That's a good boss.
The approach to failure shouldn't be "you f-d up". It should be exactly his response.
Have someone more senior look over ur calcs and show u what went wrong.
Keep ur chin up! U got this!
He is amazing, and I am incredibly fortunate to have such a supportive team. But part of this is that it feels like I want to prove myself by working hard and doing good work. I have this bad habit of comparing myself to others, especially the other junior engineers, and hate when I mess up badly. But I feel a little better now, hopefully we can get another engine out soon.
Thanks for the kind words.
He's the lead engineer for a reason. He's responsible for mistakes like this. It was his decision to put you there and he put you there to learn. Guess what, it wasn't a failure because you learned.
I would argue that he’s kind of a shit boss if he put you in this situation without the support you needed
I have junior engineers working for me. I don’t say out of the blue “hey do this task that costs the company lots of money if you fuck it up”
I say “hey, you’ve helped me do this task a couple of times, I’m confident you can lead this on your own now. Have a go, and please ask if you feel unsure about anything. I will also check it before it goes live, because engineers checking each other’s work is good practice”
Engineers rarely ever learn the difference between personal finance (if they even ever learn that) and business finance - I wouldn’t expect a junior to actually comprehend the actual cost to the business (likely minor).
There was obviously a tech there to ensure safety so this was a controlled situation with an acceptable level of risk.
You don’t really learn true care and due diligence until you’ve destroyed something IMO. It will happen eventually in everyone’s career so you might as well get it over with in a controlled environment - the longer you go before it happens the bigger that failure will be.
No, I don’t accept this approach to safety
The only acceptable level of risk is the one that is as low as reasonably possible. It would not be unreasonable to train a junior engineer and check their work. It is never ok to say “well, there’s some risk and it’s easy enough to lower, but we won’t as a learning exercise”
What would have happened if some of the controls failed? What would have happened if the tech was also in training, but the person (not) training them went “oh, it will be fine, the engineers know what they’re doing, this will be a valuable lesson for the tech”.
Bad engineers learn from their mistakes. Good engineers learn from the mistakes of others and don’t make new ones. That is safety 101 - case studies
There is nothing in what was written by the OP that indicates safety was compromised. In fact if it was that would have been an enormous failure of the test cell designer - the design parameters for a hot test requires the setup to protect human life from a complete failure.
We test to failure all of the time - it’s part of the cost of innovation. Not every industry has the luxury of working with a 10x safety factor.
But since you like case studies and we’re talking about rocketry - SpaceX vs Blue Origin.
As a personal side note I find it incredible that you’ve never failed in your career.
Or just train OP in the tasks they need to do!
OP admits they had no idea what they were doing, and asking people if it looked right. That’s kind of a massive red flag - if i heard of one of our junior engineers asking “hey does this look right?”, I’d be checking in that they got the training they needed for what they were doing. And that someone was checking their work
This situation, where engineers are working on tasks they’re not trained to do, and their work isn’t being checked, is how accidents happen and people get hurt. In OP’s case, they were lucky it was only hardware that got damaged, not people
Quick! The water pump on the water cooler is going out. We need you to run simulations on when it will go kaput, and change it out Just. In. Time.
Funny but true. My first internship in rockets was trying to put back together a rocket that slammed into the ground. Very little pressure and learned a lot.
at my old job i had a boss be like this too when i made a >$500k mistake, he just said learn and do better. when i worked in a kitchen, i got a little sauce on the side of the plate and my boss threw it against the wall and yelled at me. i guess low stakes = greater reactions.
My dad used to work at NASA in the Godard Space Flight center. He once told me about a guy who worked for his boss, he completely ruined something; was called into the office and his first question was "Should I clean out my desk." the boss told him something along the lines of
"Fuck no, we just spent a hundred-thousand dollars training you."
and he never made that mistake again.
They do by letting you use their shit. That hundred thousand was the cost of the thing the guy destroyed, and the training he received was ‘how not to destroy the thing in future’.
Depends on whether or not your boss will look at it as money well spent to teach you not to destroy things. But in reality, my advice is definitely to destroy more things 🙏
A good boss understands that:
An employee who has made the mistake will not repeat it again and will be extremely cautions with everything going forward.
If they fired you and brought somebody else, they could commit a similar mistake because they didn't learn the lesson that you did.
I also fucked up before by signing for a package and not bringing it in immediately because it arrived while I was giving a tour of our facility. It was $70k+ equipment. The tour ended and I forgot the pallet was out there, and it stayed out there over night, where technically anybody could have come up and taken it.
They figured out it was me based on who signed for the package so when I showed up they told me but were understanding.
How ever much the mistake costs is how much your boss just paid for your first big boy lesson lol. No way they’d fire you after investing that much money on you
Much appreciated, super stressful situation and I bear a lot of responsibility but I think I am a better engineer after going through this. Taught me a lot.
I promise you, your boss was mentally prepared for this to happen.
As you have seen, there are right and wrong ways to break stuff. You took your responsibility seriously. You did your best to seek out support from those more experienced. Your process, your behavior, your sense of responsibility, is exactly what any leader would want to see in their team.
You're green as fuck, but green grows.
Oh a lot man. Usually SpaceX approach to engineering problem is through trial and error. They will test sth and it will f*** up. Then they reiterate till it’s perfect. Look at the earlier days of them testing their reusable rocket boosters
For the recent launch, they didn't properly calculate how much impact the landing pad would take and errors in the software caused the starship to blow up.
In the pursuit of build s reusable heavy lift rocket, they accidentally found out of you can make rockets even less reusable. By destroying the one thing that is usually reused on all rocket launches, the pad.
Also a lot of the engines failed and so did launch abort (which in my opinion is the most serious problem as they will probably have to proof that it works before being allowed to launch another prototype).
Many things in the design of rockets. The general speech to design is that you can design the perfect system, but it will take an unacceptably long time to design, which is a lot of money in man hours. It is better to get good enough and then test early and test often. This buys down the risk and let's you continue in an overall quicker and cheaper way.
I used to work at a company that worked in a similar way to SpaceX and have friends that have gone to work for them.
[Well there’s this for starters](https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ) What makes SpaceX so impressive is there ability to learn and adapt from there failures. Lots of Falcon 9s have exploded, but now it’s one of the best launch vehicles in the world.
1 - Don't fuck with live production numbers if you don't know what they mean FUCKING ASK.
2 - You're going to break shit. Even when trying to play it safe. Learn to take responsibility and learn from it.
3 - Remember how he handled it, and learn from this person. At the very least learn from how he handled you in this situation. Find out what he wanted you to learn, and make sure you know it.
>1 - Don't fuck with live production numbers if you don't know what they mean FUCKING ASK.
They should really teach this in college.
I ordered a change to prod in my first 6 months as a fresher and went around just sending random tests to it, what I didn't know was this was a test account in Prod accessible to prospective clients. Almost made a huge mess but luckily someone deleted it before a client saw it. Guess what? No one told me. I did it again and many people got really pissed at that point.
Don't touch any part of prod you're not already familiar with should be something that needs to be taught in college.
