Experience is worth very little

[SL4P]

I often look at reply posts in EEVblog, and get the feeling that any suggestion using ideas over 20 years old - is no longer relevant.

Of course, there are specific questions for prior experience or skills, but as we all know - everything worth being involved in was invented within the last 20 years, and there was no precedent before that... so older experience or ideas are largely unnecessary and inconsequential.

We can all make the same mistakes over again - no problem.
Edit: typo

[Seekonk]

Not at all. The things engineers overlook haven't changed.

The people that will use your product are not any smarter than they used to be.
Dissipating heat hasn't changed or the fact that a couple years of dust turn your calculations to crap.
Data sheets are still rather creative with the facts.
Molex connectors still turn brown with the rated current.
They still try to get a precision output from crap input.
The specs will change just before you ship.
Your boss will get all the credit and you will get all the blame.
The next guy to copy your project will do a better job.  You could too with a second chance.

The packages have changed but the issues haven't.

[suicidaleggroll]

In my experience, there are simply better options available now than there used to be.  While the "old" approaches still work, the "new" approaches are better, and will be shown preferential treatment.  Not better because they're newer, better because they're any or all of the following: cheaper, lower power, more intuitive, more configurable, more consistent, etc.

This isn't always true, but from what I've seen, it often is.

[German_EE]

I know how you feel because I have been in the industry for forty years or so. When I did my degree a computer was either something filling a room or a machine like a PDP/11 sitting in a 19 inch rack, now I have a PICAXE CPU in a single chip. TVs? they were black and white affairs containing vacuum tube based assemblies which had questionable reliability. So, anybody who was trained in computer engineering or TV repair at the time would be useless now.

UNLESS THEY KEPT UP TO DATE

There are probably some guys out there who still repair the black and white sets but most of them retrained for color then kept on learning as ICs came along then flat screens. My own industry was elevator servicing and when I started it was purely electro-mechanical with rotating control drums and racks of relays and contactors, by the time I retired an entire elevator was controlled by a 30cm x 30cm PCB and a box full of power semiconductors. Time moves on, accept it.

[tggzzz]

In some respects, I'm horrified and pleased about how little has changed in the past 35 years.

In 1980 I was programming 8 bit processors in C. The only difference is that now the equipment  doesn't cost a years salary and  fits on the corner of the table. And there are decent IDEs.

Besides, and much more importantly, the fundamentals haven't changed. Sure, which buttons you have to press and in which order have changed, but who cares about that!

[VK3DRB]

Definitely not. It's just that most engineers (esp. EE's, IME) are arrogant as all hell.

ABSOLUTE RUBBISH! Which part of "most engineers are NOT arrogant as hell don't you, yes YOU, understand?" 

OK, we EE's do have a sense of humour though, quite often twisted. Actually, I agree with you to some extent. I have come across the occasional arrogant prick of an engineer and technician. One technician was ex-military, and he was always right even if he was wrong. If he said a car was white, when in fact it was green, you had to agree with him or he would chuck a tantrum. A pain in the arse to work with. An engineer who was a know-it-all got very, very arrogant if you did not know something that he did, technically. Being a hardware and embedded engineer, I copped a public tongue lashing when I did not know what a .NET assembly was. No surprise his marriage had busted up.

But these two were a small minority out of a cast of probably a thousand engineers I have worked with over the years. Most engineers and technicians are not arrogant. A few do have problems with social skills in other areas though. One colleague, who was quite brilliant with electronics and firmware once asked me when he was 48 years old, "How do you get a girlfriend?" His social skills were very low, and he had no idea how to meet one. I sort of felt sorry for him. His personality was a detractor to a lot of people around him, but I got on well with him.

[T3sl4co1l]

I love vacuum tube circuits; by nature and by necessity, they teach the fundamentals of circuit design, at least among the types of circuits that can reasonably be designed with them (most readily: AF and RF amplifiers, detectors, mixers, oscillators..).  This ranges from the simple (triode as a Thevenin dependent source) to the more nuanced (an RF amplifier must account for terminal capacitances and conductances, with consequences for gain, bandwidth, noise and so on), and on into the nonlinear (dependent gain, reactance) and unspecified (bad datasheets, or lack of critical information such as capacitance when actually in use -- yes, it's different!).

