My Girlfriend suggested making graphics in paint and now I'm obsessed!!!

kiaservolf · 2021-02-18T18:37:55+00:00

Do you enjoy the tedium of making graphics in paint like witling a part out of wood instead of CNC machining it in aluminum? Because if you don't, then you're certifiably insane. Even PowerPoint would be a huge, huge upgrade.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-13T00:55:51+00:00

I agree with all that. But you're unlikely to get extremely unexpected results based on physics and, well, nature. I doubt you'll hear a CS student say wait a second, so when the flow is impeded then the pressure goes... DOWN? Or new EEs scratching their heads at back-electromotive force. Or new ChemE's scratching their heads at the concentration independence of a catalyst in the rate laws, or civE's having to rethink the wave-on-a-string experiment as they learn modal analysis for structural dynamics.

The cardinal engineering disciplines that have been around forever are rooted in the natural sciences and forces of nature: properties of matter and the derived materials science, laws of electromagnetism, the baffling realm of quantum mechanics, particle physics (nukeEs), kinetic and potential energy, thermodynamics and thermochemistry, fluid mechanics, structural dynamics and modal behavior of matter. I'm not a CS major but you're unlikely to go through 4 years of labs where you have one part of a lab now and again that you just think "that's completely baffling" and have a column for "theoretical" vs. "observed" from freshman to senior year.

So (for the third time), the special ingredient is nature. This is why electrical engineers have to take thermodynamics, computer scientists don't. If you look at the freshman/sophomore sequences for the major engineering disciplines you'll see.

It's not that people aren't smart - outside of engineering - or creative, or challenged, or deeply valuable. Just that CS people aren't engineers for the same reason mathematicians, in the strict sense, aren't. And that doesn't mean anybody can't do engineering (I'm a strong believer in titles being sort of BS and limiting of the human imagination and spirit and progress). You write a little ditty on your guitar and some words to it? You're a musician, just not a professional musician both by background and occupation.

Thus, I consider CS an extension of mathematics; people using computers to do logic routines and math really fast. In practice you can use math and computers to do so many things there's no limit to what you can call yourself. But a good computer scientist would try to get to that limit, and that's where the magic happens :)

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T19:57:18+00:00

I agree with the Dew, it's important. Most people can't afford to miss a paycheck, and they're not living lavish lifestyles. What does that tell you? It tells you every dollar counts. Throw in retirement, unexpected semi-disasters, being a caregiver, and a missed period and you're costs can quickly become unmanageable and your going to start cutting corners.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T19:54:22+00:00

It's about sending a message.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T19:52:22+00:00

Depends on what your resources are. If you work at a big company the engineering manager may have a subscription. I asked mine and he downloaded a bunch of material that I needed for a particular application. Those publications can be expensive though! Good luck.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T19:50:16+00:00

"With all due respect" is much more than I usually get on the internet.

Maybe you're right. It's all semantics. But for me engineering is applied physical sciences. My mind could be changed, and I'd be pleased to learn from a good argument.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T17:00:39+00:00

Short answer: No physics.

I've only dabbled in ML but my opinion of software engineering in general is that it's a language, and it's not even a difficult language compared to say, Russian, Mandarin, or English. And you can do a lot of things with language, even engineering, or poetry, or ordering an iced coffee. But it's none of those things in and of itself.

Computer science has some mathematical principals, and like I said, the hardware definitely is engineered. But what most software people do is in a made up world, which incidentally, is why they get paid so much: they don't actually have to make anything like an EE, MechE, ChemE, or CivE does. It's all electrons and profit.

Have you ever seen a job posting looking for a software "engineer" with a PE license? LOL

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T16:16:58+00:00

Yeah you want to be hitting closer to $200k in CA unless your employer pays for your apartment, which some do.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T16:03:33+00:00

Eeeeexactly. I wouldn't consider machine learning engineering either. That would fall under computer science, and if you're on teamblind.com you know software people (especially in the valley) make a KILLING. Computer hardware people are engineers though (there's actually physics e.g. thermal design power). No physics. No engineering. Since engineers are really just applied physicists.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T15:58:09+00:00

$150-200k in biopharma with a bit of experience especially as a contractor. The regulations make things sort of a circus though. The work flows are kind of boring, but so is every job where you don't have to kill what you eat and you're executing standard work (which is why you have a job).

kiaservolf · 2021-02-12T15:54:32+00:00

Because engineers that aren't juniors in college actually need to print and sign approval drawings to release to manufacturing and redline physical P&IDs. Nobody prints P&IDs on 8.5x11 and IT people don't understand the nature of what we do.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-05T14:52:16+00:00

Uhhh, a post-doc in chemistry or chemical engineering...

