Columnist: August 15, 1996

A friend went away to college at age 18, for the first time leaving home behind. A scholarship program lined his pockets with cash, enough to pay for tuition and room and board for a full year.

A few months later, he was out, expelled for nonpayment of all fees and a grade point average that rivaled that of the students in Animal House. The money somehow turned into parties that kept him from class.

Today, he's a successful mechanical engineer. With no degree, he managed to apprentice himself to a start-up and to parlay that job into others where his skills showed through and where enlightened bosses gave him the title and the work he's so adept at.

Many people in the Vietnam era became technicians, bringing their military training to a practical civilian use. Some managed to work themselves up to engineering status. Others were not so lucky.

Another acquaintance breezed through MIT on a full scholarship. Graduating with a feeling that his prestigious scholarship made him very special, he started working in aerospace. The company—as was its policy—put him on the production line for six months, riveting airplanes. He came out of it with a new appreciation for what works and for the problems associated with manufacturing. What an enlightened way to introduce graduates to the realities of the physical world.

Most of today's new engineering graduates do have some experience with tools and methods. Still, it seems the practical aspects are subjugated to theoretical ones. You really don't know much about programming until you've completely hosed a 10,000-line project, and you know little about hardware until you design, build, and somehow troubleshoot a complex board. Experience is a critical part of the engineering education.

In my career, I've worked with lots of engineers, most with sheepskins but many without. Both groups have had winners and losers. The nondegreed folks, though, generally come up a very different path, earning their engineering title only after years as a technician. This career path has a tremendous amount of value, because these employees have more hands-on experience than most of their BSEE-laden bosses.

Technicians are expert solderers—something far too few engineers ever master. A good tech can burn a PAL, assemble a board, and use a milling machine. The best—those bound for an engineering career—are adept troubleshooters and masters of the scope.

Too many of us view our profession parochially, somehow feeling that college is the only route to design. Part of this probably stems from the education itself, where instructors without doctorates cannot become full professors. Some comes from our fascination with fancy certificates.

Doctors and lawyers plaster degrees and awards over the walls to impress clients, which implies that we, the public, are indeed impressed by these paper kudos. These same doctors and lawyers have very effective professional associations that limit entry in the field only to those people with a degree—from a school approved by the association. It's a clever way to maximize salaries via anticompetitive measures.

Electronics is very different. We're in a much younger field, where a bit of the anarchy of the Wild West still reigns. More so than in other professions, we're judged on our ability and our performance. If you can crank working designs out at warp speed, who cares about scholastic records?

And yet, our creations get more complex every day. A 1975-era embedded system pushed the edge of technology at 4 MHz yet required little of the theoretical knowledge we got in college. You needed the experience to know how to create circuits and the ability to make the silly thing work.

Today, our products' algorithms rely on Fourier transforms and other advanced mathematical concepts. After all of the math they fed us, I now feel a bit like the teen-ager coming of age. Our professors, like our parents, were right after all!

Other neglected parts of a college education are becoming important. One of the most crucial: writing skills. Engineers are notoriously poor communicators, yet we're the folks building the communications age.

Occasionally, we hear talk of turning engineering education into more of a vocational program. Train students to design systems and nothing else! The model fits well into the '90's frenetic preoccupation with getting results today, and the future be damned. Yet, I worry for the future of our profession. Several forces are shaping profound and scary changes.

The first is simply the breathtaking rate of change. Approximately every three years, we're in a new sort of technology. This trend will accelerate, which means that the engineer of the future will either have a three-year-long career or will become adept at anticipating change. More than anything, it means we have to re-educate ourselves every day. By reading EDN today, you're working on your future. Yet, I talk to engineers every day who spend little to no time keeping current.

Time to market is another force that will change the profession. When designing a product, there's no time to learn how to do it or how to master the product's technology. Companies want experts now. Yet, how can you be an expert at new technology? This is one reason we see so many consultants working in development efforts. They immediately (effectively or otherwise) bring new knowledge to bear.

Enlightened management will find a way to transfer this knowledge to the core employees. Sadly, too many can't see beyond getting the product out the door.

Finally, we see a serious pigeonholing of skills. Are you good at x? Then do x! Do it forever! We can always get a new kid to work on the next project!

The complexity of software will only make this situation worse. Design a product and get it out the door, and there's a good chance you'll be involved in its maintenance forever.

I wonder how many techs-turned-engineers have the background to keep up in this rapidly advancing world. Similarly, I wonder how many college-educated designers remember enough math to understand what's going on.

I recently did a survey of several graduate engineers. None could integrate a simple function. None remembered much about the transfer function of a transistor. Granted, these were digital folks who work with ICs. But, does this mean that the background and theory drummed into them so long ago are worthless? Does it imply that only the youngest, those who haven't had time to forget, should work on the newest and the most complex systems? I wish I knew the answer.

I've tried not to discriminate on the basis of a degree, having had some wonderful experiences with very smart, very hard-working people who became engineers by the force of their will. But, over time, I see fewer of these people. Clearly, any large organization will screen out nondegreed people before they can demonstrate their (possibly) outrageous abilities.

Engineering is a diverse discipline. We need thinkers, doers, inventors, implementers, designers, and troubleshooters. Sometimes, one person contains all of these skills, though, more often, a team comes together to complement each other's skills.

When it's time to hire, most of us look for the standard requirements. I like to use the SWAN model: Smart, Works hard, Ambitious, and Nice. Though hard to gauge at an interview, these qualities almost guarantee a decent worker. When hiring nonentry-level people, the SWAN model is a far better indicator of success than any sheepskin.

As someone who rejects our fascination with form over substance, I think that good, nondegreed engineers are a valuable asset only a fool would reject. However, not getting a degree is clearly a mistake. You just cannot compete in the job market without this prerequisite.

For those folks who, by circumstance or bad planning, did not complete college, look at other degree options. For instance, check out High Technology Degree Alternatives by Joel Butler (ISBN 0-912045-61-2) 1994, Professional Publications. It's full of ideas about getting a degree without quitting your job or spending a lot of money.