To be honest, I can't actually find any evidence that she graduated with even a bachelors for any of the topics you listed. It appears that she makes a living by being primarily an entertainer, not an engineer. In this context, I think the titles "robotics hobbyist" and "robot enthusiast" are appropriate and accurate.
She didn't graduate from KTH since "Teknisk Fysik" wasn't her thing and to be honest I don't think that it would've made any difference. I would say that she's doing quite ok. :)
Source: I'm her brother.
Hope that these messages to eventually get back to her, because she deserves to know how much of a difference she is making.
Even if you do think that way, and you consider her as completely an entertainer with robotics as her medium, is she a robotics hobbyist?
Are all professional rock musicians just guitar enthusiasts?
My suspicion is that she is called so simply because of her gender, and that a male "entertainer", college drop out or not, would be called an engineer.
(joke explanation for HN: this description is technically accurate but nobody would call the guitarist from Queen a "hobbyist")
> Are all professional rock musicians just guitar enthusiasts? My suspicion is that she is called so simply because of her gender, and that a male "entertainer", college drop out or not, would be called an engineer.
Would you trust that college drop out "engineer" to work on the bridge used by hundreds of thousands of people or fly in an airplane designed and built by that "engineer"? There are some disciplines that I think should very strictly and rigorously test for competence, because the alternative is people dying. Engineering is one of those disciplines, and so is medicine. I don't want a college drop out "surgeon" with no formal training in the discipline operating on my body. Maybe I am just not as trusting as you are. But I doubt most people follow the same line of reasoning that you do.
Can you provide some examples of a male entertainer who does the same type of work that Simon does but is labeled as an engineer?
These situations are comparatively rare. If you have to reach for them, it may as well be conceding the point: A dropout's work is just as good, yes, in all but a few corner cases.
In fact, they usually dropped out because some business was willing to pay them for their work now, rather than wait till they graduated.
I think you unilaterally decided that these situations are rare. I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment. This is why we are having this debate.
> A dropout's work is just as good, yes, in all but a few corner cases.
You'd have to be seriously screwed up in the head to actually believe that as a fact. What possible line of reasoning can you be using to say that someone who is formally trained and educated in a discipline is worst or equal to someone who is not? Are you saying that formal education is a total waste of time?
Yes there are exceptions and there have been prodigious people who were ahead of their time but that is why we have a word to describe these extremely rare occurrences.
> In fact, they usually dropped out because some business was willing to pay them for their work now, rather than wait till they graduated.
Do you have a source for this information?
You're not allowed to get personal here. Once you cool off, maybe we can resume this.
I my experience from software development, self-thought developers tend to be more competent because they have learnt design principles through actual experience, and therefore have a deeper understanding of the rationale. School educated developers more often have learned design principles as dogma, and don't understand the context and limitations of the principles.
She frames herself as hobbyist, so I don't want go into war about this.
However given that pretty much everyone able to write a short script calls himself engineer, I find it ridiculous to defend sanctimony of the word in this context and not in equally inappropriate much more common use.
I did the same by replacing technology with robot, but the only hit with a comedian in it was a article about Simone Giertz.
It seems like the difference between robot enthusiasts and robot engineer is dependent on how they are being used. A robot theater show is engineered. A comedian uses a robot prop and thus get called enthusiasts. If that pattern is true then a magician using robots would also not be called engineer, regardless of gender.
https://sites.google.com/view/botslikeyou/useless-bots/shitt...
Being self taught is part of the importance I think as it makes the robots more understandable. They typically look like Mechano creations and don't hide any of the concepts used to build them.
[0]: http://uk.businessinsider.com/simone-giertzs-shitty-robots-y...
No arguments there.
> Is she an engineer, probably not,
Not probably not, but definitely not.
> because she wouldn't build things to a formal spec and report tolerances and fail rates, etc, but that's not the end all and be all of creation.
Agreed.
There's a legal term engineer, which has definitions and qualifications associated with it, a technical term engineer that has some specific connotations built against it, and an informal term engineer that is dominant in the software "engineer"ing community.
She's not 1) nor 2) but "probably not but maybe" 3).
Credentialism is sometimes a useful metric, but at a certain point experience is more important.