Category: rant

The future of electrical engineering as a profession

The other day I was watching Dave Jones, a video blogger that I find entertaining and informative. His blog, the EEVblog, is catnip for nerds who like to solder stuff and use oscilloscopes.

Recently he did a short segment where he answered a question from a student who was upset that his teacher told him that EE was perhaps not a great field for job security, and he sort of went on a colorful rant about how wrong the professor is.

The professor is right.

Electrical engineering employment is indeed in decline, at least in the USA, and I suspect, other development countries. It’s not that EE skills are not helpful, or that understanding electronics, systems, signals, etc, are not useful. They are all useful and will continue to be. But I think more and more of the work, in particular, the high paying work, will migrate to software people who understand the hardware “well enough.” Which is fine. The fact is that EEs make good firmware engineers.

I think someone smart, with a solid EE background and a willingness to adapt throughout your entire career, should always find employment, but over time I suspect it will be less and less directly related to EE.

I mostly know Silicon Valley. Semiconductor employment is way down here. Mostly, it is through attrition, as people retire and move on, but nobody is hiring loads of young engineers to design chips anymore. It makes sense. Though chip volumes continue to grow, margins continue to shrink, and new chip design starts are way down, because “big” SOCs (systems on chip) with lots of peripherals can fill many niches that used to require custom or semi-custom parts.

I suspect that the need for EEs in circuit board design is also in decline. Not because there are fewer circuit boards, but because designing them is getting easier. One driver is the proliferation of very capable semiconductor parts with lots of cool peripherals is also obviating a lot of would-have-been design work. It’s gotten really easy to plop down a uC and hook up a few things over serial links and a few standard interfaces. In essence, a lot of board design work has been slurped into the chips, where one team designs it once rather than every board designer doing it again. There might be more boards being designed than ever, but the effort per board seems to be going down fast, and that’s actually not great for employment. Like you, I take apart a lot of stuff, and I’m blown away lately not by how complex many modern high volume boards are, but how dead simple they are.

The growth of the “maker” movement bears this out. Amateurs, many with little or no electronics knowledge, are designing circuit boards that do useful things, and they work. Are they making mistakes? Sure, they are. The boards are often not pretty, and violate rules and guidelines that any EE would know, but somehow they crank out working stuff anyway.

I do hold out some hope that as Moore’s law sunsets — and it really is sunseting this time — there will be renewed interest in creative EE design, as natural evolution in performance and capacity won’t solve problems “automatically.” That will perhaps mean more novel architectures, use of FPGAs, close HW/SW codesign, etc.

Some statistics bear all this out. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has this to say about the 2014-2024 job outlook for EEs:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm#tab-6

Note that over a 10 year period they are predicting essentially no growth for EE’s at all. None. Compare this to employment overall, in which they predict 7% growth.

One final note. People who love EE tend to think of EEs as the “model EE” — someone clever, curious, and energetic, and who remains so way for 40+ years. But let’s remind ourselves that 1/2 of EEs are below median.  If you know the student in question, you can make an informed assessment about that person’s prospects, but when you are answering a generic question about prospects for generic EEs, I think the right picture to have in mind is that of the middling engineer, not a particularly good one.

I’m not saying at all that EE is a bad career, and for all I know the number of people getting EE degrees is going down faster than employment, so that the prospects for an EE graduate are actually quite good, but it is important for students to know the state of affairs.

Narrow fact-checking is less than useless

Last night, Donald Trump gave a speech that included a bunch of statements about crime that the New York Times fact-checked for us. This summarizes what they found:

Many of Mr. Trump’s facts appear to be true, though the Republican presidential nominee sometimes failed to offer the entire story, or provide all of the context that might help to explain his numbers.

Putting aside the ridiculously low bar of “many facts appear to be true”, they failed to mention or explain that in every case, despite his factoids being narrowly true, the conclusions he was drawing from them, and suggesting we draw from them, were absolutely, incontrovertibly false.

This kind of reporting drives me bonkers. Crime stats, like all stats, are noisy, and from one year to another, in a specific city, you can find an increase or decrease — whatever you are looking for. But the overall trends are clear, and Trump’s assessment was utter bullshit.

