Reverse engineering requires a different mindset and somewhat different skill set than “forward” engineering. I’ve met people who were happy to only do reverse

Reverse engineering requires a different mindset and somewhat different skill set than “forward” engineering. I’ve met people who were happy to only do reverse engineering (to figure out what make things “tick”) without building anything new. If it was up to me, 2 years of successful reverse engineering (of a variety of projects/products) would be a requirement to be called an engineer. You learn a lot from working things that you can’t learn from a book (and without having to do the mistakes yourself first…) Just to make it clear: I am not implying anything about Alyssa - just stating an observation based on my own experience.