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With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. > Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Yeah, try doing that with an engineer

With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. > Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Yeah, try doing that with an engineering degree. You can’t. Try grabbing a random Boeing engineer and get them to build a 747. They can’t. No one can. Okay, I should be more charitable. You mean can’t contribute to a portion of the 747 project? Yeah, college isn’t necessarily going to help you much either, and you might be surprised what a smart person off the street can do… there’s a really good chance your boss just has a bunch of spreadsheets for all her maths. Yeah in the grand scheme of things you’ll have to learn how to do that too, but it may not be the barrier it seems. I’m a SW Eng, but did and entry level EE gig, and basing my experience on that. College did not prepare me at all. Engineers routinely enter industry without knowing what a relay is (and we used ladder logc!). Btw, we had self taught non-college educated “engineers”… they'd usually be talented operators that knew the machine like the back of their hands. So that’s basically an ME without a degree. I did a stint on an F-16 project after switching to computer engineering, and it was the same shit. Almost everything was learned on the spot from the veterans or google for general stuff. So yes, I could have worked on F-16 off the street, as well as done EE work and it really seemed like my ME friends were grinding out the same BS. Where are all these super special engineering people you so admire? Some of them do get very specialized education, but we were talking BS Engs. P.S. I do agree about the accessibility of programming. There actually are many topics that are hard to self learn, for example comp arch would be very challenging without a good professor. There’s many others, that’s just what sticks out as “thank God I went to uni so I could learn X”

deltaonefour 5y ago
> With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. I think the analogy works. No single engineer whether out of university or not can build a 747. However a single person built a search engine. Duckduckgo. The person didn't even have a degree in software engineering. He had a physics degree. I see your point. Let me put it this way. Somewhere in building the F-16 or the boeing 747 there is a form of theoretical modelling that must be done as a fundamental thing in order to build it. You need to calculate the flight dynamics and mathematically model the control system using math skills that cannot be obtained by attending a bootcamp. Most of these skills can only be obtained through several years of practice, and a bootcamp doesn't offer that. Granted there are many parts of engineering a 747 that don't need these deep design skills so you can get away with not knowing what an ODE is while being an engineer.
- P_I_Staker 5y ago
  But again, these complicated problems tend to be handled by well educated and experienced specialists. The reasons behind why it's not possible to do for the 747, but is with a search engine deal with complexity. There's far too many pieces for one person to handle, no matter how skilled. For a single person to be able to do everything (not familiar with your examples, so I can't speak to the truth of it, but accepting your premise), the implementation must be sufficiently simple. You CANNOT provide an adequate solution to a slew of technical problems by yourself. There are many topics in SW Eng that CANNOT be done by a single person. Impossible. You can build a plane by hand by yourself. People do all the time. I had a boss that did. Sure he's buying parts and not eg designing the body himself, but no one ever really did. At one point there were no planes, but over time we learned to do it better and better. At every step engineers were learning the ropes from industry veterans, then adding their own innovations. Not that different from a guy putting together a plane from parts. You could point to more complicated areas where harder technical concepts are applied, but that really just works the same. You learn x software, and y methods (again from the veterans NOT from Uni), then you add your innovations. You think Boeing is designing all their parts, on one team? No it's mostly people cobbling together parts from suppliers and other teams, digging under the hood for some things, tweaking similar designs, managing, "business stuff", ect. That's the vast majority of engineering, even outside of software. A high percentage of people won't touch the stuff they learned in school, or just a tiny piece of it. They're getting most of their information from the professional greybeards from within their industry. I do agree that things are a bit different in software engineering, but not by as much as you seem to think. We could probably get a lot of traditional engineering prospects off the ground with an intensive camp. This makes a lot more sense in software for a variety of reasons (IMO mainly because there's SO MUCH of this kind of work to do), but I don't agree that it's impossible in other engineering domains. It seems like you'd have to make a comparison that is not apples to apples, eg. comparing a master/phd educated, highly-specialized ME to an entry level software engineer. A better comparison is comparing a run-of-the-mill developer to a basic ME working in a plant. Things aren't so different there. You can also compare a specialized SW Eng, eg. working on algorithms themselves to the kind of aerospace engineers your picturing. Things don't look so different then, I think.
spacemadness 5y ago
One of the best analog engineers I worked with was not an actual electrical engineer in title. He was a technician without a degree of any sort that worked on electronics projects at home for fun. He’d often be frustrated at the solution the actual electrical engineers gave him to implement and test and would fix the design. Sure, he couldn’t program an FPGA or write DSP code, but he had a solid grasp of analog design that a lot of electrical engineers lack.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  Thumbs up to that engineer. How many of those people exist in the industry though? I would argue far far far fewer than the equivalent in software engineering.
- P_I_Staker 5y ago
  Oh yeah, we had this guy in enterprise. Total hardware wiz. Did horribly in college. All that homework-doing and test-taking got in the way of all his fun projects. So he just limped across the finish line and got a gig from a professor he'd worked with closely. Pretty cool technical work, guessing the pay was so-so, but doubt he gave a fuck.

