This is a problem that has been concerning me for some time. We have a lot of people who plain don’t understand how things work, from cars to economies and businesses.
43 thoughts on “The Hands-Off Generation”
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This is a problem that has been concerning me for some time. We have a lot of people who plain don’t understand how things work, from cars to economies and businesses.
Comments are closed.
My stepson was always taking things apart (like the lawnmower. He wasn’t so good putting it back together and the oil stains on the drive are still there.) Which I encouraged somewhat because I did think it would make him a better man. Another reason for the frontier… tinkering is second nature there.
That’s the kind of diversity we need.
Hey, they *think* they know how economies, businesses and political power works.
Cool, I’m the first one here, so I can step on toes.
Our host, by his own admission, is a recovering aerospace engineer. I don’t lay this issue at his feet. But I do lay it at the feet of the aerospace industry / astronaut corp / ‘right stuff’ originators.
The problem of Johnny NOT knowing how things work, is that since April 9, 1959, that’s the last fifty-two years, four months and twenty-nine days, American MALES have been told that they suck and are less than REAL men if they swing a hammer, clean a plugged drain line, build a drain line, thread a pipe, clean a transmission pump, carb, brake master or slave cylinder….
I could go on, but you know the jobs NO ONE WILL DO.
I hear people saying we’re going down the tubes because we no longer ‘manufacture’ goods. Really? Who’s kid is gonna work the line at RCA TV, Frigidaire, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Not YOUR kid Joe Average!
After all, you went to college, your dad went to college!! Hell, your grandfather only went to HS and he wound up running a dairy. So being a big dog, with an office IS what American men ARE supposed to strive for. Right?
What you fail to remember Joe Average, is that YOUR grandfather only finished High School, because college was for rich kids then, His dad quit school before 7th grade was over to go to work driving a milk wagon worth a horse for an engine!
What also gets missed is that gramps worked in the office at the dairy, working up to CEO, ONLY because his father, the horse and wagon guy with the 6th grade education, OWNED the effing dairy by the time gramps got out of HS. Gramps took over when GGramps retired. That does not diminish him, because Great-Grandpa made him start at the bottom. He then worked two years in every section of that business. At the end of ten years he knew that business inside and out.
Grandpa went to college because he served in the military in either WWII or Korea, or God help him, BOTH! He had the G.I. Bill.
He’d done shop classes in HS, but he had his G.I. Bill so he went to college. Your dad went to college, because by the late 50’s everyone was starting to think of college as a logical step for the smart guys, not just the rich guys. Then comes NASA and those good looking, smart astronauts.
If you read ANYTHING about astronauts, you knew they ALL had DEGREES. Every boy wanted to be them, and there was only one way to get there.
College.
Pretty soon every business in American ‘needs’ college guys to run every aspect of their business. It simply cannot be done any other way! Just ask the profs who teach the courses. Because there is NO way that some kid who starts by pushing a mail cart, and works his way up, a guy who spends two years in every section of WTF Inc can possibly know that business or know even how a business works, nor can that 28 year old, be as smart as some 22 year old kid with a brand new degree. Perish the thought!
If you get my ire, that’s good. I feel very ‘ire-ish’ on this topic. I don’t think it was Lyndon Johnson’s objective to kill the country, but Tojo didn’t set out to get Japan nuked either!
I hate to say it. But I don’t think we’ll ever be what we once were. Just as there is no United Kingdom, like it once was, our country is gone too.
It sucks for our kids and even worse for theirs.
crap, I wrote too long windedly, now I’m third!
heh. I’m a member of the local hackerspace. A friend of mine, who trades energy for a living, was at first curious. “hackerspace? what’s that?”, so I told him “oh, it’s a shared workshop where you can store your tools, and do group buys of bigger equipment that you couldn’t buy on your own.. work on group projects together, etc.” He was outright *shocked* that anyone would want to do work with their hands.
Since then, I’ve started asking most of the guys there how they got interested and the answer is almost always the same: they liked metal work in high school but never got the chance to do more than token projects for assessment before they got shuffled off to “more important” courses and eventually university, etc. Lately we’ve been attracting tradesmen who are jealous of our cheap floor space and storage. There’s be some culture clash, but nothing I would call classism.
Interesting!
Rand, I share your concerns.
