[TowerTalk] Engineering

[Jim Brown]

On Fri,7/15/2016 11:02 AM, Mark Spencer via TowerTalk wrote:
> Sorry for the off topic post but as a successful holder of a BA in political science (at least in my view (:  ) who was able to stop working on a full time basis as a technology professional before I was 50 I believe I received value from that degree.  I found out after I was hired into my first real job in the technology sector that my BA played a major role in my selection.

Several thoughts here. First, as the holder of a BSEE who has worked in 
pro sales and run my own (very) small business, I consider the extremely 
narrow education that was part of my EE courses to be a huge limitation. 
Thanks to the wide range of jobs I held over my working years, 
especially the early and middle years, I was lucky enough to learn 
enough about business, finance, and marketing to be successful at a 
level that made me happy and allowed me a happy retirement. Extensive 
reading and some participation in politics at the grass roots level 
contributed to my education in history and the way we govern ourselves 
contributed to making me a better citizen.

I'm told that a common shortcoming of engineers is that we don't write 
well. I'm thankful that my EE curriculum included two history courses 
and one on "english," where the prof did his best to teach us to write. 
I recall one pop quiz where the assignment was to write about "hats." 
Five years teaching (at DeVry) taught me to organize my thoughts and 
present them. When began selling (pro audio to broadcasters and other 
tech professionals), that teaching experience helped a lot. When I began 
a consulting job, it also helped me communicate with my clients, and the 
writing experience was equally important.

I'm also quite bothered by the concept taught in biz schools that you 
don't need to know anything about a business to run it well. Nothing 
could be farther from the truth. Dolby Labs is a great example. Ray 
Dolby was an EE, and his business was successful BECAUSE of his solid 
education in EE and physics, and his actual WORK on projects, Dolby Labs 
stuck with long R&D projects that most MBAs would have scrapped years 
earlier, and that eventually sent the company into the stratosphere. I 
had the good fortune to hear him talk about that in an invited lecture 
to the Audio Engineering Society.

Bottom line -- all of us, not only engineers, need the broadest possible 
education to reach our highest potential. Narrow is bad.

73, Jim K9YC