The gambit flow of shifting thought

Adhering to a "no blogging from work or school" policy is probably for the best, but it does mean that most of the interesting bloggable ideas thought up during the day fade from attention before I head elsewhere. Must find a more efficient way to do this.

Having climbed up the first couple sets of hills towards the engineering goal, I've got a slightly better view -- and demonstrably stronger legs -- but am not out of the fog yet. Got my transfer function on, pondered the s-plane, breadboarded some filters, made pretty pictures in matlab. Tied up loose ends from the past.

They wouldn't call it "convolution" if it didn't turn everybody's brains into pretzels, no?

They've been working on SPICE (very popular circuit simulation software) for over 30 years now. Why does it still suck so much to use?

The Magnetizing Vars would be a great band name.

Career angst, part II

So, what sounds interesting? How about some of these or these, or maybe this or that. This would be fun... but I bet something more practical like this would be too. Ditto for this sort of thing, these, as well as these, these, these, and this.

Yeah, I want to be an engineer. Still not sure if I am willing to do what it takes to get there, as there are a ton of downsides to doing this:

• Most engineering jobs seem to require an engineering degree. Even if the work you actually do has little or nothing to what you did in class.
  
• Engineering degrees are really heavy on the requirements. A brief survey of different universities' programs shows that the math/science/engineering coursework is about 3/4 of the credits in an engineering degree, as opposed to a little over half of the credits in a math or science degree.
  
• Most engineering degree programs are geared around 20-year-olds with no outside responsibilities or lives, in that you are required to be a full-time student while in the program and tend to have extensive labs and/or group projects.
  
• ...so your classmates are mostly a bunch of 20-year-old guys.
  
• Engineering programs are not offered at many schools. The options tend to be either Huge-Ass State, Selective Tech, or Spendy Religious U.
  
• A lot of the interesting (i.e. design) jobs require at least a Master's degree — aparently a BSEE gets you a job in testing in most large companies.
  
• A lot of the interesting work is in areas that I find morally objectionable, or is funded by parties that would take the work and make it so. (Make cool robots... that kill people! Design sensor networks... that will take away everybody's privacy!)
  
• You need an internship while you're in school to get your first job in the field.
  
• Oh yeah, you're pretty much screwed if you graduate into a recession.
  
• If you do get a job in your field, it's aparently a big deal if you get one where you only work 40 hours a week.
  

So that'd be at least two years of financial free-fall (and possible mountain of debt) with a full class load of all engineering, all the time, with no guarantee of a job where I get to make stuff. Why bother?

I think — I hope — that there is something fun lurking beneath the workload, that the coolness of what I'll get to make is enough to make up for it all. So for now I'm slogging through the homework on the classes that I'm taking here and there; when the time comes to make the jump back to full time school (or not), maybe I'll have found out for sure. If it doesn't work out, there are always more jobs in tech support....

ok, that's enough angst.

Career angst, part I

I have a good job. It's in tech support, but I have good co-workers, mostly good clients[1], am at a place that produces worthwhile goods and/or services in a nice location, there is occasional intellectual challenge to the work, the management puts their money where their mouths are with regards to work/life balance, everybody is wonderfully unpretentious when it comes to credentials[2], there's no dress code, and the pay's not bad. That's just about all of what one could want from a job, no?

Yet I am unhappy.

Realized about a year ago that what I'm missing at work is the opportunity to make things... and that I'm not going to be able to get that out of a career in I.T. I currently do have the occasion to exercise creativity in troubleshooting and writing documentation, but that's a far cry from being able to look at something cool and useful and say I made that. And what's worse is that I think I'd rather produce a tangible object -- something you can pick up, or at least kick -- than something that only exists on a computer, so most of the I.T.-related jobs that do make things (sysadmin positions with a lot of scripting or that morph into straight-up development jobs, web design, etc) are just not looking interesting. Doing network engineering is perhaps a little more appealing, but even at that top of that field (being a lead network architect for, say, AOL Time Warner or National LambdaRail) you're still just putting together routers and switches that somebody else made.[3] And going into I.T. management is right out. That rules out most of the jobs that are at least moderately connected to what I'm already doing.

So what does sound interesting?

---

[1] Yeah, I hear that's pretty rare in this line of work. In part this is because I'm primarily second-tier support; somebody else usually deals with the really stupid questions before the clients get passed off to me.

[2] One great thing about a field where so many people's degrees (if they even have one) are in unrelated fields is that they care more about what you know than how you did in school. (This probably deserves its own post....)

[3] ...and as far as I know, you still have to be on call in that kind of gig, which is the other thing I really dislike about my current job.

On intuition

Now and then I run across articles in the popular press (or "diversity" articles in more technically-oriented media) exhorting people to hire/pay more attention to women because their feminine qualities will be great business assets. ("Women are nurturing! And they're so great at communication!") Am too lazy to find samples of such articles right now, but this book has the sort of sentiment I've got in mind.

As a woman who isn't so great at a lot of the stereotypically "female" things (am not a graceful speaker, tend towards social cluelessness, etc), those ideas tend to grate on my nerves. Up until a couple of years ago, the worst of these irritants was the idea of intuition as a particularly female trait. In large part this was due to the concept of "feminine intuition", that ill-defined term that seems to imply that women have some magical source of wisdom that allows them to magically and effortlessly know things. That didn't jive with my experiences, and I was insulted by the implication that I hadn't worked for my knowledge. (Inquiring minds want to know: what differentiates feminine intuition from any other kind? If I have an amazing insight as to why the router is down, does that qualify as feminine intuition?) This sort of put me off of the idea of intuition in general.

It took some comments (random asides in lectures) from two computer science professors to rehabilitate the concept enough for me to start thinking about intuition in useful ways. Ran across some useful ideas in Polya's How to Solve It; he discusses it under the heading of "subconscious work". (Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, which appears to discuss the subject at length, is near the top of my long [and long-neglected] personal reading list.)

So I've finally been able to make my peace with it and not cringe everytime somebody mentions the word. I now see intuition as the subconscious taking shortcuts. It only works well when you've fed your brain enough things to make shortcuts between, and that takes a substantial investment in learning and having new experiences. But I'm still not quite sure how to deal with other people's gendered views of it....

[11/21 update: ran across an interesting post by Kathy Sierra arguing that intuition is critical for math, science, and engineering, and wondering about how that ought to affect education in those areas.]

Is this thing on?

After standing on the sidelines watching everybody else have fun, I'm giving it a shot and joining in the game. Whether I end up just playing in a corner by myself or not remains to be seen. (Preferably not, since if I wanted nothing more than a narcisisstic diary it'd be much easier to keep one on my own computer or on paper and not have to worry about pseudonymity....)

Hello, world!