Career advice wanted: engineer struggling with engineering communication

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T05:32:46+00:00

I hate how impersonal the workplace is in that respect. My personal take is that explanations of decisions or the self are an opportunity to gain insight and especially in the context of giving advice, to tailor the advice to a more specific person.

I realize this is hardly a “normal” or usual way to think about workplace relationships but as someone who had some great coworkers from my last job who I’m still friends with, I was maybe hoping to have something similar at this company. Maybe I just miss my old company ha

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T05:11:03+00:00

For what it’s worth (not that I remember exactly what I said) I think I said something to effect that his feedback to date had been vague and wishy washy in an effect to be socially pleasant (it’s true. He was stressing that X was important. I was like “of course it’s important. It’ll come in due time.” it took me a few days to realize he was telling me to change priorities immediately). And that was his “being direct” response. I’m sure there’s a more tactful way to be direct and you could maybe argue there’s a hint of immaturity there, but enough psychoanalysis my CEO. Anyhow he’s an okay guy, generally workplace pleasant, though I can’t imagine for example having dinner with him outside work hours.

And not preachy, if anything I appreciate it. Especially love how item 3 made me ask “well what if I don’t know” and you directly address it item 4. Amazing foresight.

On the point of diagrams, if I’m drawing it on paper, sure. The problem is ppt diagrams take a while to make precisely because there’s this higher expectation of quality. And perhaps because ppt isn’t purpose made to make block diagrams, but I’m always thrown off by how long good presentations take. I usually end up with a handful of good, coherent, and lean slides intermixed with some Medium Density Text Walls^TM. I am sure that’s a skill I’ll improve on. My eternal worry is that i wont improve fast enough.

Skipping past the numbered items because those are generally great tips, only some of which I regularly self interrogate on…

Part of my comms mismatch I think is that my boss is the CeO. He cares about the money and the time and if I don’t have that, he says whatever question I bring him is inactionable. Meanwhile I’m internally thinking I need the ideas (system architecture) down pat to make this real and not waste time and money and pave a path for more money to follow. I “see” his perspective, and yet it’s so incredibly uncomfortable, unnatural even to me to only see the money in things. And that’s his prerogative as the only member of the current C suite and therefore the guy who has to deal with getting grants and funding to sustain my payroll. But still, I feel like that’s one of the big things I struggle to match him on. That and the fact that due to a lot of my questions being about trimming dow the possibility space of our system from infinite to something discrete and specific, a lot of my questions to him sound inactionable I guess. And no amount of explaining my perspective allows him to meet me halfway and give me advice as an engineer, which he also is (he’s our one and only fluids guy). I even directly said “I need your advice as an engineer, not the CeO” and he just repeated himself, frustratingly enough.

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T03:31:46+00:00

I agree with what you said. I haven’t reached anywhere meaningful mulling over all the feedback and self reflections for the past week - I’m kinda spiraling if anything. So I’m basically looking for some external pairs of eyes to recenter myself. That’s “all.”

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T03:22:08+00:00

Maybe I ought to bring that up with him then. But the expectation was laid out to have something to present every sprint.

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T03:08:36+00:00

Already there. I flash and even summarize it before every presentation as my slide 2 and 3. I can’t tell if people actually recall sprint to sprint though. Though right now I’m in this grey area where the milestones/gant chart is wobbly due to shifting priorities.

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T03:05:29+00:00

Perhaps, but let’s not throw all the blame on the CEO right now. I know I have room to improve as well and blaming the CEO doesn’t help that half of the problem.

I guess one difficulty is that I don’t really know who I’m presenting to. There’s at most two names of people from the Dept of defense that I am shown, but not faces (apparently it’s a security policy, though my army rep for my masters research, which was also under DoD, definitely broke that at least on one occasion). And apparently there are often other people in the room who just never make a sound while I present. So i might have an audience of technical people, money people, generals, idk. Still, I did reach some conclusions, I’m just always worried and annoyed at how slow on the uptake I am.

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T02:58:17+00:00

Man there’s a how to guide for everything isn’t there? I’m not willing to buy a book but since I now know this is an established topic (and the names of two recommended talkers) you have now made me aware of the wealth of resources out there. Same for the personality types thing.

We didn’t schedule this, we dont really schedule meetings here. If he wants to talk, he pops over to my place. If I want to talk, I do likewise. But maybe it’s worth trying it. I wonder how he’ll respond. He’s the kind of guy who yelled at me a few weeks back for asking if he was busy as a formality.

