You win this round, engineers!

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By Sean Michael Ragan
Posted 2010/02/22 @ 1:47 pm
Category Art & Design, Computers & Mobile, Education

As a man with a degree in philosophy, another degree in chemistry, and three engineers in my immediate family, I have to admit this strip from Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pretty much hit me right between the eyes. [Thanks, Matt Mets!]

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8 Responses to You win this round, engineers!

eLindemann on February 23rd, 2010 at 2:08 pm said:

Glad to see Zach Weiner’s work on the Make web site. He’s worth following, a lot of his jokes are science-related.

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Darren Landrum on February 23rd, 2010 at 2:20 pm said:

I would argue that getting a physics degree still allows you to be an engineer. Indeed, that’s why I went for physics instead: at my school, the engineering program has in the past almost lost its accreditation, but the physics program is pretty good. It sucks to have to choose your school based on what you can afford (especially since I had been accepted to a top-level private college), but one does what one can.

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Ken on February 23rd, 2010 at 2:58 pm said:

Most industry engineering jobs:

Here’s marketing’s unrealistic expectations for what stuff needs to do and how much it should cost, and here’s your unrealistic schedule for getting it done. To hit your deadline, you probably have to take a bunch of stuff that was already done by other people that you don’t quite understand, tweak it slightly, and mush it together until it approximates the new stuff you’re trying to make.

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John Park on February 23rd, 2010 at 2:58 pm said:

I love the phrase “Awesome stuff. Could it be…more awesome?” so much! That phrase itself could NOT be more awesome.

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cranky_EE on February 23rd, 2010 at 3:01 pm said:

I hate to bring up the genius of Scott Adams, but Dilbert’s Career Day advice still rings true:

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-11-18/

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oskay on February 23rd, 2010 at 3:05 pm said:

I studied physics and turned out okay. And the conferences that I went to weren’t like that.

But seriously, the kind of “physics” being poked at here isn’t even really *physics* – it’s out there in the untestable mathematical/philosophical regime.

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vt-pete.livejournal.com on February 23rd, 2010 at 3:29 pm said:

http://xkcd.com/435/

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Viadd on February 23rd, 2010 at 8:29 pm said:

I am a physicist and I do awesome stuff with awesome stuff. With rockets and spacecraft and giant stars that explode and fire jets of matter at 99.9999% of the speed of flight and can be seen with the naked eye from a billion light years away.

(One of my undergrad degrees was in computer engineering, which I use a lot in doing the science.)

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