Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Mike's avatar

The things I remember from my engineering career is all the wondrous machines and cool shit associated with them. The brilliance, expertise, and enthusiasm of truly talented people doing the cool shit. And world travel. Not so much my evolution into management. You’re right, as time went on we had to do more mundane shit thus defocusing our expertise. When I started you did real mind to pen to paper stuff. We had technically degreed aides. Secretaries. Personal IT, travel, and purchase agents. These gradually disappeared. On the other hand the spoken word of the engineer in charge of a project increased. But as you point out, so did the fiefdoms intending to keep that in check.

Expand full comment
Live Life Not Behind Glass's avatar

I took to building things without looking anything up about how to do them in advance. Sound crazy? Yes maybe, definitely inefficient, but I get to independently figure out and discover stuff that way and it makes a fairly run of the mill project like building a weird shed the way I want a lot more interesting. And as a plus I’ve made some cool stuff and gotten better at whittling for when my processes dont work and I have to make them work anyway by whittling some random thing. Also, contraptions. Contraptions are AWESOME. Live that wallace and grommet/swiss family robinson life—it’s a good one.

Expand full comment
9 more comments...

No posts