Larkin, Here's mine...
Now show us yours. ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
Haven't seen mine in decades. I think my mother wound up with it. I never cared about that sort of stuff, framing sheepskins and all that nonsense, like some dental hygienist. They wanted me to join the Freshman Honor Society (big hideously ugly ring, deadly boring dinner) and I declined. Nobody had ever done that before, and it became a very big public deal. The Dean of Students called me in, railed at me, and told me to never do that again. I thought about that for some milliseconds and agreed.
I cut the graduation ceremony, too. Who wants to stand in the New Orleans sun, in a previously-worn black robe with rediculous hat, listening to fatheads talk for hours?
Call Nick:
He buys me lunch when he's in SF.
Still killfiling me? Hilarious. Even assholes can be fun.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
...Jim Thompson
Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process. If the graduate has learned something useful during the process, so much the better. The ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable. Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
- Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a price tag on everything.
- Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important as knowing how.
- Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.
- Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology. Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on the job.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
LOL,
There is currently a discussion about software engineers on LinkedIn.
They want to blame the (not in order), the schools, the software (Coders, Engineers, Monkeys), or management for having poor quality of software in products today.
But, here is Jeff stating that he was responsible for his own learning and becoming useful.
Good Job Jeff.
hamilton
Engineering economics is pretty useful, but I don't believe it is on the curriculum in most universities these days. What I liked about engineering economics is it is mostly a course on logical decision making. If you need to kill a project, you need to make the decision logically. I've seen boneheads kill projects with little logic, or worse yet, deem a project not profitable and never start it.
I was home schooled from the beginning through high school (college was the first time I was a full-time student*). What this really means, for the most part, is "self directed study", i.e., I tinkered with electronics (among other things) and learned about it.
*Although one might prefer to say I've always been a full time student of the world. If learning is fun, why ever stop?Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
Quite the contrary. It is required in most.
The EE basics are important. Quantitative circuit theory, Signals and Systems, domensional analysis, control theory, field theory are all valuable, and something that non-college types aren't usually forced to learn. Ditto physics.
On the job stuff is good, but is mainly qualitative.
Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
A true idiot, who obviously got too far, and that totally by accident.
You know less than nothing. You cannot even get the proper operation of a degreaser right.
I've written three RTOSs, a few compilers, a couple hundred or so hard embedded apps, and a zillion lines of various PC-type apps. I just wrote a PowerBasic utility a few minutes ago, to help me edit a manual I'm working on. Without the benefit of ever taking a programming class. Most people learn very bad habits in college computer courses. "State machine? What's that?"
I did this last month, in PowerBasic, to graph the dynamics of a temperature controller. PBCC makes Windows apps really easy. The compiled EXE is 68Kbytes, not that that really matters any more.
Do you have a CompSci degree?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
One of my first engineering jobs was with a company where the chief engineer was self taught. He was extremely good within his area of expertise, but also had many gaping holes in the fundamentals. This caused some odd problems, where simple and obvious solutions and analysis were lacking. I was far from an expert in any of these areas, but my knowledge of the basics was usually sufficient to at least inspire some frantic reading. We worked well as a team.
I was graduated from Cal Poly, Pomona in 1971. At the time, the philosophy of the skool of engineering was "Learn by Doing" which meant maximum lab work. Hands on experience with everything electronic, mechanical, and chemical was part of the exercise. It was important to learn the theory, but much better to have hands on experience. In order to graduate, one had to design, calculate, build, and demonstrate a non-trivial electronic product. What suffered were the general education classes, which was fine with me. However, a few years after I graduated, the college became accredited which meant that many of the great lab courses were replaced by boring general education classes in an effort to contrive "well rounded" graduates. Retch.
I wouldn't know. In almost every engineering position I've ever held, I was expected to function be able to perform everything from assembler to project manager. When I started, it was 90% engineering and 10% the other stuff. When I escaped engineering, it was the other way around. At one point, I needed to determine why production was unable to wind a simple inductor. I sat on the assembly line for much of a day, where I discovered that just about everything else was also being done inefficiently and often badly. I later did much the same with production test, QA, shipping, and field service. I think I made every mistake possible, but that didn't matter because I could make far more mistakes per day than anyone else, and by brute force would eventually contrive something that worked. I'm not sure I could do all that today. Probably not.
Along the way, I learned a few useful techniques and tricks. Far more important was learning what motivates people, what is important, what can be ignored, and how to get things done. My basic litmus test is to judge people by their willingness and abilities to learn new things, not by what they know, or have accomplished in the past. This is where the skools tend to fail. The colleges claim to teach students "how to learn" but more often just teach them how to pass exams. I've found that those engineers and techs that have electronic interests outside of skool do much better at the learning part than those with a pure academic background.
Chuckle. Many years ago, I got overloaded and needed a programmist to clean up a simple name, address, and phone number database for a customer. I hired a computah science student from the local university, who was allegedly skilled in the programming arts. He could probably write his own compiler, but cleaning up someone elses code was somehow an insurmountable obstacle. After several blown deadlines, I paid him off, and finished the job myself. Apparently the transition between theory and practice was a problem him.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
The term is "machine state", idiot.
Wrong. The correct term is "finite state machine" but it's only used by pretentious academics.
-- Bil Sloman, Sydney
No, the correct term is State machine. Idiot^2
I've dignified this as the Obstacle Course theory of education. My supervisor wasn't best pleased when I described my graduate education as a process of demonstrating that one could produce useful results with the bare minimum of support.
h the better. The
You don't need a college course to learn that. You can't sell it for less than it cost you to build it, and you can't sell it for more than the customer can make out of it,
You don't need a college course to learn that either. If you don't know why something is going to be used, you don't know how it is going to be used.
Graduate students are good at that. If you haven't broken something in the course of your experimental work, you are too cautious to be of much use.
There's nothing to stop you buying or borrowing a text-book, or borrowing a colleagues lecture notes, when you need access to academic information. The advantage of doing it when you need the information is that you've got the motivation to plow through the text, and a ready-made experiment in which to test the information you've acquired.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Surely by now you must be aware that when you say something like that, you are going to be wrong?
Why not take 3 seconds to type it into google or wiki first.
Look, it will raise your apparent IQ by 30 points!
The "state machine" is an extremely useful ideom in programming, especially real time programming. The basic type is very simple, but there are whole fields of study dedicated to elaborations of the concept.
-- John Devereux
Oh dear!
Oh dear! is right. I bought a machine from the state once, 10 cents on the dollar. Mikek
It certainly wasn't required when I went to college. I took the course because several profs recommended it to me.
Engineering economics may give you the tools to make logical decisions, which is great in your personal life but in most businesses it's the bonehead that still makes the decisions. The numbers can always be manipulated to get the desired results no matter how sound the arithmetic is in between the assumptions and the results.
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