working on turning this lab bench science into industrial work.
You could actually do the math for the mutation rate and the odds of a mutation being useful and weigh that against the odds of survival by the patient without the treatment. The math is probably not too bad and it is something that the scientists involved probably considered. Sure there is a non-zero chance of it happening but without this the odds of surviving pancreatic cancer is close to zero. I had a friend die from that one and it is definitely not the way you want to go. It is a very soft organ and VERY hard to treat with surgery, chemo or other drugs. It is one of the hardest to treat cancers we know of. So this kind of treatment is better than what we have even if it could mutate into something and kill you.
Except that in 18-20 months some of the cures being tested will be going into phase 1 and 2 trials and those patients can be given a try on that. So far some of them are showing about a 99% success rate in rates for complete eradication of cancer. From a societal perspective it is probably worth it to try and keep someone alive for 18-20 months if a cure is possible during that time. Society has invested a lot of resources in someone by the time they are an adult. If you let the person die you are basically writing that investment off. if there is a decent chance you can cure the person then the investment is not lost and they will probably contribute a lot more in their lifetime than what the treatment was worth.
You could probably do some genetic modification to the bacteria to keep it from reproducing or even give it a termination time. Genetic engineering is getting pretty good at kill switches.
We are working on moving on from that. There are newer nanomedicines that are looking extremely effective. The problem is that those medicines are HARD to make. I mean really really HARD. Some of those things take a team of people a year to create one dosage. That is one reason that I decided to change from being a programmer to doing nanotech/biotech work. A lot of work is needed to turn the lab bench science into practical industrial scale cures. Until then we are going to be stuck with these simpler to make treatments because it is the best we can realistically do right now.
The plus side is our technology is getting better very quickly. A lot of developments are happening quicker than almost anyone ever predicted and things are looking very good long term. It is something that I hope to make a large difference in. So far things are looking very good for that.
This is one of the things I absolutely agree with. Intuition just does not work on these complex systems. I really like using tools like MATLAB to solve systems of ODE/PDEs and then do things like a sensitivity analysis on the parameters. It allows you to find out which parameters matter and by how much. Sometimes you can have a parameter change by many orders of magnitude and not matter and in other cases even a 1% difference can completely change the outcome.
Without understanding the math you won't know that and your experimental design will end up being pretty useless.
Part of the power of MATLAB is all the stuff you can integrate it with. Most of that integration is only with windows applications. You can't integrate MATLAB with openoffice/liberoffice and that is a serious liability. Someone can send me raw data in excel (fairly common) and I can highlight the cells and export them to MATLAB and do any advanced calculations and then send the data back to excel with a click.
MATLAB also integrates nicely with many other engineering applications that are windows only apps.
That and I don't think I want to try and run HYSYS or Matlab on a mobile platform. There is some limited ability to run MATLAB remotely from a mobile device but you need to have a desktop version running somewhere for it to connect to it and it is pretty limited.
Somehow I suspect that no matter how powerful a mobile device is a desktop device will be far more powerful. I do think eventually more content creation can be done on mobile type devices but I don't see doing things like figuring out how to create a DNA based structure (used in nanotech because we can predict how it will fold very accurately) and figuring out the kinetics of the reaction will happen on those devices. No matter how much computing power we have we can always use that computer power to create more accurate simulations. Those simulations improve the medications a few more percent, cut the risks a bit more and understanding how to write those simulations is hard.
If Microsoft actually continues on this multiple applications open at once and desktop hostile approach it means that the engineering apps will end up moving to some custom version of linux. It won't be a happy transition but that is where it would end up. Being able to hook up MATLAB, Excel, HYSYS, Aspen Plus etc makes for some pretty nice toolchains for doing complex simulations and being able to generate output for everyone from managers to other engineers.
It is pretty sad that so many people still divide the world into ethnic, gender etc groups and then judge everyone in the group based on a stereotype. I understand why humans do it. There is a fair bit of biology behind that in terms of how our brains categorize number to make it easier to handle complex system. However, it is also extremely lazy thinking and most people should know better at this point.
I often wonder what the world would be like if we could actually get along and work together to solve problems instead of all the wasted energy and effort we have now. At the same time we are moving forward and trying to create artificial enzymes to create nanotech drugs to cure diseases we have others in the society that still can't accept science like evolution, plate tectonics or the age of the earth. It is like we have two completely different worlds. Some people are moving forward at great speed while many others seem like they would be much happier a few hundred years ago.