Another, somewhat less savory, media outlet did a much better job, because they took the 10 minutes of Googling necessary to assemble some charts and put Trump’s facts in context.

Would it have been partisan for the NYT to put Trump’s facts into context with respect to the conclusions he was drawing from them? It just seems like journalism.

 

Gah… Apple

I use a Mac at work. It’s a fine machine and I like the screen and battery life, but I’m not a generally fan of Apple the company or its products. Sometimes I forget why, and I need to be reminded.

Like today, when I decided, even though Safari is basically a sucky product, there are probably people that use it, so I might just port my little political statement Chrome extension to Safari. I’d already done so to Firefox, so how hard could it be?

Well, it turns out, not too hard. Actually, for the minimalist version that most people are using, it required no code changes at all. It did take me awhile to figure out how everything works in the Apple extension tool, but overall, not too bad.

I knew I would have to submit to reviewers at Apple to get it published. I had to do the same at Mozilla for Firefox. But what I did not know is that in order to do that, I had to sign up to be an Apple Developer. Moreover, I could only do so under my real name (ie, not dave@toolsofourtools.org) and most annoying, they wanted $99. A year. or as long as the extension is up.

I’m not going to play $99/yr to provide a free plugin for the few people who are dumb enough to use Safari on a regular basis.

In an odd way, this gets right to the heart of one of the many reasons I do not like Apple. They are constitutionally opposed to my favorite aspects of the computing and the Internet: the highly empowering ability for people to scrappily do, say, make anything they want for next to nothing, and at the level of sophistication that they want to deal with. Apple doesn’t like scrappy things in its world, and actively weeds them out.

Apple, you suck. Thanks for the reminder never to spend my own money on your polished crap.

Simulate this, my dark overloards!

Apparently, both Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson believe that we are probably living in a more advanced civilization’s computer simulation.

Now, I’m no philosopher, so I can’t weigh in on whether I really exist, but it does occur to me that if this is a computer simulation, it sucks. First, we have cruelty, famine, war, natural disasters, disease. On top of that, we do not have flying cars, or flying people, or teleportation for that matter.

Seriously, whoever is running this advanced civilization simulation must be into some really dark shit.

Mental Models

I think we all make mental models constantly — simplifications of the world that help us understand it. And for services on the Internet, our mental models are probably very close — logically, if not in implementation — to the reality of what those services do. If not, how could we use them?

I also like to imagine how the service works, too. I don’t know why I do this, but it makes me feel better about the universe. For a lot of things, to a first approximation, the what and how are sufficiently close that they are essentially the same model. And sometimes a model of how it works eludes me entirely.

for example, my model of email is that an email address is the combination of a username and a system name. My mail server looks up the destination mail server, and IP routes my blob of text to the destination mail server, where that server routes it to the appropriate user’s “mailbox,” which is a file. Which is indeed how it works, more or less, with lots of elision of what I’m sure are important details.

I’ve also begun sorting my mental models of Internet companies and services into a taxonomy that have subjective meaning for me, based on how meritorious and/or interesting they are. Here’s a rough draft:

The What The How Example Dave’s judgment
obvious as in real life email Very glad these exist, but nobody deserves a special pat on the back for them. I’ll add most matchmaking services, too.
obvious non-obvious, but simple and/or elegant Google Search (PageRank) High regard. Basically, this sort of thing has been the backbone of Internet value to-date
not obvious / inscrutable nobody cares Google Buzz lack of popularity kills these. Not much to talk about
obvious obvious Facebook Society rewards these but technically, they are super-boring to me
obvious non-obvious and complex natural language, machine translation, face recognition Potentially very exciting, but not really very pervasive or economically important just yet. Potentially creepy and may represent the end of humanity’s reign on earth.

 

Google search is famously straightforward. You’re searching for some “thing,” and Google is combing a large index for that “thing.” Back in the Altavista era, that “thing” was just keywords on a page. Google’s first innovation was to use the site’s own popularity (as measured by who links to it and the rankings of those links.) to help sort the results. I wonder how many people had a some kind of mental model of how Google worked that was different than that of Altavista — aside from the simple fact that it worked much “better.” The thing about Google’s “Pagerank” was that it was quite simple, and quite brilliant, because, honestly, none of the rest of us thought of it. So kudos to them.

