Final Thoughts On Social Media-You Thought I was Done?

We have explored LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. They have been a mixed bag of good, bad, and indifferent. One social media that may prove invaluable to you as a design engineer is YouTube.

That’s right, YouTube. The website that launched Justin Bieber is also a treasure trove of valuable information and education.

YouTube

Search whatever you want to learn about. How much money and time would you spend learning how to use Excel, PowerPoint or some other software? There are literally billions of dollars or free education just waiting for you on YouTube.

Software tutorials, how-to videos, how do they make it videos. You might even get a new idea for how to complete your next design.

There is a video for ball bearings;  Ball Bearings

Soap:  Soap

Contact lenses: Contact Lenses

Playing cards, beer, mirrors……….you name it. There is even a video on how they make condoms…..I suggest you purchase them at Walgreens or CVS, but if you feel driven to know how they are made, YouTube has a video.

This is the end of my exploration of social media as it is used in the engineering profession. I may search some more, as my interest has been piqued.

Come back from time to time, as I have many other topics germane to design engineers to explore.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Jerry Cox  (aka Greybeard)

If you are an engineer, you will laugh at this. If not, well, if I explain it it won’t be funny anyhow!

Blogs – what is a portmanteau?

Blogs – what is a portmanteau?

A blog is a web log…….actually, blog is a portmanteau of the words—a combination. Kind of a hybrid word.

I am a vast storehouse of useless knowledge!!!

The writers are called bloggers. Loggers do logging; bloggers do blogging. Somehow that makes more sense than people on Twitter doing tweets!

I actually found a list of the Top 100 Engineering Blogs, and looked at more of them then you will ever get me to admit. Look for yourself;

Top 100 Engineering Blogs

Number three on the lihttp://www.cookingforengineers.com/st is Cooking for Engineers, and it is exactly what the name implies. One of the featured articles when I visited was a review on which cooking thermometer was the best.

It isn’t much for engineering information, but if you are the typical detail oriented engineer that also likes to cook, evidently a lot of people like you enjoy this site. I was a single dad for a few years, so I avoid cooking now.

There is an Engineering Ethics Blog! Actually quite well-written, although the posts are long for a blog. They post 4-5 times a month. Guess it takes a week to write a blog that long.

It is actually a commentary on current events with an engineering ethics angle; and in our profession ethics is nearly as important as technical expertise. Don’t believe me, ask the engineers who were on the Ford Pinto project; they kept their mouths shut to avoid managerial anger and released an exploding car…..I am not making this up.

So many possibilities; so many dead ends. Promising titles that haven’t been posted to since 2010. Many in the top 100 are that way. Good ideas that died before their time.

Design News is another old faithful engineering magazine, and they have a blog.

Design News Blog

Actually, it is a collecting place for blogs, but there is something for everyone.

Variety’s  the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor.
William  Cowper

Twitter-Are they Tweets or Twits?

In the interest of full disclosure, I shuddered down to my core when I realized I had to explore Twitter. All I knew about Twitter was that many famous people have accounts and followers, and they tend to say a lot of things on Twitter that they would love to take back. More harm to reputations has been done by an ill-advised Twitter posting than nearly anywhere else, and there is no deniability. You put it out there yourself!

I searched ‘machine design’ and found Machine Design. I was delighted. Machine Design is an established publication that goes back to before the World Wide Web, when engineers actually got magazines like this delivered to the workplace.

https://twitter.com/MachDesign  or @MachDesign

You looked, and were as disappointed as I was! They haven’t posted since July of 2010. All the wonderful content they possess, and they give us nothing on Twitter. They really should close this account if they aren’t going to use it.

For you sparkys (Electrical Engineers) there is the Control Design account.

https://twitter.com/Control_Design  or @Control_Design

Sadly for gearheads like me, this account is up to date D; not neglected like the Machine Design account. (It is rare that gearheads get outdone by sparkys) When I looked they had several threads started in the past few hours. A lot of the tweets are sponsored by suppliers, but they are full of quality information.

Design engineering – I’ll search that one. And I find Design Engineering Magazine has a Twitter account. AND they actually post on it! Most of their tweets link to outside sites, but they are full of good stuff. It is time well-spent, especially when the alternative is following one of the self-important celebs that inhabit Twitter.

https://twitter.com/design_eng_mag  or @design_eng_mag

Do your own searches. There are Twitter accounts for mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical and even computer engineers. Look them over and follow one that catches your eye. Twitter turned out better than this old Greybeard thought it would.

I found good things on Twitter because I dared to look. It was not luck; it was effort. Effort is the secret to success.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Facebook Failure-part deux

We design engineers are a persistent lot. After all, WD-40 and Preparation H both point out the fact that the first 39 WDs and Preparations A thru G were unsuccessful, but the creators did not give up.

So once again I ventured into Facebook, and what did I find? That my hopes were elevated, only to be destroyed like a poorly lubricated gear train under heavy load at high rpms.

There it is, right in front of me……

Mechanical Engineering Forum – is it too good to be true? Yes, it is. As you will see, this is a static page with a button which links to outside of Facebook. This is a big failure, as I am searching for Facebook pages that apply to design engineering. This page is an ad disguised as a Facebook page.

Other searches yielded Facebook accounts for various design and manufacturing firms with 31 views and 5 likes and no usable content—just a poor attempt to garner some free advertising–so I abandoned Facebook as a viable social media for design engineers professionally. Although design engineering requires persistence, it also demands that we know when to abandon a bad idea. To do anything else is crazy:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Using Facebook in its current state for design engineering is one of those bad ideas. Like the perpetual motion machine and robots doing our housework, it’s time has not yet come.