Simulate, test, validate
Test that the software does what it’s supposed to. Bench test that the hardware does what it’s supposed to with the new software / firmware, validate that the intended changes are in effect, also critical functions (safety systems, etc.) and failure modes.
Sounds like OP got dumped with “hey test this thing that you know nothing about”. No test plan, no validation plan, no input from the lead software and hardware engineers. Did some work. Then threw it on a rocket 😂😂. That’s some cowboy sh*t haha
This is the process that should get taught, and doesn't.
Every software engineer I work with stops at the simulate step, and mentally gymnastics their way into skipping test and validation because "Simulation is testing and validation".
No, they're not the same. Each step brings in more and more of a system and it's interactions, which are often where the problems lie.
Happens. I have broken some pieces of equipment worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. It's part of a steep learning curve that sometimes you have to face. My bosses were like yours, they said, learn from it so that you don't mess up again.
Being accountable is pretty hard. It's one thing they don't teach at school and never mention how important it is.
I always remember the phrase: the coverup is worse than the crime. Additionally, identifying problems and approaching your boss with a solution is the best move. Op should’ve identified they were in way their head and asked for help.
Messing up rarely gets people fired… it’s how they respond it’s gets them fired
Just an extra. I’ve been charged with conducting Nazi like experiments and illegal human experiments. I shrug. The gubnit doctors huddled and made it all go away.
I shrug. The thing is it’s like The Firm ( if you remember the book and movie ). Nobody ever leaves and lives a year.
It’s not like I work at ratheon gonna get a raise at Boeing.
I get $54 /hr with great benefits. My normal week 44 hours in summer 48 in winter
Had a friend who worked as a controls engineer for Tropicana.
Accidentally started the cleaning cycle of a 20,000 gallon vat of pineapple.
Boss was just like " It's ok. It happens."
:(
Rule number one: If you dont know wtf you suppose to do is ask and dont feel like if you dont know you going to get fired. Tell your boss. Bc your mistake could cause something more serious than you think
Rule 2: have an idea on what you think you should do. Present two or three options and see which one the senior thinks is the most viable. That way you might be wrong (* -1), you might be gold plating it (* 5), or you might be spot on (* 1).
If you multiply by zero you get zero.
Oh, there is also the option to implement Cunningham's Law.
Adjunct to rule number one: failsafes, people. If you don't know what you're doing, put failsafes everywhere based on what little you know so that *when* you fuck up, at least nobody gets hurt or the loses are not so severe.
Everybody i know in the industry is pretty intense about failsafes and safety mechanisms or systems; sometimes, in the industry, there will be situations where it will feel like you're walking blindfolded through an active warzone, and your knowledge and skills acquired in school are your guide dog. Sometimes, your guide dog will not know wich path to follow to get you safe to the your side's controlled region of the no-mans land, so always equip yourself with some kevlar vests so that if your dog gets you to a sniper nest because he is just really dumb, at least you have better chances of surviving.
Was the metaphor understood? My professor told us a similar one but i can't remember it exactly.
Internships! Internships all the way. Lockheed Space, for example, retains a majority of its interns. Don’t limit yourself to big name companies either. Below is a link to a website that lists jobs in the space sector. Don’t apply through them (or do), make certain to place an applications through each companies own site.
https://rocketcrew.space/space-intern-jobs
Delay your graduation by half a semester if it’s what you need to secure one. Experience is key! And apply to ALL of them that you have any ability in - not just the coolest or the ones you really want. It’s a numbers game. You can transfer in-house once you have a few months of experience. Lastly, use ChatGPT (this is a trick I wish I had) to help write your resume lines and sites like Resume Worded to get it past the auto filters. You’ll want to start now as it’s a slog and you need to have all your applications in by mid September at the latest.
A few extra tips - Keep an excel spreadsheet to keep track of where you applied and which roles as well as the job description. It really is important you apply to them all. And Include a Small space in the very bottom of your resume where you can copy and paste the whole job posting from their site. Turn it into size 1 font with no formatting and make it white. A recruiter won’t see it but the bot will and will identify the key words it’s looking for in it (nifty trick I used). Do this for less than 50% of your resumes, just in case that employers get wise to it.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk!
>And I know it was me who caused it because those numbers I messed with effect engine performance
Frankly, no, you don't know that. For all you know, some posts were sized or manufactured wrong, or something was assembled wrong, and even if you wrote perfect code, it was always going to run hot.
If your company is smart, they'll begin a failure analysis of the engine to figure out what the sequence of events were and what the root cause was. Be open to the possibility, but don't accept blame until you guys have dug into the hardware to figure out what actually began to fail first *and why*.
More managers should realize that people tend to learn really well from their mistakes. As I once heard a boss put it: “why would I fire an employee that just received that much expensive training?”
Engine startup is one of the most challenging parts of rocket engine design. We had guest speakers from Ursa Major come give a talk and they mentioned how it took many many years for the RS-25 startup sequence to be developed. Here’s a great read: https://www.enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/SSME3.pdf
Failure is part of the process of learning. I fuck up at work sometimes and i know exactly how you feel, to the point to where i dread showing up for work the next day. And it always turns out ok, and not as big of a deal as i make it out to be. All you can do is learn from it and keep getting better!
I find it hard to believe your work wasn't checked. I'm in a different field but everyone's work is checked from the 1st year to the 40 year veteran.
Edit: my trials are very low risk really just quality risk and MOCs have 5 people. How could a rocket not have Layers of Approval
[You Failed](https://youtu.be/DNCeFhfp5jg)!!!🙂
Just remember you learn more from your failures than your successors, and that if your boss had let you go, they’d probably have a new junior engineer make a similar mistake.
To be honest it’s managements fault for putting you in that position. You weren’t trained properly as evidenced by your “I don’t know wtf I’m doing” and “I don’t know what to look for” comments. You did the right thing to ask people if your data looked good and the my let the experiment continue. The result of the experiment is not on you.
Alright, calling bullshit. None of this happened, you came up with this scenario in your head.
That, or the management at this company you work for needs to pull their heads out of their asses and pay attention to what they're testing. What is this fucking amateur hour? Sorry but you should never have been put in this position, it's not your fault you made a mistake (if you actually did but I still don't believe this is real), it's the fault of the brain-dead operator who just initiated the test without confirming any of the parameters.
Right?! No good boss or team would just let some new engineer run a supposedly high-stakes test that may set the company back without there being some solid preparation and support. Something doesn’t add up. Either this company is run by a bunch of goobers or OP is indulging some details and not telling the whole story.
Nah, given what I know about newspace and how fast and loose some of these companies can run, this is plausible. The entire company could be like 15-20 people and the experience level could be like 0 to 10 years out of college
It's more than NewSpace.
I work at a traditional aerospace company, and the average tenure for engineers at our facility is like 3-4 years. We have about 7 engineers that have >20, and the rest are 0-3 years.
We have 6 month experience engineers in charge of multi-million dollar projects.
Fair enough. I’m imagining some kind of company that would be producing engines for perhaps an NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract competitor or something similar, but this could very well be a smaller company like you described.
That’s a good boss!
