1mo ago

I try to spice it up with some VB Macros but it's still ultimately just a spreadsheet.

So many spreadsheets.

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As an engineer, this hits close to home.
- Engineers: So we had all this complicated theory, but no one can calculate that stuff by himself. Here's a linear aproximation formula and 50 pages of tables where you just look up the values for the factors given certain conditions.
  
  The complicated math is for the one guy who made the tables and charts. The rest of you just look it up. It's fine, it's how we've always done it. Even sending people to the Moon had lookup tables for precalculated things. Although those guys were legend, ever try to use a sliderule?
- Depending on the field, later in your career you can often skip the spreadsheets and get away with just saying, "That looks close enough,." If you have enough seniority people will assume you know what you're talking about.
- Join the technicians in the field who get to laugh at engineers, its more rewarding
  Edit: sales get the commission tho :(
  
  "Be a Mechanical Engineer, then you get to hate nearly everyone including yourself." A Mech. Engineer told me this after we both had a really long day. If you pay attention to those guys, you'll find that they know more than most because they play the parts of Engineer, Tech, and Liaison
  
  Thats the great thing abput being a electrical engineer, people wont laugh at you but they will ask you to fix their house wirering. And once you just look at a pcb and casually tell them what the parts off it do you blow their mind.
- As an engineer, this is missing a first bump where you stop doing "basic operations" still in school, and develop an intrinsic fear of "numbers and counting".
- Computer engineer checking in. Same here!
  
  Hopefully you utilize Python instead of Excel for data management. Unless you have non-engineers or tech-illiterate people on your team or adjacent teams lol
- As another engineer, not at all 🤨

It's amazing to be to see these memes where people seemingly declare that all applied mathematics is done by MBA flunkies in Excel. Just in the past year I've done cuda implementations to calculate the intersection of N cones, physics-based EM ray tracing, and fisher-information regularization.
Christ if there's this population of physicists and mathematicians on here who are yearning for real DSP and numerical analysis jobs, then fucking hit those DMs because we cannot find you on Indeed.
- Its probably the required degrees that are the problem, not the lack of people who like numbers and would want to have those jobs. Feel free to share how to get into the field quickly though if you know how.
  
  The meme says "life of a mathematics student"
- Well I for one would be delighted to cross 35 years of software engineering with a maths hobby but I can hardly find anything.
  The only place I did find declared that I didn't have enough maths without even seeing me or saying what kind of maths I would need for the role. From the JD it didn't sound too tricky: pathfinding for construction robots.
- I dropped out of my Physics MS and my shitty job is now inventory spreadsheets. Fucking hate people trying to make them relational databases.

There is no real math on that graph. It's just what anyone learns in a good education. Well, that and probability theory, combinatorics, and statistics.
I'd really expect more from a math student.
- I was gonna say the same thing. Advanced calc was the baseline for Engineering when I went to school.
  The real math folks got into some crazy shit! Where’s the topology‽ Where’s the knot theory‽ Set Theory? Fractals and Chaos theory? Hierarchy of infinities? Where’s the Schwartzfeldt nonlinear matrix transcendence or whatever madness those beautiful nerds have cooked up‽
  
  Awww, thank you. I feel seen.
  
  ikr? None of that stuff looks intimidating or totally useless. Not. Real. Math.
  
  They're probably talking about calculations (in which case "math skills" is a mislabel), which I don't think math students do much of.

It guy, I have to fix spredsheets that are actually charts on word documents. I can not make them a spreadsheet as it is a miracle they got it that far and I must not break the finances.
- Uhhhhhhhh wow. My sympathies.
- I must not break the finances.
  If they're doing calculations in a table in word, then it's already broken :)

On the "numbers and counting" part they crossed over 5 lines instead of 4, I am upset.

Woah woah woah wait hold up. So you're saying I can just represent these complex multi-variable integral abominations into just stuff like a couple of matrices and vectors???

Is this really the path of mathematicians? I would at least assume they'd learn matrixes and linear algebra, and at least dip their toes into one of the adjacent tangential maths like discrete maths.

I like to spice up my time with spreadsheets by doing them in Pandas. That way they can be theoretical and it is like mathematical roleplay.

the best most classic excel video ever: You Suck at Excel by Joel Spolsky (Reupload)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg

Human kettlebell here, them squigglies shore is purdy!

40 comments