Are We Teaching Engineers the Wrong Way to Think? (zdnet.com) 125
Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk summarizes the argument of four researchers who are warning about the perils of pure engineer thought:
They write, politely: "Engineers enter the workforce with important analysis skills, but may struggle to 'think outside the box' when it comes to creative problem-solving." The academics blame the way engineers are educated.
They explain there are two sorts of thinking -- convergent and divergent. The former is the one with which engineers are most familiar. You make a list of steps to be taken to solve a problem and you take those steps. You expect a definite answer. Divergent thinking, however, requires many different ways of thinking about a problem and leads to many potential solutions. These academics declare emphatically: "Divergent thinking skills are largely ignored in engineering courses, which tend to focus on a linear progression of narrow, discipline-focused technical information."
Ah, that explains a lot, doesn't it? Indeed, these researchers insist that engineering students "become experts at working individually and applying a series of formulas and rules to structured problems with a 'right' answer."
Oddly, I know several people at Google just like that.
Fortunately, the researchers are also proposing this solution:
"While engineers need skills in analysis and judgment, they also need to cultivate an open, curious, and kind attitude, so they don't fixate on one particular approach and are able to consider new data."
They explain there are two sorts of thinking -- convergent and divergent. The former is the one with which engineers are most familiar. You make a list of steps to be taken to solve a problem and you take those steps. You expect a definite answer. Divergent thinking, however, requires many different ways of thinking about a problem and leads to many potential solutions. These academics declare emphatically: "Divergent thinking skills are largely ignored in engineering courses, which tend to focus on a linear progression of narrow, discipline-focused technical information."
Ah, that explains a lot, doesn't it? Indeed, these researchers insist that engineering students "become experts at working individually and applying a series of formulas and rules to structured problems with a 'right' answer."
Oddly, I know several people at Google just like that.
Fortunately, the researchers are also proposing this solution:
"While engineers need skills in analysis and judgment, they also need to cultivate an open, curious, and kind attitude, so they don't fixate on one particular approach and are able to consider new data."
Yes (Score:1)
You can't teach people to think, they have to learn that part on their own in order to get any value from a lesson.
Stop thinking you taught somebody to think. You didn't, and they might not be.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Well in my experience (as an engineer) the focus on analytical skills is so extreme, and the education so intense, that after 4 years you have lost all sense of why you are even there and how these analytical skills are actually going to be useful. Getting the degree, assuming you're not going to cheat your way through, becomes mostly a battle of willpower, or a love of pure academics.
They try to offset this with the occasional "business soft skills" courses, but any sensible person uses those to pad his schedule as the easy A class you can either not attend or pay loose attention to. It might be hard for an MBA, but to the degree an engineer will ever need to care, we can skip it. It's logical but like cleaning a toilet. I'd throw these classes right out the window, they're easy to pick up.
But by nature engineering is usually not about pure analysis. We see problems, we analyze them, we come up with solutions and evaluate their fitness. Half of those things are using a totally different set of skills, some of which can be "taught" to a degree. Usually relegate to just ENG 101 in most schools, but probably needs more meat in the subspecialties, are studying problems and the solutions people have come up with over the years. Then challenging students to come up with their own problems and solutions, possibly using skills they have obtained thus far. That is frequently missing.
As it stands, you can get a 4.0 GPA in some engineering discipline based purely on your ability to do math problems, but not be able to understand why those skills are useful or how to utilized them. This has created the environment we have today where we, experienced engineers out in the real world, essentially ignore GPAs and have to grill potential employees like it was their Nth thesis defense. We cannot establish a correlation between their grades and their aptitude, and it really must suck to work hard for that 4.0 and find out you're not highly desired in the field. But it happens quite a bit. Ultimately most work out there is much more heavily oriented towards problem solving, and knowing how to use the analytical tools to evaluate the solutions.
PSYCHOLOGY (Score:2, Interesting)
In particular, as a dutiful little nerd, you take this article at face value, and are completely oblivious to the fact that it's yet another PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE CAMPAIGN, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Frankfurt School sooth-sayers, designed to lure you into being an Insula-dominant Amygdala-submissive goyische lamb being led to the Purim slaughter, just like all the humanititties & scrotial scienc
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I run into too many without many engineering skills, or at least being unable to apply them to the engineering problem at hand. On the other hand, there are others who are so dogmatic about doing things one way that they can't see the bigger picture. Like being on an extremely tight schedule and insisting on what is essentially a big rewrite to do things the proper way
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As it stands, you can get a 4.0 GPA in some engineering discipline based purely on your ability to do math problems, but not be able to understand why those skills are useful or how to utilized them.
