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

At least JFK was a bit credible 'A man does what he must'. Shortest so far too :-)

Then you don't have good lab skills. If my notes don't match reality, all the math on Earth isn't going to help.

It usually takes smart people with an eye for commercial exploration to do product development. Tell me where you can get a degree for that :-)

Today I've read an funny joke:

A man walks into a petshop to buy a parrot. The salesman shows him 3 parrots and says the one on the left is $500.

Man: Why is that parrot so expensive? The salesman explains: it knows how to use a computer.

Man: Hmm... how about the middle one? Salesman: that one costs $1000 because it can program in PHP and Java.

Man: OK.. just for fun, how much is the parrot on the right? Salesman: That one costs $5000. I must say though that I've never see him do anything special but the other two call him boss.

The thing about a university BSEE degree, is that a lot of time is spent on math, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, electromagnetics, english, psychology, philosophy, sports, dating, and drinking. It's not like a 2-year tech school where they start teaching practical stuff from the start.

Once you get a BSEE (or, for some people, *before* the degree) you can start to learn to design stuff. That takes some additional years. The theory here is that all that basic math and science will, in the long term, be beneficial, even necessary, for serious design. That stuff is something that non-degreed people don't usually get, unless they truly force themselves to acquire it... which is rare.

Degree for smart: N/A Degree for 'eye for exploitation': N/A

The book learnin' required for an engineering degree helps with determining whether something is remotely practical though. There are lots of idiots with pipe dreams- it takes some judgement to determine which edge of almost possible you are on. Of course some succeed because they are too ignorant to know it's "impossible", but I think that's very much the exception.

There was a reasonably-well-funded group that came to me almost a decade ago with an idea similar to the iPad (they had a clever scheme for marketing it.. but that's not important).. the problem was the technology was not there yet. I predicted when something like it would be available, and told them why some aspects their specifications were not likely to ever be met (at least in the next 20 years). Both predictions were spot on, and saved them a huge number of dollars. They had tried to infer from existing products, but were WAY off on the difficulty, because they didn't understand the technology.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

In five years of college, I had ONE instructor who tried to teach us how to think like an engineer. He had a daytime job as an engineer for TI. His teaching a college course was just lucky for me.

Projects fall behind for many reasons...bad planning, bad execution, technological failure, competition, the list is endless.

The fact that some executive way up the chain arbitrarily cut three months off the schedule just so the IPO would fetch a higher price for his founders stock is no excuse. You're the one called into the weekly meeting to have the vise tightened around your nutz. Hiring people with "papers" means one less thing you have to 'splain.

Project management has surprisingly little to do with technology.

For whom? Wouldn't this up to the employer? In most cases, it's probably true. Universally, obviously false.

Amen!

I say that as a *reader* of lab notes. You have to, IMO, go back and polish them... which is what I do.

-- Les Cargill

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.

how 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.

two 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.

Sounds like freshman chemistry. ...just make sure to have a 50% error. Perfection isn't rewarded. ;-)

Les Cargill expounded in news:jm1r67$dur$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Hey Les:

One of the challenges of self study is finding good books. Or perhaps I should say the "right" books for your own level.

Going OT...

I recently bought a used copy of "Design of Analog Filters" by Rolf Schaumann and Mac E. Van Valkenburg (LC 99-035428). It appeared to be a good book with people recommending it.

Because I never studied Laplace transforms before this is already a stretch for me. But I soldiered on...

The problem is that I suspect that there are errors in the introductory chapters. So it is difficult to know whether I've solved the problems or not (given that even the examples seem to be in error). Worse, the (perceived) error is propagated through sucessive examples in the same chapter. I can't find any errata for it.

So I'm thinking I need to invest in another text. Besides the perceived error(s), the book seems to make big leaps in the math in the beginning chapters. This too often leaves me wondering if there is an error or some supposedly well known short cut was taken.

An example of this is on page 81, Example 3.4:

T(S) = s+0.5/s+3|s=jw = 1/6 ( 1+jw/0.5 ) / ( 1 + jw/3 )

Then in Eq 3.59 is written:

a(w) = 20 log (1/6) + ...

but..

the 1/6 is from magnitude( K * z1/p1 )

but the 1/6 is just K. Wa??

Is the 1/6 a short cut? Or an error of omission? Or something I don't get?

Eq 3.49 says it is supposed to be:

a(w) = 20 log magnitude(K z1/p1) + 20 log...

Answers/Recommendations?

Warren (aka snark in AGB).

My boss showed me their "iPAD" prototype from five pr six years ago. It worked (though was about 1-1/2" thick) but no one saw a use for it. That's what set Jobs apart, IMO.

What's on the right there in the 4th line? Can you link to a scan of the page?

log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b), right?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

??? What's with the vertical bar?

Is z1/p1 a 1?

Beats me. I don't recognize what it means by that particular kind of equation. What kind of filter is it?

-- Les Cargill

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.

how 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.

two 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.

I got good at sloppy slide-rule slinging to approximate experimental data. The point scatter was beautiful.

From a strictly "product liability" perspective, judges and juries tend to place undo emphasis on the product designer(s) having attained a degree in the relevant field of work. However, the underlying question is usually one of competancy, and the existance of a degree does not necessarily answer that.

I think in some fields, folks are so bewildered by the technical "know- how", they tend to trust the degree more than the individual holding it.

For some reason, Bernie Madoff comes to mind - but I'm not sure why?

You sometimes see the same basic theme play out in 3rd party testing labs. I know of a whole product line that is absolutely illegal (in the US) when used as intended by the general public, yet the testing labs will routinely place their stamps of approval on the devices, and the FCC certifies them "no questions asked". It really rather remarkable.

Anyway, hope this helps.

-mpm

Reminds me of a woman back in the '90s who wanted help because her brand new, freshly plugged in printer would not print.

We determined that it will not work via osmosis. A data cable (and data) was required. :-)

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

Why am I not surprised?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen