Engineer in a Box? 351
Dr.Luke writes "Robert Lucky in a IEEE Spectrum Online article laments the state of today's engineering as progressively more removed from the "real" reality of tinkering and soldering "in a big musty laboratory" like Thomas Edison as engineers become more and more reliant on software tools and simulations. He fears that "math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us" and that eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0. What do you think?"
What do I think? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's a damn shame that we don't build everything by stacking up blocks of stone like our ancestors did.
Re:What do I think? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What do I think? (Score:2)
When you need to find the sine of 1.395, do you use a scientific calculator, or do you sum the series?
math being a team sport
Go rent Apollo 13. There's a priceless scene in there when several engineers do a bit of calculus; each verifies the result. (granted, they did it by hand...but they had to because their computers were so primitive). Go try to publish a proof without peer review. For that matter, try to see farther than others without standing on the shoulders of giants. Math IS a team sport. If you don't understand that, then you've never played a team sport. Football is pretty individualistic in that each player has a individually assigned tasks that he must perform. If he fouls up, the team fails. Success is multiplicative; any zeroes mean that the product is zero. It's as true in math (and science - see the story on the Bell labs guy) as it is in sports.
ah yes, the box (Score:3, Funny)
Engineering is more difficult now (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Engineering is more difficult now (Score:2, Funny)
1) Find a BIG envelope.
2) Take a piece of chewing gum and two paperclips, and...
3) ???
4) Pentium 4!
At least, that's how I surmise the people at Intel are doing it
Re:Engineering is more difficult now (Score:2, Insightful)
We only live for 80 years or so if we're lucky - complex electronics and semiconductors are only possble if each guy concentrates on his stratum of the process: I can code in C, but I know nothing about CPU design, and I don't expect the users of the stuff I write to know C in order to use it. I can build a PC, and engineer the right components into it to eliminate bottlenecks in performance, but I don't know (or care) about how each compnent achieves it's performance - I just read what it says on the lid "Athlon 1900+" or "40Gb 10,000 rpm SCSI disk"
My old maths teacher said something similar about the use of calculators in school maths lessons and it was something like "if we spent all day working out long division in our heads, we'd have no time to do any maths" - in other words - we recognise what the technique is, and do a few to prove we can do it, but then - in the name of random chance - move on!
Re:Engineering is more difficult now (Score:3, Interesting)
Engineering something now that was engineered many years ago is much easier now.
With hindsight, and knowing all that we do now, yes it would be easy to engineer a lightbulb. But it wasn't an easy thing to do when Edison did it.
Engineering a quantum processor or an artifical joint for your hip/knee/shoulder is not easy now, but it will be 20+ years after it's been done.
To get back to the discussion, all of the computers/programs are tools - they will never make up for an intuitive understanding of the problem and a good 'engineering brain', something that a good Bachelor course will try to teach. And that is the problem - engineering students now start on the computer programs and have little appreciation of their status as a tool. The real problem here is that when the computer program spits out an answer that is completely illogical, it doesn't register as being wrong.
If I was to hire an engineer by the hour (Score:2, Interesting)
They teach computer programming here to write code without teaching then to use de-buggers, color coded editors, etc.
And the grads. need at least 6mos of 'on the job' training to learn how to use modern programming environments efficiently.
Someday perhaps educators will learn that there is nothing wrong with teaching students to learn the best tools for the job at hand. Of course theory is important, but teaching theory should not require making students spend hours scratching away with the primitive tools that the theory was originally figured out on!
Ahh well, folks said writing was dead with the advent of the fountain pen (you have to cut your own quill and mix your own ink to understand how to write a _real_ letter, sonny!). Then it was the typewriter...
And so it goes, I expect in fifty years, profs will be saying "Stay off the neural net! You can't really get the answer in holo space! Use your your calculator like a real engineer!"
Re:Engineering is more difficult now (Score:3, Interesting)
When someone says, "use your head," they are usually refering to finding a better faster way of doing something. So why is it you think learning to use your brain entails training yourself to do complex operations in minutes when a machine can do them in seconds. The human brain is piss poor at performing complex computations, sorting, detailed memory storage, and the like. Machines are very good at these things. On the other hand, humans are very good at analyzing complex situations, planning, designing, and the like. Machines are piss poor at this. Wouldn't it be smarter to assign your brain tasks it is good at and relegate other things to tools?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you don't need to learn to do some of this stuff manually. Sometimes knowing how things work is necessary, but at the same time we don't need to permanently burden our minds with tasks that our tools can accomplish more efficiently.
Re:Engineering is more difficult now (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes and know. What the professors are (or should be) getting at is that you should think before you compute. Sure you can punch a much on numbers into your calculator in the right order and get the right answer. However what if you press the wrong button? Suddenly you have the wrong answer and don't know it. You should always have an idea of what the right answer would be.
Also, if you don't reach for the calculator right away you can often see a way to simplify the problem, and then the rest works out quickly. In fact for most of my college tests the problems were choosen such that it if you caught the tricks you could do all the math in your head faster than someone who memorized the equations without knowing them can punch numbers on the calculator. (or look, these two variables cancel, and 2 to the second power is 4 and before I knew it I had the right answer)
Of course there always a few problems that cannot be done in your head, but most can be.
Re:Almost. (Score:2)
Bah, I still can't get even the simplest logic to compile. High school flunkies just shouldn't be allowed to play with PLDs, I suppose.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but stock prices of companies that still fab 74xx logic are slowly rising. Blame me.
Re:The projects grow the talent is finite (Score:2)
Hey man, I worked in a big musty laboratory... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hey man, I worked in a big musty laboratory... (Score:2)
What do you think?" (Score:3, Funny)
What do you think?
