Should a non-degree'd personal do product development ??

What do you mean by "qualified"? What sorts of products? What sorts of *effort*? What sorts of markets?

After a very looong thread on technicians doing engineering work, I want to know what people here felt about the subject line.

Your response has a feeling of, "not in my field" to it.

Not only no, but hell no! Furthermore many degreed electrical/electronic engineers are not qualified to do product development, circuit design, or many things a technician is expected to do. Art

Degreed engineers aren't necessarily qualified to do product development; yet plenty of folks without degrees do just fine.

Diligence, humility, and a willingness to be honest with oneself have a far greater bearing on whether one can do product design than a degree. Although all three of those are a help in getting a degree, that doesn't mean a degree is necessary.

I've worked with plenty of degreed engineers that couldn't design their way out of a wet paper bag, and plenty of non-degreed designers who did sterling jobs.

--
Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
www.wescottdesign.com

Not at all! There are fields, though, where "credentials" tend to be "strongly preferred" -- if not outright "required".

Consider how willing you would be to have "just anyone" practice medicine on YOUR body. Or, design a nuclear reactor. Or...

Note that a degreed engineer is often the *worst* person to design a product. Successful product development requires more than just knowledge of the actual technologies but, also, how they should best be *applied*. A "technically correct" product can often be abysmally poorly designed from the perspective of the user. Or, the application domain it tries to address.

IIRC, Therac-25 was designed by "degreed engineer" :-/

?

The best way to show you're qualified to do product development is to do product development. But if you haven't done any yet, formal credentials are a prerequisite to be hired by big outfits. I worked at a place that considered only masters degree holders for product development, or fresh grads who were willing to get a master's while working.

?

I got a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, and spent most of my career doing product development in electronics, an area where I have no formal qualifications.

I'd say that a university degree can be handy - it can teach you how to look up stuff, though some graduates never master the art, and you can develop the skill out in other ways - but it's certainly not essential.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Of course not. Product development is a discipline with a lot of dimensions. A degree is a piece of paper that says you've been exposed to some learnin'.

Bottom line is that most product developers are incompetent for the job they're doin'.

There are lots of reasons. Google "peter principle" and the "law of large numbers". Look around you and see how many mentors you can identify. Sit through any design review. Or a marketing strategy session.

I once crashed a meeting tasked with developing a marketing questionnaire to determine future product direction. I asked, "how are you gonna convert these checkboxes to product definition?" I was ejected from the meeting. Six months of customer visits later, they had a market segmentation scheme that had 117 segments. And ZERO product plans.

If you really want to be disappointed, sit through the weekly executive meeting and try to identify something substantive. But I digress...

Plot the distribution of any measure of goodness you like. The law of large numbers sez you'll end up with a bell-shaped curve.

Say you need heart surgery. Pick a surgeon from the peak of the curve in the middle. He graduated in the middle of his class from a no-name university and did his residency in some third-world country 'cause he couldn't get a better position.

Is that guy your first choice for your surgeon? I thought not. The really bad news is that half the surgeons are WORSE than him. In fact, the guy you want is WAY, WAY out on the right end of the graph.

Same goes for product development. You want the .1% out in that little sliver of graph on the far right. They might not need a degree, but the fact that they do is comforting. More to the point, they also know a LOT of stuff that wasn't taught in school and how to apply it. Thinking outside the box is a cliche, but most people really are stuck inside a box of their own making. Tunnel vision is the norm.

Bottom line is that most of us are idiots. The guy who trained your boss had no idea how to be a mentor, 'cause his boss didn't either. You've got a graph to prove it. Try to find people who aren't incompetent.

You can hire people to do math. The hard part is hiring a person who can decide what math needs done.

Then, the cost (COM) and price point (Perceived value) balance as well.

A thread about why I ONLY buy American cars, regardless of quality trade-offs and why some here buy a foreign job, despite the damage our national work forces have suffered (and the prosperity of those US car makers) as a result.

The thrashing we took as we went through economizing operational and manufacturing costs at companies back in the seventies at the same time the "world's" economy was "globalizing" has almost killed us.

If y'all had any brains, you'd buy US cars. And no, FORD is not included. Leave them out of your thoughts.

Did you see Bubba's hook shot?

Unreal.

The guy coached himself.

Bwuahahahahahaha!

And passed tests via 'various' means?

