[sdiy] Who Needs a Degree?

[cheater cheater]

David,
> "plodders" who never seem to make the connections
> necessary to synthesize disparate elements into a novel concept, but may be
> very competent engineers or researchers nonetheless.  Innovators rely on
> plodders to carry out their nefarious schemes.

There is a similar distinction in mathematics - the people who state
problems and the people who solve them. Usually a mathematician is one
or the other. Both are extremely important to mathematics, though, and
are valued equally. Being able to understand a big problem is just as
difficult as being able to notice it and put it into words - it's the
same in all kinds of work I think.

I think you have also forgotten one important way of innovation - what
I would call 'colonization' of knowledge. It's when there's something
out there that becomes very easy to reach and it randomly falls on one
person able to do it, out of hundreds, who 'just does it'. Hence you
have things like people racing to patent the telephone, or multiple
companies implementing the same technology in different ways in
parallel without knowing much about the others doing the same. That's
how you get eBay - it was easy so they did it - turned out to be
important, but that's not what motivated them, they did it because
they could. It's natural and linear - unlike what you said; however
there are so many possibilities that a single unit will not end up
going the 'important' way. However, due to the sheer amount of
thinking minds on the earth, but because of the laws of statistics,
those discoveries end up happening.

Going back to the original topic, no, I don't think a degree is
necessary for the kind of work engineers are doing. All knowledge in
engineering comes from some *real-world* needs that existed (and
usually still exist) in the world. Law of Archimedes, Fourier
Analysis, Euler's number e. That's how the civilization works, needs
must. In day-to-day work, especially nowadays with pre-packaged
solutions, there are very few situations where in-depth PhD-level
knowledge is required; you're usually doing simple jobs and everyone
here who worked a year in engineering knows it. And before you get to
the point of *needing* this sort of knowledge, your understanding of
the craft has to be broad enough for you to be able to appreciate that
abstract knowledge. That's why I think learning it before you can
appreciate it is wrong, upside-down and against nature. No surprise
people don't understand unit testing if they've never built a board of
over 100 elements. No surprise people don't understand version control
if they have never worked in a team. No surprise people don't
understand RF design if they have never deployed their design in an
office next to a desk fan. This goes for everything in engineering,
but it's the same in science and mathematics - people try to learn
things without understanding what they're good for and fail; that's
unfortunately the path most uninspiring teachers put before their
pupils, and that's the path most of the unmotivated students take when
studying something. Only the top researchers who actually *get* to
innovate can tell their students, without doubt, what the things
they're teaching about are good for; only the most motivated students
will mix and match courses to learn how to accomplish what they want
to do. The rest will be shoe salesmen.


On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 23:38, Grant Richter <grichter at asapnet.net> wrote:
> I would like to thank both Karl Dalen and Paul Schreiber for their well
> reasoned, well written and mature essays covering a number of topics related
> to the college experience.

Karl didn't write the original post. He copied it from Jack Ganssie
who wrote the essay on embedded.com - Karl's grasp of English and
general coherence are *miles* away from being able to write something
like this, but he's just smart enough to copy-paste it and put his
name on it, 'forgetting' to cite who wrote it, plagiarizing it and
waiting for exactly the kind of comment as Grant's. Way to go Karl.
It's nice to point our attention to an interesting article, it's not
nice what you did. Had you dragged the mouse just an inch lower you
would have copied the author's mini-bio which would have been ethical
of you, but instead you have chosen not to. I hope my comment manages
to make up for any hopes people have had for you. Either way here's
the original:

http://embedded-systems.com/columns/embeddedpulse/9900257

"Who needs a Degree?" By Jack Ganssle, Embedded.com (07/20/01, 03:07:21 PM EDT)

If anyone is interested in more (enlightened!) comments on the topic
of the original post check out the link, it has some interesting
readers' mail sent in since 2001. Jack Ganssie's column seems to be
growing strong and there are many more interesting articles there, as
well as other interesting columns:

http://embedded-systems.com/columns/

Cheers,
D.

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 18:13, David G. Dixon <dixon at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
>> You don't need a degree to build stuff that works. You do need experience
>> to build stuff that works, and that experience is always a mix of hands-on
>> and theory.
>>
>> But you - usually - need a degree, or at least degree-level knowledge and
>> insight, to *innovate*.
>>
>> <snip>
>
> Excellent response, Richard!  But, you left out probably the most important
> ingredient for true innovation: luck.
>
> I agree that deep insight is needed to come up with new stuff in any field,
> and that a degree (and I'll commit myself here and say an "advanced" degree,
> and by that I really mean a PhD) is almost always a prerequisite (but
> absolutely not a guarantee!).  However, I can say from experience that one
> almost never arrives at novel concepts in a linear fashion.  Typically,
> these things are arrived at by one of the following routes:
>
> 1) Happy accident (i.e., discovery).  In my case, I've been researching
> something fairly mundane, and an important innovation has "happened" as a
> result.  My role has been to recognize the new thing as not only new, but
> potentially important, and this requires broad knowledge of the field, in
> terms of both theory and practice.  The last six years of my professional
> career have been shaped by just such a discovery.  Now, of course, one could
> argue that the original decision to study the mundane thing in the first
> place already contained the seeds of innovation at a subconscious level.
> Perhaps.
>
> 2) Additive synthesis.  This sort of innovation is almost always dictated by
> need.  Someone comes to you with a problem, and you set about trying to
> solve it by putting together various elements from your experience.  These
> kinds of solutions always require a broad knowledge of ones field, and for
> this an advanced degree and many years of subsequent experience are almost
> always required.  Also, in my experience, even with an advanced degree, this
> sort of synthesis seems to be possible only for a small subset of
> individuals.  The rest are "plodders" who never seem to make the connections
> necessary to synthesize disparate elements into a novel concept, but may be
> very competent engineers or researchers nonetheless.  Innovators rely on
> plodders to carry out their nefarious schemes.
>
> I think that most (if not all) "big ideas" are arrived at by method 1.
> Indeed, these discoveries often appear as "diamonds in the rough" and
> require a fair bit of further innovation and refinement (often conducted
> with an air of desperation) by method 2 to get them to the point where they
> are reliably useful.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
>