I dont think! I bet Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0 could tell me though!
Re:What do you think?" (Score:2)
And then we get to replace all the help desk people with.....oh, nevermind.
um (Score:2, Insightful)
And do we still live in a capitalist nation where other real engineers will attempt to create Developer-in-a-can 2.0 to compete?
Did many developer tools obsolete many engineering fields, while closing that engineer off from moving on to other types of engineering?
These tools enable us to engineer, you will always need skills to make a computer do it's magic.
Computers will stop needing engineers and math skills when they are no longer operate on math-based principals.
Re:um (Score:2)
Yes, one or two can do it, then they are obsolete.
Re:um Profession (Score:2, Informative)
As an "engineer", I welcome the updated software release, but I don't expect to run out of things to do!
It's all about ideas... (Score:2)
People has always lamented the losing of skills, where have all the assembler programmers gone? The wheel wrights? Even machinists are going away.
But the ideas aren't disappearing, there will always be room for the people who do what others say can't or shouldn't be done.
Simply the nature of technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that the loss of the chance to do a little tinkering in one's job isn't a sad state of affairs, it is. But if I was the guy who wrote the cheques at Boeing's R&D department, the word 'tinker' would probably send me into a conniption.
People have changed (Score:2, Insightful)
I was out in a half hour. I didn't even study.
Meanwhile I'm surrounded by them and they're getting better grades in math than I am. For God's sake don't let them be designing the circuits in the space shuttle.
Re:People have changed (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhhh
Meanwhile I'm surrounded by them and they're getting better grades in math than I am. For God's sake don't let them be designing the circuits in the space shuttle.
Yeah, they might actually design circuits that do calculations correctly because they actually understand the calculations
Re:People have changed (Score:2)
More likely, they'll design a servo loop that breaks into oscillation and jams the X-band transponder because they had no understanding of how to work with real components of the non-mathematical variety.
Re:People have changed (Score:2)
Yeah, that happened to me once. Fortunately, Scotty was able to reconfigure the main deflector sprocket to create a tachyon causality loop in the warp flanges. We were back at Starbase 001 in time for alien babes and Romulan Ale!
-- Kirk
I can (Score:3, Funny)
besides, don't they already use software to conduct trains?
*ducks, runs off.*
As any good engineer knows... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure why the collar is necessary at that point.
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:5, Insightful)
I see this everyday where I work. The good engineers think they are breaking new ground and working all the hours to achieve this. The few experienced engineers go home at 5 and always hit their deadlines.
For most engineering endeavours it's all been done before. We turn out systems not inventions.
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:2)
I'm glad you said "should be" and not "is". Because, in reality, it almost never happens that way. You can rarely foresee every problem in the time that you have to verify a design.
One could argue that if you did find all the problems during the verification stage, you spent too much time on the verification. The rate of problem-finding near the end of the project is significantly slower than at the beginning, and some of these "late" problems can be found and fixed faster during the confirmation stage.
Of course, that will cost you more, but most of the time "schedule is King".
The few experienced engineers go home at 5 and always hit their deadlines.
Where I work, they stay all night trying to help those that are less experienced.
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:2)
Must be nice, around here all of the experienced and good engineers work long hours and hit thier deadlines. The rest of the hacks work thier 8 and leave, only sticking around late when they are up against a deadline, then they whine until the deadline gets pushed back. Topping it all off by taking time off to make up for the long hours they put it to try and make the first deadline.
Give me an engineer that is willing to stay late and get the job done. And do so before the night of the dealine.
To bring this post back to the article at hand, it sounds like your average old foggie rant. "back in my day we had to (insert hardship here). And things were better, grass was greener the sky was bluer, (insert more ramblings here)."
Get off it, it felt better back then because you were still young and idealistic. Not to mention that you fit better with the technology and society. Yup, getting old sucks, as I'm sure I'll find out some day, but that does not mean that the world as a whole was better.
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:2)
Sure, if you think "engineering" is writing Perl CGI scripts. Real engineering is not a seat-of-the-pants affair, just like any other mature profession. The reason good engineers work 9-5 is because you can't make silly mistakes when you're building something that has to do serious work in the real world. There's nothing glamorous about staying up all night before the delivery date, it merely indicates poor planning and unnecessary risk. Read this [fastcompany.com] and get a clue.
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:2)
No, I just get regularly victimized by it. My company is run by marketers, and you would be amazed at what the salesmen are allowed to get away with. Not a month goes by that some salesman promises a feature that we don't currently have, and puts a date on it without consulting anybody with any sort of technical knowledge.
It wouldn't be so bad, but our upper managment insists that we make those dates, no matter how screwed up they are. Moreover, the upper managment does nothing to stop and/or punish the salesmen that do this. So, those of us that actually do the work, get to work horrendious overtime to make those deadlines, while the salesmen get thier fat commision for screwing the rest of us.
Its not that I don't like marketers or salesmen, but I think the lot of them should be hung from the rafters, without benift of a neck-breaking knot.
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:2)
I wonder how many apollo engineers got out there and punched rivets themselves?
Re:As any good engineer knows... (Score:2)
For the most part.
You've chosen a strategic example to reinforce your argument. In the days of Edison, bridge-building engineers didn't have the proper tools so they were at a disadvantage. Hence the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse [uab.edu]. I won't say that a computer might help out with bridge building today, but I won't say that prototype testing doesn't *still* happen either.
Allow me to give a better example.
I live in the Detroit area. Without getting into the performance of the Lions football team (sigh...), witness Ford Field [fordfield.com]. When the roof was hoisted into position, it set the record for the largest one-piece modular construction object. I was there.
