Why I quit my job as an engineer after 40 years (RANT)

[IanB]

Worst example I heard was from a friend who designs smps.
He designed a (figures might be a bit incorrect but its just an example)
30W 95%eff smps  and an 90W 94% eff smps.
In comes the marketing guy: "Listen up I did marketing research with our customers and I now know what they really want: a smps that can be last minute configured between 30 and 90W with the same efficiency. Go build it so I can sell it!"

He could 't make the marketing guy understand :
1) that you can not get that high efficiency when the power output has such a high range
2) that this smps even with lower eff would cost more than a fixed output

The marketing guy went to his boss called him incompetent and the manager gave him a bad score that year on his annual assessment.

That's just poor people management on the part of the engineer. He should have designed an SMPS that can switch between 30 and 90 W with a claimed efficiency of 95% ¹ and given it to the marketing guy to sell. A majority of customers won't care to measure the actual efficiency, and if any do measure it and complain that it is not as specified, simply explain that the 95% is just a nominal figure for marketing purposes and of course the actual efficiency will vary...

¹ of course with a footnote that the manufacture reserves the right to vary the design and specifications at any time at their discretion

[basinstreetdesign]

I just need to vent this, but I pulled the plug after 40 years (close of being retired).
I decided to quit my career as an engineer.

...

Don't know yet what I am going to do next, I have enough savings for a while, so we will just see.

I just had to vent this. Feel free to share your own similar experiences.

Yeah, been there, done that...
I quit cold turkey after 30 years due to an increasingly acute awareness  that the skills I needed to learn were becoming less and less enjoyable or relevant.  Analog hardware was becoming less common, FW more so.  But I'd done lots of both.  Even so, my favourite  industry, broadcast video, was increasingly just data streams not analog hardware, or even just specialized digital streams.

But the worst was putting up with a person who was supposed to be my partner in our small consulting company and later on as my boss in a larger organization, schmoozing me with half-truths, BS, or outright lies to get me to stay on ("we need analog designers, we really do...").  So, enough was enough.

And for the next loooong while you wake up every day feeling pissed, that is, if you got a good nights sleep at all.

My best advice to you, OP is if you have  work space at home, a home lab, the most important thing is not to throw it all out in a moment of pique and disgust.

The anger you have on quitting work will radiate from you like Hawking radiation from a black hole that is slowly evaporating.   But evaporate it will until it finally disappears.  It may take a few years for it to completely dissipate, but it will.

Now, I can do what I love, build little gizmos for me or for others, or not as I choose, try to lend my thews to others on the social forums, or do whatever I choose.  And I continue to learn about this crazy stuff, which is the best part.

Moneywise, I can maintain this lifestyle for ever on the standard government pensions alone and leave our (modest) savings invested.
Best of luck.

Gotta go, I have some perogies to cook.

[P.Mouse]

It's not anger from my side, just frustration.
Just don't wanna live a life of "disproving" people constantly.
So I just rather do something fun.

Maybe my last "resort" is to actually write a decent engineering book about it.
In my opinion that is part of the issue. Good books are rare and/or very expensive.
In my professional career I can only name 4 (!!!!!!!) people who in fact read the most import things you need to know.
The rest of the bunch haven't even heard of these things at all.

Some may call it a ridiculous type of matter, but Merlin Blencowe wrote a few EXCELLENT books about tubes.
Even if you're not into tubes/valves, it is just so easily written and to the point.
Since his books you definitely see a change in attitude around engineers who like to fiddle around with good old tubies.
(which is sometimes also for kicks and fun)

[EEVblog]

I just need to vent this, but I pulled the plug after 40 years (close of being retired).
I decided to quit my career as an engineer.

I was mainly active in analog electronics, amplifiers, (SMPS) power supplier and other audio related stuff.
Unfortunately there seems to be a trend with people who have a serious lack of (basic) knowledge and skills.
In some fields it's even so bad that you're basically talking to a wall of myths.
Myths that are being spread like a terrible incurable disease.

*snip*

Lately I had another of these typically non-discussions about basic knowledge and that was the last straw.

Why should that make you quit your paying career?
If you don't enjoy your work any more then move into a new or related field perhaps?
New people and a new change of scenery can often work wonders.

[Bassman59]

Folks applying frequency domain fixes to time domain problems (Loudspeaker and 'Room' equalisation vendors, looking at YOU)

I don't pay any attention to the hi-fi/audiophile world, but I've been a live sound mixer for a long time, and I've gotta say that the newest stuff is amazing. What Dave Gunness is doing, and what the d&b people are doing, and the l'Acoustics people are doing, is quite stunning. Remember, with live sound reinforcement, the problem is significantly more difficult that two speakers in your TV room.

