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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • This depends on the area of medical device. I work in medical device but totally different from this, mine get implanted into your body.

    1. I doubt many people have the knowledge to to truly troubleshoot our devices beyond what the doctor is allowed to do. We need a bunch of expensive and specialized hardware to troubleshoot.

    2. We are legally required to investigate and report any complaints(https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfmaude/search.cfm) . If we don’t get the complaint we can’t investigate and report it.

    3. If a certain number(honestly I don’t know the specific number) of complaints occur we are legally required to create a corrective action to help the patients immediately (or as soon as possible) and a preventive action to ensure it doesn’t effect other patients. If a person has an issue and “repaired” it themselves they don’t get counted in this and as such could cause more patients to suffer.

    While I agree with right to repair I think certain things should be exempt. That said then there should be a requirement of the manufacturer to ivestigate/repair the equipment.



  • When I was younger my mom had cats(started normal 1 or 2, got insane… Highest number I remember is 37 but now she has 0). One cat was a hunter through and through. Basically there was a hall way that ended in the kitchen and my room was the first door from the kitchen. I was sitting at my computer desk, the cat was on top of the fridge. The cat jumped up the fridge, hit ground, jumped again reached my door frame, backfliped off it, caught a fly in it’s front paws, landed, ate fly, looked at me like “aren’t you impressed?”

    Another time… Same cat actually… Another cat had a litter of kittens(old enough to walk and see etc but still kittens)… Hunter jumps in my living room window with a live chipmunk. Puts it down and calls the kittens. The basically encircle the chipmunk and the hunter removes its paw and steps back. Nothing happens. Chipmunk is terrified. One kitten walks up and swats it. Chipmunk runs. Hunter chases, grabs it and brings it back to the circle. This cycle repeats until the kittens have a good idea as to how to attack pray. Hunter kills chipmunk, at which point I intervene and put it outside. It’s was like watching a savage show but it was also just nature playing course. Honestly really interesting… Not idolizing the violence and death but the watching one animal teach its family how to hunt and eat.


  • I do this alot but I alway follow up with “Do you know what blah is?” and depending on age/experience/acronym or term I ask them to explain it.

    Sometimes I get assigned work with a senior engineer(where I learn) and sometimes I get asked to help a new person. For example right now I’m in a project being driven by a senior engineer but was asked to assist a professional development program employee(or pdp) to actually execute the project. As a result this is the habit I developed to 1. Make sure I don’t confuse people with random acronyms or terms 2. Ensure we are on the same regarding definition(and they are not just saying yes I know when they don’t).


  • I decided to move out of my mother’s house. I found a place to rent, it was 1.7 miles from my job. It was just a room in a house but it was good enough. I decided to take it and called the owner.

    We met at 5:00 at the panera bread after I got out of work. I signed my first ever real contract. It was my first big boy official legally binding contract.

    Next day I go to work all excited and telling everyone about it. I hear there is a all employee meeting. Then all contractors get sent home early. I go to the meeting…

    They announce they are closing the facility. Everyone will be let go. If we want to move to the new location we will be given priority otherwise it was nice to work with us.

    Less than 24 hours after signing a legally binding contract I was going to be jobless.

    Eventually I agreed to move. I have grown in my career. I live with my girlfriend who I met her. I still work with the same company.

    Overall it’s a improvement over my previous experience and it was 9 years ago…




  • I tend to recommend a 3 year cycle. Year 1 upgrade peripherals (speakers, monitors, maybe chair, keyboard, mouse etc) year 2. Upgrade video card and hard drives. year 3. Upgrade motherboard, ram and cpu. Year 4 repeat year 1

    With this you can you can do 95% of the latest stuff with “good” stuff (think XX70 cards rather then 80 or 90 series) since you are never that outdated on any portion.



  • I’m also a software engineer (at least in title). I agree with the social skills but a different thing came to mind. The ability to actually watch and understand what people are trying to do. I’m lucky as all my software is internal to my company. I don’t make what we sell, I make what tests the products we sell. And yes I test the tests and also test the test’s tests 😭.

    I’ll give an example. I have an operation where the operator is to scan a number off a paper before testing. That number is for traceability we need to know which test results are for which unit. Previous engineer said since it’s scanned off the unit it will never be incorrect as long on the printed barcode is correct(separately validated) so no need to verify format.

    I ran into an issue where units had an extra zero either before or after the number. So if number was 12345 sometimes it would be 012345 or 123450.

    I went to watch the process. The operator scanned the unit( I watched them work all day, this was 1 unit out of a whole days work) and when they put the scanner down the scanner’s corner was on the 0 button of the keypad.

    We did a 2 phase remiduation. Stage 1. Operator instructed to log in and then place keyboard on shelf away from workplace. Stage 2. Verify the number is in correct format in code. Yes the code update is simple but in our field needs weeks of work to test, validate, and release.

    Actually watching the operator closely identified the problem. The code was not the issue, the code passed all requirements and tests. The issue was the tests and requirements did not match the user’s experience but if I stayed in my cube as for weeks I would not of been able to find the bug.



  • I had that experience last week. I half blame the language though cause the way it works is you don’t initialize a variable, first time you use it the language automatically makes the variable and default value is 0.

    I had a variable countoot that I had a formula calculate. Then a simple if countoot > 0 do this else do that. The program kept doing that. I knew countoot should be 2. I manually did the formula … The answer was two.

    I did the same formula in 3 other programs and it worked correctly. I spent between 1.5 to 2 hours a day for like 3 days banging my head on the desk trying to figure out why it would work. Fourth day me and 2 other guys were trying to figure it out when I finally really looked closely. I realized the formula result was stored in ccountoot(notice 2 c) and the if statement was based on countoot(notice 1 c)…yeah I felt so stupid when correcting the typo fixed the problem.


  • The difference is in exact wording Agile: the software shall properly authticate a user within our active directory.

    Documention : user authentication will be provided by functions ”valisate username” as described in section 14,7 subsection 4, ”validate password” as described in section 16.2 and validate the correct pasword as described in section 23.4.Proper authication to the correct use group shall comply with the requirements in document 654689 section 64.7 subsection 17

    Yes there is a difference and one is better…




  • I’ve done some gcode but moved onto other programming(mostly c# so completely different. One thing I HATED about gcode, I don’t know if it was just my machines or gcode in general(most of mine were based on fanuc cnc controllers typically seen as top of the line) , we were not able to name variables.

    I create a variable and assign it #315. What does #315 do? What does it mean? Who knows… Better have notes or comments to explain or your fucked. I can’t say variable x_offset_tool_15 nope…just #315.