There were more engineers there than there were construction workers. Unless construction workers are wearing collars these days.
Like a big fucking set of Legos.
Decline of Math/Drawing skills (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of two excellent examples, one where the engeneer was very good at both drawing and math, but neglected some fundamental requirements for the product (and therefore no one was happy with the result). The other example is of a person with a bachelors of physics, working as an engeneer. This person uses a quite a few computational and drawing tools, but does a wonderful job paying attention to the fundamental requirments of a product/project. Usually this engeneer completes projects quickly with inovative solutions. Point is, you only need so many people making tools (like CAD programs), if creative people can use them easily.
Re:Decline of Math/Drawing skills (Score:2, Funny)
a fellow engineer
but wait, there's more (Score:2)
So now am I back to thinking inside of the box?
We'll rue the day... (Score:2)
At least it'll be Gnu/Linux based...
Kind of but not really (Score:2, Insightful)
No one thinks that the calculator has hobled todays engineer simply because he no longer has to do long division. The calculator let's the engineer think about what the numbers mean without having to worry about whether or not he/she has remembered to carry the one.
Engineers Aren't Going Anywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Only the methods change. Engineering never gets easier or less intense.
Re:Engineers Aren't Going Anywhere (Score:2)
Well, a report my staff wrote today reiterates that very issue with the nature of the engineering students that we're turning out.
Basically, there is concern in a variety of sectors (primarily civil and mechanical) that the engineers coming out today choose to be too reliant on the software and not focus on using their brain to solve the problem and confirm that the software is correct. It's not that they are dependent on the software, it's that this generation has a natural trust and confort with the software that the older engineers really don't have.
You may claim that 'no honest engineer' would do that, but that's exactly what industry is reporting.
Edison? (Score:2)
From the article:
"Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations?"
They all learned the math.. But half of the reason of learning some of it is to realize that doing it by hand isn't feasable anymore. I don't think it's fair to compare engineering then to engineering now. A better choice may be to redefine the word "engineer" and what it means to "engineer" something.
Try telling that to my students (Score:2, Interesting)
The proper role for the boxed software is to substitute for the slaving minions working under the tutelage of a chief engineer. The slaving minions traditionally grind out endless gruntwork calculations, while the chief engineer does back-of-the-envelope calculations. These back-of-the-envelope calculations are not accurate enough to base a design, but they tell the chief engineer if one of the minions misplaced a decimal or is way off in some kind of way.
I try to teach my engineering students to yes, use software to do the grunt work, but one needs methods to calculate by hand to at least 2 or 3 significant figures to check up on the software. The software can have bugs. Total reliance on software will breed a kind of innumeracy where engineers won't have a handle on what things should be.
My other gripe is, as a DSP person, the complete reliance on Matlab or worse yet, LabView. My own preference is to code stuff up in Delphi Pascal (I learned Pascal from a data-structures course taught by Pascal-partisan Brinch Hansen), but I teach DSP algorithms and filter design in C++ (OK, don't flame me that I should use C for efficiency -- besides, object-oriented programming is an degree program accredidation bullet point). I guess Matlab is OK because it has amassed the FORTRAN numeric libraries, and LabView, we can debate, but shouldn't engineers who use computers express themselves in C++? Especially DSP engineers who will go to work for Motorola to do things like implement GSM speech coders in firmware, and I am not aware that LabView is available for a mobile phone. Actually, such engineers should be able to go all the way through assembly language down to bare metal, but C++ is such a universal standard, and they probably have C++ for DSP chips by now.
My point is that not only are engineering students not soldering hardware, they don't want to be bothered programming anything more low-level than LabView, the Visual Basic of electrical engineering. Doesn't C++ experience look just awesome on the resume of an electrical engineer (much of what I have done in my engineering career is write computer programs of one kind or another, and C++ is the lingua-franca in this day and age)? Students seem uninterested.
Re:Try telling that to my students (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not saying you have to derive/understand/program every numerical algorithm and not use the packages, but at some point you are going to have to know, as a DSP person, some numerical algorithms and how to represent numerical algorithms in non-proprietary programming systems (such as C/C++/FORTRAN/Lisp).
OK, another analogy. I don't expect an engineer to design an op amp -- op amps are things you go out and buy. But op amps are unlike software: black-box IC like things are this 30-year-old dream in the software field, but interoperable software IC-like components only exist within various proprietary sandboxes (Visual Basic/COM/Windows, LabView, Cocoa). It is like to use an op amp you have to purchase one vendors circuit card substrates and power supplies. Maybe that's why Miguel De Izeca is so fire up about C#/Mono -- to come up with a non-proprietary component sandbox.
Also, op amps cost, say 50 cents a piece in small quantities, 5 cents a piece in volume. Is there a piece of commercial component software that can be reused with such generous terms? Oh, and the 741 op amp has been around for 30 years with the same specs. What piece of numerical software (apart from published source code form) has been around and conforming to its spec for that long?
And one more thing. The op-amp people may have patents up the wazoo on op-amps, but they will sell you the op-amp to do what you please with it. They are not greedy SOB's who say, "We hold the op-amp patent -- any thing incorporating the op-amp, even if you have bought the op-amp part, falls under our patent and you pay us tons of money.
There was an Ask Slashdot a while back. . . (Score:2)
I advised him to go out on trash day and collect all the broom handles and angle iron ( bed frames) he could find and simply play about at making structures from them.
While a few people understood what I was about I was amazed, and somewhat distressed, at the invective I also received from that simple suggestion.
Engineering is about understanding structures, and the materials that make them, in every day use. There is no way you can learn this from a book. It requires that you " get your hands dirty" and build some actual structures, with actual materials. That's why engineering schools have programs like Formula SAE.
