engineering graduate school question

I have to disagree a little here. If your goal is to be, e.g., an analog IC designer, unless you're Jim Thompson's kid it's very difficult to do these days without the formal education. The problem is that building ICs requires big bucks, which implies big companies, and big companies are notoriously bad about using academic credentials as the first "gatekeepers" to employment.

On the other hand, for someone who wants to write software, do some digital design, perhaps some power supply stuff, etc. (i.e., decent chance of getting a job in a smaller company as a "general-purpose useful person), it is reasonable to just learn on the job. Perhaps not the most secure career strategy, but I certainly know several people who've taken this route and it works just fine for them.

This may be true for companies with large bureaucracies, but competence has always trumped credentials every place I have worked. And an MSEE typically fails to add any significant competence outside of the narrow thesis area.

We all have strengths and weaknesses in various areas, but I find that the engineers that I hire who are generalists rather than specialists are much more productive.

Mark Walsh

For 25 tears, I wore jeans and flannel shirts (with a sports jacket for the pockets) most days at work. I wore a suit when I had to attend a meeting with outside people for the first few times, and I kept a necktie in my bottom drawer "just in case". I several times turned down offers to become a manager. For me, the extra pay wasn't worth the hassle, and I would have hated giving up my soldering iron. I was much better off doing what I enjoyed.

Jerry

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Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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I always asked about car and bicycle maintenance when I interviewed job candidates. I've rarely seen a good engineer who was a poor mechanic. When quizzing new graduates about technical competence, I asked what subjects they felt they knew best and concentrated on that. There's no good comes of sandbagging someone with a topic he's weak in, and if a person's best is poor, I'm ready to accept his word that the rest is poorer.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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...

For 25 *years*, I wore jeans

Jerry

-- Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get. ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

Jerry Avins wrote in news:pfqdnS0MMaFHmeXbnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@rcn.net:

Thanks-- for a second, I though Question Mark (of The Mysterios) might have reemerged!

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Scott
Reverse name to reply

Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud....

;-) Rich

I have my amateur radio license and all, but at the end of the day, what does it get you? The ability to go out and legally transmit on a bunch of frequencies that you otherwise couldn't.

This is no longer all that horribly interesting to most people, especially when you consider that historically hams prmiarily used those frequencies for conversing about nothing in particular (their use for, e.g., propagation studies, coding studies, etc. has always been miniscule in comparison), and today anyone with Internet access or a cell phone can do the same thing... and a lot more. I have a fancy PDA phone that let's me access any web site on the Internet -- including secure sites -- at speeds in the "many hundreds of kbps" range, and plenty of my colleagues do as well. What does the *typical* ham have today? A 2m HT that's hitting a voice repeater. While I expect it's primarily lack of interest and funds that precludes hams from building similar systems, the fact that the FCC regulates amateur radio with rather obsolete rules -- only certain modulation formats are allowable, for instance -- definitely doesn't help either. (For every licensed amateur with a 2m HT, I suspect that something under 5% have any form of a digital radio system, and probably As a career decision the MSEE makes sense only if very, very

I'd say it's only killed it as a desirable career path for those who really weren't particularly passionate or good at it in the first place.

On the other hand, I can definitely see why someone who's not sure if they want to be an engineer or a businessman deciding to go the MBA route instead of the EE route these days. Plenty of competition there as well, of course.

It's not a crime to leave out some of your prior job experience and educational qualifications on your resume. :-)

There's also a lot more to the country than Silicon Valley.

It really sounds like he should try to find a job outside of California...

---Joel

I don't see this happening. People have successfully argued that many of the old tests (such as Morse code!) were outdated and should be dropped (quite reasonable, I think), but the culture today is very much against replacing those old tests with up-to-date tests in there place. Hence, getting an amateur radio license today is not much harder than getting a driver's license. Even that's not entirely a bad thing, but it makes it clear why hams today reflect a pretty "generic" slice of society (plenty of bad in with the good) compared to the largley "niche engineering" slice it once did (somewhat more good than bad...).

It's not even true in this case. I should know; I work in a big, big multinational with enough bureaucracy to make even a civil servant gibber in terror. We have people from the senior engineering level all the way up to the executive level who don't even have a BSEE and were promoted on a merit/achievement basis.

It depends.

I found that when hiring a freshman just from school, the BSEEs are worseless. They don't know anything, they can do nothing and, what is much worse, they don't want to do anything about that. It will be years and years till they reach the level of apprentice.

The fresh MSEEs and PhDs are lot better in the general; it takes only 6 month or so to make them productive. The advanced degree is an indicator of diligence, discipline and ambition; this is good.

I consider the ability to work independently as the very important parameter. This includes setting and accomplishing the goals and the self education in the course of the project. BSEEs are not ready for that; they expect somebody to change their pants at all time.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

I think you're guilty of making some generalizations as well here, Vladimir. Yes, many BSEEs aren't able to "run a project" (even a very small one) on their own, but some are. Similarly, I've had MSEEs and PhDs whose practical skills were so poor I honestly think I could have done better standing in the an engineering school's student union, talked to a couple dozen students as they walked by, and returned with the best candidate.

P.S.: Since this is related to your area... we did have a guy come in to interview about doing DSP work, and I asked him how he might go about taking some digitized signal he had in the memory of a DSP and reversing its spectrum -- preferably as efficiently as possible. His answer was that he'd take the FFT, reverse it, and then perform an iFFT. :-( That's the sort of answer I might expect from someone right out of school, but not from someone who'd been in industry for many years as he had.

