Help Needed - What Engineers Think of Developers

Even more interesting: What Engineering Students Think of The Next Big Thing.

Do the comp sci students look for engineers to spend summers with them at Kill Devil Hill looking for the Next Big Thing in transportation?

You know what I see? A couple of college kids who want to start seriously kicking around the idea of building something outside of their domain.

I don't put words in their mouths or thoughts in these Engineering majors head's. And heres why:

When I was at school and wanted to build something outside my wheelhouse, I would talk to the EEs or MEs. At first they could always see that I didn't know what I was doing when talking about their area, but it wasn't malice on my part or thinking less of them.

Luckily I had some good friends in those majors, and my shitty ideas helped me make more. You know why? Because we just liked building things. I would have shitty idea X, sometimes it was salvageable and we built something, sometimes we all just had a good laugh about it after they explained how terrible it was.

Maybe these guys have an idea for social networking that would work incredibly well as a facebook application and they just need 15 minutes of talking with a programmer to understand the domain a bit more and figure out how to go forward.

Its a startup and you're not gonna get paid? Well, duh. They're college kids (broke) and want to build something that they believe in and is instantly distributable to everyone in the world.

I know this is HN and everyone has the "oh, hes one of those 'idea' guys" mentality, but lighten the fuck up. Either move on from the job posting because they don't know what they're doing and let them fail, or go steer them in the right direction. What you don't have to do is call them out on HN for making a rookie mistake.