To wit: my first time at the Sinclair in Cambridge, MA, I was doing my soundcheck with the drums. I put spot mics on the crash cymbal to the drummer's right, and another on the ride cymbal, down over his kick drum in front of him. And I could hear the phasing between those two mics, as they both picked up the ride cymbal. (The mic over the crash cymbal was maybe 3' away.)  Back in the day, the honk of the KF850 or a JBL whateverfuck system would totally mask that. (And the 850 was a revelation over previous rigs.) Yeah: d&b Q system. That shit is amazing.

 Oh, and at 9:30 in DC is its bigger brother, 12 boxes of d&b J-series a side in a 1250-cap venue. And it sounds like studio monitors.

Anyway. There's a lot of real processing going on, implemented by smart people who really understand the problems of sound reinforcement.

Of course a lot of the educational material out there does not exactly help, digital audio books with silly stairstep pictures of quantised (but undithered, which is to say broken) waveforms, are just annoying and give completely the wrong idea about how things work/

Those books oughta be burned, and the authors hung out over a ledge until they admit that they don't know what they are talking about.

Finally for giggles there are the chuckleheads who blindly 'upgrade' opamps, yup that 797 sure sound different, that will be because it is going off in the middle of the shortwave band...

"Why doesn't my console work any more? The power supply seems to be broken!" Yeah, nitwit, you replaced all of the TL072s with opamps that draw ten times the current and your supply ran out of gas. You should have worked that out before you did the swap. This is the primary reason why sockets on boards should be illegal.

[dmills]

D&B Q is very cool, but D&B rigs have always been top kit, never had a chance to play with a J rig yet. Biggest complaint I have ever heard about a D&B rig was that it did not visually appear that there was enough of it (Sound was fine however)!
And yea, live sound is a hard problem, especially in not very good rooms.

DSP in that space has made a huge difference mainly by allowing us to do things that we knew we wanted but were way too expensive, delays for time alignment being the biggie for me, but also things like Bessel arrays and Cardioid subs that actually work reliably and can be rigged without very careful work with mathcad.

Still cannot fix a poor off axis response or a nasty flutter echo from the room with DSP however.

Regards, Dan.

[digsys]

Had a very similar decision made 7 months ago. Taking a break now, and deciding the future. Sooo many a$$hats to swat, soooo little time :-)

[G0HZU]

I'd like to retire soon but I have the opposite problem...

I find the outside world (away from customers, competitors and colleagues) to be a slightly scary (and frustrating) place in terms of how inexperienced most people are when it comes to RF stuff. I've not seen anyone on a forum or a blog that I would consider to be a top notch RF engineer with loads of experience. I can chat and discuss RF stuff with plenty of people like this at work but not outside of work. Maybe they hide themselves really well but my old boss used to tell me that the way to spot a fake RF engineer (no matter how much they big themselves up) is to let them keep talking... and talking and eventually you realise they have no real experience.

So I will miss this when I retire. I won't miss the corporate side of things at work though. i.e. the ever increasing red tape and rules and restrictions that get worse every year...

[IanB]

I've not seen anyone on a forum or a blog that I would consider to be a top notch RF engineer with loads of experience.

But surely Shahriar (The Signal Path) at least knows the basics? 

[IanMacdonald]

https://www.illustrationhistory.org/images/uploads/Dinosaur_Parade.jpg

I guess those would be Tademasauruses, then. 

Just remember that these paintings were a Victorian-era guess at what Roman life was like, and are not strictly accurate.

In reality, they painted the dinosaurs in bright colours.

[P.Mouse]

I just need to vent this, but I pulled the plug after 40 years (close of being retired).
I decided to quit my career as an engineer.

I was mainly active in analog electronics, amplifiers, (SMPS) power supplier and other audio related stuff.
Unfortunately there seems to be a trend with people who have a serious lack of (basic) knowledge and skills.
In some fields it's even so bad that you're basically talking to a wall of myths.
Myths that are being spread like a terrible incurable disease.

*snip*

Lately I had another of these typically non-discussions about basic knowledge and that was the last straw.

Why should that make you quit your paying career?
If you don't enjoy your work any more then move into a new or related field perhaps?
New people and a new change of scenery can often work wonders.

And you think I haven't done that? (many times).