This was my #1 problem when I was studying computer science back in college. I really struggled to understand calculus because my professor was obsessed with scribbling a whole lot of numbers on the chalkboard, but didn't say a damn word about what the application for this stuff was. Their attitude was that they would teach us the numbers, and it was our job to figure out why it was useful on our own. Given that the textbooks were all about solving equations, doing homework didn't help. I'm the kind of
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Indeed. I think a big part of the problem is that teaching (and evaluating) linear problem solving skills is vastly easier than divergent ones, leaving schools in a "we teach you the easy-to-teach stuff, and you'd best already have the natural talent for the hard-to-teach stuff." Which might be okay, except that they don't actually point that out regularly, so you end up with a bunch of graduates that are really good at solving math problems, but not actually any good at the job as a whole.
It's sort of li
Where is your evidence? (Score:4, Informative)
"You can't teach people to think" Yes you can. Check out this evidence [parentingscience.com].
Your post is just a pessimistic opinion stated as if it is an absolute truth, with zero evidence or argument. I will, instead, offer both.
I have already given evidence, so here is some argument: Humans are at the top of the food chain precisely because our brains are so amazingly adaptive. Our brains physically re-wire themselves in response to experience and training (this is called neuroplasticity [wikipedia.org], and human brains are really good at it).
It IS true that some people are just genetically predisposed to be better thinkers than others. But such a fact does not, in and of itself, imply that there is zero gain in quality of thought as a result of education. In fact, the ability to recognize when an inference goes beyond the scope of the facts presented (as I just did just now), is a mental skill that not only can be taught, but is routinely taught in philosophy and science classes around the globe.
So, based on this evidence and argument, is believe that your statements are wrong. Furthermore, they are harmful, as they suggest that inaction is the optimum course in a domain where action has a very high potential to yield benefit, and a successful history of yielding benefit.
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"You can't teach people to think" Yes you can.
Nope. You can only avoid teaching them not to think and success with that will always be limited, as most people do not actually want to think.
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Living up to the tail end of your sig, eh?
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That doesn't say anything about teaching people to think, it talks about parents spending time with children causes the children to be more interested in learning.
You don't understand the point you're arguing with, and yet, it is a very very basic point in the philosophy of teaching methods. I say "philosophy" because the field hasn't had much in the way of results, but they've been arguing for hundreds of years already.
What I said is a truism. Truisms are not wrong. If you think a truism is wrong, you're e
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I was taught one lesson that stood me in good stead for 45 years.
"There are many solutions to most problem. The most obvious one is not always the best. The easiest one is not always the best. Analise the problem and pick the best solution."
The supplemental is.
"What worked last time may well not be the most appropriate for this time."
This was lesson was not taught in some high faluting University or somewhere like MIT.
It was in the Toolroom of the factory where I did my apprenticeship as an Engineer.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
> pick the best solution
That's what people don't grok. "Best" depends on context!
Does "best" mean:
* Cheapest to make?
* Shortest time to implement?
* Best quality? i.e. Military grade specifications?
* Most features?
Engineering is knowing about the trade-offs the various potential solutions have.
In Computer Science we tend to care more about "average case" and "worst case" then the "best case", along with the time it will take to implement, and cost to maintain.
Products aren't developed in a vacuum. They are constantly being tested via the Project Management Triangle [wikipedia.org]:
* Price
* Schedule
* Features
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Bingo!
First job out of university was working on pension systems (superannuation for those across the pond). Before they would let us even touch the system they put us through eight weeks (8hrs/day) of training on what pensions where, importance, how they're calculated, etc. This wasn't a class geared towards programmers but for the newly minted business folks.
It's not just the what, but the why as well.
As with all analytical disciplines (engineers included!) "If you don't/won't understand the business of
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He learned it in a toolroom. That means that Best Solution is always the most macho solution, as determined by the sum of shop myths and platitudes that have to be recited while using the relevant tools.
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Even if that is true (I don't know), you definitely can teach somebody *not* to think.
