There is a perception that you are an idiot without a four year degree. Also if you're over 40 then forget looking for any kind of professional job, because your education is "expired." This is exactly what several potential employers have said to me. They chuckle and say my education is expired. They can't legally say that I'm too old so they say that instead.
I've been reduced to doing short term contract work. I have a relationship with a couple of companies and that's it. I asked one of the building managers for a job a long time ago. She knows what I can do. I've been Johnny on the spot for her a few times when they had electrical and mechanical problems. I get them up and running ASAP and they know it. She told me straight up as a courtesy that at 60 years old I had a 0% chance of getting hired by her company. She said that she's been told to hire under 30 if at all possible. She's also almost retired so that's why she sticks her neck out. In retrospect the corporate scene at that company (don't ask) has gone from bad to much worse, with executives openly sniping at each other and employees too.
I wonder when we'll reach peak insanity. Are we there yet?
That's shocking. I had mastered transformers by the time I was 12 tears old.
But I'm the stupid one, and my education has expired.
According to today's business model, he doesn't know anything without a piece of paper saying he knows it.
Last edited:
In 1972 I walked into a Motorola plant with only a "certificate" from a poorly funded public high school that declared me an "electronics technician." We all knew that that meant that I might be qualified to fix TV sets and other consumer electronics, which coincidentally was the only job experience that I had.
I was one of about 500 applicants that day for three positions. After brief interviews had reduced that number to about 100, they gave each of us a 60 question multiple choice test. I scored the second highest marks ever achieved on that test and was hired to fix two way radio boards as they came off the assembly line.
After one and a half years of fixing radios, and 10 years of fixing the factory that made those radios, I managed to land a job in engineering. My first job was aptly to design the audio amplifier for a two way radio.
My first real responsibility was to train "freshout" engineers in the aspects of real engineering that was not taught in school. The BIGGIE, soldering. They DON'T teach that, or how to operate test equipment, or how to measure real radio specs in school.
Most of those recent engineering school graduates had NO IDEA how a superhetrodyne radio actually works, why it was designed the way it was, or even what the words "frequency synthesizer" or PLL meant, let alone how it worked. It was 1985 and we were all just learning how to put microprocessors into radios and make it all work, but someone needed to teach them all of this.
As the infusion of processors into radio equipment grew at an ever increasing pace, there of course needed to be an army of software engineers to code it all. Think the gap in electrical engineering is bad, does a recent graduate in computer engineering or software development understand how a two way radio or cell phone works? Can they be expected to? NO, That's why Motorola set up training classes in real classrooms with teachers to train them.
The rapid advances in technology make the gap between what's learned in engineering school, and what an engineer needs to know grow wider each day. This will not change until academia realizes that it needs to.
I was one of about 500 applicants that day for three positions. After brief interviews had reduced that number to about 100, they gave each of us a 60 question multiple choice test. I scored the second highest marks ever achieved on that test and was hired to fix two way radio boards as they came off the assembly line.
After one and a half years of fixing radios, and 10 years of fixing the factory that made those radios, I managed to land a job in engineering. My first job was aptly to design the audio amplifier for a two way radio.
My first real responsibility was to train "freshout" engineers in the aspects of real engineering that was not taught in school. The BIGGIE, soldering. They DON'T teach that, or how to operate test equipment, or how to measure real radio specs in school.
Most of those recent engineering school graduates had NO IDEA how a superhetrodyne radio actually works, why it was designed the way it was, or even what the words "frequency synthesizer" or PLL meant, let alone how it worked. It was 1985 and we were all just learning how to put microprocessors into radios and make it all work, but someone needed to teach them all of this.
As the infusion of processors into radio equipment grew at an ever increasing pace, there of course needed to be an army of software engineers to code it all. Think the gap in electrical engineering is bad, does a recent graduate in computer engineering or software development understand how a two way radio or cell phone works? Can they be expected to? NO, That's why Motorola set up training classes in real classrooms with teachers to train them.
The rapid advances in technology make the gap between what's learned in engineering school, and what an engineer needs to know grow wider each day. This will not change until academia realizes that it needs to.
Years ago one of my employees with a masters EE from a good university started on a repair using an NOS electrolytic from stock. I recommended slowly charging through a resistor to confirm it wasn't faulty. Regardless of the attempts he couldn't grasp the concept of RC charging. I was told later the curriculum is effectively virtual; software focused instead of reality based.
