Comment by jayjay71 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayjay71 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm not sure why you hold such a high regard for degrees. I also got my EE degree from UIUC, and while I think it is/was a great university most of what I learned was self-taught. I'm also a PhD dropout, worked at prestigious companies, yatta yatta ya. Then I started a robotics company, and I've looked at thousands of resumes and interviewed at least a hundred people. One thing I've learned is that degrees, grades, etc are completely worthless. They tell you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone can actually build something. The only thing I care about is what people have built, and I don't care if it was at a company or in their spare time. It's much more impressive if they did it by themselves though as opposed to being supported by all of the resources of a giant company, as being resourceful is a great trait for a talented engineer (and especially important at a startup).

Long story short - it only matters what people have built. It doesn't matter what their pedigree is.

> One thing I've learned is that degrees, grades, etc are completely worthless.

Going to a good engineering school, mentored in engineering is important. It is one thing to build a few electric vehicles and something totally different to build something that is that complicated and mass produced.

There are processes and procedures one learns in order to build something for mass production. I am not speaking of most software for which I have hired people without degrees and know others without degrees, but cars, airliners, jet engines, nuclear power plants, buildings, bridges, VLSI design for mass production, refineries, ....

In my initial area of work, VLSI design, Intel had a $500 million recall in the mid-'90s. I know the circumstances from first hand sources and how the error was found which should have and could have been found before mass production.

One doesn't need a large firm to do some of these engineering activities, but they do need the engineering education and the mentoring of engineering procedures which they can then bring to their startup firm.

I learned a lot from my EE courses at Illinois and from my mentoring faculty of which I can think of several. The materials science, the transmission lines and impedance mismatches, amplifiers, satellite communications, ...

You seem to have a lot of experience and a way of doing things which works for you, and that's fine. Your experience seems to have made you conservative, for better and for worse. Of course people with traditional experience will have learned a lot, and that's useful. Even the people that are looking to disrupt the status quo can benefit from this as it helps them to understand how things are already done so they don't reinvent the wheel. But it's not a prerequisite. The biggest disruptions often come from out of left field. The Wright brothers worked on bicycles before inventing the airplane, and they had a lot of better funded, better educated competition. Is that an outlier? Absolutely. But outliers are the people that make huge strides suddenly, and you can't discount them just because they don't have a traditional background. There are many examples of people making enormous contributions to fields outside of their own, engineering not excluded.

It only takes a single person to come out of nowhere and have a truly novel idea because his/her field of view wasn't constrained by previous experience. You really think there's nobody alive on the planet that fits that description for mechanical/electrical/aerospace/robotics engineering? There was a problem my engineers were struggling with at my company for months. The guy who finally figured it out was a chef, and he concocted his own mechatronic solution which he then machined himself. He has no engineering education, he just had a unique idea that all the engineers overlooked.

The notion that a piece of paper makes you elite is archaic.

> Your experience seems to have made you conservative, for better and for worse. Of course people with traditional experience will have learned a lot, and that's useful

An architect can disrupt with a new building design, see Frank Lloyd Wright for example, or the Citibank Tower in Manhattan, and so on. That doesn't mean one doesn't use engineering design methodology. In order to disrupt, one needs the design methodology.

Nuclear power electric plants and nuclear powered naval vessels were disruptions. But still one needed well trained engineers to design and run the systems. Even for disruption. Putting nuclear power in naval vessels was a huge disruption.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, had a MS EE Columbia University (one of my other schools, BTW). Read what he has to say about engineering education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Early_naval_...

In computing, Seymour Cray was a huge disruptor who managed to build a computer far more powerful than IBM (CDC 6600) with "29 people including the janitor" according to then IBM President Thomas Watson, Jr. Cray had a MS EE. He was the Genius supercomputer designer. A huge disruptor, but only able to disrupt by applying engineering education and principles.

A third example, is Joe Sutter, chief engineer of the 747. He has a BS Aeronautical Engineering and died a few days ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Early_naval_...

Was the 747 disruptive. Absolutely. Still, the designers of the aircraft were educated and trained as engineers.

Solid engineering and training is not obstructive to disruption, but absolutely necessary having the background in order to be successful at the disruption.

Hyman Rickover, Seymour Cray, Joe Sutter. All engineers. All huge disruptors that could not have achieved the disruption without their engineering backgrounds.

Sometimes there are no shortcuts.

You're missing the point. Your argument is it's impossible for someone to make great strides without a traditional education, and I already provided you with two specific counter-examples. Unless I'm lying about the personal anecdote and the Wright brothers didn't invent the airplane, then your argument doesn't hold water. If you want to argue that most people benefit from having traditional backgrounds, then what you're saying makes sense. But I've already disproved your original statement and you've done nothing to address my evidence.

If you ever become a manager, please don't disregard what people say just because they don't have the same background as you. I've worked with people like that in the past, and they are terrible managers/coworkers. They are needlessly pedantic and often feel the need to do things the way they learned in school (or read about some complicated technique in a paper they have to try), when there is obviously a simpler and better solution. The sad thing is, they think they're better than everyone else and that nobody appreciates their "superior" point of view - if you feel that way, you should reconsider how you approach problem solving.

I haven't met you so I can't comment on you specifically, just speaking as to my general experience. Whatever the case, I wish you luck in your career.

To me you seemed to imply that engineers are staid and conservative and not capable of disruptive innovation which as I pointed out with the examples given, it is precisely because of the trained engineering background that innovations come to fruition. It is precisely because of their engineering training that the nuclear navy, Cray's supercomputers, and the 747 were able to exist. All massive engineering projects that were hugely disruptive and innovative.

The Wright brothers innovation happened when not many people were trained as engineers or could afford to go to college. It is also in general one thing to create an idea and something else to "productize" it or for a concept to stand up to the forces of nature, etc.

There were lots of construction innovations without civil engineering, but it is inconceivable today to do any form but the smallest projects without it.

There is an enormous amount to engineering products, buildings etc. that non-engineers generally aren't familiar with. That also includes most who go to college in engineering but then go into another field, eg. working for consulting firms such as McKinsey. It may even include engineers that might work on prototypes but never really worry about something that must stand up "in the field."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com