If you don't believe me have another look at your
It ain't all in the books, and it ain't all going to be in no software package.
When do you actually begin to be an engineer? Not when you get your degree. Not when you get your first job in the field.
You *first* begin to be an engineer when you design and build a project * and it fails!* And when the stadium dome or the car you designed fails and someone dies you damn well better learn to be an engineer in a hurry or it's the fry machine for the rest of your working life, and I defy any software package not simply being used as a tool by thinking, *experienced* engineers to figure out why something it said would work. .
KFG
Re:There was an Ask Slashdot a while back. . . (Score:2)
Re:There was an Ask Slashdot a while back. . . (Score:2)
What I'm *saying* is that that's bullshit. It's the engineer's job to use software as a tool, not as a substitute for personal skill and understanding.
KFG
Re:There was an Ask Slashdot a while back. . . (Score:2)
Having been a Mechanical Engineering major, I'm not sure I wholly agree with you. While building your structure out of parts scavenged from here and there:
Where is the structure's weakpoint? How weak is it? What material have you built with? How strong is it? Have you overdesigned? Have you underdesigned? How much would it cost to manufacture? How much force will break it? How much impulse force will break it? How will it fracture when it does break? Will it give off shards of crap that might cut somebody or poke their eye out?
All that math we take sets us up to work equations in statics, strength of materials, fracture mechanics and finite element analysis. Fortunately computers do most of that gruntwork. There's a lot of crap we learn from the books (afterwards we generally go to the lab and break shit... that's why mechanical engineering was such fun... all the breakage!) It isn't practical to mock up and crash test every design (oh how we wish it were...)
Though like you said, if he's just looking to make a few doodads for around the house and bone up on his l33t band saw skillz... Just build something with the scavenged parts.
Software is a tool (Score:2, Interesting)
Software should be developed to make engineering more efficient. If tools today are doing things that you would have done manually 5 years ago, and you can't take advantage of it to do better things, then you are probably a weak engineer.
Frankly, if the entirety of your job can be encapsulated in a software algorithm, I question your value as an engineer.
What are we building, anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
I never experienced that kind of dissonance until I accidentally barbecued an Athlon XP chip a few weeks ago. The chip package cracked open from thermal stress, and I broke it the rest of the way apart with my thumbnail. Inside, there was... nothing. Just a featureless, amorphous gray substrate that might have been a rock from my driveway. Maybe half a million violated transistors lay along that fault line, but my crime against Messrs. Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley left not a trace of evidence to be seen.
At some level I was already aware that IC fabrication processes had reached the point at which even the largest features would be entirely invisible to the naked eye. But I never appreciated it until looking inside that Athlon chip. I don't know what kind of '1337 t3ch they found at Area 51 when that UFO augered in, but I'll bet when they cracked it open, it looked just like the guts of an Athlon XP-1800 some idiot tried to run without a heatsink fan.
Re:What are we building, anyway? (Score:2)
That's why we invited microscopes, right?
But, seriously, put that piece of "rock" under a good microscope, scratch the top off a bit, and you'll easily see the top level of metal. Scratch around it, and you'll see the layer below it.. Get a FIB machine, and you can drill all the way down to metal 1 and cut a wire and reconnect it somewhere else.
It's really the same as doing it on a breadboard, except you need really expensive machinery, and you have to be a little more careful where you put the wires
Re:What are we building, anyway? (Score:2)
This is surprisingly close to no longer being true. Gate widths are already much less than the wavelength of visible light, and metal lines and so forth are on their way into the same realm. You might or might not see a pretty diffraction pattern looking at a 0.13 or 0.09 or 0.064um linewidth chip, depending on how the larger features are laid out.
An electron microscope could still resolve them, of course. An atomic-force microscope or tunnelling electron microscope should always be able to. It just gets progressively more difficult
Re:What are we building, anyway? (Score:2)
If we could identify that it *was* technological, then we could eventually identify the components and operating principles. There are several techniques that can be used to map the structure of an object on an atomic level, and it's unlikely that any alien technology would be structured at a level finer than that. It would just take quite a while to map any significant part of the device.
Re:What are we building, anyway? (Score:2)
You'd have a hard time seeing anything there even under very old processes. Doping in the silicon is the next best thing to invisible, and the metal and polysilicon layers will only be a micron or two thick under any process (thick films in the old processes, boxy wires in newer, and narrow ridges in the newest). About the only thing I'd expect you to see edge-on would be the overglass layer, which would be a transparent layer perhaps a tenth of a millimetre thick.
Re:What are we building, anyway? CIRCUITS! (Score:2)
C'mon, you CPU hardware guys haven't come up with anything new in, like, decades. One guy came up with the transistor - props to him. Some other guy came up with the CPU - good work, that man. Then after that, all you little clone drones carried on just making the same thing over and over, getting smaller and faster on each iteration. Kinda like the Swiss watchmakers. Ooh! It's a millimeter thick, and it still tells time exactly the way the one we made 200 years ago did! Woohoo!
The least you could do is come up with a decent silicon-level execution model (Von Neumann is so twentieth-century) so us parasitic trend-followers don't have to waste our time dealing with a teensy array of "registers" and the like. I dunno, native chip-level lambda calculus support might be nice, for a change.
Anyhoo, wake me up when you guys actually come up with another invention, willya?
Uplift books (Score:2)
One interesting idea that David Brin put in his Uplift books is that his extremely advanced civilizations don't even have a very developed system of symbolic math. Since the computers of these civilizations are so fast, you can pretty much calculate a working approximation of anything for any practical purpose, and the idea of an "exact" answer is simply useless. Presumably these cultures "solved" math at some point in the distant past, but moved on once the intellectual challenge was gone.
