Let's step back from this a bit.


In the 1980's I had a Mk III Escort and my wife had an old style Mini. I could fix them both. And I did. Every weekend. By 1990 I could afford a three year old Corolla. Very sadly 18 years later someone drive into it while it was parked and wrote it off, it was still starting perfectly every day, and I never had to fix it. These days I routinely expect my cars to last 15-20 years without requiring any work on them, and they do. Oh, and they use half as much fuel, and stop reliably when you put your foot on the brake. And don't rust.


In the 1980's I was an old school analogue design engineer, designing using a breadboard, a pile of components, and pencil and paper. By the end of the decade I was leading an analogue design team who had no components on their desks, but by using modelling could finally achieve the flat frequency and phase responses that we'd never been able to achieve before. (The SSL 4000 mixing desk may be iconic, but the 9000 sounds a heck of a lot better.) Now my son is able to record music on his MacBook using a virtual mixing desk which is more powerful, and better sounding, than the £250,000 analogue desks we were designing back then. And yes, around 1990 I was an analogue bore (I cringe to think about it now) who would tell everyone in the pub how awful digital audio was. Ok, digital audio was pretty bad then, but it was all about to change due to Moore's law and some fantastic theoretical engineering in processor speeds and software - it was my error to underestimate theoretical knowledge and the possibilities of change. (Incidentally, in the spirit of this thread, I engage heavily on a forum where brave people are keeping old SSL 4000s running all over the world, and I help them as much as I can. Good for them. And I'm very proud of having a small part in the SSL story. Those old desks would be silly things to put in a new top-flight commercial recording studio though. Yep, you can fix them easily, but they're noisy, distort, have poor frequency response, and - the big thing - the automation and settings recall was cutting edge in 1977 but really really isn't now...) 


In 1983 I was taught by good practical BBC engineers in my training that the highest frequency we'd ever get down telephone lines was 6kbits/s (and they didn't really believe we'd get that far). Thanks to theoretical analysis and modelling 2Mbit/s is now easy.


We are writing these messages on devices we can't fix (or at least I can't). But what I can do is have video conferences with other engineers all over the world from my office in my back garden. Which I do. 


Disrespect if you like the wonderful generations who came after us, who are solving real problems in the world in ways we didn't think were possible. And who in turn are inspired by the possibilities those technologies can offer; they don't need boxes of each value of capacitor, and 'scopes which had to be ceremoniously pushed around on a trolley (they can develop new stuff on a laptop, and that is really inspiring). And who use Lean and Six Sigma principles to ensure that systems don't need maintenance and repair, with the cost and down time that entails, by ensuring that they don't fail in the first place. Personally I respect them, it's a constant delight to work with them, be inspired by them, and learn from them. 


By chance I just came across this wonderful quote in a book I'm reading. (Note: Downloaded from WiFi to my Kindle. I love high quality, beautifully bound hardback books, and indeed bookshops, but this theoretical based technology means I can decide to read something and it's just there. If Caxton had had the technology available he'd have invented the Kindle.) This quote actually relates to scientists in a rather different field to ours coming to terms with change, but I think applies beautifully to us as engineers as we find our own skill sets inevitably become superseded:

"People need to be in the place where their anxieties are recognised, to be able to say, 'Yes, this is scary; this is hard,' and only then [] can we be truly mature, creative, strategic, and innovative."

Yes, as we get older we do worry that we're obsolete and stuck on a back shelf, and so it's easy to try to fight back with arguments that "engineering were better when I were a lad". But it's rubbish, and doesn't help anyone. The way not to be in that scary place is to learn new skills ourselves. I wouldn't dream of calling myself an analogue design engineer now, I've gone in a quite different direction where the skills that do tend to come with experience - and yes there are some - are useful, and balance the up to date pure technical knowledge that recent graduates have - knowledge which is far more appropriate to the way engineering has evolved. And as the quote says above, it's scary and hard. But tough: that's life. If you don't want to have to cope with change then engineering ain't the right profession. (In fact I'm not sure what is, subsistence farming perhaps? Not a profession I fancy though.) 


And yes, I do like looking at and messing around with steam engines, but I wouldn't recommend them as a mainstream transport solution, method of moving water around, or for powering industrial machinery. And I do like making and fixing things for my own amusement (and to make make a minor contribution to reducing landfill), but I'm happy to be perfectly honest that it is only in the same spirit that I like doing, say, very fiendish Sudoku variants - it's a pastime, not an occupation. And yes, I do get frustrated like all of us when software issues mean I have to wait a whole five minutes before, say, writing an email, but I am also prepared to laugh at myself about it - I remember in the mid 1990's when we had to leave the most powerful PC in our business running overnight to run a PSPICE transient anlaysis, which this cheap laptop could now run instantly.