Sounds like the "modern" atmosphere to me.

Degreed (or licensed/licenced) engineers, for that matter, are not necessarily qualified to do product development (I would say that the majority probably are not ideal candidates). Non-degreed personnel are not necessarily unqualified.

I am currently charged with making the final decision on hiring for two positions involved in product development. For one, I won't likely seriously consider anyone with less than a masters degree from an accredited university (and lots of relevant work experience and other accomplishments, of course), for the other, I don't really care (just work experience and ability + attitude is enough). But it wouldn't be easy for the second person to ever do all of the first role- they would have to spend years in school and self-study, which doesn't tend to happen once people get families and a comfortable enough income. Nothing wrong with that-- but they shouldn't get all bitter and twisted about it- some things are just better learned in school.

For some things you really want (and in some cases need) a licensed (not just degreed) engineer. A bit of focus on professional liability and law doesn't hurt. There are sometimes higher levels of credentials above that too, which are sometimes legally required. They mostly convey obligations on the engineer rather than any kind of privileges.

Hey, if the product is just combining some off the shelf stuff and it can't hurt anyone or anything much and the amounts of money involved worst/best case are not going to be large, it doesn't really matter- a talented high school student or maybe even a typical grad student might be able to do it, given enough time.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Oh, do I, a NDE*, get a chance to shoot back for once?

*Non Degree'd Engineer.

Yesterday the degree'd PhDs in engineering, were cleaning out a old lab, at= tempting to retain the useful gear. I, the mere "Research Associate", thoug= ht to save the manuals, software, and schematics for the gear, which they t= rashed. I then grabbed the special tooling for the systems.

I also identified what the 30 year old systems were for them, and explained= how to evaluate their functionality.=20

What stunned them was when I located the unmarked HOT radioactive source by= merely looking at the material and its location. I keep a pancake counter= solely for this purpose. I work in some very nasty R&D labs.=20

My biggest trouble is getting past the HR ladies. You know, the ones with a= two year secretarial degree that screen resumes. Once I do that, I can do= very good work for my employers.=20

I often want to say, when they ask why I'm not a EE, "Well, my parents were= married".

Many interviewers are intimidated by the fact that I had a product mass pr= oduced. It gets worse when I tell them it was sold in Walmart, Radio Shack,= and Sears Hardware. It gets even more difficult when I tell them my last c= ommercial design was just bought by the Chicago PD, 8000 units at 8K a pop.

It gets even worse, when I ask them if a glassblowing lathe, a mill and a = metal lathe will be at my disposal. I try not to ask that question any mor= e.

I flunked out of EE math, in one of those tough schools so highly desired b= y employers. I'm not ashamed of it, it was a TOUGH program.

On the first day of class, the lead EE instructor, said: "Look to your= left, look to your right, count to nine, and guess if you will be one of t= he nine we keep." I could not teach myself the math fast enought. The math = instructors were foreign TAs, so the profs did not have to "waste" time tea= ching undergrads.

If my math instructor might have spoke English, and not given us a closet a= s the location of his office, I might have had a chance.=20

How in the world?, asks the HR person, can you be so brazen to suggest with= a ED degree, that you can do engineering? If, their not laughing when I ap= ply.

Once I talk my way into a job, I've ALWAYS made at least several times my = yearly salary for every one of my employers, including the universities. Of= ten just by rebuilding old gear and hitting the surplus places for parts.

How? Sheer dogged persistence, a collection of my own test gear, and a will= ingness to get my hands dirty. Plus a heck of a home library.

Oh, and one other critcial skill... The ability to say "I'm sorry sir, I'm not qualified to do that." or "I ne= ed to consult a specialist" That line comes up when the issue is safety of= life, and a PE is needed for the obvious reasons. The other line comes up = when I get stumped. When I get stumped, I come to S.E.D and other resources= or head to the library.

Its amazing what a ED degree can do when you need to explain things to the = production line folks, and the PHBs/management.

Am I qualified to sign off on a Defib, a civil structure, or a space shuttl= e, NO.

But I am qualified to go work on a femtosecond laser system that costs $1,0=

00,000$ and has over 140 variables to be optimized? Yes.

Funny thing, its been down for two years. Two engineering PhDs could = not get it going... Sheer persistance, and the fact that I knew enough abou= t ADC noise and chillers to find the two bugs, they said "Could not exist".= Took me a month, most of that was waiting for custom parts. Most of the d= amage was caused by their insistance on using 10 Meg DI water as coolent.