Evolution is even used in modern engineering. At least for the biological engineering side one of the best ways to figure out how to destroy a toxin is to take some bacteria and give them a little bit of it. Most will die but some will have a mutation that allows them to survive. You can keep creasing the levels of the toxin and can use directed evolution to create a bacteria to break down what you need. You can also use a little genetic engineering and gene splicing to help the process along.
This is a strange world but at least as an engineer you can work to try and make it better.
Probably end up having the computer give a test on all skills that are required. If you can't past the test you don't know the skill regardless of what you said on your resume.
It is sad but I can see the humor aspect part of the question. Most of the engineers I have been around make jokes about things like using the equipment to cook breakfast or wondering if the reactor could build up enough pressure to make a cool water gun etc. Most of the women I have known go upset at those jokes for some reason. I can understand not making sexual jokes since they don't really belong in the work place. However, if engineers can't make non-sexual jokes about the equipment it makes it very hard to bond with the team.
What I notice is teams try to hire people that will fit in with the rest of the team. A lot of men are also looked over because they would not fit in with the team and for engineers a sense of humor is pretty important. You even find a lot of actual solutions can come out of silly jokes. I have met many women who would fit in and many that would not. I would want to make that clear during the hiring process although I would have made it clear what type of humor I was referring to.
If you do work with a solar concentrator and have never though of cooking a marshmallow with it you should not be working with it.:) If the idea of using your large CSTR to make fruit punch has never occurred to you please find another field.
So maybe computers should make the hiring decisions and remove the humans from the process if the humans are doing such a poor job of it. I am not saying the computers will do a very good job but it is at least worth a shot to see if they can't do a better job.
That is what I actually like about engineering. It is a regulated field and you can't just go somewhere else to get something underbid. It is one of the many reasons I am getting out of regular programming. Customers will try to have one part of a project done very cheaply by someone in another country but then when it breaks or never works to begin with they want someone here to fix it but they also want it to be super cheap because that other company in india was able to do it for almost nothing. Programming has become a race to the bottom.
Programming skills though are highly useful in a number of fields. That is why I am moving into the nanotech and biotech markets.
Are you willing to pay higher fees to have that auditing done? What I have seen is that when given a choice a customer chooses the lowest cost option no matter what. They won't pay for security audits and that means if someone else is willing to give up on security they can charge less and you will lose the business.
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I think that even when the VAST majority of jobs are gone I will still be trying to turn research into practice. Honestly even if I didn't really have a better reward from society (other than the tools necessary to do the work) I would not mind. I like the challenge of figuring these things out. If someone else wants to paint all day, sing (as long as they are not around me all the time :) ), take walks, just sit and watch TV etc that is fine with me. I am okay with a post scarcity society.
I do think there is a lot of work to be done that can't be done under our current economic system though. In a post scarcity system I think more people would be able to be scientists and engineers and contribute to needed things that are not viable right now.
I think this person is also in a field that doesn't involve physical engineering so they don't have all the high costs of chemical reactors, consumables etc.
Worse a lot of programmers think they are engineers. I don't think most have any concept of what software, consumables etc cost. If you are trying to turn a lab bench drug into an actual shipping product just the cost of the software and consumables in a pilot plant to figure out how to make the drug at an industrial scale can easily cost millions of dollars. If you create a new biomaterial the expense of all the testing to get FDA approval is extremely high. There is really no comparing the costs related to software programming and physical engineering.
It is almost scary to see the costs of some engineering software packages. $100K/year and to know it is cheap for what it does and how much time it saves.
Marketing should never set deadlines but they should be able to communicate outside realities. There might be some external date that needs to be hit and they should be able to see we need this by this date for this external reason and why it is so important to hit that date. That way engineers can access if that can be hit and work with marketing about what features can be removed in order to hit that date.
Neither marketing or engineering should set dates for each others but external realities have to be accounted for in both.
All of that stuff certainly racks up serious dollar amounts very quickly. That is one thing I understand from having worked for 10 years before going back to school to become an engineer that most students have no concept of.
I was just making the point that you can't compare engineering expenses to marketing expenses if you don't know the industry. Although I don't think it is really far to call most programming engineering. Most software is not engineered.
This seems to be entirely based on what market you are in. If you are doing software programs in a small company then this seems very reasonable. If you are doing something like pharmaceutical drug creation this would not be even a tiny bit reasonable. Based on the dollar values involved I would guess this is a software company and not actual engineering. Having been a programmer for 10 years and now becoming an engineer there is a huge world of difference.
