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View Poll Results: How wouold you describe yourself
Engineer/scientist 68 56.67%
Artist/writer etc 3 2.50%
other 49 40.83%
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Old 08-14-2009, 11:47 AM   #21
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Still w*rking on that...
All I had was Business 100 in college. The rest was self-taught online and through a lot of reading. And of course you good folks and the links you provide. TY
My grasp is still fledgling at best. But give me numbers and some logic behind it and I can fly!
One thing engineers can't do is understand the details of accounting. I had the GI bill and went back to school for a MBA - I went just to get some money to buy a hang-glider! Never got an MBA, but I did get a hang glider. Also, I managed to struggle through Accounting. Later I learned that understanding what your accountant is talking about is really important if you are in business.

Accounting 101 is the same type of basic fundamental information as Financial Analysis - it's all cookbook. No rocket science, nothing anybody can't learn by reading a book which covers net present value, present value of future cash flow, discount rates, alternatives analysis, etc. Concepts like sunk costs are really important if you are trying to make decisions after loosing money in the market. You can't let emotions get in the way of the numbers.
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Old 08-14-2009, 11:51 AM   #22
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Is this some sort of ploy to trick closet geeks to out themselves? O.K. I'll admit to being a geek and a nerd.

I guess that I am not too surprised at the results. The engineers I worked with were all tightwads. Driving a flashy car was definitely looked upon with suspicion. Expensive clothes? Fugetaboutit.

Looking back, I can see that peer pressure helped me from slipping into the standard American consumerist mode. (Well, it didn't prevent me from buying a red Alfa Romeo spider, but a young man has to have some indulgences.)

I also feel that engineering is basically a young person's game. The energy, concentration, and attention to detail it demands was O.K. for a while, but there is no way I could do it now. I will be quite happy if I never see a differential equation again.
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Old 08-14-2009, 11:53 AM   #23
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...Hey great website for figuring out all this stuff.. Wolfram|Alpha Try entering, "car loan 8% interest 3 year balloon" in the search slot and it spits out a ton of great information.
Nice link. Wolfram is a familiar name to me because of their Mathematica software.
Check this out
Wolfram|Alpha Examples - Money & Finance
However, I was unable to change the fields.
Must need a license for the software?
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Old 08-14-2009, 11:55 AM   #24
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One thing engineers can't do is understand the details of accounting.
Engineers and scientists usually first encounter accounting when they move into management roles. The concepts are pretty simple, but as these simple things compound they produce complex structures.
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Old 08-14-2009, 11:58 AM   #25
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I guess that I am not too surprised at the results. The engineers I worked with were all tightwads.
I'm interested in the cause-and-effect here.

I can see several different factors leading to whether or not some occupations are overrepresented or underrepresented in the FIRE realm. For example:

* How well it pays. The better it pays, the farther below your means you can live, the more you can save and invest, and the sooner you can FIRE.

* Whether or not you are covered by a good defined benefit pension plan, particularly one that provides for early retirement (say in your 50s or even earlier in some cases).

* Whether or not the occupation has a high level of "personal satisfaction." People are obviously more likely to not want to leave jobs they enjoy, even if they have reached FI.

So in a nutshell, someone who has a high paying job they dislike with a pension would be most likely to retire early, whereas someone with lesser income, no pension and a job they love may wind up dying in their job.
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Old 08-14-2009, 12:23 PM   #26
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I do miss Mathematica. When my computer died a couple of months ago, I called Wolfram to see how much it would cost to upgrade to the new version and move the license to a new machine. They wanted $2000, and that was after a 20% existing customer discount.

Yikes! I decided that $2K was above my means.

The graphics package was awesome though.
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Old 08-14-2009, 12:25 PM   #27
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I do miss Mathematica. When my computer died a couple of months ago, I called Wolfram to see how much it would cost to upgrade to the new version and move the license to a new machine. They wanted $2000, and that was after a 20% existing customer discount.

Yikes! I decided that $2K was above my means.

The graphics package was awesome though.
I use IDL and AutoCad in my w*rk, the cost of a "seat" and upkeep is horrendous
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Old 08-14-2009, 12:28 PM   #28
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O.K. I'll admit to being a geek and a nerd.

I will be quite happy if I never see a differential equation again.
Hey, buddy, there's a line here! <leading to the geek/nerd confessional>

DiffEq? You made me shudder.

Ok, show of hands for this one...did any of you ever really care how long it took to fill and/or empty
that *@#! water tank ?
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Old 08-14-2009, 12:38 PM   #29
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One thing engineers can't do is understand the details of accounting.
B.Eng in EE here.

Our degree included 3 Accounting courses which were mandatory to pass to get the degree. Reasoning is that Engineers often go on to manage departments, companies and Corporations. They certainly are often required to write proposals to justify capital projects, so need to know ROI, RONA, NPV, etc. I never thought about it before, guess I assumed that all engineering degrees required Accounting.
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Old 08-14-2009, 12:46 PM   #30
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B.Eng in EE here.

