Why so much BS in professional engineering? (Rant!) 5

[ParabolicTet]

How come in competitive sports and arts, there is very little BS at the top levels? Almost all the pros have incredible technique that evolved from generations of pros prior to them. If any professional had a weakness, other pros would exploit that to their advantage.

But this is not the case with professional engineering. I've seen far too many incompetent and unqualified people performing complex engineering analysis. My biggest pet peeve is those with no knowledge of matrix structural analysis doing FEA. Whatever happened to garbage in equals garbage out?

I've often had arguments with engineers who do not understand that in linear analysis the stresses will double if you double the loads. Or I have seen even those with PhD's reporting results to ridiculous number of significant digits. A good example is fatigue life predictions, which are notoriously known to only be correct within an order of magnitude. But time and time again I see engineers report predicted lives of 10,954.36 hours.

Or take another example where again someone with a PhD was showing how 0.5 MPA from one software was 50% off compared to 1.0 MPA from another software. He didn't understand the bigger picture that both these numbers are basically ZERO and cannot be compared with any degree of reliability.

So why does the professional engineering world tolerate so much nonsense and incompetence from so-called "professionals"? But in sports, arts, and music people will smell your BS a mile away. When is the last time you saw a hacker win the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Or if you play any musical instrument, you'll know the pros know their stuff inside out from tens of thousands of hours of practice. And it's not just any random practice, it is precise techniques and theories that all musicians agree upon. It seems us group of engineers have no common understanding of how the physics and math all works together. We just use the software like black boxes.

 

[rowingengineer]

I think FEA is the least understood analysis tool in engineering in most fields, especially if the material is semi-plastic. However I can also say that most professions have the similar problems, I remember a physiotherapist complaining that young physiotherapists didn’t understand the concepts of stretching thus a whole generation of people have got the concepts incorrect. Aka you should only stretch once you have full blood flow not before, this means that really you should only stretch after you have complete a full workout, not a light jog or walk.
I know you may think this only a small error, but most people with think FEA is only a small analysis tool as well, unless you’re an engineer.

All I can say is take pride in your abilities and try and educate those around you, and don’t worry all professions have a lot of BS (in your words) going on. I find it soothing for the soul to help people understand that FEA isn’t a magical calculator.


An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[SNORGY]

"When is the last time you saw a hacker win the Wimbledon tennis tournament."

In the 70's and 80's...

John Hackenroe...

Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[rowingengineer]

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[FeX32]

lol.

This is not always the case imo.
By far the most competent engineers I have met have been those at the top so to speak.
The "errors" you describe are not competency errors but rather those individuals need a reality check.
After all, is it not those at the top that are developing new innovative technologies for everyone to use?
I am not saying those at the top are all really "good", I am simply saying that RESPECT is what they are lacking....


Fe

 

[SNORGY]

Regarding tennis...and my recollection of Wimbledon champions...

I think that "Hackenroe" finally won because he started finding more time to practice after being Borged out of his mind for so many years.

Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[TheTick]

You obviously don't know much about the music industry. Plenty of haks succeeding.

 

[ctopher]

These days, incompetence is wide-spread.

Chris
SolidWorks 09 SP5.0
ctopher's home
SolidWorks Legion

 

[SomptingGuy]

If the rant is primarily aimed at engineering software...

Providers of engineering software have their agendas set by customers. Customers always want the software to be easier to use and more productive. As a CAE tool matures, its users need to know less and less about how it works and then even the underlying physics upon which it is based.

I doubt that (m)any FEA users could write their own FEA solver these days. This isn't quite the case in the CFD world yet, but it's getting there.

- Steve

 

[rowingengineer]

steve,
What is CFD? I am assuming you don't mean contract for difference, maybe Computational fluid dynamics or completely...

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[SomptingGuy]

Computational Fluid Dynamics. One of the last remaining areas where people run their own programs. Still, the march of the GUI, Wizard, EZ-whatever is de-skilling this field too.

- Steve

 

[SomptingGuy]

Here's an example from my own area.

Tuning a PID controller isn't rocket science. There are reams and reams on the topic. If your simulation software contains PID elements, customers always ask how to tune them. Pointing to the literature isn't good enough. So we decide to help them by creating a canned experiment to identify the system and recommend gains. By doing this, we've removed the need for them to understand what they are actually doing. When things go wrong, they do not know where to look and blame the simulation.



