EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you.
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
I find this with everything. You have to become an expert at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because the truly expert help is generally too expensive.
Examples:
- Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out
- Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I ended up with the old type)
- Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and highlight things to them to make progress
- Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK nationalised healthcare thing)
I could go on but the crux is that the average professional does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough to say if it's always been like this but it has been my observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and lack of faith in experts.
This is an interesting observation and matches with my experience. I'd add:
1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.
2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.
I agree totally agree on both points. I also think though there is an opacity element, If you can’t see/will know if these service providers did a good “quality” job corners are habitually cut.
E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).
I blame the extreme penetration of capitalism everywhere. We've created a culture where everyone thinks like a business and looks to do the minimal effort for the maximal compensation. If you don't do this, "you're dumb" (and, unfortunately, maybe there's some truth to this).
In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.
Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.
One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.
If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.
It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.
Looked at another way, capitalism has commoditized services that were historically unobtainable by certain classes for all intents and purposes. So now you have mediocre servicing at prices everyone can afford. You can still get expert services if you can truly pay for it, and that hasn't changed.
Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where you like tinkering, it’s hard not to get bitter about people who aren’t doing it correctly for you…
It's closer in meaning to "no one really knows what they're doing". Half-assing implies lack of effort. This expression implies lack of insight or direction.
If you're spending that much time doing all those things then maybe truly expert help is just expensive rather than too expensive.
There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.
This feels so true to me. I think this is the biggest reason that things feel so unfair to many average people. because the resources required to get good service in almost every meaningful endeavor are just totally unobtainable to people so you either make yourself an expert in everything or get screwed left and right.
This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies
Your observation about gaps in knowledge is true for all trades, and is at least conceptually what separates trades or job skills training university education.
A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but you learn to reason about your field essentially from first principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you really need just the job skills, and the connection to cause and effect is almost irrelevant.
This is typically why university education is held up as a better key to long term career prospects, because of the adaptability rather than rote memorization.
University is supposed to teach you fundamental ideas that help you think about the world not hard skills. That’s why it’s called a university and not a boot camp.
Don't you have codes and license requirements for electricians and roofers? In my country, most of what makes electricianing harder than electronicsing is the rules. There are rules about how close you can put mains and low voltage wires, which your guy should have followed even if he didn't know why, rules about what parts of the house you can fix them to, or if they can be laid loosely or must be stapled to the framing, the spacing between the staples, how to pull a wire through a hole, where you can drill holes for wires, using a wrong colored wire with a sleeve on the end, etc. All the understanding of electrical engineering in the world won't have you knowing those rules.
The small subset of codes in my area that I personally looked at were significantly out of date and it was unlikely that they would be updated anytime soon. There are state codes which were out of date for a long time but they just recently updated. However there are also local codes which are not up to date. When they're not in direct conflict you need to follow both, if they are then technically the state should take precedence, but if you look into it then you'll find that the locality doesn't care and will fine you and it's up to you to defend it which will be expensive and you could still lose. The codes are only as good as the people maintaining them and it seems that the maintenance is not a priority. This was not for electrical - perhaps that one is given more attention.
And then you have old houses with all sorts of weird wiring and constraints and the contractor/electrician works around those and does things mostly to current code the best they can.
That's the thing with vocationals skills - they make you really good at understanding how something works or how to fix something without breaking something else, but beyond that range of problems and solutions, you need to talk to an engineer.
Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.
I’m not saying that most people aren’t formula pluggers (and that’s a big problem) but, my first impression of that kind of card would be that’s it’s meant to be branding, not a tool. Someone is carrying around a piece of what they love.
Just out of curiosity (I don’t mean this to be a dig and don’t carry either cards), why are Maxwell’s Equations good but Ohm’s Law is an instant no-hire? How I remember the story is that, when Ohm published his equation, it came as a huge shock because no one was expecting it to be so simple. There’s a lot of beauty in that simplicity. Maxwell’s equations aren’t that complex but they aren’t exactly _linear_. Valuing complexity is an interesting hiring tactic but would probably be a great filter on younger engineers?
1. Ohm's Law is taught the first day of 4 years of an EE degree. Ohm's Law should be part of your soul, not something a cheat sheet is needed for.
2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even algebra.
Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither electronics nor the most basic algebra.
Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of calculus to even understand the notation. The equations unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic fields.
Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.
Then a smug physicist will walk by with either the the equations of quantum electrodynamics or Maxwell's equations in terms of differential forms on their t-shirt
Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.
Here in the US, the NEC specifies a one-foot separation for low voltage unless crossing at a perpendicular angle. Low voltage is generally a specialty, so a lot of electricians don’t know.
The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
I built my house with union labor (union shop) and found the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the random contractor (of course there are exceptions, and for some jobs it doesn’t matter).
Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we weren’t a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in for the union members produced better work, especially for the safety critical stuff.
I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades — certainly there are many horror stories.
> built my house with union labor (union shop) and found the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the random contractor
So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?
Excellent epistemic inquiry. I’ve owned homes for over 30 years, and have experience with hiring contractors for remodels. Also hired non-union contractors to do building work on offices over the years. And the company that had a machine shop? One of our channels was home construction and overall I was not impressed with the kind of work I encountered.
But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement was a union shop. That’s about as much A/B testing as one can get.
I find this is why the trades work best under a competent contractor who, while not an expert in all fields, brings together the necessary skills and experience to avoid gap defects.
I remember a conversation with a plumber in Cambridge, UK a few years ago. He was helping me pick out plastic pipes for a project. I asked "What material are these - are they HDPE? He gave me a weird look, and told me "They're plastic pipe!".
The same thing happened the next state over. At least this time, the electrician allowed me to explain it, and then did the low voltage wiring correctly.
> It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
Maybe, they don't need to? These trades should have cheatsheets where they can check for certain scenarios - like the 2 described, and it would provide Do's and Don'ts?
If you run, say, the telephone wires through the same holes, they'll pick up a maddening 60 Hz hummmmmmmmmmm. You're screwed because when this is discovered, the house is finished, and it gets very very expensive to rewrite it.
The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.
This isn't the main reason running low and high voltage through the same conduit is not code compliant though.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
The AC voltage will induce noise onto the low voltage wire. That noise can be of a higher voltage then the low voltage and damage the equipment behind it.
This isn't the main reason running low and high voltage through the same conduit is not code compliant though.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
Electric fields are easy to shield against with a Faraday cage, but magnetic fields are a royal pain. You can use mu-metal shielding, but that's rather expensive and only reduces the magnetic field. Technically, if you wanted to entirely shield from magnetic fields, you'd need to surround the wire with a superconductor, but that requires liquid nitrogen/helium cooling that is out of the scope of most residential work.
In practice home LV wiring is rarely shielded, maybe with CAT6 as an exception. Things like speaker wire, doorbells, vacuum control wires, etc are not typically shielded.
Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be effective.
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.