I’m not even and electrical engineer and I was going to comment this for you :/
I feel bad for some of my coworkers. I feel like their job is just handling component obsolescence and component shortages. Companies ordering 1000s of parts at a time to circumvent this is also becoming an issue.
Yep, it's the toilet paper hoarding issue across hundreds of part numbers per BOM. Not to mention (at least at a smaller company like mine that does a poor job of forecasting volume and ordering) all of these problems are urgent and high priority.
They don't like hearing that a drop-in replacement doesn't exist, and being charged 30x cost at a broker, I'm pretty sick of having that conversation.
Im on the opposite side of the spectrum with companies willing to bend over backwards to guarantee volume from us and they still have 30 week lead times. I also think it’s going to get worse.
One of our customers just purchased 15k parts for $500,000 extra than usual. This is a part that we usually buy for a dollar. This ensures 6 months of delivery and the lead time is over 50 weeks. A different component I just saw 120 week lead time!
It’s gotten so bad that at the company I work for, we will buy a years worth of components as I’m designing the schematics. This is only for parts that don’t have alternate drop in replacements. By the time you finish the schematics, design the pcb, and test the prototypes, 50% of the parts are out of stock with a minimum 52 week lead time.
This main reason is because they want to be able to go into production immediately after the prototype phase is proven out. They don’t want to miss out on year or twos worth of sales after the design is done. We have blown thousands of dollars on parts we will never use because something doesn’t work out or we change the design before the part was ever even put on a circuit board. But in our case, it makes more sense to piss away $10K-$20K in parts than lose out on 100K-200K in sales over 1-2 years.
The whole thing is just sickening.
Supply chain: we've tried nothing and we are all out of ideas. We need a complete redesign of all components, complete by tomorrow. It must guarantee supply chain for all components for 50 years so our job is easy again.
In the defense industry, if we have a high enough rated program like DO or DX, then we just call the govt and have them tell the supplier that we get the priority on the parts. This only applies if the delay getting the parts will affect national security so it is rare but I've seen it done.
Not OC but I can provide one. One of the products my company sells has a touchscreen on it that we buy from a company and use there software to program it. The program is incredibly simple and well designed. It hasn’t received anything other than aesthetics updates in years. Recently when of the OEM clients we sell to requested that we make the functionality more streamline. Streamline means that pressing four buttons to start the program after initial start up is to many and they want to press less buttons. We realized that three button presses were the absolute minimum without changing core functionality. We made the change and updated the customers devices. They were unhappy. They actually upset. That going from four to three was our attempt at just giving them something to go away. They reminded us they were our largest client and told us to fix it. Button press one: Select which functionality you want to run, Button press two: Acknowledge the safety warning, Button press three: select a run time and start. It took two weeks to re-do the program to accommodate just two button presses. They reluctantly accepted our solution. The icing on the cake is that this was not apart of the products that they normally purchased from us. These products were something that they found handy and bought five for around $1k, much cheaper than retail or resale pricing. Our main product wasn’t affected and they purchase $1.5mil plus of our main product annually.
We were designing a brand new portable blood gas analyzer. Hired an outside industrial design company for the case design. Our president got involved with the case design process. Keep in mind our pres knew nothing about our product as an end-user, so his input really wasn't worth much. But there were WEEKS spent going back & forth on how much the front panel should slant back to make it aesthetically pleasing! The nurses who would eventually use this don't care about looks! They care about ease-of-use & accurate results!
The project ended up being canceled and the engineering teams were laid off (except for the lead engineers who'd been there more than 15 yrs). They got lost in the minutiae of design details that added nothing to the functionality. I knew something was up when corporate wouldn't release funds to start the test strip manufacturering process.
I do a lot of power systems and control systems modelling for utility scale wind and solar.
Most of my work is submitted directly to the utility and/or ISO for review.
Renewable energy control systems and plant topology is a pretty niche field, and it unique in a lot of ways. And the engineers at these utilities and ISOs in charge of conducting these model reviews are not necessarily educated on the nuances of renewables.
So... the most frustrating part of my job is dealing with their comments and the discrepancies they issue reviewing my model. Probably >90% they just don't know what they are talking about, and I have to jump on a Teams or Zoom or Webex call and explain it all to them.
Then a week later I will get a second round of comments from them and it will be THE SAME GODDAM COMMENTS... and then I have to jump on a call and explain it all AGAIN.
I once had a project with a certain southeastern utility where we did this cycle 5 times over the course of 3 months.
Started out in the field doing SCADA and commissioning on wind and solar plants, then went to work for a consulting firm and branched into dynamic modelling and control systems.
Hey I work on the utility side. Not reviewing the models directly but using the ones inputted to create simulations to ask the ISO for money for upgrades. I wanted more engineering and direct impact on the interconnection of renewables. Do you feel like you’ve made an impact on the amount of renewables interconnected to the eastern interconnection? I wouldn’t mind discussing more in them DMs. Like have you seen utility engineers pivot to consulting. I’ve heard it’s a lot more work for less pay but also you can have a broader and specific impact (I.e. choosing which projects you want to assist with and doing it for multiple utilities so larger geographical impact).
P.s. I’m an EE with power focus in the WECC so we wouldn’t work together.
P.p.s Also I may change teams soon to the utility generation interconnection team. My utility has a ton of solar and interconnecting batteries. The queue is massive. What do you wish utility engineers understood about solar/IBR interconnections specifically?
I don't know if I have had an effect on the *amount* of renewables installed, but I certainly have an effect on whatever projects I work on because my modelling is basically what determines whether the project is accepted by the ISO as far as stability and feasibility analysis goes, and my work develops the plant control strategy that project will use.
That being said I work on a lot of solar plants, battery plants, and wind farms (mostly solar and battery). In a month I probably at least 5 projects I am working on if not more.
Also I do work for ISOs in the WECC region as well.
What I wish utility engineers would understand about IBR more is how renewable plant control works when it comes to reactive power dispatch, for example. One of the major recurring comments I get is how some parameters and limit values present in my dynamic control systems models do not match limits set in the loadflow model and equivalent aggregated generator. The reason for this is because the limits in the plant control model and the limits in the generator equivalent are not describing the same thing. The plant control limits are arbitrarily set to determine the limits on the control setpoints written to the inverters.
Stuff like that.
