If you do not know how to solder, you are not an electronics engineer

[tom66]

Am I the only one with this opinion? Soldering is such a basic, essential skill in electronics, and is easy to learn. However, it is not covered until the 3rd year in my university, and is not covered at all in A Level electronics (in-between secondary / high school and university.)

I was in the induction session for electronics engineering where we were given a simple through hole kit to assemble. It was simple enough, I had it done in 20 minutes (I'm certainly not a fast solderer -- but I know how to solder.) Most of the class did not even know what a good solder joint looked like, let alone how to make one. Only three other students managed to get their project working in the two hours allotted.

In addition, I am the only one in a class of 40 that does electronics as a hobby, too.. Everyone else is doing it for the degree, but I do not think you will be a good engineer if you do not enjoy what you are doing.

I am also starting to worry that at the careers fair I was visiting there were only two companies (out of about 50) looking for electronics engineers. One was Intel, the other was a small, local firm manufacturing LED lights.

[Gall]

Agree.

I also think that a good engineer should have knowledge in outdated methods and equipment, too. He should be able to repair a 1940's transceiver and, given all the parts, to design the same.

[Neilm]

A few years ago the small company I worked for got a university student in for the summer for "work experience". We needed a small piece of test equipment rebuilt - it was something that had been knocked up a few years earlier on a bit of breadboard and mounted in a small metal box. It had been used then put to one side. As you can imagine, there were a few chips missing, a wire or two broken and we gave it to this guy to fix. There were drawings for it so it should not have been too hard.

A week later, I got told to give him a hand to find why there seemed to be intermittent short circuits all over it. He had replaced the broken wires and had managed to solder only about 3 strands in it. They were causing some of the shorts.

The others? He decided to probe the circuit board with the breadboard resting on the unpainted metal box. Every time he moved the breadboard changed the short circuits.

What I haven't mentioned, was that he was studying for his masters. 

Neil

[Bored@Work]

There are more jobs in E-engineering than just soldering. And you can be a pretty good engineer without being able to solder. Of course you should be able to do it, especially when you work in design, but for other engineering jobs you can get by without.

One example is systems engineering, where you have to deal with many, many complex issues, typically non of which requires soldering. Of course, it is a pretty good stunt if you are on-site, happen to see a technician messing up some soldering, grap the soldering iron and show him how to do it. But the most that is actually expected from you is to recognizing it is wrong and telling the technician so.

And for the same reason you shouldn't expect that an engineer knows a particular unrelated vintage technology if that technology is outside of his field of work. Even if it is within his field of work, it is typically more important to look forward than backward, i.e. to incorporate new technology to produce competitive products, than nostalgically clinging to the past. In some areas just staying ahead of the curve is a full-time job. One criteria here which separates good and bad engineers is the ability to sort through the new stuff and weed out the pointless rubbish, stick with the old stuff that works, until something new comes up that really works better (in practice, not just on paper).

[madires]

I had the same experience 20 years ago :-) Most students weren't able to identify a through-hole resistor or even tell its resistance by the color code. Same for coding (maybe some Basic, but no assembler or C). But they learned it later on. And yes, an EE should be able to solder.

Don't worry too much about job offers! There's a so called "pork cycle" which might catch you at the wrong time just after finishing your degree. In that case try to gain some experience, maybe as a trainee or doing some open-hardware project.

[PbFoot]

I trained as a Flight Simulator Technician, which is repairing and maintaining the rigs that are used to train airline pilots. Of course, a lot of my training involved non-electronic aspects, such as aerodynamics etc. etc. However, part of the training was the electronics portion and a great deal of it dealt with the physical aspects of repair, especially soldering and proper wiring techniques. We were expected to complete several assemblies and devices to aviation quality and hand them in for our marks. I think it's an essential skill for anyone in electronics.

-PbFoot

[nukie]

Some of the best Intel engineers havent made a solder joint for years.

[tom66]

Some of the best Intel engineers havent made a solder joint for years.

I was looking at the electronic engineering portion - not the semiconductor side. I would guess dev kits, test rigs, etc.

[nukie]

Do you also learn how to wind an inductor? It's not absolute essential but its really down to the job that you have. A lot of skills you just pickup from work as experience. A few friends of mine graduated as EE they rarely solder at work. In fact if you work for a company, there are teams responsible for design and a seperate team who will do the implementation and testing.

Soldering is not hard to learn but if someone claim that he or she is interested in electronics then the person should know how to solder, it goes hand in hand. It's a practical skill where you can learn as a 10 years old.

[GabYoung92]

It amazes me how many people in my EE degree don't do any electronics outside of our classes.  Most of them are amazed that I have my own components at home, let alone that I etch my own boards at home and apply what we are learning to something outside of uni.

I remember last year we had to solder together a wheat-stone bridge...  4 resistors?  Most of them had no idea how to calculate the bands and were amazed that you could just test the resistor with the DMM to get an idea of the resistance.  Something that took me less than a minute to solder up, took others 10 minutes or more.

