I used to be an engineer in a traditional engineering field in heavy industry, now my job title is "Software Engineer". I still consider myself an engineer, and what I do with my team to be engineering.
Creating amazing things yourself that others struggle to replicate or contribute to is more in the realm of craftsmanship, in my opinion, and not engineering.
I can appreciate both good engineering and good craftsmanship. And I also often find myself doing (and enjoying) what I would consider crafting and not engineering - the lines can be blurry and as programmers we often end up doing both (sometimes at the same time!). Nothing wrong with it. But it is something that is distinct from engineering, in my opinion.
I now live in a small walkable city in Europe and parks and playgrounds are packed. It is very common for my daughter to randomly meet a friend from school there and start playing, or to encounter a friend of ours there also on a walk which usually leads to grabbing a coffee or beer together.
This kind of stuff just won't happen if you have to drive to your local park. Cars and car-centric city design is a huge, huge part of the problem and lack of third spaces in my opinion.
Yep, I'm in USA at the moment, but after my last trip abroad to a walkable city with transit I'm planning my escape. Not my first time being over there, but I'm finally like "why am I wasting my life over in car hell?"
Yeah my partner and I moved to Amsterdam last year and it's wild how different from American cities it is. We think of it as a "NYC lite", as in you don't have the bonkers density, height, and din of NYC but you get almost all the benefits (diversity, walkability, liberalism, culture, tolerance), and there are actually children and families here (OK I know this stuff exists outside of Manhattan, don't @ me).
But even compared to NYC the proliferation of parks and playgrounds is astounding. We thought we must live in a green paradise, but it really doesn't even rate (something like 14% tree cover; most major EU cities are > 20%).
I think stuff like this is changing. You're starting to see far less car-centric design, and there are little programs like NYC's request a tree. I worry a little about what self-driving cars will do the trend though, but maybe it's not a big deal?
and what's more interesting, Amsterdam is not even super child friendly city because of the high and thin buildings and it still thrives. I read somewhere that Utrecht is even cooler for families(but less vibes) because of better buildings
Yeah look we're all upset about what's happening on the southern border and that Biden didn't close the camps but calling them 'concentration camps' is a bit much, don't you think?
Have you thought about removing the date you graduated from your degree and removing a few of your early jobs from your resume? You have 20+ years of experience... can you make it look like you have 10? Just to get an interview?
It is absolutely awful that you should have to do this. Starting a new career in web dev at 35 it is something that's on my mind quite often.
From my experience (technical interview specifically) fortunately we've never cared about that, and more about how the person approaches problem solving and how relevant their knowledge is related to the stack we're using. If this person is bringing valuable skills and it's not a jerk, I don't see why we should even care about their age.
I think it really depends on what companies you're applying for, but the way I see it now, remote work is very beneficial because when working at an office people care more about who their gonna be hanging out with, and you know how that goes.
DAC makes no sense from an energy accounting perspective.
Simple argument:
DAC requires energy.
In some places, that energy is stranded. Think of the DAC plant in Iceland using geothermal. Fine. In that case, DAC makes a meaningful contribution.
If the energy used for DAC is not stranded and could instead be used to offset fossil fuels, it would be far better to offset the fossil fuel use. This is trivially proven true when you consider the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Better to prevent the entropy increase from adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place.
Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless. If you can build the energy infrastructure you will need to power DAC, you would be far better off just using it to offset and eliminate fossil fuel use.
Once you have eliminated the use of fossil fuels, sure, DAC makes sense. But the idea that DAC will save or even help us without complete decarbonization as a prerequisite is just nonsense in my opinion.
The atmosphere does a pretty good job of mixing, with the CO2 concentration uniform to within +/- 1% around most of the world so if there are enough places with stranded energy just building DAC plants there could help the whole world.
If there aren't enough places with stranded energy maybe we can make more. All that takes is installing more solar in some place than there is infrastructure to transport the electricity out. That excess is stranded.
The amount of energy available for solar is insane. To illustrate how ridiculously abundant solar power if you wanted to build a solar farm whose output during the day matched the power use of the entire world you'd only need about 500 000 km^2 worth of panels.
At night the power falls to near zero, but so what? If all it is doing is running a DAC plant it doesn't need to run overnight.
I'm sure there are hundreds of places around the world with good daytime sunlight, enough room for a DAC plant and a solar farm to power it, and limited grid infrastructure.
Note that is how much is needed to produce an amount of energy equal to the current consumption of the entireworld. It is to illustrate how abundant solar energy is.
