Re: V = I * R and the rest (Re: OT: C++ Newbie and KDE/QT)
On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 08:27:30PM -0400, Alan Shutko wrote:
> joost@topaz.mdcc.cx (Joost Kooij) writes:
>
> > Other people will say that I'm violently wrong
>
> Actually, I'd say you were on crack. What's a soldering iron going to
> teach you that a breadboard couldn't?
Well, that's funny? To heat the baking soda and the coke, of course.
How would you do that with a breadboard?
> The basics are a good thing, but I believe you're taking it a wee bit
> too far.
It was a gratuitous rant, admittedly. But to my defense, there was
no mention of "design and implement your own cpu core and i/o asics,
your own system architecture, your own structured programming language
and compiler, your own operating system and system libraries, your own
userland toolset, your own programming paradigm" either. I argued that
one should generally understand these concepts, though.
> Why not learn to make your own semiconductors from beach
> sand while you're at it?
Because that would be very expensive, and the amount of effort spent would
not be compensated by the gains in knowledge and experience. The gain
from this particular endeavour would not be very relevant in the bigger
picture, whereas the other ones were very relevant, in various ways.
Experience is important. Why else do you think the mcse joke goes: "must
call someone experienced"? All the serious admin job postings ask for it
explicitly (the experience). The soldering iron is implied, btw.
Here's a great little engineers' wisdom that I picked up on a
microcontroller related mailing list:
If you need to make a planning for a technical project, make a naive
engineer's best estimate. Then multiply that estimate by two and take the
result to the next unit, this brings realistic project completion time.
Eg. two days => four weeks; three weeks => six months. Corollary: if
an engineer says it'll take a year, it will never be finished in reality,
because the engineer long has a new job by then, or has been forcefully
promoted into management (zombie state), because his salary was getting
dangerously close to that of some of the lower ranked managers.
Cheers,
Joost
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