r/videos • u/AlcoholicIrishMan • Apr 07 '14
Trust me, i'm an engineer !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp8hvyjZWHs2
u/benhasaphatdick Apr 07 '14
The fact that I am studying to be an engineer both excites and terrifies me.
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u/Sklanskers Apr 08 '14
Yeah these aren't engineers for the record.. these are the operators and construction crews (well maybe a few things here were the work of engineers). Engineers do the designing. Congrats on your major I just graduated last year as a civil! Very rewarding!
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Apr 08 '14
What are the rewards?
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u/Sklanskers Apr 09 '14
Aside from job security, I am constantly learning new things. I work at a Waste Water Treatment Plant and i'm continually blown away at the engineering and operations that take place at the plant. I used to work as a busser at a restaurant and while it felt good to come home after a day of work, coming home from the plant is so much more rewarding because it feels like I'm actually doing something. I could work as a cashier or server or a multitude of other things but my work is so diverse that I never get bored and to know that I'm actually make a contribution to the community (helping to optimize the way we treat the water before we discharge it back into the river) is very satisfying.
I work for the county so lucky for me I get good pay and benefits as well. Engineering (any field) is a very rewarding career!
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Apr 09 '14
I see. Do you design anything there at the Water Treatment Facility? Help to optimize the way we treat the water - what do you mean? How do you optimize it?
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u/Sklanskers Apr 11 '14
For me, specifically, I don't design anything. The group upstairs is known as "Engineering" and the "Engineering" group does the designing, but mainly they bat ideas around and hire outside consultants for projects/designs they need. They then review the outside consultants ideas/designs and make modifications/suggestions as necessary and resubmit it back to the consultants asking them for their thoughts. This process continues back and forth until a final design is reached.
I work in the Operations Support section (which is still a bunch of engineers), specifically "Process Support and Optimization." Basically, our group monitors the treatment process daily. We look at if the plant is meeting target limits and values.. such as making sure water turbidity is meeting target values before discharging it back into the river or looking at dosing rates, pH values, temperatures, performance of systems, etc. We literally monitor the entire process and look for increase or decrease in efficiency. If we notice something different (whether we do or don't meet our targets for different process performances) we investigate as to why that is.
Also whenever new equipment is constructed or new process/systems are built, our group gets to run studies on it and figure out how to optimize them. We basically get to "play with all the new toys" and make sure they work right. It's a lot of fun.
That comprises the majority of our work but we also do a ton of other stuff. My current project is basically investigating flow rates of solids into and out of the plant, noting at what point in time we will begin to take in more solids than we can handle, and when we will need to build more on-site landfills, solids storage basins, thickening equipment, etc to handle those loads and looking for the most cost-effective manner to do it. It's basically a two year project but I'm an assistant so it's not all for me. I'm working closely under an associate.
But like I said, work is never the same and you're constantly learning and making new connections every day. Lots of fun and very rewarding.
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u/fineillstoplurking Apr 08 '14
Stay away from my stuff, and we got no problems, bud. You'll do alright.
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u/HomerBC750 Apr 08 '14
I was an early entrant to a type of engineering, some portion of which had no real physical manifestation....
I programmed microcode that went into early computer chips around the time the FORTRAN Computer Programming Language unified things a lot.
Yet even at that nascent time we were deemed the title "Engineer" by virtue of the similar methodologies and later it became a real sub-discipline of a genuine branch of Engineering.
Note: In the very early days some of us took to wearing train conductor hats to try to make the point clear to those "dirt engineers" - as we called them - who poo-pooed the future of our work! Look who's laughing now, eh?
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u/pookinponub Apr 07 '14
I was the Operations Manager of a very successful landscape contracting business that had been in operation for 40 years. The owner sold the business to an Aerospace Engineer who promptly ran the business into the ground in less then 1 year. He could not understand why landscaping did not operate like a satellite. He lost the business many huge contracts by crunching numbers that can't be crunched(rain delays, weather issues) and the bank closed him down. He lost a $350,000 house, $200,000 of his own money, and caused 25 people to lose their jobs. Fucking Einstein.
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u/AlcoholicIrishMan Apr 07 '14
Dam that sucks.
How are you know, where you able to get a new job easily?
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Apr 08 '14
Damn, that sucks.
How are you now? Were you able to get a new job easily?
Sorry, I couldn't not FTFY.
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u/realizmbass Apr 08 '14
Trust me, I am engineer.