Doing it all over again with transistors only reveals more of one's ignorance, perhaps to the extent that it's difficult to even tell which part is the most wrong!  RF transistors easily oscillate at invisible frequencies; what seems like a reasonable layout (and an apparently reasonable amplifier design, perhaps even having used s parameters, or a SPICE simulation model, in the design process) can be proven quite horrible very easily.

One might be inclined to ignore these earlier lessons, even aggressively pursue "modern" methods (like SDR), with much greater power as a result (both in terms of signal processing capability... and electrical consumption!).  But sooner or later, those same lessons cannot be avoided: in search of greater SNR, one must eventually use an LNA, or a downconverter, or something like that; harmonics and mixing products and aliasing cannot be "fixed in software"; anything that meets the real world must sooner or later deal with EMC (interference, ESD..); the list goes on.

But alas, you already guessed as much; history repeats itself in all fields, and in all eras.

Tim

[SL4P]

As the OP, I'd like to suggest that the goals in the industry haven't changed that much... certainly the technology and tools have, and a good designer/engineer will always want to grow and adapt with the times to use and apply the latest techniques untilo they retire or withdraw.

Where this goes off the track, is 'more recent' entrants to the industry often appear to believe that technology and its derivatives were invented just before the iPhone - so any thinking and evolution done prior is irrelevant, despite being based on first principles - and (plenty of) mistakes made by those prior generations!

History is doomed to repeat itself? (Damn - you beat me by a moment!)

[free_electron]

While the "old" approaches still work, the "new" approaches are better, and will be shown preferential treatment.  Not better because they're newer, better because they're any or all of the following: cheaper, lower power, more intuitive, more configurable, more consistent, etc.

This isn't always true, but from what I've seen, it often is.

15 million transistors, an operating system and 200 kilobytes of code... to blink an led..

[tggzzz]

While the "old" approaches still work, the "new" approaches are better, and will be shown preferential treatment.  Not better because they're newer, better because they're any or all of the following: cheaper, lower power, more intuitive, more configurable, more consistent, etc.

This isn't always true, but from what I've seen, it often is.

15 million transistors, an operating system and 200 kilobytes of code... to blink an led..

Yes

And those still in nappies don't have a clue what all that lot is doing, nor why it is (or isn't!) necessary, nor how it might fail. When something goes wrong, they regard it as sufficient if the problem doesn't (immediately) appear again after rebooting.

I've seen far far too much of that w.r.t. distributed systems and parallel programming, from code written to run on bare-silicon, through to enterprise code written with whatever "framework-du-jour" the salesman peddled.

[SL4P]

Reminds me of a related gripe...

Open-Loop designs.
   vs
Closed-Loop implementations.

One fails and you have to figure it out while the s#!t hits the fan... the other fails and helps you locate the problem, while increasing predictability...!  Choose one.

Very few designs that I've seen in the last decade use a closed-loop philosophy.
Make it work now, don't worry, it won't fail.

[suicidaleggroll]

Very few designs that I've seen in the last decade use a closed-loop philosophy.
Make it work now, don't worry, it won't fail.

That has nothing to do with "old" vs "new" design methodologies.  Blame penny-pinching consumers for that.  Nobody wants to buy the better designed, more expensive product anymore.  Throw it up against something half the price from China that still works most of the time, and they'll grab the Chinese product over and over again.  There's little money in good engineering anymore, those places are being run out of business.

Want to fix the problem?  Stop buying cheap Chinese garbage on sites like eBay and Alibaba and spend an extra few bucks on a product that's actually had some design work put into it, then convince your friends, colleagues, and relatives to do the same.  Until people stop rewarding manufacturers for scraping by with barely-working designs to save a buck, it won't stop, it'll just get worse.