There have been some Internet services I’ve tried over the years that I could not quite understand. I’m not talking about how they work under the hood, but how they appear to work from my perspective. Remember Google “Buzz?” I never quite understood what that was supposed to be doing.

Facebook, in its essence is pretty simple, too, and I think we all formed something of a working mental model for what we think it does. Here’s mine, written up as SQL code. First, the system is composed of a few tables:

A table of users, a table representing friendships, and a table of posts. The tables are populated by straightforward UI actions like “add friend” or “write post.”

Generating a user’s wall when they log in is as simple as:

You could build an FB clone with that code alone. It is eye-rollingly boring and unclever.

Such an implementation would die when you got past a few thousand users or posts, but with a little work and modern databases that automatically shard and replicate, etc, you could probably handle a lot more. Helping FB is the fact they makes no promises about correctness: a post you make may or may not ever appear on your friend’s wall, etc.

I think the ridiculous simplicity of this is why I have never taken Facebook very seriously. Obviously it’s a gajillion dollar idea, but technically, there’s nothing remotely creative or interesting there. Getting it all to work for a billion users making a billion posts a day is, I’m sure, a huge technical challenge, but not requiring inspiration. (As an aside, today’s FB wall is not so simple. It uses some algorithm to rank and highlight posts. What’s the algorithm and why and when will my friends see my post? Who the hell knows?! Does this bother anybody else but me?)

The last category is things that are reasonably obviously useful to lots of people, but how they work is pretty opaque, even if you think about it for awhile. That is, things that we can form a mental model of what it is, but mere mortals do not understand how it works. Machine translation falls into that category, and maybe all the new machine learning and future AI apps do, too.

It’s perhaps “the” space to watch, but if you ask me the obvious what / simple how isn’t nearly exhausted yet — as long as you can come up with an interesting “why,” that is.

The answer is always the same, regardless of question. (Civil Aviation Edition)

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial last week suggesting that the US air traffic control system needs to privatize.

It’s not a new debate, and though I will get into some specifics of the discussion below, what really resonated for me is how religious and ideological is the belief that corporations just do everything better. It’s not like the WSJ made any attempt whatsoever to list (and even dismiss) counter-arguments to ATC privatization. It’s almost as if the notion that there could be some justification for a publicly funded and run ATC has just never occurred to them.

It reminded me of a similar discussion, in a post in an energy blog I respect, lamenting the “dysfunction” in California’s energy politics, particularly from the CPUC.

What both pieces seemed to have in common is a definition of dysfunction that hews very close to “not the outcome that a market would have produced.” That is to say, they see the output of non-market (that is, political) processes as fundamentally inferior and inefficient, if not outright illegitimate. Of course, the outcomes from political processes can be inefficient and dysfunctional, but this is hardly a law of nature.

For my loyal reader (sadly, not a typo), none of this is news, but it still saddens me that so many potentially interesting problems (like how best to provision air traffic control services) break down on such tired ideological grounds: do you want to make policy based on one-interested-dollar per vote or one-interested-person per vote?

I want us to be much more agnostic and much more empirical in these kinds of debates. Sometimes markets get good/bad outcomes, sometimes politics does.

For example, you might never have noticed that you can’t fly Lufthansa or Ryanair from San Francisco to Chicago. That’s because there are “cabotage” laws in the US that bar foreign carriers from offering service between US cities. Those laws are blatantly anti-competitive and the flying public is definitely harmed by this. This is a political outcome I don’t particularly like due, in part, to Congress paying better attention to the airlines than to the passengers. Yet, I’m not quite ready to suggest that politics does not belong in aviation.

Or, in terms of energy regulation, it’s worth remembering that we brought politics into the equation a very long time ago because “the market” was generating pretty crappy outcomes, too. What I’m saying is that neither approach has a exclusive rights to dysfunction.

