14yo Engineering Gradute Gets Job at SpaceX

[james_s]

I have met plenty of grown adults that are no more mature than a typical 14 year old so I don't really see the issue here. There is no evidence that he's being forced into anything, I'm sure he's being paid well and who knows what he will end up doing with his life. He could turn out to be the next Einstein or Stephen Hawking.

Most likely will just turn into Joe Average engineer though. I got my first professional job in engineering at 17.

Maybe so, time will tell. Graduating from college at 14 is quite an achievement though. Either way good for him.

[tom66]

I have met plenty of grown adults that are no more mature than a typical 14 year old so I don't really see the issue here. There is no evidence that he's being forced into anything, I'm sure he's being paid well and who knows what he will end up doing with his life. He could turn out to be the next Einstein or Stephen Hawking.

Most likely will just turn into Joe Average engineer though. I got my first professional job in engineering at 17.

I was working from age of 17 too.  I graduated into a junior engineering position and worked my way up to senior at 27.  This kid could do the same if he puts the effort in, the challenge will be getting others to respect his opinions and input, which didn't really happen to me until I got into my mid 20's, before then it was always another engineer checking my work and usually changing things here and there.

[coppice]

Every few years a kid like this hits the headlines. Eventually there is a reasonably long form interview with them, and you end up just just feeling sorry for them. To go deep very quickly they have ignored so much breadth in their life they are pretty much broken people. I can easily see how, with the right pushing, I could have got a degree in something like maths at the age of 12 to 13, but at what cost?

[Xena E]

Every few years a kid like this hits the headlines. Eventually there is a reasonably long form interview with them, and you end up just just feeling sorry for them.

This.

I see a young man who may be gifted but who is no doubt being pushed. And what of Tesla? The only benefit to them is being a publicity driven exercise: then what? Sit the guy up the corner with some playdough and tell him he's doing a great job.

We have one of these token wunderkind types here: the worst kind. Arrogant with no practical ability, and hasn't contributed in any tenable way. just spouts soundbites. He knows he's wank useless, but manages to attach himself to whatever else is going successfully. (Although he's found that auntie Xena projects do not carry ballast), it's a good way to piss off the real engineers though if they're being slack, just tell them Jamie is going to assist them.

I'll repeat, publicity stunt.

 

[Simon]

And you guys expect the co-worker engineers will be taking his input seriously, do you.

Depends on how bright his co-workers are. We had a work experience student that at 16 I'd have given a job to if I could. by 18 I was as sorry as he was to see him going off to university to be lectured to by those who can't.

[tom66]

Depends on how bright his co-workers are. We had a work experience student that at 16 I'd have given a job to if I could. by 18 I was as sorry as he was to see him going off to university to be lectured to by those who can't.

Or to get a good education in an area where he is practically quite skilled?  If he was working in engineering then a degree in the field is a very good thing to have, if it comes from a decent university with a good reputation for engineering studies. 

I went to university having a good deal of skills beforehand, I was already designing PCBs and writing software before that.  Of course I did well in the course, I wasn't that great at the exams but the practical modules I sailed through.  It was good to get a solid mathematical and theoretical basis for the things I had already some intuition for.

The biggest problem with university is the course is too long for many engineering studies - I would choose to condense the 5-year course (4 years plus 'sandwich' year in industry) I went on down to 2.5 years and still be happy. But I don't regret doing it one bit.  It has also been extremely useful to my career, most job ads I look at simply will not consider anyone without a degree and I do put into practice the odd thing I learned.

I can only see this opposition towards degrees comes from people who believe engineering is purely an intuitive, self-taught field when the reality is it's closer to an applied scientific field than anything, and the theoretical basis is not something you can skip out on if you want to be a skilled engineer.

[EEVblog]

Remeber that thread we had on here about the 10yo kid who was trying to get a degree by his 11th birthday or something and the college said he needed an extra year, but his parents were so upset at the delay that they pulled him out?

FOUND IT:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/belgian-boy-laurent-simons-heads-off-to-university-aged-8/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50734000

[SiliconWizard]

Child labour at SpaceX?

Several of my acquaintances from uni were groomed as minors into the twin cults of SpaceX and Tesla. You can imagine how they're doing today (hint: they're heavily medicated).

Isn't this the bright future that everybody wants? 

