a_square_peg

It's amusing to think about what the technical hiring process would have been like if it were to happen now.

"Need 10+ years of experience in nuclear detonation device."

I'm sure everyone has worked with engineers who might be 10x on their own but drag the team down being inflexible or insisting on solving the wrong problem.

I like the saying that "engineering is a team sport" and agree that the multiplier should be on the productivity of the entire team as mentioned in the article. The concept of whole being greater than the sum of its parts applies to both engineering systems and technical teams (which we'd probably say is a type of system on its own).

Not meaning to downplay the role of great engineers... I suppose the best scenario would be 10x engineers who can also help the rest of the team perform better.

This is fantastic to see - I've been thinking about the need for something like this for a while.

I think there are two markets for this and I feel like you are already addressing the homeowners. Have you reached out to utilities who are looking to shave peak loads with DER?

Wow - that was painful to read because I can relate so much. Thanks for sharing. Another aspect of such dysfunction is the diffusion of responsibility that comes with it. The stubborn people who pushed for a particular solution rarely suffer ill consequence because the decision was technically made as a group.

I think a functional engineering decision process is more akin to a veto process. Someone, say Olivia in your example, would be tasked with selecting the language for the job and submitting the technical rationale for it and the relevant authorities (e.g. CTO or product owner) would sign off on the decision. They will normally have the power to approve or reject but not to impose certain solution. In a traditional hardware engineering, this is how it's done, where an engineer submits a design and it needs to be approved by relevant subject matter experts in various domains, such as material, thermal, structure, safety etc.

I recommend this essay often to people, especially in a start up. When someone describes their organization as being "flat", it's often a red flag because it means that there are unwritten power structure that newer employees will likely be excluded from.

Thanks for sharing!

I understand there is updates being made to the space export control rules (https://www.space.commerce.gov/new-space-export-control-rule...) regarding space/satellite components that were previously classified as ITAR. I've been curious to know if this will enable Canadians to apply to some space/aerospace technology companies in the US that were restricted to US citizens only?

Woah - this is strange. This was posted yesterday but I see that the timestamp has changed so it's only 4 hours old now. The timestamps for the comments seem to have changed also.

You're absolutely right on both accounts - it did work to engage us and that I would rather that such posts don't get upvoted.

Thanks for your understanding. :)

Fair enough. I feel like I've been seeing a lot of questions on Reddit along this line that comes off as very low effort to generate engagements so that's really the reason behind my comment but I see how my response also comes off as snarky.

I think this is as meaningful as the question "what's the best food you've ever eaten?", which is to say, it's not a very meaningful question.

I never got to ask this as an interview question, but I always thought it would be interesting to ask - 'if you were wrong, would you want to know?' Not on any particular topic but in general. When I asked this in casual settings, I thought it was illuminating that no one gave a simple 'yes' as an answer.

Interesting to know - thanks for the info. Strange to think that something designed for 'known, understandable, repeatable work' got adopted by software development.

Not an issue if one can do both but when there's a conflict, a great engineering firm will prioritize safety & quality over profit, whereas a business will prioritize profit & stock price over safety & quality.

Wonder how 'Sprint', 'Scrum', 'Kanban' etc. all evolved out this? I really can't understand how it went from 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools' became formalized processes of daily standups, 2-week sprints, etc.

Yep - certainly lessons learned through painful experiences.

Supply chain management is incredibly challenging and it's interesting to see one school of thought moving away to vertical integration as an alternative solution and another doing just as well with suppliers (Airbus, Apple, ASML, etc).

The way the project was structured, it was in the interest of everyone to succeed since everyone paid for their own development cost and only made money when the planes were sold. Not the easiest client to work for mind you - I've been told that many companies flat out refuse to work with them, but again, thinking back, I think that's what made the project a success, although extremely stressful.

Can confirm. I worked as Airbus' tier 1 supplier and they were even accompanying us to manage our own supplier, which in hind-sight, ensured that things like this didn't happen.

This was the practice of 'configuration management' - I mentioned it in another thread but a lot of this is discussed in the book 'The Secret of Apollo'. It's a quite a good read and gave me a whole new appreciation for the practice of configuration management and document control, something that many engineers abhor.

Another book that I enjoyed on the topic - "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs". This also comes to the same conclusion that it was the systems engineering process that allowed it to succeed.

It reallly depends on what problem you're solving - I don't think there is a generic answer unfortunately. If there is a specific industry that you're targeting and you've reached out to potential users to validate your value proposition, I think that should give you an idea where to start.

ChatGPT has already saved me from hours of Googling when I'm trying to find out how to do certain things. It almost feels magical - I don't have to read through half-dozen slightly different variations of what I need to do.

Before ChatGPT, to find the answer to things like "how do I set up Gunicorn to run as a daemon that restarts when it fails" I would have to endure hours of googling, snarky stack-overflow comments that I shouldn't do that, etc., but as a solopreneur without access to a more senior engineer to ask, it's been fantastic. I've been quite skeptical of machine learning/AI claims but I feel like I'm experiencing a genuine case of a technology that's proving to be so much more useful than I had imagined.

I think the word 'tip' should be replaced with the word 'subsidize' on these payment prompt machines.

Quite absurd practice that I really wish we can move away from as a society.

If you're going to note his credentials as a physist & Caltech president, you should also note that he was also employed by BP as the oil and gas company’s Chief Scientist from 2004 and 2009.

Remember, one of the oldest ruse of climate-change deniers is to equate weather and climate.

I seem to be hearing about these torrential rain/flood in the news more often and this data visualization that I made a couple of years ago seems relevant.

https://twitter.com/oikoweather/status/1338691244470403075

Basically, since 1950, we've added 2 litres of water per square meter of earth's surface to the atmosphere. This is twice the volume of Lake Erie.

This is really interesting - reminds me of Matt Levine's observation about some of the crypto scams promising outrageous returns that do it for the same reason, which is to filter out the most gullible targets out of the set.

I really hope people don't take this result at its face value - the model used and the approach is extremely simplistic, which is essentially a pseudo 2-D simplification of urban canyon geometry, a street with buildings on either sides. I worked with the referenced model as part of my master's thesis.

The bulk of urban heat island effect is driven by the radiative absorption of non-porous materials of the built-environment. Other heat waste put into the area accounts for less than something like 5% of the additional heat added when compared to rural areas.

Assuming technical competency is given, I think senior engineer really needs to do two things well:

1. Be able to make a design decision - among multiple options and with incomplete data and uncertainties, a senior engineer needs to be able to make a decision and be accountable for it in order to move the project forward. I think a good interview question would be to ask about their difficult design decisions.

2. Be able to identify wrong solution (most of the time) - maybe this comes with technical competency but a lot of resource is wasted chasing solutions that with the benefit of experience, should have been evident early on.

The United States has a policy about government data - including weather (e.g. NOAA) and GPS, to be made freely available to the public. Your property data, collected at the county level, falls under this category so they are accessible to everyone.

However, I think Zillow would be prevented from publishing the owner name, since it would probably be classified as Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Awesome job! Here's a similar tool specific to a location, based on ERA5 data (https://explorer.oikolab.com) so going back only to 1940. Been thinking it'd be great to show both global & local context somehow.