Motors, electronics... they're conceptually simpler, and the gap between the textbook and reality is small. But when you're talking a gooey melty viscous fluid going through an extruder and then cooling and hardening on a plate.... textbook understanding doesn't get you far.
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Something I didn't realize in like 9 years of theory focused engineering school is just how much of what you need to know is basically only knowable through bug-fixing. Engineering education is 10% concepts/design/theory, and 90% bug fixing metis.
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Bugs also thoroughly violate your sense of proportions of value/investment.
- The triviality of a bug has little correlation to how long it will take you to discover/fix it. That's entirely a function of experience.
- The cost of the bug is often the value of the whole project.
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Bugs are basically insulting. They don't respect what you think you know. Only how strong your Fingerspitzengehfül for traversing the troubleshooting tree is.
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To a first approximation, your engineering ability is the number of bugs you've fixed
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Ability to unearth bugs? Software engineers tell me I have an uncanny ability to go off script during testing.
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if you have an uncanny abiity, your bug-fixing number should go up much faster than average since you'll fix more bugs/unit time than others
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Hmm that makes you a tester/QA person rather than a full-stack developer/designer I think? I was pretty good at that too as PM. My software team used to complain that I’d find bugs within minutes of a new build that would likely not be found for months in production 😈
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They did call me testing, testy, something like that yeah.
Full-stack lol. When I say I'm a surface scientist that describes my programming abilities too.
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