BTW, you're not missing much in contemporary corporate environments. Performance is supplanted by engagement and sociability, emphasis on being cheerfully and helpfully 110% behind pretending to support your initiatives.
brilliant answer … you've entirely captured the difference between book-learning something (even in great depth!), and much more 'randomly' experiencing a lot of failures, near-failures, near-successes and occasionally surprising successes out of a LOT of experiments. Experiments based on ideas self-conjured, heard-from-'the helper' kids, preached by one's smart parent, uncle, aunt or completely nerdy cousin. And from books. Lots of books (in the old days), and today potentially lots of rabbit-hole digging in Google, in Wikipedia, on many a subject-expert site.
Still … have to burn one's fingers with a soldering iron.
Repeatedly… until you learn its foibles.
Have to fall out of trees in tree-houses that are rickety.
Have to play baseball in inappropriate locations, and break a few windows.
And work a whole week to 'pay' for fixing them.
But stare gazing at the glazier replacing the window … watching him scrape out the old dry putty, clean it up with a piece of well abused sand-paper, and a frazzled brush. Seeing him deftly cut a right-sized pane out of a bigger sheet, then use a bit of black wet-and-dry emery paper to carefully sand the corners and sharp edges. Then setting the pane, caulking it up, using a putty knife to smooth it all to a professional finish.
Then, 25 years later, having to fix one's own broken window, compliments of the kids next door. First time. Done right. Vicarious experience. Not “book larning”, but larning all the same. And cutting one's fingers before remembering the wet-and-dry business. But hey … it was a CLEAN professional looking job!
________________________________________
I really think that school-learning and my dear Dad's points (above) compliment and reinforce this idea: that outstanding learning is quite varied, quite often unplanned. But it is never about throwing up one's hands with “we don't know how to do that” and running away. Its probably why so many professional engineers (as a proportion of the population) have come from the Midwest's farms. Where when 'shît happens', either one learns to fix it right away, or a whole field of crop goes from the coming rain storm. Life on farms is unapologetic at ranking lazy-incompetence with a harsh sentence. But most-every farm kid (and while highly weighted towards boys, not exclusively so!) that has an ounce of brains, knows just about everything about everything on the farm and its machineries. Making for good engineers.
However — I'll be the first to recognize too — that there really has to be a certain 'something unusual' about the kid, if he or she is going to go on in life and not just become a specialist of some sort, but an inventor, a master and every once in a while, a professor of mastery.
Discipline
Perseverence
Diversity
Unplanned serendipity
Endless ratcheted rote
Practice
Plenty of 'free time'
Administrative support
That's what'll develop a young mind into a steel trap of useful informaiton and 'muscle memory' learning.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
Again, shocking. RC charging is the basic of basics.
When I went to school there were NO simulators period. You used KVL, KCL, and algebra. I still do it today, and it still works!
So maybe my education is expired in a virtual world.
I'm fully aware of this dynamic. I was phased out when this dynamic was phased in. I'm just a dinosaur.
That was my thought as well. Not to mention, exponential growth and exponential decay are really valuable things to understand, because they describe a lot of real-world phenomena, not just capacitors (for example, radioactivity of a sample vs. time, the intensity of a light beam as it travels through a medium, the area of a pond covered by water-hyacinth vs time, et cetera.)
-Gnobuddy
In the technical high school (1967-1970), books from the 1950's taught the basics.....The rest we learned from a big pile of parts some 0 to 400V Eico power supplies, and a VTVM with a good old Simpson 260 for backup. There were a couple of "fearless kids" who weren't afraid of blowing stuff up, and that wouldn't refuse a dare....and a teacher that would look the other way.
Would anyone today even thinking of hooking the whole class in series (holding hands) across the Variac in a game of chicken? The two "winners" of that game both wound up working at the same Motorola plant.
Would a teacher today even dream of daring a kid to see if he could make the outside envelope of a metal 6L6 tube glow red.....I won that bet, but stunk up one whole wing of the school.
Results, everyone in the class learned some real world electronics experience.
I have worked with college graduate engineers that have never touched a piece of test equipment, or seen a live circuit with more than 12 volts running through it.