I don’t tear apart transmissions (I’ve done that just once, with mediocre results) but I do most of my own car repairs. Diagnostics is my weak point, but if I can figure out what’s wrong, I can usually fix it.
I don’t trust mechanics much these days, not since I couldn’t figure out why my cruise control wasn’t working and took it to a mechanic. He poked around, hooked it up to all sorts of diagnostics, and couldn’t figure it out. I did ask if it could be a broken wire in the wiring harness. He said probably not, and that he had no way of testing for it anyway. Think on that; no way of testing for a broken wire!! I decided he was an idiot, and took the car home. I isolated the damn wires and fed 12 colts through, and guess what; it was a broken wire. I ran a new one and that fixed it. Cost me about $3 for the wire.
The very idea that a mechanic doesn’t know how to test wiring just blew me away. Seems to me like he just relies on his gadgetry.
I do my own home electrical and plumbing work, and I built most of my present home. I do my own appliance repairs too, though that’s harder since the damn things are infested with electronics.
Many times I’ve encountered people on the back roads who can’t even change a tire! If there’s a physical reason, such as age, fine, but usually it’s just stupidity. They think all they have to do in any situation is make a call on their cell. That’s why I find them stranded; they don’t seem to realize that those things don’t work everywhere.
Every single time this happens, it’s always somebody from a big city.
I despair that we’ve created a race of helpless imbeciles; they specialize, like insects, but beyond the one they specilixe in, they are helpless and hopeless. This does not bode well.
I worry about this, not just with “things”, but with math and logic too. I know a lot of people that don’t solve equations or do integrals anymore – they think that’s something computers do. But who programs the computers?
Der Schumpy , you railing against the college education i think more the issue of prolonging the adolescence phase. High school education used to mean something and had more preparation for the real world, where now it more Prep for college and teaching breath/general ed courses and stuff someone when their older they will never need. Just tossing a example requiring Trigonometry for High school graduation, yes it is a very important thing to know for myself and other technical people but would say a high percentage of high school students will never see a Trig Identity or solving for a triangle ever again after high school, short of there Kids homework. Same could be said for Chemistry/Biology, some degree of Literature courses, Psychology/sociology, some degree of history. All are general requirements of high school do we really need 2+ year s of history or over a year of literature courses). While the schools have removed electives for Machine shops, wood working, automotive repair, Home ec, Personal finance. And often these are pushed into a combine course over a year at the middle school level. Though I Believe their pushing more computer stuff though again more estoric naval gazing stuff such as touch typing, web site design, picture editing , spread sheets, no offering of general computer trouble shooting, repair.
While cutting some practical courses. While in general the first 2 years of college often repeats those same courses from high school.
Would also say the caliber of the college grads have gone down over the years, as it became over populated. And penchant to repeat the general ed courses that were taught in HS for a 2nd time.
Trent,
a few years ago, I bought a new Craftsman tool box with a big chest set up, 14 drawers in all top to bottom, 5 1/2 feet tall. I’d had my tools in 5 or 6 small boxes, which was a pain. I’ve moved that box a few times because of a need to have it when I need it.
Without fail, every time I’ve moved it, someone asked if they were my fathers tools, grandfathers tools, or even, the tools I used in the NAVY, for God sake! As if you get to keep Uncle Sam’s tools when he’s done with you.
People don’t even expect that someone they know CAN work on ‘stuff’ anymore. It’s bizarre to think that a mechanic is JUST a guy in the phone book!
(you should see their faces when Mrs D/S tells them how we rebuilt a VW engine on the dining room table, in a downstairs, two b/r apt, over a Thanksgiving weekend!) (or how she used to adjust or replace (twice) the clutch in her Datsun 210 by herself)(or how we taught our 14 y/o to do disc brakes on that puppy)
God help us all, if they ever see me carpentry or sheet rock / wall paper tools. I could be a creature from another planet knowing how to do all that stuff in the 21st century.
Klaatu barada nikto!
Engineer,
I don’t think it was a logical effort to prolong the phase. It’s just worked out that way.
And I concur on the quality of college grads.
I’ve trained a few over the years who couldn’t read a road map, fill out an expense report or change that tire Arizona CJ was talking about.
I backed up a van, with the hitch in the receiver, to the last inch of being under the trailer. I told my newby to hook it up, I had to…uh..go see a man about a dog. 5 minutes later, I came back, he’s still scratching his head.