[ejeffrey]

It depends a lot on what you do.  If you work on big projects with big teams from big companies where you can be relatively specialized.  Simulation engineering may be just fine.  If you are the 'electronics guy' at a small 6 person high tech company, you better know everything from soldering to VHDL, and you should probably know a fair bit about computers to boot.

Most people can probably hope to be somewhere in between.  It is a good idea to know what a soldering iron looks like, but you won't necessarily need to do it on a regular basis, and anything more than the simplest jobs get done by an assembler.

Look at it another way: should a civil engineer need to know how to mix a bag of cement?  Does a mech-E need to know how to weld?  Certainly those are skills that are worth having in general, but they don't seem necessary to be a professional engineer.  As a hobbyist you definitely need to be a jack-of-all-trades, but not everybody has their job also as a hobby.

[LoyalServant]

I have run into many people over the years and many that could not solder.
Extremely competent people but lacked repair/assembly experience.

I have run into far more EEs that were incompetent in my travels since I had to task at a previous job of
evaluating techs to be hired as one of my duties.

I had a few walk in with resumes and transcripts to prove they had a bachelors or masters but most if not all
of them were applying for a job that entailed field work on expensive gear that required component level repairs
or retrofitting. It was not uncommon to have to redesign something to get it going in some specialized industrial or
commercial equipment that we worked with.

I had a fairly good system in place which entailed assembly of a simple 555 PWM.
They had a board, components and fully kitted bench to build it.
I had a few people balk at it and call it an insult but when your applying for a near $40 an hour job expect to spend an
hour or two being vetted.

I did that a few times to replace outgoing techs and met some interesting people.
Soldering seems to be an issue.
Most guys I have seen fail the soldering test kept a dirty tip, cranked the iron to the max and frequently lifted tracks.

It may not be important for sitting at a computer crunching the numbers and running simulations but it's vital to field techs.
You have to know how to solder... it's just a must.
I had to pass over quite a few very competent people because they could not solder.

If you are an EE student in university please get soldering down... it will help you out if you ever decide to work in the field.
Without it your not getting in the door.

[peter.mitchell]

Even if you're not doing field work it is a very important skill, "gosh, my mouse isn't working because the cable has frayed and I don't have a spare, how am I ever going to layout this pcb now!"

[LoyalServant]

Even if you're not doing field work it is a very important skill, "gosh, my mouse isn't working because the cable has frayed and I don't have a spare, how am I ever going to layout this pcb now!"

Absolutely! I have been there!

Sometimes we have to fix our own gear.
Your power supply gives it up and you have to pull it down and figure out whats wrong with it...
I would definitely add lab gear repair to the need for good soldering.
Sometimes you have to have it now...

[Kremmen]

I agree that for a person practicing electronics assembly and repair, soldering is a key skill, never mind what the guy is called.
From previous discussions in this forum it has become clear that when people use the words "electronics engineer" they do not necessarily imply that the person in question would be have a formal degree in electronics. That is OK but the drawback is that you then don't have a well defined set of qualifications either. So everyone is free to come up with their own definition of what constitutes an electronics engineer. That definition may or may not include soldering.

The old joke about an engineer and a salesman goes something like this, that to be good in his job, an engineer is someone who knows a lot about a little, and a salesman knows a little about a lot, until the perfect engineer knows everything about nothing and the perfect salesman, nothing about everything. Now that may be a bad joke but there is a point. The subject of electronics is definitely too big for any single individual to take it all in. If one is a qualified EE in a branch of the discipline with little or nothing to do with assembly and repair, then soldering is a useless skill, unless for hobby but that is another thing. I don't mean to offend but i do get the impression that many of those who see soldering as a necessary skill for an EE, do so from their own definition of what an EE is and fail to realize how wide the discipline is today. At the far reaches of electronics engineering, they may have heard about soldering but couldn't care less. That doesn't disqualify them as EEs, however.

When i studied long ago one part of the program consisted of practical lab work. The qualification task was to design and build a functional processor controlled EKG (electrocardiography) instrument and demonstrate the working device. That certainly involved a lot of soldering and other practical work. But that was about it. In my job as a control systems engineer i never soldered one joint and was not supposed to. There were technicians with their quality control processes and procedures for that, they didn't want engineers to come and mess it up. Now, i'll take on anyone in any kind of soldering but that is a skill i maintain as a hobby, not for my profession.

I have another joke, do you want to hear it? Never mind, i'll tell it anyway: How can you tell who installed the additional electronics box in the cabinet? Easy - if it was the mechanic, he constructed  extra shelving, bolted it on and fixed the box on the shelf with screws. If it was the technician, he fastened the box with duct tape to one of the struts in the cabinet. And if it was the EE he left the box hanging by the wires near the floor.

[tom66]

I do not know what it is like in larger companies, but when I worked in a company with just 14~15 employees both the electronics engineers had soldering irons on their desks. They would modify the prototype if it was quicker, and build up small prototypes themselves. Generally a larger board would go to the production team to build the first prototype, but it's a lot of hassle to ask them to change a single resistor when you can do it in 2 minutes.

[steve30]

I think most degree courses are academic, and soldering isn't really an academic subject.