[SL4P]

*A related gripe...*
Closed loop software design doesn't add much to the cost - just awareness and effort, which I agree is invisible to the naive customer.

I guess my point was the underlying philosophy behind technology delivery has changed while the learned principles have been abandoned ?

[G0HZU]

One might be inclined to ignore these earlier lessons, even aggressively pursue "modern" methods (like SDR), with much greater power as a result (both in terms of signal processing capability... and electrical consumption!).  But sooner or later, those same lessons cannot be avoided: in search of greater SNR, one must eventually use an LNA, or a downconverter, or something like that; harmonics and mixing products and aliasing cannot be "fixed in software"; anything that meets the real world must sooner or later deal with EMC (interference, ESD..); the list goes on.

In the timeframes mentioned so far in this thread, SDR isn't really that modern. I was designing the RF converter sections for SDR type receivers >25 years ago   Some of my colleagues were doing it back in the 1980s. This was for gov/mil use back then. The digital IF/DSP was housed in a huge 19" rack back in those days and it cost an absolute fortune. The aim was to step through and digitise and process as much of the RF spectrum (well into the GHz region) as quickly as possible but with very high performance. Every year the ADCs and the DSP got better and it was a mad race to make the receivers better and better with wider and wider digital IF bandwidths and quicker and quicker spectrum coverage up to many GHz.

Back in those days we all joked that RF engineers were slowly being replaced by DSP chips as the ADC got closer and closer to the antenna with fewer conversion stages required. Perhaps the biggest joke was on all of us as none of us could have predicted just how popular SDR receivers would be in the commercial/consumer markets today. Even within the company we were seen as eccentric nerds designing something very obscure/expensive with little market potential. How wrong we all were...

[Howardlong]

And those still in nappies don't have a clue what all that lot is doing, nor why it is (or isn't!) necessary, nor how it might fail. When something goes wrong, they regard it as sufficient if the problem doesn't (immediately) appear again after rebooting.

I've seen far far too much of that w.r.t. distributed systems and parallel programming, from code written to run on bare-silicon, through to enterprise code written with whatever "framework-du-jour" the salesman peddled.

Blimey, were we separated at birth or otherwise related?!

[tggzzz]

Make it work now, don't worry, it won't fail.

Want to fix the problem?  Stop buying cheap Chinese garbage on sites like eBay and Alibaba and spend an extra few bucks on a product that's actually had some design work put into it, then convince your friends, colleagues, and relatives to do the same.  Until people stop rewarding manufacturers for scraping by with barely-working designs to save a buck, it won't stop, it'll just get worse.

Very slowly, very reluctantly I've come to the conclusion that the only "solution" (and I use that word loosely)  will come as a result of law suits and increased insurance premiums. A few long jail sentences wouldn't go amiss, either.

[tggzzz]

And those still in nappies don't have a clue what all that lot is doing, nor why it is (or isn't!) necessary, nor how it might fail. When something goes wrong, they regard it as sufficient if the problem doesn't (immediately) appear again after rebooting.

I've seen far far too much of that w.r.t. distributed systems and parallel programming, from code written to run on bare-silicon, through to enterprise code written with whatever "framework-du-jour" the salesman peddled.

Blimey, were we separated at birth or otherwise related?!

So its you I always wondered  who it was

[DimitriP]

everything worth being involved in was invented within the last 20 years,

Is TCP/IP and fishing included in your statement ?

[MT]

While the "old" approaches still work, the "new" approaches are better, and will be shown preferential treatment.  Not better because they're newer, better because they're any or all of the following: cheaper, lower power, more intuitive, more configurable, more consistent, etc.

This isn't always true, but from what I've seen, it often is.

15 million transistors, an operating system and 200 kilobytes of code... to blink an led..

And 900Mhz!

[free_electron]

and this attitude of slap it together ship it ,

dvd and blu ray players are a prime example.
wanna enjoy the new movie you just bought , sorry , gotta download 3 updates into the player and then wait 3 minutes for the 'operating system' to reboot and read the damn disk. my daewoo player i bought in 2001 plays a disc within 15 seconds after power-on ( not standby , it has a mechanical on off switch. ) the flash rom is a 27c020 ..

