I’m an engineer. I’m on my phone looking at memes until someone asks me a question, then I do a thing in 5 minutes that they expected to take 5 days because people don’t understand computers, then I go back to the memes.
Quiet! You are giving the secret away.
As an engineer:
- Receive or identify a problem.
- Design a solution that solves or mitigated the problem.
- Usually pay someone to make a prototype or do it ourselves
- Test the prototype and see if it solves the problem. If no, go back to #2 until a workable solution is found
- Get someone else to build the final thing.
- Make sure thing works. Ship it.
This is a recursive and iterative process. Meaning you will find problems inside your solutions and need to fix them.
Eventually you finish the thing and get a new problem and do the whole game over again. It’s like a puzzle that requires absurd amounts of knowledge to play well, but anyone could try to solve the problem. That’s why good engineers are paid pretty well.
You lost me at “As an engineer:”
That’s a pretty good run down. There’s all sorts of soft skills required for that as well, and hard skills specific to the industry they’re in, but I think you’ve got the essence of it. Also in step 6, add: “take responsibility for everything that will go wrong with thing in the future” aka “sign off”.
Pretty sure they drive trains
No joke, my wife’s grandpa was a mechanical engineer with a degree from Notre Dame, and he chose engineering apparently because as a 17yo, he thought he was going to learn to drive trains.
The overlap between people who love trains and people who are good at engineering is pretty high though.
I am an engineer. I can’t explain what I do, I just can’t…
I put the data in excel and make colorful charts to show management that their ideas are possible but expensive. Then do the same to show the cost of not purchasing maintenance equipment is in fact more costly than the necessary equipment.
Then they dont purchase the equipment anyway, right? That’s what tends to happen in my case.
And then they point the finger six months later when the fan is covered in shite, am I right? An engineer is just an “I-fucken-told-you-so” generator. Sometimes.
“The Engineering Method” by Mark Hammond aka the engineer guy is a great read…
…is what I would say if I actually purchased books from my wishlist.
Reading this gave me anxiety.
We are real, I am a real person, and I will not be called fake news!!! I exist dammit.
Always these bot accounts pretending to be human.
They just do engineering things.
Source: am engineer.
Like a scientist but you get paid
Whenever people ask me what engineering work is like, I always tell them I have no idea. I’m not an engineer; engineers drive trains, I’m just a poser.
(am computer hardware engineer)
Math using janky excel spreadsheets, tell drafters what we want drawings to look like, but mostly a lot of reading and writing. The secret to engineering (at least in my area) is that communication skills are just as important as technical understanding.
Yuuuup. Half the time you’re the expert* in the room and when heads turn to you you have to push the imposter syndrome down and know your shit and convey it well enough that people will listen.
And having the good sense to know when to say “I need to look that up, let me get back to you”.
8 hours meeting a day, mostly
I see you’re a senior or principal engineer.
Half of the job is to fix issues with existing suff, the other half is to make working stuff more complicated and problematic (aka “upgrade”), so that we’re still paid to do the first half.
As an engineer I can say it can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of job. Around the 20% mark of a project timeline I’m 80% finished but then have to rely on a non-responsive authority to answer me back over some obscure part of the project. After that I just nag them and the project manager about it in email to cover my ass then do fuck all until they respond. At the 95% mark they answer back and I have to hurry up to finish. It can be stressful at times but it’s not bad otherwise.
Ah, Pareto
I’m a designer that works with a bunch of engineers and yeah. I’ve got two projects that we had to rush in a two week deadline. Now we’ve been waiting for months on a reply about something. Just waiting.
Solution: give employee 7 projects
they stand near an engine idk
