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  • Author Author: JenCooke
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What does being an engineer mean to you?

JenCooke

We’ve got a birthday coming up. The element14 Community will turn five years old soon and this milestone has got us thinking about the big questions. Who we are, why we’re here and what we mean to people, that sort of thing.

 

The element14 Community was created for engineers. So we wanted to spend our birthday week celebrating and recognising you, the people who design, build and maintain the technology in our world today.

 

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We want to really understand what being an engineer means and what drives you all in your engineering endeavours. We’ve put together a few questions and we’d love to know what you think:

 

What characteristics do you feel determine you as an engineer?

 

How did you come to the realisation you wanted to be an engineer?

 

Are there any ‘rites of passage’ an engineer should go through?

 

What advice would you give to any budding engineers?

 

Do you communicate and network with other engineers? How?

 

Do you have any stories to show what being an engineer is all about?

 

Please answer in the comments below!

Parents

  • From what my parents told me, I was a born engineer.  When I was about 3 or 4 years old, they took me to the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens so I could look at all the pretty trees and flowers.  Instead, I was fascinated by the irrigation system and went running around to see where all the pipes went.  Good practice for tracing signals on multi-layer PC boards image

     

    I grew up in a neighborhood with practically no other children, other than my big sister.  My mother was worried that I wasn't getting enough interaction with other children, so she enrolled me in a nursery school.  This was too late: the teacher reported that instead of playing with the other children, I had discovered the school's collection of jigsaw puzzles and I was methodically putting these together, showing unusual focus for a boy my age.  What was most alarming is that I would store the puzzle away when I was done instead of leaving them out.  Maybe this is why I don't need automatic garbage collection. image

     

    So I had important engineer characteristics from an early age: obsession with solving problems and the ability to focus on them.

     

    Rites of passage: I don't know what schools are like nowadays, but I remember always being a social outcast.  This really didn't bother me, because I had plenty of interesting problems to work on.  I went to a high school that had strong math and science, so there were enough geeks to form a critical mass.  For example, we had a top-notch math team.

     

    Advice to budding engineers: Try not to worry about being a social outcast.  It will give you more time to learn neat stuff.  Don't wait for people to show you neat stuff -- find it for yourself.  My early knowledge of computers and electronics all came from going to the library and reading books.  Nowadays you have amazing resources like Wikipedia, so you don't even have to find physical books.  Also, you can often get used books for very cheap.  You don't need the latest and most expensive books to learn engineering: the fundamentals change very slowly, so get cheap used books.

     

    This is a great time (technically) for budding engineers: you can get cheap boards like Raspberry Pi and Papilio FPGA boards to play with things and see them working.  My first computer was an Heathkit H-8, and that cost big bucks compared to a RasPi.  So did my Heathkit top-of-the-line 15 MHz dual-trace sillyscope.

     

    On the other hand, nobody knows what sort of job prospects budding engineers will have.  It's no longer the case that an engineering degree is automatically a ticket to a long, well-paid career with a comfortable retirement.  In a way, this is good because people who want to become engineers only because they think it will pay well are probably going to be unhappy.  People who are obsessed with problem solving and understanding how things work (and fail) are the ones who are going to enjoy the work needed to become an engineer -- indeed, all those problem sets are going to be a fun adventure, not a burdensome chore.  As with most professions, the best and happiest are usually those who can't imagine being anything else.

     

    I'm currently working as an independent consultant, so my day-to-day interaction with other engineers is e-mail with clients and sites such as this one and Geek Times.  To get a periodic "fix" of feeling like a real engineer, I go to physical conferences in SillyIcon Valley twice a year: the Embedded Systems Conference (aka Design West aka EE Live!) and the ARM TechCon.  I get the cheapskate "exhibits-only" badge and generally just go one day.  ESC has never disappointed, but lately ARM TechCon has become more ARM MarketingCon.  ESC this year was quite different from the others: usually I'm more interested in the new technology and tech talks.  This year I met face-to-face a number of people I enjoyed interacting with at Geek Times and that was what made this year's EE Live! most interesting.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Thanks John for your comments.  I like your story of visiting UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens to see the flowers and you were more interested in the irrigation system. LOL - the sign of a true engineer!  Would you be happy for me to use some of your comments in the press?

    Jen

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