On the second issue that you have raised – which is essentially value versus cost. I run into this all the time being a ‘high priced consultant’. What this means is that I charge a high hourly rate. However, as I point out to potential clients, the rate is basically irrelevant. What counts is the rate * the number of hours required to get the job done. Of course if management really thinks that a 2 year engineer is the same as a 30 year engineer then this argument is dismissed. The good news is that I have no interest in working for management that thinks the two are equivalent!

I’m an old guy with 2 engineering degrees – the first one in EE (Purdue). With 30 years of experience mostly in software and silver hair, I’ve already entered that stage of life when I can tell stories and wink at the end like you must be able to recognize the general lesson it provides.

If you’re still worried about which degree(s) you got, then you’re inexperienced; so wet behind the ears that you still think everything you’re supposed to know was taught in school. That’s just the beginning.

Anonymous March 17, 2009 at 9:34 am is right that there are several layers of design to be considered but blames EEs for deaths for the wrong reason. Companies love to hire the young on the basis of false economy. Hiring managers (often not experienced engineers themselves) often make the same mistake. They fail to embed the right balance of experience in their organizations. Hiring less experienced engineers is more expensive, and the fastest development path is the slowest and most expensive way to build a crappy product (and creating more crappy technology that can’t be reused – adding to the overall expense plus a lost set of additional opportunities).

Management tends to hire the cheapest set of engineers they think they can get away with and then give them a minimum amount of time to build a product. That’s the primary reason their projects run vastly over time and budget and why products are so lousy that they can go beyond irritating to actually kill people.

Now if you happen to work for HP, please tell someone that it’s irritating that the battery charge status gets out of sync and gives me a constantly blinking light on the front of my laptop. I googled and found lots of people advising that the battery needed to be replaced. It doesn’t. You just have to remove the battery, reboot the computer, then replace the battery and reboot again to work around the software glich. And if you happen to have an HP Photosmart printer, perhaps you’ll join with me in expressing irritation that you can’t print in B&W when the magenta cartridge is past its “use by” date without jumping through work-around hoops even though HP swears they don’t block printing by cartridge date.

Don’t even get me started on Microsoft.

A bit of a logic issue perhaps. If you’re an embedded systems expert, how do you know that anyone would be better off with a CS if the product is “less embedded”? Doesn’t that question lie outside your area of expertise?

Without “science,” the name “computer scientist” is misplaced. I’m not of the school that thinks that anything that’s complicated is science. My wife is complicated.