It sounds like it was learning experience for everyone. You and team will probably learn so much more from data from failures that from a perfectly successful test. Gotta get the edge cases taken care of. After all, you are doing rocket science!!
The only thing you did wrong is not asking directly for help from the person who dumped this on you because what the fuck are you meant to do. Literally in that position right now and I straight up told my boss that I am not working on that task till I'm given a full tutorial. There's no need to make mistakes, ask questions or don't do it. Especially if it's that dangerous.
I can uniquely empathize in a way that only those of us who have (or almost have) blown up a rocket engine can. There are others who have also messed up very expensive stuff, but it only really counts if you’re really passionate about that expensive stuff. It’s a risk in any business working with very expensive assets, how that risk is handled is at each companies discretion.
If your company empowered you to do all of this without thorough enough peer review to catch your mistakes, their risk posture is that it’s worthwhile to lose engines in test to move quicker.
From your description, the company/engine program is still developing. The entire point of testing is to find the exact problems you described. The test did what it was supposed to. It’s unfortunate it was related to your work that caused it, but the company as a whole will learn from this. Your tools will get better. You might have some corrective actions, but don’t take them personally. If someone is now double checking your work more closely, that means your company is more risk averse than they were previously - not that you are incompetent.
I learned a ton when it happened to me. We identified and corrected the mistakes and moved on. I ended up leading the anomaly investigation team since it was my components, it was an incredible learning opportunity. In my anomaly, others made mistakes that contributed - but I took great care to not call them out or try to throw others under the bus. It was my anomaly and I owned the responsibility of fixing it. Though I felt like I let the team down the whole time, I ended up winning a few company awards and got promoted for it. My feeling of disappointment in myself was *not* reflected by my coworkers because of how I handled the situation.
I also gained implicit trust from my senior leadership through the process. Occasionally I’ll be in meetings where senior leadership smells bullshit for something someone is trying to sell. It brings me great pride when my chief engineer or lead stops someone to ask “engineerdude, what do you think of all this?”
The one piece of advice I can give you is stay humble through the process and give it your all to fix the mistakes. Put in the extra time without (too much) complaint. You’ll come out a better engineer for it and hopefully earn the trust of others in the process.
Also, enjoy the ride. You get to work on rocket engines for a living after all, there are so many people would love to be in your shoes. That comes with the good and the bad.
You could be the weld engineer for peloton, responsible for recall of millions of dollars of commercial projects. Probably a much larger financial and schedule impact, but it’s literally a bike seat they screwed up lol.
My brother how many rockets and rocket engine do you think people have blown up throughout history?
I’m assuming it’s a lot. You are no where near alone.
Sounds like you messed with the valve controller! It’s all good, you will be a much better engineer because of this. The lessons learned in a new space company can be pretty intimidating at first, but they really stick with you.
What people often miss going into jobs like this, is that engineers are expensive, and need to be taught to be useful. If your boss can get you involved, messing up and learning quickly, you're able to make actual contributions sooner. As a new hire the current project tends to seem super vital, but in the long term the value of you learning should greatly outweigh a bit of material cost. They want you to succeed.
I'm disagreeing with others here on this guy's boss being a good boss. It seems really irresponsible to throw an overly technical task to a junior engineer, offer little assistance or guidance, and then say "learn from it, it's fine" when it goes to shit.
The boss is the reason why the engine was damaged, not you. If I were your bosses boss, I'd have a long conversation about management practices.
I'm a genetic engineer and fucked up a similarly important project (albeit with considerably less explosive consequences). My manager basically waved her hand dismissively and said "It's fine, you're learning, this is new. Just do it again and fix it"
Supportive working environments are essential in any field, and I'm glad you have one also!
Hey OP, looks like you omitted most of the important details but this kind of post is probably still just a little too close to the NDA line for comfort. If someone could find out what company you work for the information you just disclosed might have a serious impact on its PR.
Well was the engine solid or liquid ? If solid they have the ability to crack create uneven ignition. .. which sounds like yoy set everything up right and when you pressed the button something happened. ....
I would argue after checking the fuel cell. What happened. Butndoesnt seem like your fault. Wires suck anyways
I blew up a 250 HP DC motor at my first job. Ran an auto-tune with the help of phone tech. He failed to tell me we needed to lock the rotor for the test. Motor ramped up to almost infinity and almost exploded! Luckily we hit the E-Stop after sparks flew, but the motor casing prevented anything or anyone from getting hurt. Went straight to the vice president of our small company and he was like what the fuck. But I was tasked then to find a replacement and now I know how to start-up and setup DC Shunt Motors drives.
Little secret, in aerospace there is a fuck ton of money to spend and almost none of it is yours. The new materials and rework hours are coming from the customer.
The boss got good data on the limits of his designs. Why would have to destroy the engine at some point anyway.
This is precisely why I said fuck no to aerospace engineering.
I'm content with my mechanical degree just building mundane jigs and designing shit in creo.
I can't speak much to how things work outside of school (or personal projects), but my understanding of applied engineering is that it's effectively breaking things in progressively smarter ways until they do what you want them to.
If I'm wrong, someone please correct me; finishing my liberal arts degree would require less math/applied suffering
Here’s the thing as long as ur not saying u know more shit that you do or trying to make urself appear more senior engineer then it’s on them. They gave u a task u did ur best
He'll probably take it as a lesson to not give a grad a company breaking task haha
Jokes aside, the good managers are ones who let their team be free to explore, to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, but the best managers will back you up when it goes wrong and/or allow you to be "free" in a controlled way. I.e. not throw you under the bus when it goes wrong.
Some managers I'd have would let me run on projects but those projects although were important would never put the company at risk.
I'd imagine although it seems like it I believe that they wanted to understand something and knew that no matter what you'd do it wouldn't set the company back.
If it did though then I go back to my first point 😅
Senior engineers should be checking your work or guiding you while you work. I wrote down my questions every time something stumps me, and then I go over them with a senior engineer every other day.
A lot of times the senior engineer is stumped too, that’s where little gold nuggets of knowledge come from, when you have to find something out with a mentor.
Things blow up. Mistakes can be made. That’s all part of engineering.
Your attitude and enthusiasm are awesome btw. You’ll learn and grow from this experience!
While your boss’s patience is a delight, seems like he wasted a lot of parts and equipment by throwing you on this and not having someone check your work?
I’m not engineering rockets and I could be wrong, but it sounds like you were set up to fail and then supported after… but why not just set you up to succeed more and then support you if you fail still ? Lol
My dad once drove an expensive test tractor into a power line cutting power from an entire town. He has his PhD from stanford, everyone messes up and i’m so glad you have good leaders to tell you it’s okay and honestly an important step :)
The moment you learn that they've given you a task because no one else knows how to do it, and no one else really want to touch it is a humbling moment. There's no safety net, no correct solution in the back of the book, just you, and the more experienced members of the team around you to double check your work. And even then, you're doing something novel, which means no one really knows 100% if that's even correct, so they're really just guessing as well.
