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My position (reservoir engineering tech) has a lot of overlap with reservoir engineer as far as skills goes, but I'm still going for the degree anyway because it would take something like 15 years of experience to get taken seriously as an engineer candidate. That being said, by the time I get my degree I'll have 5+ years experience as a tech, and most of the managers at my company I've discussed it with have said it would be reasonable for me to be hired on as a full engineer directly, rather than as a junior engineer.
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Jun 18, 2014 17:20
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BeefofAges posted:In my time as a test engineer I saw a few test lab techs move up into engineer positions, but it was definitely a struggle for them politically. They had the skills and education, but they really had to fight the bureaucracy to move up. Yeah, people sometimes treat techs like poo poo, which blows my mind. Sometimes I feel like it is analagous to the military where you have some shithead 2LT fresh out that doesn't know a drat thing making GBS threads on his NCOs because he can. Good engineers involve techs early and listen to what they have to say, IMO.
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Jun 18, 2014 17:48
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movax posted:Yeah, people sometimes treat techs like poo poo, which blows my mind. Sometimes I feel like it is analagous to the military where you have some shithead 2LT fresh out that doesn't know a drat thing making GBS threads on his NCOs because he can. Definitely. I'm out of the hardware industry now, so I don't work with techs anymore, but when I did, I always treated them as skilled and knowledgeable equals. Techs helped me way more than engineers ever did.
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Jun 18, 2014 17:55
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Exactly, that's why I said the skills acquired are unappreciated. These skills will help you get your job done, but there will be no reward for saving the day. Infact, you will end up doing work outside your scope to clean up messes, earning goodwill, but exposing yourself to greater liability. And then, the root cause is rarely addressed barring missing milestones or something that costs the company money.
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Jun 18, 2014 17:58
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What the hell is a tech? Is it supposed to be some gray area between skilled craft/tradesperson and engineer?
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Jun 19, 2014 01:21
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I worked for a year as a temp production tech at a chemical production facility. It was my first job out of college (I graduated with a BS in ChE with a poo poo GPA, I posted about it a few pages ago) and boy was it a really lovely experience. I fought tooth and nail to try and work my way up into an engineering role but it wasn't really happening. It took way too long to even be hired as a full-time employee. Eventually after working that job for a year, there were product support engineering openings in a former classmate of mine's company and I ended up quitting and moving there. Oddly enough, the techs at my new company are treated very well and they're awesome to work with because they know our products inside and out. With that said, I don't regret taking that job because it paid decently well with overtime and because it at least got me used to working in an industrial environment and how to deal with people who suck in such a workplace. You could do worse by not taking a tech job. At the same time though, you have to realize that your real opportunities lie outside of that realm and you should continue to aggressively apply to other entry level engineering roles. At the very least you can say you have the work experience that's required for tons of entry level roles.
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Jun 19, 2014 02:13
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Different disciplines and industries have different types of technicians. They're knowledge based workers who have some amount of technical training but generally focused on implementing tasks rather than working at a more conceptual level. Technicians work in labs, do surveying and field work, are 'designers' (do conceptual level designs or implement engineering into fleshed out designs), do QA/QC and that kind of thing. I've known lots of designer type techs who have later become engineers.
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Jun 19, 2014 02:17
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Most of the techs I've worked with had associates degrees or various computing certifications, but not a four year engineering degree. They do stuff like soldering and following test plans/procedures (but not writing/developing the test plans/procedures).
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Jun 19, 2014 03:03
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Was this at a small or large company?
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Jun 19, 2014 05:27
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Xeom posted:Was this at a small or large company? The office itself was about 50 people at the time that I left but it was a new offshoot of a well established company. The small company environment sort of contributed to the negative experience that I had. Nepotism was a big one, especially in regards to trying to move up the ladder. These are sort of general working environment problems and not necessarily related to working as a tech or whatever. Trust me, I was in basically the exact same position as you two years ago (with interviews in the single digits and all). At the very least, you will be building up that experience and making that number on your resume bigger. I wasn't really in a position to turn down any job offers at the time so I went ahead and did it. Keep in touch and keep networking (literally the most important thing, make that nepotism work for you  ) to find that better opportunity.
