How do you describe what you do for a living?

[Engineerj22]

Thankfully at this point most of the repeat service calls I go to, the people there don't blame the program changing anymore.

[plvlce]

Originally Posted by saultgeorge

As an aside, EVERY time something goes wrong in a process, it's always "The Program". The program that has been running flawlessly just mere seconds ago. NO ONE seems to understand that a program doesn't change, except programmers...Hmmm.

The program doesn't change, but every once in a while I find that the program was wrong all along and just happened to produce the right results 99% of the time.

[Steve Bailey]

EVERY time something goes wrong in a process, it's always "The Program".

When things go awry, people tend to place the blame on that which they understand the least.

[Aardwizz]

I make stuff that makes stuff.

[p8p8]

Originally Posted by Tom Jenkins

If I'm trying to impress an attractive young lady, I'm in the environmental and energy conservation business.

If I want to be left alone, I'm in sewage.

When the snobs asked me at a party, I said " I am saving the world ".

[Mickey]

Originally Posted by plvlce

The program doesn't change, but every once in a while I find that the program was wrong all along and just happened to produce the right results 99% of the time.

That "What If" you didn't think of finally happen. So true.

[jaden]

I've been a self-employed controls engineer for 37 years and people that I know well still don't understand what the job entails. I guess you have to see it to appreciate what happens.

[JaxGTO]

I say "have you ever seen How It's Made?" if they say yes then I say "That." if they say no I say "I am a rocket scientist".

[ASF]

Originally Posted by Mickey

That "What If" you didn't think of finally happen. So true.

I once commissioned a system where, in hindsight, there was a tiny flaw in my communications structure. Basically, if there was a network failure that occurred after the PLC had completed executing one rung of code, but before it finished executing the next rung, it would fail to start communicating again once the network was restored. You'd think that with a relatively rare trigger like that (network failure), and such a minute window of time (we must be talking microseconds), that it would probably never happen.

It took less than a month after I left site for it to happen.

So yes, the code doesn't change, but edge cases can lay dormant forever, or for no time at all!

[Soggy Canuck]

Given that I was called after everyone else had a go a "fixing it", whatever "it" was, I told people who asked that I was a janitor.

Always cleaning up somebody elses mess.

[Peter Nachtwey]

I solve engineering problems.

[dmroeder]

I say: I automate industrial machinery. Like JaxGTO, How it's made often comes up. Some people will say, oh, you kill peoples jobs. Basically

[I_Automation]

I just go simple

[I_Automation]

Originally Posted by Peter Nachtwey

I solve engineering problems.

As in???

[Peter Nachtwey]

Originally Posted by dmroeder

I say: I automate industrial machinery. Like JaxGTO, How it's made often comes up. Some people will say, oh, you kill peoples jobs. Basically

I don't see how you kill people's jobs. I can't see what you automate being done manually.


I know that what I do does. Sometimes we are so efficient we kill our own jobs.
There have been multiple times where we sold the controls for a machine and we were suppose to sell 2 or 3 more and it didn't happen because the first machine performed so well.


Our french fry machines replace 8 to 20 people.