The Engineer as Manager

I became an electrical engineer in 1966, after having been a ham radio operator at age 16, in 1957. I soon learned that designing radios as a profession was way different than doing it for fun. That was probably the first thing nobody told me about my new career. The second thing I learned was that I had been taught to do circuit analysis but nothing about design. Later I learned that the reason for this was that none of my professors ever worked in the real world so none of them knew anything practical. On top of that, transistors were pretty new, so they were trying to learn about them at the same time we students were learning both transistor and vacuum tube technology. The real shock came when I realized that I had to supervise technicians and other engineers. As a scientist told me many years later, "When I was working on my doctorate, nobody told me I would have to supervise other people. I have no clue what I'm doing." I totally understand that. You may have heard ...