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Ask HN: Who Taught You Engineering?
I am including engineering as super-set of Programming.
I know there are many self-taught engineers and programmers. However, most often we are taught by some one.
1. An author who wrote your favorite book that you studied from.
2. Your dad, mom, uncle, aunt or elder family friend.
3. Your peer, your friend pushed you to learn.
4. Your school or college teacher.
HN, tell me who taught you engineering. Describe how they influenced you.
- pid-1 4y agoVideo games.
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoLibgen and YouTube
- MaxLeiter 4y agoMinecraft mods
- Mnf3 4y agoI think https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey had similar questions. If not, you can suggest them to ask in a next survey
- jwrallie 4y agoEngineers taught me engineering, in college.
- efortis 4y agoOutside programming I’ve never met someone self taught saying they are engineers. Has anyone met one?
- frozencell 4y ago- Leonardo da Vinci - John Smeaton, first civil engineer. - James Watt, invented the steam engine, mostly self taught - Thomas Edison - Nikola Tesla - Henry Ford - LeTourneau (biggest wheel loaders in the world) - Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (co founded rocket engineering) or Oliver Heaviside (put Maxwell's equations in vector notation)
- efortis 4y agoHow do you know they called themselves engineers? BTW, Tesla studied engineering.
- orsenthil 4y agoColleges and Programs are designed by administrators. Most of the subject / invention itself was often created by self-taught engineers, in all fields. I recollect an Asimov quote. "Self Education, is the only kind of education there is"
- efortis 4y agoRADQ: Right answer for a different question
- eirikr 4y agoMy dad. He was an electronic organs technician (started in the 80s). Later I studied electronics engineering and computer science in college.
- jmartin2683 4y agoI was lucky enough to get hired to work for an old neckbeard type who took me under his wing and spent 3 years making me not worthless.
- gaws 4y agoNeckbeards aren't patient people. Congratulations on finding a unicorn.
- starboyy 4y agoFantasy of becoming a hacker made me google things up. Probably, my father also motivated me a lot, who himself is an engineer. There were a lot of things that made me curious, and alas, I learned things myselves. I would give not all but a significant credit to academia as well.
- 8note 4y agoUniversity? It was an accredited engineering degree
- muzani 4y agoThesis supervisor. It was a speech transformer. There's a lot of complex parts. He taught me to break it down into different parts, like input, output, and splitting components into black boxes. Speech is very complex, so what we did was just extract certain parts that were most impactful instead of getting it perfect. He also taught me to take inspiration from different sources instead of trying to be too clever and retry everything from scratch. There's the meme that developers just copy paste stuff from Stack Overflow, but engineering is really just building on the shoulders of giants. There's usually ego involved in trying to figure someone out without seeing what others have done.
- GianFabien 4y agoAs a kid: my dad As a university student: some brilliant young academics and read a lot + self-taught As a professional: working with experienced engineers from many different disciplines. In non-software field, engineering is more a design, specification role. You identify and document the requirements, breakdown the design into modules and carefully specify, etc the solution. So often what is called software engineering is, in effect, software construction with minimal design. No wonder so many enterprise-sized projects end up over budget and late.
- tamaharbor 4y agoWhen I was six, my grandpa built me a rudimentary breadboard with bulbs, sockets, knife switches, batteries, and wires. I immediately knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer.
- fuzzfactor 4y agoI was a mathematical toddler, an electronic child, a financial teenager, and a chemical college student. That certainly didn't make me an engineer, so when I do have to pick up where engineers leave off, I just have to make it up for myself.
- drakonka 4y agoMy parents, Google, and my code reviewers. My parents in a somewhat indirect way. They let me have a computer in my room as a kid despite complaining about how much time I spent on it. They'd complain about how I didn't want to go outside, but still took me to the library to get programming books or amuse me by looking at my random projects. They complained about how much time I spent playing video games, but would still come home with random interesting looking video game discs they'd found at some dollar store (one of which became my favorite game of all time). Having access to these resources taught me the first steps of curiosity about programming and building simple things. They also encouraged my interests and exploration in various implicit ways, accepting whatever I was interested in and never really pushing me toward one direction or another.