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How has the corona virus pandemic affected engineers? Part 2.

PART 2

I asked six engineers in different industries how the pandemic has affected their work.

The first questions were business/company related and are covered in Part 1. These are the ore related to each engineer.

Who:

Name Photo Job Title Company
Emily Harford Emily_Harford_5e70b0ca52d5ad00ee8dba314c5b78d5032b7cf9.jpg Principal Engineer for the Design Authority UKAEA
Mark Mellors Mark_bd3f6021acd88fdf84de88f7967bfb46fcd11fae.jpg Freelance Engineer Mechanically Minded (just me!)
John Grimshaw John_Grimshaw_bd9d91366ae773252aca898ba1bd08ba42beace6.jpg Engineering Manager / (Product Development Manager at start of pandemic) iXtract Ltd (8 weeks) / (Elcometer Ltd)
Julie Winnard DSC_garden_photo_face_crop_104f0cef7dfc2e0532050d7c13809566db31ff95.jpg Director and Lead Sustainability Consultant Haynard Ltd (just me!)
Mike D

Mike_Davies21_019544427f1e13f5346b3421162b6c467b42ce65.jpg

Design & Build Engineer JD Controls
Andy Stanford-Clark ASC_At_Blackgang_89ab0142c181258d409ecc7e0f54d1481d237ab3.jpg Chief Technology Officer IBM UK & Ireland

What’s the thing you wished you had known in February 2020, that would have helped you prepare for the pandemic?

Name Response
Emily I would have packed my office up at work. This has been such an extreme change, I'm not sure how I would have prepared differently.
Mark

From an engineering/business point of view I feel I was well prepared, I've been steadily expanding the materials, tools and work techniques I have direct access to, so that I can be reasonably independent if needed, and that has worked out well.

However, I wish I'd known about the government's poor pandemic planning, particularly around supply chain capacity. If I'd known how long it would take for traditional supply chains to respond, I would have started the PPE production much earlier. I could see in February what would be needed, but I incorrectly assumed the supply chains could see it too and would be able to respond in time.

John

I wish I’d have known the power of a personal visit, whether that be in person or via technology. When its normal you don’t realise how much it means for a leader/colleague to just turn up at your desk for a chat. We forget the friendships/relationships we build in the working environment and how effective they are for your mental health when you can just take a walk to someone’s office or turn around and have a chat about (insert random thing here) with your team. I tried to either turn up for a random MSTeams chat with colleagues just to keep that random chat alive. It highlighted how some people (sometimes me) were really struggling but didn’t show it in our daily/weekly team meetings.

Julie

Ironically I have seenmore of social and ex-work friends online as they are not in the office 24/7 or out in London. But I still haven’t been able to work network much due to busyness and cancelled events - I wish I’d had the foresight to book onto some of the online ones when there were spaces.

On a more subtle note - my job is to spot sustainability risks & opportunities ahead and mitigate them, so I was thinking about and could see this coming quite a long way out thanks to some interesting friends (infection control specialist at a hospital)- but the intellectual knowledge is not the same as gut instinct and the heart and doesn’t make you immune to the wider pandemic effects. You still have to go through the rollercoaster with everyone else.

Mike Nothing, as we knew something was going to happen, but not to what extent it has
Andy

I can't actually think of anything that I wish I'd known... I didn't join the rush for buying toilet rolls (!), but even so, we didn't really run short of anything we couldn't work around - I think running low on tinned tomatoes was our biggest "near miss", but that's very much a first-world problem, isn't it?!

What new games / gadgets / devices have you played with during this time?

Name Response
Emily I've been gardening and refurbishing old tools. I have a very lovely looking wheelbarrow and pickaxe now.
Mark

Miro was the online whiteboard I played with. I've joined many more online community groups than before (in relation to PPE coordination), so Discourse, Discord, Slack, Teams, Skype, WhatsApp and Google Docs have all been used more and in ways, I'd not tried before.

I discovered a clothes iron and greaseproof paper is perfect for heat sealing polyethene film, something I'd assumed would need a specialist gadget. This was discovered as part of testing out makeshift gown production designs and techniques, but I'm hoping to use it for a fun art exhibit in future.