When I asked what he was doing, he said he, “… couldn’t find ‘the switch’…”.
The ‘switch’? Huh? When I grabbed the big, black hand-crank and began to lower it down, he was honestly shocked that it was mechanical! He lasted all of 3 weeks. He told the boss, he didn’t go to college to work that hard. I’ll admit, some of that job was hot, sweaty and physical. But the $$ was exceptional for those kids.
But I can’t imagine walking away from the money he was making, because of sweat and blisters. He was one of those guys who prided himself, and boasted, about having never had to work hard. He worked smart! No, he worked the system and schmoozed his way through.
What kind of parent raises a kid to be that way? Or what kind of parent doesn’t know that their kid acts that way? The bad part is that I can’t swing a dead cat now without hitting ‘him’ or ‘them’.
I’m going to be a little bit contrarian here: at least with respect to aerospace engineering (my field), I’m seeing recent graduates with MORE hands-on experience than my generation. Due to advances in electronics, computers, etc., a lot of AE grad students (and some undergrads too) are, for example, building and flying their own UAVs as part of their college work. They get to experience the pain of installing the rate gyro upside down, not doing a phasing test, and having the aircraft crash because the yaw damper became a yaw enhancer. They struggle getting their code to compile and run in real time. They get to figure out how to balance the aircraft so that the short period is controllable. We couldn’t do these things in my day because the hardware was just too damned expensive to let dumbass undergraduates futz with it, for Chrissakes!
Yes, I wish that high schools still had wood/metal shop, auto mechanics, drafting classes. Yes, it is detrimental to most high school grads that they don’t take at least one of these classes. But technology in the service of education ain’t all bad.
IMNSHO DS hit it on the head with the “I didn’t go to college to work this hard” memory.
It’s the attitude, the “I’m better because I went to four years of college” mindset. I dealt with it for 20 years in the Navy and continue to deal with now that I’m in the real world. It frosts a…certain part of my anatomy…when I have to deal with one of them. It’s almost like noone ever told them that being a rude, arrogant prick to someone you want something from just because you have more formal education than they do is not a good idea.
“heh. I’m a member of the local hackerspace. A friend of mine, who trades energy for a living, was at first curious. “hackerspace? what’s that?”, so I told him “oh, it’s a shared workshop where you can store your tools, and do group buys of bigger equipment that you couldn’t buy on your own.. work on group projects together, etc.” He was outright *shocked* that anyone would want to do work with their hands. ”
That’s a real thing? Awesome! I had suggested something like this the other year (mostly because I feel like I’m being sucked out into theoretical-land wrt my education, and wanted the opportunity to try things with tools and a garage that I can’t afford on my own in a city). I was told a business like this could never work because of the liability in case anyone hurt themselves.
Don’t worry, once the depression gets going good, the college grads will be spending their time downtown rioting and picketing for assistance while we make money fixing broken stuff people can’t afford to replace.
Some people want to buy gold, guns and bullets, but I’m also stocking up on tools and skills.
Orville,
some of us are stocking up on ALL that…and more! Something tells me your in that group too.
I’m trying to build a forge AND an outdoor oven as soon as it cools off outside. And we quit having hurricanes and tropical storms type rain here ’bouts. I’m having a hell of a time finding an old anvil, at a price I can afford though.
If I can work iron, and I can bake bread, I can make a living! And yes, BTW, I DO know how to make charcoal.
(Personally I’m hoping the over / badly educated and really dumb people have tasty brains. That way when the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse happens, they’ll go after THEM before US)
Der Schtumpy, two points.
First, a few years back when I couldn’t find a technical job, I was working as a janitor, and my boss(a VERY good one) showed me a listing for a college offering 2 year degrees in Janitorial work.
I am back working as a UG designer, but I still look at the janitor ads online sometimes, and a growing number of them want that 2 year degree(along with other companies that want a Master’s degree for CAD detailing).
Secondly, as far as the recent engineers are concerned, I am NOT impressed. Most of them have but one semester on a low power CAD system, and seem to spend most of their work day in meetings, wondering why the work isn’t getting done.
On this assignment, I spend more than half my work day filling out the client’s paperwork instead of modeling, updating, or detailing files.
I keep telling myself, it’s a job, it’s a job…
Re: CJ “I do my own home electrical and plumbing work, and I built most of my present home.”