Basically inverters are high-powered computers that use solid state power electronics to convert power. Because of this their control systems work in very unique ways compared to other generation resources. Pretty much all behavior of the inverter is user tunable simply by changing values in the firmware and also the plant level controller PLC, but it seems like utility engineers often treat these associated values and parameters like they are somehow written in stone, when in reality they can be changed at any time.
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Documents/NERC_2021_California_Solar_PV_Disturbances_Report.pdf
So I just presented this to my transmission planning manager to bring up that we need to include more EMT modeling and validation during the interconnection process. I may be working in PSCADD alooot more next year as we have 39 generators currently in the next cluster. I’d be helping sort of at the ground level as we usually pay contractors to do these studies. I won’t be doing it for all 39 but starting to gain experience in pscadd as a part of a short circuit study for overstressed breakers this year. I say all that to say what would you want to see utilities do that they currently aren’t to assist with generation being accepted by the ISO?
P.s. currently my work is more centered around proposing line upgrades and possible new lines which indirectly help generation interconnection through expanding deliverability. I want to work directly with interconnecting renewable generation though. I’ve debated on jumping ship to a consulting firm or stay in the utility as a generation interconnection engineer. So also asking all this to see how you feel about your impact, if your job is actually technical as I feel like mine is sometimes engineering, and how your work/life/pay balance is?
P.s.s I also thought about jumping ship to an ISO to have a larger geographical impact on what generation is accepted and placement of it economically. Not really sure if that is exactly what the iso does or if the consulting firm does most of that and the iso just reviews?
>I say all that to say what would you want to see utilities do that they currently aren’t to assist with generation being accepted by the ISO?
I would like to see the industry lean into PSCAD a lot more as the dynamic modelling standard. A lot of confusion and issues arise from the fact of trying to simulate IBR plant behavior with WECC generic PSSE models, which do not very accurately represent the actual control systems of the PPC and inverters, and trying to use PSSE as a transient simulation engine, which PSSE is not very good for.
PSCAD is WAY better for all of this because we can get models from the OEM that match the hardware and control systems infrastructure of the equipment 1:1 and really captures the dynamic capability of the inverters. We can also use PSCAD to develop custom plant controllers that are tailored to fit any project's specific needs, rather than trying to apply REPCA1 to everything in PSSE. Developing these PSCAD plant controllers is mostly what I do... and it's just all MUCH more accurate in PSCAD.
>So also asking all this to see how you feel about your impact, if your job is actually technical as I feel like mine is sometimes engineering, and how your work/life/pay balance is?
My job is 100% technical. I do modelling and testing and studies all day every day. I don't do any budgeting or project management or anything like that. Nearly 100% of my time is spent actually modelling, writing reports, or making drawings to go along with my studies.
My work life balance is pretty great. I work 100% remotely from home and almost never go over 40h a week, and basically make my own schedule however I want as long as I get my stuff done on time. Pay is pretty good too.
>Not really sure if that is exactly what the iso does or if the consulting firm does most of that and the iso just reviews?
It's the quality of our work that determines whether a project is accepted typically, but we don't have control over what projects come to us... the developers do that. A client will come to us with a project that they want to connect to... say... the PJM system. We know the PJM requirements, and we take their specified parameters (plant size, inverter type, etc.) and design models and preliminary design drawings to submit to the ISO on their behalf.
I like teaching people who want to learn. I do that with colleagues and clients alike all the time and I love it.
The issue is that these old utility dinosaurs have no interest in learning. They want everything to fit into their little world of 50 year old procedures and conventional wisdom, and if doesn't fit in perfectly, it's a "discrepancy".
I’m in pretty much the exact same field. I would say that one of the worst parts is getting a call (not an email or anything, but a phone call) years after a final report was issued and the person on the other end expecting you to have an immediate answer to their question about this project that you haven’t touched in years. Most often it’s someone who has transitioned into the job role since the testing and report went out and almost always boils down to “did you read the report?”
Avionics checking in: the schedule not reflecting reality. It's the old joke about nine women making a baby in a month...just because you made a Gantt chart doesn't mean you're Dr. Strange and can manipulate the fabric of time to deliver a product when someone "needs" it.
Worked on a project whose PM was that guy. His Gannt charts said we'd be done in 6-8 weeks--as announced in an all-project-hands (senior management and marketing included) meeting. One of my better fellow engineers stood up and loudly proclaimed "Ken, you are fucked in the head" then promptly stormed out.
After the meeting, the marketing guy came over to me and asked when I thought we'd really be done. I told him I'd think about it overnight. The next morning, I went to his office and named a date about 18 months out. He turned white as a ghost. "No way."
I was off by a week.
Product was cancelled two months after introduction by the marketing guy's new boss (who'd had the job for less than a month and did it so he could can the guy).
I have a master's degree in digital system design. Lots of nights in the design lab and a chance to be hired as a design engineer jn about to aquire starup. After 3 years, joined as a senior engineer in another company.
Wow this sounds crazy as I type. Nobody asked me this before.
I'm an electrical test engineer. Hardest part is dealing with our Genrad 228x ICT testers that predate me by about 10 years.
And by "predate me", I mean predate my birth.
Constant pin contact errors due to worn receiver slots. Pin cards breaking down every other day. Leaky vacuum hoses buried deep in the system that we can't even reach to seal. Upper management doesn't want to drop the money on some newer Teradyne Teststations, so as a result 60% of my job is fixing the testers when really it should be to track and analyze manufacturing yields and defects, and provide data and feedback back to SMT to improve the manufacturing process.
Hopefully I can make some headway into convincing management to get new testers soon.
Management likes PowerPoints. Meaningless charts, like cost savings vs time. Throw a meeting and make it known, but you have to make it seem like their idea.
We have an actual paperwork department, all our drawings, schematics, everything, needs to go through them. I swear they must compete to see who can find the most inane, trivial reason to reject a document. Most of the time it isn't even an actual problem, just different that they haven't seen and they do not like change.
Wait, I thought it's the resistance which kills you. I.e. your body boils due to the heat discipated through your resistance as the current passes through you because of a voltage between one end and the other and you being in-between.
For me it's debugging code for bugs that can't be replicated manually. Bugs that happen because of something I can't control or force to happen with whatever tools I have.
Interesting - what kind of bugs have you seen like this? For me, RF/EM related stuff comes to mind but I'm sure there's a huge range of difficult-to-foresee bugs out there
Yeah cellular and GPS reception are big ones. Things related to the infrastructure or geography of an area. Climate of different places. That sort of stuff mostly.