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Jun 19, 2014 05:52
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Senor P. posted:What the hell is a tech? Is it supposed to be some gray area between skilled craft/tradesperson and engineer? My take on it (EE) is a skilled craftsperson who usually picks up a fuckload of knowledge "along the way". At jobs I've worked, they are highly skilled at hand working PCB assemblies (solder, hot air, etc), or doing end-of-line testing, warranty repairs, etc. Basically, non-design jobs. Now that said, the majority of techs I've worked with are not dummies when it comes to electronics; far the opposite. Yes, they may not be able to design a FPGA accelerator from scratch, but they're the ones who can do a better, cleaner job than I can to rework some BGAs or QFNs that may be broken, need to be prototyped, etc. They'll tell me "hey, this makes me take an extra hour if you put that part there, can you move it?", and let me know what assembly houses to work with and what to stay away from. I guess it's hard to put into writing, but being a younger engineer myself, techs have always been the old, wiser folk able to bail my rear end out when I do something boneheaded, and I've learned a lot from them along the way. I don't know why more of them don't punch an engineer in the face when he shows up smug, asks them to fix something that requires intricate effort and then walk away.
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Jun 19, 2014 06:12
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I finished my degree in computer engineering with an ee minor last year. My school is on the periphery of Silicon Valley, but small and not strongly connected to industry. I think my education was decent, but like all things it really depends on how much you're willing to put in. Engineering lab classes (where you have a project every 2 weeks or so, in addition to lecture) are where this relationship between effort and education is most apparent. You have to practically apply what you've learned which really tests if you know what you're doing. Labs make you explore a little beyond what you know from class because everything is more nuanced than they first appear. They are also awesomely rewarding when you finally get you first LED to blink/robot to shoot ping-pong balls at a target/whatever. During my last summer I worked on a project in the physics department, porting Verilog to a newer FPGA for an experiment onboard a NASA Globalhawk UAV (though I wasn't involved in the mission, just development). Although I slightly regret not doing a corporate internship, I don't think it will matter much down the road. I also worked various roles in a corporate-sponsored senior project with a decent budget (around $4k) for the last part of my senior year. I learned things I never studied before at ridiculous speed to meet deadlines. This project improved my confidence in my skills, really honing my ability to learn things quickly. I also learned from our "mentor" how bad having a terrible boss is and what to to avoid in a job. After graduation I started an internship at a local company that designs human-motion analysis products like sleep and fitness trackers. The environment feels non-corporate, but it's not a start-up (around eight years old, stable and expanding). The median age is around 35. People bring their well-behaved dogs to work. Our company engineers a reference design for a product, designing app or an embedded system that runs algorithms on accelerometer data to extract something meaningful. Our sales arm then finds companies looking for that kind of product and sells the reference design and support as they productize it and manufacture it. I started in testing/verification where interns and new hires start in most companies. Though before my 6 months were over, I was writing code for new platforms. Most of my duties involved running tests using internal diagnostic software and bench testing equipment to verify firmware and hardware changes aren't creating bugs or unwanted side-effects. A big part of my job was automating my work using bash or python and interfacing old tests to new test equipment. I also did work creating a basic inventory system for our prototypes. After my internship ended I was hired full-time with a decent pay-bump over my internship pay, but since my employer is the only game in town I'm underpaid compared to the folks over in Silicon Valley. The nice thing is I don't have to live there and deal with traffic and techies. I may succumb one of these days. I've been working for about 4 months as a salaried full-time employee. I spend most days writing bare-metal C/C++ for an ARM chip. Since our product uses Bluetooth Low Energy, I read the Bluetooth 4 spec (which isn't that boring, actually), forum posts and books about it a lot. I also work with state machines EVERY DAY, that's something really important from school. I do occasional board rework and soldering for bench-top debugging/analysis. I don't do work in the DSP side of things (our actual algorithm), since I never studied it though it interests me. When I get bored I ask my coworkers about anything interesting they're working on, it's a great way to learn about projects within the company I haven't heard of, or parts of a project I haven't seen. My favorite part about my job, besides the near instant gratification of writing software, is learning from my seriously knowledge-steeped coworkers. There are people that have been doing this kind of thing for 30 years and can pinpoint a problem or recommend a simple solution instantly. It always amazes me how important experience is. That's a lot, but I hope it's useful to anybody considering a major.
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Jun 19, 2014 07:56
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Senor P. posted:What the hell is a tech? Is it supposed to be some gray area between skilled craft/tradesperson and engineer? In my field, I'm more focused on industry specific software knowledge and data manipulation than the engineers I work with, so they can focus more on the conceptual stuff. We still have to have enough business / engineering knowledge to know how to appropriately make that translation, though. There's times I help guide / answer questions from the less experienced engineers. Working with the more experienced ones, usually I build a model myself and explain my reasoning, and they either approve it or modify it as needed.
