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by BeetleB
17 days ago
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> I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers. I have an engineering degree and did "real" engineering (electronics/semiconductors) before switching to SW. Almost all my engineering courses required calculus knowledge. None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it. And I say that as someone who tried to find any and every excuse to use calculus at work. I love calculus. My role is not an outlier. Every grad who came back to talk to students said the same. |
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At Boeing, there were two parallel engineering groups. The design group, and the stress group. The design group did things by eye, the stress group did the math.
I was in the design group. I did the math for my work (and so did a couple others), and we got the good assignments as a result. the stress group normally required a master's degree, but they invited me to join their group. (I declined, because I wanted to do design work, not check other peoples' work.) But it was a very nice compliment from the stress guys.
I've also seen the EEs at work who avoided the math. They'd just try random things until the circuit worked.
When my house was built, an architect designed it. But a structural engineer did the math on it - and I have copy of his work. It involved the usual beam formulae. But sometimes a beam is not in the book of formulae, and you gotta use calculus to do the stress calculations.
I've also watched engineers use book formulae with zero understanding of the basis of them. I was not impressed.