"What courses were most and least useful to you in your engineering career?"

Hi Daniel!

I feel the same as Gene, in that pretty much all courses were useful. Some vocational stuff can become obsolete quickly though.

Bullets successfully dodged: B-ISDN, Microsoft certifications.

Flak that hit me: I spent some time learning some voice technologies that are now obsolete - but still it was useful for a while, and was a spring-board to other stuff.

Most useful for finding jobs for me: Micro-controllers and digital design, computer architecture, assembler, C - I felt a bit fake for the first year in my first real software engineering job, since I only knew C and assembler and no real computer science or engineering stuff, but I stuck at it for a few years, and read as much as I could, not just on language but also techniques and design patterns, did a formal course on server admin to use the machines at my disposal properly, and finally was confident enough to realise I was doing adequately, and that there are plenty of other things I'd picked up that helped in the job - such as some maths, and some knowledge of how processors worked.

If I have to pick the least useful course from uni, for me personally it was accounting, I was just not interested in it and it showed in my test result (22%! : ) But apart from that, everything was either useful or interesting to me.

I still try to select courses and webinars these days too, typically just single-day courses.

At the risk of sounding old...

First job was running the tape library in operations.

In college, they hired me in to work the batch station, to answer questions, when the questions I was asking, couldn't be answered by the people in the batch station (no good deed goes unpunished).

Wrestled with a PDP-11 for a while.

Wrote video games for a while (old 8 bit Atari/Commodore stuff as well as 8088 PC)

Keep a slide rule around for the apocalypse.

Wow!  I went straight to the 5 Mbyte hard drive (both washing machine size and years later a card-based solution for an IBM PC).  I remember doing multiple pass assembler programming with paper tape (teletype).  It didn't take too long before I wrote my own magnetic tape assembler, with a CRT editor.

Gene

Oh, right, there are two parts to the question. Least valuable to my Engineering experience, perhaps the English Literature class that did an in-depth study of "The Great Gatsby". (I'm sure to get some blowback for that one)

I too have done the cards, slow and high speed paper tapes, DecTapes, Magnetic Tapes. First hard drive had all of 64 Kwords capacity. Thought I had hit the big time when we upgraded to a 1.2 Mbyte hard disk.

How the times have changed over the decades.

DAB

Jack,

I did not drop the stack, but the runner who took the cards off-site to be processed did, in a puddle.  We got back a waterlogged, random stack of punch cards.  Yeah!

I used punch cards and tapes for several years (military and aviation were slow adopters of technology).

Gene

Hey Gene,

Ever drop a stack of cards?  I dropped a Cobol box the day before the project was due... fun times.

Surprisingly enough... typing.  All the loop circuit stuff and antenna field concepts are all stuff that I go back to, because each new idea has a refinement that makes the stuff I learned long ago, a bit outdated. However, learning to poke buttons on an old Selectric hasn't changed (except for the spacing of the keys).  I did however play a little with Dvorak but always drifted back to qwerty.  For the amount of source code generation I have done over the years in assemblers of all types and C, Pascal, Java, Ruby, and now Python, I find being able to type well and not do the two finger dance, has proven to be most valuable.

Jack

Without a doubt, my technical writing class became the most useful in my career.

Being able to communicate technical ideas with all ranges of people makes a huge difference to your career options.

There were better engineers than I, but my superior communication skills gave me the edge, especially since I could describe complex ideas in simple terms with management. Trust me, managers do not fund projects they do not understand, so you really need to simplify ideas down into basic terms.

After considerable thought, I would say there were no least useful classes. Being a systems engineer I was tossed into a wide range of projects and I ended up using just about everything I learned in school. You just never know what tidbit of knowledge will come in handy.

DAB

This could be fun.....

Let's start with the least valuable classes.  Under the topic of "general electives" we were required to take PE classes.  I would have to say that my 3 terms of ice skating classes were the least valuable to my engineering career.  The bowling class comes in second, but was more fun overall.

Most valuable: Logic Design, Structured PASCAL, and working in the University theatre as "Special Effects Master"  I used a Sinclair ZX80 to control the theatre light board system (thousands of watts per channel), along with several hundred red LEDs for "rats eyes" embedded in the stage.

Scott