Oh, and Bob Widlar- no degree. If he were alive, we’d have to put him in jail for engineering without a permission slip.
Yea - my man:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Widlar
He did have a degree tho... UofCO
Me? Not so much - I dropped out of high school. At the time, I was doing state variable filter designs for non-destructive testing and some of the first CGA crap for the then-new IBM-PC. It helped take Opus One out of bankruptcy, by allowing the projector TV's to get all 16 colors as well as allow the local monitor to run at the same time.
Not having a degree hasn't stopped me. I've designed over 3,500 PCB's. Got three patents for stuff I started and did all the hardware for, designed a major part of the hardware that won the Perry Award for Precision Munitions, and a bunch of other silly things.
My son, on the other hand, is going for his PhD right now. He was published as an undergrad and presented at major conferences. He is using academia for the right reasons.
Me? I'd love to go to school. But for the right reasons.
I've told this story before -I just had a kid in my lab that we hired - from VATECH no less. Top of his ME class. I happened to have a mic stand adapter hangin' out on the bench.
Told him it was a weird internal thread - 5/8-27 - that I had to single point on a lathe.
"How do you make threads?" he asks...
At first I thought he was joking.... nope. When I asked other new hire ME's they too said they were never taught the various methods of thread making...
Another story involves getting what seems to be one of the first patents on the wireless IoT - https://www.google.com/patents/US6208266
So turns out that we initially end up using one of the more prestigious IP firms in Pittsburgh - they had an office in the glass tower in Market Square. So they send these two IP lawyers over to our dinky ass lab - one's an electrical and the other chemical (I have no idea why). A patent atty has to have an undergrad in the engineering discipline he will be prosecuting.
We were talking about various protocols and line code used by devices and I had some hardware simulations running with a scope attached. I flipped to a different protocol and mentioned ..." ok set the V/Div for 5..."
Kid looks at me like he's lost...
"Dude - where'd you go for your undergrad?"
"Brown..." he stammers...
"Let me guess - you partied all the way thru that..."
"uhhh....."
Hmmm.
So we get our first action back - I didn't get to see the draft of the patent and the independent and dependent claims. Turns out the chemical guy wrote them and tried to patent the fact that electrical circuits need electricity to operate, and also tried to claim a switch as novel.
I freaked at my co-founder "WTF, Over?"
My CTO steps in.... "... look we're near Boston now [we'd moved] and lets see who we can get to run this patent thru. Find a guy - Chris Gagne - that somehow saved our ass. He wrote a really tight Detailed description and did the best he could with the claims. Ended up with Nixon Peabody walking the filing thru... god, what a PIA patents are.
So yea - education can go either way. My son mentioned that the term education has been so deluded that people in his one field of study don't really use it anymore.
I recall the school my wife went to... I was smoking a joint with the owner's kid and he mentioned after taking a huge toke, "... yea, we get these MILF's in here since they get guaranteed gov't loans, so we get paid no matter what... here take a hit"
"No, thanks... I'll pass.."
"What makes an expert isn't so much what they know,
It's that they've done similar things so many times wrong
They know what not to do"
So I prefer the term "Tenacious Idiot" to engineer...
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