A control towerOK. Let’s get back to ATC and the WSJ piece.

In it, the WSJ makes frequent reference to Canada’s ATC organization, NavCanada, that was privatized during a budget crunch a few years back, and has performed well since then. This is in contrast to to an FAA that has repeated “failed to modernize.”

But the US is not Canada, and our air traffic situation is very different. A lot of planes fly here! Anyone who has spent any serious time looking at our capacity problems knows thUS and Europe have very different sources of flight delaysat the major source of delay in the US is from insufficient runways and terminal airspace, not control capabilities per se. That is to say, modernizing the ATC system so that aircraft could fly more closely using GPS position information doesn’t really buy you all that much if the real crunch is access to the airport. If you are really interested, check out this comparison of the US and European ATC performance. The solution in the US is pouring more concrete in more places, not necessarily a revamped ATC. (It’s not that ATC equipment could not benefit from revamping, only that it is not the silver bullet promised.)

Here’s another interesting mental exercise: Imagine you have developed new technology to improve the throughput of an ATC facility by 30% — but the hitch is that when you deploy the technology, there will be diminution in performance during the switchover, as human learning, inevitable hiccups, and the need to temporary run the old and new systems in parallel takes its toll. Now imagine that you want to deploy that technology at a facility that is already operating at near its theoretical maximum capability. See a problem there? It’s not an easy thing.

Another issue in the article regards something called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast), a system by which aircraft broadcast their GPS-derived position. Sounds pretty good, and yet, the US has taken a long time to get it going widely. (It’s not required on all aircraft until 2020) Why? Well, one reason is that a lot of the potential cost-savings from switching to ADS-B would come from the retirement of expensive, old primary radars that “paint” aircraft with radio waves and sense the reflected energy. Thing is, primary radars can see metal objects in the sky, and ADS-B receivers only see aircraft that are broadcasting their position. You may have heard in recent hijackings how transponders were disabled by pilot — so, though the system is cool, it certainly cannot alone replace the existing surveillance systems. The benefits are not immediate and large, and it leaves some important problems unsolved. Add in the high cost of equippage, and it was an easy target to delay. But is that a sign of dysfunction or good decision-making?

All of which is to say that I’m not sure a privately run organization, facing similar constraints, would make radically different decisions than has the FAA.

Funding the system is an interesting question, too. Yes, a private organization that can charge fees has a reliable revenue stream and is thus is able to go to financial markets to borrow for investment.  This is in contrast to the FAA, which has had a hard time funding major new projects because of constant congressional budget can-kicking. Right now the FAA is operating on an extension of its existing authorization (from 2012), and a second extension is pending, with a real reauthorization still behind that. OK, so score one for a private organization. (Unless we can make Congress function again, at least.)

But what happens to privatized ATC if there is a major slowdown in air travel? Do investments stop, or is service degraded due to cost cutting, or does the government end up lending a hand anyway? And how might an airline-fee-based ATC operate differently from one that ostensibly serves the public? Even giving privatization proponents the benefit of the doubt that a privatized ATC would be more efficient and better at cost saving, would such an organization be as good at spending more money when an opportunity comes along to make flying safer, faster, or more convenient for passengers? How about if the costs of such changes fall primarily on the airlines, through direct equippage costs and ATC fees? Or, imagine a scenario where most airlines fly large aircraft between major cities, and an an upstart starts flying lots of small aircraft between small cities. Would a privatized ATC or publicly funded ATC better resist the airlines’ anti-competitive pressures to erect barriers to newcomers?

I actually don’t know the answers. The economics of aviation are somewhat mysterious to me, as they probably are to you unless your an economist or operations researcher. But I’m pretty sure the Scott McCartney of the WSJ knows even less.

 

progress, headphones edition

It looks like Intel is joining the bandwagon of people that want to take away the analog 3.5mm “headphone jack” and replace it with USB-C. This is on the heels of Apple announcing that this is definitely happening, whether you like it or not.

obsolete technology
obsolete technology

There are a lot of good rants out there already, so I don’t think I can really add much, but I just want to say that this does sadden me. It’s not about analog v. digital per se, but about simple v. complex and open v. closed.