I've seen plenty of times when people were discouraged from trying to do things the 'wrong' way. I have noticed in my kid's education on occasion. Interestingly know that my kid is in 'academically talented' programs, in this school system she is treated much differently. The do leave it at her discretion to find solutions. Contrasting with when she is in the 'normal' classes and very much the expectation is that all
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Well, no, it remains true, because even there the outcome is not determined by the teacher but by the student, and it doesn't cause the student to learn any less.
It simply changes what lessons the student learns. They might learn the teacher sucks, or that people who look like the teacher suck, or they might learn something about the structure of academia and how that affects the quality of lessons. They might even learn that they personally dislike participating in that system.
But what they learn from the
Difference between Science and Engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientist may invent, say, an airplane. But you would not want to ride in it if it wasn't designed by an engineer. Both are skills, not one less than the other. But Engineering a careful approach to certain outcomes. Science is a reduction of something new to understanding its principles.
Predictability is diff between architecture & (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly.
Programming and software engineering are two different things.
Architecture and engineering are two different things.
An architect of a building can come up with creative new designs. The engineer then makes sure that the building actually stays standing during heavy winds, by applying well-known, time-tested formulas and other concepts. The job of the *engineer* isn't to come up with cool new ideas that just might work. The special job of the engineer is to say "this structure is rated for 100,000 pound load. I've analyzed the components of the design and it is safe at that loading".
Sure some people with engineering degrees are employed in roles that use out-of-box thinking. Some people with psychology degrees are employed as coders. The professional association for engineering defines the word "engineering" as ensuring that a system will meet the defined requirements, based on known properties and established methods. I can't be troubled to look up the exact wording the use at the moment, but those ideas are in there. :)
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Re:Predictability is diff between architecture &am (Score:2)
I think it's sad that programmers aren't taught more how they CAN use well-trusted, known, measurable methods. Heck, recently it's fallen put of fashion to teach new programmers how to fijs the current requirements and predict likely future requirements. They think it's impossible, because nobody ever taught them how to do it. That's sad because often programmers are VERY smart people. They would have improved on the methods I was taught and we'd be BETTER at requirements now than we were 20-30 years ag
Re:Predictability is diff between architecture &am (Score:2)
Everyone has heard of SQL, nobody knows what relational algebra is.
The problem is thinking that you can teach intellectual curiosity. You can't.
It may be that giving them training in this wouldn't change anything. People don't give a shit about relational algebra because they don't have to understand it in order to recombine the latest libraries into some new mishmash, they don't desire to learn about things like relational algebra.
Like with The Art of Programming. Everybody agrees it is a great series of books that teach the underlying algorithms, and explains why the alg
Re:Predictability is diff between architecture &am (Score:2)
As a life-long programmer who does a little bit of (electronics) engineering, I can say I've never once seen a "Software Engineer" do any engineering.
In engineering the design is based on calculations. If an architect is building a house, they recombine previously known components with known physical properties to achieve a customized design or layout. To engineer the same structure you would calculate the physical properties of the building based on the materials used and how they're put together.
What prog
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Based on some of the creative new designs I've seen architects come up with, there may not be any well-known, time-tested formulas that make sure the building actually stays standing during heavy winds.
Re:Predictability is diff between architecture &am (Score:2)
Yep, and when you can't reasonably calculate the wind loading because the architect has drawn an arbitrary curve, you have roughly three choices:
1. Hope the building doesn't collapse on the occupants
2. Adjust the curve of the framing to be a parabola, a section of a circle, or something else the engineer CAN calculate loads for
3. Calculate a loading that's physically impossible just based on size and overbuild
As I understand it, civil engineering discourages signing off on a design based on #1.
Re:Predictability is diff between architecture &am (Score:2)
If the architect isn't reusing an existing design, they were supposed to calculate it themselves.
It may be that in these cases it is a person with an architecture degree who is not actually filling the role of architect, but merely is acting as a designer, and the building is being engineered. The engineer has a hard time calculating the wind loading because they don't want to engineer that part, they want to look it up from a table.
They got A's in calculus but that doesn't mean they're going to do any whil
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And then there is engineering scientists (I am one and I know and work with a few more), that can do both. But we are _rare_ and there is no way to produce more than are already produced. The problem is, if a field is not attractive to us or we are treated badly in a job, we just go someplace else.
