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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.
For the last few years, I’ve been working on an open-source Ethernet switch.
Postdoc in engineering research - we’re using machine learning to predict chemical properties relevant to combustion, speeding up the discovery of cleaner liquid fuels as we transition away from fossil fuels!
interesting. how does that process work?
TL;DR, I throw a bunch of molecules at a pile of linear algebra, and hope predicted values line up with known experimental values; then I use the pile of linear algebra on novel molecules.
There’s a bit more to it than that, like how to represent molecules in a computer-readable format, generating additional input variables (molecular characteristics), input variable down-selection and/or dimensionality reduction, the specific ML models we use (feed-forward MLPs and graph convolution nets), and how to interpret results as they relate back to combustion.
From a broad perspective, our work is just a small part of a larger push from the Department of Energy to find economically-viable alternative liquid fuels. ML speeds up the process of screening candidate molecules, for example those found in bio-oil resulting from pyrolizing and catalytically-upgrading lignocellulosic biomass or other renewable sources. Our colleagues don’t have to synthesize large samples of many molecules just to test their properties and determine how they will behave in existing engines (a very costly and time-consuming process), instead we predict the properties and behaviors to highlight viable candidates so our colleagues can focus on analyzing those.
These papers (1, 2, 3) best outline the procedures and motivations for this work. PM me if you can’t get access and I’ll send you them!
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…
Nothing at all man. So many meeting, so depressing. Can’t wait to retire
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.
Working to make sure the electric grid doesn’t blow up when we add a few more generators.
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I’ve been working on an autonomous AI helper that can take on tasks. You can give it whatever personality you like along with a job description and it will work on tasks either based on what you ask it or whatever it decides needs to be done based on the job description. Basically the AI in the movie Her without the romantic part.
Working on a camera system to automatically detect and notify operations of arc breakdowns in switchgear. Our facilities are big enough that when something goes bang, a lot of times we don’t know where it happened.
I do the hardware and software… Not the career I went to school for, but I’m having fun and it’s interesting.
Out of curiosity, why not go off-the-shelf? I think you can buy ready made systems for that job.
Couple of reasons: this is a high energy pulsed-power environment, so aside from concerns on how to reliably power it (I’m designing PoE into this new version), we also need it to be reasonably small and really fast.
Are we saving money? Individual units are certainly cheaper than COTS solutions. Maybe no real savings, but it’s meeting our needs without any compromises.
Besides, this is one of my simpler projects off the top of my head that wouldn’t bust an NDA. 😆
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.
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.
I live in a state where we have fire season year round. I’m currently working on fire hardening the electrical lines in high fire risk areas.
I worked in a lightweieght LMS that I will improve soon https://github.com/navitux/workshops_project/
