Engineering is not a routine gig. Like a long slow baseball game, it can be quiet and tedious for long stretches, and then explode into a frenzy of throwing and catching almost without warning.
I was in Austin for an SOC power-on that had me in a lab full of electronics equipment and highly educated foreigners for nine to fourteen hours every day between two weekends inclusive (i.e. nine days). After that things settled back into my usual routine shirking as I slowly ramped up on a new project. But right when my colleague had just gotten to Munich for a design review that depended on me completing my design, I was pulled off of it to join the team verifying electrical specs on yet another product development. There is quite a lot of urgency -- I won't risk unemployment right now explaining why but it has to do with the letters MWC -- so my pal has been left hanging with little enough to show a bunch of Germans, and if you know German engineers you know that won't be fun, but what can we do? Meanwhile I'm in the lab right now -- I guess if I'd gone to work at eight and been here all day I'd be heading for a sixteen hour day -- hovering over a chassis stacked with circuit boards, little indicators blinking fiendishly, a terminal open on a lab computer so I can use adb to talk to the stupid things, and a 2.5GHz scope glowing overall with a dull 1024×768 pixel malignancy. It's all very goddam uninteresting, except it isn't, it's pretty cool actually, being part of this global effort, I'm just too, um, seasoned to focus so intently on technology development anymore, and find that too much else in life is completely fascinating, stuff young engineers dismiss such as human relationships and poetic prose and all the other soaring symphonic phrases of real life. But if one must earn a living, there are worse ways to do it, and no shortage of people who don't have the option of doing whatever else I'd be doing anyway. Thus, I am not uncontent, just tired, and rather more prone to discursive circumlocutions than signal integrity analysis. Perhaps I should go home to bed, and actually, just this once, set my alarm.
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4 comments:
I fully empathize with you. And even envy you. Not the long fucking hours, good god no, but the fact that you're working at an actual engineering position and have the skills still to be able to do it.
It's cool that you're valued enough to be put on a hot new project, although it sucks for your other cow-orker in Munich.
"Valued" as in "Done with that other thing yet? No? Do this anyway."
I know you REALLY envy me using adb to control Android development systems. And I'm not even a software geek. Of course, we're all in this together. I understand the black magic, and they the incantations.
No doubt working in a lab full of electronics and highly educated foreigners pays better than working at Walmart but Walmart delivers a bigger bang for the buck when it comes to the boring cacophonies of real life.
I'm not sure about that, asha. Like Don and N, in real life, I'm an engineer although I've never played one on teevee.
You know the old joke, "A true engineer will carry on a one-hour debate over the expected results of a test that actually takes five minutes to run"?
It's true.
And we all three still own slide rules and know how to work them.
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