I'm also (as well as OP) in the UK, but mildly disappointed to read it on HN. Bit of a pet peeve of mine (as a capital E Engineer I suppose) the absurd things we accept having 'engineers' sent out for, things that are barely even trades.
I had a dishwasher engineer fit a replacement plastic piece where you put the tablet; a quote for an oven engineer to replace the glass door.
That sort of ridiculousness makes me more sympathetic to bonafide tradesmen using the term (or rather having it used about them by customer services) - boiler engineers, ISPs' 'engineer visit' to set up a new line, etc. - despite that probably being what started my peeve initially!
I don't know how widespread it is, I know in Germany for example it's a protected term. In Canada I think if unqualified (i.e. not 'software engineer' or 'boiler engineer', but just 'Engineer') it is too. We have chartered institutions that can bestow 'CEng', but it doesn't affect whether or not you're allowed to be called 'an engineer' or anything.
(This whole comment probably makes it sound like I'm a lot more annoyed by it than I am.. I just mean it's sort of 'heh ok sure' chuckle/eyeroll when they say it. Like if it started to be normal to refer to pharmacists/nurses/phlebotomists as 'dispensing/assisting/blood-taking doctors' I suppose.)
Perhaps we have it backwards. I'm in the UK. If I saw a company that did 'engineering' I would expect to walk in and see someone at a lathe. I work in the West Midlands a lot and this is especially true.
An engineer may drive a train or maintain ships propulsion in the English speaking world.
A Civil Engineering company builds roads and bridges, and may not have any Chartered Engineers on the staff.
I know several people who design electronics for a living, have degrees in the same subject and call themselves 'Electronic Engineer', yet becoming CEng would never cross their mind. Whereas if you wanted to become a structural engineer you would likely have to become chartered.
I have never met a Chartered network engineer, yet what else would a CCNA call themselves?
Never mind the software engineers and Devops engineers...
Perhaps the Chartered Engineers should have found their own term rather than adopt a general one and then get sniffy about other uses? I know the Chartered Institutes have been around a long time but the term 'Engineer' predates them by some years.
Yeah, maybe. But that's what I mean about 'barely even a trade' - takes a lot more know-how to operate a lathe (per your example) than to do a lot of the 'handyman' type jobs that we get told 'an engineer' will be sent out for.
Fwiw I'm not CEng, EE by degree, but work in SE. I'd like the IET & chartership to be more relevant for SE, but all I meant by that was that we have it, but don't (as some other countries do) require it or something like it in order to use the term 'engineer'.
Not at all, as I mentioned above I am in the UK. It is hard to get our police to react to anything...but any mention of firearms gets them excited. Interestingly I thought the phone engineer was more of a dick than the coppers.
Actually remember a presentation from one of the logbook startups from a few years ago. The key feature that skyrocketted adoption was the ability to fudge (...er, "correct") the logbook manually. When it was automated, they had issues because it would basically lock them down to the rules.
Agree. In US, 500 kids have died. That's in over a year, and in a time period which didn't include vaccine.
Every year 800 kids die from drowning. About 200 kids die from the flue. Driving kills 4000. Suffocation 1500.
The risk to kids is very very small (especially considering vaccine can probably prevent almost all the above deaths), and certainly less than many other risks we tolerate.
And these figures are all _with_ not _of_. A subset of the persons who have died with covid died of it, for young people it's likely that its a fairly small subset.
It is huge amount to die from a illness and it is so limited mostly because of restrictions. There were just few deaths from flu in the same period.
US just has stupid amount of violent deaths, either homicide or car accidents. 3 times more for vehicle accidents and 10 or times more for homicide than in other countries.
For example car accidents from million in 2019
Below 15
US: 21
Germany: 7
15-24:
US: 139
Germany: 49
This is only counting mortality but there are also hospitalizations and prolonged illness. Fortunately it is very huge but it is not small either.
F'n A. Reading the comments on this thread makes me love humanity. So much ingenuity, raw engineering horsepower, creativity. Goddamn, you are great people and you should be proud of yourselves. Reading this makes me believe we will survive as a species.