Now before you think, he's just doing repairs, that laser needs systems int= egration with four other lasers, made over a two decade time period. plus i= t gets a six axis motion stage. Three of the lasers are tunable, and none o= f them were designed for remote interfaces. The enviromental controls for = the room must be integrated into the system as well. The whole thing runs = at 150 femtoseconds, and my predecessor made some wierd choices. One optica= l path length in the system needs to automatically peak itself.

So some of us make it there by doing scutwork for years for the "qualified"= folks. Amazingly, I teach instrumentation and circuits, to PhD students, a= ll the time. Not in class, of course, but in the applied lab, where their e= xperiment matters more then the theory.

Do I take some potshots at the "real" EEs and CEs? Yes, because they like t= o aim all sorts of BS my way. Usually I'm working late in the office helpin= g them debug their projects, or finding materials sources for them.

I guess I should not think of myself as a "skilled hobbyist" any more, afte= r all, I've been paid to do this for the past 20 years.

Please forgive my poor English, a traumatic brain injury a few years ago to= ok out a large portion of my language skills. Google Groups does not offer = a grammer checker. That is why I have not been posting here for a few years= .

OK, rant over. I really have a huge amount of respect for EEs with passion = and experience. But I still hate "Computer Science" based EE programs with = a passion. If one more kid tells me PWM is the cure to all evils, I'll stra= ngle em...

I'd rant more, but I need to go design a box to stabilize a diode laser wit= hin 10 Mhz for 30 minutes at a time. Thats 10 Mhz out of 640 Thz. I have a= 200$ budget for parts, and it needs to diagnose itself. No Arduino, the di= agnostics are going to be optogalvanic. That means I need to sense a DC nan= oamp change in 1 mA at 150 volts.

Any Questions?

One thing they do like at HR, Sadly, I'm always cheaper.

Steve=20

Wot works about as well as having non-engineers decide what engineering needs to be done.

Predictive math skills help, too. Fiddling until is works is a recipe for bugs and hazards.

--

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

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Why the masters? Unless it was specific to the immediate problem at hand, what advantage would a couple extra years at a university produce? My instincts suggest that, for an electronics design engineer, a BS is better than a masters, and a PhD is swinging negative. People who really want to design electronics aren't going to hang around an academic environment, doing one research thesis for years, when they could be out there designing lots of stuff. Four years is plenty to get the math, physics, and signals/systems you need to design most electronics. There would be benefit from advanced study in specialized areas, like DSP or semiconductor theory or some such.

--

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

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

attempting to retain the useful gear. I, the mere "Research Associate", thought to save the manuals, software, and schematics for the gear, which they trashed. I then grabbed the special tooling for the systems.

to evaluate their functionality.

merely looking at the material and its location. I keep a pancake counter solely for this purpose. I work in some very nasty R&D labs.

year secretarial degree that screen resumes. Once I do that, I can do very good work for my employers.

married".

produced. It gets worse when I tell them it was sold in Walmart, Radio Shack, and Sears Hardware. It gets even more difficult when I tell them my last commercial design was just bought by the Chicago PD, 8000 units at 8K a pop.

metal lathe will be at my disposal. I try not to ask that question any more.

employers. I'm not ashamed of it, it was a TOUGH program.

left, look to your right, count to nine, and guess if you will be one of the nine we keep." I could not teach myself the math fast enought. The math instructors were foreign TAs, so the profs did not have to "waste" time teaching undergrads.

the location of his office, I might have had a chance.

Our electromagnetics prof, Dr Seto, was brilliant, and we couldn't understand a word he said. But he was kind, too, so nobody flunked his course.

Being junior on the EE staff, he also had to supervise the afternoon labs. He left after 5 minutes, and we left after 10. We faked all the lab reports. If you can skillfully fake a lab report, there's no reson to do the lab.

--

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

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Math skills and good lab practices/note taking are key. Good math skills help with NOT making stupid mistakes, and good lab practices keep you from repeating those you do make. Around here I am known for this single line, "Let's do the math." I've been thinking about taking a few refresher courses at the local college because a few of my match skills have gotten dusty, but the basics tend to stick.

Dream on....anyone can, if they have the ability....

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