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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college?

No. The Motte just has a contingent of college haters who forget non-software related engineering degrees exist. I've yet to see a self taught competent electrical engineer who didn't either get a college degree or be a rare prodigy. Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

I had to teach myself matrix math on the job. 0/10 - would not recommend.

Eh, matrix math I never found that difficult. Perhaps circumstance can present challenges, unless you believe you’re disadvantaged in mathematics. Curious, what was the job (if you don’t mind sharing)?

I work in software and I was doing a bunch of image processing on tiffs and jpegs.

It probably would have been easier if the project didn't also have a tight deadline, and my manager at the time wasn't also implying that my job was riding on it.

Ah, that makes sense. That’s foundational to digital imaging. Working on raster images is a gigantic pain in the ass, but multiplying coordinate vectors to digitally allow for infinite scaling makes the job so much easier (zero pixelation) once you’ve got it nailed down. If I was learning it for the first time, I wouldn’t want to be under that kind of pressure either.

The biggest issue was the fact that I was doing rotations and mirroring on images that were too big to fit into memory all at once. Not only did I have to learn the math, I also had to figure out how to do it in chunks. The tiffs were tiled. The jpegs were not. It was not a good time.

It sounds like you made it through and learned quite a bit though. A lot of people fold and stress out when they’re sandwiched between impossible circumstances. I’d always reminded myself in those moments I can’t afford to fail, so it actually became easier when I realized I didn’t have an out. You can bear anything when your back is really to the wall.

Do note the "and" I put there. Now realize that matrix math is just the beginning and imagine having had to teach yourself all the rest, too.

I take no responsibility for any existential despair that may follow.

Oh believe me.

I didn't go into engineering for a reason.

I've yet to see a self taught competent electrical engineer who didn't either get a college degree or be a rare prodigy. Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.

I can second that, EE was a massive PITA. The math was hard, the courses were unforgiving, and the amount of time it required for lab classes was too much. For my ASIC design labs you had to spend 14 hours in the open lab prior to the actual lab so you could finish the actual lab in the 3 hours provided. I recently amused myself by seeing some mass-market "cool special math" book on a friends coffee table, opening it and realizing it was just complex numbers + euler. What a throwback.

Apart from two thirds of the math courses and less than a dozen other courses I didn't find it that bad. Certainly not trivial but really nothing ridiculously difficult or laborous. I suspect a big part of this is Finnish university (and AFAIK European universities in general) not leaning nearly as heavily into making students do mandatory coursework just for the sake of doing work and absolutely nobody giving a shit about your grades as long as they weren't completely shit tier. I spent my summers working full time and the semesters working maybe 3-4 days a week on average (in practise working full time except taking a couple of days off before major exams).

Still, there's no fucking way I would have ended self studying all that or ever working in signal processing if I hadn't studied the topics formally in university.

Yeah I wish... I might just be a midwit but I found ECE to be particularly difficult and laborious, and occasionally very abstract. I deliberately switched out of the CompE side of the major because the PCB/ASIC design courses were required and had horrible(deserved) reputations. A major component of it was that the department prided itself on "no grade inflation" and having lots of smart research professors. This translates into most courses being graded on actual curves in that 50% of the class fails regardless of absolute score, and the lectures being completely pointless to attend (but losing points for non-attendance in a way that could only hurt you). Most learning was done in TA study halls, Professor office hours, and at home. It was essentially learn this by yourself and we'll grade you, oh and learn it better than your classmates.

I remember the average on an intro linear circuits exam (the Thevenin's equivalence topic area) being something like a 28% I had been chatting with the professor and she pretty much admitted they had went a bit overzealous with that one and actually felt bad.

It was a slog, and still to this day I feel like I suck at math.

Our circuit theory 2 course (basically passive AC circuits + laplace transform + transmission line theory) had a fail rate of around 40% ever year even though the professor was voted several times as the best teacher in the department. That topic was just legit difficult.

Then on the other side there was electronics 2 with massive and completely useless emphasis on mosfet calculations. Luckily I managed to pass that one by cheating and filling my TI-85 with all the required formulae.

I only understood perhaps a quarter of the math they taught us but the trick was to learn just enough that you could reliably pass the course (requiring typically > 50% of points in the exam) except when it came to actually useful things (iow the first semester course with all the basics required for everything else in EE).

The best thing about university was that attendance was almost never mandatory (and still isn't) with the exceptions being almost entirely the occasional lab courses.

Jane Street's hardware desk would like a word.

?

You'll have to explain that a bit more.

High frequency traders that make the fastest lowest-latency hardware to enable their financial parasitism.

And you’re saying the people who design their hardware are self taught and didn’t go to university at all?

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