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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Ah interesting, I think for some reason I assumed it’d be more of an administrative career path offshoot for someone working in chemistry, but architecture does make more sense. And I know how you feel, I started my career in industrial controls because the idea of working at the interface between invisible electrical black magic and moving valves, motors, and other machinery seemed real cool.

    Quickly learned that in that world, creativity and innovation are treated more like liabilities than anything else lol, and rightly so. There’s a few great, proven ways to do most things, and rarely is it wise or fruitful to develop novel approaches over one of the proven solutions. I wouldn’t want to be a chemist in a lab toting multiple new designs, lol.

    I found it stifling, but could’ve tolerated it a lot better if the majority were WFH like yours!







  • A lab planner! That’s one of those cool (sounding at least) jobs that are obvious when you think about it but I’ve just never thought about it.

    Definitely piqued my curiosity though. How much of your work is designing new labs vs retrofitting existing ones, how much travel is involved / how much area do you cover (the question there is really about how many labs exist needing such services), and what are any weird or surprising elements of your job?!





  • Great insight, and really this is emblematic of the idiotic hyper-focus on growth, as much and as quickly as possible. It’s always better for society and broader stakeholders if growth happens organically. Growth should happen to satisfy growing demand, it should not be forced to go as fast as possible because there’s ridiculous money to be made by getting in early and inflating demand.

    Every damn thing “investors” get a fuckin whiff of they ruin this way, housing being probably the worst (repeat!) offender. We have to figure out how to disincentivize this behavior. It guarantees toxic trash for industries in their wake and just further enriches the worst among us.

    Edit: clarity




  • I’ve had an antagonistic relationship with a vendor like this, it’s awful. In my case the vendor was supposed to be a fast moving tech startup - the only thing that moved fast there was the revolving door of engineering talent coming and going.

    Even worse, my boss had been convinced by their founder that he had all this pull with the company, and since the company was super cool, that made him super cool, and I dunno if you’ve ever tried to criticize something that has made a middle aged nerd feel cool for the first time in his life, but let’s just say it was not a fruitful endeavor.

    The number of things I effectively fixed for them via email, the abominations I had to construct to work around the things they refused or failed to fix…bad times.