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Education level required for employment as EE
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tggzzz:
Setq wrote about his experiences.

Regardless of the student, bad teaching and uninteresting (to the student) subjects will put anybody off. There are analogies with apprenticeships, where there was a tradition of shatting on the apprentice to "toughen them up" and "make them pay their dues".

I have long thought that apprenticeships are underrated and underused, and for some people are much more appropriate and better that a degree. It narked me when Polytechnics rebranded themselves as Unis, because Polys offered a different type of course to a trad Uni course. Horses/students for courses.

Having said that, in electronics the theory (inc maths) cannot be ignored, since it underpins every reliable reproducable design. It is pretty difficult (although not impossible) to get a good grounding in the theory without formal course.

In software there is far more latitude for, well, hacking in the pejorative sense. Many would argue that's a main contributor to the dismal state of most of today's software systems.

As for the quality of graduate software writer... there are many that shouldn't be let anywhere near a keyboard. But the same is true of non-graduate software writers.
setq:
Which incidentally suggests that the deciding factor is aptitude, not education and the latter does not necessarily correlate to the former.
dmills:

--- Quote from: setq on September 14, 2016, 03:49:53 pm ---Which incidentally suggests that the deciding factor is aptitude, not education and the latter does not necessarily correlate to the former.

--- End quote ---
More so for software I think, because the elephant in the room there is not learning a language and typing code into a computer, it is acquiring the sense of taste to know how to structure reasonably large real world systems so that they are maintainable, and you can sort of do things on a small but somewhat useful scale without that.

Something similar happens with hardware design, but the barriers to entry are rather higher so it is a little less obvious, and somewhat easier to test in an interview.

The closer you get to the physics the more the math matters.

Agree that the loss of the polytechnics was a disaster.

Regards, Dan.
setq:
That's a fair point. I ascended to architect status eventually and there's a lot of rigorous engineering going on these days but there is a mire at the entry point and in older products that is quite scary. I've walked into a couple of companies in the last decade or so and quit immediately. If they were hardware we'd all be dead or on fire.

The mathematics is the interesting bit for me. Physics and electronics comes from being able to apply it to something that does something rather than just ponder the existence of abstract constructs.
rstofer:

--- Quote from: EmmanuelFaure on September 14, 2016, 05:15:54 am ---I second that, Huff's book is a masterpiece that everybody should have read long before graduating.

--- End quote ---

One more masterpiece:  "The Ropes To Skip And The Ropes To Know" The book is/was used at Santa Clara University (Silicon Gulch) and was given to me back in the late '70s.  I can't find a free version but if you want to know how the game is played, this is the book to read.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0470169672/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all

Literally everything you need to know in order to understand and thrive in a corporate culture.
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