4 ms·

Somewhat different experience: I was a hiring manager at a large tech company where we needed mostly hardware engineers. Company was very big on credentials, so

Somewhat different experience: I was a hiring manager at a large tech company where we needed mostly hardware engineers. Company was very big on credentials, so we always recruited from top unis. We had just a handful of "partial-degreed" engineers who had often worked their way up from electronic technician positions while attending college part time. Turns out we needed both types. The top credentialed engineers did lovely designs but never got any of their hardware to actually work. The "mechanics" always had to come in to fix things. Added: It really was quite like this Dilbert comic https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-21 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-21

jononor 7y ago
Why exactly did you need those credentialed designers that churned out non-working "lovely" designs?
- mring33621 7y ago
  Not OP, but sometimes 'lovely' designs also nearly work and all that is needed to bridge the final gap is knowledge earned through practical experience.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    This happens in construction too. Architect/engineer sign off on a design, the "no education" guy swinging the hammer has to make adjustments in the field to get it to actually work.
    - brewtide 7y ago
      "i'll draw it in later after you have built it".
    - geomark 7y ago
      I worked for my dad a couple summers when I was a teenager. He was a contractor doing wood frame construction in southern California. I never heard him swear so much as when the plans called for something that was next to impossible to build. Later on I did some framing work on my own. Ran into several cases where the designer completely ignored the dimensional instability of wood due to changes in humidity. Often that was really hard for the "no education" guys to fix.
  - geomark 7y ago
    Yes, it was mostly this. The sharp credentialed engineers could design, model and simulate complex systems like nobody's business. But, of course, models are never quite exact representations of the real world, especially when it comes to hardware. So the engineers with pracitical knowledge would look at the hardware and (usually rather quickly) spot missing decoupling, debouncing, metastability, sneak paths, etc issues.
- sbergot 7y ago
  The hability of coming up with high level designs that solve a complex problem does not always include the debugging/troubleshooting skills needed to make something actually work well.
- hguant 7y ago
  Not OP, but in my experience it's the customer. Some contracts (mostly government) have a strict definition of what an FTE is/can be. Because it's the government, instead of having a nuanced understanding of the field, they treat everything as a series of buckets - "you have a college degree? You're Engineer II. No degree? Clearly Engineer I." There's some wiggle room with technical experience and whatnot, but it's tricky to do. So, when the government customer puts out a request for bids, they'll say something like "we want a system that does X, Y, Z, and we expect this to require 3 FTE 2s and a part time PM for 6 months" - generally establishing the upper limit of what they'll pay/how many hours should be billed to the project. (This gets interesting when you realize that the customer doesn't really know how the sausage is made, so they talk informally with contractors to get a feel for what's possible/go to a team they've worked with before, get a feeler for what the requirements should be for a project/what to expect cost wise, and only then put out the formal request. 9/10 this means that the government PM has a team they want in mind, and basically has the team write their own requirements sheet). Any way, long story short the credentialed designers look good on a contract, and produce valuable designs that can get approved/validated by the Powers That Be, while the mechanics who implement things come up with the product. Both are providing value, just in different ways. Also, sometimes you need to start with a lovely design, even if you know it will never survive production.
itronitron 7y ago
reminds me of this one... https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-09 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-09

jononor 7y ago

Why exactly did you need those credentialed designers that churned out non-working "lovely" designs?

mring33621 7y ago
Not OP, but sometimes 'lovely' designs also nearly work and all that is needed to bridge the final gap is knowledge earned through practical experience.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  This happens in construction too. Architect/engineer sign off on a design, the "no education" guy swinging the hammer has to make adjustments in the field to get it to actually work.
  - brewtide 7y ago
    "i'll draw it in later after you have built it".
  - geomark 7y ago
    I worked for my dad a couple summers when I was a teenager. He was a contractor doing wood frame construction in southern California. I never heard him swear so much as when the plans called for something that was next to impossible to build. Later on I did some framing work on my own. Ran into several cases where the designer completely ignored the dimensional instability of wood due to changes in humidity. Often that was really hard for the "no education" guys to fix.
- geomark 7y ago
  Yes, it was mostly this. The sharp credentialed engineers could design, model and simulate complex systems like nobody's business. But, of course, models are never quite exact representations of the real world, especially when it comes to hardware. So the engineers with pracitical knowledge would look at the hardware and (usually rather quickly) spot missing decoupling, debouncing, metastability, sneak paths, etc issues.
sbergot 7y ago
The hability of coming up with high level designs that solve a complex problem does not always include the debugging/troubleshooting skills needed to make something actually work well.
hguant 7y ago
Not OP, but in my experience it's the customer. Some contracts (mostly government) have a strict definition of what an FTE is/can be. Because it's the government, instead of having a nuanced understanding of the field, they treat everything as a series of buckets - "you have a college degree? You're Engineer II. No degree? Clearly Engineer I." There's some wiggle room with technical experience and whatnot, but it's tricky to do. So, when the government customer puts out a request for bids, they'll say something like "we want a system that does X, Y, Z, and we expect this to require 3 FTE 2s and a part time PM for 6 months" - generally establishing the upper limit of what they'll pay/how many hours should be billed to the project. (This gets interesting when you realize that the customer doesn't really know how the sausage is made, so they talk informally with contractors to get a feel for what's possible/go to a team they've worked with before, get a feeler for what the requirements should be for a project/what to expect cost wise, and only then put out the formal request. 9/10 this means that the government PM has a team they want in mind, and basically has the team write their own requirements sheet). Any way, long story short the credentialed designers look good on a contract, and produce valuable designs that can get approved/validated by the Powers That Be, while the mechanics who implement things come up with the product. Both are providing value, just in different ways. Also, sometimes you need to start with a lovely design, even if you know it will never survive production.

itronitron 7y ago

reminds me of this one... https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-09 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-09