/eng/ - Engineering

>>2
>(except maybe China but they're moving away from that)

I had a quick google to see about that and realised how little I knew about the Chinese power structure. It looks like a pretty neat way of doing things

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_Chinese_leadership#Fifth_generation_.28current.29

>Thus, the era of the "fourth generation" is officially regarded to have begun in 2003, and lasted until 2012, when the next election for the party leadership occurred. The prominent leaders included Hu Jintao (as General Secretary), Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin, Zeng Qinghong and Li Changchun. It is also known as the "republican generation" or the Hu-Wen Administration.[citation needed] These were promoted to top leadership at the 16th Party Congress and remained in power until the 18th Party Congress in 2012. This generation of leaders, born mainly in the World War II years from 1939 to 1944, represented a new technocratic style governance and a less centralized political structure. The majority of this generation of leaders were engineers whose academic lives were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and, unlike both their predecessors and likely successors, have spent very little time overseas. The dominant political ideology of this era was Hu's Scientific Development Concept and a goal for a Socialist Harmonious Society.

>The fifth generation came to power at the 18th Party Congress in 2012, when Hu Jintao stepped down as Party General Secretary. In the fifth generation, one sees fewer engineers and more management and finance majors, including successful entrepreneurs. Most of the fifth generation of civilian leadership, born in the postwar years 1945 to 1955, were educated at top Chinese universities. Hu Jintao's Communist Youth League faction, and the Crown Prince Party (or "Princelings") are seen to be the two dominant factions within the leadership.[3][4]

>>4

Absolutely!

Engineering is ridiculously interdisciplinary in obvious and not so obvious ways.

I use software and electronics everyday.

>>20

MechEngfag here. My interpretation of "software engineer" is that it goes above and beyond just "programming". You have to design (sometimes large & complex) systems to meet requirements and deal with constraints. It's one thing being able to slap together a few lines of code that lets you post some text into an HTML page, it's a whole other monster being able to construct a system that can handle 100 million people trying to post to the one page simultaneously.

It's about being systematic, meticulous and aware of the bigger picture. All skills and practices that a GOOD programmer already has and follows but a more specific and developed approach to problems.

Picture is related, it's the first two posts I made in a >>>/tech/ thread.

It's one thing that's confused me a little over the years, the "apparent" lack of cool engineering collaboration over the internet. That's not entirely fair because there are lots of communities scattered around but there appears to be a lack of the gusto seen when it comes to software.

Anonymous Engineering? Doing work without credit for the benefit of someone who isn't necessarily you? Engineering can be time consuming, difficult and extremely expensive to implement in the real world. I think the big difference here is the expense of implementing a project, you can't just distribute thousands of free copies for everyone to download of whatever you've just designed and made.

30 people could sit and design the greatest machine ever but no one could have any of it without getting business involved with massive sums of money. This leads me onto another point, especially from an anonymous point of view, there really isn't much for stopping people from taking all of your work, putting their name on it and making a lot of money from it. I know that seeing someone else benefit sneakily from your hard work is a massive kick in the teeth, no one wants that.

Considering the rise in crowdfunding options and the fact that engineering design packages are increasingly becoming much more friendly to remote online collaborative projects, am I seeing a potential future rich with new possibilities?

>>35

I don't know what this board could turn into but I think there's a clear enough distinction to be made from other boards like /diy/ and /sci/, part of that includes attempting to solve problems as an engineer using numbers, international standards and common engineering practice.

Something like that, you don't necessarily have to be a professional engineer to take part.

I know there are lots of other engineers out there who have old skills and education that are deteriorating to waste because they don't practice, "stuff you learn once but never use again".

Word and PDF file of my attempt at creating a standardised document for the board

https://mega.co.nz/#!z5sE3S5Y!20OlDTzK7QA1pO13KWz4nEwWc0SrqTAgTYNRNy7AaWk