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Girls in STEM is failing both girls and STEM? 99

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moltenmetal

moltenmetal

Chemical
Jun 5, 2003
5,504

Read the article, THEN discuss...

CLEONIKI KESIDIS said:
Growing up, I increasingly saw my good grades as a trap locking me into a single career: STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). It felt like a dystopian YA novel, and my high school report card was The Choosing. A’s in math and science? Here are your jeans and sweatshirt.

Well-meaning people lied to me. They said computer science was a great work-from-home career if I wanted children (when in fact a majority of women quit STEM because the culture of poor work-life balance makes it too difficult to raise a family), that STEM careers are secure (actually the industry has frequent layoffs and is very competitive), and more....
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CWB1,

I am going to check and see if my old employer had/has a certificate of authorization. I am not sure that they did, and I don't think any senior managers are PEngs[ ](PEs) at the moment. The managers back when I started were PEngs. When you manufacture stuff, you generally have the ability to test something and verify that it is environmentally sealed, explosion proof, crash safe, not a shock hazard, etc. You cannot test buildings, bridges and other large structures, and large pressure vessels. You have to take somebody's word for it that they are safe. It helps if that person is part of a regulated profession.

How do you work out if someone is working as an engineer. I am now a "product developer, mechanical". I am a certified engineering technologist. Quite a few of my co-workers are professional engineers. I am aware of at least one other CET. If "engineer" is not in the job title, does it means none of us are (apparently) doing engineering?

--
JHG
 
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That's the correct reasoning. If you can prototype it and then create replicas for use by non employees then codes and regs only need to define outcomes, not design methods. If members of the public are buying uniquely designed and untestable things then they need to know that they are designed in robust and failsafe manner, and in the absence of prototypes that means design by codified methods. And that's where registration comes in.


Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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"If members of the public are buying uniquely designed and untestable things then they need to know that they are designed in robust and failsafe manner, and in the absence of prototypes that means design by codified methods. And that's where registration comes in."

Why is registration involved? We've been down that argument before; there's nothing in the registration process that ensures that there are "codified methods," for which there are not, particularly in electronic equipment. Registration simply ensures that there's a name to sue after the fact.

Nevertheless, a UL listing does ensure that someone paid to have the device tested and checked out, and that's better than being able to sue the designer after the fact. And, that does not require registration on the part of the design engineer.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I'd say, but wouldn't die at the barricades in defence of it, that if your design has testable outcomes then there is no ethical requirement to stick to a codified design process, since the proof is in the pudding. Whereas a boiler that is unique must be designed to code, using standard techniques that have evolved over time, because its fatigue life cannot be tested.

There is a separate issue of designing to get around the tests, the rather formidable German registration system for engineers didn't seem to help much with Dieselgate.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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Therein lies the irony of engineering - new technology is developed mostly by unlicensed folks, many of whom do not have engineering degrees and whose main claim to the title is their ability. Meanwhile, to design structures using well-established, often antiquated methods one needs a license. Even more ironic is that the attitude of the licensed guild is often to push for more licensing as a means of demonstrating ability.
 
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"new technology is developed mostly by unlicensed folks"

Perhaps, in the dim past, licensing might have meant something relevant, but there's movement afoot to license software engineers, but to what end?

What's the government's interest in mandating the licensing? Would that have prevented Stuxnet? Is the California PE Board going to chase down the perpetrators of WannaCry for programming without a license? Are we going force the programmers who left their browser design open to the Heartbeat exploit to be sued or fined for negligence?

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Will engineering registration expansion have anything to do with the price of tea in China?
 
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Speaking of programming, I just ran across some lazy programming in my credit card processing. I had noticed, the last time I re-financed, that I was getting dinged by the underwriter for "carrying a balance" on my credit card, even though I was paying it off fully every month. Additionally, it occurred to me that my credit score probably reflected that as well. So, I thought that a simple way to game that would be to pay off the balance before the statement date, but to make life simpler on myself, I would simply make a large payment and carry a negative balance on the statement. After doing that for a while, my credit score did actually go up, by 30 points.

