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I've been (slowly) reading Marx's Capital and I just finished the chapter on the division of labour- I think it might shed some light on the situation of software developers and coders in general. Marx talks about how specialization of labour makes the worker worse-off at the expense of the capitalist. For example, a medieval blacksmith could make hundreds of different tools in his forge and employs a wide variety of methods in making those tools; a 19th-century factory worker only knows how to operate a specialized piece of machinery used in one aspect of making, say, hammers. The blacksmith might take an hour to make a hammer, while the 19th-century factory worker contributes to making hundreds of hammers in an hour; so the factory worker is more productive, but less skilled. The factory worker is also much more vulnerable than the blacksmith. A new technological advance in the field of hammer-making could render the worker's skills obsolete, but the village blacksmith was always in demand. And a factory worker's skills are only useful in the context of an enormously complex factory which is owned by a wealthy industrialist, whereas a blacksmith's skills are useful in the relatively much simpler context of a forge which he himself owns. Blacksmiths don't need unions, but the more vulnerable factory workers do. I think coders today are a lot like blacksmiths. Programming skills transfer easily from one realm to another, so the same person can work on making a PS3 game, a mobile app, and a website, with relatively little adjustment. The main tools in the industry, like programming languages, are easily accessible and haven't changed too radically over time. There aren't many people who code in C++ but who are incapable of working in Java. So why would coders need a union? They have a lot of flexibility in who they chose to work for, and if they get fired they have thousands of potential employers to look at. I don't think this is going to last in the long run. As the tech industry keeps developing, history shows the field will only get more specialized, and the means of production will be concentrated increasingly in the hands of the owners rather than the coders. I'm imagining a world where there are dozens of subdisciplines of computer science, with relatively few transferable skills, and an enormous surrounding infrastructure that's needed to do any programming at all. Perhaps programming languages have become very specialized and require expensive licenses to use, or maybe computing power will all be concentrated in the "cloud" and you'll need to rent on a per-cycle basis from Amazon. Under those conditions, a programmer's union would make a lot of sense.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:54
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blah_blah posted:The standardization of engineering curricula means that engineering probably has the highest minimum bar to pass of any program, or close. But it also means that the worst graduating engineering undergrad and the best graduating engineering undergrad take effectively the same courses, and that students at mediocre state school A cover approximately the same content as students at highly selective private school B. This is definitely not the case for CS (or math or physics or) undergrads, and the best undergrads at the best schools take a much more advanced set of courses than an engineering major would, anywhere. Not coincidentally, these are often the same undergrads that get hired at places like Facebook and Google. Computer Science: definitely a more advanced education than learning to design a skyscraper. I don't think you understand how much engineering professors are paid. The College of Engineering at your local state school usually accounts for around a third of the total budget, all by itself. And yes, they are absolutely ranked, just like any other important program with high visibility, particularly regarding the Fundamentals of Engineering exam pass rate (the exam you must pass in order to begin your internship - basically an 8 hour overall final exam). Top programs have a better than 90% pass rate (poor ones frequently fall below 50%). Comparatively, the majority of CS programs only became ABET accredited in the last decade.
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Aug 2, 2014 22:31
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Computer Science: definitely a more advanced education than learning to design a skyscraper. Some computer scientists design software that designs skyscrapers. They are the real engineers.
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Aug 3, 2014 00:29
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I feel like my attempts to be a reasonable programmer in this thread are being undermined by people using Marx to argue against unionization and claiming well known CS programs are harder than any engineering programs. 
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Aug 3, 2014 00:30
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Computer Science: definitely a more advanced education than learning to design a skyscraper. What? When i was in school, taking (and passing) the FE exam was seen as more of an "Eehh, nice to have but a pain in the rear end." And people began internships 1-2 years before you would even be able to take the exam. Or are you talking about grad school? Edit: As an aside, the FE exam was seen as more of a civil, or possibly, nuclear engineering thing. As being a PE is only really useful for construction projects, since you can't really do any failure testing on structural stuff. Kristov fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 00:47
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down with slavery posted:Some computer scientists design software that designs skyscrapers. They are the real engineers. Actually, CAD was first pioneered by electrical engineers attempting to automate iterative techniques in circuit design, and is still primarily developed by real engineers; primarily in and from members of the academia. Because, as I'm sure you can guess, learning the software side of things is a bit easier for someone like a structural steel PhD holder to pick up than the converse of a team of codemonkeys learning the myriad things even a specialized engineering tool would need to perform properly, much less a more generalized tool like CAD is asked to perform. It's really apparent too; companies like Autodesk, Bentley, and ESRI could definitely stand to have a few more pure software people on board dealing with usability issues. Even their user documentation is total amateur garbage, though this might be intentional with the very lucrative third party training market centered around teaching (older) engineers to use these tools.
