Ask HN: Who Taught You Engineering?

Video games.

Libgen and YouTube

Minecraft mods

I think https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey had similar questions. If not, you can suggest them to ask in a next survey

Outside programming I’ve never met someone self taught saying they are engineers. Has anyone met one?

Engineers taught me engineering, in college.

My dad. He was an electronic organs technician (started in the 80s). Later I studied electronics engineering and computer science in college.

I was lucky enough to get hired to work for an old neckbeard type who took me under his wing and spent 3 years making me not worthless.

Fantasy of becoming a hacker made me google things up. Probably, my father also motivated me a lot, who himself is an engineer.

There were a lot of things that made me curious, and alas, I learned things myselves. I would give not all but a significant credit to academia as well.

University? It was an accredited engineering degree

Thesis supervisor. It was a speech transformer. There's a lot of complex parts. He taught me to break it down into different parts, like input, output, and splitting components into black boxes. Speech is very complex, so what we did was just extract certain parts that were most impactful instead of getting it perfect.

He also taught me to take inspiration from different sources instead of trying to be too clever and retry everything from scratch. There's the meme that developers just copy paste stuff from Stack Overflow, but engineering is really just building on the shoulders of giants. There's usually ego involved in trying to figure someone out without seeing what others have done.

As a kid: my dad

As a university student: some brilliant young academics and read a lot + self-taught

As a professional: working with experienced engineers from many different disciplines.

In non-software field, engineering is more a design, specification role. You identify and document the requirements, breakdown the design into modules and carefully specify, etc the solution. So often what is called software engineering is, in effect, software construction with minimal design. No wonder so many enterprise-sized projects end up over budget and late.

When I was six, my grandpa built me a rudimentary breadboard with bulbs, sockets, knife switches, batteries, and wires. I immediately knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer.

I was a mathematical toddler, an electronic child, a financial teenager, and a chemical college student.

That certainly didn't make me an engineer, so when I do have to pick up where engineers leave off, I just have to make it up for myself.

My parents, Google, and my code reviewers.

My parents in a somewhat indirect way. They let me have a computer in my room as a kid despite complaining about how much time I spent on it. They'd complain about how I didn't want to go outside, but still took me to the library to get programming books or amuse me by looking at my random projects. They complained about how much time I spent playing video games, but would still come home with random interesting looking video game discs they'd found at some dollar store (one of which became my favorite game of all time). Having access to these resources taught me the first steps of curiosity about programming and building simple things. They also encouraged my interests and exploration in various implicit ways, accepting whatever I was interested in and never really pushing me toward one direction or another.