- Steve

 

[FeX32]

Funny. When I learned FEA in undergrad university I had to write my own code for linear 1 and 2D problems. This really helped to learn the underlying concepts.


Fe

 

[moltenmetal]

I don't think that engineering is unique in this respect.

Comparing with music is a fool's game. There are musicians and vocalists who are amazing technicians who are as boring as hell to listen to, and there are complete hackers with no instrumental training who are brilliantly creative and who communicate something about the human condition in every note. And a precious few who have BOTH. And each likes their own.

Our profession has them too: brilliant theoreticians and skilled number-crunchers, and brilliant intuitive people who can feel their way through problems, can pare through complexity to the few key issues like a hot knife through butter etc. And a precious few who have both.

Licensure requirements vary by location. Here the license means nothing EXCEPT that it gives the public, via the licensure body, a means to ensure that the truly incompetent people, at least those who put people's lives at risk AND who are caught, can be censured. This is distinct from the actions of the civil courts, who prevent nothing but offer compensation to the victims after the harm has been done.

Yes, it's frustrating to see the level of incompetence out there. It's also very frustrating when people state opinion as fact (that's a sin I commit regularly!), or when people under-state the uncertainty in what they're doing. It's also VERY understandable, since "certainty sells" in our business. Try to treat these instances you've mentioned as "teachable moments" rather than letting them boil your blood.

 

[TenPenny]

Back in the dark ages, when I was in University, some of our profs made a particular point of discussing significant digits, and the accuracy of the numbers generated from calculations. I think that this was particularly important to them, as they had mostly come up through the 'slip stick' era, where is was crazy to carry 17 digit numbers through calculations when that level accuracy wasn't needed or was completely meaningless.

They also made a point of looking at the final number, and asking yourself if it makes sense. Does it seem that your answer is an order of magnitude higher or lower than you would expect? If so, then carefully review your calculations and assumptions.

A good engineer will think about what he is doing, and where he expects to go with his results, and not just blindly accept whatever number gets spit out at the end.

 

[SomptingGuy]

Back in those same dark ages, we had a lab that was based on measuring something (moment of inertia of a disc) in several different ways and then comparing and contrasting the results. Nobody told us it was an error analysis study. We all assumed that there was a "right" method and then several approximations. Our reports mostly came back with a red F on them. Then we got to re-do them using all the appropriate mathematics. A very good lesson.

- Steve

 

[apsix]

"How come in competitive sports and arts, there is very little BS at the top levels?"

The relevance of this statement to engineering is nil, and its veracity with regard to the arts is doubtful.

The visual and performing arts world is full of BS to us common folk.

(I'm not excusing the lack of basic knowledge in the engineering profession.)

 

[cvg]

there's plenty of BS in professional sports, just review the performance of the referees in the last couple games leading up to the Superbowl, in the NBA playoffs, in most baseball games, world cup soccer, need I go on? Not to mention the antics of some of the athletes who have been repeatedly charged with both misdemeanors and felonies, yet continue to play and get paid the big bucks - tacit acceptance of bad behavior by the owners and the fans.

 

[MintJulep]

Because we are not teaching fundamentals in engineering school anymore.

Universities see the industry is using FEA, so universities are teaching engineering students how to use FEA programs. Not teaching them how to understand the results. Not teaching the fundamentals of manual analysis. Not teaching the theory underlying FEA. Just teaching "make your pretty model in CAD, click the mesh button, click the solve button, look at the pretty pictures!"

Too many engineering graduates that don't even understand F=MA or V=IR or even "righty tighty, lefty loosey".

Look at the many many questions here on Eng-Tips that are asked due to a lack of understanding fundamentals.

 

[FeX32]

"Too many engineering graduates that don't even understand F=MA or V=IR or even "righty tighty, lefty loosey"."

I don't entirely agree. Though I agree that some(too many) graduates are severely under par, this is far exasperated if spoken in a general sense.


"Look at the many many questions here on Eng-Tips that are asked due to a lack of understanding fundamentals. "


Most of these can be attributed to someone with no eng. background asking the question.
Anyone that can click the left mouse button and a few keys on the keyboard can ask a question.

This is imo.





Fe