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

do

to do.

Boy, howdy! The same applies to other engineering fields.

nb

That happened to me at OmniComp/GenRad. We did so well with cheap high-performance, that we gave bonuses to everyone, while Concord was floundering. So Concord closed us down :-( ...Jim Thompson

Yup, we got closed down as well. I almost knew this was going to happen. Which is why I wasn't super cheerful when we "won".

"A man's gotta know his limitations" - Clint Eastwood.

-- Les Cargill

(Handwritten) notes are always wrong. Keeping the math chops fresh is just (IMO) best served as self-study.

-- Les Cargill

They help, but I don't think they're a deal-breaker. Humility and a willingness to be honest with oneself will lead one to get help if one's predictive math skills aren't up to snuff.

Predictive math skills and a swelled head will, however, lead to disaster.

ttdesign.com

Which is why good systems engineers often make good managers: the best bit of advise I ever got as a systems engineer is that a good systems engineer doesn't know everything: he just knows who to ask in every case.

That is just so "corporate". You know that a company is too big when stomping on your fellow divisions becomes more important than stomping on the external competition. (Note that a two-person company can be too big by this definition, and a 10,000 person company can be doing just A-OK).

"A man's got to do what a man's got to do" - John Wayne

:-)

Perhaps on the latter, because those headed for the academic track don't pay as much attention to things that matter in non-academic environments. But it's not an advantage to have someone that can only offer a blank look when tensor calculus or quaternions come up in the course of discussions, or doesn't understand the subtleties of digital signal analysis and filtering. That said, it seems it is quite possible to plod through the higher math without ever being able to confidently (and correctly) apply the knowledge.

Graduate level courses can cover a lot of useful stuff, or not. It is hard to argue that a deeper knowledge of control or communication theory is a disadvantage, and another course or two can get you a lot further in.

Most of the folks who are really interested in doing electronic design aim themselves at IC design.

Bingo! Some of my clients are excellent examples. They do not always understand analog stuff to well but they know over which fence to throw it so it gets done :-)

It was a good company alright but it did become a bit big for my taste. Essentially I agreed with the closure of our satellite location because they could do all the R&D just as well at headquarters. And not that I have any problem working at a big company but I prefer a consulting relationship.

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

ed how to evaluate their functionality.

by merely looking at the material and its location. I keep a pancake =A0cou= nter solely for this purpose. I work in some very nasty R&D =A0labs.

a two year secretarial degree that screen resumes. =A0Once I do that, I ca= n do very good work for my employers.

re married".

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

d a metal lathe will be at my disposal. =A0I try not to ask that question a= ny more.

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

to your 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. T= he math instructors were foreign TAs, so the profs did not have to "waste" = time teaching undergrads.

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

th a ED degree, that you can do engineering? If, their not laughing when I = apply.

my yearly salary for every one of my employers, including the universities= . Often just by rebuilding old gear and hitting the surplus places for part= s.

llingness to get my hands dirty. Plus a heck of a home library.

I need to consult a specialist" =A0That line comes up when the issue is saf= ety of life, and a PE is needed for the obvious reasons. The other line com= es up when I get stumped. When I get stumped, I come to S.E.D and other res= ources or head to the library.

e production line folks, and the PHBs/management.

tle, NO.

,000,000$ and has over 140 variables to be optimized? =A0Yes.

s could not get it going... Sheer persistance, and the fact that I knew eno= ugh about ADC noise and chillers to find the two bugs, they said "Could not= exist". =A0Took me a month, most of that was waiting for custom parts. Mos= t of the damage was caused by their insistance on using 10 Meg DI water as = coolent.

ntegration with four other lasers, made over a two decade time period. plus= it gets a six axis motion stage. Three of the lasers are tunable, and none= of them were designed for remote interfaces. =A0The enviromental controls = for the room must be integrated into the system as well. =A0The whole thing= runs at 150 femtoseconds, and my predecessor made some wierd choices. One = optical path length in the system needs to automatically peak itself.

d" folks. Amazingly, I teach instrumentation and circuits, to PhD students,= all the time. Not in class, of course, but in the applied lab, where their= experiment =A0matters more then the theory.

to aim all sorts of BS my way. Usually I'm working late in the office help= ing them debug their projects, or finding materials sources for them.

ter all, I've been paid to do this for the past 20 years.

took out a large portion of my language skills. Google Groups does not offe= r a grammer checker. That is why I have not been posting here for a few yea= rs.

Glad to have you back Steve, I've missed your posts. Your grammer seems fine to me.. but then I figure English is my second language. (I have no first language.)

I think Jim Williams was degreeless also. Didn't stop him.

n and experience. But I still hate "Computer Science" based EE programs wit= h a passion. If one more kid tells me PWM is the cure to all evils, I'll st= rangle em...

ithin 10 Mhz for 30 minutes at a time. Thats 10 Mhz out of 640 Thz. =A0I ha= ve a 200$ budget for parts, and it needs to diagnose itself. No Arduino, th= e diagnostics are going to be optogalvanic. That means I need to sense a DC= nanoamp change in 1 mA at 150 volts.

Wavelength of 470 nm.? (I didn't know DL's came in that range.) Do you have some spectral line to lock on to? Some sort of Fabry-Perot cavity maybe?

George H.

Well someone else actually decided what engineering was to be done, he managed the engineers including this person or persons. That's an orthogonal skill set, very, very valuable, but orthogonal, IMHO.

That's an indication of a severely dysfunctional organization (that it took them by surprise). They should have known this organically at the managment level. Not that uncommon, unfortunately, and sometimes deliberate (the lack of knowledge).

He did not hesitate to make technical decisions, for example on system architectures. But only after he got a good dose of information and opinions from the guys (us).

The organization was not dysfunctional at all. It was a nice company, I liked it a lot to work there. Otherwise I wouldn't have because there were plenty of other opportunities. Such surprises are also quite normal. You can simulate stuff until the cows come home but in the end the real performance won't be known until the rubber meets the road.

This is one thing that Apple does well- they're not afraid to cannibalize existing products with new cheaper products. Eventually competition will do it anyway, so you might as well do it yourself.

I have noticed that trend. There's not so many people around who put parts on boards, or at least do it well.

I much prefer customer-client politics than employee-management politics, myself. It's much more open and on the table, and there's fewer people that wander around claiming that they "don't play politics" at the same time that they're subtly undermining the people around them.

Company politics is why I'm a loner. It can be quite disconcerting to find that a "friend" was not so subtly sabotaging me in the eyes of upper management. Fortunately an upper manager told me what was going on and asked if I wanted him fired. "Yep" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Sounds like what happened to the PSpice team after Cadence... ;-)