Do you really need to know the first principles to...

... become an engineer? Before today I was 100% sure that you do need the base knowledge of the engineering field you specializing in. You have to understand some basics of electronics for example to be able to design electronic systems. Or you need some basic knowledge of mechanics to produce robots. And in both cases you most likely will use computers and therefore you need to know computer basics too.

So what happened today?

A few hours ago (on a very short notice) I helped to setup an Arduino based class for schoolchildren visiting the Uni for a field trip. Some PhD students were organizing and helping with technical side: connect Arduino based robots, copy libraries onto computers, setup login and workspace for the school students to practice.

The first problem occured when the PhD's tried to install a particular Arduino library onto the computer's harddrive. I usually frown upon anything that gets installed on top of the base image, especially if this requires admin rights. Well, I am probably too lazy to type the admin password into 20+ computers, but I also know that this should not be necessary in order to use that library. It can be done by simply coping the library to desktop and using an absolute path in the program source code. So the students - intelligent Mechatronics PHD's in their early 20's! - copied the files from a network drive onto local Desktop and asked if this is enough to do it once so the file will (magically?) appear on the rest of computers.

They were surprised when I told them they will have to manually copy the files on all computers. And no, I did not want to automate the process - why to make their life easier, especially when they were not prepared in the first place?

Another problem was with specifying the local path for #include statement. I would expect them to know that #inlcude takes a file name as an argument, not the directory name. But no! The student's did not realize that library (in Arduino sense) is just a bunch of source files, with the .H file as its base. I wonder what will happen when they meet real uC development toolchain?

Once again, these were intelligent (and some are quite actually bright) people who did not understand fully the basics of 1) Desktop computing; 2) Arduino programming; 3) File structure. I am pretty sure they are quite successful at what they do despite these knowledge gaps - thanks to several layers of abstraction imposed by software developers.

Then what is the problem?

The problem lies in their core ability to create something non-mainstream, something that will require advanced skills. What looks to me as a very basic and necessary information for them will become an intimidating and alien concept. They will spend too much time to get through the wrongly understood principles and improperly learned skills

Or they will just hire someone who will do all the dirty work for them