[Simon]

Depends on how bright his co-workers are. We had a work experience student that at 16 I'd have given a job to if I could. by 18 I was as sorry as he was to see him going off to university to be lectured to by those who can't.

Or to get a good education in an area where he is practically quite skilled?  If he was working in engineering then a degree in the field is a very good thing to have, if it comes from a decent university with a good reputation for engineering studies. 

I went to university having a good deal of skills beforehand, I was already designing PCBs and writing software before that.  Of course I did well in the course, I wasn't that great at the exams but the practical modules I sailed through.  It was good to get a solid mathematical and theoretical basis for the things I had already some intuition for.

The biggest problem with university is the course is too long for many engineering studies - I would choose to condense the 5-year course (4 years plus 'sandwich' year in industry) I went on down to 2.5 years and still be happy. But I don't regret doing it one bit.  It has also been extremely useful to my career, most job ads I look at simply will not consider anyone without a degree and I do put into practice the odd thing I learned.

I can only see this opposition towards degrees comes from people who believe engineering is purely an intuitive, self-taught field when the reality is it's closer to an applied scientific field than anything, and the theoretical basis is not something you can skip out on if you want to be a skilled engineer.

i don't know how long ago you went to university but it has degenerated a lot. No engineering is not just about intuition. I am completing a HND by distance learning and it has been horrendous and useless. Electrical now includes a module on renewable energy that somehow ended up into the poorly explained principles of heating a house and heat loss. Apparently a house only needs it's air heating and in one exercise having argued with the tutor I made the point in evaluating calculations that I did not need to take into account heat loss as the temperature rose to it's steady state as it would take a mere 45 seconds to heat the house.

Naturally calculating thermals on a circuit board has not been taught.

[magic]

Remeber that thread we had on here about the 10yo kid who was trying to get a degree by his 11th birthday or something and the college said he needed an extra year, but his parents were so upset at the delay that they pulled him out?

FOUND IT:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/belgian-boy-laurent-simons-heads-off-to-university-aged-8/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50734000

And reportedly he jumped from EE to physics and graduated last year.
Surely sounds like somebody who knows what he wants. Or not.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Remeber that thread we had on here about the 10yo kid who was trying to get a degree by his 11th birthday or something and the college said he needed an extra year, but his parents were so upset at the delay that they pulled him out?

FOUND IT:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/belgian-boy-laurent-simons-heads-off-to-university-aged-8/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50734000

And reportedly he jumped from EE to physics and graduated last year.
Surely sounds like somebody who knows what he wants. Or not.

 

At that age we all went wherever the girls were.

[.RC.]

I'll repeat, publicity stunt.

These big corporations and government when they make grand announcements, how much is believable these days, there is just so much marketing wank and they have cried wolf so many times that people switch off.

Or maybe it is just me getting older and grumpy.

These prodigal youths, if they find everything so easy, I wonder how do they fare when all of a sudden the going gets tough, when they have never had a tough going before especially today in these big fake woke corporations where the fake corporate image is one of the most important things.  You can not tell them to stop being a cockhead these days.

All I can see is that unless properly nurtured, being very smart it would be a curse. 

[tom66]

i don't know how long ago you went to university but it has degenerated a lot. No engineering is not just about intuition. I am completing a HND by distance learning and it has been horrendous and useless. Electrical now includes a module on renewable energy that somehow ended up into the poorly explained principles of heating a house and heat loss. Apparently a house only needs it's air heating and in one exercise having argued with the tutor I made the point in evaluating calculations that I did not need to take into account heat loss as the temperature rose to it's steady state as it would take a mere 45 seconds to heat the house.

Naturally calculating thermals on a circuit board has not been taught.

I graduated about six years ago.  I don't think much has changed then.

One issue is distance learning.  I'm not convinced it's as good as being there in person.  Obviously if you want to work a job at the same time it might be your only option.

We did a course on renewable energy too, but it was more focused at the grid level, and on things like MPPT and power converters for renewable systems.  Not that useful to me but I can imagine someone finding it useful.

The most useless subject was our motor controls one, which spent the whole semester talking about SCR-controlled motor drives.  Yes, they are still used, in old industrial systems, but there was no mention at all about three phase induction motors or BLDC motors, which are actually the future in things like electric cars.