Not allowed in the UK, now if you do your own work you need a ‘qualified professional’ to come and give the OK … which of course they’ll do for a fee which is only slighly less than then doing the work in the first place!!!
Secondly, as far as the recent engineers are concerned, I am NOT impressed. Most of them have but one semester on a low power CAD system, and seem to spend most of their work day in meetings, wondering why the work isn’t getting done.
I read an interview with Burt Rutan last month and he discussed his last project with Scaled, a concept vehicle for a flying car. Part of the project was to advance the skills of the company’s younger engineers. Burt started using computers to aid in aircraft design back in the Apple II days but he says one problem with young engineers is that they tend to dwell on CAD systems too much. According to the article, Burt went old school on the project and things went very quickly.
BTW: years ago, I read that Burt’s policy at Scaled was that engineers needed hands on skills. IIRC, he said that an engineer wasn’t allowed to design something he couldn’t build himself. That’s something I highly respect and it explains how Scaled has turned out an average of at least one new design a year for almost 30 years with very small teams.
I come at this from a rather different perspective. I graduated from Rutgers in 1967 with a degree in physics. My father earned his degree in economics from Rutgers in 1935. My grandfather earned his degree in chemistry from Rutgers in 1890. Yes, 1890. That freaks people out a bit. I don’t know where his father learned how to practice law. I can say that the 1880 Census records reported his birthplace as Ireland in 1828 and his wife’s birthplace as England. Her maiden name was Angelina Elizabeth Donne. That’s how I am related to John Donne. He studied at Cambridge and Oxford in the 16th Century but was not granted a degree because he was still a Roman Catholic. He also became a lawyer. Later on he switched to the Church of England and eventually became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621.
One practical consequence of this family history is my educational background. Because I was a pest, my parents started teaching me how to read at age 3. I also started learning how to think for myself. That has gotten me into much trouble over the years. Modern day academia favors specialization with deference — sometimes extreme — to authority. I have conflicts with authority unless it is kept within democratic bounds.
I’m also a generalist. This year we Episcopalians in the Diocese of Washington are selecting a new bishop. At one of the meetings one of the candidates remarked how they were the last of the generalists. I will claim that the decline of independent minded generalists is one very important cause of our nation’s problems. I too often will think authoritarian specialists make hilarious mistakes once they move outside their specialty. It doesn’t matter where they work — government, academia, private sector, whatever. NASA, for example, has been led by narrow specialists for entirely too long. Rand’s complaints about Michael Griffin can easily be explained by Griffin’s narrowness. I heard Griffin’s first talk as NASA Administrator. He was visibly angry about what the Columbia investigation showed about NASA. He also made a revealing comment. He admitted he didn’t understand the cultural parts of the investigation because of a lack of knowledge of human psychology on his part. In short, he really didn’t have any idea on how to fix the agency’s most severe problems.
You don’t want me working on your car or around your house — unless the activity is cooking. Then you will beg me to come back to whip up one of my dishes. I learned the basics of cooking from Mom and have learned much more over the years.
Yes, we need more tinkerers. I use that word with real respect. We also need a more open, free, democratic culture in government, academia, private business and more.
“So the decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.” – Gary Pisano and Willy Shih, “Restoring American Competitiveness”
Not sure to what extent this is correct, but it’s definitely worth thinking about.
On the other hand, not all hands-on work is necessarily productive. I spent 5 hours last night hauling various tools and goops up and down a 15 foot ladder, putting crown moulding in our stairwell… and if it weren’t fun it probably wouldn’t be worth it. Specialization of trade is how we built civilization, and me working to achieve sub-minimum-wage savings over what a professional contractor could have done isn’t quite as efficient.
jrman wrote:
“I worry about this, not just with “things”, but with math and logic too. I know a lot of people that don’t solve equations or do integrals anymore – they think that’s something computers do. But who programs the computers?”
Many people can’t even do basic arithmetic and are therefore gullible about all kinds of crackpot ideas that anyone with any kind of feel for numbers can see right through. Journalists are particularly poorly educated in this respect. Numbers in media reports are sometimes off by orders of magnitude and no one at the MSM outlets that publish the flawed stories catches the errors.
Oh, I’d say somewhere between 100% and 100%, give or take 0%. Design -> Manufacture -> DFM is actually a loop. Manufacturing and process engineering know-how becomes tribal knowledge of the nation, taking years to develop ab initio. At first I was amazed at how [insert name of product here] is a small world. Now I believe this to be the norm.
