interviews

Really? Would you expect them to know how a buggy whip is used if you were looking for a race car driver?

I remember that vacuum tubes were joked about as a "home for wayward electrons" when I was in college 40 years ago. I only remember them well because I played with them at home in my teens and actually was fortunate enough to have a high school class which still covered them. Transistors were still the new kid on the block in the 60's. Seems the training equipment was slow to catch up then as well as now. :)

--

Rick

Funny, when I did my project, I was told that teams were preferred for "team experience". Could it, in fact, be the "terrible truth" that they expect the useless students to coast along on this mechanism -- students who would otherwise have wasted an entire four years, having, well, wasted it not learning anything anyway. The evolutionary moral of the story being 1. students need to be stuck together to pass (insert undertones of communism here), 2. in the "real world" (in as much as college is representative of it..), the same is true, and 3. yes, they do indeed know that students are that awful, and they have no way (or desire) to teach the material they are charged with covering.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs 
Electrical Engineering Consultation 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

Yes, I believe you have it nailed.

I always found the best way to really learn something was to teach it to someone else. So the slackers do serve some useful purpose.

tm

On a sunny day (Sat, 26 Apr 2014 19:23:53 -0400) it happened rickman wrote in :

Electronics is all about electrons. Yes, as many years ago as you and even longer than that actually I worked with tubes, lemme see, the fifties of last century, and when I did my exams tube theory and calculations was part of it. Yes transistors were new then .. S parameters, pages full, do not use those these days normally...

I dunno what an 'electronic[s]' designer (without the 's' a robot (simulations will go there) ) (watch correct parenthesis) is considered or accepted as -these days, sure a rohbud could do some of it already. OTOH those expert systems can really really fail, in many fields.

So history in physics and electroniocs (actually a sub field of physics) is a must. And that includes how a vacuum tube works, and these are still used today in many applications. So if the applicant for the dee-sign-game or whatever does not know the basics, well, just use the application notes of the sJip makers.. Is that what you are suggesting?

Well I dunno much about edu[vac[uum]]ation in the US, but IIRC it requires you to be good at baseball.

And that is why Von Braun got themn to the moon, and why they now need Russian taxies to get 100 km or so up on there for their round the world sightseeing trips. All that advanced electronics has given us: teevee with motion artifacts. no space travel.

0bamacare standard of living in the US way below that in Europe. Taxes way higher than in Russia. .. Ferry Loong Lizt here ... Car recalls, many dead, But on the plus sise, cellphones, just that if you are lucky you never have to work again as you will be on the phone all day. There was a guy doing repair work here, dissapeared all of the sudden, spotted him outside with a phone to his head next to his car.... Sorry got a call. So does the high tech help us? I am not so sure. One big Russian nuke, one big EMP, and industry will have to build everything new again. Only Joerg's old diesel will still work, and my tube based old army radiation counter, oopps, think it has a trans-sister somehere too. To bad, all over, back to start. But hell I tell you in a couple of hours I could rebuild and change that thing into a radio receiver and transmitter. And you with your d*m*d slimulators will have noting to run it on, you callejaculalator will not work, and these days kids do not learn ho to add and divide or whatever, they learn how to call-a-culate. So, hopefully for you 'merricans some older guys wil stil be able to continue your species, but anyways what diffeence does it make.

Spell sjecked

I thought that was Chemistry.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs 
Electrical Engineering Consultation 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

Chemistry does require a lot of though about chemical bonds, and the bonding electrons that create them, but the atoms being bonded are equally important.

Every electron is identical but the 96 atoms (118 if you count all the atoms which we've made) are all different, and a couple of the lighter isotopes are different enough have to worry about that too.

Chemistry isn't just about electron. Nuclei matter a lot, though you might claim that it was only in the way that they influenced the electrons.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On a sunny day (Sun, 27 Apr 2014 03:05:47 -0500) it happened "Tim Williams" wrote in :

Yes, chemistry too. Then electrons rule everywhere!

I still work with tubes. I am a guitar player...

Kevin Aylward B.Sc.

- SuperSpice

I recall an ugly black machine oscillating in a corner of a laboratory. My friend was busy on some work, so I sat and waited, and engaged my attention on that gizmo.

Well, it had optical parts, and a cover (which was removed at the time) so the black color was functional. And the asymmetric shape of its baseplate was an elegant frame-and-leveling support system. And then I found functions that fit other elements of the design. It was a very enjoyable wait; I was certain at the end that the machine was a thing of great beauty.

(IBM Instruments FTIR spectrometer, if memory serves - maybe Phil Hobbs knows the model).

And photomultiplier tubes are still the best way of detecting light in a great many situations.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

wasted

of

know

Google eyed optimist.

?;-)

On a sunny day (Sun, 27 Apr 2014 13:23:49 +0100) it happened "Kevin Aylward" wrote in :

Sure, but the group of people working with tubes everyday is much larger, many Americans and Europeans have a microwave oven at home. A magnetron is a tube, with very interesting electron play.

CRTs are a bit out these days.. But I am sure there are still many CRT based TVs in other parts of the world, maybe even at home.

I keep an old CRT monitor in the attic, its not for sale (below certain price :-) ).

soon to be.

. One guy,

demand.

one

new.

it.

Raw graduates tend to be useless compared to a professional engineer for th e first two years within a company generally, as I'm sure you know. Most el ectronic engineers are surprisingly lousy when it comes to laying out a sch ematic compared to a draughtsman with years of experience!

From my experience, the key is ensuring they're intelligent, have an intere st and passion for developing as an electronic engineer, trust worthiness, loyalty, an ability to get on with people, flexibility in learning stuff no t connected with their interests.

Regards,

Larry Harson

Nah, Instruments was before my time there. I do have a couple of pals who used to work in that division.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Why would that be surprising? Who the hell uses draftsmen to draw schematics?

...which not knowing Ohm's law, after four or five years of daddy-financed partying doesn't demonstrate.

"Draftsman" is like "typist", basically a long-gone profession.

I still draw schematics on paper, but I don't know anyone else who does. All my engineers enter their own CAD schematics, and mechanical drawings, themselves. They do not often do their own PCB layouts.

Sure, but it's not promising when they can't remember how their own projects, highlighted on their resumes, work.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation

Depends. There are associate-level CAD people out there.

I'm a paper guy as well. It's way quicker and more intuitive, and since I have my Beautiful Layout Hunchback to turn them into CAD, it's all good.

Yup.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

We call PCB layout people "designers." It's more than semantic; a classic draftsman drew what he was told to do. There's a lot of strategic and detailed thought that goes into a PCB layout.

CAD entry slows me down, what with the mechanics of drawing, library issues, all that. And I like to scribble design notes on my schamatics, which D-size vellum leaves lots of room for. There are a lot of equivalent pixels on a sheet of 22x34 vellum.

I like my drafting table. I get to move around. It has a view.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Nah, Instruments was before my time there. I do have a couple of pals who used to work in that division.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs [/quote]

One of my favorite IBM PC ads of all time dates back to about 1984 or so, maybe a year after IBM had bought the Instruments division. They ran an ad in Byte Magazine showing a PC with pictures of various peripherals that were available for it: printer, plotter, color monitor, $500,000 NMR system, etc.! :-) :-)

----- Regards, Carl Ijames