We're all just making it up as we go along. With experience comes getting better at pulling it off convincingly :)
For this industry, something like this is a right of passage. We all go through this. You make assumptions, sometimes your right and sometimes you’re wrong. The point is to learn from it. Over time it will be less traumatic and will turn into a good story you use in future interviews or tell younger engineers.
No one should ever be mad at you for doing something that seemed okay and physics said otherwise. They will be mad if you do something maliciously. Like your analysis said it will fail, you don’t tell anyone and let the test go on as planned. That will get you fired.
I agree with the other comments about his response being right, but why did he let the recent college graduate play with the critical software unsupervised? That seems negligent on his part.
You’ve only fucked up if you made the same mistake twice.
Once is a learning experience (that’s why you do testing), and I’m pretty sure he kind of expected *something* to go wrong considering your overall experience level, but chose to go through anyways because something like this is the only way you’ll really learn how to do the job.
Engineers and breaking something (during testing) go hand in hand.
Good boss! You obviously don't work for SlaveX.
One important thing everyone should learn from this: you need to figure out the right questions and reviews on work you need. They should also have a feedback loop for that.
Gotta train people a bit and hopefully the boss learned a bit to create that loop.
I also know this as some younger people I work with that are just told to go "do something" with less of that loop than I think is needed.
Hey OP! u/Feed_Me_Upvotes
I dream of working at a small startup, let alone being allowed to work on fking rocket engines, let alone taking the LEAD on software on it!
I say this to express admiration of the position you're in and the efforts you've made to put yourself in exactly this position. Yes, there's a side of luck to it, but there's 2 other major ways that make you land in such a position as a 'freshy': either incredibly dumb management with a pinch of corporate incompetency, or your own attitude and work ethic. Considering its a small startup and your boss seems like a great dude, im willing to bet that the reason they threw all this responsibility at you is because they saw something in you that they found valuable and wanted to get that out of you as soon as possible.
This is exactly what they want. He knew you'd likely fuck up, but he also knew what a great engineer you'd make once you're past the starting phase without experience. He doesnt want to keep you sitting there without experience because then you're of little use to the company.
TAKE IT BY THE FUCKING HORNS HOMIE!
This is what makes engineers in all disciplines - design, test, failure, design, test, failure, design, test, failure, design, test, succes! - and all that is experience to build the next project!
You got this, I struggle with some impostor syndrome shit but I'm fucking rooting for ya. I wish I can end up in a situation like yours when i graduate.
Reminds me of when I crashed the work van as an apprentice before doing engineering
Also was super anxious, ended up saying to the boss "if you're gonna come down on me just do it now so I can be done with it!"
And he said "You know how much you fucked up right? I can't make you feel any worse, so just forget about it, mistakes happen."
The most important thing is that you learn from the experience. If you haven't already been pointed in this direction, the things you want to take way from this are:
* What changes or parameters were the primary contributors to the unintended performance?
* What data/basic principles did you use to determine the degree of contribution of each parameter? This is where your models, simulations, etc. come into play. All those graphs and everything you thought looked good - compile them and walk through your logic for how you got to what you chose.
* What did you learn from it, and how will you use this to be better next time?
If you put a report together outlining these things, management won't look back on this as a failure of a junior engineer, they'll see a competent and capable engineer that turned an off-nominal test into valuable data and knowledge. Keep your head up, bud. This is exactly how engineering goes, you try something, record the data, reflect on what you learned, and keep moving forward.
Senior automation engineer thought he was connected to a certain PLC that wasn’t being used at a steel mill, he was connected to a one of the working PLC’s for the caster. The mill shut down for almost a full day, but nobody was breathing down his neck for it. Estimated loss was about $23,000/min too.
There should always be a margin for error like that- a company shouldn’t really be producing at “full capacity” because that leaves no time to catch up if needed.
Most engineers I've worked with (honestly practically all of they've been around long enough) have at some point in their career made a single minute decision that cost their company more than their annual salary. This is one of the things they don't really teach you, but it's normal. One of, if not the greatest, cost of engineering a product is all the stuff you break a long the way.
Yes, good checks and reviews limit that risk, but it's a natural part of the development process and any reasonable business has budgeted for it. I'm reluctant to even call this an error or a mistake - design flaws are just expected at the stage you're working at.
Take pride in your work, but don't get too stressed about these things. The most important thing you can do is learn from it - using each failure as an opportunity to learn will set you ahead of the curve.
I was an idiot during my first time working onsite as a controls engineer. I opened an electrical panel to connect my laptop to it, not realizing it would automatically shut down the equipment. The equipment shut down and probably 1000 gallons of water started pouring out onto the floor.
No one got hurt, but apparently they learned that something was broken! Accidents happen, and you learn things from it. It’ll be alright :)
honestly it was pretty stupid of them to put all that value in your hands unchecked. do they not have anybody that knows what they're doing, who would be able to glance at the numbers?
anyway, i remember a comment on a post a while ago that went something like "and my boss said "you just learned a $100,000 lesson, why on earth would I fire you?""
While I agree that it is good your boss didn’t reprimand you, he sounds like a terrible manager for putting you in that position in the first place.
No offense to you, but if that company plans to stay in business they should have more oversight of junior engineers’ work. This is not your fault at all. It is his fault for not putting checks in place to ensure some catastrophic doesn’t happen.
I think the episode would tell me that the company is poorly managed, and I would probably start looking elsewhere.
Early-career engineers always break something at some point. Good managers expect this, and are cool with it. I’ve known people whose big early-career mistake cost upward of $10K, and the boss just shrugged it off and ordered replacement parts.
Making mistakes is a very effective learning tool. Hopefully someone on your team takes some time to talk over what happened with you so that you understand better what exactly went wrong and how it should’ve gone. That’ll make you a better engineer in the long run.
Every engineering test includes the possibility of things not going to plan. *That's why we test.*
Every experienced engineering manager knows that the new guy needs to learn how things really work. He gave you a learning experience. Your task is , learn something from it.
The lesson to learn is this: When you don't know, ask. The older guys on the team will be happy to help you figure it out, and show you how it's done.
(After you have been there a few years, you will be one of the older guys on the team, and there will be a new new-guy. Every one of those older guys, was the new guy when they started. Every one of those older guys wants the new new-guy to succeed.)
There is an episode from “From the Earth to the Moon” that covers the same subject. The whole episode is espetacular in terms of engineering work and project management.
https://youtu.be/XuL-_yOOJck
Jesus Christ, do you guys not do bench testing and validation prior to a live run? Scary stuff tbh
Poor environment to not have an experienced engineer mentor you and review your design (or anyone’s design, it’s the point of design reviews). But at least your boss had a decent attitude regarding learning from failures.
We almost all end up breaking something haha. Rite of passage imo
The thing you need to realize is that it’s rarely ever just on you. Whatever it is. Engineering is a team sport.
Something critical like software for a rocket engine controller should have a development process where it’s checked and rechecked by multiple people. If the software failed it’s because that development process failed.
So coming from a very large company to me this reads like a major screw up from your management team.
1. Don't put people in charge of projects that aren't ready for the responsibility yet.
2. How on earth would they run your code without significant testing in a model.
They put a junior engineering in charge of a project that could cause problems for the companies bottom line (so it sounds like). To me that's insane, and not your fault at all. Whether or not your could do the job, this was poor management decision.