A rare compliment from me for SpaceX: at least they know how to get stuff flying. Kudos for their hands-on skills! And I mean that with no sarcasm.[Yeah, I know, save this link…].
I’d say somewhere between 100% and 100%, give or take 0%.
Hyperbole has it’s place. But among a group of nit pickers like here?
We haven’t given the whole game away. When I was a kid I once worked for a guy in Brooklyn that had a few buildings and made stuff. I got to supervise a half dozen guys in one of his buildings. Sadly, this meant I couldn’t spend more time watching this old guy come up with the stuff he sold.
Even my drug addict brother shows amazing mechanical skills. He once interviewed for a job where they showed him a very intricate part and asked if he could make something like it. He told them truthfully, he had made that one!
As long as we have kids growing up on farms and ranches (and coming from S. Africa) I think we’ll be ok. We just have to deal with the idiots at the top who want to keep interfering in all our lives.
But, you make a good point Titus. One I agree with. Well, that’s what makes it such a good point, isn’t it? Damned confirmational bias!
Ken, if the Pedantic Caucus hasn’t run me off the premises by now, what makes you think they ever will? Really, every time a member raises his head and starts bleating past me that which he thinks I’ve never heard before, it’s probably someone with no original thought to voice. That’s no different than meatspace, and I haven’t quit that, either.
P.S.: Your point about the cultural/genetic raw material is well taken.
P.P.S.: I’ve often wondered if the American pre-occupation with team sports, especially in our youth, isn’t a significant contribution to our entrepreneurial success. That is, fostering the ability of random people to self-organize ostensibly to win should necessarily translate into the business world as easily.
Let me ‘splain my rantings. it seems I didn’t make my point well. Yet again here, as we’ve pummeled this equine in days gone by!
I’m not calling out individuals, nor engineers nor aerospace engineers, nor the college educated in general. (God knows that I know enough to see that THIS is an exceptional group of people. I know enough to see a fast current)
I’m calling out a system that absolutely denigrates and talks down to and talks shit about the people who DO most of the work!! In days gone by, there were “X” number of workers per “Y” number of college degreed managers / engineers. Not anymore, they want an AAS to drive a delivery truck because it has a TV on it!!!
We are talking trash, as a nation, about the people who keep our cars running, keep our toilets flushing and keep our roofs from leaking! Not to mention the people who build said items.
Joe Average cannot change his own tire. YET, he talks trash about the guy who drives the tow truck that drags his ignorant ass to Tire King!!! He tells his kids what a dolt and slack jawed yokel that guy is!! He FAILS, FAILS, FAILS to tell the part to his spawn, where HE was to damned stupid to change a tire!!!!!!
In my mind, Joe College Professor is the worst of the lot.
He can do nothing in many cases other than teach. But college profs are looked up to like they ARE doing something worthwhile. Seriously? Did they cure the common cold or poverty yet? Unless you include running for public office after he bombs out at every other level, professors need the knuckle draggers or they’d starve and live in a box behind their office building.
IMO, I’m not humble on this one, IMO, we a large part of our decline is because American youth were told working with your hands makes you less of a person.
That’s been a stupid and dangerous message to send. And it’s still being said to our kids!!!
To continue D.S. thought with an anecdote of my own… Working at a regional HQ I once heard an engineer speak disparagingly about air traffic controllers who mostly are NOT college graduates. ATCS are selected for special abilities and youth, not educational level. Maximum age is 30, but most are around 20 when they apply and individually have little life experience (collectively it’s another matter since they come from all corners of life.)
Looking down on others seems a common past time.
that which he thinks I’ve never heard before
Having a far ranging imagination can be a real social problem. My response has usually been to thank the thousandth person to tell me something I already knew. I once made a mistake over at Selenian Boondocks regarding passing EML1 at ‘highest speed.’ I got it once the first person pointed out my error, but a dozen or so felt the need to explain it better for me. I just grin and bear it. They don’t realize they’re being helpful is not, but I don’t fault them for that.
I once had a brain. It almost caused about 50 Asians to get a C in physics until I dropped out and the curve snapped back… and lost my full scholarship to Harvey Mudd back in the 70s.