Use Facebook for finding your old college friends, keeping up with family news and viewing pictures of the nieces, nephews—and grandkids if you are a Greybeard like I am.

Facebook–Don’t Even Go There!

In my last blog I spoke about LinkedIn, and what a savings of effort and time it can provide. Time and effort are vital commodities to design engineers. Our whole profession is about designing machinery and devices to make things easier, faster and better.

With noble thoughts in mind, I ventured into Facebook to explore the viability of using it as a design engineer. Evidently, to paraphrase Captain Kirk, I boldly went where no design engineer has gone before. Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life on Facebook.

I searched “Mechanical Engineering” and found some scary things. The first one was Production Engineering and Mechanical Design. That sounded promising, so away I went. The picture I saw at the top encouraged me until I ventured down the page. This page evidently is centered in the Middle East, as was evidenced by the names of the admins and members, but what really hit me were the profile pictures. One of them was a Swastika—that’s right, the emblem of Nazi Germany. Other profile pictures were similarly disturbing, so I went back to search again.

The next page that popped up in my search was Mechanical Engineers Rocks—that’s right, both Engineer and Rock were plural. OK, I can deal with a grammatical error if the content is good. Scrolling down, I saw cross-sectional pictures of pumps and heat exchangers-Eureka! Reading the entries showed the title was a forewarning of what was to come; poor technical information, poorer writing skills, and some of the poorest attempts at humor and insight that I have ever encountered.

Being a positive individual, I tried once again. See my next blog for the results.

LinkedIn Follow-Up – What, no creative headline???

Last time I spoke of LinkedIn as a great social media forum for our profession. If you are unfamiliar with LinkedIn, I have provided the link to a Screencast video to introduce you to my profile, as well as a link to my actual profile.

Screeencast welcome to my LinkedIn profile

http://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/clX0YEVnKL

My LinkedIn profile:

http://lnkd.in/GxUQHC

Here are a few examples of engineer’s LinkedIn profiles, with my comments

Cliff Davis

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=12189872&authType=name&authToken=Mu4_&goback=%2Econ

Cliff is highly qualified, but his profile is sparse.  Cliff has worked at the same place for decades.

Another former coworker is Ken Williams. He is also highly qualified, and you can see this by his LinkedIn profile.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15506795&authType=name&authToken=gfT3&goback=%2Econ

Ken gives a lot of information about his qualifications, education and experience. I know Ken, and he is always prepared—even his LinkedIn profile shows it. He could post a more professional picture.

Create a profile, or update your profile if you already have one.

Be Prepared – It isn’t just the Boy Scout Motto.

For my money (and it cost nothing) LinkedIn is the most useful of the social media for the design engineering professional. Between being able to link to friends and acquaintances in our field, and the professional forums that are available, much can be accomplished. Whether your question is

• What ever happened to that old co-worker?
• What is the best way to laminate multiple webs at high speed?……….OR
• How am I going to find a new job?

Linked in provides the functionality and connections that will send you in the right direction.

Utilize LinkedIn. Don’t try to
reinvent the wheel by random means of trying to connect with other design engineering professionals.

Use the tools that are available. Remember……

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible
– Freeman Dyson

Everything is Not As It Seems

So you are looking for a job? Maybe you are soon to graduate. Maybe you are early in your career and are looking for a growth opportunity. Maybe you are mid-career and have been downsized.

Those of us who have been around for a while used our professional contacts, newspaper and trade publication ads and the evil headhunters (recruiters) to find work. Professional contacts were often the best sources; former coworkers and technical salespersons who knew where the jobs were. We typed resumes and cover letters and sent them via snail mail, or the office fax machine. And you waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Those of you who are younger grew up with social media, and immediately turn to the internet to search for a job. You look at Monster.com, Career Builders, Yahoo Jobs (and Personals) and other sites. You post your resumes on these sites. And wait. And wait. And wait some more.

I want to mention a website that is best of the old and the new. It is called LinkedIn, and it has become the social media site for professionals. It has all the strength and dependability that we more seasoned engineers found in our professional contacts coupled with the speed and diversity of the internet. You can keep in contact with your college classmates, people you worked with on your last job, sales and technical reps, and even the evil headhunters……errr…..recruiters. You can join forums in your field so specialty, search jobs, and most importantly, keep in contact with those individuals who know you and your work. They are your best opportunity at that next job.

Get busy.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.
Lou Holtz

Hello world!

At my workplace I am referred to as the “Graybeard”, which is a reference to the old man of the group in the Dilbert cartoon strips-the one who has all the answers. I don’t have all the answers, but I have most of them, and know how to find the rest. That is where the internet and social media comes into play.

When I entered the field there were no blogs, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. We got information from magazines, eighth generation copies from some older coworker, and our Machinery’s Handbooks, or asking the resident “Graybeard”.

Now the internet represents a myriad of ways to learn about nearly anything.

There are plenty of blogs, forums, and even twitter feeds that deal with the technical aspects of design engineering, and from my experience they come in three types.

• Those posted by some very smart and helpful people
• Those posted by people that want to sound smart
• Those posted by people that have no business dispensing technical information

Together we can try to navigate this minefield and learn to ascertain which sources can be trusted for technical information, and which ones to steer clear of.

There are very few places that deal with the philosophy of how we think, live, and work, and that is my other intention for this blog. Together we will navigate social media as engineers and see what useful things we can discover, and I will try to offer some practical insights along the way..

To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.