I went to Leeds, a red-brick research university, I think when I went there they were in the top 10 for UK universities in electronic engineering.   I've been trying to get a friend of mine to look into going there, as he's quite a skilled engineer as a hobbyist but has struggled to get a decent job without a degree.  Unfortunately due to poor academic history most universities won't consider him, even if he shows skills in the field he'd be studying.  That kind of thing needs to change, at least for engineering.

[Simon]

The distance learning material is so bad that I have no faith in the university itself but they are the only university doing electronic engineering by distance learning. Yes I work, I nudged my way into electronics at my last job but got fed up and moved having gained enough experience to be taken on as the only electrical engineer.

We recently interviewed some people. I agreed with the head hunter that power electronics would be a suitable angle to try as I wanted to weed out the Arduino and STM32 junkies, as I was more interested in people that actually get electronics. So one person had listed power electronics as a module they studied at university, they made as their final project a disaster relief battery with a linear regulator, apparently it was the cheapest option and the goal was cost, although I thought disaster relief might have efficiency as a goal but never mind me, they remembered that there was another type of regulator but never mentioned the name of it.

They referred to their time at uni as though it was a long time ago and hardly relevant, but were in their first job since uni basically plastering off the shelf parts together on a rack at a start up company that was all hype.

I really wish university was relevant these days, but I always get a sense that it has been dumbed down, they are just businesses now, and it is a race to the bottom to get people through the door.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Just get your ticket and get outta there. Don't waste energy fighting with teachers.

[wraper]

These prodigal youths, if they find everything so easy, I wonder how do they fare  when all of a sudden the going gets tough

The thing is they should not be left stagnating with average children, otherwise exactly this will happen. They should get it increasingly tough so they cannot become complacent.

when they have never had a tough going before especially today in these big fake woke corporations where the fake corporate image is one of the most important things.  You can not tell them to stop being a cockhead these days.

In this particular case, SpaceX is not woke though and as it's company controlled by Elon Musk, you won't get paid for doing nothing useful.

All I can see is that unless properly nurtured, being very smart it would be a curse.

Yep.

[Simon]

Just get your ticket and get outta there. Don't waste energy fighting with teachers.

On my last module, I started at the last job and this job agreed to keep paying it. My boss seems to like the idea of formal education.

[EEVblog]

These prodigal youths, if they find everything so easy, I wonder how do they fare when all of a sudden the going gets tough, when they have never had a tough going before especially today in these big fake woke corporations where the fake corporate image is one of the most important things.  You can not tell them to stop being a cockhead these days.
All I can see is that unless properly nurtured, being very smart it would be a curse.

Once the novelty of being the young genious wears off, you just become yet another engineer. Ok, so you might have graduated and started work 8 years earlier than everyone else, but no one is going to care if you are 24 with 10 years of exerience vs someone who's 32 with the same 10 years of exerience. There is nothing special about you any more, welcome to the real world.
In fact it could become a disadvantage, as they are hiring a very experienced engineer who probably has a young family and wants stability, and you rock up all baby faced, good luck.

[tom66]

I really wish university was relevant these days, but I always get a sense that it has been dumbed down, they are just businesses now, and it is a race to the bottom to get people through the door.

Yes, but this is your experience from a course at the only university that does distance learning - perhaps there is a reason most don't do it for EE?  I'm all in favour of remote working where it's possible but electronics is a difficult field to do fully remotely even if you have a lot of the equipment, nothing quite beats the lecturer standing behind you pointing to the circuit and the scope and explaining things.

The biggest issue I have with university is it is too focused on theory for the average engineer but then again a masters/bachelors is a stepping stone to a PhD or further academic study, so it is just going to be like that.  Perhaps there should be a degree level for people who just want to study engineering theory without getting into the weeds on how semiconductor laser diodes operate.

I have met many people who have gone to university for engineering and a few who have not and would always consider a degree as part of the hiring process, it is certainly not a useless piece of paper it is a genuine qualification and shows that someone has at least some competence.  Now yes, if you have someone with 10yrs experience and no degree and someone with a degree and no experience, then the 10yrs person is going to win out first, but it is a lot harder to get that experience without a degree and often times they will be lacking the theoretical background necessary for some tasks.

I certainly can't say my university course was easy - I worked hard to get the grade I did and it involved a lot of extracurricular hours and study.  Compared to my A-levels (broadly equivalent to upper secondary school / high school for anyone outside of the UK) it was a proper mountain to climb.

