“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.
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:”
Pretty sure they drive trains
Professional zero finders of derivatives of mathematical models built from duct tape, prayers, and Jimmy’s observations from before he got cataracts.
All I do as an engineer is piss and shit and fart
It’s an elaborate money laundering scheme. Most “engineers” secretly cook meth and stuff. It’s actually super easy to make like buildings and planes because God holds them up until He decides they should fall.
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.
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.
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.
8 hours meeting a day, mostly
I see you’re a senior or principal engineer.
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.