Health and safety guidelines today prevent a pupil who has been charged up by a Van de Graaff generator from delivering a shock to a line of his fellow pupils who are holding hands, the distant one grasping a cold water tap.
The teacher just can't be certain that one of those pupils hasn't an undetected heart condition.
The teacher just can't be certain that one of those pupils hasn't an undetected heart condition.
I remember well in about '69 a fellow apprentice connecting an electrolytic the wrong way round, probably a 100uF at about 250V, and it exploding and a roll of red hot aluminium travelling several feet across the lab.
I also personally took apart a tin of bench polish, cutting off the top screwthreaded part and remounting it insulated with its cap on, connected to the +ve of a large capacitor inside, the -ve to the case. I charged it up to 350V, and left it around on Fridays, the day we cleaned up. Quite fun to see someone pick it up.
I also personally took apart a tin of bench polish, cutting off the top screwthreaded part and remounting it insulated with its cap on, connected to the +ve of a large capacitor inside, the -ve to the case. I charged it up to 350V, and left it around on Fridays, the day we cleaned up. Quite fun to see someone pick it up.
Nearly everything comes with a risk. I accepted that a long time ago and am not afraid to try something that has potential to be dangerous.
It's possible to live a sanitized, minimize-all-risks life, but then what exactly is the point?
I don't know, maybe I'm just destined to blow myself up. Until then, I'm perfectly content taking risks with reasonable precautions. Better that than making it to age 80 and realizing I haven't done anything with my life.
Besides. I trust myself a lot more than I trust the soccer moms in minivans who do 40 in a residential area while texting.
It's possible to live a sanitized, minimize-all-risks life, but then what exactly is the point?
I don't know, maybe I'm just destined to blow myself up. Until then, I'm perfectly content taking risks with reasonable precautions. Better that than making it to age 80 and realizing I haven't done anything with my life.
Besides. I trust myself a lot more than I trust the soccer moms in minivans who do 40 in a residential area while texting.
Guys (and gals?), I've just registered on this site because of this thread. It's been fascinating, poignant, hilarious, deeply personal, philosophical, inspirational. Not bad for a simple forum post on a forum dedicated to (I guess DIY audio - i've not even looked at the rest of the forum yet). And I'm actually only on page 12. It's late now so I'm probably going to just have to read the rest tomorrow, but what a read.
I feel lucky to have been born in the mid 70's and so can relate to some of the old-time stories on here (that I heard from elders at the time) as well as being young enough to be interested in the new tech that came along in the 90's that's given birth to the all-encompassing techno-dystopia we find ourselves in and have some idea of what life is like for the youngers being born into it. But boy am I jealous of some of the great stories you guys have shared so far. And moved by some of the sad ones.
Anyway, all the best everyone.
PS. almost didn't get to register as it asks you a "technical" question when registering, i suppose to filter out plebs like me. Luckily for me though, my interest in guitars means I was able to figure out the other name for a valve amp. But I panicked for a moment 😛
I feel lucky to have been born in the mid 70's and so can relate to some of the old-time stories on here (that I heard from elders at the time) as well as being young enough to be interested in the new tech that came along in the 90's that's given birth to the all-encompassing techno-dystopia we find ourselves in and have some idea of what life is like for the youngers being born into it. But boy am I jealous of some of the great stories you guys have shared so far. And moved by some of the sad ones.
Anyway, all the best everyone.
PS. almost didn't get to register as it asks you a "technical" question when registering, i suppose to filter out plebs like me. Luckily for me though, my interest in guitars means I was able to figure out the other name for a valve amp. But I panicked for a moment 😛
Reminds me of my Father, whom I cite as living in a way parallel to the way some kids would keep their fountain pen at school, in the case on the velvet pad so as to preserve it.
Yes preserve, and take care, but surely to live we have to take risks, albeit calculated ones, in order to fulfil anything.
Yes preserve, and take care, but surely to live we have to take risks, albeit calculated ones, in order to fulfil anything.
I hate to be this cynical (and apologies if this verges into the political), but as the husband of a recently retired HS English teacher, I have a hard time seeing the changes to public education as anything but a deliberate, long-term effort to destroy and privatize the public school system to the benefit of those who would own the schools, profit from them, and be able to instill their political and religious ideologies into the next generations of children.
