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Asked by mads.rose to Fran, Peppe, Greg, Petros, Pooja on 15 Nov 2017.
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Greg Chance answered on 15 Nov 2017:
I look after several MSc and PhD students so I regularly help these guys with their projects, from advice on how to structure their working day, to helping plan experiments or analysing their data.
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Petros Papapanagiotou answered on 16 Nov 2017:
I also supervise masters and PhD students with their projects. I had 2 students recently who I helped learn about how to setup and online learning platform for some doctors. I taught them not only about how to engineer it, but also how to talk to the doctors and understand what they wanted from the platform and how they prefer to learn things. I also sometimes give lectures or tutorials to groups of students, teaching them about AI, logic, engineering, and other stuff.
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Fran Zuch answered on 16 Nov 2017:
There are a couple of different ways: One thing I have to do is teach out coders about Finance. Out coders have no idea about the financial services industry, they come from many different backgrounds.
Together as a company, we are exploring blockchain right now, that is the stuff behind bitcoin and because we don’t know much about it, we thought – why not do a workshop with other people who are also interested. So yesterday we had the first event, a bunch of coders and interested people sitting in a room trying to figure it out together. That was great fun.
And then I have started to write blogs and go to conferences. Tonight I am speaking at a panel about AI. I have to say that you don’t have to do that, I just like it a lot. -
Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 17 Nov 2017:
This can happen often at work once you are in the job for a few years or you are very proficient at something new for the company (i.e. a new software, or how a new microcontroller can be configured). Personally as engineer you might have to limit yourself not to delay your own work (as a researcher this might not be a problem and might be part of the job) and you can teach colleagues or student trainees (which require more help obviously).
One way I helped a very senior member of our team once, was to suggest him some technique to structure our software so that the code will not became very messy (i.e. ona part of the software that tries to access information on another part of the software and everything is done in a 200 lines long function – the technical term of this is “spaghetti code”). This was done in the form of discussions and showing him information from websites and books and we came together to an agreement on what to do and I am currently working on that.
Another thing I did once was a hack on one of our own electronic boards. This was required to inspect which type of information was travelling on the ethernet cables so that an engineer can understand whether the software on the board is wrong or the incoming data is handled wrongly (a lesser problem). I did this using the same tools security analysis and hackers use to spy on internet data exchanges. The way this was done before was very complicated and time consuming. After trying it out myself a few times, I wrote a wiki article on how to do it and now it is standard practice in the company to do it my way and sometimes even research engineers are using the same trick. Although there was not discussion involved, only trying it, putting it online and informing all the software bosses, still this was a way to help others and sometimes people still came to me and ask for help.In a company helping others is very important, as it is a way to show to everyone else some skills of yours that might go unnoticed, and to build a good reputation around your work. Good engineers are generally allocated to cool projects. My advise is not be tempted to overdo it, because you still need to deliver your own work on time!
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