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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, May 02, 2011 at 20:50:05 :
In Reply to: Re: "no sarcasm" posted by M Fanoni [65.98.184.194] on Monday, May 02, 2011 at 19:39:36 :
When I was only a little older than you, I was talking with my 75 year old neighbor in Everett, a man named "Frank" who had tended orchards in the Methow, trapped marten around Stevens Pass, mined gold in the Blewett country, hiked regularly through the old Cascade Tunnel while they were still running trains through it, dug petrified wood in Nevada, welded everything that needed welding for 30 years in a Weyerhauser mill, and could still shinny up a cedar tree with a hand saw and cut it down from the top down.
I told him I'd been up to Kennedy Hot springs one weekend. He said to me "There's a hot spring up by Stevens Pass". I said "No there isn't". He said "Yes there is". I said I'd hiked around there and read books on the area and there wasn't any. He told me he'd never been to the spring itself but when he was trapping marten up there during the depression he'd been to the hotel where they had the water piped down to for hot baths. I said "I didn't know there was a hot spring up there." He said, "There's a lot of things you don't know." He said it in a nice way, but he didn't smile and he looked me in the eye when he said it. I went back and looked and not only was the hot spring there, but the pipe that used to carry the water to the long-gone hotel was still there.
Those words stuck with me. There are still a lot of things I don't know. The older I get the more things I know I don't know.
Engineering is a very humbling profession. It's easy to talk about how you think things ought to work. It's not very hard to convince people that something should work. It's not even very hard to make the simulator give you the results you want. But when you actually build the thing you're up against the most brutal critic in the universe -- the laws of physics. Mechanical part break where they shouldn't. Electronic circuits oscillate or are noisy. Optical send the light in all the wrong directions. O-rings fail to seal. Impossible combinations of inputs happen. Products that 100% passed final test in the factory fail at the customer's plant in Kazakhstan when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, and start working again the moment you show up with your test equipment.
There are no old, arrogant engineers. Plenty of kids come out of college full of themselves because they learned the latest whatever, but the laws of physics take them down pretty fast. They either get humble or they go into marketing. The difference between college and real engineering is that in college you have to convince the professor that you know the material. In real life you have to actually build the damn thing and make it work. In production. With the cheapest parts purchasing can find. With assemblers who are thinking of what they're going to do at 5:00. With customers who don't read the manual.
Every time I think I know sh*t, reality proves me wrong. Happens to all of us who actually try to make things.
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