I always thought that was one of the more interesting ideas of the books, and something that I could see actually happening in a few thousand years.
Pour me into that box! (Score:2)
Of course, the problem is that there's always that remaining little 1% the computer can't do. For instance, I use a calculator where my dad used a slide rule. That specific task is relegated to an artificial aid, while we retain capability for general problem solving - and we do know how to do things that the aid does, if necessary. On the rare occasion where a calculator is unavailable and I am too distracted or fried to just quickly compute sums in my head, I still do resort to long form addition when necessary. But it's very rarely necessary.
There is a fundamental difference between never needing a skill in practice, and almost never needing a skill in practice. Where decent software exists to do a task I do, I find myself in the latter category. The only time I find myself in the former category is with needs that are ultimately provided by other human beings: (mostly corporate) farmers, with tons of agricultural machinery, grow my food; shipping companies run by people ship it to market by plane, boat, truck, and rail; I write scripts whose services other people sell, so there will be money in the bank when I cash my paycheck; et cetera. But the bits I manipulate, I know how to manipulate from the ground up - on the silicon if necessary. On rare occasion, the system fails so hard that - or merely fails to anticipate my needs so that - I must do so (and the bits involved so valuable that it is worth my time to do so).
This frees me to concentrate on those bits I must do. I need not know the exact angle and force with which to use a soldering iron, for a robot can weld a circuit faster, cheaper, and better than I - so I use the robot to do that task, saving myself time, money, and aggrivation at my own incompetence. I remember, in my very first job in my early adolesence, I used to trace circuits by hand: they had no software to do the task, but the circuits were simple enough that even a child (by their standards) could do it - and better to pay a child minimum wage, than to take their own time. (I suspect those circuits I traced have long since fallen prey to Moore's law, if nothing else.) If faced with the same task today, the firm could buy chip design software, and cycle through several combinations of inputs and outputs to find the optimal design in the same time it used to take me to trace out one chip...but you know the software will have an option to delve into the design, in case it faces some circuit so intricate, or dealing with poorly-emulated quantum features, where human assistance is again required.
To believe that these things don't exist because the machine takes care of them is mere solipsism, just like walking around on a moonless night in a poorly lit city and believing that nothing, aside from those areas close to the street lights, truly exists. (This is a well-documented psychological disorder in certain Scandinavian villages, where such conditions do exist during winter.)
And Visual programming tools (Score:2)
It will not happen any time soon. Unless the entire human population geneticly changes to some other kind of animal that actually sits back and says. "Nah, that's enough, don't need to pursue anything more... ever." or AI actually becomes a reality.
Humans have always and will always be looking for the next thing in the unknown. As soon as engineers are freed of the deugery of re-doing what has been done before counteless times, they will move on to new things. Let the computer do the drudgery of wing design or component layout. We'll just get more interesting work done!
Sad... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was probably in one of the last classes that actually learned drafting first, then CAD later (this is at the School of Engineering, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez). Drafting was a pain but it really taught us the beauty of CAD/CAM and not to ever take it for granted. Same for numerical analysis: numerical analysis becomes a thing of beauty after you have spent two years getting HAMMERED with advanced calculus courses.
Now every mickey mouse NT admin is calling himself an engineer. It is a shame. Engineers are supposed to be able to build stuff, to apply science to resolve problems, but we are raising a new generation that is being trained to use software packages and that's about it.
Of course, generalizations are not good, and I am in awe of the next generation of hard core programmers that are being exposed to real programming languages and real world problems like building a kernel, not us that were writing stupid little Fortran (WATFIV!) programs on a freaking VAX.
Re:Sad... (Score:3, Interesting)
An NT admin is a SOFTWARE engineer. Thi sis quite different from a HARDWARE engineer. Software folks don't need to know how a circuit works, they just need to know what the inputs and outputs are. Both groups are needed... and they shouldn't be confused. Hardcore hardware folks still know how to draw a circuit diagram... and "real electrical engineers" know analog too.
The reason we'll never be replaced by Engineer-In-A-Box is the same reason why computers will not take over design. They're not creative. They cannot find a new solution to an old problem. They can optimize the known solutions, but that's it. Creativity is uniquely human (well, AI, hypothetically could do this... but then AI is only hypothetical for now.) And it's this type of creativity that makes everything happen.
Thalia
Re:Sad... (Score:2)
I'm an NT admin. I work with NT admins. I have known some great NT admins. NONE OF THEM were engineers. We're glorified technicians. We implement what someone else has created by carefully reading the instructions (whitepapers, technet articles, resource kits, etc.) We are not creating new products; we are implementing and administering existing products.
Engineering is a fundamentally creative profession, IMHO.
Consider automotive engineers...they design new cars. Assembly line workers build them; mechanics maintain and fix them. A few gearheads add after-market parts. A tiny, tiny minority machine new high-performance parts for stock cars. NT admins are generally closest to assembly line workers or mechanics; paper MCSEs are definitely the former.
Re:Sad... (Score:2)
But not if you have to do 40 iterations of Tchebyshev approximations by hand. Bloddy freakin' hell. I'd do anything from differential equations again before I'd touch that stuff without a computer. And I'm a person who thinks that doing linear regression analysis by hand is good for the soul.
-W
Re:Sad... (Score:2)
Re:Sad... (Score:2)
Credit where credit is due - NT call themselves engineers because Microsoft does: "Microsoft Certified System Engineer." Why does Microsoft do that? Because of Novell: "Certified Novell Engineer." MS is just as wrong as Novell was, but that's business for you; they couldn't let Novell have a marketing edge. The real problem is that the professional engineering societies didn't respond appropriately; now there stuck with an entire industry that is cheapening the title.