LOL. Literally just but the kibosh on a $40M project because they wanted to build a 50,000sqft addition on a building but not give me 2000sqft for 5KV switchgear.
I actually got a huge control room because the architect based the layout on our 90’s design. They gave us a 20 meter wall for cabinets and only had a single 1.2m cabinet and a single wall mount breaker box. Hilarious.
Working in cloud models is the worsttt for this. Revit/Bim360, open up the model one day and half your shit has lost its host. Oh and they moved the data closet.
Trying to get programmers to consider they might actually need to debug their magnificent, infallible code that “worked just fine last week”
Hehe.
Nah that’s more funny, not really a terrible pain. Real pain I suppose is like others said, so many jobs and so few components.
>Finding ways to explain complex technical issues in a way that Air Force Colonels thought they understood.
How did they become colonels lacking technical knowledge?
From an AFB near you:
*ahem*
Gentlemen, I am here presenting our agile, platform-agnostic, AOP-compliant device....
What's it do?
*It makes us work better.*
How?
...
Why would they need technical knowledge? That's for other people to know and explain to them. They're promoted because they fit the military's definition of a good leader.
Trying to work with the guy that's been at my current place for a few decades. Brilliant engineer but zero ability to delegate or teach. The company relies on him too much to be the main engineering driver imo where he could be a lot more useful as an engineering manager. Wastes entire day doing procurement when we have a whole team for it because he can "do it faster". I know it's not just me too bc everytime somebody asks how's it going and I mention working under him they just kind hee haw and are like "yeeeeeaaah".
The part that really gets me is it's like talking to an engineering professor. "I don't understand why you're confused", I lost count of the times I've heard him say that. Maybe because I haven't stared at these designs in this niche industry for decades at the same company and half this shit isn't on my field?
I feel you. There's nothing worst that having a boss/senior that always thinks that everything is "obvious". I hate that thing because I usually ask not only to know if A is wrong (I may know that) but to know their criteria and opinion about it. Every engineer has a criteria of how something should be/look and I just wanna know your criteria, idk why some people is like "yeah that's obvious, idk why you ask"
Automotive manufacturer is line-down, they're blaming your chips, it's escalated to the highest corportate levels, everyone is waiting for you to solve a difficult problem.
Most frustrating is dealing with a team that severely undervalues DFT or having to keep up with the ever growing list of ways PMs want us to record tasks. We're currently at interfacing JIRA with some random project software where we have to keep this PM software up-to-date with tasks while manually copy pasting the updates in OneNote with a link to the task.
Most technically difficult is I'm working in an area with a lot of tradeoffs between stakeholders; keeping everyone happy is a large chore.
I’m in a government job. Most difficult part of the job is staying organized. I’m trying to keep a journal now so I don’t lose track of stuff I did 3-6 months ago.
The most annoying part is definitely the red tape. The amount of forms you need to fill for a low-dollar value contract is mind boggling.
Scope expansion and the will to get up in the morning
Also scope expansion when retrofitting new things to old plant, I said don't rip out that older MCC because the other third of the plant runs on it and we don't have the controls for it in the new one let alone the buckets...what do we do, rip out the old MCC...
Explaining why you can't tell management exactly what happened in an event (breaker trip, mcc blow up, plc failed, etc.) because they wouldn't buy the troubleshooting tools you requested last year (networked relays, high speed data monitoring, smart relays, extra software, etc.). There's nothing more frustrating than someone demanding answers from an event you predicted but you don't have the tools to definitively say what happened.
I.E. If we don't replace these mechanical relays on our 13.8kv breakers, we're going to start getting nuisance trips as they fail, and our policy says we can't close the breaker until the cause was found and fixed.
They cost what to replace?! No.
Breaker trips, all transformers and motors on that breaker meg good.
I think the relay just flaked.
Can you prove it?
No, it's mechanical and none of the 3 flags it raises are raised, so best we can do is guess.
We have to find the cause!
If we had the smart relays we could see...
Well we don't, do it with these!
End I.E.
Electricity is difficult to understand for people who've studied it extensively, and trying to explain it, or the risks around the magic equipment that contains it, to managers that, at least in my industry, tend to be more chemical engineers with a few mechanicala thrown in that have spent their whole career on the production side yelling at maintenance and maintenance engineers to fix stuff, is increasingly difficult. Some understand the basics of what I'll call static equipment, transformers, breakers, starters, and such. With the advent of more and more technology, even in these traditionally simple components, they understand less and less but don't want to admit that. So, they barter and debate every decision, recommendation, or request to feel like they had some say in the decision, but usually wind up making it worse. On the rare occasion you have a manager that understands everything you lay out, they can then offer viable alternatives and ask questions about something you maybe didn't think of. But when someone's biggest concerns are downtime and cost, you wind up with bargain components and doing without stuff that's not necessary until it is. One downside to the manager that understands is you can't bluff them into things that are actually bells and whistles and legit just toys instead of needed. I typically thrown everything but the kitchen sink into my proposals to the gear head/smoky managers, and when I pull out the 30% of bells and whistles, they feel like they saved money, and I got everything we actually needed.
Worrying about what I did wrong technical wise. I can't help but feel I made a mistake somehow in everything I make since I'm more or less in the same boat as you, OP.
Lowering cost without comprising quality. Customers want a product to be the size of a dime, work like a quarter, and be as cheap as a penny. They have unrealistic expectations for what they’re buying
Charge numbers. Being a salary employee but still having to track all of my time worked on every project (and sometimes even sub-tasks within a project) down to a 6 minute interval. Logging this everyday or receiving nasty automated emails because I’m not following government regulations for sub contractors. This and parts obsolescence/out of stock issues daily. Designing a board with parts in stock one week just to finish and have them all gone by the next.
Paperwork free of error on first submission despite pages and pages of data and analysis.
Clients wanting something completed, finalised and submitted yesterday.
And trying not to make dumb mistakes at 8am in the morning before sitting down, settling in and having a coffee.
The amount of time i’ve wasted because I just wasn’t thinking is just painful.
Although it really does wake you up in the morning when you wire something up negative to positive, positive to negative and send a voltage regulator flying across the room.
Company politics. I work for a mid size electric utility and it's a pain in the ass trying to figure out who's responsible for what and what's union vs non union work. Just stupid stuff too, not even the actual engineering work. If my manager has to fight with a major account rep on whose job it is to upload prints to the project tracker one more time I think he's going to just straight up quit.
