Invisible wrote:
> The Motion Picture Experts Group might need to know the difference 
> between a Type-I and Type-II Discrete Cosine Transform, but most people 
> only *implement* MPEG standards, not design them.

I think you underestimate how much knowledge it takes to implement something 
like that from the spec.  You can't just follow the instructions without 
understanding them and expect it to work.

> Most companies do not design ICs. They purchase them off the shelf and 
> assemble them.

I think you underestimate how much knowledge of ICs it takes to build a 
board. And lots and lots of companies design custom chips.

> (Indeed, I was under the impression that the number of 
> companies world-wide who actually have IC fabrication plants is very 
> small - although admittedly you don't need to actually have a fab to 
> design new ICs.)

Indeed. Lots more people took 35mm photographs than there were people 
developing photographs.

> It certainly doesn't call for a C programmer.

No, but lots of the enterprise software calls for a SQL programmer, a PHP 
programmer, an ASP.NET programmer, or a VBA programmer.  How do you think 
the things get customized.

> And game engines... Well, that's probably way, way less exciting than it 
> sounds anyway. ;-)

I expect designing the games is more cool than coding them. I expect coding 
game engines is more cool than most anyting "enterprise".

>> Sure, most are not as glamorous as designing the next GPU for the 
>> PlayStation 4,
> 
> Actually, I imagine most jobs are way less exciting than they sound. ;-)

Welcome to the real world, where jobs suck bad enough they have to pay you 
to do them.

> Seriously... Doing what? Everything seems to be made of off-the-shelf 
> parts (which, by definition, already exist). What's to design?

Uh, the next off-the-shelf part? Optical mice are off the shelf, but the 
chips running them had to be designed. Remote controls are off the shelf, 
but the chips running them had to be designed. Of course once it's off the 
shelf, it's already designed. But someone had to design every one of those 
off-the-shelf bits you found. Someone designed the XBox-360 GPU before the 
XBox-360 was an off-the-shelf part.

Nowadays it's actually cheaper to build a specific chip for what you want to 
do than cobble together off-the-shelf parts, for most applications. You use 
the software to design a chip, and you ship the tape to the fab and they 
mail you back a crate of chips.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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