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Aug 3, 2014 01:17
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Actually, Yes but who programmed the computers that the guys programming CAD program on? They are the true heros Also, guess what Autodesk groups their programming jobs under? https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/adsk_gen/jobsearch.ftl?lang=en https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/adsk_gen/jobdetail.ftl?job=14WD16162  H.P. Bittercraft, are you even a real engineer? I kind of want to defer to Autodesk on this one down with slavery fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 01:23
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Kristov posted:What? When i was in school, taking (and passing) the FE exam was seen as more of an "Eehh, nice to have but a pain in the rear end." And people began internships 1-2 years before you would even be able to take the exam. Student workers != Interns; most jurisdictions don't count student experience as valid toward licensure reqs. And almost all (reputable) engineering programs require their students to pass the FE their senior year as contingent to graduation, regardless of field. It's a major part of how these programs are ranked, particularly since the NCEES decided long ago that ranking students by FE and PE passing grades (like med school does for board exams) was detrimental to the profession. Even people like EE grads not going into power generation, who wouldn't normally need even an EIT to practice, are almost always required to pass the FE anyway. But those are somewhat edge cases anyway; the vast majority of graduating engineers are civil and mechanical, and they absolutely need all of that stuff to practice.
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Aug 3, 2014 01:31
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down with slavery posted:Yes but who programmed the computers that the guys programming CAD program on? They are the true heros Ah, but who built the computers that the people who are the "true heroes" programmed? Poor people in China and Taiwan, that's who. Now you know: Solidworks is made by sweatshop labor, heroically bootstrapping their way into the global CAD market. Clearly, outsourcing things to China works.
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Aug 3, 2014 01:34
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down with slavery posted:H.P. Bittercraft, are you even a real engineer? I kind of want to defer to Autodesk on this one Yep, I'm a graduate of one of the top ranked engineering programs in the nation and hold licenses to practice multiple engineering disciplines. And if you think I'm bitter, you should try calling yourself an engineer to one of the old dudes who've been licensed since the exams were 8 hour handwritten 10 question exams. Those guys absolutely lose their poo poo about it, I think because it's frequently claimed by office t-shirt wearing college and hs dropouts. Us younger engineers mostly just tend to laugh at you like a hilarious long-running joke, particularly at the claims at "building a better world" or whatever. It's adorable that you think your work is that important to society
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Aug 3, 2014 01:43
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It makes sense now. I was wondering why you've been railing at software developers the entire thread. You're an engineer envious about the tech bubble and all the money flowing through to CS kids these days. I went to a top CS and engineering school as well and the CS kids average 50% more salary out of the gate than the engineering kids.
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Aug 3, 2014 01:46
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Yep, I'm a graduate of one of the top ranked engineering programs in the nation and hold licenses to practice multiple engineering disciplines. Good news! It occurs to me that I'm really missing out by working in software, having a BS EE and not having "engineer" somewhere on my card. (hell I don't even put EIT on there because that'd be dumb)
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Aug 3, 2014 01:51
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Yep, I'm a graduate of one of the top ranked engineering programs in the nation and hold licenses to practice multiple engineering disciplines. So how come Autodesk knows that software engineers are engineers and you don't? quote:It's adorable that you think your work is that important to society The irony. It's adorable how willing you are to just make sweeping claims about fields like engineering and software development without so much as pulling your head from out of your rear end.
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Aug 3, 2014 01:55
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shrike82 posted:It makes sense now. I was wondering why you've been railing at software developers the entire thread. Lebron James makes more money than lawyers therefore he is a lawyer. For all this talk of jealousy, I don't see engineers pretending to be computer programmers when they inflate their resumes, but we sure see the opposite. It's almost as if
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Aug 3, 2014 02:10
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Dirk Pitt posted:I have worked at two companies that have done multiple rounds of layoffs. The low hanging fruit is always first. Then in both instances, older devs in their 50s and 60s were kicked to the curb. Yes their knowledge is vast and they are very fast and good employees, but they have $175000 a year salaries, and that's a lot of money when you have 20-30 somethings raking in $75k to $100k doing similar work. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be fired for not being an old fart in your lifetime? I'm assuming you don't do enough hookers and blow to make that a non-issue  Has it also occurred to you that you are less likely to be fired for the sin of being old fart if you're in a union?