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Jun 19, 2014 16:57
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Here's my take from being both a tech and a babby engineer: Boss: Engineer, go make this process faster. Also help technician fix his thing Engineer: Hey, what's wrong, technician? Technician: This thing is leaking and I don't have the tool to tighten it. Engineer: Ok *designs tool, orders parts, has technician help assemble it* Here's a special torque wrench. The torque spec is 100 inch-lbs. Technician: *uses tool, torques thing, fixes leak, can do job better now* Boss: Hooray, technician can do his job 10% faster and thing isn't broken anymore E: Wanted to float an idea here. I'm about a third of the way done with this internship and my boss has told me that he wants me to come back* next summer and eventually hire* me as a full time engineer. He's aware of my school schedule and said he'd be open to hiring me as an intern for my last semester of college since I only have 1 or 2 classes to take (2nd half of senior design project and an elective if I dont take it early). He said that I'd have to work a minimum of 40 hours a week but could flex time to meet that. Afterwards, he should* be able to have me start as an Engineer 1 or 2 the day I get my degree. Can anyone see any downsides to doing this? I -was- planning on just taking some easy business classes to pad my GPA instead. *Assuming budget works, of course :\ KetTarma fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 21:21
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At my work its more like. Engineer: Can we hire a tech? Boss: No. *4 PhDs put together soldering benches for the whole day*
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Jun 20, 2014 01:58
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Uncle Jam posted:At my work its more like. It's even more frustrating when the boss sees the value in hiring Mechanical Engineering techs, but not in hiring Electrical Engineering techs. "Why is X taking so long?" Well, let's see, I had to design it, lay it out, interact with the MEs and METs to make sure it fits, have prototypes made, write firmware, write software, rework the first bad batch of boards, make wiring harnesses, and remake the wiring harness because the mechanical engineer thought it would receive power via magical faerie dust, all by myself.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:51
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How often do you goons go to tradeshows? I'm going to the coil winding expo in Berlin next week and was wondering if I will meet any goooonz. And how often does purchasing folks come with a engineering background?
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Jun 20, 2014 07:20
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caberham posted:How often do you goons go to tradeshows? I'm going to the coil winding expo in Berlin next week and was wondering if I will meet any goooonz. I go to about one a year and then a training one as well. My experience is we tell purchasing what suppliers we want approved, then we spec them out if ask the T&Cs are good, then they order everything. No one in our supply chain has an engineering background or degree.
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Jun 20, 2014 14:56
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We had a customer send a drawing of a torsion spring to a salesman for a quote. Salesman puts it in engineering and quotes it based on material, how long it takes to bend, how long it takes to set up, etc. Then, customer asks max angle of defection of the spring, and that operating conditions have a 10 degree preload and a 60 degree swing from there. Being the only degree-ed engineer, they then decide to send it to me to calculate, and it has a max deflection of 40 degrees so now I'm the rear end in a top hat holding up the whole process while we make a prototype and see if the approximations intrinsic in the calculation and differences between the real thing and the drawing give us the 70 degrees total we need. Good thing no one thought of doing verification before we quoted it.
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Jun 29, 2014 02:17
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movax posted:Yeah, people sometimes treat techs like poo poo, which blows my mind. BeefofAges posted:Definitely. I'm out of the hardware industry now, so I don't work with techs anymore, but when I did, I always treated them as skilled and knowledgeable equals. Techs helped me way more than engineers ever did.  I'd be your tech any day.  Regarding upward mobility from a tech spot though: I'm realistic about my chances and the stigma. I'm gonna ride this job out as long as I can while I crank out school -- finishing a Bachelor's and then hopefully a Master's. Then I'll shoot for an engineering spot here long enough to get the title on my resume, and then explore my options. Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 02:24
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Hi, I've posted here before a couple months back. Basically I'm taking my laptop to a member of an engineering team which I'll be joining (as a noob) and he will help me replace my OS with Linux as well as replace my slow HDD with an SSD. He said the team uses Ubuntu because "only stable builds of ROS are on Ubuntu" which I will also be learning (and have already picked up this book in advance). But since I've never used Linux before, I have a question. Does this mean I'm supposed to be reading guides on intro to linux or intro to ubuntu? Not entirely sure and I bet it's a really stupid question.
