Today, I'll be going to a statewide Engineering Conference on the kind of engineering for which I am a technician -- and if you think that's confusing, ponder that most of the Chief Engineers (it says so right on their door) who will be there aren't officially "Engineers" in the hang-out-a-shingle legal sense, either. About half of them have some form of EE degree, maybe more than half, but it's not a line of work where regular big boss engineers need to be Certified Professional Engineers, so they're not. They hire 'em for projects when needed, and if a CPE is not needed (or if there is any sort of heavy lifting), you get soldering-iron jockeys like me.
And tomorrow, the whole lot of us -- techs and Chiefs and Assistant Chiefs, plus the occasional CPE (usually teaching the rest of us) get to go hang out, learn stuff, attend a big rubber-chicken lunch and awards ceremony with non-technical people in our business, and then go learn more stuff while trying not to fall asleep.
It'll be fun.
I remember a particularly tedious voir dire session when I was being considered as a juror for a product liability case.
ReplyDelete"Are you an engineer?" was the question, and my initial response was "that is my job title, but I am not a 'licensed engineer' nor do I have an engineering degree".
I was asked the same question about 20 different ways, responded truthfully each time but never to their satisfaction, and they eventually used one of their peremptory challenges to get rid of me. I suspect that the plaintiff's lawyers really didn't want an engineer on the jury, and I was too close to being one for their comfort.
Now, while I may >now< be a multi-degreed engineer, if I want to know what's really going on with some project, I don't ask the Director of the Lab, I don't ask the Program Manager, I don't ask the Project Engineer. I ask one of the techs - the people that really know what's what and will tell me. If your fingers aren't in the grease, you don't have a true feeling of the issue.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I regret letting ambition take me away from the fun (and sometimes not so fun) work.
Q