My UNSW Talk

[EEVblog]

Part of my talk at UNSW Sept 2023:



Part 2: Q&A
00:00 - How important are qualifications? And a huge engineering job tip!
00:46 - My worst university experience
02:35 - Where did you get components before the internet?
04:16 - Will I do more low cost lab videos?
04:57 - Engineering Contractor vs Full Time
06:06 - Freelance Engineering?
06:57 - Estimating design time frames. Gantt charts, feast & famine contract work
08:19 - How do contracting roles start?
09:18 - What if you don't have lab space?
10:15 - Australian University vs the USA
10:46 - Would I ever return to working in industry?
11:43 - Not everyone is cut out to start their own company
12:20 - I went to NIDA, I'm the 2nd worst actor in history
13:14 - How to find a niche product market
14:03 - Have I ever lived overseas?
14:50 - How much of my income comes from Youtube?
16:28 - One of the first full time Youtubers in Australia
17:29 - Would I ever be a university lecturer
18:35 - I was almost a teacher
18:50 - I hated this about university

[tggzzz]

"in this country nobody cares about your qualifications it's different in other countries here once you get your first job your degree goes to the bottom of your resume no one cares sorry but it's just it's just the way it is no one cares it's it's it's what you can do right it's what you can do for them"

You're right it is "what you can do for them".

You're wrong "nobody cares about your qualifications".

Why? Because as an interviewer for deeply technical jobs I know

• usually this company's job requires significantly different technical experience to your current job. Hence your current job is a very imperfect guide as to how you will perform in my company
• the quality - or lack of quality - of an engineering degree is a strong indicator of what you can/cannot be expected to manage in my company now and in the future

In addition, I was using the stuff I learned at university for most of my career. The fundamentals last a lifetime; one specific tool's details are useful for at most 5 years.

Having said that, towards the end of my career, I became heavily software oriented - and appalled at how few fundamentals the typical employee knew. You know, little things like finite state machines ("aren't they part of a compiler"), the Byzantine Generals problem ("oh, the framework guarantees distributed transactions ACID properties"), Partial Ordering ("oh, this distributed system has the same time everywhere").

TL;DR...
To get 10 years technical experience and growth, then a good degree is invaluable.
OTOH, for one years technical experience repeated 10 times, you needn't worry about the degree.
Too much software avoids engineering, and relies on crossed-fingers plus <sing-song voice> "la-la-la-la-lah".

[EEVblog]

You're wrong "nobody cares about your qualifications".

That's the majority of how it works in Australia. YMMV of course.
And even if they do care about the qualification, they generally don't care where you got it, unlike say the US, where if you went to MIT then that goes at the top of your resume.

[tggzzz]

You're wrong "nobody cares about your qualifications".

That's the majority of how it works in Australia. YMMV of course.
And even if they do care about the qualification, they generally don't care where you got it, unlike say the US, where if you went to MIT then that goes at the top of your resume.

Quite possibly. I have zero experience of Oz/Kiwi engineering, other than working with a few Oz/Kiwi engineers in the UK (all of whom were very competent).

However perhaps the key word is "majority". To put it bluntly, most jobs (engineering and otherwise) are pretty boring and crap.

I've always aspired to better, and mostly achieved it. I try to encourage youngsters to aim high and not settle for mediocre. Occasionally I succeed.

[Tony_G]

12:20 - I went to NIDA, I'm the 2nd worst actor in history

Am I the only one who is actually interested in if they told Dave who the worst actor in history was?

TonyG

[golden_labels]

Looking from the perspective of Poland and IT, I see the same thing Dave described.

A well done, active project on GitHub is usually worth more than a degree and two years in a company nobody heard about. This isn’t universally true for all companies, because many have nobody to evaluate you properly. But the proportion of those, who can, is large enough. And they are not stupid. Their choice is simple. A newbie with half-outdated, half-forgotten theoretical knowledge and a nice paper, whom they will have to pamper for the next 5 years, or somebody who has solid hands-on experience and has shown they can tend for themselves, including acquiring new knowledge as needed.