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Aug 3, 2014 02:12
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Has it ever occurred to you that you might be fired for not being an old fart in your lifetime? I'm assuming you don't do enough hookers and blow to make that a non-issue So how well have unions dealt with downsizing etc 1980-today?
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Aug 3, 2014 02:15
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computer parts posted:Again, Marx did inherently believe in a changing society for the better, which is why he supported the Union over the Confederacy: Yeah he was cool with the union winning because it was fitted his model of history and society of feudalism transitioning from capitalism. I don't think he saw technology in capitalist societies as anything other than increasing the employer leverage over employees though.
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Aug 3, 2014 02:17
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hobbesmaster posted:Good news! Oh yeah, they finally started offering the SE depth portion of the PE last year, after years of talking about it. Man is it gonna be funny if the BPELSG ever gets California to recognize the SE license. But their enforcement is way down, even for terms clearly protected in California, like traffic engineer - "infrastructure traffic engineer" is widely used outside of transportation, for example. Though talking to the firms here, it's ruefully laughed at by the people trying to advertise for the legit positions, because the alternative is raising a stink about title misuse against a local industry that currently pulls in a third of all of the VC money spent in the country. So lol at that happening before the next crash.
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Aug 3, 2014 02:21
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I feel as though I've contributed to a misunderstanding. I never intended to participate in a "who's more left" dick waving contest, I only wanted to point out, as others have done, that labor solidarity is at the heart of anything which could be called leftism. If people wanted to call themselves anti-union liberals, I would have no complaint.
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Aug 3, 2014 03:54
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I like how tech has these insane burnout rates and bias towards young people yet no one thinks there's a need for a union.
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Aug 3, 2014 04:24
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HootTheOwl posted:I like how tech has these insane burnout rates and bias towards young people yet no one thinks there's a need for a union. In Silicon Valley, yes. In the 9-5 corporate IT world, no. I'm in my 30s, and I'm the youngest person on the team by over a decade. Most people on the team work 9-3 then a couple of hours after the kids go to bed. Silicon valley is the minority of tech workers.
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Aug 3, 2014 04:33
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Computer Science: definitely a more advanced education than learning to design a skyscraper. I'm sure that at some point a smug physics major has said something like 'Engineering: definitely a more advanced education than understanding the fundamental forces underlying the universe'. I don't really have a dog in this fight, I have a Ph.D in math. My dad has a Ph.D in engineering and designed the curriculum for the civil engineering program at the institution he teaches at. I work in tech (not as a software engineer) and many of my high school friends majored in some flavor of engineering in undergrad. I have a pretty decent understanding of what the curricula of undergraduate CS and engineering majors consist of. The main difficulty of engineering as a major is that they give you a lot of work and projects, not that the material you're covering is theoretically difficult in any way (a few engineering physics/engineering science-type majors at a few top universities might be outliers here, but they're definitely an edge case). H.P. Hovercraft posted:Comparatively, the majority of CS programs only became ABET accredited in the last decade. Accreditation is irrelevant to the point that I'm arguing, but I don't think that those numbers are exactly something to be impressed by. An exam that still has a 50% pass rate among even low-ranked schools sounds like it's basically nothing more than a formality for anyone remotely competent. Top-tier tech companies (like Facebook/Google/Microsoft, or startups like Palantir/Square/Airbnb) do a better job of selecting for people that can actually do their jobs competently than just about any industry I can think of, in any event. Xae posted:In Silicon Valley, yes. Maybe in startups, but most people at established companies in Silicon Valley work hours similar to 9-5. And larger startups work fairly similar hours as well.
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Aug 3, 2014 04:36
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Student workers != Interns; most jurisdictions don't count student experience as valid toward licensure reqs. I've never met an engineer who was required to take the FE in college. MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley don't appear to. Google is coming up blank except for every college recommending that seniors take the FE because the content of the test is largely stuff you'd learn in college.