Folks applying frequency domain fixes to time domain problems (Loudspeaker and 'Room' equalisation vendors, looking at YOU)

I don't pay any attention to the hi-fi/audiophile world, but I've been a live sound mixer for a long time, and I've gotta say that the newest stuff is amazing. What Dave Gunness is doing, and what the d&b people are doing, and the l'Acoustics people are doing, is quite stunning. Remember, with live sound reinforcement, the problem is significantly more difficult that two speakers in your TV room.

To wit: my first time at the Sinclair in Cambridge, MA, I was doing my soundcheck with the drums. I put spot mics on the crash cymbal to the drummer's right, and another on the ride cymbal, down over his kick drum in front of him. And I could hear the phasing between those two mics, as they both picked up the ride cymbal. (The mic over the crash cymbal was maybe 3' away.)  Back in the day, the honk of the KF850 or a JBL whateverfuck system would totally mask that. (And the 850 was a revelation over previous rigs.) Yeah: d&b Q system. That shit is amazing.

 Oh, and at 9:30 in DC is its bigger brother, 12 boxes of d&b J-series a side in a 1250-cap venue. And it sounds like studio monitors.

Anyway. There's a lot of real processing going on, implemented by smart people who really understand the problems of sound reinforcement.

Of course a lot of the educational material out there does not exactly help, digital audio books with silly stairstep pictures of quantised (but undithered, which is to say broken) waveforms, are just annoying and give completely the wrong idea about how things work/

Those books oughta be burned, and the authors hung out over a ledge until they admit that they don't know what they are talking about.

Finally for giggles there are the chuckleheads who blindly 'upgrade' opamps, yup that 797 sure sound different, that will be because it is going off in the middle of the shortwave band...

"Why doesn't my console work any more? The power supply seems to be broken!" Yeah, nitwit, you replaced all of the TL072s with opamps that draw ten times the current and your supply ran out of gas. You should have worked that out before you did the swap. This is the primary reason why sockets on boards should be illegal.

Yes, I have been active in the pro-audio/sound reinforcement world mostly.
Very well underestimated field, especially if the top three requirements are; it must keep working, it MUST keep working, it MUST KEEP WORKING!

I have seen gear failing during big concerts on live television.
Needles to say that the customer was not so amused.
The problem is that most customers in the pro-audio world are pretty conservative.
Which is pretty annoying when you try to solve real issues like weight and size, but people don't really seem to care/understand.

But to be very honest, nowadays bluetooth speakers are the other opposite.
Making a tiny box sound pretty decent, in fact sound more than fine for most of the consumers.
10 years back not one single person what have thought that these little bastards would become mainstream.
And to be very honest, some of them actually do sound very good indeed.

You can say what you want, but from an engineering point of view it's pretty remarkable.
When transducers are that small, the mass of air is all of a sudden a significant factor for example.

I'd like to retire soon but I have the opposite problem...

I find the outside world (away from customers, competitors and colleagues) to be a slightly scary (and frustrating) place in terms of how inexperienced most people are when it comes to RF stuff. I've not seen anyone on a forum or a blog that I would consider to be a top notch RF engineer with loads of experience. I can chat and discuss RF stuff with plenty of people like this at work but not outside of work. Maybe they hide themselves really well but my old boss used to tell me that the way to spot a fake RF engineer (no matter how much they big themselves up) is to let them keep talking... and talking and eventually you realise they have no real experience.

So I will miss this when I retire. I won't miss the corporate side of things at work though. i.e. the ever increasing red tape and rules and restrictions that get worse every year...

I can spot a "wanna be engineering" withing two sentences about certain subjects.   

I would join a forum or some kind of group.
So many nowadays with retired way to smart people.
It's sometimes a shame they are actually retired.
(maybe I actually never really will, just do stuff on the side)

[Mr. Scram]

I guess it's also because of the requirement to know everything today. Every employer wants his staff to know everything about everything. In software suddenly everyone is asked to be a full stack developer. Generally, they don't need a full stack developer. They just want the most bang for the buck. So of course people are spreading their training ever thinner and of course people who aren't actually complete full stack developers sell themselves as such. There aren't enough to go around to begin with. If you're terrible at describing your actual requirements, of course you'll get staff that doesn't actually fit the bill that well.

Ask shit, get turds.

[schmitt trigger]

I guess it's also because of the requirement to know everything today. Every employer wants his staff to know everything about everything.

That is correct, Even quote-unquote analog engineers require some knowledge of C+.

I just passed what appeared to be a very exciting opportunity, related to deep failure analysis (which I have been doing for over 20 years) because the employer was adamant that the engineer should be capable of writing windows applications.