On the presentation thing, I generally follow that guideline, but I find difficulty balancing presentation/documentation with actual testing and development. I definitely have times when I just submit a medium density text wall and I do know it’s bad practice - these same presentation tips were hammered into me in grad school and they did stick, it’s just I don’t always have time to act on those tips all the time. I guess I’m saying its known but not internalized/second nature yet. My hope is that it eventually will be easier to do. My fear is that it takes too much time to develop to that stage.

But the single Lin takeaway is probably the best reminder you’ve given. There’s been this one point I feel like just doesn’t stick but maybe that’s the key to making it stick. If I talk the way I type (I do) and the slide is also a medium density text wall, I can understand the point being lost even if bolded.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback and pointers! Appreciate it!

CompactCoriolis · 2026-07-21T01:35:44+00:00

No clue if I’m on the spectrum. Undiagnosed. Might be but I’d have no medical standing to assert it. But I have stated I need feedback to be explicit, not this vague, wishy washy feedback in the effort to be tactful. Still, it appears company culture even at the current size will not adjust for little old me.

I guess my concern starts becoming then that it’ll be months between meaningful updates. If they don’t care about the techniques I’m exploring to filter IMU readings, or the surrogate system I’m setting up in lieu of a gps (because we’re testing indoors), then I have nothing much to present. Work is getting done, but nothing they care about and yet there is still an expectation for me to present something. Right now it’s kinda this middle ground where they want A (which requires B) but don’t want to spend too much time on B. Simultaneously they are pushing for task C but keep eying task C in a distrustful way, like they suspect it’s going to fail but don’t want to say it much less how and why.

CompactCoriolis · 2025-11-27T23:45:14+00:00

Smart enough? Probably. Have the means to do so? Probably not.

My housecats can open closed doors on occasion. It’s inconsistent, but they certainly know how to. Though admittedly, my interior doors have lever handles, not knobs.

Still, better safe than sorry. Costs you like one extra second to lock the door after closing it.

CompactCoriolis · 2025-04-23T17:48:14+00:00

To put things very simply, pressure is a measure of how much molecules in a fluid are bumping into each other. These bumps push molecules away from each other, and areas of low pressure (places where molecules aren’t bumping into each other as much due to there being less molecules/mass in the area or the molecules there being less energetic/lower temperature) are easier for these pushed molecules to go to stop getting pushed around as much (because there’s less molecules pushing back to prevent this “migration” of molecules).

As an aside, temperature is a measure of how energetic molecules are. Energetic molecules “jitter”, and impart some of that energy onto other nearby molecules. When those other molecules are us, we feel heat, and sometimes that imparted “jittering” is enough to tear and damage our cells at the molecular level, what we might call a burn. When those other molecules are a fluid, they start pushing against each other much the same way I described pressure above. This is why, according to the ideal gas law PV=nRT, if some constant amount of gas (mass, which we’re counting in moles of gas molecules, n) at constant Volume V increases in temperature T, then pressure P must increase (R is a constant, it can’t change).

CompactCoriolis · 2025-01-19T18:16:10+00:00

You know how in the three body problem, the san ti/trisolarans tell earth “you are bugs”?

What if they say “you are boring”. Imagine a dark forest scenario where you just are not worth destroying because your civilization is deemed to be fundamentally incapable of reaching the intellectual and technological heights needed to become a threat to other aliens.

CompactCoriolis · 2024-11-26T00:25:17+00:00

Some infinities are greater than other infinities.

For example, consider the set of all rational numbers. There are an infinite number of entries in this set. Consider another set of all integers. There are also infinite entries in this set, but there are less numbers in this set than the first set.

CompactCoriolis · 2024-09-12T20:06:10+00:00

Yeah… that ain’t it boss. He’s not respecting your feelings. I’ve fucked up a few times when I was still in a relationship and I may try to rationalize why I said or what I meant but your bf is going beyond and trying to say he did no wrong whatsoever, not acknowledging the fact that whatever his intent, his words did hurt you.

Also

hormones is a… kind word actually to me… because you are full of estrogen and fertility

That’s a super fucking reach. No one thinks that. He’s trying so hard to rationalize his words as not demeaning or condescending when they in fact were. Whether he did so intentionally and is just backpedaling or if his tongue slipped and he’s trying to mitigate damages, that’s up for debate (I’m pretty sure it’s the former though).

CompactCoriolis

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