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Jun 29, 2014 05:36
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metasynthetic posted:My position (reservoir engineering tech) has a lot of overlap with reservoir engineer as far as skills goes, but I'm still going for the degree anyway because it would take something like 15 years of experience to get taken seriously as an engineer candidate. Working with a large company in the oil industry, the way that companies treat techs is atrocious. A reservoir engineering tech I worked with was previously a supervisor of production engineers because of her experience in the industry and knowing what procedures were needed, but when they got bought by a bigger company, she got regulated to being a tech again because she didn't have an engineering degree. I also worked with the guy that wrote the SPE book on plunger lift and another tech that held one of the most patents for our company. All three quit because the company considered them techs and when they hit the pay ceiling in that tree and found out they were worth more money for an independent that cared more about getting the job done than what degrees the person had. To me Petroleum Engineering, compared to other disciplines, relies a whole lot more on the 80/20 rule because our uncertainties are so much greater. Outside of major projects, there are a finite amount of materials you can use and repair payouts are so quick that we rely a lot on experience/trial and error. I think we can do a lot better on improving the engineering aspect, but  and rules of thumb rule the day.
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Jun 29, 2014 07:27
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Faded Sloth posted:Hi, I've posted here before a couple months back. Basically I'm taking my laptop to a member of an engineering team which I'll be joining (as a noob) and he will help me replace my OS with Linux as well as replace my slow HDD with an SSD. He said the team uses Ubuntu because "only stable builds of ROS are on Ubuntu" which I will also be learning (and have already picked up this book in advance). You could learn how to comfortably navigate Linux within a day but spend months trying to master it. Ubuntu is arguably the easiest distribution of Linux to learn, at least. Here's a quick runthrough to get you started: Ctrl+Alt+T pulls up the terminal window. "man thing" where thing is the command you want to learn about gives you the help file (manual) for it. Here's how a command line interface works (CLI). This command sequence updates your files: sudo apt-get update y sudo apt-get upgrade "sudo" is saying "superuser, do" That means "convert to the administrator account, enter a password to authenticate, then do this admin action" apt-get is telling the aperture software management program to do the "get update" command which is like checking for updates. apt-get upgrade is telling aperture to "get upgrate" which is installing the updates. CLI is generally a lot faster than using Windows. Let's say I don't have Firefox on my desktop but I want to use it. I hit Ctrl+Alt+T and type "firefox" Linux informs me that it's not installed. Oops. I type "sudo apt-get install firefox", wait for the installation to complete, then type "firefox" again and now I'm browsing hilarious internet posts. In Windows, I would've had to search for the program, realize that it's not installed, Google for the webpage, navigate the webpage, download it, find the file, open it, install it with multiple clicks, then find it again to open it.
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Jun 29, 2014 15:42
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Are there any major websites or programs that can't be used on Linux?
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Jun 30, 2014 01:29
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Faded Sloth posted:Are there any major websites or programs that can't be used on Linux? SolidWorks and AutoCAD 
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Jun 30, 2014 02:20
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Chrome/Firefox work fine in most major distros of Linux. There are a few weird distros where you'll have to use Chromium or Iceweasel though. As far as apps go, you have to use the Linux equivalent. Instead of MATLAB, you use Octave. Instead of Word, you use Libre Office. Instead of Powerpoint, you use Impress (I think that's what it's called) You get the point. Any time you HAVE to use a windows program, you'll have to either use WINE or load up VM Player or something. There are plenty of programs with no Linux equivalent so good luck there. Generally open source engineering solutions don't work as well as the expensive commercial version. I used to have Linux as my only operating system; however, I bought a laptop with Win8 on it so I just keep a virtual machine with Ubuntu on it these days since I dont need any Linux specific programs anymore.
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Jun 30, 2014 02:33
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KetTarma posted:Chrome/Firefox work fine in most major distros of Linux. There are a few weird distros where you'll have to use Chromium or Iceweasel though. I believe MATLAB has Linux support as well.
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Jun 30, 2014 03:05
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Matlab does have a Linux build
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Jun 30, 2014 04:25
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Faded Sloth posted:Are there any major websites or programs that can't be used on Linux? EDA's kind of hosed on Linux; I do all my design work on Windows and use Linux after I've got development spun up enough to kick off distributed builds, nightlies as part of Jenkins, etc. Not uncommon in my experience to find release notes that mention poo poo broken on the Linux version but works fine on Windows. That said, Linux knowledge is pretty invaluable, as being able to create scripts/toolchains to support your work is a great ability to have. We have scripts that automatically talk to various JTAG programmers and other debug adapters that can deploy software to a dozen different MCUs simply by SSHing into a machine and typing 'deploy'. IMO Linux can support your work, but the "big" apps like SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Altium, MATLAB etc are all either Windows only or perform smoother under Windows. For the love of me I cannot MATLAB on OS X or Linux to run as smoothly or quickly as the Windows build does. 