What really saddens me is that the ideas below aren't just the thoughts of some bloke on a forum. I wouldn't have bothered replying if I thought they were, however unfortunately I find them endemic among a certain generation of IET members. Not  necessarily (hopefully?) the majority, but often those who feel the need to make themselves heard (see again quotation above). Our membership profile consistently shows that engineers in their 20's-30's-40's, the ones who are actually developing these incredible technologies, aren't joining the IET. Well, if they go to an IET meeting and after a few pints start hearing "blooming graduates they don't know anything, didn't deserve their degree, no practical skills" why would they want to join? What bright, imaginative, innovative engineer would have any interest in being in that club? Of course this is not new at all, IEE members could be just as bad, looking back this was the big reason I didn't join for very many years - the occasional meetings I attended seemed to have nothing to do with the real collaborative innovation and solving people's problems which is what had attracted me to the engineering profession, and which I was working in very successfully, and much more with discussing how whippersnappers might be able to become proper engineers when they got to about 60...it's up to us now whether we want to repeat that mistake. 



Oh, and for the record, I don't care, and have never cared, what degree grade graduates get, so I really can't get excited about grade inflation. The whole thing smacks to me a bit of sour grapes. Ok, I do feel for older engineers who find they can't get an interview because the silly HR department has drawn a line below 2.1s to make their CV sorting task easier, irrespective of the candidate's proven experience; since I've only got a third in my first degree (mis-spent youth, sadly not in an interesting way) I've been there myself. But in the end the companies that do that only have themselves to blame when they complain that they can't find the right staff. Companies that recruit based on what graduates have actually learned tend, in my experience, to do rather better. 



Anyway, I'm going down to my workshop to add a HPF capacitor to the preamp I've just designed and built for my home constructed electric bouzouki.


P.S. The comment about women of course is just silly and patronising. But that discussion's been had elsewhere on these forums.


P.P.S. This is the polite version of this post. I deleted before posting the one I wrote last night with lots of SHOUTING because it was unhelpful, and I do like to try to be helpful...


P.PP.S. Shame about this thread, I like chatting about making and mending things, but there we go.


Andy

Let's step back from this a bit.


In the 1980's I had a Mk III Escort and my wife had an old style Mini. I could fix them both. And I did. Every weekend. By 1990 I could afford a three year old Corolla. Very sadly 18 years later someone drive into it while it was parked and wrote it off, it was still starting perfectly every day, and I never had to fix it. These days I routinely expect my cars to last 15-20 years without requiring any work on them, and they do. Oh, and they use half as much fuel, and stop reliably when you put your foot on the brake. And don't rust.


In the 1980's I was an old school analogue design engineer, designing using a breadboard, a pile of components, and pencil and paper. By the end of the decade I was leading an analogue design team who had no components on their desks, but by using modelling could finally achieve the flat frequency and phase responses that we'd never been able to achieve before. (The SSL 4000 mixing desk may be iconic, but the 9000 sounds a heck of a lot better.) Now my son is able to record music on his MacBook using a virtual mixing desk which is more powerful, and better sounding, than the £250,000 analogue desks we were designing back then. And yes, around 1990 I was an analogue bore (I cringe to think about it now) who would tell everyone in the pub how awful digital audio was. Ok, digital audio was pretty bad then, but it was all about to change due to Moore's law and some fantastic theoretical engineering in processor speeds and software - it was my error to underestimate theoretical knowledge and the possibilities of change. (Incidentally, in the spirit of this thread, I engage heavily on a forum where brave people are keeping old SSL 4000s running all over the world, and I help them as much as I can. Good for them. And I'm very proud of having a small part in the SSL story. Those old desks would be silly things to put in a new top-flight commercial recording studio though. Yep, you can fix them easily, but they're noisy, distort, have poor frequency response, and - the big thing - the automation and settings recall was cutting edge in 1977 but really really isn't now...) 


In 1983 I was taught by good practical BBC engineers in my training that the highest frequency we'd ever get down telephone lines was 6kbits/s (and they didn't really believe we'd get that far). Thanks to theoretical analysis and modelling 2Mbit/s is now easy.


We are writing these messages on devices we can't fix (or at least I can't). But what I can do is have video conferences with other engineers all over the world from my office in my back garden. Which I do. 


