There are some great things out there.
There is also a lot of shit.
I never said there weren't smart and talented individuals in the industry. That would be insane.
What I said was that the industry is getting filled more and more with people that don't have either the training or the education or the brains to be excellent in the position they hold nor live up to their own inflated version of themselves and their importance.
They are sometimes bad, sometimes ok, sometimes good but rarely excellent.
I can't be the only person to have noticed this trend.
That's one of the reasons I do my skit about being awesome.
People who aren't in the know think something I do is awesome so say so but, reality is it's more often the lowest level of engineering one can imagine.
It's their ignorance that make it seem awesome.
Then of course there are people that can do the really basic things and get called awesome by those who can't.
The problem is when they start to believe it and get this reputation of awesomeness built on basically bullshit.
In the mean time, those with the actual talent are generally quiet about it or are treated worse than the other.
As an example, one of the engineers I worked with pumped out designs super fast. The problem was that he'd get 99% o the job done but that last 1% made life hell for everyone else. The boss loved him because he pumped out a design really fast. The installers hated him because they always spent a lot of time getting it to work properly often blowing the budget on repairs/patches.
Then there was another engineer that was slower. The boss didn't like him because he was slower. Everyone else loved the guy because he was spot on. Every job went smooth and the only problem I ever recalled on one of his jobs inn the 10 years I knew him was when a bearing failed. Turned out that he spec'ed a different bearing and it was overridden by someone higher up as being too expensive. Naturally, the proper bearing was installed at a far more significant cost later.
The faster engineer still works there. The slightly slower far more experienced and far better engineer left because he was classed as not as good, didn't get the same pay etc, when in reality he was magnitudes better than the other guy. The slower engineer would regularly ask me for my input (I did the motor control/electronics) and he took that advice and had no problems. The faster engineer rarely asked and when he did he often ignored the advice because he thought he knew better. I spent weeks at one job repairing and redesigning things to make it work. Another was ripped out completely and redone.
When you look at the broad picture you see that the slower engineer was actually more profitable for the company. He produced products that worked, gave no problems, were simple to install and gave the company a great reputation. The other put out fast designs but the cost of maintaining, installing and running the designs way exceeded the time cost factor he saved.
The customer however often thought it was all great so long as it did the job. They know little about reliability, safety factors, duty cycles etc.
So when the problems appeared they would often be put in the over usage category, teething problems, noise is just something you have to expect etc.
The electronics version of the mechanical engineer designed the touch pad on this Samsung Chronos7 laptop.
It's the worst laptop touch pad I have ever used and is also the most expensive. A year later they still haven't got a fix for it.
It's that 1% that makes the difference between a product and an excellent product.