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Aug 3, 2014 06:34
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blah_blah posted:I'm sure that at some point a smug physics major has said something like 'Engineering: definitely a more advanced education than understanding the fundamental forces underlying the universe'. I don't really have a dog in this fight, I have a Ph.D in math. My dad has a Ph.D in engineering and designed the curriculum for the civil engineering program at the institution he teaches at. I work in tech (not as a software engineer) and many of my high school friends majored in some flavor of engineering in undergrad. I have a pretty decent understanding of what the curricula of undergraduate CS and engineering majors consist of. The main difficulty of engineering as a major is that they give you a lot of work and projects, not that the material you're covering is theoretically difficult in any way (a few engineering physics/engineering science-type majors at a few top universities might be outliers here, but they're definitely an edge case). Hahaha well yeah, the entirety of engineering is physics so that would be flatly ridiculous to claim that physics majors are less hardcore or something whackadoo like that. To a physicist, it's some pretty basic stuff: water flows downhill, you can't push on a rope, heat expands things, ect. Compared to quantum behavior or astrophysics? Or even the senior-level classes math majors attend? Engineering (and computer science) is some baby-level math compared to that. Boy, it sure would be ridiculous if you saw engineers going around claiming that they are physicists. Accreditation is relevant because it points to a very recent shift toward even attempting to treat the curricula of computer science with any level of consistency. Granted, I have several friends who're very successful software devs who graduated with unaccredited CS degrees (back in 2006) that didn't seem to affect their careers in the slightest, working both in banking and gaming software outside of SV. Which is exactly my point: their employers didn't care one iota that their alma mater graduated them from an unaccredited curriculum. Hell, one of my buddies has been the guy administering the skills portion of interviews for his local office of one of the "big three" credit reporting companies for a few years now. It's a terribly informal industry that could easily benefit from licensure requirements or at the very least robust standards. CS people love to tout that their field is a meritocracy, precisely because there's no one pulling together and enforcing industry-wide credentials beyond the minimums set up by ABET and a few large private companies like Microsoft and Cisco. This is a solved problem in the engineering industry. Those students that survive the single highest attrition rate and largest credit-hours major in order to qualify and pass the FE and graduate are deemed competent enough to begin working in a field that is responsible for the design and maintenance of the very things that make our civilization possible, and are eventually held responsible for the lives of the public once they pass the PE. That both of these exams have nonzero amounts of failures speaks to how effective this level of competency checking is. Engineering position interviews never feature a skills test. Oh sure, at the most you might have a panel interview where they determine if your breadth of experience means you'll be more valuable to a firm or entity over another applicant. You've definitely got to be able to speak intelligently about your specialty. But it's entirely unlikely that you'll be asked to stand up at a whiteboard and work some engineering problems in front of your prospective project manager (though it isn't entirely unheard of in the more esoteric and rarefied fields, and even then it's a huge red flag).
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Aug 3, 2014 07:44
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CCrew posted:I feel like my attempts to be a reasonable programmer in this thread are being undermined by people using Marx to argue against unionization and claiming well known CS programs are harder than any engineering programs. H.P. Hovercraft posted:It's adorable that you think your work is that important to society All the ones I see now just play WoW or talk about working on their yards.
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Aug 3, 2014 07:52
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Zachack posted:I've never met an engineer who was required to take the FE in college. MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley don't appear to. Google is coming up blank except for every college recommending that seniors take the FE because the content of the test is largely stuff you'd learn in college. If it's not mandatory then it is *strongly* encouraged, usually by your senior guidance counselor if not the department head face to face in his office. Though I've heard of prospective graduate students being exempted from this, particularly in fields where being an EIT isn't strictly mandatory, like EE outside of power gen, it's still encouraged to a high degree because it's one of the main points of comparison for the various ways they rank programs and will absolutely limit employment opportunities for recent graduates who end up abstaining anyway and make the school look bad. Not that it really matters; the vast majority of engineering graduates require it anyway in order to work in the field. Hell, trademark law tries to headhunt engineering students all day long and you can't even qualify to take the Patent Bar exam without first passing the FE. Prospective employers will look at you askance if you haven't passed or even attempted the FE exactly because it's just an overall final exam for the hodgepodge of things you were supposed to learn in your engineering academic career. H.P. Hovercraft fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 08:02
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Hahaha well yeah, the entirety of engineering is physics so that would be flatly ridiculous to claim that physics majors are less hardcore or something whackadoo like that. To a physicist, it's some pretty basic stuff: water flows downhill, you can't push on a rope, heat expands things, ect. Compared to quantum behavior or astrophysics? Or even the senior-level classes math majors attend? Engineering (and computer science) is some baby-level math compared to that. Boy, it sure would be ridiculous if you saw engineers going around claiming that they are physicists. At the higher levels of CS, physicists and mathematicians dominate. Look at the people who helped found the field - Jon von Neumann, Tanenbaum. Today, the people at the top of industry and academia are still the same top physicists and mathematicians; it's why they get sniped to develop HFT and other algorithms for finance. At the low-end, sure; you'll see some hacks. It's a profitable new field and more loosely regulated, no surprise there. It's dumb to get in a dick waving contest over who is holier because their discipline is more pure or whatever. Sure an engineer helps design part of a city, but a computer scientist or software dev can have a huge impact on the world in their own way. And carpenters can make extremely cool poo poo or found a religion. Or maybe a swiss patent clerk stares at clouds in his coffee, writes a few papers about brownian motion and ends up kicking off new fields of study all over the place, inadvertently helping usher in an era of nuclear weapons. You never know.
