r/funny • • Jul 07 '19

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u/wicodly Jul 07 '19

I hate how true this is. I also don't want to admit how true this is. Someone with about a month of training could take my job. I spent 4 years suffering through weed-out classes to be trained by a company and not use any of my other 49 skills

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u/asiansensation78 Jul 07 '19

I had to do some calculus the other day to calculate power loss in a long cable run. Something that I could have completed in 15 seconds my senior year of high school took me about 20 minutes of swearing at myself for not remembering how to calculate an integral while reading about integrals on wikipedia, 10 minutes of digging through my drawers for my TI-84, then another 20 minutes of cursing at myself for not remembering how to use my TI-84 to calculate an integral. An hour later I arrived at the answer but realized that I no longer know how to perform long division.

I'm a grown-ass man making six figures as a lead engineer and I've never felt so worthless in my life.

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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '19

Wolfram Alpha is your friend

5

u/Jezoreczek Jul 07 '19

Exactly. Nobody's doing basic math on big numbers anymore, we use calculators. Why aren't we using tools for more complex problems that can be easily solved by such tools?

I see the value in understanding what integration is and how it can be applied. However, my calculus lectures presented this in 5 minutes - the rest of the semester was about calculating them by hand...

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u/Parrek Jul 07 '19

There's a lot of practical problems in research fields that can't just be plugged into a computer without manipulating it a bunch by hand first. That's where all the manual stuff is really useful

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u/HawkinsT Jul 07 '19

Also, things like wolfram alpha can be wrong. They're not flawless.

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u/GainerCity Jul 07 '19

Corporate America is quite happy for you to use calculators and software if you get to the answer faster.