
Aerospace companies find engineers at a college race-car competition - happy-go-lucky
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-formula-sae-recruiting-20170618-story.html
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onesun
I was heavily involved in solar car racing during college, so much so that my
grades suffered because of it. But for the most part that didn't matter. Most
recruiters I spoke to ended up being much more interested in the stories I
could tell about all the challenges we had as a team and the novel solutions
we invented to overcome them. I knew that if I talked to a recruiter and they
only focused on my GPA, then that was a good sign I didn't want to work there.
After my first job, GPA became irrelevant. If I had to do it all over again, I
wouldn't change a thing. Fifteen years later, I still count my teammates as
some of my best friends.

~~~
humanrebar
This is partly why we should be more open to non traditional educations. I
don't see why someone needs an entire four year degree to be able to
contribute to these kinds of engineering problems. There are certainly
"university level" subjects that need to be covered, but that could easily be
taken as needed. Or in a more condensed form.

~~~
colechristensen
I think you are quite wrong, at least in the narrow sense covered by SAE
competition engineers (and areospace engineers).

Recruiters look at grades and activities. If all you have to show for yourself
are perfect grades, it's entirely possible (and sometimes way too likely) that
the only thing you're good at is getting good grades. Add in experience that
you can prove yourself by talking about and suddenly grades matter a lot less
– you still have to pass your classes and understand the material, but the
experiences prove your competence in combination with the grade.

Not everyone developing a product has to be an engineer, so if you want a lot
more technicians, fine. But you still need a good portion of engineers with
the full depth of knowledge. People who program don't necessarily understand
this, because a lot of programming work is technician work that you can teach
yourself. Not that it's impossible, but very few people self-teach partial
differential equations, and it's not something you can just pick up via
osmosis.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Perhaps software engineering needs more engineering and less "stack-overflow
technicians".

Yet, the need to gain extensive knowledge does not require the traditional
university-then-work model.

~~~
eksemplar
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with google programmers.
Sometimes looking something up is faster, sometimes it's inspiring.

The thing a degree does though, is make sure people know what stackoverflow
code to ignore.

You can certainly obtain the same knowledge on your own, and you can certainly
avoid getting it with your degree.

The thing is though, hiring people is about minimizing risks. The most
expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and
degrees offer the highest probability of skilled labour.

~~~
jlarocco
> I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with google programmers.
> Sometimes looking something up is faster, sometimes it's inspiring.

I think the term "google programmer" covers too much ground to make a blanket
statement.

On one hand, Google and StackOverflow can serve as an easy to use interface to
documentation and troubleshooting information. I think this use of Google is
great.

On the other hand, it's also possible to use them as a source of copy/paste
code snippets without necessarily understanding what the code is doing. This
second kind of "google programmer" is a huge problem. These are the type of
people we all laugh at for not being able to solve FizzBuzz (assuming they
haven't found somebody else's solution to copy/paste).

> The thing a degree does though, is make sure people know what stackoverflow
> code to ignore.

I wouldn't count on it. Even if a code snippet on SO is 100% correct, that
doesn't mean it'll be the best solution outside of the original asker's
situation.

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franciscop
"are finding talent in an unlikely place: a college race-car competition."

I am sorry but are we to believe that people who build racing cars for fun on
their spare time are more likely to be worse Engineers than those who don't?
Because certainly that sounds like the perfect place for recruiting great
Engineers.

I am one of the creators of a huge (maybe the largest) Spanish Maker community
[https://makersupv.com/](https://makersupv.com/) and I would bet and highly
recommend absolutely anyone who has been in any of the leading positions. We
have won a worldwide NASA competition, best design for Hyperloop, made Robot
competitions and a really long string of achievements and projects while
developing people and managing skills. Meanwhile our average school mate can
barely make an LED blink with Arduino, solve a small dispute in a team or just
about any real world problems.

I am actually surprised that only few companies are _poaching_ them; I have
come to realize in what a poor shape Spanish tech world is with this. I am
pretty sure in the US with the same achievements all of them would get 10s of
offers/week.

~~~
leggomylibro
Yeah, FSAE is pretty hardcore when it comes to engineering extracurriculars.
It goes without saying that they've been fertile recruiting grounds for auto
companies since their inception, but I do know more than one person who has
gone to work at Space-X recently with this on their resume.

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pacaro
Historically this is a reversal. In the U.K. after WWII a lot of the people
who had worked in aircraft engineering moved to working in Motorsport. This is
usually given as one of the main reasons for the concentration of F1 teams in
the U.K.

~~~
matthewmcg
You see this in the application of aircraft construction materials and
techniques to race cars from that period. The Lotus Type 25 F1 car for example
was a stressed skin, riveted, aluminum semi-monocoque body. It's a thing of
beauty and it was 3x stiffer than its predecessor's chassis at half the
weight.
[http://www.grandprixhistory.org/images/lotus25c.jpg](http://www.grandprixhistory.org/images/lotus25c.jpg)

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atroyn
My team from TU Munich's self driving racecar (TUfast Driverless) are some of
the best engineers I've worked with, including during my time in industry.

This is no surprise to me, and the sooner tech companies start tapping this
well off talent, the better of they'll be. For now only the auto makers have
caught on, but it's a matter of time.

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hprotagonist
CMU buggy also has a good track record for being a way to get hired.

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joshu
Hiring is definitely a big aspect for Self Racing Cars as well.

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walshemj
Why is finding talent from mech and thromofuids students so odd of cause the
college race cars arn't that fast so the aero side isn't as important.

~~~
atroyn
Maybe the US cars. Our cars in Germany go fast enough that Aero certainly
matters.

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SimbaOnSteroids
My buddy did college race car competitions and then got a job at SpaceX right
outta school. I can anecdotally attest to this.

~~~
aisofteng
"Anecdotally" is redundant in that sentence.