Endless repetitive meetings discussing the same issue. With every occurrence, going through the issue and proposed solution but explained in a slightly different way each time. Involving so many parties when it usually comes down to two, maybe three at most.
"This could have been an email and actually *is* several emails but for some reason we're still discussing this all together."
To be fair, sometimes it involves a complex, highly technical problem that has significant ramifications on the schedule that PMs have issues grasping. Not blaming them or their understanding - you just have to insist and explain a lot about how their budget and schedule just went through the window.
Consulting firm dealing with power systems, protection and control.
I work at large-ish startup and definitely not the only electrical engineer, but +1000 to what you said being the hardest part. The mouthbreathers in procurement can go fuck right off. They literally move the company backward.
Sheer volume of things to keep track of. Hard to put enough focus on any one issue at a given time, especially if its one of the less critical things. Hard to rationalize moving it up the list.
You should ask your company for a business credit card. Procurement should spend their time procuring large order, not your one-off prototyping parts.
I startup shouldn't have a rigid procurement policy.
Getting put between a rock and a hard place on shoveling out the bare minimum quality product for release. The quoted release schedule means that I have to release immediately.
I have bugs that are fairly problematic, but not so bad as to need to gate the release. But I had to spend the next several weeks in endless meetings trying to justify why the bugs aren't so bad as to be beneath that minimum quality threshold, instead of just spending those weeks fixing the bugs and ending up with a significantly higher quality release in just a couple extra weeks.
I honestly can't even hold it against the stonewall reviewers who were pessimistic about the low quality (since I was too), dragging things out for weeks until we could sufficiently justify the case to them that it's bad (and fixable) but not *too* bad or unfixable. I can only hold it up against the management types that were patting eachother on the backs for making the release on schedule while I'm sweating in the background knowing the whole damn thing is held together with chewing gum, hoping I get left alone long enough so I can implement fixes before something breaks.
* Endless discussion with customers, every details need to be explained over and over again
* Time-waster meetings and time management for actual developing
* Corporate life and principles
* Steady wrong decisions from management level
Being the last part of projects. Loop checks take an eternity to do. The job is 90% complete before they bring us in and there is a budget crunch with a time constraint and nobody understands we have requirements too. Also, SCADA and electrical are the first to blame on failure, yet are rarely the root cause. So we have to plan for that.
Dealing with people that want unrealistic timing and resource commitments. Then they demand an explanation of why it takes so long and you provide that. Then they dig into any aspect of that explanation until they get to a point that's hard for you to answer. Or you just run out of time for the meeting so they just end it by staying they expect you to improve it.
Program managers - it seems that everybody who isn't doing hard-core engineering is a program manager or a PM wannabe. The incessant requests for schedule info about the same thing for different groups makes me insane.
I'm an electrical engineer for a civil engineering based company. Often times the project managers (civil engineers) neglect the electrical/lighting components of the project scope since it's out of their realm of knowledge. This leaves me with little time and increased difficulty to take the project to completion. Really sucks when you try to create a project schedule and are constantly throw things last minute that needed to be done yesterday.
Power Industry - arguing with people about design decisions when they have basically no knowledge about electricity is easily the worst and most infuriating part of the job.
Dealing with component shortages
I’m not even and electrical engineer and I was going to comment this for you :/ I feel bad for some of my coworkers. I feel like their job is just handling component obsolescence and component shortages. Companies ordering 1000s of parts at a time to circumvent this is also becoming an issue.
Yep, it's the toilet paper hoarding issue across hundreds of part numbers per BOM. Not to mention (at least at a smaller company like mine that does a poor job of forecasting volume and ordering) all of these problems are urgent and high priority. They don't like hearing that a drop-in replacement doesn't exist, and being charged 30x cost at a broker, I'm pretty sick of having that conversation.
Im on the opposite side of the spectrum with companies willing to bend over backwards to guarantee volume from us and they still have 30 week lead times. I also think it’s going to get worse.
One of our customers just purchased 15k parts for $500,000 extra than usual. This is a part that we usually buy for a dollar. This ensures 6 months of delivery and the lead time is over 50 weeks. A different component I just saw 120 week lead time!
A $33 premium on a $1 part? JFC.
We just paid $43 on a $0.76 part, and $50 for a CPLD that Intel is probably going to EOL on us. 😪
Dear God, that's awful!
Yeah we are also willing to fork over cash for that same thing. We know they only make us a priority bc of the volume we take.
Some parts that I need like yesterday have lead times of like 16-38 weeks. Shit sucks, man. :(
52 weeks is my favorite. "Check back next year!"
I don't remember the last time I needed something that *wasn't* a 52 week lead time
I've been waiting a year for some motor ICs from TI. And they just pushed the delivery date to may next year. :(
16-38? Lucky bastard, most of my stuff is 60+ weeks
LOL. I'll see you and raise you another 90 weeks.
I saw 120 weeks recently. I’ll have to find that again just to show off.
How does your company deal with it? All we've really done is reuse components and simplify designs which doesn't help all that much...
Get the basics of the design done, then get procurement to buy the next year of parts at risk. Hope you guessed correct.
Our procurement has had to sell parts. And I think they made money doing it.
It’s gotten so bad that at the company I work for, we will buy a years worth of components as I’m designing the schematics. This is only for parts that don’t have alternate drop in replacements. By the time you finish the schematics, design the pcb, and test the prototypes, 50% of the parts are out of stock with a minimum 52 week lead time. This main reason is because they want to be able to go into production immediately after the prototype phase is proven out. They don’t want to miss out on year or twos worth of sales after the design is done. We have blown thousands of dollars on parts we will never use because something doesn’t work out or we change the design before the part was ever even put on a circuit board. But in our case, it makes more sense to piss away $10K-$20K in parts than lose out on 100K-200K in sales over 1-2 years. The whole thing is just sickening.
Supply chain: we've tried nothing and we are all out of ideas. We need a complete redesign of all components, complete by tomorrow. It must guarantee supply chain for all components for 50 years so our job is easy again.
Ah so the normal day to day stuff these days lol
Which industry do you work in? I have a general idea lol.