Hmmm...I wonder what the call NT admins at engineering firms?
The other side of the divide (Score:2)
I'll neatly leap over the question whether or not system admins are engineers *leap*, and address the problem of MCSEs.
As someone who is interested in both unix and microsoft systems, the current state of MCSEs is damaging to honest admins. A network is no more easy if its windows 2000. Setting it up may appear easier, since windows will try to hold your hand, but that doesn't make debugging easier. (In a way, its harder, since windows likes to hide scary information that has the potential to debug). I've worked with windows machines for 5 years, and I take pride in professional setups of workstations and networks, regardless of the underlying OSes.
In theory, the MCSE program is not bad. The business world benefits from being able to tell a professional Microsoft administrator from the boss's nephew whose professional skills involve setting up a half-life server. However, MCSE seems to be one of the cash cows out there, computer training centers and Microsoft is pimping out the certification for money. There are plenty of 'paper' MCSE's out there - people who have passed the test and have the certification, but lack the real-world experience they need.
Linux zealots shouldn't be smug, because as linux becomes popular (to the public and management), expect the same thing to happen to the Linux+ or RHCE exams. There is nothing preventing the schools that teach to the test for MCSE exams this week to teach to the test for RHCE exams next week. Instead of having poorly running windows networks, there will be poorly run linux networks. Instead of Nimda attacking unpatched IIS servers, there will be the latest $LINUX_WORM attacking unpatched apache servers. THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT LINUX THAT WILL SAVE IT FROM THE STUPIDITY OF POOR ADMINS!
Just my $.02
Re:Sad... (Score:2)
Like unicorns, exact answers are mythical beasts. I was a math major, so there's nothing I like more than an "exact answer" - but they have ZERO practical use (and since we're discussing engineering, I assume we're going in for practicality). If you disagree, I encourage you to show me (4*pi^2)/(2e) on your ruler or ammeter or scale. Can't do it, can you?
Measurements can never be anything but approximations. If your intended result will be converted to a measurement, then you've already settled for something other than an exact answer. The only decision that remains is at what point you want to start approximating. Anyone who suggests that approximating AFTER you've gotten the perfect mathematical result is somehow morally superior to approximating from the get-go is a bit like the lady who told Groucho Marx she'd sleep with him for a million bucks but was offended at his offer of $5. As Groucho pointed out, her character had already been established, and he was merely haggling over price.
Engibeer (Score:2, Funny)
If the great engineers of the world were replaced by software the beer companies would suffer the most!
Have one on me....
Zakias
What's an Engineer? (Score:2)
Yes, someday that damned fool will be entirely replaced by computer software. The engineer never will be.
Engineer in a box? (Score:2)
But this is revision 2 of engineer-in-a-box...maybe it includes a door this time.
Same old complaint. (Score:2, Interesting)
When software starts to become usefull people say "Engineering and Math will become obsolete, programs will do all the thinking for people".
And when computers first came out "Computers are going to replace people in all sorts of jobs, soon a computer will be doing YOUR job, better than you do it!".
Anyone remember when Robot's were popular? People were saying that robots will take over all our jobs. Soon robots will do all the thinking, and man will become obsolete.
The industrial revolution, I wasn't there to experience, but anyone suppose there was similar paranoia about large machines? Printing presses? Automated factory machines?
Finally I vaguely remember a quote from history class. It was something along the lines of: "This new invention will be the end of us. Man will no longer have to think for himself, it will all be done for him" and you know what they were complaining about.... THE WRITTEN WORD.
Come on, as long as there is a need for people to know math, and engineering skills (which there always always will be) there will always be engineers. My computer isn't quite perfect yet. I still need to be able to put my stick of memory in, or have some engineer soder a new capacitor in when a chronic blue screen keeps appearing.
There have always been 2 types of engineers (Score:5, Interesting)
those whose jobs it is to innovate and make the impossible possible, and those who just turn and crank. One innovator can't be replaced by 100 turn and crank guys just because the ability to innovate doesn't follow a statistical bell curve. Its not like after you get up to some obscene number of turn and crank guys, your chance of developing an innovation will reach 90% or something. It will still be at zero.
I think what this guy is lamenting is an adjustment in the ratio of innovators to turn-and-crankers that has been brought on by the anti-innovator prejudices of the SEI and other "everything must be predictable" initiatives. Very large projects that couldn't hold innovators because management was threatened by them and wouldn't pay them the six figures that they were worth were collapsing (as they should). The world reacted by saying that we can't depend on heros instead of recognizing that they needed to pay the heros more. Now all the heros, those that just instinctively know the aspects of "right" that aren't teachable are disappearing. Big surprise.
The result is that true innovation and accomplishment of the "impossible" has been going away and our economy is suffering because of it. What truly new classification of software have you seen in the last few years? I don't know about you, but the world in CompUSA has been looking pretty stagnant to me for quite some time. Mostly incremental advances, not the type of true innovation we were seeing in the late 80s before these things had really taken hold. Sales are down because the next blockbuster reason to use more CPU cycles, more RAM, more disk space, more pixels, more polygons/second, etc. hasn't been appearing.