John I’m learning to weld and building a workshop at home, I’m finding that physical, hands-on skills seem much more important to me personally through this crisis. I watched some plasterer’s working in my living room and realised how much of an art form it was, I was really envious of them. I’m really appreciating the things that I used to go out of my way to farm out to others and realising how important it is to have some form of trade/skillset. Also, Elcometer purchased an SLA Printer in the form of a Form3, that’s pretty special and once my workshop is up and running I may get one myself.
Julie

I have continued to learn to drive Instagram and Facebook for business visibility for my sideline, and how different that is as public facing retail, from LinkedIn and technical/professional audiences. I have become very familiar with Zoom and Teams. I learnt to use Discord, and Google Hangouts, as part of a leisure project to write & test an online freeform (partly at an online writing weekend which would have been real life) remotely with a group of gaming friends, written specifically for lockdown and with curtailed communications channels. This required a lot of work on nerd-communication skills and volunteer management, as well as deep thinking about how different people think, play and communicate, and how fast information (memes) move inside in-person games and within online games; plus what happens when real people play your carefully crafted game! We also used Trello and Google drives for the first time for something so big and complex. Lots of learning.

Other specialist tools I have learnt during my Rail work but would have been doing that anyway- the Network Rail Billing files, energy use gateways, driver advice systems and so on, all for energy use analysis. And finally, I had to deepen my Excel skills greatly to reverse engineer the client’s spreadsheet tools so we could use them and they worked properly on huge datasets, have been building new versions, and am starting to learn about PowerBI (Microsoft cloud service for building dashboards for large complex datasets) which will be used to build the next generation of tools.

Mike None
Andy

Being at home full-time has given me the chance to review my home automation requirements and applications. Some of them related to being aware of whether people were at home or not. That's almost always "yes" now, so those are less useful.

I was inspired to invent a couple of gadgets which I describe as "inspired by song titles". "A Day Without Rain" is a weather clock that shows a rolling weather forecast for my house, hour-by-hour for the next 24 hours, using data from The Weather Company. That's very useful for planning when to go out for a run. The other is a tribute to Karen Carpenter: it lights up on Mondays and days when it's going to rain. It uses a "lithophane" technique to show an image of Karen's face (see below).

Andy Stanford-Clark's Lithopane of Karen Carpenter Image source: Andy Stanford-Clark

Andy Stanford-Clark's Lithopane of Karen Carpenter
Image source: Andy Stanford-Clark

Have you felt more or less creative during this time? How so?

Name Response
Emily I don't think my creativity has changed.
Mark

I miss collaborative, creative whiteboard sessions. From a hands-on, being creative, practical point of view, I've probably done more of that than usual, what with the PPE design explorations. Also, new constraints tend to breed creative solutions.

John

I have felt much less creative personally and professionally, I’ve been away from my “fun” sessions over at Fablab Warrington and in work/at home I have been focused on ensuring my staff and family are well looked after and have something to do/get motivated for. Its been very much a functional process for me, step by step, planned and measured and so far creativity has been offered out to others as a form of encouragement to stay motivated or engaged at times when they seem a little burned out from the day to day grind.

Julie Less creative as very very busy in Feb/Mar/Apr but gradually able to make a little space for small creative things in my sideline, and had time to find creative solutions for the client later on once most of the difficult learning was done.
 
Mike

More creative. I am using the downtime to improve my knowledge, PLC writing etc.

Andy

It comes and goes. There have been some quite stressful times that have been exhausting, but there have also been times when I have benefitted from not travelling and getting home late at night, where I have had some great ideas and the time to implement them. My 3D printer has been busy, even since the frenzy of printing all those PPE visors at the start of lockdown!

What has frustrated you most during this time?

  Response
Emily Cover your nose, and get out of my space.
Mark

Government response and communication. This could be a time when science communication gets a boost, but I worry the public perception of science and scientists has been negatively impacted by government communication 'guided by the science'! Nevermind the health, livelihood and economic impact of policy decisions and communication.

I'm thankful my social life (such as it is) hasn't changed much as I mostly chat to friends online anyway, and my hobby of making things has been able to continue mostly as before, only a reduced amount because of prioritising PPE support. However, I really feel for those who've lost their social interaction and leisure activities. My wife enjoys salsa, but it's going to be a long time before she'll be able to meet with friends and dance again.

