I'm afraid we're already there
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.