this video is sponsored by squarespace so when i think of engineering i pretty much straightaway jump to thoughts of elon musk and his intense daily routine you know sleeping five hours a night between his NUMBER_TOKENam of shooting cars into space and then squeezing every ounce of performance out of both the cars being designed and the people he has working for him but here's the completely crazy thing tim cook ceo of apple jeff bezos ceo of amazon bill gates microsoft founder the one thing they all have in common other than being absolutely loaded is that they all come from engineering backgrounds and have risen to the very top of some of the world's biggest companies but i guess what i really want to know is just what's it actually like to be you know a normal engineer at the bottom working in one of these extremely innovative companies designing the future of tech or the cars of tomorrow and most importantly what do you actually spend your days doing do you just you know spend all of your time working on the tiny cogs quite literally in the huge machine or do you actually get to step back and see the bigger picture even at the start of your career well and somewhat ironically here i jumped on a train last week to go and see one of my geared friends from cambridge a guy called david who works as an engineer for one of the world's most renowned high-end car companies to find out what it's really like all righty so how would you describe what you do in a sentence my job is to decompose the customer experience we want into engineering and engineering specification that a supplier can can deliver so take me through kind of what a day looks like if you have a day is a sort of pie chart how would you break up your day into different tasks from email and messaging calls i don't know design or development or whatever you know how do you kind of break your day down it's probably NUMBER_TOKEN emails um there's a lot of communication that needs to be had uh maybe NUMBER_TOKEN in meetings and those meetings tend to be alignment so getting the stakeholders together so they can argue and get to the grunt of an issue more quickly than emails could achieve NUMBER_TOKEN um doing actual development work that tends to include using modeling software so taking that customer experience modeling it and simulating that model to see yeah that does look right that's what i would want the customer to experience and then lots of other things within that tool set trying to run tests try out different things break it down into the functions that need to happen so to use the cruise control example um on the high level it's about slowing down or speeding up based on the car in front but that involves perceiving the car in front it involves measuring the relative velocity it involves some logic of what you're going to do on the back of that and then there are functions responsible for braking and accelerating and those all of those things can will be done by a different team or a different supplier so there'll be a supplier responsible for taking the image or the presence of a car might be using something like radar and working out speed and then there will also be team different teams responsible for the braking system and a team responsible for the acceleration the propulsion system yeah taking that customer experience and breaking it down to the little blocks that need to happen and then managing what each of those blocks needs to do with the people who are going to deliver it that is probably the main chunk and then
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