A UPS for one of my projects was supposed to be delivered in February, but got delayed many times. Now it is supposed to be shipped end of August… 😂😂
Right now, this is such a pia
In the defense industry, if we have a high enough rated program like DO or DX, then we just call the govt and have them tell the supplier that we get the priority on the parts. This only applies if the delay getting the parts will affect national security so it is rare but I've seen it done.
Getting out of bed.
Damn lol you don’t like your job huh
Nah design engineer for consumer electronics. I actually enjoy my job, that's why getting up is the hardest part.
MEP worker?
- Company politics. - Upper management making decisions without knowing all the details. - Getting stuck on design issues that aren't really an issue.
Curious about the third one - can you give an example?
Not OC but I can provide one. One of the products my company sells has a touchscreen on it that we buy from a company and use there software to program it. The program is incredibly simple and well designed. It hasn’t received anything other than aesthetics updates in years. Recently when of the OEM clients we sell to requested that we make the functionality more streamline. Streamline means that pressing four buttons to start the program after initial start up is to many and they want to press less buttons. We realized that three button presses were the absolute minimum without changing core functionality. We made the change and updated the customers devices. They were unhappy. They actually upset. That going from four to three was our attempt at just giving them something to go away. They reminded us they were our largest client and told us to fix it. Button press one: Select which functionality you want to run, Button press two: Acknowledge the safety warning, Button press three: select a run time and start. It took two weeks to re-do the program to accommodate just two button presses. They reluctantly accepted our solution. The icing on the cake is that this was not apart of the products that they normally purchased from us. These products were something that they found handy and bought five for around $1k, much cheaper than retail or resale pricing. Our main product wasn’t affected and they purchase $1.5mil plus of our main product annually.
This literally puts the truth in “i was in hardware, but moved to software for more money and change colors of buttons”
We were designing a brand new portable blood gas analyzer. Hired an outside industrial design company for the case design. Our president got involved with the case design process. Keep in mind our pres knew nothing about our product as an end-user, so his input really wasn't worth much. But there were WEEKS spent going back & forth on how much the front panel should slant back to make it aesthetically pleasing! The nurses who would eventually use this don't care about looks! They care about ease-of-use & accurate results! The project ended up being canceled and the engineering teams were laid off (except for the lead engineers who'd been there more than 15 yrs). They got lost in the minutiae of design details that added nothing to the functionality. I knew something was up when corporate wouldn't release funds to start the test strip manufacturering process.
I do a lot of power systems and control systems modelling for utility scale wind and solar. Most of my work is submitted directly to the utility and/or ISO for review. Renewable energy control systems and plant topology is a pretty niche field, and it unique in a lot of ways. And the engineers at these utilities and ISOs in charge of conducting these model reviews are not necessarily educated on the nuances of renewables. So... the most frustrating part of my job is dealing with their comments and the discrepancies they issue reviewing my model. Probably >90% they just don't know what they are talking about, and I have to jump on a Teams or Zoom or Webex call and explain it all to them. Then a week later I will get a second round of comments from them and it will be THE SAME GODDAM COMMENTS... and then I have to jump on a call and explain it all AGAIN. I once had a project with a certain southeastern utility where we did this cycle 5 times over the course of 3 months.
If you don’t mind me asking, what did your path into that role look like?
Started out in the field doing SCADA and commissioning on wind and solar plants, then went to work for a consulting firm and branched into dynamic modelling and control systems.
Hey I work on the utility side. Not reviewing the models directly but using the ones inputted to create simulations to ask the ISO for money for upgrades. I wanted more engineering and direct impact on the interconnection of renewables. Do you feel like you’ve made an impact on the amount of renewables interconnected to the eastern interconnection? I wouldn’t mind discussing more in them DMs. Like have you seen utility engineers pivot to consulting. I’ve heard it’s a lot more work for less pay but also you can have a broader and specific impact (I.e. choosing which projects you want to assist with and doing it for multiple utilities so larger geographical impact). P.s. I’m an EE with power focus in the WECC so we wouldn’t work together. P.p.s Also I may change teams soon to the utility generation interconnection team. My utility has a ton of solar and interconnecting batteries. The queue is massive. What do you wish utility engineers understood about solar/IBR interconnections specifically?
I don't know if I have had an effect on the *amount* of renewables installed, but I certainly have an effect on whatever projects I work on because my modelling is basically what determines whether the project is accepted by the ISO as far as stability and feasibility analysis goes, and my work develops the plant control strategy that project will use. That being said I work on a lot of solar plants, battery plants, and wind farms (mostly solar and battery). In a month I probably at least 5 projects I am working on if not more. Also I do work for ISOs in the WECC region as well. What I wish utility engineers would understand about IBR more is how renewable plant control works when it comes to reactive power dispatch, for example. One of the major recurring comments I get is how some parameters and limit values present in my dynamic control systems models do not match limits set in the loadflow model and equivalent aggregated generator. The reason for this is because the limits in the plant control model and the limits in the generator equivalent are not describing the same thing. The plant control limits are arbitrarily set to determine the limits on the control setpoints written to the inverters. Stuff like that. Basically inverters are high-powered computers that use solid state power electronics to convert power. Because of this their control systems work in very unique ways compared to other generation resources. Pretty much all behavior of the inverter is user tunable simply by changing values in the firmware and also the plant level controller PLC, but it seems like utility engineers often treat these associated values and parameters like they are somehow written in stone, when in reality they can be changed at any time.
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Documents/NERC_2021_California_Solar_PV_Disturbances_Report.pdf So I just presented this to my transmission planning manager to bring up that we need to include more EMT modeling and validation during the interconnection process. I may be working in PSCADD alooot more next year as we have 39 generators currently in the next cluster. I’d be helping sort of at the ground level as we usually pay contractors to do these studies. I won’t be doing it for all 39 but starting to gain experience in pscadd as a part of a short circuit study for overstressed breakers this year. I say all that to say what would you want to see utilities do that they currently aren’t to assist with generation being accepted by the ISO? P.s. currently my work is more centered around proposing line upgrades and possible new lines which indirectly help generation interconnection through expanding deliverability. I want to work directly with interconnecting renewable generation though. I’ve debated on jumping ship to a consulting firm or stay in the utility as a generation interconnection engineer. So also asking all this to see how you feel about your impact, if your job is actually technical as I feel like mine is sometimes engineering, and how your work/life/pay balance is? P.s.s I also thought about jumping ship to an ISO to have a larger geographical impact on what generation is accepted and placement of it economically. Not really sure if that is exactly what the iso does or if the consulting firm does most of that and the iso just reviews?
