Do You Need to Be a Genius in Electronics?

That's because you chose the wrong career path. Had you gotten into politics instead it would be "the bicycle fell away from underneath me, causing a lack of support, and this was out of my area of responsibility".

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Ah...an engineer that adapts when new tools come out.

Distance to next fire hydrant?

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

A computer won't think for you. Don't you see, a computer is a $2000 mistake checking tool (spice) that takes alot of time to learn. :P

I look at engineering as playing with new toys. I just happen to be fortunate enough to get paid while I play ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     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 http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
                     In wine there is wisdom,
                    In beer there is freedom,
                   In water there is bacteria
                                               - Benjamin Franklin

Behind the mouth hole, there's a big chamber with a sort of piston in the back. I don't know where the smoke comes from, but it blows rings in much the same way as a person does. Chamber fills up, piston pulses, and voila! Smoke rings!

Cheers! Rich

Speaking of change - remember when the total would come to, say, $19.12, and you'd hand them a twenty, a dime and two pennies, and get $1.00 back?

That's back when the clerks knew how to do math. ;-)

One of the most infuriating things they do these days is, when the register displays the amount of change, they put the paper in your hand and lay a pile of change on top of it, where it promptly slides off. This is expecially awful at the fast food drive-thru. In the good old days, if, say, somebody made a $19.12 purchase and paid with a twenty, they'd start pulling coins out "nineteen twelve", grab 3 pennies, "fifteen", then a dime "twenty-five" and quarters "fifty, seventy-five, twenty".

If there were bills in the change, they'd hand them to you last, with the change snug in your palm.

Oh, for the good old days!

Cheers! Rich

Do what you love, and the money will follow. :-)

Cheers! Rich

Slowman.

The last fifteen at my PPOE, the only techs we had ran the ATE systems or were librarians, or such. Before that we had techs to build stuff for us. Some were really good, too. At my CPOE, we have one engineering tech and sometimes he'll build a fixture for us but generally we do it ourselves. Sometimes he'll replace a component for me because he's much faster and I *hate* RoHS solder.

That's about where I am now. I've ended up doing most of the design and the other EE doing most of the ongoing support. Don't know how he let me get away with it, but I'm not complaining.

I would keep a *good* tech busy, by myself, and do the work of three engineers. He went to the research division and ended up an engineer. Did I say that he was good?

That's good advice, except then it doesn't matter as much if the money will follow in quite the way one may hope. Sometimes it follows, sometimes it doesn't. The hope is that enough of it does, to get by.

I've been self-employed most of my life. Others often ask me about it and ask me if I think they should try it -- their main thought being that I must be "making a lot of money" and they think they might, as well. (In this economy, folks have stopped asking.) However, I told them, "You need to have _another_ reason for doing it. If the money is your expection, there will be times when it isn't there and you will make much more working for someone else. And when you do, your own business dies. You have to have another, long term reason for doing the work as a proprietor. If you don't have that reason, you won't survive across the lows." That other reason can be that you love it, of course. In my case, it's because I refused to be an "absentee father" working an 8-5 when our first child was born. They deserved both of us present while raising them. So there really was no choice. Luckily, we survived our decision. But it wasn't always easy and it took a good dose of dumb luck.

Jon

I took the SAT at 17.5 years of age (before entry to the University, no prep either) and got 800 on the math section (597 on the English part.) That fact is probably a large part of what got me into the "University Scholars Program" there.

Didn't change the fact that I was completely unable to 'navigate' the university educational system or understand much of human behavior most others seemed to feel almost at home with.

I'm not a whiz at design, either, and I'm also a hobbyist. Okay, I'm not obsessive about it. I've done a few things that I'm proud of, though. However, I love learning the theoretical parts of everything. I _need_ to understand theory, as it grates terribly on me to just memorize rules without knowing the theoretical details from which they develop and knowing where the gaps in science knowledge are at.

For example, I didn't enjoy learning BJT 'rules' from others until I'd found a source discussing three different Ebers-Moll models (EM1; injection, transport, and hybrid-pi) that included the temp-dependent Is model required to understand the temperature behavior of BJT junctions (Shockley alone obviously doesn't cut it as the sign is wrong.) Of course, that didn't help because then I wanted to know why, why, why. So before worrying about Gummel-Poon, I was on to valence and conduction band, dopants, minority and majority carriers, space charge, crowding and lateral base diffusion (Hauser), 3D effects on models, and eventually a year of 1D quantum mechanics up through the hyperfine structure of hydrogen.

Years later, I still couldn't design a practical common-emitter amplifier. (I think I can, now.) But I wouldn't let myself go any further on practical issues until after digging as deep as I could into theory.

All measurement is mere noise, without theory to give it context.

Others seem satisfied being practical. Oh, well.

...Back to Lie Groups and Algebras, reflection spaces, Coxeter graphs, Dynkin diagrams, and the mathematics of catastrophe theory for me. ;)

Jon

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I agree! That practice is very annoying. I think they do it because they don't want to actually touch the customer's hand. (?)

I was in Walgreens the other day and handed the clerk $21 for a $5.xx purchase. The point being, so I wouldn't get a bunch of ones back. Just a 5, a

10, and some change from the automatic change dispenser near the register. The clerk simply could not figure out why I gave the extra $1.

So of course, my change consisted of a 10, five ones (including the one I gave her) and some change. Got me to thinking: Just how clueless do you have to be to work a retail cash register???

I explain the reason why, while I'm forking over the money. Just so they know. (I don't assume they know enough, though many do.) Then, if they still screw it up, I remind them of the conversation a few seconds earlier. No harm... I wait until they "get it."

As clueless as customers permit (and so long as any errors benefit the corporation, on balance.) I suppose I'd complain, if annoyed. "Or forever hold your peace," as the saying goes. If those opening their wallets provide much pressure, educated clerks will be hired.

Jon

It is quite strange how one could be an engineer for 35 years without understanding the math.

I would be far less surprised that the current generation CAD designers did not understand anything about math.

Jon,

This is a curious subject to me as well. I used to work for a company, where we had maybe one technitian for every 100 or so engineers. Obviously he was not there to do your prototypings, but for rather complicated skilfull tasks. Virtually all EE's were prototyping things by themselves, and that was naturally expected.

Then I joined another company later, where majority of employees were from a former huge(Hughes) deffence compnay. The culture there was that if you are an EE, you are supposed to draw simple schetches of you circuit idea, and hand it to your technitians, and wait. I even learned that you were not supposed to prototype things there yourself because that might jeopadize someone else's job, I never thought about that...

Speaking of board design in general, I always thought that capturing schematics is a vital part of your EE life(you must do it _your_self_) But later I also learned that for some, schematic capturing is not a kind of task real EE's are supposed to be spending their time. Well, different companies have different cultures.

Atsunori

Sounds like a real engineer with a deep understanding of what he does, as distinct from a recently-qualified engineer who hasn't got a clue other than how to press buttons on a keyboard and who is incapable of recognising a software bug that would give him a wrong answer that would be a factor of 10^3 out.

Q. As a mark of respect for the efforts they have expended, what is the correct way to address a recently-qualified PhD?

A. A Big Mac with large fries, please.