However, after a while, the credit card company randomly decided to issue me a refund for my negative balance. I called and told them that I wanted no refunds unless I specifically requested one, and they all said, "No problem." 4 months later, I get another refund check, and my statement balanced popped positive. So, call again, and get to talk to a supervisor, who finally explained that the "computer" saw that I carried a negative balance for 3 months and automatically refunded the money. So, I point out that the programmers were obviously lazy, because the negative balances weren't the same money, and to prove it, we went through the last statement line by line, and we could clearly see that I made a prepayment on 5/5, and the dumbsh*t programmers were too lazy to write code to look at daily balances, so less than 10 days later, the program kicked out a refund, resulting in a positive statement closing balance 4 days later, because the programmer assumed that 3 consecutive months of negative balance meant the same money was sitting for 3 months, even though it clearly had not. Unclear whether this will ever get resolved.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IRstuff said:
Perhaps, in the dim past, licensing might have meant something relevant, but there's movement afoot to license software engineers, but to what end?
Click to expand...

A lot of computer crackers assume they will find jobs in security after they are caught and convicted of whatever it is they did. It would be nice to have someone certify computer professionals, and withhold certification from the vandals and crooks. What sort of person should be allowed access to hard drives containing information that you signed NDAs on?

--
JHG
 
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"It would be nice to have someone certify computer professionals, and withhold certification from the vandals and crooks. "

So, you want to guarantee that they'll never be positive contributors to society, and piss them off enough to do something newer and badder? Even Kevin Mitnick was reformable.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IRstuff,

I've read your horror story. All I can say, just wait 'til hordes of self-driving cars hit the road.

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
 
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A pox on both their houses. The guy who wrote it was an ass, and the Google hierarchy, sadly not quoted in that yahoo link, are no better. Sacking someone for writing an internal memo is, at first sight, an excellent way of doing exactly what he was complaining about.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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If you're dumb enough to write a memo saying "men are better than women at this job" at your work you deserve to be fired imo.
 
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" Sacking someone for writing an internal memo is, at first sight, an excellent way of doing exactly what he was complaining about.
In the US, his memo could be considered evidence of a hostile work environment, and the creation of that is a fireable offense.

Dumb, or not, he appeared to be serious, so there's the whole gender bias thing, which is apparently more endemic than a simple question of encouraging females to pursue STEM

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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If you're dumb enough to write a memo saying "men are better than women at this job" at your work you deserve to be fired imo.
Click to expand...

Your description is pretty far off. His post and the arguments contained therein are pretty well balanced IMHO if read in full context with multiple disclaimers that as a proud liberal he personally does not agree with every argument contained therein but shared to provide balanced viewpoints. The main point of his post was actually that both business and employees suffer when folks are unwilling to discuss opposing viewpoints, case in point being Google's openly discriminating in favor of women and minorities with training and promotion opportunities to meet internal diversity quotas. The fact that the media is smearing him as evil by assuming him to be that which he's arguing against is classic irony. This also wasnt a memo btw, this was posted on one of many internal corporate forums. Had you said that its dumb to post on a corporate forum criticizing your employer I'd agree in most cases, however Google holds itself up as this flawless ideological utopia so to Greg's point - it shows that they really arent open to others' opinions as they claim.
 
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"if read in full context with multiple disclaimers that as a proud liberal he personally does not agree with every argument contained therein but shared to provide balanced viewpoints."

Agree to disagree; his premise is one sided, that Google's hiring practices and environment are geared to promote women into positions that they don't really want, nor are really interested in. He makes the claim that there are more men in management because that's what they want and what they are biologically driven to attain, and by extension, that's why there aren't more women in management.

His claim to be a liberal is belied by his recommendation to "stop alienating conservatives." Moreover, he claims to be a "classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason," and his document specifically links to the Wikipedia entry wherein it's clear that the term actually refers to what is today a libertarian and capitalist, which is typically concomitant with social conservatism. The only conclusion one can draw from his own citations and recommendations is that he's a conservative, not a liberal. He claims to be promoting discussion, but his "discussion" is that there's nothing wrong with fewer women in STEM AND management because that's what they're biologically driven to.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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The good reason for firing him isn't what he wrote, but that he was stupid enough to think anything would change. It reminds me of the line in The Cloud Atlas about things not going well for those who buck the system.
 
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