On 2/23/2013 9:53 PM, BillW50 wrote:
On 2/23/2013 6:34 PM, Chris S. wrote:

"BillW50" wrote in message
...
On 2/22/2013 8:05 PM, Paul wrote:
BillW50 wrote:


When I volunteered to be tested against civilian EE grads, I was
shocked that most of them had problems even biasing a simple
transistor correctly. No wonder most companies will hire one with a
military EE degree over a civilian one.

Actually, they hire people with practical experience.
That's how you "get someone who has biased a transistor".

You can hire a civilian EE, if that person has done the job
before. I had three summer jobs designing things, and
at the time, had just finished designing my own computer
from scratch (ran at a blistering 3MHz, on a foot
square breadboard). I managed to run 256 instructions of hand
assembled code in it (by reading the instruction set
manual, and working out the opcodes and operands by hand).

(This is the breadboard I used. Mine has one black and three
red terminals. I still use this. Right now, it has my LED
sorting circuit on it. This is supposed to be "RF quality",
but in truth, it was horrible. Just as bad as any
conventional breadboard similar to it. Other digital circuits
on here, had noise problems. ACE 236 breadboard.)

http://www.bmius.com/images/Product/large/35009.jpg

This is the processor I used. The processor is so large,
you can write the signal names on the white ceramic lid.
Used four phase non-overlapping clocks, to coordinate the
internal logic. It took something like a thousand plugged
in pieces of wire, to wire up the circuit and the support
chips. (Like the tiny capacity RAM chips.)

http://www.cpushack.com/chippics/TI/...ITMS9900JL.jpg

The ugly part of that project, was the clock generator.
Needed to be buffered with a handful of transistors,
switching 12V amplitude signals. My first clock generator,
the chip burned out - it overheated. We didn't use fans
back then - I don't think brushless DC fans existed
at the time. Everything was supposed to run cool enough,
you only needed passive cooling. This was the basic chip,
and by adding transistor buffers to the thing, it isolated
the capacitive load of the processor, from this chip.
So it wouldn't burn out. The upper four MOS signals
needed to be buffered.

http://www.ti99.com/tms9904d.gif

*******

In my graduating class, there were only two of us with
practical experience. We both ended up working for the
same company. As digital designers. Both of our first
designs were a disaster. He had the misfortune to
design with 74S, and our company didn't yet possess
the right (multilayer) PCB technology for it. So his circuit
had never-ending noise problems. Mine suffered a different fate.
I designed my circuit with single edge clocking
(nothing really out of the ordinary), I guess because
the circuit wasn't a technical challenge. The wakeup
call I got, was when the factory informed me, that they
bought ICs from as many as fifteen different manufacturers,
and as soon as they started mixing and matching at random,
my design blew up (the timing was never meant to handle a
3:1 mix of timings). I ended up doing a redesign, using
opposite edge clocking, to make the design bulletproof.
You could use any brand of chips you wanted after that, and
the design technique works well enough, you hardly have to
check the timing (hahaha). I learned a *lot* about our
company component database that year.

We didn't seem to have very good "design reviews" back then.
We had design reviews, but they weren't as timely as they
could be.

And that's how generous companies, provide practical
experience to young engineers. We didn't even get fired :-)

You see, my practical experience up to that point, didn't
involves factories or production issues. I just made
one-off circuits, and only the prototype had to work.
You learn fast, when your butt is being kicked :-)

Paul

Oh yes, I am well familiar how life was with some civilian EE. I was
keeping track of everything while I was still in the military. When
Gary Kildall created CP/M, I thought that was just child's play
compared to what I was doing and I know I could do it far better.

Then the Altair came out. I thought that too was no match compared to
what I was doing and that also was merely just a toy compared to the
things I was building. Then Paul Allen and Bill Gates came out with
Basic for the Altair, that too was far too simple compared to the
things I was doing. For example, programming the VTAS computer for
guided missiles was far more complex compared to what Paul Allen and
Bill Gates had ever done in their lives.

