Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

This printer has two trays, a duplexer, and a network print server. Apart from the collator which we don't have, it's as fully-loaded as they come.

Khaos

car looks nasty what tow hook is that

rider384

iTrader: (3)

yeah brah sick tow hooks dawg.

On another note, I am writing my college extracurricular resume right now and I realized that I have three things to put on it, one of which is my job.

****.

Faeflora

iTrader: (2)

Killer toe hook bro I like hwo you put the car on the hook so the hook can move around on it's own. good build dued

Pen2_the_penguin

iTrader: (4)

Godless Commie

iTrader: (2)

How come they did not choose to obliterate something that would cost the taxpayer far less dough, like an empty barrel, I fail to grasp.

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

Not impressed. So they start with a small spot and edit the video...for all we know, that took an hour to get going lol

Machismo

iTrader: (1)

Having your girl request to get the "P-car" fixed before replacing the toilet is Pure Win!

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

Ever wonder what happens when you smoke crack?

Well here it is-

http://www.autotrader.com/fyc/vdp.js...standard=false

2004 Mazdaspeed MX-5
Price $18,500
Mileage 108,000

Machismo

iTrader: (1)

Oh wow! Only 8K over blue book if in excellent condition. Yes, plz!

rider384

iTrader: (3)

There was a SNC NA with like 60k miles for 11 grand up here at a stealership at one point.

rider384

iTrader: (3)

If a computer scientist/Mechanical Engineer/Electrical Engineer/Techie could answer these questions, I would be very grateful. Must have a college degree, it's for an assignment.

1. What is your job title?

2. How did you choose this career?

3. What are your daily responsibilities

4. What kind of skills do you need to perform your job? Did your major in college help you gain these skills? What was your major?

5. How much education or training is required or recommended for this occupation? What kind of degree would you recommend for someone going into this profession?

6. How many hours per week do you work? Are you expected to do overtime?

7. What kind of personality is best suited for this career?

8. What are the advantages and disadvantages of your job?

9. Do you feel that your salary compensates you appropriately for the amount of work you do?

10. What can you tell me about advancement opportunities? Do you need to update your skills/education to ensure advancement?

11. What do you see as the future outlook for this job? Are there going to be jobs available in this field in 5 years?

12. What kind of work experience or volunteer experience would help me find out if I am interest in this profession?

I would appreciate anyone who answered.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Guru. Seriously, that's what I had printed on my business cards.


I didn't. I always figured I'd wind up in IT (well, they didn't call it IT then, but you know what I mean.)

When I was 16 years old, I was the A/V geek at our high school. Among other things, this meant that I was the one who wound up loading the big PA system into my little VW Beetle (with all the seats removed) and setting it up anytime somebody needed it. One saturday afternoon, I had set up a gig in the parking lot of the local community auditorium, and found that my cassette player had stopped working. With only about 30 minutes before "go" time I couldn't drive back and get another one.

Across the street, I saw a radio station van with the mast up, doing a remote at a local car dealership. I ran over there, went to the van, and pleaded my case to the guy with the headphones, who took pity on me and gave me a spare cassette machine. As it turns out, the guy doing the remote was also the owner of the radio station, and after his gig was over, he walked across the street and offered me a job setting up remotes and running the station during baseball games evenings and weekends.

This job turned into sort of a mentor / apprentice relationship. Over the next couple of years, he schooled me in broadcast engineering, equipment maintenance, etc. By the time I graduated high school, I'd rebuilt a 20 kilowatt FM transmitter, installed and tuned a 5k FM rig, learned editing, built a new remote van, read every manual in the place, done all sorts of studio maintenance and upgrades, and logged quite a bit of airtime.

So by the time I was ready to go to college, I pretty much already had a "career".


These days, I work with a major manufacturer of broadcast equipment (Harris corp) in the audio consoles department. My time is split roughly 50 / 50 / 50 (yes, that's 150%) between R&D / prototyping of new products, service & support for advanced applications and weird problems (the stuff the service guys can't figure out, mostly software-oriented), and doing "systems engineering", which is designing and installing whole broadcast facilities out in the field. I'm heading down to Birmingham this weekend to commission a new 14 studio facility for Entercom radio.



Apart from a basic grounding in electrical theory and networking, the biggest requirement is a capacity for abstract thought. There's an old joke that asks what is the difference between a scientist and an engineer, where the answer is that a scientist knows how to solve for X, whereas the engineer knows which book the answer is printed in. There's a lot of truth in that, however since most of the stuff we build is fairly unique, and the topology of our audio networks has no parallel in the CS world, by the time a problem gets handed to me, it's a safe bet that there is no book with the answer printed in it.

I spend a lot of time doing black-box analysis. Essentially, once you have a system which is sufficiently complex, you can't really validate it or look for problems by just staring at the code. You have to actually build it, and then prod it in unique and interesting ways while looking at how it responds. To an extent, you have to anthropomorphize the machine, put yourself inside it, try to imagine scenarios in which it might respond inappropriately, and then test those theories.