Also, I saw several posts on here about this being because people can't do it all anymore. Bull. Some who could have done it all are being hampered by the education system telling them that they can't, others aren't allowed too, and others just stay quiet about it to avoid the backlash from those who've been brainwashed into thinking that we know such a vast amount of things that noone can do it all. It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
Re:There have always been 2 types of engineers (Score:2)
The problem, and where the SEI attitude falls down, is that it's very difficult to draw a bright line at the point where innovation is no longer needed. The truth is that in a sense, innovation is needed everywhere, in different measures and different kinds. So you're correct that the attempt to impose uniformity on everything can have a horribly stifling effect, and we see this in large corporations all the time. The biggest difference between small and large companies, and the reason why large companies still buy up small ones, is because the small ones have the freedom be original - the large ones, mostly, don't.
I think we could do a much better job in these areas, but's it going to take some innovators to reform the system. This is hardly original, but the biggest problem is that the people who understand the value of these things are not the pencil-pushers who run things, and all the pencil-pushers ever want to know is where their next quarter's revenue is coming from.
However, I don't think innovation has slowed to a crawl at all - there's a lot of interesting stuff happening, all over the place. One problem is that at the consumer level, a sort of plateau has been reached, where much of what a consumer would want is already available, and it's just refinement from here on. I mean, cellphones with built-in PDAs, PDAs with built-in cellphones, HDTV, media convergence, woop-de-do. Most of it isn't very life-changing. We're stuck in a local minimum, or something, and it'll take a big invention to get out. (I want my flying car! :)
It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
On the plus side, if you actually achieve something, many of those mindless majority will adore you with almost the same fervour usually reserved for Britney Spears. Hmm, a little scary, that. Perhaps that's why there are problems with innovation...
oh bull... (Score:2)
Never Happen (Score:2)
If they acurately simulated a human engineer, can you picture any company that would be willing to take on the liability of all the times engineers screw up?
Either that, or can you picture anyone agreeing to the MSEngineer EULA?:
Microsoft shall not be held liable for: buildings falling down; bridges collapsing; unaligned railway tracks leading to derailing; subsidence; big spikes left sticking out or any other failings in design created by this product.
The user accepts that anything designed with MSEngineer 2.0 remains wholly the posession of the Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft retains the right to ammend the software or anything designed, tinkered or maintained by it at any time, and the rights pertaining to such products.
Should the user contest any of the above, or have any reason to challenge Microsoft in any way, they agree that all cases shall be heard in the state of Washington by Steve Ballmer dressed as a clown. Steve's decision shall be binding unless Bill tells him otherwise.
It's all about balance (Score:3, Insightful)
As far a computer-aided engineering and mathematics is concerned the emphasis should always be placed first on pencil and paper. You may not every solve enterprise or grand challenge level problems this way but you sure won't have a chance if you haven't thourghly understood the fundementals of solving the smaller problems first.
what were the old farts saying... (Score:2)
"Kids these days, they don't grind their own components, just go to a hardware store and pick them up. X and Y and Z are readily available and you don't have to make your own any more. And when you don't make your own, you lose some of the beauty of the profession and some fundamental understanding of Q, R, and S."
If you look back, you can find examples of this, how peole depended on X technology instead of computing square roots by hand.
Here is a general purpose response:
"Don't worry. There will still be cool problems to solve, and people will still get into solving them. We solve problems because we are human, and we can't not do it, just like we write and make music because something inside us is screaming at us to be expressed."
It's not that I don't think he has a point--there is some intrinsic value in doing things the old way. People still bind books by hand, just because they want to. People quilt and can food and all sorts of things for the enjoyment of it. , or when prepackaged solutoins just don't meet their needs. It is possible that a way of life is fading, but there is cool stuff in the future.
What we should focus on is learning how to solve problems, learning how to show kids how fun solving interesting problems is, and how to show them how to do it. Then there will be a steady suppoly of people ready to tackle whatever comes next. But the good thing is, no matter how hard we try to do that wrong (school), we still end up with people who want to solve problems! Just like no amount of bad piano teachers will prvent te emergence of future garage bands.
We're still humans, and all in all that's a pretty cool thing to be.
kinds of engineers (Score:2)
Now, the kind of engineer that really does creative thinking to solve problems and is much more comfortable with actually building/programming stuff rather than just simulating/prototyping, will not go away, because a) it's much more fun! and b) this is the kind of people that will get everyone else out of trouble when engineeer-in-a-box 1.0 fails to run.
Simulation is like Masturbation... (Score:2)
Seems I've forgotten where I heard that.
Seriously, though, I don't think engineering is going away antime soon. For the last 20 years, I've been hearing that software is going to replace engineers, and yet I still have a job. What's really happened is that the software has let fewer engineers tackle much larger and tougher tasks, but in the end, you still need the judgement of the engineers to make sure the software has done what you wanted.
This is true especially in the area of analog design, where software to automate design has moved ahead much more slowly than in the digital realm. There are some very expensive programs [neolinear.com] out there that will attempt to optimize simple and medium complexity analog circuits, but they are still nowhere near replacing analog engineers. You still have to give them a circuit topology, they only optimize the device sizes.
Even in the digital arena, while the tools for synthesizing actual transistor level circuits are fairly mature, and digital designers by and large don't have to deal with transistors or gates anymore, they still have to design the algorithms and check the results of the software synthesis. Basically, the digital designer's job still exists (and will for some time to come), but it has just moved up a level or two in abstraction, from transistors, to gates, and now to algorithms.
Garbage In...... (Score:2)
I'm afraid we're already there (Score:2, Interesting)
At my last job, I found a huge bug in a commonly used engineering software. The results of finite-element anaysis for composite materials just didn't make any sense. I did some simple tests and figured out that the bug came from a grade school math error. After speaking to the company in question, it became clear that their personnel was uniquely based on computer scientists that had no clue what the software was going to be used for. They just took a couple of books and plugged in formulas to get numbers out. I sent them a lenghty e-mail basically describing how to solve the quadratic equation the problem was boiling down to and they just would not get it.