Most engineering software apps I have run into (process simulation, fluid dynamics, materials etc) cost $10K-$100K per year which would completely wipe out that budget instantly and that is a per engineer cost. Most of these apps also have no free software counterparts. These apps are also updated frequently (as new materials and the simulations for these get entered into the system) so these costs are recurring. This software is hard and expensive to develop and requires actual lab work to create the software simulations.
I agree with all of that. I was trying to make a point that this considering a degree worth almost nothing is mostly only valid in fields where obtaining the knowledge and practical experience is not hard to come by. If something requires a lot of specialized equipment to learn and the act of learning can be dangerous without professional supervision then the degree matters more.
I would put my knowledge of programming up against any CS degree. I am a self taught programmer. However I would not trust a self taught chemical engineer. I would absolutely not trust a self taught engineer doing bioengineering. The tools you need, experience etc are just not really available outside of a university for those. That is one reason I returned to a university to change my profession. I wanted to do something I am finding more interesting and that requires knowledge I can't just gain on my own. Over the summer I will be doing some actual creation of customized bacteria to create specific enzymes and proteins for a project. That is not really knowledge you can gain on your own and trying would be be expensive and dangerous.
This attitude is common in programming mostly because the field changes so quickly and schools still do a poor job among other things. However you DON'T see this attitude for hiring chemists, biologists, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers etc.
It might be okay to be a self taught programmer and writing some software but a self taught bioengineer that will be creating custom bacteria in a multimillion dollar reactor to create some new drug is another matter entirely.
You might trust a self taught programmer to write your webpage, would you trust a self taught aerospace engineer to design a plane?
There is a large difference between real engineers and most programmers, a lot of that is the responsibility that goes with it.
I definitely don't agree with this. I love reading and I read a lot of scifi and fantasy in addition to technical papers/books. Actually many engineers and scientists I know are the same way. They like reading scifi and fantasy, watching it and reading technical books.
These are the stories I love to hear and why I went back to school to help turn those lab bench drugs into industrial scale drugs. We have the technology to cure many of these problems now or at least almost cure them to the point where a LOT of time is bought but making the drugs is very difficult. My goal is to work on making these drugs. A cure without a means of production is not much of a cure.
Yes and that treatment is looking very promising. The problem is that when I last read up on it the issue is that it is very hard to make. We have an interesting problem right now. We are discovering some miracle level cures but not the miracle level abilities to make them at industrial scales. So some of these new things do work but take several people a year to make one dose so ... That is a major reason I am changing my profession. I plan to be working on turning this lab bench science into industrial work.
You could actually do the math for the mutation rate and the odds of a mutation being useful and weigh that against the odds of survival by the patient without the treatment. The math is probably not too bad and it is something that the scientists involved probably considered. Sure there is a non-zero chance of it happening but without this the odds of surviving pancreatic cancer is close to zero. I had a friend die from that one and it is definitely not the way you want to go. It is a very soft organ and VERY hard to treat with surgery, chemo or other drugs. It is one of the hardest to treat cancers we know of. So this kind of treatment is better than what we have even if it could mutate into something and kill you.
Except that in 18-20 months some of the cures being tested will be going into phase 1 and 2 trials and those patients can be given a try on that. So far some of them are showing about a 99% success rate in rates for complete eradication of cancer. From a societal perspective it is probably worth it to try and keep someone alive for 18-20 months if a cure is possible during that time. Society has invested a lot of resources in someone by the time they are an adult. If you let the person die you are basically writing that investment off. if there is a decent chance you can cure the person then the investment is not lost and they will probably contribute a lot more in their lifetime than what the treatment was worth.
You could probably do some genetic modification to the bacteria to keep it from reproducing or even give it a termination time. Genetic engineering is getting pretty good at kill switches.
We are working on moving on from that. There are newer nanomedicines that are looking extremely effective. The problem is that those medicines are HARD to make. I mean really really HARD. Some of those things take a team of people a year to create one dosage. That is one reason that I decided to change from being a programmer to doing nanotech/biotech work. A lot of work is needed to turn the lab bench science into practical industrial scale cures. Until then we are going to be stuck with these simpler to make treatments because it is the best we can realistically do right now.
The plus side is our technology is getting better very quickly. A lot of developments are happening quicker than almost anyone ever predicted and things are looking very good long term. It is something that I hope to make a large difference in. So far things are looking very good for that.
This is one of the things I absolutely agree with. Intuition just does not work on these complex systems. I really like using tools like MATLAB to solve systems of ODE/PDEs and then do things like a sensitivity analysis on the parameters. It allows you to find out which parameters matter and by how much. Sometimes you can have a parameter change by many orders of magnitude and not matter and in other cases even a 1% difference can completely change the outcome.