Our degree included 3 Accounting courses which were mandatory to pass to get the degree. Reasoning is that Engineers often go on to manage departments, companies and Corporations. They certainly are often required to write proposals to justify capital projects, so need to know ROI, RONA, NPV, etc. I never thought about it before, guess I assumed that all engineering degrees required Accounting.
My B.S. in EE (at Texas A&M, a long time ago) didn't require me to take any accounting classes although many chose accounting as an elective. I have never taken an accounting or economics or business class. We did have to take a 2 unit senior level EE class called "Engineering Economics". It was generally considered to be a "gimme" - - in other words, nearly everyone got an A in that class (and believe me, it was the *only* EE class like that! ). We learned about Gantt charts and that sort of thing.
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Old 08-14-2009, 12:50 PM   #31
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Hey, buddy, there's a line here! <leading to the geek/nerd confessional>

DiffEq? You made me shudder.

Ok, show of hands for this one...did any of you ever really care how long it took to fill and/or empty that *@#! water tank ?
Me! Me!



I have to admit that I LOVED diff eq and got an A in it. One of the things I might do in ER, is to brush up on diff eq just for fun.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:00 PM   #32
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My B.S. in EE (at Texas A&M, a long time ago) didn't require me to take any accounting classes although many chose accounting as an elective. I have never taken an accounting or economics or business class. We did have to take a 2 unit senior level EE class called "Engineering Economics". It was generally considered to be a "gimme" - - in other words, nearly everyone got an A in that class (and believe me, it was the *only* EE class like that! ). We learned about Gantt charts and that sort of thing.
Maybe it's just a UK thing with Engineering degrees requiring Accounting. I did find it interesting and pretty easy - a nice break from many of the EE classes !! We were also required to pass a class in Industrial Sociology (think labor relations, managing employees etc).




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Me! Me!



I have to admit that I LOVED diff eq and got an A in it. One of the things I might do in ER, is to brush up on diff eq just for fun.
me too, and I even majored in Transmission Theory and began my career as a Radar engineer. However, all that 3-D math did wear me down and when I switched to Process Control I was much happier
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:01 PM   #33
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One of the things I might do in ER, is to brush up on diff eq just for fun.
You are one sick individual.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:09 PM   #34
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You are one sick individual.
Well, maybe not sick but definitely a social misfit. In one way or another, I think most of us here fit in that category (just maybe not in loving diff eq, but who ever heard of someone retiring in their 30's or 40's? Definitely misfit material.).

I loved differential equations, and still do. I enjoyed all my calculus classes, too, and linear algebra was really cool! But diff eq was more challenging and so much fun. I still have my old textbooks and I think they have half the answers in the back of the book, so I can have a lot of fun re-doing all those problems.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:13 PM   #35
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I loved differential equations, and still do. I enjoyed all my calculus classes, too, and linear algebra was really cool! But diff eq was more challenging and so much fun. I still have my old textbooks and I think they have half the answers in the back of the book, so I can have a lot of fun re-doing all those problems.
Leave it to an Aggie!

I was really good at linear algebra. Got an A+ in it. I think I still have the textbook and solutions manual in the garage. I've probably forgotten 2/3 of it...
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"Hey, for every ten dollars, that's another hour that I have to be in the work place. That's an hour of my life. And my life is a very finite thing. I have only 'x' number of hours left before I'm dead. So how do I want to use these hours of my life? Do I want to use them just spending it on more crap and more stuff, or do I want to start getting a handle on it and using my life more intelligently?" -- Joe Dominguez (1938 - 1997)
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:18 PM   #36
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When I retired, the problem of the moment was simulating noise in electrical circuits and that requires stochastic differential equations. I'm OK with regular DiffyQs, but it gives me the heebie-jeebies when their coefficients start wiggling around randomly.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:19 PM   #37
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me too, and I even majored in Transmission Theory and began my career as a Radar engineer. However, all that 3-D math did wear me down and when I switched to Process Control I was much happier
That's fascinating! Physical oceanography involves a lot of PDE's, but the assumptions you have to make are pretty mind boggling and most of the art in that science is in the assumptions, not the PDE's. Math that really isn't math, in a sense. In retrospect I would probably have been happier doing something that was more mathematical and less dependent on intuition and tradition, but really, it's all good.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:21 PM   #38
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Leave it to an Aggie!
tee-hee! Yep!

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I was really good at linear algebra. Got an A+ in it. I think I still have the textbook and solutions manual in the garage. I've probably forgotten 2/3 of it...
Gotta like someone who got an A+ in linear algebra! And see? You might end up working through some of those problems after ER, too! Gotta keep your mind sharp.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:27 PM   #39
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I guess that I am not too surprised at the results. The engineers I worked with were all tightwads. Driving a flashy car was definitely looked upon with suspicion. Expensive clothes? Fugetaboutit.
Spending money on that stuff is suboptimal.
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Old 08-14-2009, 01:34 PM   #40
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Want2retire, this will help keep you sharp.

The Spider Problem
, first homework in vector calculus and the traumatic event of my sophomore year:

Assume a regular N-gon. The distance from each apex to the center is 1. There is a spider at each apex and they are arranged male-female-male-female....
The spiders all look in the clockwise direction and, seeing a member of the opposite sex, begin pursuit . They all travel at speed 1.

Their paths form a spiral.

Give the equation of the spiral, its arc length, and the time they arrive at the center.
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