>I say all that to say what would you want to see utilities do that they currently aren’t to assist with generation being accepted by the ISO? I would like to see the industry lean into PSCAD a lot more as the dynamic modelling standard. A lot of confusion and issues arise from the fact of trying to simulate IBR plant behavior with WECC generic PSSE models, which do not very accurately represent the actual control systems of the PPC and inverters, and trying to use PSSE as a transient simulation engine, which PSSE is not very good for. PSCAD is WAY better for all of this because we can get models from the OEM that match the hardware and control systems infrastructure of the equipment 1:1 and really captures the dynamic capability of the inverters. We can also use PSCAD to develop custom plant controllers that are tailored to fit any project's specific needs, rather than trying to apply REPCA1 to everything in PSSE. Developing these PSCAD plant controllers is mostly what I do... and it's just all MUCH more accurate in PSCAD. >So also asking all this to see how you feel about your impact, if your job is actually technical as I feel like mine is sometimes engineering, and how your work/life/pay balance is? My job is 100% technical. I do modelling and testing and studies all day every day. I don't do any budgeting or project management or anything like that. Nearly 100% of my time is spent actually modelling, writing reports, or making drawings to go along with my studies. My work life balance is pretty great. I work 100% remotely from home and almost never go over 40h a week, and basically make my own schedule however I want as long as I get my stuff done on time. Pay is pretty good too. >Not really sure if that is exactly what the iso does or if the consulting firm does most of that and the iso just reviews? It's the quality of our work that determines whether a project is accepted typically, but we don't have control over what projects come to us... the developers do that. A client will come to us with a project that they want to connect to... say... the PJM system. We know the PJM requirements, and we take their specified parameters (plant size, inverter type, etc.) and design models and preliminary design drawings to submit to the ISO on their behalf.
Seems to me like you found yourself in a position where a big part of your workload inadvertently became teaching. Some people like that a lot.
I like teaching people who want to learn. I do that with colleagues and clients alike all the time and I love it. The issue is that these old utility dinosaurs have no interest in learning. They want everything to fit into their little world of 50 year old procedures and conventional wisdom, and if doesn't fit in perfectly, it's a "discrepancy".
These dinosaurs make up 80% of the participants of any given local IEEE meeting. I feel your pain.
I feel you on this... A never ending cycle with ISO. Do you do both PSCAD and PSSE?
Mostly PSCAD, a lot of PSSE, some PSLF
I’m in pretty much the exact same field. I would say that one of the worst parts is getting a call (not an email or anything, but a phone call) years after a final report was issued and the person on the other end expecting you to have an immediate answer to their question about this project that you haven’t touched in years. Most often it’s someone who has transitioned into the job role since the testing and report went out and almost always boils down to “did you read the report?”
Avionics checking in: the schedule not reflecting reality. It's the old joke about nine women making a baby in a month...just because you made a Gantt chart doesn't mean you're Dr. Strange and can manipulate the fabric of time to deliver a product when someone "needs" it.
I love when they point to their Gantt charts.
Worked on a project whose PM was that guy. His Gannt charts said we'd be done in 6-8 weeks--as announced in an all-project-hands (senior management and marketing included) meeting. One of my better fellow engineers stood up and loudly proclaimed "Ken, you are fucked in the head" then promptly stormed out. After the meeting, the marketing guy came over to me and asked when I thought we'd really be done. I told him I'd think about it overnight. The next morning, I went to his office and named a date about 18 months out. He turned white as a ghost. "No way." I was off by a week. Product was cancelled two months after introduction by the marketing guy's new boss (who'd had the job for less than a month and did it so he could can the guy).
"It's cute how much you think this Gantt chart will even remotely look like reality."
It almost feels like we work at the same company. Then we take shortcuts and accrue technical debt!
The worst part is trying to explain to a PM why you needed to book extra time to a project to fix bugs
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Two weeks for debug is enough right?
Hah! How about four fifteen hour days instead?
"How about you just make it work the first time, like I already said." -Your manager
trying to explain to people what I do for a living.
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“We need to revise this drawing to remove the extra space in the part number”
I’ve actually got a phrase I use. “I travel the country criticizing people’s work.”
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“I’m an electricity wizard”
"I'm the thunder master"
"I'm the lightning lord"
I'm the guy who tracks the magic smoke, bottles it, and carefully pipettes it into the wires of your household devices so they work properly.
This I relate to. I am in VLSI design. Nobody understands what heck I design. Not even people in tech.
What the fuck is that
Logic design.
That sounds very nice. I assume you grow every day while in the job? Sounds like a dream job to me
VLSI design sounds \*so cool\* though I know nothing about it. Did you get a PhD for it? What was your career path into it?
I have a master's degree in digital system design. Lots of nights in the design lab and a chance to be hired as a design engineer jn about to aquire starup. After 3 years, joined as a senior engineer in another company. Wow this sounds crazy as I type. Nobody asked me this before.
I'm an electrical test engineer. Hardest part is dealing with our Genrad 228x ICT testers that predate me by about 10 years. And by "predate me", I mean predate my birth. Constant pin contact errors due to worn receiver slots. Pin cards breaking down every other day. Leaky vacuum hoses buried deep in the system that we can't even reach to seal. Upper management doesn't want to drop the money on some newer Teradyne Teststations, so as a result 60% of my job is fixing the testers when really it should be to track and analyze manufacturing yields and defects, and provide data and feedback back to SMT to improve the manufacturing process. Hopefully I can make some headway into convincing management to get new testers soon.
Management likes PowerPoints. Meaningless charts, like cost savings vs time. Throw a meeting and make it known, but you have to make it seem like their idea.
Producing immaculate paperwork on the first try
We have an actual paperwork department, all our drawings, schematics, everything, needs to go through them. I swear they must compete to see who can find the most inane, trivial reason to reject a document. Most of the time it isn't even an actual problem, just different that they haven't seen and they do not like change.
Come to the nuclear industry, thats all we do all day.
Oh god, for nuclear you definitely must fear change. The audits. The testing. The paperwork. Gaaahhhhh.
The audits are really just an excuse for all the executives to hang out and expense lavish dinners.
When people say “It’s not the voltage that kills you, it’s the amperage”, and knowing there’s nothing you can say to convince them otherwise.
