Ask HN: Who Taught You Engineering?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Colleges and Programs are designed by administrators. Most of the subject / invention itself was often created by self-taught engineers, in all fields.

I recollect an Asimov quote. "Self Education, is the only kind of education there is"