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Aug 3, 2014 08:27
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I'm getting the impression he's whining more about engineering the profession rather than engineering the academic degree.
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Aug 3, 2014 08:32
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:This is a solved problem in the engineering industry. Those students that survive the single highest attrition rate and largest credit-hours major in order to qualify and pass the FE and graduate are deemed competent enough to begin working in a field that is responsible for the design and maintenance of the very things that make our civilization possible, and are eventually held responsible for the lives of the public once they pass the PE. That both of these exams have nonzero amounts of failures speaks to how effective this level of competency checking is. This is total nonsense. I interview Ph.Ds from top schools in a variety of disciplines (basically the entire gamut of STEM disciplines, plus a few others like economics) on a regular basis with very impressive resumes and the majority of them fall well short of our hiring bar. Boasting that your field never actually tests the skills of its practitioners at the time of hiring beyond checking to see whether they've passed a test in which H.P. Hovercraft posted:Top programs have a better than 90% pass rate (poor ones frequently fall below 50%). is unbelievable to me.
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Aug 3, 2014 11:47
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Hahaha well yeah, the entirety of engineering is physics so that would be flatly ridiculous to claim that physics majors are less hardcore or something whackadoo like that. To a physicist, it's some pretty basic stuff: water flows downhill, you can't push on a rope, heat expands things, ect. Compared to quantum behavior or astrophysics? Or even the senior-level classes math majors attend? Engineering (and computer science) is some baby-level math compared to that. Boy, it sure would be ridiculous if you saw engineers going around claiming that they are physicists. You do know solid state physics is a large branch of electrical engineering right?
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Aug 3, 2014 14:20
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:. How would you imagine setting up those certifications? Microsoft has a set of certifications for .NET now, but the biggest complaint I hear is it's too generalized. You could have certs set up on language syntax, but that doesn't mean you have problem solving ability. You could set up questions on specific algorithms or design practices, but the techniques you use will vary based on the problem you have to solve, and those techniques can change with technology from year to year. Companies currently have varying levels of design practice that would also need to be unified to make a generalized test applicable. Unless you just mean a CS style cert, in which case why not standardize the curriculums? I don't think it would be an impossible task, but you'd need to find a balance between generalized and specific questions, and the tests would each need continual updates as the field changes. Take iPhone apps for example, over the past month the most popular language has drastically shifted after Apple released Swift. Would this certification process need to be publicly funded to keep up to date?
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Aug 3, 2014 17:48
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CCrew posted:How would you imagine setting up those certifications? Microsoft has a set of certifications for .NET now, but the biggest complaint I hear is it's too generalized. You could have certs set up on language syntax, but that doesn't mean you have problem solving ability. You could set up questions on specific algorithms or design practices, but the techniques you use will vary based on the problem you have to solve, and those techniques can change with technology from year to year. Companies currently have varying levels of design practice that would also need to be unified to make a generalized test applicable. The person you were quoting was talking about licensing not certification, which is a big difference. Licenses are issued by the government while certifications are issued by a 3rd party. Also, there already is the test you're asking about, people have linked it several times in this thread. Its mainly about the fundamentals of CS and critical concepts like that.