The article wants faux inventions (Score:2)
You know the type. waterseer etc. the cancer of inventions and invention selling.
however engineering and science skills are very well worth having in knowing if they are a scam or not. If you have "creative skills" but cannot comprehend conservation of energy or whatever, sure, you can come up with wi.
a totally separate issue is that an engineer might do what you told him to do, though the real answer would be to just change what you want to do in the first place. think that what you want is hot water. but
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(for the record tank boilers are just fine and typical inline heaters are not good if your starting water temperature is too low, if it is high enough they work just fine and there is no need for a centralized heated water tank)
Inline heaters come in different sizes that add different amounts of heat to the water. The relationship between watts and the temperature of a volume of water is well understood, there is no cliff or anything that would create a limit.
And you don't need to teach them to think! (Score:2)
Curiosity comes natural to every child!
It's only us crushing it, that changes that.
In fact, you *can* teach them to think!
By fostering what they have.
It's the essence of game design.
Games and playing exist for that exact reason. To give one a problem to solve, and a simplified model environment with tools to use and knobs to turn, to train your brain to think and solve such problems.
With fun, aka joy plus surprises, being both the motivator that makes you think, and the direct indicator for good learning. W
Re: And you don't need to teach them to think! (Score:2)
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I fully agree on that. Also, most people (even most engineers) cannot actually be taught to think independently. This is the domain of the "independent thinkers", which are just about 10-15% of any group, including engineers and that is it. The only thing you can make sure is that you recognize these people and support them.
Of course, these people are inconvenient. They will question your skills and insights. They will see the actual quality of your work. They will speak truth to authority. Hence teaching t
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All through this thread people have been trying to teach gweihir that. Ironically, he doesn't want to learn it.
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Insisting you're right isn't even teaching, so your conclusion is not valid.
It may be that you disagree on the meaning of some of the words, and one of you doesn't even know that they're arguing against a truism. ;)
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But you can most definitely teach people not to think. And it's being done on regular basis.
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You can't teach people to think
Umm. You can.
It was the big differentiator between British and Indian software engineers.
British graduates had been taught how to think. They'd learned the course material but university wasn't about the material, it was about how to gather, analyse, assess and draw conclusions. It was about thinking, with the material merely a focus point for the learning.
Indian graduates were taught the material. The emphasis was on knowing things, not thinking about them.
This is one reason Indian outsourcing failed. They
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You can't teach people to think, but you can teach them to be racist by feeding them false analysis based on misleading data.
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Maybe we should ask an Indian.
âoeI think the Indian education system as a whole is greatly flawed in that it does not urge students to think, but rather to memorize, or âmugging' as they say in India," he said. âoeEssentially if you can stay up all night before an exam and cram as much information as possible into your head, you will do pretty well on tests.â
-- https://www.theatlantic.com/in... [theatlantic.com]
Clearly nobody taught you to think.
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No, "ask a person who looks similar" isn't a process I would engage in.
I wouldn't even be able to catalog how many different logical fallacies are involved in attempting it.
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Well, I've shown evidence that my view is shared by someone from India.
So you're calling two people of different races and cultures racist, and providing no evidence to that effect.
I do believe this makes you a cunt. Fuck off.
Boeing (Score:2)
Did 737 Max crash themselves?
Is the KC-46 still having problem?
Did Starliner miss itâ(TM)s trip the the ISS?
I think we can answer this question about engineering today pretty easy.
Well when Boeing is concerned.
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Yes! That's the big problem with it. Human pilots couldn't override the autopilot.
Nope, the engineers did. (Score:5, Informative)
They controlled the plane. Via a very long and convoluted lever, called a "computer". The pilot, at this point, was merely giving suggestions to the engineers.
(Look up how this plane was special. It was essentially trying to simulate the behavior of a traditional plane, to save retraining pilots, but wasn't behaving traditionally at all. Rather more like a deliberately unstable fighter jet or B2 bomber. Shit hit the fan, whenever the illusion broke.)
Re: Boeing (Score:4, Insightful)
The fatal thing here is that you can do this for a while and see increased profits. Hence the shortsighted and insight-less MBAs think their approach is working. In reality, they are just slowly cutting away the redundancy that good engineers had put in. And at some point, often quite a while later, things start breaking in worse and worse ways.
Of course, in the end, society is to blame. Why are the Boeing CEO, CTO and the chief technical pilot not in prison for criminally negligent homicide on mass-scale? Because that is exactly what they did.