For whatever reason, this is a skill that a lot of people, even very smart people, don't seem to be able to master. Our lead programmer will sometimes argue with me that such-and-such is impossible, and I'll argue that no, if you do this and then this and then this, that I predict that some mechanism will react in this way, and then we go and actually construct a test for it. Sometimes it fails the way I predicted, sometimes it works like he said it would, and sometimes it goes off and does something totally unexpected that requires me to spend the next week analyzing the results, trying to figure out what the hell the machine was thinking, and devise new tests to zero in on whatever weird thing happened.

They don't teach this stuff in school. Well, maybe in Philosophy. I only know one guy who studied Philosophy, and he's a bartender.

There's also a hell of a lot of failure-mode analysis. Now, they do teach that to mech and civil engineering guys, but that's mostly about figuring out why a bridge collapsed or the wing fell off of an airplane. I've never heard of FMA being a hot topic for EE or CS guys. FMA in software, particularly for complex, networked systems, is still sort of a black art. It's actually kind of fun, but most guys simply suck at it for the same reasons they suck at black-box analysis. Looking over a months' worth of syslog data and core dumps to figure out why a machine did something a week ago that was poorly described by some stoned overnight jock earning minimum wage to sit in a chair and push a button every few minutes requires an almost zen-like comprehension. One of the guys here jokes that I look like Neo staring into the Matrix when I'm in that mode.



Most of the folks I work with are EEs. One (our best analog and power-supplies designer) has a degree in chemical engineering, and we have one ME. Those guys do all of the actual nuts-and-bolts circuit design. It's boring, tedious, 9 to 5 work and I'd kill myself if I were them.


Most of the folks here work 40-50 hours a week. My job varies greatly. When I'm on the road (typically for 1-4 weeks at a time) then it's usually 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as it takes. When I'm home, there are days (sometimes weeks) when I have absolutely nothing at all to do, so I come in late, spend a lot of time on this forum, go home early, and build **** to relax. Other times, when there's some major crisis or huge problem that needs solving, then it's long hours with no breaks. I have a little inflatable mattress that I keep in my office for when I'm too damned tired to drive home.

I honestly like it better this way. It's less boring.


For traditional EE / CS? Dull, boring, and systematic. Watch the movie "Sneakers" and pay attention to the Werner Brandes character; the guy who meticulously folds his toothpaste tubes from the bottom up. That's who you want doing your circuit design.

For my particular job, it's more a cross between a sadomasochist and an alchemist.


Advantages: They give me lots of money, I get to travel to really interesting places and get free cruises, and it's rarely boring.

Disadvantages: This wouldn't work if I had a wife and kids.



I'd always rather be earning more, but particularly now that I'm a freelancer and getting paid by the hour, I can't complain too much. I'd estimate that the average salary around here is probably between $90-$100k, though of course the salary range here in SoCal tends to skew slightly upwards relative to most of the country.



The broadcast industry as whole is circling the drain. And since my particular skillset and knowledge base are pretty specifically intertwined with this business, it'd be very hard for me to make a lateral career move.

The rest of the guys here could probably jump ship and land a similar job doing boring circuit design for any one of a number of companies.


I honestly have no idea. I've never had to apply for a job. The thought that I might someday have to do so scares the **** out of me.

Pen2_the_penguin

iTrader: (4)

tl;dr

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

I went back through my gmail one day after landing my current gig. I started applying in June of '09 and sent over 100 resumes out. Could have been more that I didnt send through my gmail. I accepted this job in Nov of '10, didnt get onboard until Feb of '11.

Had at least 40 phone interviews, and maybe 20 in person, 5 had me come back for a second, 1 a third, 2 had more do "skills tests", 1 hired me.

I had the chance to work with Newt Communications for Newt Gingrich's PR firm, however, they didn't want to pay me enough to live.

rider384

iTrader: (3)

Thanks Joe, I greatly appreciate it. What do you mean by "thinking abstractly" though? Abstract thought to solve problems by non-traditional standards? Finding different paths to the same solutions?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Finding logic in that which appears to make no sense. Discerning patterns in that which appears to be random.

It seems like the majority of the people who I work with are just too deeply imbued of the philosophy that if A, then B. And 99% of the time, they're absolutely correct. But sometimes, once you've constructed a sufficiently large, complex device, or an array of small, simple devices interacting in a cooperative fashion, ghosts can arise in the machine.

Individual circuits or individual pieces of software might behave in perfectly predictable, orderly ways when tested individually. But put them all together and they sometimes behave in ways that you didn't expect and which may seem nondeterministic until you figure out why they aren't.

In other words, sometimes 2 + 2 = 5, for unusually large values of 2.

Some people just can't see that.

ZX-Tex

iTrader: (15)

Because though most technical types realize it may not make much difference, it is easier to sell it to a non-savvy customer if you demonstrate it with the actual end application components. Otherwise they may think it is a canned demo. BTDT.

What I want to know is if you can defeat the laser by painting or covering the engine cowl with something highly reflective.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I want to know if you can defeat the laser by moving forward a few feet.

Anybody see the Archimedes Death Ray episodes of Mythbusters?

rider384

iTrader: (3)

This. That thing is cool, but it took a long-*** time (relative to how much a boat could move) to do anything. Imagine trying to focus the beam at one point for long enough when two boats are flying across the water at 50+mph.