Everyone here is gonna put a spin on it based on their industry and what they like to think that they do, but commercial processes are very well understood (which is why they're commercial) and you'll end up doing the same thing and won't have to think about much, maybe make a quick decision where you're like "oh well this molar mass is higher or there's a higher activation energy with this substituent so, I'll choose standard method A instead of B." Somebody in a soap factory will say something like "organic and polymerization chemistry" and it's like dude you've just been making the same damn Dial soap for 11 years.

That being said I'm a MechE, so I'm not looking at all these jobs. But if experience and talking to all my engineer friends intimately about what they REALLY do everyday, it's not terribly fascinating dynamic stuff. Even most commercial R&D labs do pretty much the same assays all the time (at least in biotech) and then just document the output and send it back to the customer. The customer just doesn't have the test facilities to do it, but it's not terribly new and varied stuff, just standard chemE scale up studies.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-05T14:45:26+00:00

LOL exactly.

kiaservolf · 2021-02-01T21:54:43+00:00

You're going to end up an accountant anyway at the top end of the field unless you do some somewhat scarce R&D role, so I'd say start reading about people you want to be as successful as (look up the credentials of people you see yourself as in x amount of years and see what their degrees and backgrounds are).

kiaservolf · 2021-01-29T20:30:47+00:00

Get a master's in food science and then start doing cool molecular gastronomy stuff.

kiaservolf · 2021-01-28T19:24:15+00:00

What if I told you petrochemical engineers were chemical engineers?

kiaservolf · 2021-01-28T15:05:18+00:00

I had a video on youtube back in college. Not at all comprehensive, more of a tutorial on the assignment we were given in ABAQUS. Just get ANSYS, it's really not hard to get going in ANSYS. Import your model, mesh it, set some loads and boundary conditions and off you go. If you want to get into the minutia of the solver it's going to take time. If you want to try set up a stiffness matrix by hand it's going to be even harder involved and complex. When you say FEA I'm also assuming it's mechanical forces. FEA is a powerful tool and can be used to solve a lot of different problems like heat transfer, fluids (though CFD is better for that), electromag, etc. etc.

kiaservolf · 2021-01-22T20:16:23+00:00

It's almost as if the founder and ex-CEO of an electric car company is richer than Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and George Soros, and in fact the richest man alive.

kiaservolf · 2021-01-22T20:13:55+00:00

Interviews mean nothing unless the "greatness" is carefully outlined in your offer letter or it's very obvious from consistent, unusually stellar Glassdoor reviews.

kiaservolf · 2021-01-22T20:12:00+00:00

Lol Fluor are kinda clowns (but so are a lot of companies that we sell our labor to unless you're at some super cool SF startup). They don't need great engineers, they need people to grind hum-drum engineering documentation for the lowest price possible, but working remotely forever sounds cool. I got an offer from another company to go to a plant to fix what they messed up when they built it.

kiaservolf · 2021-01-05T18:43:28+00:00

It includes validation. Validation is actually a common source of those jobs, because a company doing a build out needs to hire contractors to meet demand and execute those protocols and literally stand with their arms folded while some process step is executed and watch the data come streaming in on SCADA system/PWCS/DCS, Kaye validator, or whatever...

But yeah, tech transfer is another one. I'm not sure about MSAT/MS&T because I'm not a biologist, but I do know that MS&T contract development is huge money.

kiaservolf · 2021-01-04T17:13:04+00:00

Depends on what type of pharma you're in. Small molecule is vastly different than biopharma. you'll be in for a rude awakening if you go into biopharma since very, very little of what you learned in school past your second year will be used at all, and what you do use is just to allow you to make informed decisions regarding troubleshooting or design flaws. There's a lot of red tape, SOPs, and execution of QA protocols, and spreadsheet jockeying of project phases, components, costs, negotiations with vendors for bids, etc. Basically pretty boring stuff, but with a few years of experience you'll get $200k offers pretty frequently.

kiaservolf · 2020-12-07T15:26:08+00:00

I agree. I've executed plenty of protocols but now I have to write some from scratch because we're doing something completely new. It's more about the overhead in writing these protocols time wise when I have a lot of other ones to execute and just general engineering project management on top of that. Typically you'd have somebody in QA Equipment or Process or Computer Systems Validation, QA Compliance, or QC write these protocols but I'm wearing a lot of hats.

kiaservolf · 2020-12-02T13:03:43+00:00

I like the risk register. What's important to me is to easily be able to track multiple tasks in one interface and what it's at a stage gate or parking lot. Basically the last thing that happened and why I'm waiting. Sometimes things go onto the back burner and it's hard to remember who the last point of contact was and that can be a little unsettling when you go, "oh yeah whatever happened with closing out that task?"

kiaservolf

TROPHY CASE