[sdiy] Who Needs a Degree?

[thx1138]

On 5/28/10 5:59 AM, "karl dalen" <dalenkarl at yahoo.se> wrote:

> 
> Who Needs a Degree?
> 
> In my experience some engineers are plodders. They just don't get it. Sure,
> they can crank some C or design a bit of logic but their creations are leaden,
> devoid of style, crude, slow and just not elegant.
> 
> Then there are the superstars, those few who establish a mind-meld with the
> code or electronics. Have you ever worked with one? When the system doesn't
> work, mysterious bugs baffle all of our efforts, up comes the guru who sniffs,
> licks his finger and touches a node, and immediately discovers the problem. We
> feel like idiots; he struts off in glory.
> 
> Who are these guys, anyway? An astonishing number of `em have "unusual"
> academic credentials. Take my friend Don. He went off to college at age 18,
> for the first time leaving his West Virginia home behind. A scholarship
> program lined his pockets with cash, enough to pay for tuition, room, and
> board for a full year. Cash - not a safer University credit of some sort.
> 
> A semester later he was out, expelled for non-payment of all fees and total
> academic failure, with an Animal House GPA of exactly 0.0. The cash turned
> into parties, the parties interfered with attending class. His one chance at a
> sheepskin collapsed, doomed by the teenage immaturity that all of us simply
> must muddle through.
> 
> Today he's a successful engineer. He managed to apprentice himself to a
> startup, and to parley that job into others where his skills showed through,
> and where enlightened bosses valued his design flair despite the handicap of
> no degree.
> 
> Another acquaintance breezed through MIT on a full scholarship. Graduating
> with a feeling that his prestigious scholarship made him oh-so-very special he
> started working in aerospace. To his shock and horror the company put him on
> the production line for six months, riveting airplanes together. This outfit
> put all new engineers in production to teach them the difference between
> theory and practicality. He came out of it with a new appreciation for what
> works, and for the problems associated with manufacturing.
> 
> What an enlightened way to introduce new graduates to the harsh realities of
> the physical world!
> 
> Experience is a critical part of the engineering education, one that's pretty
> much impossible to impart in the environment of a university. You really don't
> know much about programming till you've completely hosed a 10,000 line
> project, and you know little about hardware till you've designed, built, and
> somehow troubleshot a complex board. We're still much like the blacksmith of
> old, who started his career as an apprentice, and who ends it working with
> apprentices, training them over the truth of a hot fire. Book learning is very
> important, but in the end we're paid for what we can do.
> 
> In my career I've worked with lots of engineers, most with sheepskins, but
> many without. Both groups have had winners and losers. The non-degreed folks,
> though, generally come up a very different path, earning their "engineering"
> title only after years as a technician. This career path has a tremendous
> amount of value, as it's tempered in the forge of more hands-on experience
> than most of their BSEE-laden bosses.
> 
> Technicians are masters of making things. They are expert solderers -
> something far too few engineers ever master. A good tech can burn a PAL,
> assemble a board, and use a milling machine. The best - those bound for an
> engineering career - are wonderfully adept troubleshooters, masters of the
> scope. Since technicians spend their lives daily working intimately with
> circuits, some develop an uncanny understanding of electronic behavior.
> 
> In college we learn the theory at the expense of practical things. Yet I
> recently surveyed several graduate engineers and found none could integrate a
> simple function. None remembered much about the transfer function of a
> transistor. What happened to all of that hard-learned theory?
> 
> Over the years I've hired many engineers with and without their bachelors, and
> have had some wonderful experiences with very smart, very hard working people
> who became engineers by the force of their will. Oddly, some of the best
> firmware folks I've worked with have degrees, but in English! Perhaps clear
> expression of ideas is universal, whether the language is English or C.
> 
> We're in a very young field, where a bit of the anarchy of the wild west still
> reigns. More so than in other professions we're judged on our ability and our
> performance. If you can crank working designs out at warp speed, then who
> cares what your scholastic record shows?
> 
> 
> 
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Hi Karl,

Well I find this thread a bit like my history and a few others I could name.

I started building Audio projects back to mid 1960's and landed a summer job
at Fender music working for Harold Rhodes. By my Senior year in High School
I knew how to build a tube pre-amp, power supplies, etc.

It is funny as I got my Master's in Music Composition first then got a BSEE
mid Masters Program in a Dual Major agenda.

By then I was working with Tom Oberheim and Dave Rossum. Dave got his
Master's in MicroBiology if I remember correctly at CalTech.

We had been building Synth products in the 1970's and chips later on.

I think my point is that Education helped but a focus on Electronics in end
products was what drove us forward.

I have yet to see the passion in school to do what we did but there again
programmable logic also opens many new doors we did not have.

I do most of my work in assembler as C compilers were not even functional on
DSP's until much later.

Working with Wolfgang Palm was interesting as his tech's were better than
many Engineers I have worked with. Difference in German education vs US
education perhaps.

I wish we had more apprentis positions available. It would be fun to teach
others the craft of fine audio.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards,

Terry