I’m not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.
After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I’m in university for tech, and i’m still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don’t often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.
I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.
So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.
But why should we think so much about the final result when it’s out of our hands? Without you, these people probably wouldn’t have gotten any care whatsoever (or at the least, delayed with it -> higher risk for worse results).
Unless you did stuff to worsen their condition, you’ve undoubtedly saved many lives, and many people are very thankful for your contributions. So, thank you!
Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.
The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It’s like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.
If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you’ve got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(
I’m not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.
After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I’m in university for tech, and i’m still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don’t often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.
I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.
So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.
But why should we think so much about the final result when it’s out of our hands? Without you, these people probably wouldn’t have gotten any care whatsoever (or at the least, delayed with it -> higher risk for worse results).
Unless you did stuff to worsen their condition, you’ve undoubtedly saved many lives, and many people are very thankful for your contributions. So, thank you!
Full stack baby
That’s why so many programmers want to work in game development. It feels good when you made something that brings people joy.
And that’s why game developers are paid terribly
You may enjoy the robotics field of programming ngl. Or embedded systems if you still want more coding than engineering.
Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.
The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It’s like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.
If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you’ve got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(