Titus Says:
September 8th, 2011 at 9:31 am
I’ve often wondered if the American pre-occupation with team sports, especially in our youth, isn’t a significant contribution to our entrepreneurial success.
I was going to say the Duke of Wellington would agree, but maybe not. I do.
On the subject at hand, I think H.G. Wells predicted the bifurcation of society into Eloi and Morlock, did he not?
Bart,
we are in a current culture, that is looking for an ALL Eloi world. It’s crazy.
It doesn’t matter anyway, none of this we’ve said. All the problems will be fixed by Mr. Obama’s next speech. I’m betting he’ll propose taxing the rich and writing more rules
But it’s just a guess.
Indeed, he did
Now Der schumpy two things a lot of the force to push the kids to college is the parents who did the dirty job and wanted a better life for their children. I work with a older draftsman who father was auto mechanic and owned a fairly large shop, but stead fast refused to let his son work on cars or in the garage. He would do odd jobs around the shop or paint the building, the father wanted him to go to college and find a none dirty job. The draftsman can’t even change his own oil or locate important parts of his car. Though he dose a lot of home maintenance, puttering around the house , from building additions, re-plastering/tileing, painting, helping his plumber and house building friends.
There is a reverse to your trend too, their are the old codgers who are deftly afraid of computers and want nothing to do with them or don’t even use them to full potential. I ‘ve worked with a few of them. In college had a older African who was a mathematical geniuses he could run circles around most of the class with pencil and paper solving equations but came to a VLSI course to design simple adder circuits with cadence he was whole sale copying other people work , not even using the computer just having someone do it for him and put his name on it and giving him a cd to hand in. Then was in a Design course he was grouped with 2 ‘whiz kids’, one of them that went on to do internships with a major engineering software/simulation/control outfit, they asked him to go calculate something and/or come up with the equations for a model of pan tilt system in Matlab, he came back with pencil and paper equations on multiple pages. The ‘whiz kids’ didn’t want to deal with transferring and whine and complained to the prof and got him kicked off the team. Whiz kids made a very slick presentation and shown their slick computer model of the system and video of it working. In the ‘whiz kids’ case him coming with a a paper solution mightiest well been no solution at all.
Then Going back to my draftsman coworker. He is only slightly better with computers than he is with cars. He started with the easel board, and guess drew Very quickly and efficiently with pencil and paper and draftsman triangle, often doing tasks faster than the other draftsman, and took a while to introduce him to computers, out of the companies fear of slowing him down. Though eventually he picked up auto cad and became very quick with it that eventually he could do all the draftsman work by himself. But he uses the autocad like a easel board and making pretty pictures not using the advanced capabilities provided which could provide people down the line additional information and prevent the duplication of labor that a true Computer Assisted Design system could provide and make some of his own tasks less manual labor intensive. And only other computer functions he can do is read and write emails from outlook, and do a little web surfing be it clicking on stuff from the MSN homepage or using the msn search often to go find a spec on something. Has no concept that he can navigate the computers file structure outside of autocads Open and save windows. He can’t even reload his own plotters paper rolls though he will jump in to manually use a 3 axis milling machine or other power tools/machines.
I am somewhat frustrated by the developing divide between people who do things and people who (allegedly) think about things.
I am an engineer. I’m supposed to be able to do both, !*@&it.
Today, I was asking the machine shop to make something for me. I don’t yet know how to weld. I asked them if they could train me on the equipment, so that I could do parts of it myself. No, they weren’t allowed to let the students use the equipment, and they don’t provide training. Liability, we could hurt ourselves, ect, ect.
The only thing I have been *allowed* to have hands-on experience with have been the computers. Any tools I need for manual tasks I have to provide myself, because the ones the university has aren’t for us.
If I ever want to develop pseudo-hands-on experience with anything, I have to develop some sufficiently detailed model from first principles, and play with the diffeqs on a computer – this requires both crazily detailed mathematics, tons of computing power, and lots of time. It’s sort of like that old saying: If you want to make an omelette, you must first create the universe.
Der Schtumpy,
I have a 110-lb German Peddinghaus Anvil.
*does a snoopy dance*
We once had a pretty bright engineer with a masters degree in EE. One day I had to explain to him how a bipolar transistor worked. He didn’t know what the base was for, so I explained base current and current gain, etc. He said they only covered it for a couple of days in school. Prior to working for us he interviewed for a similar controls job where they said he was overqualified, as he’d just be doing relay logic. His reply was, “What’s a relay?”