I'm much more worried about doctors (Score:2)
I have never dealt with a group of more disorganized, sloppy thinkers in my life.
It's not their fault. (Score:4, Insightful)
They are expected "learn" 5000 pages of dense medical textbooksy just casually over the weelkend. Every nth weekend. For years!
That that cannot possibly ever work, and would be better suited to a USB drive, is brutally obvious to everyone but the "That's just how it is. How.we always did it." crowd that runs the show.
And I haven't even talked about *understanding* it!
It is no surprise that so many doctors use cocaine or drugs with similar effects.
They only have their huge egos and Got complexes due to the Apple effect: If I invested so much, it cannot possibly such, or I'd be an idiot, and we can't have that!
(They are not idiots. They just lived in an illusion. And nobody else would have known any better beforehand either. Still, it hurts to accept it anyway.)
So don't hate. Help fix the system. It's your job too, if you want good healthcare.
s/Got/God/: s/such/suck/ (Score:2)
In case anyone was wondering.
I'm sorry. Touch screen keyboard are a nightmare.
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Doctors are not engineers or scientists. They are technicians. They are technicians who are extraordinarily skilled at what they do, and who are very impressive at a specialized kind of problem-solving, but technicians nonetheless. (And yes, there are a few unimpressive doctors, but honestly not that many.)
The problem is that they believe that are their talents are broader than they actually are. (And again, some are exceptions.)
solution: hire us physicists (Score:2)
We are FSM's chosen people, after all.
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Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you know it. (Score:2)
I can also offer the Invisible Pink Unicorn, if you like that one more.
Maybe you're thinking of sonething else. (Score:2)
"Engineers enter the workforce with important analysis skills, but may struggle to 'think outside the box' when it comes to creative problem-solving."
Isn't that what Architects are for? They design it, Engineers built it.
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Depending on the field that we are talking about, I can absolutely hate this mode of thinking.
Particularly we in the software world are enamored of this philosophy, that a sufficiently creative/smart person should never touch a line of code and programmers should only ever have a plan laid out specifically by an architect. In this field it is pretty dumb as generally the architect/engineer divide is a construct of us thinking of the field as more complex than it needs to be.
I'm sure that there are scenario
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As an Engineer, at least here in Europe, design is all that I do. Design is the umbrella term for the process identifying a problem and conceiving a feasible solution for it.
There are bad engineers whose design process sucks, since their thinking is too rigid, but there's also good engineers.
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Yeah... my background is Architectural Engineering: we took half of an architecture program plus all of an engineering program crammed into five years. You quickly see the difference between convergent and divergent approaches in people, and who would make a better architect vs engineer. It isn’t the education system, it is how the individuals think.
Coming from college, I loved being in the middle of design sessions, and offering up my (very small) morsel of knowledge, knowing that I would not be th
Let me guess... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes. The same ones employers are [marketwatch.com] looking for [bls.gov].
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Indeed. I went through college just as the dot-com boom happened and the curriculum was so full of gold digging people who I would say outright hated the field. I was a teaching assistant and it was painfully obvious the sort that had wanted to do this from the time they first started messing about with computers and the folks who decided to be there because the news said computing was the path to riches with minimal education. Some so bold as to even say "don't explain it to me, I don't care, just tell
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Let me guess: those academics are in humanities?
I was curious about this and here are the authors of the paper.
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I was thinking the same thing. Particularly when TFS said engineers needed to cultivate a "kind attitude". As an engineer, I don't know if there is a way to quantify the "kindness" of a particular solution. But from what I've seen, people in the humanities seem to have no problems attaching such immeasurable properties to things.
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Yet one of the most influential architects of the previous century was all about the feels.
Christopher Alexander knows an awful lot about buildings, and wrote an entire book trying to articulate the immeasurable thing that makes them work. Because to him, and many others, it's rather important.
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The closes would be "empathy". When as an engineer you design something, have a thought to who might use it and try to figure out a way to make it easier on them. It goes beyond "ma
They hate Sheldon (Score:2)
I agree with you though, FUCK EM!! We've got shit to build, peoples' lives to save, and budgets to meet. I don't have time for any namby pamby hug it out bullshit. They can paint me a goddamned mural o
The guys who actually build stuff. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Only a few out-of-the-box thinkers are needed (Score:5, Insightful)
And it seems it takes only a very few out-of-the-box engineers to lead large numbers of ordinary mortals to do astounding things. Look at SpaceX and Tesla.
