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.
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.
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.
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...
If you can read English well enough to read the rulebook yourself, then you can play with your kids in German... this is not like D&D or something, you never really need to reference the rulebook while playing the game. There is no player's handbook. The rules are really, really light. The focus is really on storytelling.
I can highly recommend Amazing Tales, it is a pen and paper RPG for kids her age. I play with my daughter and she LOVES it. You only need a couple of six sided dice, although you can optionally spice things up with 8, 10, and 12 sided die if you have them (or you can make it special and buy some from your local games shop).
It's basically collaborative storytelling, and the possibility of failing dice rolls makes it exciting (you always 'fail forward', failures never really hurt the player but just open up new opportunities). The book also has tons of tips that you would probably never think of on your own - for instance, don't let your child name their character after themselves. Having a separate name allows them to keep some emotional distance between themselves and their character, which makes scary situations less scary for them!
I'm originally from the US, I understand how things work there well enough... but anyway after re-reading your original post I think we probably generally agree more than we disagree. Having lived in both continents I take issue with the idea that delivering goods via freight has anything to do with the density and walkability of cities. Tomatoes get shipped from Southern Spain to remote villages in Sweden just like they get shipped from Florida to North Dakota. There are many other factors to blame for how car centric the US is, and you point out several in your other posts.
I am not comparing our current leisure time to the time we had at the beginning of the industrial revolution and onward. We probably do have more free time than we did 150 years ago. I'm comparing our leisure time to the leisure time we had before agriculture was invented - that's why studying hunter gatherer tribes is so interesting. These also happens to be the conditions we evolved for.
We have 748 million people here in the EU, so I'm not sure what you're on about when it comes to scale. As for efficiency, I suppose that depends on how you define the numerator and denominator.
It's false that people now have more leisure time, in fact we have less than ever before.
For most of human history we were hunter gatherers. We know from the field of anthropology that people in hunter gatherer tribes "work" about 30 hours a week - but their work consists of things we consider leisure like hunting, fishing, hiking, and building things with friends (ever spend a weekend helping a buddy build a deck?).
Hell, even medieval surfs had more free time than us. Planting and harvesting seasons certainly had some full workdays but other than that... lots of time off. You know all those feasts in the Catholic church? Yeah, they got all those off. Kind of like how government workers get all the extra holidays off like MLK and Columbus day. A medieval surf's PTO puts an average American's PTO (0 days by law!) to shame.
If you compare our current amount of free time to the free time of a Dickensian orphan working in a factory at the turn of the 20th century then yes, it seems like we have it pretty good. But compared to 95% percent of human history, we work way more time at our stupid jobs than any other humans in history.
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.