5 ms·

I'm guessing most mechanical and/or ECE programs still teach "control systems", and that might be where one begins, along with some "signals and systems" and RF

I'm guessing most mechanical and/or ECE programs still teach "control systems", and that might be where one begins, along with some "signals and systems" and RF classes. I suspect that the engineers you know are more computer science "engineers" than people who went through a traditional engineering core.

InitialLastName 5y ago
This exactly. The ABET mechanical and electrical engineering curricula combined would give you all the skills a team needed (perhaps with the aid of a physicist and chemist or two) to build this system. That we have dissolved the word "engineer" to mean "ad salesman at scale" doesn't mean the traditional engineers aren't out there.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  I'm teaching in an ABET accredited program using MIT textbooks and I'm not impressed. If engineers want to avoid learning how to integrate by parts or use the chain rule it seems like a great idea. Arubis' comment above seems on point.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Are you saying that the current program lets them avoid learning those things, or that they should be allowed to avoid learning them? I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      It's more an issue of what the students are retaining from calculus.
      - StillBored 5y ago
        I don't think this is a new problem. Its largely a problem of the way its taught, particularly at the high-school level where professional teachers and politicians choose what is important in the curriculum (and yes, I know a lot of engineering programs require an "engineering calculus" taught at the college). Nothing has changed since Feynman's little rant, if anything looking at my kids schooling its worse than ~30 years ago when I was in HS. Although, i'm told I can't compare my HS education because I went to one of the best HS's for math/science in the country (one of first of what are now called "STEM magnets" long before that term was even coined) at the time. But even so, my calc for engineering classes suffered from basically the same problems of focus. It was frequently hard to tell what was really important vs what was an interesting sidetrack I would never use again. Which is why I distinctly remember a number of my engineering classes having week long math refreshers as the first week of class for things like Laplace transforms/etc or a math refresher TA lead study groups the prof would strongly suggest people attend at the beginning if they couldn't solve some basic math problems written on the board the first day of class. Where I went, the first week or so was add/drop and many of the professors would toss in a "prereq" quiz to scare people into dropping who weren't strong enough in the prereqs as another method. And being an engineering class grades weren't "given". For some classes it was well known that there were going to be a lot of C's and D's because the prof wasn't going to dumb down his material if you couldn't keep up because they were believers in normal distributions (and I remember a physics professor who would show the distribution for tests/etc) and that A's really meant you were excelling.
        selimthegrim 5y ago
        Unfortunately we are told that we have to make engineering “not scary” and “fun” so we get more engineering majors and this is explicitly not to be a weedout class. I do try to work them hard in the recitations to compensate.
        selimthegrim 5y ago
        And on cue I get an email saying students have been complaining my class is "too technical" and "doesn't have enough examples"
Arubis 5y ago
And there's a fair cohort of us (note, US-based perspective here) that _did_ go through the traditional electrical engineering education, learned the hard math and analog/mixed-signal engineering needed to put together something like this, dipped our toes in the industry, and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work. We've strongly disincentivized gaining mid-level expertise on hard engineering.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  > and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work. One thing I realised as a graduate student designing RF PCBs and digital circuits was that the debugger for reality sucks. It's really frustrating to be faced with a problem where you just can't get "more information by recompiling with debug flags" and can't easily (or reversibly!) change the system to make it easier to understand. Totally different skillset, and requires a different method of thinking (frankly, at times, with a lot more thought).
  - Arubis 5y ago
    This is a huge part of it! I spent a couple years doing IC-level failure analysis, which involves cool toys like electron microscopes, ion beams, strong destructive chemistry… a lot of it was neat, but the feedback loops were hours at best, and often days. Compared with having CI just do this for you automatically, or having something like `guard` running locally, is utterly transformational by comparison.
digitallyfree 5y ago
The HN crowd is primarily software engineers and their curriculum probably doesn't cover this. But a EE can specialize in this field with courses in radar systems, signal processing, control theory, etc.

InitialLastName 5y ago

This exactly. The ABET mechanical and electrical engineering curricula combined would give you all the skills a team needed (perhaps with the aid of a physicist and chemist or two) to build this system. That we have dissolved the word "engineer" to mean "ad salesman at scale" doesn't mean the traditional engineers aren't out there.

selimthegrim 5y ago
I'm teaching in an ABET accredited program using MIT textbooks and I'm not impressed. If engineers want to avoid learning how to integrate by parts or use the chain rule it seems like a great idea. Arubis' comment above seems on point.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Are you saying that the current program lets them avoid learning those things, or that they should be allowed to avoid learning them? I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    It's more an issue of what the students are retaining from calculus.
    - StillBored 5y ago
      I don't think this is a new problem. Its largely a problem of the way its taught, particularly at the high-school level where professional teachers and politicians choose what is important in the curriculum (and yes, I know a lot of engineering programs require an "engineering calculus" taught at the college). Nothing has changed since Feynman's little rant, if anything looking at my kids schooling its worse than ~30 years ago when I was in HS. Although, i'm told I can't compare my HS education because I went to one of the best HS's for math/science in the country (one of first of what are now called "STEM magnets" long before that term was even coined) at the time. But even so, my calc for engineering classes suffered from basically the same problems of focus. It was frequently hard to tell what was really important vs what was an interesting sidetrack I would never use again. Which is why I distinctly remember a number of my engineering classes having week long math refreshers as the first week of class for things like Laplace transforms/etc or a math refresher TA lead study groups the prof would strongly suggest people attend at the beginning if they couldn't solve some basic math problems written on the board the first day of class. Where I went, the first week or so was add/drop and many of the professors would toss in a "prereq" quiz to scare people into dropping who weren't strong enough in the prereqs as another method. And being an engineering class grades weren't "given". For some classes it was well known that there were going to be a lot of C's and D's because the prof wasn't going to dumb down his material if you couldn't keep up because they were believers in normal distributions (and I remember a physics professor who would show the distribution for tests/etc) and that A's really meant you were excelling.
      - selimthegrim 5y ago
        Unfortunately we are told that we have to make engineering “not scary” and “fun” so we get more engineering majors and this is explicitly not to be a weedout class. I do try to work them hard in the recitations to compensate.
      - selimthegrim 5y ago
        And on cue I get an email saying students have been complaining my class is "too technical" and "doesn't have enough examples"

Arubis 5y ago

And there's a fair cohort of us (note, US-based perspective here) that _did_ go through the traditional electrical engineering education, learned the hard math and analog/mixed-signal engineering needed to put together something like this, dipped our toes in the industry, and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work. We've strongly disincentivized gaining mid-level expertise on hard engineering.

azalemeth 5y ago
> and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work. One thing I realised as a graduate student designing RF PCBs and digital circuits was that the debugger for reality sucks. It's really frustrating to be faced with a problem where you just can't get "more information by recompiling with debug flags" and can't easily (or reversibly!) change the system to make it easier to understand. Totally different skillset, and requires a different method of thinking (frankly, at times, with a lot more thought).
- Arubis 5y ago
  This is a huge part of it! I spent a couple years doing IC-level failure analysis, which involves cool toys like electron microscopes, ion beams, strong destructive chemistry… a lot of it was neat, but the feedback loops were hours at best, and often days. Compared with having CI just do this for you automatically, or having something like `guard` running locally, is utterly transformational by comparison.

digitallyfree 5y ago

The HN crowd is primarily software engineers and their curriculum probably doesn't cover this. But a EE can specialize in this field with courses in radar systems, signal processing, control theory, etc.