I’ve read some interesting academic opinions on what went wrong with engineering schools.
The more general observation is that liberal arts professors looked down on engineering professors as glorified mechanics, so over time the engineering professors de-emphasized mechanical skills like machining, eventually eliminating them entirely. Those classes were replaced by more theory and equations to make engineering as clean and respectable as physics, law, or English literature.
A more specific story concerns the problems with electrical engineering education. Up until probaby the 1960’s or so, most kids going into EE were already electronic hobbyists, having built their own radios and the like, already knew how all the basic components worked, along with concepts like hysteresis, impedance, resonance, mutual inductance, tuned circuits, oscillators, filters, antennas, etc. So EE curriculum was aimed more at turning them into professionals by opening up the world of calculus, frequency domain analysis, control system theory, field and wave theory, semiconductor physics, and such. The university program was essentially a finishing school to give already skilled hobbyists a firm engineering groundwork, like turning a skilled machinist or builder used to rules of thumb and algebraic formulas into a mechanical engineer.
Then the incoming student population stopped being highly knowledgable hobbyists (essentially ham radio operators and electronic tinkerers), but the EE curriculum didn’t change. Then the incoming hobbyists became few and far between, yet still the EE curriculum didn’t change. So now an EE student starts out doing big matrix algebra problems involving ideal current sources, yet doesn’t know what a transistor is (other than they’re the things inside computer chips), how it works, how to bias them, or that in the real world ideal current sources don’t actually exist.
Somehow, some of the students end up being very good, if not brilliant, which is probably more of a testament to their intellect and curiosity instead of what should be the inevitable result of getting a degree in engineering.
Another observation I have is what you might call and end-point in this trend. In college one of my engineering friends was living with the son of the former Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union. What amazed him most about us was that we were very smart and yet built things ourselves (I’d built an 8″ telescope, and we were always building electronics projects, computers, sensors, and other routine things). He said that in India the educated people do not touch things themselves, they tell someone else what to build. To build something with their own hands would greatly lower their status. Perhaps that’s why few of us have ever bought or seen a complicated piece of machinery made in India.
Hmm, just looked up the local hackerspace. Maybe they could help me learn what I need to know. Thanks for letting me know about these.
Only problem now is finding a substitute for sleep, so I have time … 😛
Well Turner your basic sentiment is correct being a semi recent EE grad and only done minimal electronics tinkering before going to college and a lot more programming and tinkering with computers. But i am guessing the Brilliant EE you have would been a lot better with OP amps and I am guessing even Fet transistors. The op amps were taught /used repeatedly in the controls and signals courses along with circuits courses, while the mosFet in the VLSI and Micro electronics. Though Relays would never be covered, short of a freshman intro to electronics course.
Though i had went with relays for motor control in one of my sophmore level design courses while another group in our section try to use bjt based hbridge circuit they got from online source but couldn’t make them work , suggested/gave them a few of our relays to use instead during the crunch time before the presentation.
Though I work with a clunker of an older engineer, though he pretty much used college to dodge the draft for Vietnam. He would perpetually get glue logic backwards at best or simply wrong, couldn’t calculate power dispensation for the life of him on a BJT circuit, took a few minutes to understand raising the voltage on one side of a resistor would raise the current thru the resistor. Though he adequate as a technician and has enough experience to be a adequate sales/ customer relations engineer. Though the 60’s Era MIT grad I work under is funny thinks the clunker dosen’t have degree , but he almost never likes any other electrical engineers and thinks they don’t have a degree (fake resumes), other than the one from the same era as him. Only younger engineers he likes were of a different focus than himself such as microcomputer engineers, FPGA engineers.
Engineer, yes, I think our MA EE would’ve been more at home with FETs and op-amps. I just had trouble grasping how a person could get a masters in EE and not know a BJT inside out, along with a dozen useful amplifier configurations, current mirrors, and odd types like multi-emitter (used in TTL) or the microwave hetero-junction types. Perhaps it’s because he specialized in VLSI.
I’m sure the new trend is that many freshmen show up with more programming experience than most graduates used to possess.
George,
I AM jealous!!! Hand-me-down, or BIG $$$ acquisition?