It would have been really nice if I could have shared everything I
knew with the rest of the computing community back then. But I
couldn't, one I was still in the military. And two, most of what I
knew was classified technology and I couldn't share it even if I
wanted to. I was not alone, their were others also doing remarkable
things that the world would never know about.

Getting a military EE degree was far harder than getting a civilian EE
degree. As they were only interested in the cream of the crop and all
others were reassigned for other jobs that may not even have anything
to do even with simple electronics. And 95% of my original class was
reassigned. So few ever made it that far.

You had to keep up at least an A- average to stay in class. I didn't
really apply myself as much as I could, just good enough to stay in
class (so I thought). But when I graduated, they told me I had the
highest tests scores they had seen in the last 5 years. And they were
so impressed, they let me do something I never heard of them doing
before. They let me pick any place I wanted to go next. I said how
about Hawaii? And they said sure, no problem. So I lived in Hawaii
during the Vietnam war. So that wasn't a really bad deal at all. Now I
wonder what would have happened if I really applied myself in school?

After the military I got a job as an EE at Philips. In the military,
it was perfectly fine to do your best. If you did anything less, you
would get reassigned to do something else. Although I didn't know in
the civilian world, you shouldn't always do your best. Because I ended
up flying all over the world helping other engineers solve their
problems that they couldn't figure out. Boy that was really just a
miserable life. Spending all of your time just working on the hardest
problems in the world and living out of a suitcase and rarely ever
seeing your friends and family ever again. :-(

And how many professional groups will let you join? I have been
a member of the IEEE even when it was the IRE.

I am sure I would have no problem. Just like companies looking for EE
has no problems with an military EE degree. Many won't even bother to
ask me to even take a test. I got that a lot actually.

And what interest would I have with IEEE anyway? They can't get it right
the first time, nor the second, etc. and has to keep revising their
standards. I would only be interested in a group that gets things right
the first time around. After all, why go anywhere else, right?

Your Self aggrandizing is still fascinating to me. Get a BS EE
or stop saying that you are a "Electronics Engineer"

Like I said before, it doesn't matter what you want or think, all what
matters are the companies that are looking for EE think. And they
consider military EE as far superior to civilian EE. And after being
tested against them, I can clearly see why. So how do you excuse how
most can't even bias a standard transistor correctly? Where I come from,
there is no chance in hell they would ever graduate.

And even if I did get a BS EE, I would fly right through the course and
learn little to nothing anyway. And they would learn 90% more than they
ever did before from me. So what would be the point again?

Chris
US Army Signal Corps, Long ago retired

Oh that explains why you are into substandard stuff. See I was taught
completely differently. You had to do it right the first time or you
were a complete failure! There is no such thing as second chances, do
overs, etc. and all of that was just sissy talk. After all, everybody
knows if you want the job done right the first time, you sent in the US
Marines.


The real "killer" to getting a EE started in earnest in the 70s to my mind.
Employers wanted to lower pay scales. Bringing in foreign EEs from India
with a waver partially solved the problem. So much so that in the 80's,
it was not too unusual to see EEs from India and the far east working as
techs in the US.

Starting salaries were low enough that many potential EEs elected to go
for less demanding and less costly sheepskins. After all, not a few EEs
found themselves working under bosses that had business or accounting
degrees.

In my time (I'm retired) there was a big difference between a true
design engineer, and a working engineer. The design engineers often had
advanced degrees, and the working engineer anything from a bachelors to
a technical school certificate. The "working engineers" might have had a
more wide range of duties, such as implementation of a design in
hardware or software, and overseeing production and testing.

Much of my career also involved military hardware and support.
No one else could afford or wanted to spend the money for complex
computerized test systems. Even the systems to be tested were unusual,
in that they were designed to do things that are blatantly a no no in
the civilian world.