Skip navigation

Zibb

Anablog

Paul RakoTechnical Editor Paul Rako looks at analog technology in power supplies, interface, the signal path, and life in general.



   Advertisement

Profile

RSS Feed

  • Add this blog to your RSS newsreader!

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Most Commented On

Archives

By Category

Analog Design Articles

Blog

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Working with your hands

May 27 2009 12:54PM | Permalink |Comments (8) |


The NY Times has a great article about the satisfaction and joy that comes from working with your hands. The nice quote:

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002…. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents.

But here is the deal, the author, Matthew B. Crawford also has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. I think all good engineers have an appreciation for hands-on work. It is one of the satisfying things about engineering, that it has a heavy intellectual aspect, full of theory and math and computers, but it also has a hands-on component where you build things and solder breadboards and wire in prototypes, all the while using one of the most intellectually demanding tasks, troubleshooting. There is a reason job ads for engineers often say they need a “hands-on” person. A manufacturing company can’t sell simulations and theory. They need a real product.

Crawford has sounded off on this subject before, and I blogged about it a few years ago.


Related entries in: Analog | 

Reader Comments



at 5/27/2009 1:36:41 PM, Paul Rako said:
Well yippee, we have a new comment Captcha. It sometimes requires two tries in my Opera web browser but the old system did that as well. The old system let you cut and paste the Captcha letters, which was a little broken, but it exploded a week or two ago and refused about 90% of the comments. The other weirdness was that if you had an apostrophe', it would add another apostrophe to it, for every time you tried to enter the comment. I also love that the letters are not case sensitive. I think our IT folks whipped up their own system rather than buy a pre-packaged one and the hard works shows, the equivalent of the hands-on work I talked about in the blog post. BTW, if you use Opera like me be sure to add the plug-in Aspell, and you can right-click and check spelling in any comment box. Explorer has iespell that will do the same thing.




at 5/27/2009 6:16:15 PM, Chris Gammell said:
I agree, I can feel like I accomplished just as much in a day if I spend it troubleshooting a board (and finding one bad resistor) as when I spend it figuring out transfer functions on paper. Sure, the transfer function might be more crucial to the end product or give better insight into that product I'm working on but I wouldn't get too far if I couldn't implement the transfer function in the real world on a real product.




at 5/28/2009 11:46:01 AM, Kevin Szabo said:
Engineering is so many things. It is binding to a solution while having too little information. It is knowing what data are important and what data may be ignored. I believe the latter is one of the greatest engineering skills, since we are usually inundated with data and complexity. The act of "getting your hands dirty" lets you know if you have paid attention to the right stuff and correctly ignored that which doesn't matter. BTW, great blog Paul. I read everything you write.





at 5/29/2009 8:06:36 AM, Steve H said:
I saw that article too - he is a fun writer and an interesting guy. As a hardware/firmware/software engineer I'm sure the only thing that makes my 'cube life' worthwile is that I get to build things - all in all it's a good life in an engineering cube.




at 5/29/2009 8:12:44 AM, Steve H said:
Paul: I just looked at your other post too. Good stuff, I like the approach of hiring hands on engineers - very few places in my 30 years have valued that at all, yet those are the sort of people who solve production problems and keep situations from getting out of control in the first place. Good posts Paul.





at 6/2/2009 4:40:44 PM, Moe said:

Well, I don't share your thrill with the new captcha, since so many other things are broken. I am not so enamored of the IT guys' "hard work" since all they did was build a buggy comment system instead of using one of several open source solutions that are much more robust.

Last time I posted, it STILL needed multiple tries; it STILL replicated apostrophes, and it STILL did not do line breaks, making it appear that everyone who posts is one of the semi-literates who don't know what a paragraph is for.

(Wow, listen to me! That was cranky!)




at 6/2/2009 4:42:32 PM, Moe said:
OK. Looks like the apostrophe replication is fixed. Took two tries to post ("You typed xxxx which was WRONG!" -- oh, how I hate that message.) And it still ignores line breaks.



at 6/2/2009 4:44:56 PM, Moe said:

Anyway, regarding hands-on engineers, I so agree. I think an engineer who doesn't know how to solder is at a disadvantage. Am freshly back from MakerFaire, where I saw a delightful array of DIY creativity. Hous and hours of labor-of-love, working with their hands.

Post a comment



Display Name

Change Image
Before submitting this form, please type the characters displayed above.
Note the letters are NOT case sensitive.


ADVERTISEMENT

About Us   |   Contact Us   |   Free Email Newsletters   |   Free Magazine Subscription  |   Advertising   |   RSSRSS   

©1997-2009 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Use of this Web site is subject to its Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Please visit these other Reed Business sites