Formerly successful engineering organizations tend to run into trouble when non-engineers take the helm - that's what happened at Boeing and many car companies. It takes a competent engineer to manage engineers (well, more than competence in just engineering, but that's one of the requirements).
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It's hard to say the engineering profession as a whole is doing poorly - we have all of technological society, from steam engines to machine learning, built by engineers. The last airline crash in the United States was 10 years ago! https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
+1.
Also, there's a very good reason that engineering education spends so much time focused on teaching the technical skills: You really do have to understand both what is not possible and how to execute all those formulas in order to make stuff work. This style of thinking is not natural to humans and it takes a lot of work to learn how to think like an engineer. There are some aspects of the education process that tend to suppress inventiveness and creativity, but I think those are mostly at the pre-u
No, it's the right way (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, is this really a problem? Do we see a lack of new solutions for old problems? Seems to me like there's no hint of stagnation in engineering of any kind. When things are still under development, we need people who can produce the solutions simply. There's absolutely no need for everyone to be a creative thinker and re-open every known solution.
Divergent Thinking (Score:1)
Re: Divergent Thinking (Score:2)
I sort of agree and also sort of disagree.
A bit of creativity and questioning assumptions is always a good thing, but not every task calls for reinventing the wheel. Engineers should solve problems, including novel problems that they have not encountered before.
In fact, I would argue that engineers are the most creative people out there! And that they display all of the ways of thinking discussed in the article at the appropriate times.
Strawman argument. (Score:2)
How did you get from "out of the box" to divergent?
It simply means you don't limit yourself to what is already established in your mind.
If we did what you wanted, we'd still have perfectly engineered oil lamps on our perfectly engineered horse-drawn carriages.
It's Finally Happening (Score:1)
The touchy feely crowd is finally getting around to ruining the field of engineering as well.
As opposed to what? (Score:2)
The psychopatic robot asshole crowd?
It's like your species is allergic to any suggestion of human behavior.
Wishy-washy bullshit. (Score:2)
There are good engineers and bad engineers.
Thanks for that, Captain Sherlock Obvious.
A good engineer very well thinks outside of the box when tasked with finding a solution for a difficult problem. That's what makes them good engineers.
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There are different ways to do it though. An engineer will typically work to refine a concept rather than throwing away something that doesn’t work and starting from scratch. A good engineer might have 4-5 potential solutions to a problem, but the engineering approach is to whittle them down and see which fits best. That can be done in parallel or series, but it isn’t the same as an artistic approach.
Both approaches have their place. Artists rarely have that “finishing” gene on pr
Re:Wishy-washy bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
A good engineer might have 4-5 potential solutions to a problem, but the engineering approach is to whittle them down and see which fits best.
"We need a bridge."
Engineer sits down, offers options:
- Cantilever; not necessary,
- suspension; too expensive
- arch; pretty
- truss; ugly but effective
- beam; would collapse
Sure, you're already honing down the options, heading towards a solution space in which you can create a functional design (that may also be elegant and/or attractive).
What I want is the engineer that explores other options too:
- tunnel; less environmental impact
- three bridges; total cost would be higher but meets your needs better
- dam the river upstream; no bridge now required, and hydro-electric power now available
- trebuchet; perhaps a bit niche and the cars seldom land in usable condition
Even something as simple as 'we need a bridge' has a whole range of options available.
It's still an engineering approach but it's not a passive one.
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That is an upstream (heh) decision. The engineer will optimize span and type when told to design a bridge.
Hopefully, there is an economic analysis of your other options done prior to it getting to the bridge designer. Bridge designers don’t like designing tunnels or dams.
I’ll give a simple example as an engineering principal. Client comes to me with complex architectural program that won’t fit in their building. I tell them to get a bigger building, they do, and we design for that prog
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that task is really adult daycare and not engineering
The moment you stop holding a spanner I think that's likely the case in any engineering role.
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Sadly, I think it is true for almost all jobs. Oh well...