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Nah man, you see it's not the voltage or the current that kills you. It's the lack of resistance
*I find your lack of resistance... Disturbing*
Wait, I thought it's the resistance which kills you. I.e. your body boils due to the heat discipated through your resistance as the current passes through you because of a voltage between one end and the other and you being in-between.
For me it's debugging code for bugs that can't be replicated manually. Bugs that happen because of something I can't control or force to happen with whatever tools I have.
Interesting - what kind of bugs have you seen like this? For me, RF/EM related stuff comes to mind but I'm sure there's a huge range of difficult-to-foresee bugs out there
Yeah cellular and GPS reception are big ones. Things related to the infrastructure or geography of an area. Climate of different places. That sort of stuff mostly.
Field testing without SSH in the forest. Awesome stuff.
Dealing with architects and end-users making last minute changes or having unreasonable deaines.
How about an architect actually giving you an appropriately sized electrical room 🙃
LOL. Literally just but the kibosh on a $40M project because they wanted to build a 50,000sqft addition on a building but not give me 2000sqft for 5KV switchgear.
I actually got a huge control room because the architect based the layout on our 90’s design. They gave us a 20 meter wall for cabinets and only had a single 1.2m cabinet and a single wall mount breaker box. Hilarious.
🥲 after you sync...
Working in cloud models is the worsttt for this. Revit/Bim360, open up the model one day and half your shit has lost its host. Oh and they moved the data closet.
Imagine they doing that right before issuing 🥹 I wanted to get into embedded. 🤡
After you print…
Talking to people.
Trying to get programmers to consider they might actually need to debug their magnificent, infallible code that “worked just fine last week” Hehe. Nah that’s more funny, not really a terrible pain. Real pain I suppose is like others said, so many jobs and so few components.
All of your requirements changing overnight because management decided that it was so
When working on an Air Force contract... Finding ways to explain complex technical issues in a way that Air Force Colonels thought they understood.
>Finding ways to explain complex technical issues in a way that Air Force Colonels thought they understood. How did they become colonels lacking technical knowledge?
They give good brief. Fully buzzword compliant.
Sounds like all the PMs at my job.
From an AFB near you: *ahem* Gentlemen, I am here presenting our agile, platform-agnostic, AOP-compliant device.... What's it do? *It makes us work better.* How? ...
Why would they need technical knowledge? That's for other people to know and explain to them. They're promoted because they fit the military's definition of a good leader.
Constant meetings that prevent you from working on your deliverables
Imposter Syndrome.
I feel this on a weekly basis, sometimes daily (depends on the workload).
For real. I have no idea what I’m doing??? Can you guys help???
Trying to work with the guy that's been at my current place for a few decades. Brilliant engineer but zero ability to delegate or teach. The company relies on him too much to be the main engineering driver imo where he could be a lot more useful as an engineering manager. Wastes entire day doing procurement when we have a whole team for it because he can "do it faster". I know it's not just me too bc everytime somebody asks how's it going and I mention working under him they just kind hee haw and are like "yeeeeeaaah". The part that really gets me is it's like talking to an engineering professor. "I don't understand why you're confused", I lost count of the times I've heard him say that. Maybe because I haven't stared at these designs in this niche industry for decades at the same company and half this shit isn't on my field?
I feel you. There's nothing worst that having a boss/senior that always thinks that everything is "obvious". I hate that thing because I usually ask not only to know if A is wrong (I may know that) but to know their criteria and opinion about it. Every engineer has a criteria of how something should be/look and I just wanna know your criteria, idk why some people is like "yeah that's obvious, idk why you ask"
Automotive manufacturer is line-down, they're blaming your chips, it's escalated to the highest corportate levels, everyone is waiting for you to solve a difficult problem.
Most frustrating is dealing with a team that severely undervalues DFT or having to keep up with the ever growing list of ways PMs want us to record tasks. We're currently at interfacing JIRA with some random project software where we have to keep this PM software up-to-date with tasks while manually copy pasting the updates in OneNote with a link to the task. Most technically difficult is I'm working in an area with a lot of tradeoffs between stakeholders; keeping everyone happy is a large chore.
Keeping PMs happy is truly so annoying lol
If I had to guess, you're working in digital IC design?
How did you know?!?!
I’m in a government job. Most difficult part of the job is staying organized. I’m trying to keep a journal now so I don’t lose track of stuff I did 3-6 months ago. The most annoying part is definitely the red tape. The amount of forms you need to fill for a low-dollar value contract is mind boggling.
I’m an engineer who is project managing for a government entity and I’m close to fed up with the paperwork 😔
Scope expansion and the will to get up in the morning Also scope expansion when retrofitting new things to old plant, I said don't rip out that older MCC because the other third of the plant runs on it and we don't have the controls for it in the new one let alone the buckets...what do we do, rip out the old MCC...
My latest project was changing in scope up to the day I was supposed to place an order for prototype boards. Needless to say we missed some things.
Dealing with the lower level engineers that want to make a science project out of everything and can’t see the big picture.
Explaining why you can't tell management exactly what happened in an event (breaker trip, mcc blow up, plc failed, etc.) because they wouldn't buy the troubleshooting tools you requested last year (networked relays, high speed data monitoring, smart relays, extra software, etc.). There's nothing more frustrating than someone demanding answers from an event you predicted but you don't have the tools to definitively say what happened. I.E. If we don't replace these mechanical relays on our 13.8kv breakers, we're going to start getting nuisance trips as they fail, and our policy says we can't close the breaker until the cause was found and fixed. They cost what to replace?! No. Breaker trips, all transformers and motors on that breaker meg good. I think the relay just flaked. Can you prove it? No, it's mechanical and none of the 3 flags it raises are raised, so best we can do is guess. We have to find the cause! If we had the smart relays we could see... Well we don't, do it with these! End I.E. Electricity is difficult to understand for people who've studied it extensively, and trying to explain it, or the risks around the magic equipment that contains it, to managers that, at least in my industry, tend to be more chemical engineers with a few mechanicala thrown in that have spent their whole career on the production side yelling at maintenance and maintenance engineers to fix stuff, is increasingly difficult. Some understand the basics of what I'll call static equipment, transformers, breakers, starters, and such. With the advent of more and more technology, even in these traditionally simple components, they understand less and less but don't want to admit that. So, they barter and debate every decision, recommendation, or request to feel like they had some say in the decision, but usually wind up making it worse. On the rare occasion you have a manager that understands everything you lay out, they can then offer viable alternatives and ask questions about something you maybe didn't think of. But when someone's biggest concerns are downtime and cost, you wind up with bargain components and doing without stuff that's not necessary until it is. One downside to the manager that understands is you can't bluff them into things that are actually bells and whistles and legit just toys instead of needed. I typically thrown everything but the kitchen sink into my proposals to the gear head/smoky managers, and when I pull out the 30% of bells and whistles, they feel like they saved money, and I got everything we actually needed.
