[sdiy] Can your *really* teach "Engineering"?

[Veronica Merryfield]

Whilst working in a large software company a few years back, a  
discussion was had over the course of a few months as to why many  
software engineers we were seeing mostly at interview didn't seem to  
have the knack and if there was some quick way to discern this.

The consensus boiled down to what does someone do outside of work and  
what did they play with or do as a child. Lego and meccano rather than  
video games and tv seemed to be a fairly universal distinction and  
whilst we could base our interviewing questions on this solely, we did  
start asking if it wasn't on the resume/cv.

I think it is a combination of things, being in us to start with and  
being able to explore and tinker when we are young.

Veronica

On 22-Aug-09, at 12:03 AM, mailing gigaspeeds wrote:

> Jerry Gray-Eskue wrote:
>> Can your *really* teach "Engineering"?
>>
> I was born with it, it's a state of mind, always willing to find out  
> stuff, tinker etc...
> My whole childhood is based on tinkering, finding out stuff (lego  
> technics & mecano as a kid, @ age 9 started electronics with my  
> steph dad (he repaired tv's & stuff) @ age 15 started to tinker with  
> motorcycles, didnt know anything about them though but was  
> fascinated by 2 strokes that made 13500 rpm's :p, but that didnt  
> last long ( a year later a Ducati store asked me to work for them  
> because I was repairing all bikes in the neighborhood)...
>
> I also have this weird mentality of not being afraid to learn a  
> subject that seems to be hard for other people, I just tell myself :  
> It was made by men, that means I can understand it...
> So far it always helped me out where other people would say *this is  
> too hard for me, I've not been teached to learn this stuff* ...
> As of now I'm 27 year's old, a succesfull unix system engineer (also  
> started with linux 6 years ago as a hobby...), work for banks and  
> other big companies...
> And now I've decided to do sdiy as a hobby because I do too much  
> linux/unix @ work :p, it doesn't feel as a hobby anymore...
>
> cheers