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So many spreadsheets.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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As an engineer, this hits close to home.
Engineers: So we had all this complicated theory, but no one can calculate that stuff by himself. Here's a linear aproximation formula and 50 pages of tables where you just look up the values for the factors given certain conditions.
The complicated math is for the one guy who made the tables and charts. The rest of you just look it up. It's fine, it's how we've always done it. Even sending people to the Moon had lookup tables for precalculated things. Although those guys were legend, ever try to use a sliderule?
When your "calculator" is a room full of women, mostly black, it is kinda hard to fit them all into the orbiter.
Edit: I just realized that the "mostly black" came off like I was saying that us part of the reason they would not fit in the orbiter. I was trying to acknowledge the impact and importance of these black women in history, but I am autistic and fail hard at SQ communication.
I comprehended it as meant, and you're right, give credit where it's due.
Depending on the field, later in your career you can often skip the spreadsheets and get away with just saying, "That looks close enough,." If you have enough seniority people will assume you know what you're talking about.
Join the technicians in the field who get to laugh at engineers, its more rewarding
Edit: sales get the commission tho :(
"Be a Mechanical Engineer, then you get to hate nearly everyone including yourself." A Mech. Engineer told me this after we both had a really long day. If you pay attention to those guys, you'll find that they know more than most because they play the parts of Engineer, Tech, and Liaison
There's a reason we called it Anger Mech in school
Thats the great thing abput being a electrical engineer, people wont laugh at you but they will ask you to fix their house wirering. And once you just look at a pcb and casually tell them what the parts off it do you blow their mind.
As an engineer, this is missing a first bump where you stop doing "basic operations" still in school, and develop an intrinsic fear of "numbers and counting".
Computer engineer checking in. Same here!
Hopefully you utilize Python instead of Excel for data management. Unless you have non-engineers or tech-illiterate people on your team or adjacent teams lol
Why not both. I once wrote an abomination that read and wrote data into a Google Spreadsheet, interacting with formulas in the spreadsheet in the process.
Jesus Christ
I hope there's a place worse than hell
Oh Lord. Before I found power bi 15 or so years ago I made interactive speeadsheets that did a lot of querying directly towards sql based on a set of input cells. Did a lot of crunching on the data merging data fetched from different database etc before presenting them in their own sheets. The worst part is that it was a huge leap from what we did earlier. Then I would write sql queries and dump the result to Excel every time management needed data.
I mostly use sql for data management stuff through c# .NET. But there is a lot of Excel and power bi towards the numbers people.
As another engineer, not at all 🤨