John Honestly, it’s the unknown, I haven’t seen my eldest son for 5 months because we don’t know what we are or are not allowed to do, he turns 21 this month and mentally it's really hard to not break down thinking I may not be able to see him as our two areas are possibly going into further lockdowns and both of our separate families have shielded or at risk people within our own separate bubbles so merging them isn’t an option.
Julie

Losing access to exercise classes (not that I do that many!) and not having the forethought/luck to get a push-bike in advance.

Everything taking longer and not being able to pop round and find colleagues/the boss to get a better response or sort out a query more easily.

And slow server connections which freeze your apps when you work with big data sets - I now do the ironing or small craft/sales tasks when trying to upload or download as each file takes 15 minutes to open/save/process.

Government flip-flops on policy announced on a Sunday to be implemented Monday and some nonsensical policies/contradictory advice that mean I and everyone else have to go and read the Government advice every time we want to do something in real life to work out if it’s even possible… if I am struggling with my analytical skills (and I have resorted to drawing Venn diagrams for some things!) then no wonder Joe Public is confused or has given up on some measures.

Mike

Not knowing delivery times for goods purchased.

Andy

The "always-on" activity of each workday. No "downtime" to think, collect my thoughts, mull things over, etc, which I hadn't consciously realised that my lengthy commutes by car, ferry, bus and train, gave me plenty of time to do. Also, the gaps between meetings, when I would travel from one location to another, gave time for me to assimilate my thoughts from one meeting before the next one started. That "buffer zone" has gone now. We need to enforce more "Social Distancing" between meetings!

Anything else you'd like to add / comment on (relevant to engineers!)

Name Response
Mark

In March and April, I communicated far more, and with more people than I ever had. I was spending long days talking to people for work (less face to face time means more explicit communication is needed to avoid assumptions causing problems down the line), as well as coordinating with other community PPE production groups. I found this level of communication exhausting, but necessary and useful. It was nice to see groups coming together from all over geographically, politically and technically to collaboratively work on a common cause and share ideas. I wish this sharing, communication and collaboration was more common.

John

This crisis has opened up a lot of opportunities for companies to treat their staff well and help them through this, some have excelled at this, others have missed the mark. I’m going to suggest that people remember how companies reacted to this crisis and put your time, effort and support (money) into the companies that have really excelled in these areas to ensure that they are still here after this crisis.

Also, be nice to each other, it costs you nothing but means the world to the person on the receiving end.

Julie

I’ve been reflecting on the design engineer and project manager (and sustainability) mindsets during the pandemic. All these roles are built to detect and try to manage problems/risks (and opportunities but we usually spot fewer of those!). We are used to being able to manage this and solve problems as skilled professionals if only we analyse enough data and work hard enough.

Sustainability (and real life) had already taught me that some things are unknown and you have to make informed guesses or work on the precautionary principle and that you cannot think about everything or you will go mad - just do what comes to your hand and try not to make anything worse.

In the background, I still also have the continuing (subconscious) rising pressure of climate change and all the other unsustainable things building up - some of which the pandemic has helped and some definitely not. I suspect anyone with a risk/future radar element in their job may have similar issues - just because the pandemic tidal wave is here now doesn’t mean the other one will pass us by or delay itself.

This has required a new skill - not thinking.

Or living in the moment mindfully I suppose and not drowning in worry for a future you are not yet in. I do wonder if older engineers are better at this?

On the slightly positive side, a global crisis is quite good for showing up really bad leaders, so I am hoping this when-the-chips-are-down experience might bring on a calming reversion to voting for competency and experience.

Andy

Considering the changes that "The New Normal" brings, is a rich area for creative thinking and considering how things need to change for us to continue to thrive in the world we now find ourselves in. This is a great opportunity for innovative solutions to the World's problems, which is just the kind of challenge we engineers love, isn't it?!

I am an inventor, engineer, writer and presenter. Other stuff: Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Engineering: Creativity and Communication at Brunel University London; Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and have a PhD in bubbles; Judge on BBC Robot Wars.
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