[onesun]

I was heavily involved in solar car racing during college, so much so that my grades suffered because of it. But for the most part that didn't matter. Most recruiters I spoke to ended up being much more interested in the stories I could tell about all the challenges we had as a team and the novel solutions we invented to overcome them. I knew that if I talked to a recruiter and they only focused on my GPA, then that was a good sign I didn't want to work there. After my first job, GPA became irrelevant. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. Fifteen years later, I still count my teammates as some of my best friends.

[humanrebar]

This is partly why we should be more open to non traditional educations. I don't see why someone needs an entire four year degree to be able to contribute to these kinds of engineering problems. There are certainly "university level" subjects that need to be covered, but that could easily be taken as needed. Or in a more condensed form.

[colechristensen]

I think you are quite wrong, at least in the narrow sense covered by SAE competition engineers (and areospace engineers).

Recruiters look at grades and activities. If all you have to show for yourself are perfect grades, it's entirely possible (and sometimes way too likely) that the only thing you're good at is getting good grades. Add in experience that you can prove yourself by talking about and suddenly grades matter a lot less – you still have to pass your classes and understand the material, but the experiences prove your competence in combination with the grade.

Not everyone developing a product has to be an engineer, so if you want a lot more technicians, fine. But you still need a good portion of engineers with the full depth of knowledge. People who program don't necessarily understand this, because a lot of programming work is technician work that you can teach yourself. Not that it's impossible, but very few people self-teach partial differential equations, and it's not something you can just pick up via osmosis.

[eeZah7Ux]

Perhaps software engineering needs more engineering and less "stack-overflow technicians".

Yet, the need to gain extensive knowledge does not require the traditional university-then-work model.

[colechristensen]

I could see 3-year degrees, but that's it.

Having gone through an engineering program, the first two years were prerequisites which were entirely required before anything useful was learned starting in year three.

And it wasn't just extensive knowledge gained, that was the least important part. It was learning how to think. There was quite a lot of mindset change. It just isn't feasible for many kinds of engineering to babysit high schoolers for 5 years before they become useful. (undergrad graduates aren't useful when they start either).

[gaius]

It was learning how to think. There was quite a lot of mindset change.

Indeed. I remember when a prof introduced us to linear programming - it was literally mind expanding - suddenly a whole class of problems that I couldn't even properly think about before because I lacked both the vocabulary and the mental structures, were within my grasp. Now it would theoretically have been possible to teach myself LP... But I couldn't have in practice, because I didn't even know there was such a thing, let alone what it was called. All the googling and stack-overflowing in the world can't help you in that situation.

A sufficiently motivated student could do it via MOOC sure (I am doing one myself right now to get up to speed on ML) but for most people, most of the time, the traditional old-fashioned in-a-lecture-theatre degree is the right call.

[eksemplar]

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with google programmers. Sometimes looking something up is faster, sometimes it's inspiring.

The thing a degree does though, is make sure people know what stackoverflow code to ignore.

You can certainly obtain the same knowledge on your own, and you can certainly avoid getting it with your degree.

The thing is though, hiring people is about minimizing risks. The most expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and degrees offer the highest probability of skilled labour.

[jlarocco]

> I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with google programmers. Sometimes looking something up is faster, sometimes it's inspiring.

I think the term "google programmer" covers too much ground to make a blanket statement.

On one hand, Google and StackOverflow can serve as an easy to use interface to documentation and troubleshooting information. I think this use of Google is great.

On the other hand, it's also possible to use them as a source of copy/paste code snippets without necessarily understanding what the code is doing. This second kind of "google programmer" is a huge problem. These are the type of people we all laugh at for not being able to solve FizzBuzz (assuming they haven't found somebody else's solution to copy/paste).

> The thing a degree does though, is make sure people know what stackoverflow code to ignore.

I wouldn't count on it. Even if a code snippet on SO is 100% correct, that doesn't mean it'll be the best solution outside of the original asker's situation.

[eeZah7Ux]

Please understand my sentence in context. I did not write that a search engine should not be used per se.

[isatty]

I'm heavily involved in one of the AUVSI's autonomous vehicle competitions where recruiters from SpaceX etc show up frequently. I'm a senior now and my grades have suffered as well. I wouldn't say it was purely because of the competition - but I've a similar experience to yours where recruiters love stories from the competition and about how we managed to achieve our goals. I've learnt a LOT of stuff that I wouldn't have managed to in class.

Similar to you, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.

[eloycoto]

How envy I am! I'm working mentoring some students to get this projects. Local companies don't see any value on this, you can't imagine how frustrated I am sometimes.

[colechristensen]

What do they do and how could they be out-competed?

[seal6105]

BS Mechanical Engineering here from big name school. I wish someone explained this to me in college. I realized my deficiency one day senior year when I let my car overheat and had no idea what to do. I left engineering as a result and came back to it 10 years later.

[onesun]

Some of my classmates in college all went to a city a couple of hours away for a weekend, in a not so new car, and the car quit them about half way there. Turns out a car full of "mechanical engineers" drove an hour on the interstate with the car in 3rd gear because the gear selector didn't quite make it to D. Cooked the engine and I think they ended up totaling the car. They were top students too. That definitely reaffirmed my belief that GPA is a poor indicator of a quality engineer.

[gaius]

There's an episode of the Big Bang Theory where all the fancy scientists mock the internal combustion engine for being primitive technology... But when their car breaks down, Penny has to come and help them out :-)

[sslayer]

I think your deprecating comment should be directed at the engineer who designed the shifter.

[onesun]

But.... an hour with the car at redline? They joked about it for months afterward. I think even they wouldn't have placed the blame on the aging shifter.

[jacquesm]

Which team was yours? I've been following the solar races quite intently, some of the work is amazing.

[onesun]

I raced Mizzou's SunTiger 4 in 2001, then became Mechanical lead and Project Co-manager for SunTiger 5 in 2003. Mizzou's solar car team changed to a hydrogen car team for the eco-marathon competition after ASC 2005

[jacquesm]

Cool I found a whole bunch of pictures:

http://mizzou.orgsync.com/org/mizzouecoracing/Media_Press

[roamingryan]

Similar story here. I didn't completely tank my GPA due to solar racing (Rose-Hulman, ASC2001) but it certainly didn't do it any favors. None of that mattered though as the practical engineering skills I gained far outshined anything academic on my resume.

[onesun]

Ha! I think I have a Rose rain jacket from ASC 2001. Was that the last year Rose competed? I forget. I raced Mizzou's SunTiger 4 in 2001, then became Mechanical lead and Project Co-manager for SunTiger 5 in 2003.

[jedc]

Ditto; & well-said. A number of friends and colleagues from my solar car days (at the University of Michigan) are now working at SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.