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Aug 3, 2014 17:52
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computer parts posted:People will want the moon no matter what you teach them. That's why there are currently job requests that have "20 years of VMWare experience" as a required feature. A lot of "impossible postings" are because the person who wrote the job req has a specific person in mind that they want to hire but HR has hiring processes that do not include, "hire your buddy". So they make a req that's impossible and when questioned as to why candidate X didn't get the job they can point to an item on the req that candidate X didn't meet. People almost never ask why candidate X got the job so long as candidate X does well so the target person also not meeting the req is almost never questioned. This happens most frequently for government positions as they have really stringent hiring over site and require you to interview multiple people before hiring. I had a few written to be impossible for anyone but me when I was in college because I was a great summer intern and they wanted me specifically back the following summers but the rules didn't allow them to just re-hire last summers intern this summer. And the internship was not a high paying job ... So this isn't a high end nudge/nudge/wink/wink big money thing. It's just, "drat it, I don't want to waste 3 weeks of the summer getting a new network admin intern up to speed when the girl from last year already knows where everything is and will be effective from day one".
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Aug 3, 2014 17:52
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McAlister posted:A lot of "impossible postings" are because the person who wrote the job req has a specific person in mind that they want to hire but HR has hiring processes that do not include, "hire your buddy". So they make a req that's impossible and when questioned as to why candidate X didn't get the job they can point to an item on the req that candidate X didn't meet. Just so you know "20 years of VMWare experience" is literally impossible. The company didn't exist 20 years ago. There is also a long standing and well noted phenomenon of HR people wanting a lot of conditions in an applicant that don't actually come into consideration in an interview for the position.
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Aug 3, 2014 17:56
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HR job reqs are basically an eight year olds letter to Santa. They're never gonna get a pony, but it doesn't hurt to ask.
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Aug 3, 2014 18:40
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:And almost all (reputable) engineering programs require their students to pass the FE their senior year as contingent to graduation, regardless of field. ] This is simply not true in my experience. As an undergrad I double majored in two engineering disciplines, both of which have been listed in this thread as ones that absolutely require a PE. Nobody even mentioned taking the FE until I got my first job. A year or two after I took it I switched to an industry where having a PE isn't worth anything so I can't comment on the difficulty of the PE exam, but as I remember it the FE was an absolute joke. edit: And to contribute a bit: I would love to see unionization of engineers, or at the very least the end of salaries as standard. At my company it's simply expected that you will work well over 40 hours. If the company actually had to pay people hourly I think there would be a lot more respect for people's time. I've worked closely with a few German engineers, and they seem to have a much better system over there: extra hours were either paid out, or went to time off. I doubt the political will exits to ever make that happen here, but I really wish it did. DeadlyMuffin fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 18:40
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uncurable mlady posted:HR job reqs are basically an eight year olds letter to Santa. They're never gonna get a pony, but it doesn't hurt to ask. If eight year olds could destroy America's workforce.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:04
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:If it's not mandatory then it is *strongly* encouraged, usually by your senior guidance counselor if not the department head face to face in his office. Though I've heard of prospective graduate students being exempted from this, particularly in fields where being an EIT isn't strictly mandatory, like EE outside of power gen, it's still encouraged to a high degree because it's one of the main points of comparison for the various ways they rank programs and will absolutely limit employment opportunities for recent graduates who end up abstaining anyway and make the school look bad. Not that it really matters; the vast majority of engineering graduates require it anyway in order to work in the field. Hell, trademark law tries to headhunt engineering students all day long and you can't even qualify to take the Patent Bar exam without first passing the FE. quote:A. CATEGORY A: Bachelor's Degree in a Recognized Technical Subject. An applicant will The FE counts as a alternative to having the degree. I guess if the PTO is trying to get students prior to graduation that could be useful but it looks like the test is given pretty frequently so it's not like they can't do like everyone else and hire grads into sub positions until they pass the test. quote:Prospective employers will look at you askance if you haven't passed or even attempted the FE exactly because it's just an overall final exam for the hodgepodge of things you were supposed to learn in your engineering academic career.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:07
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Zachack posted:This has not been my experience at either side of the table and since the FE basically passes on a C- grade (roughly 70% although I think it shifts) it's not like it means much besides "this person is not a retard", and that should be covered by transcripts/GPA/school accreditation. This probably depends a lot on the field, because I imagine if you're in a field where the only sensible progression is to PE you might look at applicants without the FE as clearly not dedicated to the task. But if you're somewhere where academia, management or other pursuits are options too the FE might not be such a litmus test for dedication.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:18
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Trabisnikof posted:The person you were quoting was talking about licensing not certification, which is a big difference. Licenses are issued by the government while certifications are issued by a 3rd party. Also, there already is the test you're asking about, people have linked it several times in this thread. Its mainly about the fundamentals of CS and critical concepts like that. Fair enough, thanks for the clarification.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:25
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