For deep failures, physics and chemistry knowledge, in addition to significant electronic component and board assembly techniques is required. Those are a must. But developing Windows apps? WTF?

[P.Mouse]

I think the problem is not that companies expect someone who know it all, but more that certain people think they know it all.
Discussing with these type of people is a lost battle, because they are unaware of their own ignorance.

[dmills]

For an allegedly "Senior Hardware Engineer" (It says so on my appraisal, so it must be true), I seem to wind up writing a remarkable amount of C on various microprocessors, as well as fixing a remarkable amount of rather screwed up assembler written by others also on small cores. 

The problem is that the software team seem to think that 1GHz is slow, and that 1Mb of RAM is small, sigh.

And yes, employers not being too clear on what they want is a problem, being good at a sufficiently wide range of stuff while being an expert in **one** thing is getting ever harder. "Jack of all trades and expert in ONE" is not an easy thing but seems to be expected, to the point that I probably spend well north of £1,500 a year on journal subs, and probably at least the same on books and still cannot really keep up.

"Dunning Kruger" is definitely a thing, usually more obvious with the newly minted, but you find it almost everywhere if you look, it is usually disguised as simple certainties about complex things.

Regards, Dan.

[Mr. Scram]

I think the problem is not that companies expect someone who know it all, but more that certain people think they know it all.
Discussing with these type of people is a lost battle, because they are unaware of their own ignorance.

I'm not saying those people don't exist and Dunning Kruger can be a real hassle, but I see the workforce responding to the latest fad the HR drones are pursuing. You can't realistically expect the workforce to retrain within 5 years because everyone is asking for X instead of Y now and asking for something else again in 5 more years. It's something new every few years and the supply simply doesn't adapt as fast as that and probably isn't even prepared to actually make those changes, so people respond to bullshit with their own bullshit.

Another issue is that people that do play the fad game get chosen over people with relevant skills.

[Nominal Animal]

The lack of rigor and sanity in software engineering (especially wrt. web services) was enough to burn me out for the first time before I was thirty.  The lack of sanity and engineering in scientific computation did it again five years later, and I've never recovered. It's been eight years, and I still don't function properly.

I've found that answering questions on forums is a good way to keep up with the tech, and rarely make some interesting contacts, if you keep looking for the new and interesting stuff (to you, that is; I do not mean trendy), and completely ignore the popularity contest crap.  (We definitely do not live in the information age anymore; that came and went. We live in the reputation or popularity age, now.)

This.. I guess rejection of good practice, tested science, and robust engineering? .. is widespread, if you care to look.  One of the best examples I can think of, is the evolution of the C standard.  C99 was a great step in the correct direction, but most of C11 is utter crap.  None of the known good interfaces from POSIX (like getline()) got included in the standard, but a lot of frankly useless "safe versions" of I/O functions, invented by Microsoft, were.  It makes zero sense, unless you consider it from MS's business standpoint, ignore all long-term effects, and consider only the short term.  I just wonder how the committee members went along with it, some of them actually know what they are doing, programming/software engineering-wise.

I can see similar stuff in the embedded area.  Sure, Arduino is an excellent environment for playing with microcontrollers and electronics; it makes them Legos, essentially.  However, if you look at the implementation, it's not that impressive; many libraries conflict, or need changes to work with certain hardware or other libraries, fracturing the code base. Not good engineering.  Embedded Linux SBC's are even worse.  Too many of them use a hacked-up kernel and userspace, with zero regards to maintenance, and zero effort to push it upstream (so that the hardware would stay maintained for longer than until the manufacturer pushes out the next revision).  And, of course, people blame Linux, and not the manufacturers, for putting out a crappy software implementation.

How do you do work you can be proud of, and still get paid, in this world?

[Yansi]

I find the outside world (away from customers, competitors and colleagues) to be a slightly scary (and frustrating) place in terms of how inexperienced most people are when it comes to RF stuff. I've not seen anyone on a forum or a blog that I would consider to be a top notch RF engineer with loads of experience. I can chat and discuss RF stuff with plenty of people like this at work but not outside of work. Maybe they hide themselves really well but my old boss used to tell me that the way to spot a fake RF engineer (no matter how much they big themselves up) is to let them keep talking... and talking and eventually you realise they have no real experience.

