This engineer hasn’t worked on anything cool lately.
Hoping to find a new job later this year and move onto something more interesting as a byproduct of that. Assuming that doesn’t lead to me being drowned in meetings and emails…
I’m working on open source session replay tool (skipping the name not to promote it explicitly, but its quite easy to guess since our niche has not too many fully OS companies) as R&D/js library maintainer; at the same time I’m making my own lemmy app :)
Very fun and quite the opposite experience (going in deep with browser specs and API vs thinking about mobile UI and features)
Been using some free time at work to make an inventory of pipeline stream crossings and plan on making it a GIS feature class for regular maintenance. This was inspired by an encased sanitary sewer essentially becoming a low head dam (just eroded, not discharging sewage) in a homeowners back yard and we were unaware until someone called.
It’s mostly just been tracing the features so far, but I’m thinking about where to take it next. Thinking a good direction to go next will be to use the elevation model to try and find manholes in high slope areas and ditches so they can be identified for monitoring for erosion or I&I.
For the most part, making sure our products run safely and groaning at the previous philosophy of moving fast and using duct tape for everything.
Oh and creating standards and templates for documentation, because that doesn’t exist either. The downside of working for a newer green energy company is that the typically established processes and methods aren’t established yet. And you get the fun task of changing that.
I’m sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I’m with you. It wasn’t enough for me.
I just could not get motivated over my projects being “Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building” or “Let’s replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity”. Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?
Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee’s day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.
Like…I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we’re trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.
I just couldn’t. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it’s that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.
Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it’s making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.
Yeah I like a lot of what I do and it honestly gives me a lot of opportunities to express my class consciousness and stand up for reasonable expectations of workers. But yeah I do really miss research and want to be doing cooler stuff. I’m just still a junior engineer and can’t afford grad school yet.
I’m also absolutely looking for other work it just seems nobody is interested in junior engineers except the military.
New ways of cooling data servers and batteries for EVs. Rather than typical air or water/glycol cooling we’re immersing the components in a dielectric fluid. It’s an interesting space as both the hardware and fluids are being developed simultaneously. The company I work for is developing the fluid.
About 90% of the fluids out there are just oils taken directly from a refinery and repackaged under different names with a ton of marketing. Yet, end consumers don’t really understand the technical details of the the fluids so they tend to fall for whoever has nice marketing. We’re out to change that and show that the chemistry we add improves the performance and durability of the fluid. So half the job is engineering and the other half is educating customers.
oh wow this post blew up! cool stuff y’all. unfortunately what i’m doing for job is boring (software engineer), but i try to do cool stuff on the side. like a laravel code generation thing, which also helps with a community exchange website that uses esri arcgis to map the things. not done yet and my progress is very slow because i can’t dedicate all my time to it. also helping some friends with a game in unity. also been trying to learn about lemmy, activitypub, decentralized apps, etc. and get involved in development.
I agree with the NDA comment, it’s difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.
I feel pretty safe in saying that I’m working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we’re able to use. That’s a pretty fun one for me.
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This engineer hasn’t worked on anything cool lately.
Hoping to find a new job later this year and move onto something more interesting as a byproduct of that. Assuming that doesn’t lead to me being drowned in meetings and emails…
I’m working on open source session replay tool (skipping the name not to promote it explicitly, but its quite easy to guess since our niche has not too many fully OS companies) as R&D/js library maintainer; at the same time I’m making my own lemmy app :)
Very fun and quite the opposite experience (going in deep with browser specs and API vs thinking about mobile UI and features)
Been using some free time at work to make an inventory of pipeline stream crossings and plan on making it a GIS feature class for regular maintenance. This was inspired by an encased sanitary sewer essentially becoming a low head dam (just eroded, not discharging sewage) in a homeowners back yard and we were unaware until someone called.
It’s mostly just been tracing the features so far, but I’m thinking about where to take it next. Thinking a good direction to go next will be to use the elevation model to try and find manholes in high slope areas and ditches so they can be identified for monitoring for erosion or I&I.
Sounds like important work that most people never hear about. Glad to hear about it.
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deleted by creator
hits bong
For the most part, making sure our products run safely and groaning at the previous philosophy of moving fast and using duct tape for everything.
Oh and creating standards and templates for documentation, because that doesn’t exist either. The downside of working for a newer green energy company is that the typically established processes and methods aren’t established yet. And you get the fun task of changing that.
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Yeah exactly. It’s just annoying how much work that takes
I worked in a lightweieght LMS that I will improve soon https://github.com/navitux/workshops_project/
NDA :(
Nothing at all man. So many meeting, so depressing. Can’t wait to retire
Sometimes I have meetings about scheduling more meetings
They don’t pay us to work on cool things.
I’m marginally improving factory layouts bit by bit. Probably for the next 50 years
I’m sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I’m with you. It wasn’t enough for me.
I just could not get motivated over my projects being “Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building” or “Let’s replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity”. Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?
Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee’s day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.
Like…I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we’re trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.
I just couldn’t. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it’s that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.
Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it’s making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.
Yeah I like a lot of what I do and it honestly gives me a lot of opportunities to express my class consciousness and stand up for reasonable expectations of workers. But yeah I do really miss research and want to be doing cooler stuff. I’m just still a junior engineer and can’t afford grad school yet.
I’m also absolutely looking for other work it just seems nobody is interested in junior engineers except the military.
New ways of cooling data servers and batteries for EVs. Rather than typical air or water/glycol cooling we’re immersing the components in a dielectric fluid. It’s an interesting space as both the hardware and fluids are being developed simultaneously. The company I work for is developing the fluid.
About 90% of the fluids out there are just oils taken directly from a refinery and repackaged under different names with a ton of marketing. Yet, end consumers don’t really understand the technical details of the the fluids so they tend to fall for whoever has nice marketing. We’re out to change that and show that the chemistry we add improves the performance and durability of the fluid. So half the job is engineering and the other half is educating customers.
oh wow this post blew up! cool stuff y’all. unfortunately what i’m doing for job is boring (software engineer), but i try to do cool stuff on the side. like a laravel code generation thing, which also helps with a community exchange website that uses esri arcgis to map the things. not done yet and my progress is very slow because i can’t dedicate all my time to it. also helping some friends with a game in unity. also been trying to learn about lemmy, activitypub, decentralized apps, etc. and get involved in development.
Working to make sure the electric grid doesn’t blow up when we add a few more generators.
For the last few years, I’ve been working on an open-source Ethernet switch.
That’s interesting as fuck, thanks for the good read.
I agree with the NDA comment, it’s difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.
I feel pretty safe in saying that I’m working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we’re able to use. That’s a pretty fun one for me.