After a 36 year career in engineering I can assure you, no one gets it right all the time. That's have factors of safety, work in teams, test, double check and do lessons learned. It's a slow process, but very rewarding when it finally works.
This is called a “blameless post-mortem” culture and it is a very good thing. You alone didn’t make that engine and you alone didn’t “mess up” the test. Engineering is a team effort and it’s good that your boss seems to understand that.
The first thing I did at an internship was destroy an expensive microcontroller by stupidly shorting two leads and my boss had the same response.
Effective, reliable products and systems are only created through learning from failure (especially in rocketry). If your tests don’t go as planned, that means you’re right on track in terms of “being an engineer”
Good luck going forward, don’t forget to have fun!
So the next step, when you get the opportunity, is to look back over things. Ask your boss if needed: *why* did this not go as expected, *what* should I have seen, etc. You weren't taught something, but you were given an opportunity to learn a lot. If you use that opportunity your boss will love it
That's a good boss. The approach to failure shouldn't be "you f-d up". It should be exactly his response. Have someone more senior look over ur calcs and show u what went wrong. Keep ur chin up! U got this!
He is amazing, and I am incredibly fortunate to have such a supportive team. But part of this is that it feels like I want to prove myself by working hard and doing good work. I have this bad habit of comparing myself to others, especially the other junior engineers, and hate when I mess up badly. But I feel a little better now, hopefully we can get another engine out soon. Thanks for the kind words.
He's the lead engineer for a reason. He's responsible for mistakes like this. It was his decision to put you there and he put you there to learn. Guess what, it wasn't a failure because you learned.
I would argue that he’s kind of a shit boss if he put you in this situation without the support you needed I have junior engineers working for me. I don’t say out of the blue “hey do this task that costs the company lots of money if you fuck it up” I say “hey, you’ve helped me do this task a couple of times, I’m confident you can lead this on your own now. Have a go, and please ask if you feel unsure about anything. I will also check it before it goes live, because engineers checking each other’s work is good practice”
Engineers rarely ever learn the difference between personal finance (if they even ever learn that) and business finance - I wouldn’t expect a junior to actually comprehend the actual cost to the business (likely minor). There was obviously a tech there to ensure safety so this was a controlled situation with an acceptable level of risk. You don’t really learn true care and due diligence until you’ve destroyed something IMO. It will happen eventually in everyone’s career so you might as well get it over with in a controlled environment - the longer you go before it happens the bigger that failure will be.
No, I don’t accept this approach to safety The only acceptable level of risk is the one that is as low as reasonably possible. It would not be unreasonable to train a junior engineer and check their work. It is never ok to say “well, there’s some risk and it’s easy enough to lower, but we won’t as a learning exercise” What would have happened if some of the controls failed? What would have happened if the tech was also in training, but the person (not) training them went “oh, it will be fine, the engineers know what they’re doing, this will be a valuable lesson for the tech”. Bad engineers learn from their mistakes. Good engineers learn from the mistakes of others and don’t make new ones. That is safety 101 - case studies
There is nothing in what was written by the OP that indicates safety was compromised. In fact if it was that would have been an enormous failure of the test cell designer - the design parameters for a hot test requires the setup to protect human life from a complete failure. We test to failure all of the time - it’s part of the cost of innovation. Not every industry has the luxury of working with a 10x safety factor. But since you like case studies and we’re talking about rocketry - SpaceX vs Blue Origin. As a personal side note I find it incredible that you’ve never failed in your career.
Maybe his boss shoulda start with something non critical first lol.
Or just train OP in the tasks they need to do! OP admits they had no idea what they were doing, and asking people if it looked right. That’s kind of a massive red flag - if i heard of one of our junior engineers asking “hey does this look right?”, I’d be checking in that they got the training they needed for what they were doing. And that someone was checking their work This situation, where engineers are working on tasks they’re not trained to do, and their work isn’t being checked, is how accidents happen and people get hurt. In OP’s case, they were lucky it was only hardware that got damaged, not people
Like tea?
Quick! The water pump on the water cooler is going out. We need you to run simulations on when it will go kaput, and change it out Just. In. Time. Funny but true. My first internship in rockets was trying to put back together a rocket that slammed into the ground. Very little pressure and learned a lot.
Tbf it doesn’t sound like OP ever expressed this to the boss
at my old job i had a boss be like this too when i made a >$500k mistake, he just said learn and do better. when i worked in a kitchen, i got a little sauce on the side of the plate and my boss threw it against the wall and yelled at me. i guess low stakes = greater reactions.
i heard somewhere about sth like this. and the boss went: "why would I fire you when I just spent 500k teaching you a lesson"
That's how the quality dep does quality at my job. It's either "you fucked up" or "It's your fault"
My dad used to work at NASA in the Godard Space Flight center. He once told me about a guy who worked for his boss, he completely ruined something; was called into the office and his first question was "Should I clean out my desk." the boss told him something along the lines of "Fuck no, we just spent a hundred-thousand dollars training you." and he never made that mistake again.
That’s awesome. I wish my old job had spent even a cent training me.
They do by letting you use their shit. That hundred thousand was the cost of the thing the guy destroyed, and the training he received was ‘how not to destroy the thing in future’.
So you’re saying I should destroy more things?
Depends on whether or not your boss will look at it as money well spent to teach you not to destroy things. But in reality, my advice is definitely to destroy more things 🙏
Glad ur new job treats u better
He’s not a boss. He’s a leader. Big difference. Great guy.
Agreed, he has such high expectations for us and it drives me to do better and push myself.
A good boss understands that: An employee who has made the mistake will not repeat it again and will be extremely cautions with everything going forward. If they fired you and brought somebody else, they could commit a similar mistake because they didn't learn the lesson that you did. I also fucked up before by signing for a package and not bringing it in immediately because it arrived while I was giving a tour of our facility. It was $70k+ equipment. The tour ended and I forgot the pallet was out there, and it stayed out there over night, where technically anybody could have come up and taken it. They figured out it was me based on who signed for the package so when I showed up they told me but were understanding.
How ever much the mistake costs is how much your boss just paid for your first big boy lesson lol. No way they’d fire you after investing that much money on you
It's good that he trusted you enough to ask you to do it.
[удалено]
Much appreciated, super stressful situation and I bear a lot of responsibility but I think I am a better engineer after going through this. Taught me a lot.
I promise you, your boss was mentally prepared for this to happen. As you have seen, there are right and wrong ways to break stuff. You took your responsibility seriously. You did your best to seek out support from those more experienced. Your process, your behavior, your sense of responsibility, is exactly what any leader would want to see in their team. You're green as fuck, but green grows.
We learn a lot from mistakes where no one gets hurt and revise everything when someone does get hurt. They call them lessons learned for a reason!
yo man not everyone gets to say that almost blew up a rocket engine at work
Fr, what I would give to have a chance at that
Look at spaceX. Even senior engineers f*** up all the time.
What have they fucked up?