[all_repair]

5y can be 5 x 1y, or 5y can be 1y + 1y + 1y + 1y + 1y.  Outside is the same 5y but it can be a miserable more of the same non-experience, or an accumulation of complex and diverse experiences.  From my limited observations, those with the accumulated real experiences can regularly impress with penetrating insight into new difficult problems by offering a simple but effective solution or suggestion.

Of course, most here are the accumulated type 

[suicidaleggroll]

and this attitude of slap it together ship it ,

dvd and blu ray players are a prime example.
wanna enjoy the new movie you just bought , sorry , gotta download 3 updates into the player and then wait 3 minutes for the 'operating system' to reboot and read the damn disk. my daewoo player i bought in 2001 plays a disc within 15 seconds after power-on ( not standby , it has a mechanical on off switch. ) the flash rom is a 27c020 ..

That's not the manufacturers' fault, you can blame DRM for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Digital_rights_management

Most of those firmware updates simply update the DRM crap so they can play new releases.

That's one of the main reasons I was a big supporter of HD DVD during the HD wars...unfortunately we lost.

[suicidaleggroll]

Very slowly, very reluctantly I've come to the conclusion that the only "solution" (and I use that word loosely)  will come as a result of law suits and increased insurance premiums. A few long jail sentences wouldn't go amiss, either.

When it comes to legitimate manufacturers making shitty products, I think you're right, but who's to stop the knockoffs, and what about products that are shit but don't kill/maim somebody?  There are plenty of people who have been electrocuted (yes, died) from using knockoff phone chargers, but all of the labels and numbers on the product are fake, so there's no way to contact or sue the manufacturer, and yet people still buy them in bulk because the "real" ones are "too expensive".  Every time somebody purchases a knockoff (and risks electrocuting themselves) it takes money away from manufacturers making legitimate products.  Too much of it, and those manufacturers are forced to either make the same shit as everybody else (and risk being sued) or go out of business.

I am simply amazed at the number of people on this forum who buy everything from eBay and Aliexpress and are seemingly oblivious to the repercussions.  Saleae is too expensive, just buy a knockoff and use the Saleae software...it makes me sick.

[suicidaleggroll]

Does that rant include Volkswagens? And why shouldn't consumers watch the pennies carefully when so many are seeking to exploit them? Buying expensive designer goods is a luxury not available to everyone.

I don't know what VW has to do with anything I or anybody else here has said, so I'll just ignore it...

Sure, watch your money and watch what you spend it on, that has nothing to do with what I'm saying.  When you make a purchase, don't just think about the money coming out of your wallet, think about that money going into the wallet of whoever you're buying it from.

This has nothing to do with "expensive designer goods", this is simply a matter of giving your money to people who care about the quality of what they're selling (or at the very minimum, caring whether or not the product they're selling is going to kill somebody) versus those that simply shove shit out the door hoping for a paycheck.

[suicidaleggroll]

Consumers relying on your advice would not have been protected.

What advice?

Price is NOT a guarantee of quality, neither is place of manufacture or purchase.

I never said it was.  Apparently you're trying to put words in my mouth.  I said that consumers buying the lowest of the low cheap knockoff crap is pushing the entire industry to cut corners to meet these artificially low price points at any cost.  I never said that spending more is any guarantee it will be of higher quality.

All I'm saying is that the masses of people buying gutter trash products are forcing quality manufacturers to stoop to that level to keep up or go out of business.  The only way out of it is to stop supporting those practices.  Spending a bit more on quality products will incentivize manufacturers to actually invest some R&D.  Show them that price is not the only thing that matters, R&D does actually pay off.  Of course this does assume that if the market is willing to support a higher price point, manufacturers will meet it with better quality products.  I don't think that's a risky proposition, but I've been wrong before.  VW is an indication that this isn't always true, but the plural of anecdote is not data.