eevBLAB #58 - Engineers Are Underappreciated

Engineers are a tad underappreciated.
An extract from the Jan 28th 2019 live show.

Bitcoin Donations: 38y7DE8HEHNj8fGDtUr4PkCn9nWxiorvvy
Litecoin: ML7oQokTwB38bgzzjLDbRV97HKAHuwRfHA
Ethereum: 0x11AceA38DCA9DbFfB4F35f3F746af65F9dED28ce

Support the EEVblog through Patreon!

Buy anything through that link and Dave gets a commission at no cost to you.

Stuff I recommend:

Donate With Bitcoin & Other Crypto Currencies!

#Engineering #Career

[Tooob]

Won't somebody please think of the capacitors!

Sorry, bad joke.

[RiyadhElalami]

To all the nameless engineers, cheers

[djsquarewave]

There's a saying in design, "If you've done your job right, nobody will know you've done anything at all." When something works, it gets taken for granted and eventually becomes invisible. The only time most people notice is when it breaks down and they start looking for someone to blame.

[randomelectronicsanddispla]

This isn't only in the electronic world, our whole life is made up of things that took combined years of engineering, countless unappreciated people's time and hard work.

And yet everyone takes it all for granted.

Everyone is there to complain when there is a power outage, when there is no bread left at the shop or when a train runs late. Yet very few marvel at all that when it is running smoothly.

[spicemasterii]

Sad thing is (especially for electrical engineers) that board is probably obsolete by now. At least civil engineers get to show their projects to many people for years to come.

[SouthernEngineering]

And a gray beard speaks. Maybe underappreciated but after 40+ years, half a dozen company's, uncountable number of projects, I can state for a fact, I would do nothing else if I could start over. The rewards and satisfaction can't be measured.

[redtails]

I want to live in a society where scientists and engineers are superstars. Musicians and actors should not be the center of attention.

[BigDaddy_MRI]

Engineers and the technicians that support them are some of the most unsung heroes of science today. You’re right, Dave. How many man years went into the development of that Siemens board and who were the folks who designed the board, wrote the firmware, spent sleepless nights debugging, and when it went to production who congratulated the team? I bet nobody. The next project was starting up and the team broke up and went to new projects. That’s the life of an engineer. Chasing the next project to keep your job. I like this video very much. Thanks for your hard work, your tutorials and keeping the EE life a fun one.

[MaxWattage]

For what it is worth, I was one of the unsung engineers who worked at Siemens R&D for 8 years, developing VHDL code for FPGAs.
I specialised in using the RocketIO (multi-gigabit SERDES) connections used on these Xilinx Virtex-II Pro.

[arthurvin]

Millions of people don't know where the tech comes from, it's taken for granted. Take that everyday's tech away from them = enjoy appreciation. But the true engineer loaded with enthusiasm doesn't give a shit about appriciation. He's just enjoying what he's doing.

[uski]

Part of the problem is that many engineers lack fundamental business and communication skills. Many engineers are far too focused on the technical aspects, but do not care about the business side. Often, they agree with low salaries, with bad employment conditions, just because "the job is interesting". As an engineer, I feel the problem comes from OUR attitude. We need to stop accepting shitty salaries and crappy contracts.

[jiioannidis]

"There are those who do the work, and those who get the credit. I recommend being in the former group; there is much less competition'

[edgar]

I am sure many of these nameless engineers were happy to build all this and be nameless engineers. They don't look for publicity and they are happy they did a lot of good jobs. I am far away from a high level. In the moment I play around with some Arduinos and sensors. I solder things together and I do some programming and it's just nice to see that the projects develop and work - even if nobody else will ever appreciate them.

[toxto]

I had multiple jobs where they sent a young girl from the offices to me with new tasks. The girl made a presentation in a hour about the job which took me a month of work then she got a raise for her "excellent managerial skills" and i only got hurried by the management "what took so long?". I started sabotaging these jobs and people and lowered my productivity to the bare minimum and then eventually quit these jobs. I am trying to distance myself from engineering as much as i can nowadays. I wont make millions anymore for the management in change for chump change.

[lcdconsultant]

Proud to be one of the engineers that helped build that board. Just the fact that it shipped and did it’s job was appreciation enough for me.

[raymitchell]

Dave -- Thanks for the video! As an engineer myself, I agree with you and know what you mean -- I experienced that myself when somebody at the local coffee shop asks me what I do for a living and they have no clue... but as you outlined the all tech in that board, all of the support components like capacitors, the test equipment, PCB layout, etc. I realized that I took a lot for granted too -- Perhaps we should have an "International Engineers Appreciation Day" -- it probably won't get you very much, maybe a free coffee at the local coffee shop -- if you're lucky, then you can explain _again_ what it is that you do...

[printxii]

Worked for company that did a lot of misc controls. I designed the sensorless automotive set controller, spent many of my own personal hours doing it. Then a new kid came in and they gave him all the credit and he never even touch it. Worked at another company were I designed a automated cutter, software and hardware, built the whole thing with my own 2 hands. Got demoted and eventually left. They had another company build 2 more and they're using all 3 today. So think hard before choosing a engineer degree and watch out for a hole employer's.

[Falcrist]

I've been saying this for years. People think I'm crazy.
Untold millions of engineers from many different fields had put their life's work into forgotten projects just to make it POSSIBLE for Apple to think about building an iPhone, or IBM to release a new server, or LG to make your TV.
Millions of engineers each pushing our knowledge forward a fraction... Just so we can live with modern technology. It's difficult to wrap your head around.

We don't stand on the shoulders of giants like Newton. We stand on a skyscraper where each brick, nail, rivet, beam, and bolt represents the contribution of some forgotten engineering team.

[thegardenofeatin]

I appreciate the skills, knowledge and talent of engineers. What needs to change is everything around them. Millisecond deadlines drive engineers to solve problems in a quick, dirty, "just this once" way that gets used six or seven times, a team of 40 people get used to using it, it gets written into a standard, that standard gets adopted worldwide, another team looking to do something slightly different picks up that standard and has to break their spine to fit through it, that project goes wildly popular and all of society shifts over to it, and soon we're running all of society on a goddamn networking protocol meant to hook ten terminals to a mainframe and there's nothing we can do about the ten billion security holes and vulnerabilities in it. Thanks engineers! Fuck off, managers.

[galier]

Amen. For having worked on these kind of products (not that complex though), i.e. unnamed, unsexy, underappreciated industrial electronic I can only commend you for this video. I have worked on Siemens products (Siemens also resells products made by external companies) that were sold at several thousands of pieces and which are completely invisible on the Internet, not one page in the billion of pages on the Internet mentioning these products (Siemens ES-122C for example returns a lot of things but not the product that I worked on).