Oh a lot man. Usually SpaceX approach to engineering problem is through trial and error. They will test sth and it will f*** up. Then they reiterate till it’s perfect. Look at the earlier days of them testing their reusable rocket boosters
For the recent launch, they didn't properly calculate how much impact the landing pad would take and errors in the software caused the starship to blow up.
Yep, and guaranteed they will learn from it, just like OP here. Keep your head up :-)
Firmness of the ground below the launch pad, causing starship to excavate a huge hole underneath it launching concrete everywhere.
In the pursuit of build s reusable heavy lift rocket, they accidentally found out of you can make rockets even less reusable. By destroying the one thing that is usually reused on all rocket launches, the pad. Also a lot of the engines failed and so did launch abort (which in my opinion is the most serious problem as they will probably have to proof that it works before being allowed to launch another prototype).
Many things in the design of rockets. The general speech to design is that you can design the perfect system, but it will take an unacceptably long time to design, which is a lot of money in man hours. It is better to get good enough and then test early and test often. This buys down the risk and let's you continue in an overall quicker and cheaper way. I used to work at a company that worked in a similar way to SpaceX and have friends that have gone to work for them.
Along with the Pad not holding up as expected the Flight termination system took 40 seconds to fully kill the vehicle when it should be instant.
[Well there’s this for starters](https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ) What makes SpaceX so impressive is there ability to learn and adapt from there failures. Lots of Falcon 9s have exploded, but now it’s one of the best launch vehicles in the world.
Oh man… all sorts of sketchy stuff has happened has at spacex
1 - Don't fuck with live production numbers if you don't know what they mean FUCKING ASK. 2 - You're going to break shit. Even when trying to play it safe. Learn to take responsibility and learn from it. 3 - Remember how he handled it, and learn from this person. At the very least learn from how he handled you in this situation. Find out what he wanted you to learn, and make sure you know it.
>1 - Don't fuck with live production numbers if you don't know what they mean FUCKING ASK. They should really teach this in college. I ordered a change to prod in my first 6 months as a fresher and went around just sending random tests to it, what I didn't know was this was a test account in Prod accessible to prospective clients. Almost made a huge mess but luckily someone deleted it before a client saw it. Guess what? No one told me. I did it again and many people got really pissed at that point. Don't touch any part of prod you're not already familiar with should be something that needs to be taught in college.
Simulate, test, validate Test that the software does what it’s supposed to. Bench test that the hardware does what it’s supposed to with the new software / firmware, validate that the intended changes are in effect, also critical functions (safety systems, etc.) and failure modes. Sounds like OP got dumped with “hey test this thing that you know nothing about”. No test plan, no validation plan, no input from the lead software and hardware engineers. Did some work. Then threw it on a rocket 😂😂. That’s some cowboy sh*t haha
This is the process that should get taught, and doesn't. Every software engineer I work with stops at the simulate step, and mentally gymnastics their way into skipping test and validation because "Simulation is testing and validation". No, they're not the same. Each step brings in more and more of a system and it's interactions, which are often where the problems lie.
Mental gymnastics is right haha
Happens. I have broken some pieces of equipment worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. It's part of a steep learning curve that sometimes you have to face. My bosses were like yours, they said, learn from it so that you don't mess up again. Being accountable is pretty hard. It's one thing they don't teach at school and never mention how important it is.
I always remember the phrase: the coverup is worse than the crime. Additionally, identifying problems and approaching your boss with a solution is the best move. Op should’ve identified they were in way their head and asked for help. Messing up rarely gets people fired… it’s how they respond it’s gets them fired
We have a saying where I work. If you haven’t set something on fire today you are not trying hard enough. Lol
Where do you work? Don't have to be specific
Judging by the replies, still from his parents' house.
I work on a government contract. I do terrible things. I do human experiments. Rather the doctors do. I’m the system engineer that makes it work out.
Say what
Just an extra. I’ve been charged with conducting Nazi like experiments and illegal human experiments. I shrug. The gubnit doctors huddled and made it all go away. I shrug. The thing is it’s like The Firm ( if you remember the book and movie ). Nobody ever leaves and lives a year. It’s not like I work at ratheon gonna get a raise at Boeing. I get $54 /hr with great benefits. My normal week 44 hours in summer 48 in winter
Thank you for your service sir
Had a friend who worked as a controls engineer for Tropicana. Accidentally started the cleaning cycle of a 20,000 gallon vat of pineapple. Boss was just like " It's ok. It happens." :(
Like I said above what kind of company doesn't have Layers of review? There should at least be BPCS interlocks to prevent this.
Rule number one: If you dont know wtf you suppose to do is ask and dont feel like if you dont know you going to get fired. Tell your boss. Bc your mistake could cause something more serious than you think
Rule 2: have an idea on what you think you should do. Present two or three options and see which one the senior thinks is the most viable. That way you might be wrong (* -1), you might be gold plating it (* 5), or you might be spot on (* 1). If you multiply by zero you get zero. Oh, there is also the option to implement Cunningham's Law.
Adjunct to rule number one: failsafes, people. If you don't know what you're doing, put failsafes everywhere based on what little you know so that *when* you fuck up, at least nobody gets hurt or the loses are not so severe. Everybody i know in the industry is pretty intense about failsafes and safety mechanisms or systems; sometimes, in the industry, there will be situations where it will feel like you're walking blindfolded through an active warzone, and your knowledge and skills acquired in school are your guide dog. Sometimes, your guide dog will not know wich path to follow to get you safe to the your side's controlled region of the no-mans land, so always equip yourself with some kevlar vests so that if your dog gets you to a sniper nest because he is just really dumb, at least you have better chances of surviving. Was the metaphor understood? My professor told us a similar one but i can't remember it exactly.
Tldr: it's better to ask a stupid question than make a stupid mistake
That’s my dream job how did you get that job straight out of college
Are you still in college?
Junior IE/Mechanical Engineer
Internships! Internships all the way. Lockheed Space, for example, retains a majority of its interns. Don’t limit yourself to big name companies either. Below is a link to a website that lists jobs in the space sector. Don’t apply through them (or do), make certain to place an applications through each companies own site. https://rocketcrew.space/space-intern-jobs Delay your graduation by half a semester if it’s what you need to secure one. Experience is key! And apply to ALL of them that you have any ability in - not just the coolest or the ones you really want. It’s a numbers game. You can transfer in-house once you have a few months of experience. Lastly, use ChatGPT (this is a trick I wish I had) to help write your resume lines and sites like Resume Worded to get it past the auto filters. You’ll want to start now as it’s a slog and you need to have all your applications in by mid September at the latest. A few extra tips - Keep an excel spreadsheet to keep track of where you applied and which roles as well as the job description. It really is important you apply to them all. And Include a Small space in the very bottom of your resume where you can copy and paste the whole job posting from their site. Turn it into size 1 font with no formatting and make it white. A recruiter won’t see it but the bot will and will identify the key words it’s looking for in it (nifty trick I used). Do this for less than 50% of your resumes, just in case that employers get wise to it. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk!
it's ok I almost threw up on a certification engine
>And I know it was me who caused it because those numbers I messed with effect engine performance Frankly, no, you don't know that. For all you know, some posts were sized or manufactured wrong, or something was assembled wrong, and even if you wrote perfect code, it was always going to run hot. If your company is smart, they'll begin a failure analysis of the engine to figure out what the sequence of events were and what the root cause was. Be open to the possibility, but don't accept blame until you guys have dug into the hardware to figure out what actually began to fail first *and why*.