The playing field has been tilted to make public education more and more difficult (e.g. the public schools must provide expensive educations for all children of any handicap levels, a requirement that charter schools do not have to meet). "School choice" bills exist to provide financial incentives to move children into for-profit and/or church run schools. The current Secretary of Education has no connection to or support for public education. Chip away at the foundations long enough and the structure will collapse.
I'll stop now before the ban hammer emerges.
[/rant]
Maybe the steady decline is just the fallout from the years where people were exposed to so much lead from car exhausts?
I don’t think it actually did any good, that’s for sure, and not sure which studies I would even trust to try and determine anything for certain.
I don’t think it actually did any good, that’s for sure, and not sure which studies I would even trust to try and determine anything for certain.
A lesson that life taught me, in an off campus Motorola facility no less...…
Never connect the leads from a defibrillator across a banana and hit the test button. 400 Joules + banana = BIG BANG and BIG MESS. It took two of us several hours to clean it up, and the place smelled of banana for days!
"Testing" a few small poly capacitors brought a phone call asking if we were OK, they thought they heard gunshots.
I was tasked to solve lightning related issues in a SCADA system, so I got an old defib to "make" lightning. We had some fun after we fixed the issues and did the testing. Once the boss found out about the "fun" the defib was banned, and subsequently dismantled. I still have the big cap that makes the bang. It can be seen in this rather unsafe test amp....a 200 watt Champ. Note the Lexan shield used in all testing. It was removed for a couple pictures which were taken from a distance. There is 1500 volts in that high quality yellow clip lead.
I don't think it's possible for a youngster coming out of high school today to work their way up to being a research engineer, and get the company they're working for to pay for them to get two college degrees.
There is still however quite a few people learning how to "make" some neat stuff by connecting a bunch of cheap PC boards together and then writing code to make it all do something useful.....there is still hope for those that have the desire, and drive to make it happen.
Who would believe that a self taught kid could make their own IC chips in their GARAGE!
KID, did I hear you right, you want to buy WHAT......Hydrofluoric acid? UH, yes.
YouTube
First IC 🙂 – Sam Zeloof
Note, I successfully used the same MAGIC VLSI design software to layout a simple CMOS opamp chip at school. We however had it fabricated at MOSIS.
Never connect the leads from a defibrillator across a banana and hit the test button. 400 Joules + banana = BIG BANG and BIG MESS. It took two of us several hours to clean it up, and the place smelled of banana for days!
"Testing" a few small poly capacitors brought a phone call asking if we were OK, they thought they heard gunshots.
I was tasked to solve lightning related issues in a SCADA system, so I got an old defib to "make" lightning. We had some fun after we fixed the issues and did the testing. Once the boss found out about the "fun" the defib was banned, and subsequently dismantled. I still have the big cap that makes the bang. It can be seen in this rather unsafe test amp....a 200 watt Champ. Note the Lexan shield used in all testing. It was removed for a couple pictures which were taken from a distance. There is 1500 volts in that high quality yellow clip lead.
I don't think it's possible for a youngster coming out of high school today to work their way up to being a research engineer, and get the company they're working for to pay for them to get two college degrees.
There is still however quite a few people learning how to "make" some neat stuff by connecting a bunch of cheap PC boards together and then writing code to make it all do something useful.....there is still hope for those that have the desire, and drive to make it happen.
Who would believe that a self taught kid could make their own IC chips in their GARAGE!
KID, did I hear you right, you want to buy WHAT......Hydrofluoric acid? UH, yes.
YouTube
First IC 🙂 – Sam Zeloof
Note, I successfully used the same MAGIC VLSI design software to layout a simple CMOS opamp chip at school. We however had it fabricated at MOSIS.
Attachments
Last edited:
Quoted for truth.
I spent a lot of years making money on my competance/performance, and then my employer was taken over by a Canadian telecom giant. You can all guess what happened next.
My bonus just keeps getting bigger every year and I smile when I am supposed to. It doesn't matter that my projects now take me at least 6 or 7 times longer to accomplish (due to the typical corporate BS, interdepartmental politics, incompetence at every level, yada yada yada)
It feels terrible, but watcha gonna do after almost 20 years of service, eh? Golden handcuffs.
Welcome to the forum! Your initiation is that you have to build yourself something. I recommend starting with a pair of full range speakers. Pretty straightforward and very rewarding.