The Big (Employment) Squeeze
It’s funny how information tends to come in waves. Recently, I came across two articles that had similar themes about different victims. The first was the notion that engineers that are over 35 are essentially unemployable. The opinion piece from CNN discusses how “older” workers are perceived as too expensive to hire. It also discusses how the point of mass layoffs is to eliminate the older, more expensive workers and foist more work on less people. Fluxor has discussed the reality of this situation in many of his posts. Shortly before this article came out, another one showed up on Bloomberg. This one had the age of unemployability as 40, but around the same ballpark. All of this has been discussed often on EngineerBlogs. However, what brought this to mind was an article I came across a few weeks ago. This one talked about the other end of the employment…
Getting my groove back
Last week, I complained on my own blog about how I wasn’t looking forward to school starting. In the meantime, it has started, and I’ve made it through the first week of classes. Now that I’m starting to get back in the groove, I’m looking at things a different way. First, as much as I love summer, I like the fact that my life is now moving back into a predictable, albeit busy, routine. I have certain days I’ll be teaching, certain days where I take my dogs to class, certain days I’ll be running my kids to events, and certain meetings that I simply cannot avoid. Taken as a whole, I really like having a schedule and knowing where and when I need to be a certain place. Summer, with it’s lack of structure, sometimes leaves me feeling a bit lost. Second, I’m happy to be teaching again. I…
Irreproducibility
I’m not sure how many academics read EngineerBlogs, but I’m curious how many have run into the problem of false results. I personally spent a lot of time trying during my MS trying to reproduce data from various papers only to find there were problems with the results or the set up. I can remember one paper, in particular, that showed an antenna design published by a fairly prestigious group. I used exactly the same software and tried to replicate their design only to find that the results were considerably different than what was shown in the paper. I finally broke down and emailed one of the authors. Their response was that the dimensions given on the design were not correct. The problems are multiplied, of course, if you’re dealing with different software as you may not be able to even get your simulation results to match up. How do…
This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
Speaking engineer
The most difficult aspect of being on a multidisciplinary team is the fact that you don’t always speak each other’s language. Communication can be a problem. All of us are so immersed in what we do that we know what we need and our limitations. If we knew that the people we were working with didn’t understand those limitations, we would gladly explain them. However, it doesn’t become clear that there’s been a miscommuncation or lack of communication until we’re looking at a project and asking why the person didn’t do things a different way. From my perspective, it’s a bit difficult to do modeling and then hand my work to someone who will make the thing I’ve modeled. Often, the way I’ve designed the model isn’t exactly the way the object needs to be built. Then the question is whether the model is a sufficient representation of the device.…
Gift-giving for engineers
A male engineer I once worked with told me that, when he got married, he told his wife that he didn’t pick up on hints. If she wanted something for her birthday, she would hand him a magazine, point to a picture, and say, “I want this for my birthday.” I’ve personally used a similar approach after a couple of events where my husband said, “I wanted to get you something, but I didn’t know what you wanted.” If I see something I like, I may send an email to him saying, “If you’re thinking about birthday gifts, you can put this on your list.” Sometimes I’m more subtle, like when we walk into Barnes and Noble and I make a comment about how it sure would be nice to have a Nook or Kindle…and then proceed to play with the demo model for a half-hour and ask the salesperson…
Dating advice for women engineers
My husband sent me a link to an EDN page featuring a video covering dating advice for engineers. I want to start by saying that the video was very amusing, so the following is in no way meant as disparaging. However, it was also very guy-centric, and I wondered what sort of dating advice might be useful for female engineers (which, the video says, are hypothetical…like Bigfoot). So my advice would be: Ignore any guy who says that female engineers are unattractive. He’s just bitter because he can’t find a date. It’s karma. He’s probably also an engineer. You’ll probably want to date another engineer, or maybe a scientist. Otherwise you won’t have anything to talk about. (Well, maybe if you have hobby in common. HAM radio, anyone?) And saying things like “Higgs Boson” will be just fine. You’ll probably want to date another engineer because, given your salary, you’re…
Peer pressure: the real reason engineers don’t play well with others
Last week, I wrote about two engineering stereotypes – the thinker and the tinkerer. When I was attempting to add a bit of data to the fluff, I came across an article in Science Daily about how engineering stereotypes drive counterproductive practices. In particular, they encourage engineering students to engage in practices that are actually harmful in a career. Unfortunately, it wasn’t applicable to last week’s piece, but I found it worth discussing nonetheless. (If you’d like to read the original article, you can find it here.) The premise of the article is that engineering stereotypes are already prevalent in society and that students think about these when interacting with their coursework and classmates. Specifically, “There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves,” Leonardi says. “So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am…
Which Stereotype Are You?
Yesterday on Twitter, Chris Gammell, Carmen Parisi, and I got into a conversation about how we solve engineering problems. Chris said: Do what the rest of us do….keep adding caps and resistors until it works… And my response was: I need to simulate everything first before I start changing anything. To which Chris responded that we were both stereotypes of the academic and industrial engineers. Of course, I can’t disagree because those stereotypes are somewhat borne out by observation. I’ve seen engineers of both types, and the worst are the extremes: the thinker or the tinkerer. You have the engineers that run in and start changing things, not really thinking about what they’re doing, and then find out that what they did was rather ineffective. Then there’s the ones who sit there and never commit to anything until it’s time to finish things up because of decision paralysis. Most of…