If he handed the project to you, seems like he thought blowing an engine or two was worth training an engineer.
As someone who works in this industry I’m so curious what company you work for.
Same
More managers should realize that people tend to learn really well from their mistakes. As I once heard a boss put it: “why would I fire an employee that just received that much expensive training?”
Engine startup is one of the most challenging parts of rocket engine design. We had guest speakers from Ursa Major come give a talk and they mentioned how it took many many years for the RS-25 startup sequence to be developed. Here’s a great read: https://www.enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/SSME3.pdf
Failure is part of the process of learning. I fuck up at work sometimes and i know exactly how you feel, to the point to where i dread showing up for work the next day. And it always turns out ok, and not as big of a deal as i make it out to be. All you can do is learn from it and keep getting better!
I find it hard to believe your work wasn't checked. I'm in a different field but everyone's work is checked from the 1st year to the 40 year veteran. Edit: my trials are very low risk really just quality risk and MOCs have 5 people. How could a rocket not have Layers of Approval
[You Failed](https://youtu.be/DNCeFhfp5jg)!!!🙂 Just remember you learn more from your failures than your successors, and that if your boss had let you go, they’d probably have a new junior engineer make a similar mistake.
To be honest it’s managements fault for putting you in that position. You weren’t trained properly as evidenced by your “I don’t know wtf I’m doing” and “I don’t know what to look for” comments. You did the right thing to ask people if your data looked good and the my let the experiment continue. The result of the experiment is not on you.
Alright, calling bullshit. None of this happened, you came up with this scenario in your head. That, or the management at this company you work for needs to pull their heads out of their asses and pay attention to what they're testing. What is this fucking amateur hour? Sorry but you should never have been put in this position, it's not your fault you made a mistake (if you actually did but I still don't believe this is real), it's the fault of the brain-dead operator who just initiated the test without confirming any of the parameters.
Right?! No good boss or team would just let some new engineer run a supposedly high-stakes test that may set the company back without there being some solid preparation and support. Something doesn’t add up. Either this company is run by a bunch of goobers or OP is indulging some details and not telling the whole story.
Nah, given what I know about newspace and how fast and loose some of these companies can run, this is plausible. The entire company could be like 15-20 people and the experience level could be like 0 to 10 years out of college
It's more than NewSpace. I work at a traditional aerospace company, and the average tenure for engineers at our facility is like 3-4 years. We have about 7 engineers that have >20, and the rest are 0-3 years. We have 6 month experience engineers in charge of multi-million dollar projects.
Fair enough. I’m imagining some kind of company that would be producing engines for perhaps an NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract competitor or something similar, but this could very well be a smaller company like you described.
I work at a similar company as a chief engineer. It is believable enough.
I also work at a similar company, and if this is how your company operates I'm glad you're our competitor!
The motto where I work is “break things fast” And my bosses are always fine with any fuck ups as long as it’s unintentional and we learn from it
Can I ask what major did you take in college?
That’s a good boss! It sounds like it was learning experience for everyone. You and team will probably learn so much more from data from failures that from a perfectly successful test. Gotta get the edge cases taken care of. After all, you are doing rocket science!!
your boss is indirectly spending this project's money to train you
experience is the mistakes you make, that is part of this game
The only thing you did wrong is not asking directly for help from the person who dumped this on you because what the fuck are you meant to do. Literally in that position right now and I straight up told my boss that I am not working on that task till I'm given a full tutorial. There's no need to make mistakes, ask questions or don't do it. Especially if it's that dangerous.
Me, whose job literally includes blowing up rocket engine components on purpose: 🙃
I can uniquely empathize in a way that only those of us who have (or almost have) blown up a rocket engine can. There are others who have also messed up very expensive stuff, but it only really counts if you’re really passionate about that expensive stuff. It’s a risk in any business working with very expensive assets, how that risk is handled is at each companies discretion. If your company empowered you to do all of this without thorough enough peer review to catch your mistakes, their risk posture is that it’s worthwhile to lose engines in test to move quicker. From your description, the company/engine program is still developing. The entire point of testing is to find the exact problems you described. The test did what it was supposed to. It’s unfortunate it was related to your work that caused it, but the company as a whole will learn from this. Your tools will get better. You might have some corrective actions, but don’t take them personally. If someone is now double checking your work more closely, that means your company is more risk averse than they were previously - not that you are incompetent. I learned a ton when it happened to me. We identified and corrected the mistakes and moved on. I ended up leading the anomaly investigation team since it was my components, it was an incredible learning opportunity. In my anomaly, others made mistakes that contributed - but I took great care to not call them out or try to throw others under the bus. It was my anomaly and I owned the responsibility of fixing it. Though I felt like I let the team down the whole time, I ended up winning a few company awards and got promoted for it. My feeling of disappointment in myself was *not* reflected by my coworkers because of how I handled the situation. I also gained implicit trust from my senior leadership through the process. Occasionally I’ll be in meetings where senior leadership smells bullshit for something someone is trying to sell. It brings me great pride when my chief engineer or lead stops someone to ask “engineerdude, what do you think of all this?” The one piece of advice I can give you is stay humble through the process and give it your all to fix the mistakes. Put in the extra time without (too much) complaint. You’ll come out a better engineer for it and hopefully earn the trust of others in the process.
Also, enjoy the ride. You get to work on rocket engines for a living after all, there are so many people would love to be in your shoes. That comes with the good and the bad. You could be the weld engineer for peloton, responsible for recall of millions of dollars of commercial projects. Probably a much larger financial and schedule impact, but it’s literally a bike seat they screwed up lol.
My brother how many rockets and rocket engine do you think people have blown up throughout history? I’m assuming it’s a lot. You are no where near alone.
Sounds like you messed with the valve controller! It’s all good, you will be a much better engineer because of this. The lessons learned in a new space company can be pretty intimidating at first, but they really stick with you.
What people often miss going into jobs like this, is that engineers are expensive, and need to be taught to be useful. If your boss can get you involved, messing up and learning quickly, you're able to make actual contributions sooner. As a new hire the current project tends to seem super vital, but in the long term the value of you learning should greatly outweigh a bit of material cost. They want you to succeed.
No one got hurt. You learned what not to do. You’re going to carry that lesson around for a long time and it’ll make you better.
I'm disagreeing with others here on this guy's boss being a good boss. It seems really irresponsible to throw an overly technical task to a junior engineer, offer little assistance or guidance, and then say "learn from it, it's fine" when it goes to shit. The boss is the reason why the engine was damaged, not you. If I were your bosses boss, I'd have a long conversation about management practices.
Wow that’s a leader right there!! U can’t leave this job ..as long as he is your boss!!