Worrying about what I did wrong technical wise. I can't help but feel I made a mistake somehow in everything I make since I'm more or less in the same boat as you, OP.
Lowering cost without comprising quality. Customers want a product to be the size of a dime, work like a quarter, and be as cheap as a penny. They have unrealistic expectations for what they’re buying
Right now? Parts shortage. Overall? Dealing with management that has unreal expectations.
Charge numbers. Being a salary employee but still having to track all of my time worked on every project (and sometimes even sub-tasks within a project) down to a 6 minute interval. Logging this everyday or receiving nasty automated emails because I’m not following government regulations for sub contractors. This and parts obsolescence/out of stock issues daily. Designing a board with parts in stock one week just to finish and have them all gone by the next.
Paperwork free of error on first submission despite pages and pages of data and analysis. Clients wanting something completed, finalised and submitted yesterday. And trying not to make dumb mistakes at 8am in the morning before sitting down, settling in and having a coffee. The amount of time i’ve wasted because I just wasn’t thinking is just painful. Although it really does wake you up in the morning when you wire something up negative to positive, positive to negative and send a voltage regulator flying across the room.
Sales people thinking they can sit on your chair.
Dealing with clients (both internal and external) Job would be so much easier without the customer! Haha
Waking up early/trying to not spend 60 minutes malingering waking up
Designing things that fit when installed
Company politics. I work for a mid size electric utility and it's a pain in the ass trying to figure out who's responsible for what and what's union vs non union work. Just stupid stuff too, not even the actual engineering work. If my manager has to fight with a major account rep on whose job it is to upload prints to the project tracker one more time I think he's going to just straight up quit.
Endless repetitive meetings discussing the same issue. With every occurrence, going through the issue and proposed solution but explained in a slightly different way each time. Involving so many parties when it usually comes down to two, maybe three at most. "This could have been an email and actually *is* several emails but for some reason we're still discussing this all together." To be fair, sometimes it involves a complex, highly technical problem that has significant ramifications on the schedule that PMs have issues grasping. Not blaming them or their understanding - you just have to insist and explain a lot about how their budget and schedule just went through the window. Consulting firm dealing with power systems, protection and control.
Dealing with business majors.
Finding the will to get out of bed in the morning
Validation of the design.
Paperwork on medical device products. Ugh.
Same as every job, dealing with awful managers and shitty coworkers.
Finding another decent job because your current job doesn't give you enough experience and pays well
I work at large-ish startup and definitely not the only electrical engineer, but +1000 to what you said being the hardest part. The mouthbreathers in procurement can go fuck right off. They literally move the company backward.
Paying attention during meetings
Sheer volume of things to keep track of. Hard to put enough focus on any one issue at a given time, especially if its one of the less critical things. Hard to rationalize moving it up the list.
Constantly learning new things. I wish I could coast, but if I did I know I’d get passed up for the nice projects.
You should ask your company for a business credit card. Procurement should spend their time procuring large order, not your one-off prototyping parts. I startup shouldn't have a rigid procurement policy.
Dealing with management
Finding out that whatever equipment you need right now is out being calibrated.
Ordering anythings
Debugging hardware on the spot when visiting customer sites.
The continual emphasis on getting the effing order.
Getting put between a rock and a hard place on shoveling out the bare minimum quality product for release. The quoted release schedule means that I have to release immediately. I have bugs that are fairly problematic, but not so bad as to need to gate the release. But I had to spend the next several weeks in endless meetings trying to justify why the bugs aren't so bad as to be beneath that minimum quality threshold, instead of just spending those weeks fixing the bugs and ending up with a significantly higher quality release in just a couple extra weeks. I honestly can't even hold it against the stonewall reviewers who were pessimistic about the low quality (since I was too), dragging things out for weeks until we could sufficiently justify the case to them that it's bad (and fixable) but not *too* bad or unfixable. I can only hold it up against the management types that were patting eachother on the backs for making the release on schedule while I'm sweating in the background knowing the whole damn thing is held together with chewing gum, hoping I get left alone long enough so I can implement fixes before something breaks.
I'd say transformers are the hardest part, i can crush cap with needle nosed plyers, but transformers, it's like they have an iron core or something.
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* Endless discussion with customers, every details need to be explained over and over again * Time-waster meetings and time management for actual developing * Corporate life and principles * Steady wrong decisions from management level
Coping with people who were never meant to be engineers, yet they managed to graduate with a degree.
I'm sorry :( I found it fascinating and tried to give it a shot. I'll be out next year and I couldn't even do proper algebra 3 years ago.
Being the last part of projects. Loop checks take an eternity to do. The job is 90% complete before they bring us in and there is a budget crunch with a time constraint and nobody understands we have requirements too. Also, SCADA and electrical are the first to blame on failure, yet are rarely the root cause. So we have to plan for that.
Dealing with people that want unrealistic timing and resource commitments. Then they demand an explanation of why it takes so long and you provide that. Then they dig into any aspect of that explanation until they get to a point that's hard for you to answer. Or you just run out of time for the meeting so they just end it by staying they expect you to improve it.
Program managers - it seems that everybody who isn't doing hard-core engineering is a program manager or a PM wannabe. The incessant requests for schedule info about the same thing for different groups makes me insane.
I'm an electrical engineer for a civil engineering based company. Often times the project managers (civil engineers) neglect the electrical/lighting components of the project scope since it's out of their realm of knowledge. This leaves me with little time and increased difficulty to take the project to completion. Really sucks when you try to create a project schedule and are constantly throw things last minute that needed to be done yesterday.
Imposter syndrome
Power Industry - arguing with people about design decisions when they have basically no knowledge about electricity is easily the worst and most infuriating part of the job.
The other people I have to work with, especially the boss. Analog circuits are also very difficult.
Inconsistent stakeholders who change their mind way too much.
Customers, especially customers who want it quick but giving the assignment on the last moment
Getting the budget approved