I've interned in big, international company, doing finite element analysis, a method for structural analysis on computers.
As an intern, I didn't get the formal training on the software suites used, I came in with a bit of experience on another software, and a bit of theoretical knowledge from school. I managed to pick up enough in 4-6 weeks using tutorials, manuals, and the engineers around me that I think I was as productive as you could expect an entry-level engineer to be (fwiw, I had a job offer on the table before finishing that internship).
I clearly remember two guys there. One was contractor, late-20ish and I think had started not too long before I did. The other was middle-aged and I think had been working for the company for quite a couple years. Both quite incompetent. At first I thought it was me, if I couldn't explain something to them there must be something I'm getting wrong right? By the end of my term I had picked up enough, underhandedly, from other engineers, that these guys were incompetent. It was never openly admitted though. But these guys were given only the most basic, boring, tedious work requiring absolutely no actual engineering analysis.
Don't get me wrong, these were 2 guys out of 150ish people doing FEA there, and all the others were absolutely brilliant and I learned a lot. But there are incompetent people everywhere, I think. In my graduating class there was definitely a 5% ish of people which everyone else knew were not going to be doing engineering work. These people often end up as production supervisors and such, never get their PE.
Even in grad school, they are tougher to find, but there's definitely people graduating with MSc's and PhD's who couldn't engineer their way out of a bag. Generally recruited by bad profs who do all the actual thinking and just give them narrow, grunt work to do. There's safeguards in place at the University level to prevent that, especially for PhDs, but it does happen, unfortunately.
I should probably have taken that job offer, but I really wanted to see what academia/research was like.
As an intern, I didn't get the formal training on the software suites used, I came in with a bit of experience on another software, and a bit of theoretical knowledge from school. I managed to pick up enough in 4-6 weeks using tutorials, manuals, and the engineers around me that I think I was as productive as you could expect an entry-level engineer to be (fwiw, I had a job offer on the table before finishing that internship).
I clearly remember two guys there. One was contractor, late-20ish and I think had started not too long before I did. The other was middle-aged and I think had been working for the company for quite a couple years. Both quite incompetent. At first I thought it was me, if I couldn't explain something to them there must be something I'm getting wrong right? By the end of my term I had picked up enough, underhandedly, from other engineers, that these guys were incompetent. It was never openly admitted though. But these guys were given only the most basic, boring, tedious work requiring absolutely no actual engineering analysis.
Don't get me wrong, these were 2 guys out of 150ish people doing FEA there, and all the others were absolutely brilliant and I learned a lot. But there are incompetent people everywhere, I think. In my graduating class there was definitely a 5% ish of people which everyone else knew were not going to be doing engineering work. These people often end up as production supervisors and such, never get their PE.
Even in grad school, they are tougher to find, but there's definitely people graduating with MSc's and PhD's who couldn't engineer their way out of a bag. Generally recruited by bad profs who do all the actual thinking and just give them narrow, grunt work to do. There's safeguards in place at the University level to prevent that, especially for PhDs, but it does happen, unfortunately.
I should probably have taken that job offer, but I really wanted to see what academia/research was like.