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.
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”.
You lost me at “As an engineer:”
All I do as an engineer is piss and shit and fart
Engine go NEER!!! Buhr!
They just do engineering things.
Source: am engineer.
My Dad went to work one day and didn’t come back. Guess he wasn’t an engineer. All I knew was that he was a sonofabitch.
They’re the ears for engines. Engines gotta be able to hear after all!
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.
“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.
I’m an engineer. Most of the time I solve the tricky technical problems. Other times I design some new technical thing, or I think of new ways to do something.
So wizardry, sorcery, technomancy, and witchcraft. That was all you had to say.
That sums it up.
Pretty sure they drive trains
8 hours meeting a day, mostly
I see you’re a senior or principal engineer.
Like a scientist but you get paid
Scientists make something new. One time. In a lab. Under ideal conditions. With 3 PhDs assembling, testing, and running it.
Engineers have to make the same thing so that their cheap-ass company can hire any gaggle of idiots off any street around the world and train them to assemble, test, and run 500 of the thing.
Alternatively so those same idiots can buy the product and do all manner of stupid things to it without it breaking.
Note: not saying all technicians are idiots, but the good ones get paid more so companies eventually go for the idiots instead.
The best QA technicians think like perfect idiots.
Professional zero finders of derivatives
Come on, it’s right there in the name. We engine.
I started my engineering program at University not knowing what engineering was.
Thank goodness for that orientation session.
I’m half way through my second year and still not sure.
