On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 08:27:30PM -0400, Alan Shutko wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Joost Kooij) writes: > > > Other people will say that I'm violently wrong > > Actually, I'd say you were on crack. What's a soldering iron going to > teach you that a breadboard couldn't?
Well, that's funny? To heat the baking soda and the coke, of course. How would you do that with a breadboard? > The basics are a good thing, but I believe you're taking it a wee bit > too far. It was a gratuitous rant, admittedly. But to my defense, there was no mention of "design and implement your own cpu core and i/o asics, your own system architecture, your own structured programming language and compiler, your own operating system and system libraries, your own userland toolset, your own programming paradigm" either. I argued that one should generally understand these concepts, though. > Why not learn to make your own semiconductors from beach > sand while you're at it? Because that would be very expensive, and the amount of effort spent would not be compensated by the gains in knowledge and experience. The gain from this particular endeavour would not be very relevant in the bigger picture, whereas the other ones were very relevant, in various ways. Experience is important. Why else do you think the mcse joke goes: "must call someone experienced"? All the serious admin job postings ask for it explicitly (the experience). The soldering iron is implied, btw. Here's a great little engineers' wisdom that I picked up on a microcontroller related mailing list: If you need to make a planning for a technical project, make a naive engineer's best estimate. Then multiply that estimate by two and take the result to the next unit, this brings realistic project completion time. Eg. two days => four weeks; three weeks => six months. Corollary: if an engineer says it'll take a year, it will never be finished in reality, because the engineer long has a new job by then, or has been forcefully promoted into management (zombie state), because his salary was getting dangerously close to that of some of the lower ranked managers. Cheers, Joost
