Is it just me? ...............

[mrflibble]

Is it just me, or did HDL school start again recently? Gentlemen, warm up your trivial google queries and friendly PC answers.

Some more standard answers to standard questions in the sticky posts might help. Anyone have some spare time to flush on that?

 

[TrickyDicky]

Terms start in september, so after 2 months of lectures, they're being given their assignments.
I notice it gets very quiet in summer, and on weekends!

 

[mrflibble]

A fun exercise would be to make a bunch of regular expression matching "halp, need homework answer fast, URGENTTTTTT kthxby!" posts. Then plot the number of matching posts over the year and see if there's any trend. XD

 

[ads-ee]

well just search on vishal_sonam and all you'll see are homework questions. ;-)

Actually I really want to know if the schools in the region south of China, east of Pakistan, west of Bangladesh, and north of Sri Lanka all tell their students to use edaboard as their homework help resource. I know from looking at some site statistics (from some web page I don't remember where I found it) there are nearly 2x more site visits from that previously mentioned region than the rest of the world put together.

Besides that I'm sort of becoming convinced it's those schools that are considered tier III and below that are probably the source of all the questions. If you do any searches on quality of education there are only a small number of tier I-II schools that are known for giving students a quality education.

I can tell you I've interviewed a number of top marks students with 4.0 GPA's that I wouldn't expect to be able to design a 16-bit rollover counter with asynchronous reset. They certainly couldn't answer my boiler plate question: What is metastability? If you can't answer that or at least give the impression you understand it's a problem that needs to be addressed and are supposed to be an FPGA/ASIC engineer...well I'm not recommending they get hired. I get the impression their degree isn't worth the price they paid to get it. It's probably equally likely they didn't want that degree in the first place, but they were pushed into getting that degree so they would:
a) look good to prospective mates
b) make good money (for a)
c) have an impressive degree (for a)
d) move to the US on an H1B visa (for a)

 

[sharath666]

Actually I really want to know if the schools in the region south of China, east of Pakistan, west of Bangladesh, and north of Sri Lanka all tell their students to use edaboard as their homework help resource.

Nice way to put across your point ;-).
I do agree with all your points including the the last 4 reasons you have. Hope to see better days ahead..

 

[ads-ee]

I really hope things change for the better there. Just filling the pipeline with students only interested in $$ or prestige isn't going to bode well for the industry.

When I went to school there was a big push for everyone to go into engineering as that was where the money was. Needless to say there were a lot of poor to mediocre engineers graduating and pretty much all of them went on to get MBAs. Now a large number of them are incompetently managing those engineers (that graduated at the same time) that are still "engineering" products. The rest are no longer in engineering. Personally I know of only a handful of classmates that are still engineers, of course those are the ones that went into the field for the right reasons.

 

[shaiko]

I really hope things change for the better there. Just filling the pipeline with students only interested in $$ or prestige isn't going to bode well for the industry.

From a technical perspective - I agree. not everyone can become a good engineer and if one doesn't have a passion for it - he'll never be good at it.
From an indu$trial perspective however things are a little different.
The MBA guys at Nvidia, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung etc...have a BIG interest for the market to be flooded with engineers from a simple reason - the more taxi drivers there're, the lower the fare.

An approach I see in many companies I work with - is to have one guru to handle the rocket science and 10 puppets around him to take care of the 16-bit rollover counters with the asynchronous resets - after 128 attempts they get it right.

Now...if according to the MBA guys math it's the most economical approach - then (with all the sorrow in it) that's what the indu$try needs.

 

[ads-ee]

From a technical perspective - I agree. not everyone can become a good engineer and if one doesn't have a passion for it - he'll never be good at it.
From an indu$trial perspective however things are a little different.
The MBA guys at Nvidia, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung etc...have a BIG interest for the market to be flooded with engineers from a simple reason - the more taxi drivers there're, the lower the fare.

An approach I see in many companies I work with - is to have one guru to handle the rocket science and 10 puppets around him to take care of the 16-bit rollover counters with the asynchronous resets - after 128 attempts they get it right.

Now...if according to the MBA guys math it's the most economical approach - then (with all the sorrow in it) that's what the indu$try needs.

Yeah, those MBA's you're talking about are those not-so-good former engineers that just want to make those that love the profession suffer miserably (because they couldn't cut it).

And it just proves how bad they are at engineering and problem solving when they insist that having 10 code monkeys pounding away on their keyboards making those 128 attempts to get it right (up to interpretation and lurking bugs) is more efficient (both financially and technically) than having one or two top notch engineers that get the job done right the first time, with no lurking bugs (due to good design practices and lots of testing) that will end up killing grandma Jane.

 

[mrflibble]

The problem with the 10 monte carlo monkeys approach is that this one guru will be busy putting out monkey induced fires all day long instead of doing any rocketry. Better would be for the guru to strap those 10 monkeys onto the rocket, press [LAUNCH], and then request two new hires who can then be properly trained.

Train those new hires to build a new rocket, strap MBA onto rocket, and let the new hires do the launch sequence as a celebration of their first rocket construction. Clean launch or explosion, it's all good. It's the learning experience that counts. :thumbsup:

 

[ads-ee]

On the other side of the coin. The absolute best managers I've worked for were, truly engineers at heart. They just had an aptitude for managing projects/people that shined and they could also get there hands dirty with design/coding or even in the lab (which they enjoyed immensely, when we didn't kick 'em out of the lab for being a distraction!).

Those managers were the ones that would ask you for a schedule and would immediately look at it and you and say "Okay, what is the real schedule, ignoring what marketing and upper management says, and how many people will we really need" You tell them and they would then proceed to pad it by 2-3x because they know you want to be optimistic (and they know Murphy is sitting in the room). They take all the flack from upper management about the schedule and then proceed to push to get the resources you need to pull the schedule in. Those are the types of managers that you want to work with, they are out to make your life easier and get a good product out the door. They also never throw you under the bus at the first sign of trouble like those previously mentioned good for a rocket ride MBAs.