A young lady I know stopped over here on Friday for a visit. As I understand it, she graduated with several (I think I heard it was three) bachelors degrees early last summer. I know one was in abstract linguistics, because we talked a little about that. I can't recall the others (something to do with languages, as she speaks Japanese, Mandarin, hochdeutsch [German], and probably more.) She keeps looking for work that uses what she trained for, but to survive right now she works 32 hours a week at subway.
Worse thing I ever ran into was I ran into a little 99 cent store, and bought about four dollars worth of stuff. I handed the clerk (who definitely did not speak english!) a fiver. He gives me back another five and some change! I try to give him back the five and get a one, and he argues with me (in spanish!) I finally TAKE a one, and leave the five.
That store was REALLY busy. I have often wondered since then if they sold a lot more than cheap 99 cent items in there!
Come on! I was itching to get my hands on the first IBM PC when it came out just so I could avoid that crap.
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show
I can't imagine designing electronics without regularly getting my hands on the actual parts. This is the corner of my office:
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/DSC01371.JPG
When you fiddle with circuits, you discover all sorts of interesting and unexpected stuff. Using someone else to prototype circuits would probably lose most of that.
I've visited engineering buildings that were 100% offices, no labs or hardware work areas at all. Just computers.
Some companies evolve a hostile culture between engineers (techs are innumerate morons) and technicians (engineers are over-paid eggheads.) Ditto hostility between engineering/marketing/manufacturing.
And if everybody belongs to unions, engineers literally can't even touch a screwdriver. I've had union techs turn a trimpot for me at the DeLaval turbine plant... probably out of business by now.
I still hand-draw my schematics on vellum, because I like to draw and because CAD slows me down, especially if a library part doesn't exist yet. My cad person (aka The Brat) enters them for me. I keep the originals, decorated with notes and marginal calculations and mechanical sketches, forever. All my other engineers (aka Young Punks) do their own CAD schematic entry.
I think one of the disservices that our educational system does for students is to expose them to the many possible careers there are... but not back it up with a healthy dose of reality regarding how many jobs like there are and what the pay (particularly over many years) tends to be. And a discussion about how often the traditional educational system fails, too, and how this doesn't have to correlate that well with whether or not you'll be successful in life.
CNN is currently running a series on a guy who signed up with the Army and is heading over to Afghanistan. He came from a small town, and one of the most surprising things I heard him say was (paraphrasing) "Like many other kids in my high school, I was thinking of going into professional sports. It wasn't until my junior year that it hit me that probably wasn't going to happen..." Wow!
I've had the same experience -- tech departments where there's a certain amount of low-level resentment to engineers building their own prototypes.
Personally, I almost always build my own because I want to be familiar with where everything on the board is (even if I laid out the board myself, going through it and building it a piece at a time helps commit the layout to memory), and I want a chance to actually measure what the thing is doing and tweak if necessary before manufacturing goes off and build 1,000 only to find that we just got lucky on the first prototype and, e.g., 50% of what was built doesn't meet spec and need a few component values changed.
A lot of big companies seem to have woefully inefficient engineering groups, but a good manufacturing group can more than make up for it.
Yeah, most kids have dreams of being in pro sports, or rock stars. Very few have any idea how HARD you have to WORK to get to those jobs. They really don't just happen to you...
I tried to write an Autocadlike program when my high school got Apple IIe computers. I told my drafting instructor (I took the pencil-paper drafting course at the same time) that I don't care about fuzzy pencil lines. It's all going to computerized someday.
Which leads me to think... Is SED the largest international electronics group on the net? If so, I think your ludite engineer is missing out by not being here.
I do have problems revisiting my old (but clever) designs. I look at a schematic and can't figure out why it works... so I spend a day remembering ;-)
Now, when I archive, I include notes to myself ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| 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
Our educational system acts like everyone needs a college degree... when most people don't.
The best thing that can happen to the US... and Obama is ensuring it... is a ball-crushing depression.
Then wages and prices adjust back to reality.
And people with aptitudes... like mechanics and machinists... will skip the college waste.
Skilled folks, degreed or otherwise, always survive.
Publicly-financed colleges should be sold off or shut down. ...Jim Thompson
--
| 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
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