[Miyuki]

These prodigal youths, if they find everything so easy, I wonder how do they fare  when all of a sudden the going gets tough

The thing is they should not be left stagnating with average children, otherwise exactly this will happen. They should get it increasingly tough so they cannot become complacent.

All I can see is that unless properly nurtured, being very smart it would be a curse.

Yep.

One can expect such people will be on the autistic savants' spectrum, so they will be bored with other kids and will never fit in with peers, which brings other problems.
Forcing them to sit in school for required years is not a good way, yet in many places, it is this way. Such talents then tend to go to waste.
But you still have the problem with social skills and psychological development and most of them are impaired in this aspect even before they skip all the years of classes.
This problem is mostly overlooked and as we can see most of such people ended badly.

[AndyBeez]

Early achievement is just that. Early achievement. Even if by the age of two, a child is placed by child psychology experts in the 'future genius category', being better than everyone else is no guarantee of future success or mental wellbeing in adulthood. Has being a child star worked out well for many, long term?

As other parents, you should never feel inadequate because your children have not addressed the UN climate change committee or reinvented the internet using AI. So what if your 13 year old is not on the front cover of Forbes magazine, you have other metrics to value their worth. Support their interests, but don't turn them into little sociopaths. Especially when there are siblings involved. Fundamentally, wunderkinds only make headlines because of unrealistic parental expectations.

As young kids we dedicated our efforts to collecting badges, belts, pins and school certificates. It's what all kids did. And then we became teenagers and discovered all things to do with money, sex, rock music [electronics] and cosmetic products. Finally, after a period as trainees, apprentices, interns or students, we graduated into the world as tax paying parents, with kids of our own. Kids who collect badges, belts, pins and so on. You failed, you fell over, you got up. It's what all kids should be free and able to do.

Hey teacher ( at university ), leave them kids alone.

[.RC.]

Once the novelty of being the young genious wears off, you just become yet another engineer. Ok, so you might have graduated and started work 8 years earlier than everyone else, but no one is going to care if you are 24 with 10 years of exerience vs someone who's 32 with the same 10 years of exerience. There is nothing special about you any more, welcome to the real world.
In fact it could become a disadvantage, as they are hiring a very experienced engineer who probably has a young family and wants stability, and you rock up all baby faced, good luck.

I wonder, these young smart people, do they just peak in their abilities earlier in life, or if nurtured and given the opportunity do they manage to rise above most other people in the same career.

I know it is probably a difficult question as just plain luck comes into it.   Perhaps we need a long term study.  Get some really smart kids and some not so smart and control their lives to adulthood, so each one can learn at their maximum rate.  Make sure other things in life that could derail the study do not get in the way like interest in the opposite/same sex, social life etc. And see if even if some get a head start on the others education wise because of their natural ability, do they just peak earlier, or end up with a greater skill set when they reach their level of incompetence.

And then become famous on the youtube channel "Plainly difficult"  The dark side of science.

[Miyuki]

Once the novelty of being the young genious wears off, you just become yet another engineer. Ok, so you might have graduated and started work 8 years earlier than everyone else, but no one is going to care if you are 24 with 10 years of exerience vs someone who's 32 with the same 10 years of exerience. There is nothing special about you any more, welcome to the real world.
In fact it could become a disadvantage, as they are hiring a very experienced engineer who probably has a young family and wants stability, and you rock up all baby faced, good luck.

I wonder, these young smart people, do they just peak in their abilities earlier in life, or if nurtured and given the opportunity do they manage to rise above most other people in the same career.

I know it is probably a difficult question as just plain luck comes into it.   Perhaps we need a long term study.  Get some really smart kids and some not so smart and control their lives to adulthood, so each one can learn at their maximum rate.  Make sure other things in life that could derail the study do not get in the way like interest in the opposite/same sex, social life etc. And see if even if some get a head start on the others education wise because of their natural ability, do they just peak earlier, or end up with a greater skill set when they reach their level of incompetence.

And then become famous on the youtube channel "Plainly difficult"  The dark side of science.

Most of the programmers' prodigies I know burned out pretty soon (even in their 20s), some even ended with brain damage, and some just changed to completely unrelated fields, like philosophy or theology.

[VK3DRB]

He'll do well until he discovers girls. But if he is a typical engineer, that won't be until he is around 50. And that will be an AI robot ordered off Internet.