I worked with a factory that spent several years tracking down a quality problem. Eventual cause was wind direction...whenever they were down wind of the local cattle stockyard during a hot day.
I would welcome you to move to VT, which has had fully state based funding since 1996 or so. The outcome has been decidedly mixed.
One clear thing that has happened is every student is getting a lot of money spent on them! (~$19k). Spending has increased substantially. There is a lot of waste. Despite losing 30% of students since that time period due to demographics, the number of teachers has actually increased. Staff to student ratio is 1:4.
But performance has not changed, and has actually gone down a bit if you squint at the numbers.
Agree. I've voted in 4 states (NC, NY, VT, NH) and it has all been like above. And I've also served as election volunteer, checking absentee ballots against the voting rolls.
I can COMPLETELY believe it was a lazy analyst at an insurance company. Boss: where's the data that Bob wanted? er... Here! (Source: been inside many insurance companies.)
Hanlon's (and Ocham's) Razor all the way here. Laziness / stupidity wins.
100% agree. Especially if the data was going to be hard to collect.
I have fabricated data to shut up my political chain more than once in my life. Why? Because they kept pestering me after being told that the data doesn't exist yet but will exist naturally at some point in the future.
So, I can fight with my management chain because some VP has "collect data about X" on his quarterly goals and simply won't take "No" for an answer. Or I can feed him crap data that he will most likely forget about. And if the data is actually important, the data will fix itself in <n> months when I collect it.
Most probably, the data never gets looked at and I never waste the time collecting it. All good. I'm a wonderful team player that gets his job done. Probability: 95%
Or, possibly, some intern comes to me in 18 months asking why my data seems to be ... off. Cool. Unbelievably, someone is really using that data. I give a "Hrm. I'll go look at that." prioritize the poor intern, collect the data and give them an attaboy for being so diligent. Intern is happy and his boss thinks he's extra diligent. Probability: 4%
Or, if the data was actually important, I collected it and resubmitted it myself at the first point we could realistically collect it because I wanted it for myself, too. Probability: 1%
However, if that fabricated data somehow escaped the company and people depended upon it, yeah, egg yolk on the face all around, and I might get fired. Probability: 0% to a three digit engineering approximation.
The culture at your company must be really awful to have driven you to this. Why can't you just tell these VPs to go pound sand, since data takes some time to collect and can't simply be willed into existence by working long hours? Are you afraid they'll badmouth you to your boss or something?
Because I already told said VP to get lost, loudly, with justification and he still didn't listen.
It wasn't just my group being harassed. It was probably 15+ design groups. Sure, that VP eventually got nuked, but fighting with a shitty VP generally results in you losing your job before he does.
Politics is a thing. You pick your battles--you only get so many bullets. Too many people here on HN think that fighting every single slight makes you honorable. No, it actually makes you jerk--shitty things happen even at the best places and you need to deal with them without pissing everybody off--it's called being an adult. Sure, at some point enough shitty things happen that you should leave. Prior to that you need to learn how to deal with things so that your team is protected.
Feeding that VP fabricated data meant that he thought I was "good guy" team player. My chain VP got less political heat. My team got an extra positive evaluation for generating data early and going "above and beyond". Everybody on our side got back to doing their job instead of something stupid that would never help us.
All this at the possible cost that I might have to personally say "Whoops, I screwed that up. My bad." 18 months down the road for a single VP who may not even be there that long. I'm gonna take that tradeoff 99 times out of 100.
Now, is that the case here? Don't know and it doesn't look like it. However, don't rule out the fact that someone got "tasked" with something that was obstructing them and did the absolute minimum thing to make it go away.
I appreciate the insight and definitely don't judge you for adapting to survive in your environment. It seems like a really toxic environment though. Really unfortunate that this level of dysfunction is normal in some places.
Thanks for sharing this. It is a good insight. WTF who cares, get the paycheck and whatever is an attitude far more common in industry than in academia.
It's hard to overstate how disengaged and checked out the data people at big companies can be. The idea that data is valuable enough to merit executive attention is pretty new, and data scientists often find themselves on new teams in old, blue chip companies where data has gotten no respect for many years. And the long-tenured data employees, if there are any, have the attitude you'd expect from this.