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Jun 30, 2014 07:25
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What version of MATLAB are you using? I have it on OSX and it runs great. By the way, I will say Macs can be the best of both worlds, since there's tons of commercial application support and you can use it like a BSD machine if you want, too.
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Jun 30, 2014 19:29
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KernelSlanders posted:What version of MATLAB are you using? I have it on OSX and it runs great. By the way, I will say Macs can be the best of both worlds, since there's tons of commercial application support and you can use it like a BSD machine if you want, too. R2012a I believe. I love MBPs/OS X, don't get me wrong, but the sad truth is if I wanted to switch to one at work (we're mixed between ThinkPads and MacBooks), I'd probably spend 80% of my time in Fusion or Boot Camped because of the tools I use most 
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Jun 30, 2014 19:49
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Yeah, I'm pretty lucky in that regard. They got all of us powerbooks when we started because the boss likes keynote better than powerpoint. I hadn't really used one since before the OSX days, so it's nice to be able to use all my linux tools on the same computer that runs Illustrator and Office without dealing with cygwin. As I said, I know I'm lucky most of what I need has ports: MATLAB, Python, bash/cron/etc, even Mono's pretty solid now. I only do PCB layout occasionally and use Diptrace for that, which runs great. The only thing I need bootcamp for is the programmer for our servo drives.
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Jun 30, 2014 20:40
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Oil! posted:Working with a large company in the oil industry, the way that companies treat techs is atrocious. A reservoir engineering tech I worked with was previously a supervisor of production engineers because of her experience in the industry and knowing what procedures were needed, but when they got bought by a bigger company, she got regulated to being a tech again because she didn't have an engineering degree. I also worked with the guy that wrote the SPE book on plunger lift and another tech that held one of the most patents for our company. All three quit because the company considered them techs and when they hit the pay ceiling in that tree and found out they were worth more money for an independent that cared more about getting the job done than what degrees the person had. This is my first industry job so maybe it's different elsewhere, but I don't feel mistreated at all. Within my area of expertise, my input is respected as much as our engineers. My company's a medium-small independent though, I'm sure size plays a factor. We had a recent acquisition which came from the seller modeled in the most godawful way in Aries, and it still wasn't even accurately estimating the economic limit of the wells. In some instances we had as many as 6 cases for a single wellbore, which were interacting with one another in a way that was incomplete and cutting their lives short. After sifting through the mess, I cut the case count down by 2/3s and found out all the calculations they were doing were effectively just a 23% reduction in net revenue. Presented my model to management and they accepted it, turns out it adds about 15% PV10 to the reserves. That was fun. I think that uncertainty you speak of plays a big part in why I get the chance to do things like that. As far as reserves modeling goes, here's only so precise you *can* get, past that you just need to be able to build a model and be able to explain / defend it to your boss / outside auditors.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:41
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Heads up the new practice FE exam that NCEES offers is always the same one in case you thought you might get a different question set. Just wasted 50 dollars assuming they had a large question bank. :\
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Jun 30, 2014 21:41
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Xeom posted:Heads up the new practice FE exam that NCEES offers is always the same one in case you thought you might get a different question set. Just wasted 50 dollars assuming they had a large question bank. :\ Hey whats up welcome to the wasted 50 dollars to NCEES crew. I closed out of my graded practice exam after only looking through it once and assumed I could revisit it whenever.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:45
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I am still super nervous about taking the FE this Friday :X. Edit:I still can't believe they only have 1 set of questions. This was suppose to be my big practice before the exam. Xeom fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 21:59
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PPI has decent review materials: you can get a week of test bank access for $50 (available for the civil, chemical, mechanical, electrical, enviro or industrial exam).
The Chairman fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 23:50
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I stopped using octave after I found some bugs in some of the functions and it reported wrong results. Never again.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:51
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Instead of matlab I do all of my math in ipython+pandas. Not sure how well that might work for EE or ME stuff, but it works great for the enormous datasets of car sales/transaction data I'm analyzing. Here's an example of the sorts of stuff you can do: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/jvns/talks/blob/master/pyconca2013/pistes-cyclables.ipynb
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Jul 1, 2014 17:58
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Python is great for a lot of data processing stuff and common scientific math. IPython is basically a perfect replacement for Matlab's command line, there's a ton of packages to do common tasks like efficient linear algebra, fft's, convex optimization, and basic regression/classification/clustering, as well as some of what's sexy in machine learning these days (neural nets and kernel methods (but not as good as R as far as I've seen)), but for controls engineering there is basically no alternative to Matlab and Simulink. Unless you want to use Labview, but Labview sucks.
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Jul 1, 2014 19:20
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