How Much Programming Do Engineers Do?

this video is going to cover how much programming engineers do now before I begin no this video will mostly cover what you see at university but also throw a little about what you can see in your career also note that every University can differ a lot in this aspect so don't take this video as a guarantee of exactly what you'll see but there are many consistencies that should give you an idea of what you can expect now to start pretty much all engineers will do some programming at university some more than others but be prepared to take a programming course of some kind at least now the three big majors that use a lot of programming you might imagine are computer engineers software engineers and computer scientists these are the majors where you will come across Java Python C and C++ you may learn more or you may not even learn all of these but these are four of the most common languages that you'll come across those who haven't program before these are four different programming languages that honestly can do a lot of the same things but they do have their differences and advantages for example Java can be used to make Android apps and Java and Python can be used to do back in programming for websites whereas C and C++ are really important in robotics and programming hardware these are one you might think about when you think of programming as these are the kinds of languages that are needed for desktop applications websites video games smartphone apps robotics and things like that now if you look up the programming languages used in video games or that Facebook uses for its website you'll see plenty of others not listed so there are lots out there but just note that these are the big ones and you can do a lot with them and for those who have never programmed once you learn one language it becomes much easier to learn another and going back for those three big majors you will be doing a lot of programming in a large amount of your classes and you'll likely do it every semester it won't be in every class though like in discrete math with G's majors encounter you probably won't have a lab or programming you just focus on the math that computers use and it's simply more of a math class or computer engineers take some electrical engineering courses such as circuit signals and more most of which will not involve programming I will give some examples of these programming assignments soon but first what about the other engineering disciplines well depending on your university you might encounter some different things in terms of programming but the big and really common thing you'll encounter is MATLAB which I'll explain soon MATLAB is a very powerful tool that has a lot of cool things built in aerospace and mechanical engineers do all locked biomedical engineers also see in a lot of their classes chemical engineers civil engineers electrical engineers and even possibly computer engineers and more all have a good chance of learning it as well if you're going into any of these majors but especially those first three be ready to learn MATLAB now what is MATLAB and what can it do that other languages can't first of all MATLAB is a software application you have to purchase and download to your computer whereas with a language like C you can literally Google C compiler and start writing and executing code if you want to practice a bit or you can just download a compiler to your computer so writing in other languages like Python C and Java is completely free MATLAB also has a lot of built-in functions though that can perform mathematical calculations so if one it can graph very easily in two and even three dimensions there's a command where you type in plot some variable comma another and it just creates a plot there's a little more to it but it's that simple mostly or let's say you have a matrix a and another matrix B and you want to multiply them well for those who don't know to multiply these you take the first entry in the first row and multiply it by the other entry in the first row and first column then you take the entry in the first row and second column and multiply it by the first entry in the second row of the next matrix you add those and kind of continue this pattern four more times and you get another two-by-two matrix in a normal programming language you might have to actually program this entirely you'd have to tell the program to loop through each entry and say multiply the entry in this row in this column by the entry in another row in another column in the second Matrix add those up then move on to the next and stop after some amount of times you do this you need to know exactly how it's done then tell the computer what to do which would take several lines of code in MATLAB guess how easy it is you type a times B so yes when it comes to calculations MATLAB is way more powerful and trust me this did not even remotely scratch the surface so what would an intro to computer science or engineering class project involved versus and insert a MATLAB class well keeping it real simple a computer science class might be like write a program where you input a word and it outputs the word backwards or input a word and it outputs how many vowels there are or enter a number and determine if it's prime on the more difficult side you could have to do a Sudoku solver which I did have to do which obviously involves something unsalted oku or you could do a boggle word checker we're given a boggle grid and a word your program determines whether it's a valid word or not because you can only use letters that are touching in boggle you'll get into algorithms and have to do things like sort a list of numbers as efficiently as possible or you may have to write a compression algorithms you can communicate a word using as few bits or ones and 0s as possible and there's of course plenty more but these are some fairly basic things you can expect to see it's a computer science and engineering major as well as a software engineering major and these were actual example students have done then when it comes to mal have a very early project you could do is if you input a velocity and an angle you write code that spits out a value for how far a ball would go if thrown that fast and at that angle plus a plot of its Y position over time or distance or you would implement the physics equations and tell it what to plot on a more advanced side Electrical Engineers could use MATLAB to implement filtering techniques if you want to let's say remove background noise from a sound signal or an aerospace engineer might make a program where you input a position vector and a velocity vector and the program creates a 3d model of a satellites orbit around Earth or chemical engineers might use it in a controls class to develop a PID controller Dumond or something like insulin absorption as you can see these are all more math heavy engineering projects that also rely on plotting and visualizing data which honestly is why MATLAB can be so helpful but it's all about working with data and processing as an electrical engineer I did not actually get a noisy sound signal where I filtered it and listened to a crisper sound on a speaker I simply used MATLAB to put in the numbers that would represent the signal and at the end I could see yes the output was a less noisy looking signal so MATLAB can be used for a lot but it's not the thing you need really for being a software developer at Facebook Google or Amazon that doesn't mean these companies don't use something like MATLAB but it's not as common and just to give you a slight idea about how much MATLAB can do there are different toolboxes that you can install depending on what kind of projects you work on so that there are plenty of built-in functions for you these toolboxes include control systems aerospace signal processing antennas image processing neural networking partial differential equations finance computational biology and over 50 more if you're doing projects in any of these areas