• Question: @all what's the hardest to be an engineer?

    Asked by anon-88079 on 10 Nov 2022.
    • Photo: Paul James

      Paul James answered on 10 Nov 2022:

      For me, the hardest thing is saying “I don’t know”
      I want to be able to help people solve their problems, but sometimes I have no knowledge or experience of the issue(s) there are facing.

      So instead of saying “I don’t know” I have taken to saying “I don’t know at the moment, let me get back to you” or “I don’t know, let me find someone who does”

    • Photo: Rebecca Henderson

      Rebecca Henderson answered on 10 Nov 2022:

      The hardest part is there’s often more than solution (and usually none of them are the ‘perfect solution) so we have to consider all the solutions, consequences, risks to try and make the best-informed answer. It is rewarding when the solution works out!

    • Photo: Emma Farquharson

      Emma Farquharson answered on 14 Nov 2022:

      I think as an engineer in the energy industry, there’s always so much going on that I want to get involved in everything and learn about new things, but there’s not always enough time in the day to do that! It’s definitely really important (if sometimes just a bit tricky) to prioritise, and no matter what I end up working on I’m always learning something new 🙂

    • Photo: Anne Velenturf

      Anne Velenturf answered on 17 Nov 2022:

      Inclusion challenges. Engineering can be an unfriendly place where women are not being heard in the same way men tend to. It helps to talk about it & to keep a folder where you collect all the great stuff you have achieved to look at when you hit a difficult moment. On the plus side, while there are lots of class issues in science, out of all the disciplines I find engineering the most open for people from different backgrounds.

    • Photo: Veronica Pisani

      Veronica Pisani answered on 17 Nov 2022:

      It can be a lot of pressure to know that my decisions and actions are tied to the safety of my coworkers and the environment. I’m proud to take my job seriously, but I also need to remind myself that I work with a great team, and we are all there to check each other’s work and make decisions together.

    • Photo: Adam Yates

      Adam Yates answered on 23 Nov 2022:

      A big challenge I have is to try and prioritise what tasks need to be worked on first. A lot of the time I have many different things that need to be done and many different problems that need to be solved. It is a challenge to work out what is more important so I can work on that first.
      Following on from this, when I have a lot to do, it can be a challenge to know when to ask for help. It can be easy to keep the problems to yourself, and feel like you have to solve them alone, when actually, all it needs is a simple request to teammates to lend a hand, and the workload can be simplified very quickly!

    • Photo: Manish Labroo

      Manish Labroo answered on 23 Nov 2022:

      For me as an engineer, the hardest thing was the realization not everything can be accurate when you have a deadline to meet. You can have a perfect solution with infinite time, or have a ‘good enough’ solution in limited time. And make peace with the fact that is okay.

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