Well how the outside world should get experienced, if they don't teach the stuff in schools anymore and there is lack of experts to ask in the first place? Posting a specialized RF questions on forums mostly does not yield much answers either and there is complete absence of decent useful RF software for hobby and learning use, so when one wants to do something different or new (instead of just copying someone else's work), is completely stuck on its own. Or maybe just I am asking too stupid questions to be answered on wrong forums.
I do not know any RF engineer in person, I could ask any kind of question from such topic. This profession seems to be almost extinct or shrunk to gluing together ready made WiFi chips.
 

[Mr. Scram]

I'd love for someone knowledgeable to share his experiences with us. The most interesting episodes Dave did were interviews with industry veteran aces.

[hermit]

(We live in the reputation or popularity age, now.)

I installed forum software once and went through and ripped out all of the references to numbers of posts and 'status'.  A while back some posting guru with thousands of posts on the Arduino forum asked for input on their first circuit board design and it became painfully obvious they were about 12 years old, if that.

[nctnico]

How do you do work you can be proud of, and still get paid, in this world?

I have no problem at all doing that. However I accept that ways of doing things change and thus old ways die because they are obsolete.

[Mr. Scram]

I installed forum software once and went through and ripped out all of the references to numbers of posts and 'status'.  A while back some posting guru with thousands of posts on the Arduino forum asked for input on their first circuit board design and it became painfully obvious they were about 12 years old, if that.

You'd have to be an idiot to think post count reflects the quality of the post.

[CatalinaWOW]

As someone who retired with some of your feelings, I would counsel some step back from the brink. 

My definition of the difference between an engineer and a scientist is that the engineer makes a decision where all of the facts aren't known.  In some cases they aren't knowable, but more frequently they are merely unobtainable within the economic and schedule constraints of the problem.  Experience, judgement - whatever - stands in for the unknown elements.  Many engineers don't acknowledge this action in place of complete knowledge and get agitated when confronted with evidence that they are not fully cognizant.

[Nominal Animal]

I'd love for someone knowledgeable to share his experiences with us.

Me too! Even better, if they occasionally take the time to help us newbies when we post questions, and give constructive feedback.

The main issue I have with sites like stackoverflow.com is that it is extremely hard for askers to evaluate whether an answerer knows what they are talking about. Funnily enough, the most reliable indicator I've seen is that if a member admits to making an error and fixes it, instead of ignoring the error or deleting their answer without comment, their advice is more likely to be useful and applicable. (This seems to apply in both programming and mathematics, too.)

And aside from decades of experience condensed into good books, there is not much as useful as an experienced mentor helping a newbie make better informed choices. (To that end, I'd like to politely ask that when criticizing harshly, include some background as to why that choice/design is poor, to help newbies.  Word of God is not useful in engineering, but experience is.)

However I accept that ways of doing things change and thus old ways die because they are obsolete.

I have no issues with things becoming obsolete. What I have issues with is people: general lack of sanity and robustness, and prevalence of short-sighted design and decisions.

For example, there are very, very few companies that create products that work anymore. Due to commercial pressures, they all create products that sell. Fitness for purpose is a tertiary consideration. (The secondary consideration is whether the management of the company will be on the hook for selling the products or not.)

Scientific computation is not any better.  I know of "bugs" that have been designated as "features", because fixing them would change published and peer-reviewed results.  Of course, most of the code is written by non-engineers -- honestly, more like hobbyists, when it comes to software engineering.

[Kjelt]

Worst example I heard was from a friend who designs smps.
He designed a (figures might be a bit incorrect but its just an example)
30W 95%eff smps  and an 90W 94% eff smps.
In comes the marketing guy: "Listen up I did marketing research with our customers and I now know what they really want: a smps that can be last minute configured between 30 and 90W with the same efficiency. Go build it so I can sell it!"

He could 't make the marketing guy understand :
1) that you can not get that high efficiency when the power output has such a high range
2) that this smps even with lower eff would cost more than a fixed output

The marketing guy went to his boss called him incompetent and the manager gave him a bad score that year on his annual assessment.

That's just poor people management on the part of the engineer. He should have designed an SMPS that can switch between 30 and 90 W with a claimed efficiency of 95% ¹ and given it to the marketing guy to sell. A majority of customers won't care to measure the actual efficiency, and if any do measure it and complain that it is not as specified, simply explain that the 95% is just a nominal figure for marketing purposes and of course the actual efficiency will vary...

¹ of course with a footnote that the manufacture reserves the right to vary the design and specifications at any time at their discretion

There comes a time that there will be no quality difference between chinese stuff and european made stuff if everyone would think and act like that.
Actually one of the only reasons companies still buy the products because they know the specs are no BS and they don't have to verify them.