The headphone jack is a model of simplicity. Two signals and a ground. You can hack it. You can use it for other purposes besides audio. You can get a “guzinta” or “guzoutta” adapter to match pretty much anything in the universe old or new — and if you can’t get it, you can make it. Also, it sounds Just Fine.

Now, I’m not just being ant-change. Before the 1/8″ stereo jack, we had the 1/4″ stereo jack. And before that we had mono jacks, and before that, strings and cans. And all those changes have been good. And maybe this change will be good, too.

But this transition will cost us something. For one, it just won’t work as well. USB is actually a fiendishly complex specification, and you can bet there will be bugs. Prepare for hangs, hiccups, and snits. And of course, none of the traditional problems with headphones are eliminated: loose connectors, dodgy wires, etc. On top of this, there will be, sure as the sun rises, digital rights management, and multiple attempts to control how and when you listen to music. Prepare to find headphones that only work with certain brands of players and vice versa. (Apple already requires all manufacturers of devices that want to interface digitally with the iThings to buy and use a special encryption chip from Apple — under license, natch.)

And for nerd/makers, who just want to connect their hoozyjigger to their whatsamaducky, well, it could be the end of the line entirely. For the time being, while everyone has analog headphones, there will be people selling USB-C audio converter thingies — a clunky, additional lump between devices. But as “all digital” headphones become more ubiquitous, those adapters will likely disappear, too.

Of course, we’ll always be able to crack open a pair of cheap headphones and steal the signal from the speakers themselves … until the neural interfaces arrive, that is.

EDIT: 4/28 8:41pm: Actually, the USB-C spec does allow analog on some of the pins as a “side-band” signal. Not sure how much uptake we’ll see of that particular mode.

 

More minimum wage bullshit

 

Workers unaware that they are soon to be laid off.
Workers unaware that they are soon to be laid off.

Some clever economists have come up with a name for the religious  application of simple economic principles to complex situations where they probably don’t apply: Econ-101ism.

That’s immediately what I thought of when my better half told me about this stupid article in Investor’s Business Daily about the minimum wage and UC Berkeley.

See, folks at Berkeley touted the $15/hr minimum wage as a good thing, and then UC laid off a bunch of people. Coincidence? The good people at Irritable Bowel Disease think not!

Except, few at UC gets paid the minimum wage. And the $15/hr minimum wage has not taken effect and won’t take effect for years. And the reason for the job cuts are the highly strained budget situation at the UCs, a problem that is hardly new.

You could make an argument that a $15/hr minimum will strain the economy, resulting in lower tax revenue, resulting in less state money, resulting in layoffs at the UC’s. I guess. Quite a lot of moving parts in that story, though.

Smells like bullshit.

Edit: UCB does have its own minimum wage, higher than the California minimum. It has been $14/hr since 10/2015 and will be $15/hr starting in 2017. (http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28522491/uc-system-will-raise-minimum-wage-15-an)

Another edit: Chancellor Dirks claim the 500 job cuts would save $50M/yr. That implies an average hourly cost of $50/hr. Even if 1/2 that goes to overhead and benefits, those would be $25/hr jobs, not near the minimum. In reality, the jobs probably had a range of salaries, and one can imagine some were near the $15 mark, but it is not possible that all or even most of them were.

 

Taking back Public Policy

Hold on folks, I’m about to get highly normative.

You see, I keep running into people who claim to do “public policy” for a living, or their business card says “Director of Public Policy.”

But when I talk to them, I find out they don’t know anything about public policy. Worse, they don’t care. What most of these people do for a living is “trying to win” some game.

So public policy becomes “communications,” when there is a need to convince people that something is good for them, or supporting politicians directly, when simple communications doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

At best, I would call this work advocacy. But “Director of the Stuff We Want” does not sound so good, so we get “Director of Public Policy.”

Okay, whatever, I’m not an idiot. I get how things work in the real world. Down in the scrum, there is no public good, there is no “what is best?” There are only people fighting for what they want, and we all pretend that sorta kinda over enough time, we end up with outcomes that are a reasonable balance of everyone’s interests, intensity of interests (particularly important if you like guns), and resources (particularly important if you have lots of money).

