Posted on 12/26/2002 2:03:20 PM PST by Willie Green
Oh, and you left out 'very dangerous'. They think they know what they are doing, but often do not even understand the basic concepts.
Only if your a frat guy at my school( I wanted to join AXP but got blackballed by some a**). I saw an ad for Fox's latest reality TV show which asked the question "What do you call 25 men chasing after one woman" and I immediately said WPI.
I am the rarest of animals. I am an EE working as a Software Systems Safety Engineer. Amazing, growing field as more and more systems take humans 'out of the loop'. I lucked into it. I can work as a systems engineer, a system safety engineer, a software system engineer or as a programmer. It is the age of the generalist....
Wow, you hit the nail on the head!
I can finally say that I am honestly a software engineer... It's one thing to put your blinders on, your headphones on, get out your C++ dictionary and write a bunch of craptastic code, but when it doesn't play well with others, call me.
Antique ADA routines in the military with new embedded systems means job security to me...
I sure wish I knew who these employers were!
I'm guessing you never get the jokes in Dilbert.
How do you handle clients that only hire you to put your stamp on their work and then want to shove you out the door?
A lot like my soon-to-be ex-boss.
That's the key. Even in my field, straight chemistry, there's far too much focus on the latest flash in the pan, than on getting the kids well-trained in the fundamentals. Heck, I worked with a freshly minted ChemE who couldn't calculate a dilution to save her life...
It's not just civil engineering, guy, where that occurs. (wry laugh) It's sad when the staff develops an idea, gets shot down over and over by management (even after we snuck the experiments in on weekends), only to hear our idea issued from management as the "Latest & Greatest" after the consultants visit...
Same with regards to the sciences and math. I agree the engineering discipline may be more rigorous, but what happens is that too many junior colleges offer the same title of degree, and since it might mot be ABET recognized in title, lacks a standard curriculum throughour the community. Worse, even if recognized, enough demand may have existed that many second rate students from les rigorous programs have dfamed the reputation of the degree title.
Many Material Scientists are only associated with metallurgy or testing procedures of materials, even amongst professors in academic environments.
The point I want to communicate, is KISS, Keep It Simple S*****, the Civil, Mech and Elec degrees in Engineering are well recognized over several generations and the business community is able to handle a substitution of those skillsets between one another. Too frequently a fringe degree, although perhaps an order of agnitude more rigorous, is discounted or disregarded entirely 90% of the time as being an insufficient match. This tends to happen because of social educational levels of the layman rather than those who have the skills.
Likewise, the same institutions needing those skills frequently have allowed non-science/engineering background managers to rise within their ranks. They also lack the ability to ask the right questions to discern skillsets between the engineering disciplines to identify the good catches. Frequently they will wordsmith job descriptions to 'better manage' personnel and where previous job descriptions might have preferred say a Materials Sciencce Engr major or a Engineering Physicist or Physical Engineering student, the wordsmithing has reduced the title to General Engineering because that is the title available in their metric of recognized degrees say from a SAT or GRE table of possible degree titles.
Then to make things worse, a lessor capable candidate who had a higher GPA because of less rigorous curriculum, outscores the more rigorously studied graduate, especially between lessor schools and most competitive institutions.
Unless you already are known by your future employer or are the very top of your class, I found the more successful candidates come from state supported schools with good curriculums majoring in the major engineering degree curriculums. Frequently they only master perhaps one of 4 sophmoric disciplines the ABET curriculum has introduced to them, but it's sufficient for them to be marketable. Those who have the more rigorous skills, frequently aren't even made aware of the problems which demand their skills to solve.
This is part of my frustration with the electronics industry which has evolved, unfortunately from more greedy middle managers who have curtailed the enginering professions into a lessor category which they associate with mere 'technical skills'. Most of them are clueless to rigorous professinal engineering standards.
Especially with deregulation and socialization of the industry marketing, the past powers that were to maintain the reliability of the grid, no longer hold the authority. Today you get bozos like Grey Davis implementing new political beasts without a clue to the damage they are causing the entire industry.
There are lots of transformers installed in networks of past robust grids which aren't even mapped or even maintained by linemen who even know how to read a meter. The characteristics of the power networks are much more close to failing in many states than even a decade ago.
Before it gets better controlled, failures will place even more pressure on professionals and when there is already a shortfall of seasoned personnel and a increased workload, the tendancy will be for 'nonengineering management' to solicit advice from tradesmen rather than professionals, resulting in short term fixes, but possibly creating worse system reliability by orders of magnitude.
Just emphasize to the future generations for historicity sake, 30 years ago there was a time where public utilities were well engineered and controlled to produce the cheapest service for mass distribution by a seasoned cadre of professionals. That is not the framework of today's and I fear tomorrow's utility industry.
I found the math needs to be kept current through 4 yrs of study. Once one masters partial DiffEQ and graph theory, or say, Morse & Feshbeck, Methods of Theoretical Physics, through quaternions and tensors or 2nd rank, and masters the associatd equations and mathematical form, it's obvious that most undergraduate and master's level problem solving techniques in Electrical and mechanical disciplines are understood (solvable/approachable). So keep the analytic math going. Next, stretch out to some other mathematical domains such as optimization, graph theory, set/group theory, etc. These help tremendously in understanding compsci techniques and computer assisted problem solving. (digital domains),
WRT the engineering disciplines, most problem solving in the real world os focused on sophmoric level courses. An intuitive understanding of those sophmoric skills might entail learning the subject three times, which more advanced coursework in one of the disciplines tends to produce, but I have found the mastery of sophomore level courses by memory along with memorization of units of measure, and a handful of formulae does much more to assist in the identification problem, to frame problems in the field so that they might receive professional treatment,...is far more fruitful than some more advanced coursework.
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