Of course, I find it strange when people can't solder, but then, I learnt it when I was about 11, and it was one of the first electronics related things I did.

[firewalker]

So, a civil engineer isn't really an engineer unless he knows how to mix and use mortar? Soldering is just a tiny fraction o EE today. It has more to do with electronic technicians than electronic engineering.

Alexander.

[ciccio]

I agree that the ability to make a good solder joint is only one of many "plus" that an engineer working in electronics can have (I can solder pretty well, but I cannot write a single line of program code. Can I still be called an electronic engineer?). 
I believe that this is one of the many "practical" capabilities, including other, such as some mechanical skills (that will allow you to open something starting  from the correct side, or the ability to draw a mechanical sketch or a schematic diagram that can be understood by the one that will make the actual part or circuit, that make an engineer a better engineer.
In my experience, I've seen that the smart guys can learn very fast, be it soldering or programming.
Best regards

[Kremmen]

Again, i agree.
Could it be put this way, maybe:

- if by electronics engineer, you mean a qualified professional with a degree from a proper educational institute accredited to grant such degrees, then no, soldering is not a required skill. Unless it happens to be one of the required exams you have to pass. I don't know that it is anywhere i am familiar with.

- if on the other hand by an electronics engineer you mean a guy doing electronics then you are free to come up with your own individual list of qualifications. It doesn't have any significance but you are entitled to your opinions same as anyone else. Say you are an employer looking for a worker. Of course you can set whatever skills you want to see, as necessary qualifications.

Just as an aside - it is a cultural thing but where i come from if someone says they are an electronics (or whatever) engineer and don't have the proper qualifications, it is the same as saying one is a medical doctor without the same, i.e. fraud. The segregation between the discipline (i.e. engineering, medical care) and practitioners (i.e. engineers, doctors) is well defined. Anyone is free to do engineering but to call oneself an engineer requires the credentials, just as with MDs.

[Otatiaro]

Hello,

Just my 2 cents ... when studiing at Supelec, a French high school, we had oral exams for analog electronics.

My exam subject was a schematic that I had to set the right values of the components to get the right behavior (don't know if I'm clear enough, you are given a schematic, the expected behavior, and you have to find the components values like resistors, etc).

When I suggested 2.7V for the zener and 220 ohm for one of the resistor, the guy almost was almost crying, saying "you know that's REAL values " ... he gave me the max score for this exam.

Thomas.

[PbFoot]

I think a well rounded engineer should have at lease some experience with repair and assembly aspects. Maybe this is the reason why so many things are difficult to repair. The engineer that designed it had never tried to repair anything, so he didn't consider that his layout or design might make repair difficult.

As I said, I trained as a Flight Simulator Tech. I am not a pilot, but I learned enough to at least taxi the aircraft, take-off, make a short flight and land. That way when a pilot tells me the sim "flys funny", I can try it for myself and diagnose the problem.

So, no, it's not NECESSARY to have soldering skills as an EE, but it is necessary to be a GOOD EE.

The people that make the best engineers/techs are the people who are truly interested in a subject (I love aviation and electronics.) People that are just in it for a paycheque, or thought it was a good field because they heard it was growing or something, are generally the people who are unhappy, bored and have uninspired designs. It's the difference between adequate and great.

-PbFoot

[SeanB]

My brother in law is a civil Engineer, and part of the learning is actually how to mix cement, as there are a whole host of variables in mixing. Get them wrong and you are in for trouble. Too much water, too little water, contaminants, poor sizing of aggregates, poor sand size and texture, too little mixing, too long a mix, wrong admixtures and many other variables. This just for bulk concrete, not counting speciality mixes like fast initial cure, pumpable, friable, high tensile strength, low contraction or freeze resistant concretes. You spend a year doing this in materials study, and do practical mixing and testing to see the effects.

Remember that an EE can redo an oops moment, A civil engineer has the oopsies in the front page news and on TV in full gory detail.

[M0BSW]

Agree.

I also think that a good engineer should have knowledge in outdated methods and equipment, too. He should be able to repair a 1940's transceiver and, given all the parts, to design the same.

I can do that, as my Amateur Radio Transceivers are all old, the newest is 30 years old, all I need now is the formal bit, have I done it the wrong way round, I had to learn to fix the tube gear, as I couldn't afford to get it fixed, one way I suppose having to do it.

[G7PSK]

I have a friend whose son decided to become a doctor when he left school. I asked him why he wanted to be a doctor and not a vet or some other science subject, his reply was he wanted to end up a surgeon as the money was so good this was his sole reason for wanting to become a doctor. Halfway through his medical degree he decided that the hours of a doctor was not to his liking so he changed courses and became a radiographer as the pay was higher than a junior doctor and the hours was better, He now looks at the X rays at home on his computer that a technician has taken, and makes his diagnosis over the internet.
It looks to me that all that matters to many taking degrees is how much money they will make in a job at the end of the course, liking the subject does not come into it. My wife's nephew took a degree in maths and got a first. He took a job teaching English in Korea for a year and is now hitching around Europe doing odd jobs, I see that as a total waste with a 1st maths degree he could so much.