you can install a certain tool that is built-in functions that allow you to run algorithms and perform calculations in an efficient manner for those specific purposes now there are more computer programs out there that you will use as an engineer depending on what you are electrical engineers use ltspice or pspice to simulate circuits and all the currents and voltages within them many other engineers like civil and mechanical and more use CAD or computer-aided design for 2d and 3d modeling there's software for computational fluid dynamics or modeling fluid flow there's finite element analysis software such as abacus to model mechanical stress vibrations motion fatigue and more within a system and of course so much more some of these do involve programming but many involve more physical modeling of objects inputting parameters and all that so not endless lines of code but still computer work so how much programming do engineers do we'll definitely some depending on what you study but for many majors you won't be doing an overwhelming amount of it for this video I reached out to as many engineers as I could with the question of how much programming did you use and here are their answers from an aerospace engineer we use MATLAB in most of the Aero classes we used it for homework take-home tests labs and projects we use MATLAB to make simulations or plots that would go into PowerPoint or reports and usually the code would be attached in the appendix like in our first aerodynamics class we did everything on paper but as the problems got more complex in future classes usually needed to visualize everything through simulations or plotting data MATLAB made that much easier because you honestly would not want to do a lot of the problems by hand from a chemical engineer we just learned that lab in my last year but not all chemical engineering programs do I learn programming mostly on my own and I always tell people to learn it if they can employers really like seeing that you have that knowledge from a civil engineer we were required to take one MATLAB course and took another class which was basically doing a lot of mathematical problem solving using MATLAB some schools learned Python or Java but MATLAB comes up a lot however I did not use it much for civil engineering problems and most civil engineers do not use MATLAB in their career it can help especially if you go into research but most civil engineers will use CAD or some other drafting tool more than anything which is not about programming but from another civil engineer in the structural concentration went to another school he said we didn't do any programming we use some CAD and a ton of excel in the workplace we use lots of structural engineering specific software and listed a few and also a ton of excel as well from a mechanical engineer we used a lot of MATLAB mostly in a large amount of upper division courses to represent complicated problems such as dynamic systems heat transfer and more we only took one basic programming course but then really only use it to do MATLAB it really depends on your school but that's what I experienced then from a computer engineer most semesters in college involved at least some programming after college however many people can get jobs as a programmer but plenty of people get jobs in hardware design which can involve programming but it varies a lot how much you'll actually use I've seen engineers who have done almost no programming in their career and some who use it all the time as an electrical engineer what I would say to someone is I learned programming my first year and the first class I took was the same as computer science or computer engineering majors but then I used that programming knowledge purely in classes working on Hardware like programming and display to light up programming a robot to move and alarm to go off and so on I did not share another class with a computer science major we use MATLAB a little or controls class but I mainly used it in my signals classes to analyze complicated signals as the program could do the necessary analysis very quickly when it comes to your career it really just depends on what you do that will determine how much programming you do as a software developer you'll do a lot but not so much for civil engineer designing roads I read about a chemical engineer working in research who had to use a program to help shock heat would move through a complex system or how well mix the salt solution would be at different rotation speeds which they accomplished using C as the programming language they also used MATLAB and Python now a lot of the code they did not write themselves but they often had to alter code to do what they needed it to which required knowledge to some degree of the programming language or biomedical engineer might be using programming and circuitry to work on a prosthetic arm and yes biomedical engineers do learn programming and you likely will use a lot of MATLAB one thing that came up a lot though is that programming can be extremely useful for automating long projects I read a story of someone who was asked by his boss to create a lot of plots and sort through thousands of pieces of data over a few weeks he ended up writing code that could take the data and do what he needed to basically with the press of button and what would have been over a month of work turned into a few days which can be done with something like Python scripts this is also a great way to stand out for majors like civil engineering or chemical engineering where you might not do a lot of programming in school you can easily impress an employer with your knowledge because a lot of your peers won't have that knowledge and for anyone asking the question if I want to learn programming before University where is the best place to start you can ask this question to five different people and get five different answers but looking around the most common answer you'll see which I would recommend is to learn Python it's regarded as the easiest language to learn you will learn a lot of basic syntax and once you enter school even if you never use Python having that foundation will greatly help with writing and even MATLAB code C Java and more plus you might even use it after college anyways so really any engineer can benefit from this and you can start writing and executing code completely for free with the help of tutorials you can easily find online you can do I learn C++ or Java first but so many people point to Python as being the easiest and it may take several weeks to months to get really comfortable with your first programming language but once you know one you can learn your next language usually in a fraction of the time so just get started with something many people are worried because they don't have programming experience before college but I'll tell you that probably the majority of Engineers enter school without programming knowledge I personally had none when I first started my programming course and it was a big learning curve I got the hang of it it just took some time to get more comfortable with it so will it helped know beforehand yes do you have to know before college to succeed definitely not and that's the end of this video remember schools differed so much on this question and none of this was a guarantee of what you can expect but hopefully provide some insight if you liked the video don't forget to comment like and subscribe and I'll see you all next time

Channel: Zach Star

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Keywords: majorprep, major prep, programming, engineering, how much programming do engineers do, how to learn programming, do engineers learn programming, is programming important, applications of programming, why learn programming, c++, java, python, programming languages, matlab, matlab projects, matlab applications, should i learn programming, why should i learn programming, programming applications

Id: cKBcRy_aXsI

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2017