Question: you seem to be a talanted engineer, but what makes you stand out from the others

Andrew Hearn answered on 18 Mar 2012:

I think in my field, we have to be good at learning quickly about the other fields to be able to develop the software for. I.e. for the automatic controller box for trains, I had to understand at an higher level how signal engineering worked, and what needs to be done, what cannot be done, and so on.

For radars, I had to get up to speed about radar and microwave engineering, and what radars can and cannot do, such as electromagnetic interference from the movement of the radar – so in software we had to make the microchips “smarter” to separate actual signals from noise (false signals). Similarly for flights – we had to simulate a lot of things while obeying the laws of physics, so that we get realistic planes into the virtual environment.

So like for any engineering fields, the engineer would need to be good at what s/he does, but for software, one, has to on top of that, need to be able to understand similar amounts of information from other fields in a shorter amount of time.

However as this “I’m an Engineer, get me out of here” has progressed, the less and less comfortable I feel about the idea of deciding which engineer is the best as we all have so much to give and share.

I think my answer here applies too!: http://bit.ly/z68HQ9

Luckily for us, we don’t get to choose – you do! (As I think I would have a really hard time trying to work out which engineer is the best one!) 🙂