Except that process seems to be whiffing a bit these days, no?

What I wish for “public policy” would be for the field to somehow professionalize, to set norms of behavior, to set some notion of this-bullshit-is-too-much. Maybe, if so many people purporting to offer policy analysis weren’t so entirely full of crap all the time, we could one day reach the point where people would take policy analysis half seriously again.

So, in the interest of brevity, here are some signs your policy work may be pure hackery:

  • You talk in absolutes. If you’re in the business of telling someone that solar power or electric utilities or oil and gas companies or wind turbines or nuclear  are wonderful or evil, you probably are not doing public policy work. You’re just confusing people and wasting everyone’s time and attention.
  • your salary includes a bonus for successfully causing / stopping something
  • you will not admit publicly to any shortcoming of your preferred position
  • you do not even read work that comes to different conclusions than yours
  • if you arrive at conferences in a private jet

I also notice a lot of people who “do” public policy are also attorneys. That makes sense — knowing how the law works certainly helps. But lawyering and policy work should not be the same. Lawyers have a well-developed set of professional ethics centered around protecting their clients’ interests while not breaking any laws. This is flying way too low to the ground for good policy work. The policy world should aspire to a higher standard. Based on the low esteem most folks feel for the legal profession, it seems reasonable that if we ever hope for people to take policy work seriously, we’ll need to at least view “our clients” more broadly than “who pays our salary.”

So, what is public policy? Well, I think it’s the process by which the impacts of choices faced by government are predicted and the results of choices already made are evaluated. It takes honesty, humility, and a willingness to let data update your conclusions.

Back in Real Life, public policy professionals, of course, also need skills of persuasion and influence in order advocate on behalf of their conclusions (and their employers’ conclusions, natch). But for the love of god, if you skip the analytical step, you’re not doing public policy, you’re doing assholery.

 

 

Worst environmental disaster in history?

In keeping with Betteridge’s Law: no.

My news feed is full of headlines like:

These are not from top-tier news sources, but they’re getting attention all the same. Which is too bad, because they’re all false by any reasonable SoCal gas leakmeasure. Worse, all of the above seem to deliberately misquote from a new paper published in Science. The paper does say, however:

This CH4 release is the second-largest of its kind recorded in the U.S., exceeded only by the 6 billion SCF of natural gas released in the collapse of an underground storage facility in Moss Bluff, TX in 2004, and greatly surpassing the 0.1 billion SCF of natural gas leaked from an underground storage facility near Hutchinson, KS in 2001 (25). Aliso Canyon will have by far the largest climate impact, however, as an explosion and subsequent fire during the Moss Bluff release combusted most of the leaked CH4, immediately forming CO2.

Make no doubt about it, it is a big release of methane. Equal, to the annual GHG output of 500,000 automobiles for a year.

But does that make is one of the largest environmental disasters in US history? I argue no, for a couple of reasons.

Zeroth: because of real, actual environmental disasters, some of which I’ll list below.

First: without the context of the global, continuous release of CO2, this would not affect the climate measurably. That is, by itself, it’s not a big deal.

Second: and related, there are more than 250 million cars in the US, so this is 0.2% of the GHG released by automobiles in the US annually. Maybe the automobile is the ongoing environmental disaster? (Here’s some context: The US is 15.6% of global GHG emissions, transport is 27% of that, and 35% of that is from passenger cars. By my calculations, that makes this incident about 0.0003% of global GHG emissions.)

Lets get back to some real environmental disasters? You know, like the kind that kill people, animals, and lay waste to the land and sea? Here are a list of just some pretty big man-made environmental disasters in the US:

Of course, opening up the competition to international disasters, including US-created ones, really expands the list, but you get the picture.

All this said, it’s really too bad this happened, and it will set California back on its climate goals. I was saddened to see that SoCal Gas could not cap this well quickly, or at least figure out a way to safely flare the leaking gas.

But it’s not the greatest US environmental disaster of all time. Not close.