Should a Technician do engineering?

say

with

Try this guy:

Licensee Name: SUDDS LIONEL JOSEPH License Type: ELECTRICAL ENGINEER License Number: 15201 License Status: CLEAR Definition Expiration Date: June 30, 2012 Address: 345 CONDOR COURT City: PATTERSON State: CA Zip: 95363 County: STANISLAUS Actions: No

Public Record Action(s)

Then you tell me.

comes

to me.

similar.

it

ran

school.

Well there is "name" schools and there is hard schools in engineering, give me a graduate (or even student) that went to the latter any time. Not to mention that the student gets out of college approximately what they put into college.

?-)

Why should anyone be blacklisted? As I said, I never do that. It's unethical and not righteous to do.

resumes?

tend to listen to

a lawsuit?

If one arises, it

possibly be

you'll

about telling HR

mean you

didn't answer

place to avoid

the

_What_

but

of

equally.

anymore.

that you

rogue

screening

of this

discarded if

race, or

Scary.

is

becomes

serious

but you're

were

you're dense

And now you know why i don't bother with Keith's post any more.

?-)

Technologists to

will be no

=A0They will have

Moreover, in most of the industrialized world, Engineer has a separate licence as well, a lot like plumber or barber. But you had better have the licence before offering your services as such.

to

Not in most of Europe or Asia. Just imagine, you are sitting in a car and it was designed by non-licensed engineers, as pretty much all cars are ... GAAAAH! ... What horror! ... :-)

. ... But you had better have

Only if you offer it for residential services like surveying, building calcs and such. The rest is covered by the industry exemption.

Personally I am opposed to all this license stuff but I think we once discussed this here ad nauseam.

resumes?

listen to

lawsuit?

arises, it

possibly be

telling HR

answer

avoid

you

screening

discarded if

you're

You're a liar (and an asshole, but everyone knows that).

with

very

It is not clear to me how that may be an issue for you.

?-)

They dropped all of that stuff out of our curriculum when they were forced to drop the hours required for graduation from 148(I think in the early '60) to

=46euderal departments are particularly braindead on job classifications, definitely engage your chain of authority on preserving your appropriate title on this.

too.

I know that trap altogether too well. Two years until minimum retirement qualifications, six and the cash flow works.

Then i can hang out my shingle and i do not have to make a dollar on it, not that i expect to do so poorly.

?-)

I hear that, in some schools, EM is an *elective* for an EE degree!

Dynamics was mandatory for us, and it's the only course I ever failed, anywhere. The homeworks were ghastly, the instructor was an ogre, and I had other things on my mind at the time. I took it again in summer school and got a B without hardly trying.

I remember one homework problem: the sun is orbiting the galaxy, the earth is orbiting the sun, there's a truck on a highway somewhere. Inside the truck is a desk with a world globe. The globe is spinning. There's a fly crawling on the globe. All the velocities and angles and such are given. Compute the force on the fly! What we did in Physics was actually enough to get a handle on mechanical stuff.

Thermo was OK, but it emphasized steam and enthalpy and that sort of stuff a lot, whereas I'd have preferred more thermal conduction and convection and electronic-related stuff.

I did take two semisters of power engineering (motors, transformers, generators, like that) that was fun and turned out to be useful. I never studied digital logic and don't think it hurt.

My best course was probably the 2nd year "Signal and Systems" thing, all about spectra and convolutions and stuff.

Most technicians don't get exposed/subjected to all that stuff, and that can be limiting.

Ouch. That's incredible... although I guess they figure a lot of graduating EEs are going to become DSP jockeys and won't ever touch a soldering iron much less an antenna?

Definitely a little over-the-top!

I took two semesters of power stuff as well, although one was fairly useless -- it should have been titled something like, "Building variable-speed drives in SPICE using ridiculously simplified models and perfect components." The other was pretty good, being largely a survey of how to design and analyze various types of motors.

I did have a few digital courses in there as well. Except for one course, there was only a very occasional useful topic -- stuff like asynchronous state machine design and formal methods of logic reduction (Karnugh maps, Quine-McCluskey, etc.) The one course that was really cool was on superscalar CPU design, or more generally "how to do a bunch of stuff in parallel while still presenting a simple serialized interface to the outside world." While I never ended up designing a superscalar CPU, I did deisgn a pretty slick memory controller that gained significant speed via keeping multiple DRAM banks open simultaneously and dynamically re-ordering memory requests.

Given the kind of equipment you're designing, I don't think you missed much. :-)

Agreed, that sort of thing is challenging to learn on one's own; one exception might be some self-taught DSP guys who could tell you all about convolution and spectra in the discrete time domain; no need to deal with those pesky infinitesimally thin impulse functions!

(I've seen some people advocate that university courses might be better off covering discrete-time signal analysis before continuous-time analysis. I can see the motivation...)

---Joel

That's no surprise. Some of the worst soldering I've seen was done by 'engineers'. I was given the engineering sample of an old product to compare to the current design. They got mad because I cleaned up the old solder, because it no longer worked like the original tests. even worse in their eyes, it worked better.

You're right. No honest boss can afford to have someone like you around. It's no wonder the company you work for is in trouble.

However, even good old universities that teach it properly generally fail to explain the practical side of it. Time and again I get into discussions about split grounds. Usually goes like this:

"If you split and from each side there's wires coming off of the system they are bound to form a loop" ... "Huh? How?" ... "Well, this over here gets plugged into a wall outlet which hopefully is grounded and that over there is held by a person who stands on the ground" ... "Oh!"

Yep, agreed. I think this is why those guys like Eric Bogatin* and Howard Johnson and Doug Smith** seem to have no problem fulling up tutorial sessions on such topics.

---Joel

• Now a part of LeCroy, interestingly enough.

** Not a part of Agilent, although they did donate a really nice DSO to him. He used to give lectures all over the place, but these days he has everyone come to him in Nevada. I can see the attractiveness of lugging big test equipment around the country on a weekly basis gets old after awhile...

Are you saying that, being from California, a "ground loop" is something you're familiar with?

Where do "ground loops" sit on the Richter scale?

By bringing Obama into this you reveal yourself.