Without understanding the math you won't know that and your experimental design will end up being pretty useless.
Part of the power of MATLAB is all the stuff you can integrate it with. Most of that integration is only with windows applications. You can't integrate MATLAB with openoffice/liberoffice and that is a serious liability. Someone can send me raw data in excel (fairly common) and I can highlight the cells and export them to MATLAB and do any advanced calculations and then send the data back to excel with a click.
MATLAB also integrates nicely with many other engineering applications that are windows only apps.
That and I don't think I want to try and run HYSYS or Matlab on a mobile platform. There is some limited ability to run MATLAB remotely from a mobile device but you need to have a desktop version running somewhere for it to connect to it and it is pretty limited.
Somehow I suspect that no matter how powerful a mobile device is a desktop device will be far more powerful. I do think eventually more content creation can be done on mobile type devices but I don't see doing things like figuring out how to create a DNA based structure (used in nanotech because we can predict how it will fold very accurately) and figuring out the kinetics of the reaction will happen on those devices. No matter how much computing power we have we can always use that computer power to create more accurate simulations. Those simulations improve the medications a few more percent, cut the risks a bit more and understanding how to write those simulations is hard.
If Microsoft actually continues on this multiple applications open at once and desktop hostile approach it means that the engineering apps will end up moving to some custom version of linux. It won't be a happy transition but that is where it would end up. Being able to hook up MATLAB, Excel, HYSYS, Aspen Plus etc makes for some pretty nice toolchains for doing complex simulations and being able to generate output for everyone from managers to other engineers.
It is pretty sad that so many people still divide the world into ethnic, gender etc groups and then judge everyone in the group based on a stereotype. I understand why humans do it. There is a fair bit of biology behind that in terms of how our brains categorize number to make it easier to handle complex system. However, it is also extremely lazy thinking and most people should know better at this point.
I often wonder what the world would be like if we could actually get along and work together to solve problems instead of all the wasted energy and effort we have now. At the same time we are moving forward and trying to create artificial enzymes to create nanotech drugs to cure diseases we have others in the society that still can't accept science like evolution, plate tectonics or the age of the earth. It is like we have two completely different worlds. Some people are moving forward at great speed while many others seem like they would be much happier a few hundred years ago.
Evolution is even used in modern engineering. At least for the biological engineering side one of the best ways to figure out how to destroy a toxin is to take some bacteria and give them a little bit of it. Most will die but some will have a mutation that allows them to survive. You can keep creasing the levels of the toxin and can use directed evolution to create a bacteria to break down what you need. You can also use a little genetic engineering and gene splicing to help the process along.
This is a strange world but at least as an engineer you can work to try and make it better.
Probably end up having the computer give a test on all skills that are required. If you can't past the test you don't know the skill regardless of what you said on your resume.
It is sad but I can see the humor aspect part of the question. Most of the engineers I have been around make jokes about things like using the equipment to cook breakfast or wondering if the reactor could build up enough pressure to make a cool water gun etc. Most of the women I have known go upset at those jokes for some reason. I can understand not making sexual jokes since they don't really belong in the work place. However, if engineers can't make non-sexual jokes about the equipment it makes it very hard to bond with the team.
What I notice is teams try to hire people that will fit in with the rest of the team. A lot of men are also looked over because they would not fit in with the team and for engineers a sense of humor is pretty important. You even find a lot of actual solutions can come out of silly jokes. I have met many women who would fit in and many that would not. I would want to make that clear during the hiring process although I would have made it clear what type of humor I was referring to.
If you do work with a solar concentrator and have never though of cooking a marshmallow with it you should not be working with it. :)
If the idea of using your large CSTR to make fruit punch has never occurred to you please find another field.
So maybe computers should make the hiring decisions and remove the humans from the process if the humans are doing such a poor job of it. I am not saying the computers will do a very good job but it is at least worth a shot to see if they can't do a better job.
That is what I actually like about engineering. It is a regulated field and you can't just go somewhere else to get something underbid. It is one of the many reasons I am getting out of regular programming. Customers will try to have one part of a project done very cheaply by someone in another country but then when it breaks or never works to begin with they want someone here to fix it but they also want it to be super cheap because that other company in india was able to do it for almost nothing. Programming has become a race to the bottom.
Programming skills though are highly useful in a number of fields. That is why I am moving into the nanotech and biotech markets.
Are you willing to pay higher fees to have that auditing done? What I have seen is that when given a choice a customer chooses the lowest cost option no matter what. They won't pay for security audits and that means if someone else is willing to give up on security they can charge less and you will lose the business.