That would be enough energy with current DAC technology to remove each year about 50% of the year's CO2 emissions. That would effectively knock us back to 1970 levels of net yearly emissions.
There are 5 subtropical deserts in the world with areas greater than 500 000 km^2. There's room in those 5 deserts for about 30 of those 500 000 km^2 solar farms. That's enough energy to in 1 year bring atmospheric CO2 down to around 320 PPM, which is around 1960 levels. 2 years to get back back to 1800 levels. 6 years to get to pre-industrial levels.
Of course it is possible that at that scale energy isn't the bottleneck for DAC. It may depend on other resources that cannot scale that well.
> Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless.
Because no one has suggested using DAC to offset fossil fuel use without reducing fossil fuel use, this is a straw man. DAC may very well be a valid strategy when used in conjunction with the reduction of fossil fuels to better reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon in a given time frame.
Nobody seems to be doing anything to reduce emissions, either. Except for the blip due to COVID, globally, we're still on the same trend we have been forever: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
You're looking at absolute numbers. CO2 usage used to be accelerating rapidly. The first step to reducing the absolute number is to change the second derivative, the acceleration. We've done that, the second derivative of that graph is significantly negative. Once the area under the curve of the second derivative is negative enough, the first derivative, the velocity, will go negative. We're about there, the year on year change is now about zero. Once the first derivative is negative the absolute number starts dropping.
So yes, more than nothing has been done to reduce emissions, but you need to look at the right numbers and graphs.
Your link says we've stabilized over the last decade.
> We see that while emissions from fossil fuels have increased, emissions from land use change have declined slightly in recent years. Overall, this means total emissions have roughly stabilised over the past decade.
There is some hope that fossil fuel emissions are peaking right around now. See the recent Ember info:
Look at the graph of global emissions. US emissions essentially don't matter in the big picture. This is why massive, coordinated, global action is the only thing that will save us.
This is not a fatalistic "oh, let's not even try then" statement. It's just facts. Yes, we should try. No, we won't succeed if it's just the US reducing emissions.
> Nobody seems to be doing anything to reduce emissions,
No one is working on carbon-free renewable energy? Solar power hasn't doubled in efficiency since development began? No one is building wind farms? ICE vehicle fuel efficiency has not been massively increased? No one is making electric vehicles? Supply chains are not getting more efficient? There are no waste reduction strategies being implemented anywhere? There are no efforts to reduce methane emissions?
That’s all well and good but you still have to account for Jevon’s Paradox, that it might not matter if consumption keeps rising. It seems really, really hard to do that in a socioeconomic system built upon continuous industrial growth and consumption.
I don't think any of the realistic models have DAC providing a significant percentage of the carbon reduction. For example, 99% of the reduction from green electrification, and 1% from DAC.
DAC is still in the research phase, and is probably a decade a way from widespread use.
Solar power, wind power and electric transportation are already well into the production phase and are happening today.
Sales doesn't really have meaningful levels, in my experience (many years in engineering sales but not "tech"). Senior/staff/principle engineers do a lot more than just code, right? Lots of high level decisions, strategy, coordination between teams, mentoring, etc... Sales engineers pretty much just... sell. As you gain experience, you will make more sales. Your income will increase from commission, not from new titles or responsibilities.
A good sales engineer can make a lot of money. Sales is one of the few roles where there is a direct link between compensation and performance. The more you sell, the more you make. Make sure that when you are interviewing for sales positions you discuss their commission structure in depth. Don't work for anyone who isn't willing to pay you a huge amount of money for making a huge number of sales.
Yeah, there's nothing like visiting a beautiful village somewhere like Mexico (or Eastern Europe in my case)... such wonderful traditions, an old woman taking her goats and sheep out. An old man plowing a field with a horse and a wooden plow that looks no different than what his ancestors used 150 years ago. The best chicken soup you've ever had - made from an old rooster (good luck finding one of those for sale back home). Delicious sour homemade yogurt - made from the milk from the same old woman's flock!
Ah, yes, and the ever present smell of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from the partially combusted plastic in your neighbors bonfire. Just lovely, a smell that takes me back to my childhood when we used to burn those green plastic army men during battle...
Creating amazing things yourself that others struggle to replicate or contribute to is more in the realm of craftsmanship, in my opinion, and not engineering.
I can appreciate both good engineering and good craftsmanship. And I also often find myself doing (and enjoying) what I would consider crafting and not engineering - the lines can be blurry and as programmers we often end up doing both (sometimes at the same time!). Nothing wrong with it. But it is something that is distinct from engineering, in my opinion.