EE rant

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I've been thinking for some time now that EE schools don't turn out people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

Reply to
John Larkin
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Electronic engineers don't "like" electricity - they just manipulate it to get it do do what they want it to.

We are just one more sort of tool-using animal. The real competition for electronics is molecular biology - mRNA beats transistors hands down. Unless you want sub-picosecond timing ...

Reply to
Anthony William Sloman

On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:04:49 -0800) it happened John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

In the EE school I was in it was known that only 'hobbyists' would pass the final exams. The dropout in the first year was very very very high. For the 30 or so in the first year, I was 1 of the 4 people at the final graduation party in the local pub,

Granny's radio with 10 transistors? You mean those old radio bulbs?

Give me some and I will build you a radio or TV (if you can find an old CRT). I will wind the coils and transformers too, no calculations needed.. Because I DID all that. Wait for that big EMP, likely 2024, keep your SDcards in an RF proof box :-) Oh yes, protect your solar panels too, also against the hurricanes etc.. OK digital TV is out, even with transistors, so after the EMP we will have to go back to more simple AM FM (FM is simpler) radio.

Oh I can do software too .. I AM THE GREATEST pity after the EMP no more sjips to run it And then thank Got no more microsore bloat.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Although Microshiv kills by a thousand cuts it's hard for me to earn $$$ without it. There was a similar "gatekeeper" at my EE college. He was a mere Instructor with heavy EE experience. He taught a couple of mandatory sophomore courses. Regardless of major, all students were required to pass his classes. The first day of class he announced his primary goal to wash out as many as possible. And he did. Most former students didn't make it to the Senior pub party. Danke,

Reply to
Don

"And to make it your life, there has to be a lot of high-status, high-wage, high-interest jobs to do at the end."

Software-startup culture is glamorous in its way, the young kids can very quickly feel like they're working on something novel.

The EE jobs available tend to be at established companies, like Northrop Grumman or Nexteer Automotive or Fisher Scientific or BAE systems etc, you can go down the list on job sites and see what they are.

Biggest complaints you hear from EEs about working places like that is that the jobs aren't particularly high status. They don't pay particularly great. The "company culture" sucks. And worst of all the job responsibilities tend to be rigid and the work not particularly interesting.

Reply to
bitrex

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"I am an Air Force pilot with a BS in business management. My end goal is to become a test pilot. In order to do so I need a technical degree. For the Air Force to pay for it I need a masters (military tuitions assistance). A colonel on the selection board recommended I do electrical engineering as the trend seems to be adding more and more electronics to airplanes and test beds."

Lol, jesus

Reply to
bitrex

Coding is an easily acquited skill. It requires no math, no science, little discipline, and is a tightly bound, artificial abstraction layer with little visibility up or down.

Electronic design and especially analog design distresses most people. They are intimidated by the endless possibilities.

And most people are afraid of electricity. I got an emergency call yesterday to help a giant rugged construction guy take some pendant lamps down from a hair salon. He's terrified of getting shocked. I've had EE interns who won't touch a PC board that is known to be running off 3.3 volts.

The big aerospace companies used to design board-level electronics but aren't replacing the old-timers who could. They outsource more now, fine with me.

Some people care about status, and some people just enjoy being left alone to make things that work.

Of course, a really good EE manufacturers his own status, if he/she cares.

Reply to
John Larkin

From that same post,

"QUESTION: which upper level math courses did you find most applicable to your major or masters courses. Are there any other free/cheap courses that can set me up for success in Power Electronics and/or Embedded systems?"

I don't think that higher-level math courses set people up for success in any EE field except academics.

Reply to
John Larkin

I've been thinking for some time now that EE schools don't turn out

...detestable sociopaths, some fraction of whom worked in engineering long ago. (FIFY)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
Phil Hobbs

... or don't want a blood clot. A friend of mine got some in the lungs after his 2nd COVID booster.

Reply to
Joerg

It's almost always been that way. Except in the last century it was ham radio. I learned way more useful stuff that way that in years at the university.

At my university the drop-out rate (start to degree) was at times 83%.

In the old days that also required a crate of beer and some Ouzo :-)

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Reply to
Joerg

I think that electrical instincts should be acquired young. Then the college courses add the theory. That's why the lego/maker/Raspberry Pi thing is interesting.

Too many kids selected an EE degree based on some high school councelor's advice, or dreams of a tidy income. Too late.

Barbaric. Rum and Coke is the ideal balance. The rum numbs your frontal cortex and the sugar and caffeine power up the better parts.

Reply to
John Larkin

Nah, plenty of opportunity at very small companies. Both of my positions as an employee were at small companies. I would not have thrived at big ones and would have become too much of a rebel there because the thing I hate most is bureaucracy.