However, there is an important, yet easy to miss conditional. Whether the job requires skill and experience. If not, if you are applying to be an unskilled drone, then you do need all the documents. That’s not because your education or previous experience matters. Because it does not. You’ll be a gear on the production line just like hundreds thousands others, replaceable with any indistinguishable copy. But the market floods the HR with thousands and thousands of almost identical “gears” and somehow they must filter the dozen they currently need. The simplest way, which gives some semblance of rationality, is ranking them by features like earlier employment, education, languages they know, having a driving license, traits beneficial to the employer etc.

[tggzzz]

Their choice is simple. A newbie with half-outdated, half-forgotten theoretical knowledge and a nice paper, whom they will have to pamper for the next 5 years, or somebody who has solid hands-on experience and has shown they can tend for themselves, including acquiring new knowledge as needed.

The counter-statement is "a bodger that throws something together and fiddles with it until the declare it 'working', understanding neither how it works, nor the theoretical limitations, nor the envelope limits, nor  whether it can be manufactured/used reliably - or someone who understands what is and isn't possible, and can work out how to implement and improve it".

I've encountered too many of the former at crap companies; they drag everybody down. The good companies I've worked at have the latter (and reject the former), which allows everybody to achieve more than they might otherwise expect.

Assessing potential employees is vital. At HP the divisional manager met every promising candidate before an offer was made.

[golden_labels]

Yes, assessment of a candidate is essential. So why did you remove this step in the first sentence? Or do you believe that, after assessment, a notable portion of people gets a job with no skills and basic knowledge and just being lucky somehow throwing things together on GH? I’d say that’s shitty assessment then.

Not sure, what’s the other end of your dichotomy. I believe it’s supposed to negate what I wrote, but it implies what I wrote must be true.

[EEVblog]

12:20 - I went to NIDA, I'm the 2nd worst actor in history

Am I the only one who is actually interested in if they told Dave who the worst actor in history was?

Yes, you had to be there to hear who it was. Edited that bit out.

[tggzzz]

Yes, assessment of a candidate is essential. So why did you remove this step in the first sentence? Or do you believe that, after assessment, a notable portion of people gets a job with no skills and basic knowledge and just being lucky somehow throwing things together on GH? I’d say that’s shitty assessment then.

Not sure, what’s the other end of your dichotomy. I believe it’s supposed to negate what I wrote, but it implies what I wrote must be true.

The point was to illustrate that your characterisation was rather extreme and one sided. I did that by giving a different equally extreme and one sided characterisation. Reality is, of course, more nuanced.

The world is shades of grey, not black and white. What you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.

Social media thrives on steering people towards extreme and simplistic statements - and thoughts. That is not good for society, and should be resisted.

[golden_labels]

On that I agree. I was using extremes. Of course it’s an entire distribution and it’s multidimensional. And the options are not mutually exclusive either, so it’s not like we’re choosing between one or the other. I would certainly prefer a person showing both their own projects and their formal education or past employment, over somebody with just one of those. And yes, practical ability to develop a program is not a replacement for solid knowledge. I hope I wasn’t understand suggesting this.

But let’s map this onto a single line. One end focusing on showing actual projects, the other just waving some documents. I believe this is the simplification Dave made and what’s being discussed here. If we funnel reality into those categories, my opinion is that we are getting much better employer material on the “actual projects” end. Not that certainly one end is good the other is bad, but the weight of the distribution leans strongly towards one of them. This is what I wanted to show.

My personal experience in choosing people to employ for a commercial project is limited. I can easily recall only 4 examples, which is a very low N. One only formal education, two mostly hobby projects. one being on both ends. The outcomes were as follows. The first one didn’t do his job at all: called me about 2 hours before the deadline and asked, what he was supposed to do. In retrospection earlier interactions were warning signs, telling me he’s incapable of working on his own, but I ignored those and chosen to believe in his honesty. The second one did great until one day I heard he disappeared and stopped responding. Depression apparently, no malice or negligence on his end. The third one was the best coworker I ever had: not a single bad word about him. The commercial part of our coöperation was focused more on graphics things than coding, but we did coding on non-commercial stuff. The fourth one is a stereotypical Eastern European programmer: will write you anything in a blink of an eye, it will work perfectly as specified, low bug rate, and exceeds performance of any competing code. The catch? He implements exact use case scenarios. Deviate from it a little bit and everything falls into pieces. Basically acts like a very efficient translator.