deltaonefour 5y ago

> With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. I think the analogy works. No single engineer whether out of university or not can build a 747. However a single person built a search engine. Duckduckgo. The person didn't even have a degree in software engineering. He had a physics degree. I see your point. Let me put it this way. Somewhere in building the F-16 or the boeing 747 there is a form of theoretical modelling that must be done as a fundamental thing in order to build it. You need to calculate the flight dynamics and mathematically model the control system using math skills that cannot be obtained by attending a bootcamp. Most of these skills can only be obtained through several years of practice, and a bootcamp doesn't offer that. Granted there are many parts of engineering a 747 that don't need these deep design skills so you can get away with not knowing what an ODE is while being an engineer.

P_I_Staker 5y ago
But again, these complicated problems tend to be handled by well educated and experienced specialists. The reasons behind why it's not possible to do for the 747, but is with a search engine deal with complexity. There's far too many pieces for one person to handle, no matter how skilled. For a single person to be able to do everything (not familiar with your examples, so I can't speak to the truth of it, but accepting your premise), the implementation must be sufficiently simple. You CANNOT provide an adequate solution to a slew of technical problems by yourself. There are many topics in SW Eng that CANNOT be done by a single person. Impossible. You can build a plane by hand by yourself. People do all the time. I had a boss that did. Sure he's buying parts and not eg designing the body himself, but no one ever really did. At one point there were no planes, but over time we learned to do it better and better. At every step engineers were learning the ropes from industry veterans, then adding their own innovations. Not that different from a guy putting together a plane from parts. You could point to more complicated areas where harder technical concepts are applied, but that really just works the same. You learn x software, and y methods (again from the veterans NOT from Uni), then you add your innovations. You think Boeing is designing all their parts, on one team? No it's mostly people cobbling together parts from suppliers and other teams, digging under the hood for some things, tweaking similar designs, managing, "business stuff", ect. That's the vast majority of engineering, even outside of software. A high percentage of people won't touch the stuff they learned in school, or just a tiny piece of it. They're getting most of their information from the professional greybeards from within their industry. I do agree that things are a bit different in software engineering, but not by as much as you seem to think. We could probably get a lot of traditional engineering prospects off the ground with an intensive camp. This makes a lot more sense in software for a variety of reasons (IMO mainly because there's SO MUCH of this kind of work to do), but I don't agree that it's impossible in other engineering domains. It seems like you'd have to make a comparison that is not apples to apples, eg. comparing a master/phd educated, highly-specialized ME to an entry level software engineer. A better comparison is comparing a run-of-the-mill developer to a basic ME working in a plant. Things aren't so different there. You can also compare a specialized SW Eng, eg. working on algorithms themselves to the kind of aerospace engineers your picturing. Things don't look so different then, I think.

spacemadness 5y ago

One of the best analog engineers I worked with was not an actual electrical engineer in title. He was a technician without a degree of any sort that worked on electronics projects at home for fun. He’d often be frustrated at the solution the actual electrical engineers gave him to implement and test and would fix the design. Sure, he couldn’t program an FPGA or write DSP code, but he had a solid grasp of analog design that a lot of electrical engineers lack.

deltaonefour 5y ago
Thumbs up to that engineer. How many of those people exist in the industry though? I would argue far far far fewer than the equivalent in software engineering.
P_I_Staker 5y ago
Oh yeah, we had this guy in enterprise. Total hardware wiz. Did horribly in college. All that homework-doing and test-taking got in the way of all his fun projects. So he just limped across the finish line and got a gig from a professor he'd worked with closely. Pretty cool technical work, guessing the pay was so-so, but doubt he gave a fuck.