P.P.S.: I clicked on your web page. Shouldn't that circuit board photo you have at least be of a DSP rather than a microcontroller? :-) Or do you do a lot of "hard core" DSP in microcontrollers?

---Joel

No. Enroll in Law School.

This is an excellent approach to separating the engineers that can actually create a product that works from those who can generate the equations that show that it should have worked. I've hired engineers fresh from school at both the BSEE and MSEE level who seemed to think that they should get partial credit for getting a project mostly done to spec.

I have received some offline communications:

I sense some resentment/bias against advanced degrees in some of these posts? I'll stick by my original points: getting accepted to grad school indicates the person is a good student, they can handle advanced material, and they've done at least one major project that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My own MS was in applied mathematics. It has been an valuable part of my education, but rarely used in the last 20 years. I spend most of my days in the lab or the machine shop doing what I love to do. Lifelong learning in a formal classroom setting, on the job, and through independent study is an integral part of being a competent engineer. I send my engineers to classes of varying value frequently. I am currently giving full support to one of my engineers who is pursuing his masters, both through tuition payment and extensive time off.

I have no beef with credentials, but they aren't an acceptable substitute nor necessarily an indicator of competence.

Mark Walsh

RF Radio Interference issue abatement for an ever-changing number of tower sites (and company names) (from as little as 12, to as many as

8,000 towers. And all types: cellular, paging, AM/FM/TV, rotatable log periodics, C-band uplink, etc...)

At the time, I refused to get my Amateur license. (Even at the encouragement of my radio friends, who could never quite understand my aversion to it.)

What turned me off most were the countless "back-to-back Mitrek mobile repeaters", and the ensuing interference complaints & extra workload that would often generate. And having met many a HAM, I just didn't feel like I ever fit into that crowd.

Now that I'm a bit older, and more importatnly not doing interference work anymore (unless someone pays me big bucks!), I've warmed up a little. HAMS are definitely a social bunch, but I'm not sure as a whole, they are advancing the art anymore..?? I think THAT is the "decline" we're all trying to put our fingers on. A lot of HAMS just buy gear off the shelf. And finite element analysis (which exceeds most amateur's comprehension) took over the rest.

That's a far cry from "Honey, can you bring home some milk?"

-mpm

This is the same ways most companies operate today, so it's not too surprising. Indeed, it's quite standard business practice that, yeah, engineering and marketing come up with a set of specs and deadlines, and its understood that engineering will make its best effort to deliver what's agreed upon by the deadline, but that doesn't always happen. Maybe I've been working in the wrong companies, but I can think of *very few* occasions where project schedules as *originally* set were ever actually met. What usually happens is that features are dropped as deadlines approach, and if something *has* to be shipped, if the extra features were based on software, they're promised as a downloadable field upgrade.

I'm not suggesting this is necessarily how things should be, just that in the commercial world very few schedules and specs are truly set in stone and significant "partial credit" is received for getting projects "mostly" done to spec.

Look at Microsoft: a lot of what they originally promised for Windows Vista isn't there yet, since they ran out of time to implement it... but they shipped anyway.

A pragmatic approach with your engineers is to sit down and make it clear what features of a widget are absolutely necessary, which are quite desirable but can be skipped if push comes to shove, and which really are just icing on the cake. An engineering manager who suggests that all features of a widget are equally important and all are absolutely necessary is not one that most engineers will respect.

---Joel

I primarily "joined up" so that I would have somewhere to test out higher power transmitters legally. I'm not at all a social person, although I do enjoy some of the seminars you see at the hamfests and of course just "shopping" for parts. Hams are generally quite pragmatic, so you can pick up a lot more, say, industry-applicable antenna information at their seminars than you would from, e.g., Krauss's excellent book.

No, they aren't that much, and it's understandable when you look at just how complicated the "competition" (cell phones!) are. There *are* hams out there doing quite sophisticated work -- folks running EM simulators for antenna design, folks creating pretty fancy modulation techniques with FEC using DSP, the digital voice guys, etc. -- but it is a tiny proportion of the ham community.

Have you ever had the chance to go to Dayton (the annual national conference)? It's very much worth it, since one trip gives you a lot of insight into how amateur radio encompasses everything from, "I used to be a CB'er, but the FCC confiscated my linear and my buddy told me I'd be legit if I passed this here

35 question multiple-choice test!" to "Yeah, we're implementing some turbo codes on top of our OFDM and looking at processing with a few dedicated 32 bit DSPs or might move to FPGAs if they run out of steam..."

---Joel

In general, I completely concur with this experience. It doesn't take a BSEE (or any?) degree to get ahead in life. The two wealthiest people I know didn't even go to college! (And "No", they weren't born with it.)

I also know a Ph.D. psychiatrist who delivers newspapers for a living. (I am not making this up!) And another brilliant MIT grad from the 60's who frankly has trouble keeping up with Microsoft Word.

I can also tell you that in Electronics / Communciations, it matters not what you learned or did six months ago in school. The field changes so fast, the stuff you were working on yesterday is probably already obsolete. Those with the aptitude, ambition, and ability to "keep up" are the ones who will prevail.

But I would take a slight exception on this one point: I believe manufacturing entities are much more likely to place (undo?) emphasis on higher education. I am fairly convinced this boils down primarily to liability containment issues, etc...

--which for the original poster, you're not going to get to right out of school anyway, so it's not relevant.

Is any of this helping??

Yeah. just what the world needs: more lawyers!? I'd rather be a broke, unemployed engineer than a rich lawyer anyday, thanks. -Clark