The best was that I even got them to spit out that some of the material info I had to type in was not actually used. It was just asked by the tool because a competitor's product asked for it and their product had to look like it could provide the same feature.
Zen master says: (Score:2)
It's quite true... (Score:3, Interesting)
In undergrad, I worked with a physicist and an engineer on some Fourier analysis homework. I was a math major (and a meteorology major also). (No, this is not one of those jokes.)
I distinctly remember once when we reduced a problem to a very simple integral: the integral from 0 to 2*PI of 3 x cubed minus 4 x, dx. What do both of them do to finish this problem? Pull out the calculators and begin to type it in... I just watch in awe... they didn't even want to attempt this basic integral without the "comfort blanket" that the calculator gave them. Never mind that thanks to a typo one of them got the wrong answer.
Even in my field (atmospheric science), the "simulation bug" is prevalent. They're great tools, but it's rather annoying when you ask one of these simulation people to explain something that they're pointing out using basic physics that they frequently can't, even when the basic theory has been there for decades.
Scientists and engineers need that strong mathematics background. I personally think that calculators should be outlawed from classrooms until high school. People are frequently too dependent on those tools currently (had one guy in math help session in undergrad who used a calculator to figure out 3 minus 2... I kid you not). You always should learn the basics and the hard way before being given the tools for the easier ways. Anything else is bass-ackward.
-Jellisky
Re:It's quite true... (Score:2)
When I was a student teacher, I once saw a kid in a pre-algebra course use a calculator to find 9*1. He did it several times: 9...x...1...=...9??? I could see the wheels turning in his head - "After I hit '=', I'm not supposed to get the first number back. I must have hit a wrong key or something..."
I finally asked him "What's ANY number times one?" and he got it immediately and was embarassed.
I don't think so... (Score:2)
Who says that real engineering can only be done by soldering physical components? I do "today's engineering" professionally, and while it may be easier for a clueless engineer to bullshit his way through the job by just learning how to crank the EDA tools, I guarantee he or she won't last long.
Let's face it -- today's hardware is so complex that there's no possible way that a single person (or a group of people) could "tinker" an Athlon into existence. And yet, an engineer has to be able to visualize this design as gates and wires, and keep control of the design even as he hands it off to an EDA tool to process.
In ASIC design (the field in which I have the most knowledge), you have to know enough about how to design Logic to know when the tools are doing a good enough job putting things together. A monkey can run a script, but an Engineer must know what all the commands really mean and what needs to be run to processs the design. You have to be able to visualize how the design might end up, and figure out when the tool is lying to you.
You think Windows crashing while you're playing Warcraft is bad? Try finding a bug in synopsy^h^h^h^h^h^h^h any EDA tool during a critical time in the project! These tools are big and complex, and can't help but have bugs, and since the user base is smaller than most commercial software, when you find a bug, it's entirely possible that you're the first one to encounter it. A "real" engineer will be able to find these bugs when the gates and wires don't turn out the way they're supposed to, and someone who can't visualize the design independent of the EDA tool will be up a creek...
The good old days sucked (Score:2)
I work in Broadcast Engineering....(tuna can) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I work in Broadcast Engineering....(tuna can) (Score:2)
"The disk space on these servers...it's nearly 40% full! One busy weekend could shut us down..."
If your boss is smart, of course, none of this is necessary. If your boss is stupid, none of this will help...but at least everyone knows you warned him. If your boss is ignorant and nice, he'll ask what you need to get the job done. If your boss is ignorant and mean, he'll demand you get the job done. Clarify in writing that you will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to get the job done...and do it BOFH style =)
I thought it was a cat (Score:2)
Undergrad here. (Score:2)
To pass my physics test tomorrow, to maybe get laid this month, and to find enough money to buy beer this weekend.
Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder?
Ya, I am an undergrad in EE, that is all I do all day.
Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations?
Not around here anyway, i saw a guy tell a professor to shove an equation the other day.
Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane.
Well come down from the trip and help me solve this integral.
Re: (Score:2)
Getting close... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Getting close... (Score:2)
I take it you put a little padding in your designs?
Is that 10 decimal, or binary?
Re:Who is Robert Lucky? (Score:2, Informative)
the major modem advances that came out
of Bell Labs. See http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/
Re:What Edison would say if alive today... (Score:2)
No kidding. It seems Henry was sorta wacky that way.
Carry on. I'll edit as required.
Re:What Edison would say if alive today... (Score:2, Funny)
Dr. Hathaway: "Dead."
Re:Speaking as a recently graduated electrical... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Consider the Piano (Score:2)
Re:Engineer In A Box? (Score:2)
It depends on who you recruit into the programs.
Another lifetime or two ago, I worked at an engineering company that specialized in pulp and paper manufacturing. One of the engineers was a woman who catagorically refused to ever specify the product of a certain manufacturer for any paper mill she worked on. The reason for this was that the manufacturer (who made a bed or mat upon which the paper pulp would be laid, dried, & given a texture) advertised its product wrapped around unclothed female models.
Yes, she thought the ads were sexist. But the true point was that the material is as comfortable to the skin (roughly speaking) as the pink fiberglass used to insulate houses in the US. If you've never touched it, fiberglass insulation causes itching almost immediately & can leave a rash on the skin! She argued that the material this manufacturer had the same effect on human skin, & that she had sent a petition with several dozen signatures -- including one faculty member -- to this manufacturer -- to discontinue these ads.
Aw, this post doesn't flame Microsoft, so probably no one will read it & think about this issue.
Geoff
Re:It'll take Engineer in a box 3.0 at least... (Score:2)