What they usually hate the most are meetings that drone on and on.

Becoming self-employed fixes just about any of the above. Hence that's what I did most of my life.

Reply to
Joerg

On a sunny day (Mon, 2 Jan 2023 14:43:50 -0000 (UTC)) it happened "Don" snipped-for-privacy@crcomp.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@crcomp.net:

My website hosting company "Godaddy.com" moved to Microsoft for my email. What a lot of crap that is!! The old pop-email no longer works, pop-email took a second here for incoming to add to my email system that goes back to 1998. Now I have to log in to that Microsore shit, a totally unsecure system with all your emails on a microsoft server, slow as a snail, and you need multiple clicks in a browser to read any incoming email and no way to add it to my pine (alpine) database as created by fetchmail for pop email. So I stopped auto-renewal, godaddy helpdesk sucks, keeps you hanging in the phone for hours saying wait time is 2 minutes every 2 minutes, error messages, Could just be US degeneration too. Silly pop up message, asking the same question more than once... That reminds me of that trip I took to where was it? New York or ?? Drove all the way from the North to Schiphol airport, luggage, checked in, guy comes to me and asks me questions if I was carrying bombs or something. He asked the same question over and over again (I did say 'no' once). Then I told him to f*ck of and give me the money for the ticket back as I did not want to fly with idiots who repeat the same question again and again.... The effect was interesting, he went away and was replaced by some female security women who kept hanging around me all the time... Went through security check and while waiting for the boarding met some guys who were heading to the same thing I was heading, and we made jokes about terrorists,,, Then that security women said: "Hey do you know each other?" She left... I took a bit of risk but really ... The way airlines sometimes treat people is disgusting. Why me? I have been taken of a train arriving in the UK because they thought I was an IRA guy bringing a bomb. Try bringing your own made electronics through airport security... So microsore email and software is like that, just annoying and totally un-needed not-secure slow bloated crap .

I have an other pop-email provider now, one I had for 10 years but now made primary. Probably move the website to South America or Panama or Europe. February is when panteltje.com should now go down (when next payment is due). Godaddy will never be back.

Seems I did not show up much the last year, teacher joked 'hey nice to see you again' but did 2 exams at once (one other one too), somehow 'tronics was never that hard for me.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Yesterday a dinner guest brought a bottle of Ouzo. I hadn't had any for decades and it almost felt like a time machine had ported me back to university days.

Reply to
Joerg

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Well, if she was pretty ... :-)

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Try these guys:

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I switched in spring last year. Best provider I ever had. One time I just had a little question and they answered same day even though it was a Sunday.

We had one professor like that as well who prided himself on how many students he had "weeded out".

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Reply to
Joerg

On a sunny day (Mon, 2 Jan 2023 10:56:04 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

That is why I never got any covid shots. Medical is one interest of me, I think I also know why I never get colds. I am waiting for the Walmart 'make your own dino' kit :-) I did work in a big university hospital on DNA related equipment and mass-spectrometers and so on. Maybe, if I live long enough.. and have the resources, its an idea... make your own dino. Cannot be that hard create life, must just be a natural process. Nature is self-assembling IMNSHO , from CERN's (:-) ) elementary ... particles to atoms to molecules .. to us ... to the things we make!! So smartphones are a result of self-assembling too. There was an interesting article a while back on sciencedaily.com that mentions improvement in neural net software by using _COMMUNICATION_ saying that is the essence,,, even electrons are aware of other electrons...

I am really into coffee the last few days .. seems it makes me type a lot...

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Mon, 2 Jan 2023 11:39:01 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

She was OK, could get along with here...

Thank you, will check them out.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Sensing, measuring, and filtering get a lot of utility from Fourier transform techniques; it's hard to imagine success in phase-shift measurement without using a F-transform. Absence of high-level math courses sets people up for failure, but they won't ever know that.

Reply to
whit3rd

Yes. I made my living as a embedded-realtime software developed for a few decades. My colleagues and I were all EEs who took a wrong turn, and the language of choice was assembler, or machine code, on the iron. The pure computer-science folk were completely baffled by embedded real time.

Doubly true of EEs who know only digital systems - transmission lines are their waterloo. I've had EEs like that insist that they could send unrelated signals on the two center conductors of a long shielded twisted-pair cable.

Yeah.

My experience is that the big aerospace companies perform lots of real cutting-edge design, but not for anything they can just buy, because their overhead is far too high make replicating already available products worthwhile.

There are a lot of boring but necessary jobs in aerospace.

Also true.

Joe Gwinn

Reply to
Joe Gwinn

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