Engineer,
I sort of get the old guy reluctance. That’s common, people as a whole are apt to ‘stay put’ once they learn a task “X” way. I’ve seen this too. It looks like a dangerous thought pattern to me, making yourself conspicuously less skilled.
I do NOT get the guy who would not ‘allow’ his son that life or some of those skills. I’m the odd man out I guess. Before my kids ‘got’ to use the motorized lawn mower, or weed whacker, they HAD to do it with a reel mower and a sling blade / kaiser blade and hand clippers.
Now they both know how to do some things their compadres never learned. And they appreciate the right / updated tools for most any job.
I can’t see hamstringing a kid, male or female so that they meet some societal level. Any kid can be a office guy / businessman with clean hands, AND know how to change his own tire. His dad does in most cases!
I am reminded of my time in the electronics lab at Caltech. One of my fellow students — absolutely brilliant guy who shined in all the classes we had together — came over to me one night while I was working on a project. He watched me for a bit as I was populating components. I picked up a resistor and put it in and he asked “How do you know what resistor to put in without measuring it”?
That’s right — he had lived his whole life and decided to make EE his career and, as questioning revealed, he had never actually touched a component before this lab class. He didn’t know that the markings on a resistor meant *anything* — never mind how to read them.
I didn’t then, and still don’t, understand how one can decide to pick a career without having played around in the field a little bit to see if it is interesting.
However, there are still plenty of ways for people to get practical experience — probably more than before. The difference is that now they’re often hobbies or internships or extracurricular activities or things like the AIAA UAV contest rather than a core part of the curriculum. Robotics. Building and flying R/C aircraft. Hobbyists who make things with 3D printing foundries. In other words, you have to go out of your way to get those experiences.
And the people who do are the ones who stand out of the field when we look for applicants.
Der Schtumpy,
The anvil was a big $$$ acquisition. $500 or $800, I forget which, and when it arrived I picked it up, put it on the welding table, and my back was out for about a year.
Jeff and cthulhu, I have a weird R/C idea for you, an aerodynamically unstable flying wing (using a conventional non-reflexed, non-swept airfoil) that is controlled in pitch by reacting to motor torque. Trying to stabilize such a wing with aerodynamic control surfaces is fraught with difficulty because it takes several chord lengths of travel for the full change in the flow around the wing to develop, meaning the reactions to the control surfaces is always running behind. Using Isaac Newton eliminates the delay, though it does add weight.
So embed a high-performance DC motor in the wing, with its shaft aligned from wingtip to wingtip. The motor controller gets its input from an RC rate gyro, and is wired so an uncommanded increase in the pitch angle causes the motor to spin up in the same direction. By conservation of angular momentum, the wing itself will pitch down in reaction. With a good motor you should be able to flop the wing all over the kitchen table.
Then you add a slower, servo-driven weight-shift control system that shifts the battery fore and aft in an attempt to let the motor speed return to zero, so long-term stability can be maintained across the full range of angle of attack. Otherwise the motor will just spin up to its maximum speed, in one direction or the other, resulting in loss of control.
For test flights you could add a conventional vertical stabilizer, but if that works out you could try a disk motor for yaw control, along with little drag tabs on the wing tips. Roll control could come from conventional ailerons, though wing warping would be cuter because then there wouldn’t be any obvious control surfaces.
Taken to extremes, the concept would be a ball with a high moment of inertia in all axes, with an extremely lightweight fuselage and wing wrapped around it and spun in any direction on command, kind of like a mouse spinning around a fixed track ball.
But the early steps, controlling pitch, should be a simple and educational hobbyist project.
my back was out for about a year
As my friend with cancer used to say, “Listen to your body when it says no.”
Geroge, what you’ve described is how satellites use momentum control wheels for attitude control. It works in space but I suspect it wouldn’t work so well for a model flying in the atmosphere (I may be completely wrong, though). You’d need both the weight of the motors and a mass attached to them because the torque effects of simply speeding up or slowing down the motor armature likely wouldn’t produce enough force. The motors will need electrical power so you’ll need batteries for them, quite likely larger batteries than you’d need for servos. Motors also have a top speed, so if you need additional force, you’re out of luck. You can likely speed up a motor faster than you can get it to slow down (without a brake) so your control authority will be stronger in one direction than another. It’s an interesting idea but it seems to me that if the model were seriously unstable, it wouldn’t be effective at maintaining control.