It was better 50 years ago (Score:2)
I'm an engineering student and I have to agree (Score:2)
After a career in the military, I retired, and now I'm studying engineering (specifically mechanical, but with the intent of moving into an aerospace program). I see this 'bloody-minded' problem solving thought process quite frequently in some of my engineering specific classes and while working on research. Many of the engineering and physics professors I have don't seem to be able to look outside of the way they've always done things, or beyond using a very algorithmic problem solving approach. Don't
That's what they teach in undergraduate engineerin (Score:2)
Graduate engineering programs are where you're taught how to come up with your own solutions - solutions to general math problems, engineering problems which haven't been solved, and how solutions in other fiel
Re: (Score:2)
Professors probably teach their material form a specific curriculum for that they have been using for years. In a physics class, for example, the professor is trying to instill in you a knowledge of certain laws and equations. These things are, in the context of your fundamental education on the subject, very concrete.
So you go out into the real world and get some experience. Good on you. Then you take it back to class and say "well in the real world we do X." That's great, but the professor just wants
Open, curious, and kind (Score:2)
One of these things is not like the other
One of these things just doesn’t belong
Can you tell me which thing is not like the other
Before I finish this song?
You are suggesting assholery? (Score:2)
No surprise, coming from an asshole.
Go eat some more babies, or whatever you psychos usually do.
No shit? We train them to not think at all! (Score:2)
But to merely be automatons that apply fixed patterns to problems.
We don't teach people to *think for themselves*. To think up their own things. Even thougg it comes natural to every brain-owner, even non-human ones.
It's literally punished since elementary school. Everyone knows those stories. Everyone here knows Lockhart's lament.
Everyone remembers bulemic learning: 1. Memorize as much as you possibly can; 2. Barf it onto the test; 3. Forget it ever happened.
Hell, even humor has been replaced by parroting
There maybe several things wrong with this... (Score:2)
1. There are many different engineering courses and the methods of education differ greatly.
Is the school teaching the student or encouraging the student to learn themselves? (Traditional tech school / university approaches) "Learn the topic" or "read for the degree"?
2. Are the students being encouraged to be analytical? Highly encouraged in Europe but seemingly less so here in the US.
3. Having some qualification in engineering, does not make you an engineer. You don't enter the workforce as an engineer (as
OK sure (Score:2)
engineers don't need to be scientists (Score:2)
This idea that technical training should foster creativity by focusing on problem solving around problems that have no definite or known answer is key to training in scientific research. There are plenty of people trained this way out there. We don't all need to be trained to be researchers. It's diversity of thought and approach that makes science and engineering "work".
Innovative Engineers... hah. (Score:2)
This struck a chord in me... I spent 3 years in EE and finally got sick of the math and the "put the damn square peg into the damn square hole" mentality. That, and subpar professors trying to convince us they were neckbeards and that being an Engineer was something beyond the reach of mere mortals. It really is a plug-and-chug education with very little emphasis placed on innovative thought.
By this time, I also realized that CS was much more to my liking, and switched. I lost about a year, but fortunat
Paper and Article don't match (Score:2)
The Paper was written for "The Journal of Mechanical Design".
The article talks about Silicon Valley types, and names Zuckerberg as an example. (Note: Zuckerberg has no engineering or computer science education, he's a drop-out, so he's hardly a good example)
I'd venture to say the way Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science are taught is vastly different. We don't spend vast amount of classes solving physics problems and applying calculus. I can imagine that there are many "well-known" problems in engine
LEGO is partly to blame (Score:2)
When I was a kid and you got Lego for Christmas, it was a big box of pieces with no instructions.
Today, you buy Lego and it's a kit with detailed instructions to make something specific like a Star Wars vehicle. Sure, that's cool and fun but it doesn't teach kids to be creative. I watched my nephew get bent out of shape when I tried souping up one of his kits during assembly.
Well, the schedule must be kept. (Score:2)
In my experience as an engineer, divergent thinking is beneficial in the early stages of a project. But by its very nature of moving away from closure, it is antagonistic to schedules. Also, sometimes people propose divergent ideas which are plausible TO THEM, but are obviously unworkable to me. In the end, you have to come up with a workable solution without blowing the budget and/or the schedule. I think most of us would rather have more time, more resources and more ability to explore multiple ideas. But
Quite the opposite is true. (Score:2)
You seem to confuse robotic application of memorized patterns with thinking.
Thinking is generally frowned upon in schools.
Re: (Score:2)
In my 20+ year career { ... }
Well there ya go. Engineering schools started to suck just over twenty years ago when colleges that were once institutions of higher learning became investment vehicles and job placement agencies.