Disrespect if you like the wonderful generations who came after us, who are solving real problems in the world in ways we didn't think were possible. And who in turn are inspired by the possibilities those technologies can offer; they don't need boxes of each value of capacitor, and 'scopes which had to be ceremoniously pushed around on a trolley (they can develop new stuff on a laptop, and that is really inspiring). And who use Lean and Six Sigma principles to ensure that systems don't need maintenance and repair, with the cost and down time that entails, by ensuring that they don't fail in the first place. Personally I respect them, it's a constant delight to work with them, be inspired by them, and learn from them. 


By chance I just came across this wonderful quote in a book I'm reading. (Note: Downloaded from WiFi to my Kindle. I love high quality, beautifully bound hardback books, and indeed bookshops, but this theoretical based technology means I can decide to read something and it's just there. If Caxton had had the technology available he'd have invented the Kindle.) This quote actually relates to scientists in a rather different field to ours coming to terms with change, but I think applies beautifully to us as engineers as we find our own skill sets inevitably become superseded:

"People need to be in the place where their anxieties are recognised, to be able to say, 'Yes, this is scary; this is hard,' and only then [] can we be truly mature, creative, strategic, and innovative."

Yes, as we get older we do worry that we're obsolete and stuck on a back shelf, and so it's easy to try to fight back with arguments that "engineering were better when I were a lad". But it's rubbish, and doesn't help anyone. The way not to be in that scary place is to learn new skills ourselves. I wouldn't dream of calling myself an analogue design engineer now, I've gone in a quite different direction where the skills that do tend to come with experience - and yes there are some - are useful, and balance the up to date pure technical knowledge that recent graduates have - knowledge which is far more appropriate to the way engineering has evolved. And as the quote says above, it's scary and hard. But tough: that's life. If you don't want to have to cope with change then engineering ain't the right profession. (In fact I'm not sure what is, subsistence farming perhaps? Not a profession I fancy though.) 


And yes, I do like looking at and messing around with steam engines, but I wouldn't recommend them as a mainstream transport solution, method of moving water around, or for powering industrial machinery. And I do like making and fixing things for my own amusement (and to make make a minor contribution to reducing landfill), but I'm happy to be perfectly honest that it is only in the same spirit that I like doing, say, very fiendish Sudoku variants - it's a pastime, not an occupation. And yes, I do get frustrated like all of us when software issues mean I have to wait a whole five minutes before, say, writing an email, but I am also prepared to laugh at myself about it - I remember in the mid 1990's when we had to leave the most powerful PC in our business running overnight to run a PSPICE transient anlaysis, which this cheap laptop could now run instantly.



What really saddens me is that the ideas below aren't just the thoughts of some bloke on a forum. I wouldn't have bothered replying if I thought they were, however unfortunately I find them endemic among a certain generation of IET members. Not  necessarily (hopefully?) the majority, but often those who feel the need to make themselves heard (see again quotation above). Our membership profile consistently shows that engineers in their 20's-30's-40's, the ones who are actually developing these incredible technologies, aren't joining the IET. Well, if they go to an IET meeting and after a few pints start hearing "blooming graduates they don't know anything, didn't deserve their degree, no practical skills" why would they want to join? What bright, imaginative, innovative engineer would have any interest in being in that club? Of course this is not new at all, IEE members could be just as bad, looking back this was the big reason I didn't join for very many years - the occasional meetings I attended seemed to have nothing to do with the real collaborative innovation and solving people's problems which is what had attracted me to the engineering profession, and which I was working in very successfully, and much more with discussing how whippersnappers might be able to become proper engineers when they got to about 60...it's up to us now whether we want to repeat that mistake. 



Oh, and for the record, I don't care, and have never cared, what degree grade graduates get, so I really can't get excited about grade inflation. The whole thing smacks to me a bit of sour grapes. Ok, I do feel for older engineers who find they can't get an interview because the silly HR department has drawn a line below 2.1s to make their CV sorting task easier, irrespective of the candidate's proven experience; since I've only got a third in my first degree (mis-spent youth, sadly not in an interesting way) I've been there myself. But in the end the companies that do that only have themselves to blame when they complain that they can't find the right staff. Companies that recruit based on what graduates have actually learned tend, in my experience, to do rather better. 



Anyway, I'm going down to my workshop to add a HPF capacitor to the preamp I've just designed and built for my home constructed electric bouzouki.


P.S. The comment about women of course is just silly and patronising. But that discussion's been had elsewhere on these forums.


P.P.S. This is the polite version of this post. I deleted before posting the one I wrote last night with lots of SHOUTING because it was unhelpful, and I do like to try to be helpful...


P.PP.S. Shame about this thread, I like chatting about making and mending things, but there we go.


Andy