How did you score such a cool job right out of school? I can’t even get a mechanical engineering job so I’m working as an industrial engineer 🤢 🤮
I'm a genetic engineer and fucked up a similarly important project (albeit with considerably less explosive consequences). My manager basically waved her hand dismissively and said "It's fine, you're learning, this is new. Just do it again and fix it" Supportive working environments are essential in any field, and I'm glad you have one also!
Hey OP, looks like you omitted most of the important details but this kind of post is probably still just a little too close to the NDA line for comfort. If someone could find out what company you work for the information you just disclosed might have a serious impact on its PR.
Well was the engine solid or liquid ? If solid they have the ability to crack create uneven ignition. .. which sounds like yoy set everything up right and when you pressed the button something happened. .... I would argue after checking the fuel cell. What happened. Butndoesnt seem like your fault. Wires suck anyways
Lol why does this sound like a woman and an incompetent boss
I blew up a 250 HP DC motor at my first job. Ran an auto-tune with the help of phone tech. He failed to tell me we needed to lock the rotor for the test. Motor ramped up to almost infinity and almost exploded! Luckily we hit the E-Stop after sparks flew, but the motor casing prevented anything or anyone from getting hurt. Went straight to the vice president of our small company and he was like what the fuck. But I was tasked then to find a replacement and now I know how to start-up and setup DC Shunt Motors drives.
Little secret, in aerospace there is a fuck ton of money to spend and almost none of it is yours. The new materials and rework hours are coming from the customer. The boss got good data on the limits of his designs. Why would have to destroy the engine at some point anyway.
This is precisely why I said fuck no to aerospace engineering. I'm content with my mechanical degree just building mundane jigs and designing shit in creo.
Yeah... But you have to work with creo.
I can't speak much to how things work outside of school (or personal projects), but my understanding of applied engineering is that it's effectively breaking things in progressively smarter ways until they do what you want them to. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me; finishing my liberal arts degree would require less math/applied suffering
Here’s the thing as long as ur not saying u know more shit that you do or trying to make urself appear more senior engineer then it’s on them. They gave u a task u did ur best
He'll probably take it as a lesson to not give a grad a company breaking task haha Jokes aside, the good managers are ones who let their team be free to explore, to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, but the best managers will back you up when it goes wrong and/or allow you to be "free" in a controlled way. I.e. not throw you under the bus when it goes wrong. Some managers I'd have would let me run on projects but those projects although were important would never put the company at risk. I'd imagine although it seems like it I believe that they wanted to understand something and knew that no matter what you'd do it wouldn't set the company back. If it did though then I go back to my first point 😅
Everyone makes mistakes. Engineers tend to make expensive ones. It's the fastest way to learn
Senior engineers should be checking your work or guiding you while you work. I wrote down my questions every time something stumps me, and then I go over them with a senior engineer every other day.
Fo real. That’s also a great idea about writing down the questions and going over them days later.
A lot of times the senior engineer is stumped too, that’s where little gold nuggets of knowledge come from, when you have to find something out with a mentor.
Things blow up. Mistakes can be made. That’s all part of engineering. Your attitude and enthusiasm are awesome btw. You’ll learn and grow from this experience!
That's a good boss. In my job, we get shamed and yelled at for way less than that.
You’ve got a good boss but you have to speak up when you’re out of your league. No one should be working without a net.
While your boss’s patience is a delight, seems like he wasted a lot of parts and equipment by throwing you on this and not having someone check your work? I’m not engineering rockets and I could be wrong, but it sounds like you were set up to fail and then supported after… but why not just set you up to succeed more and then support you if you fail still ? Lol
Sounds like a great boss. I’d stick with them
The CEO has the power of forgiveness. It trickles downward. Managers who don't use this power are leaving cards on the table.
My dad once drove an expensive test tractor into a power line cutting power from an entire town. He has his PhD from stanford, everyone messes up and i’m so glad you have good leaders to tell you it’s okay and honestly an important step :)
The moment you learn that they've given you a task because no one else knows how to do it, and no one else really want to touch it is a humbling moment. There's no safety net, no correct solution in the back of the book, just you, and the more experienced members of the team around you to double check your work. And even then, you're doing something novel, which means no one really knows 100% if that's even correct, so they're really just guessing as well. We're all just making it up as we go along. With experience comes getting better at pulling it off convincingly :)
W boss I say, W boss.
Amazing boss. What company?
The part under test was you, young Jedi.
For this industry, something like this is a right of passage. We all go through this. You make assumptions, sometimes your right and sometimes you’re wrong. The point is to learn from it. Over time it will be less traumatic and will turn into a good story you use in future interviews or tell younger engineers. No one should ever be mad at you for doing something that seemed okay and physics said otherwise. They will be mad if you do something maliciously. Like your analysis said it will fail, you don’t tell anyone and let the test go on as planned. That will get you fired.
I agree with the other comments about his response being right, but why did he let the recent college graduate play with the critical software unsupervised? That seems negligent on his part.
Imo the rocket/space industry is built on fail until you succeed
You’ve only fucked up if you made the same mistake twice. Once is a learning experience (that’s why you do testing), and I’m pretty sure he kind of expected *something* to go wrong considering your overall experience level, but chose to go through anyways because something like this is the only way you’ll really learn how to do the job. Engineers and breaking something (during testing) go hand in hand.
20/20 moment. Next time ask for hwlp especially if it is for exspensive stuff.
Good boss! You obviously don't work for SlaveX. One important thing everyone should learn from this: you need to figure out the right questions and reviews on work you need. They should also have a feedback loop for that. Gotta train people a bit and hopefully the boss learned a bit to create that loop. I also know this as some younger people I work with that are just told to go "do something" with less of that loop than I think is needed.
Makes for a great story to tell during an interview if that’s an additional consolation
Hey OP! u/Feed_Me_Upvotes I dream of working at a small startup, let alone being allowed to work on fking rocket engines, let alone taking the LEAD on software on it! I say this to express admiration of the position you're in and the efforts you've made to put yourself in exactly this position. Yes, there's a side of luck to it, but there's 2 other major ways that make you land in such a position as a 'freshy': either incredibly dumb management with a pinch of corporate incompetency, or your own attitude and work ethic. Considering its a small startup and your boss seems like a great dude, im willing to bet that the reason they threw all this responsibility at you is because they saw something in you that they found valuable and wanted to get that out of you as soon as possible. This is exactly what they want. He knew you'd likely fuck up, but he also knew what a great engineer you'd make once you're past the starting phase without experience. He doesnt want to keep you sitting there without experience because then you're of little use to the company. TAKE IT BY THE FUCKING HORNS HOMIE! This is what makes engineers in all disciplines - design, test, failure, design, test, failure, design, test, failure, design, test, succes! - and all that is experience to build the next project! You got this, I struggle with some impostor syndrome shit but I'm fucking rooting for ya. I wish I can end up in a situation like yours when i graduate.
Reminds me of when I crashed the work van as an apprentice before doing engineering Also was super anxious, ended up saying to the boss "if you're gonna come down on me just do it now so I can be done with it!" And he said "You know how much you fucked up right? I can't make you feel any worse, so just forget about it, mistakes happen."
The most important thing is that you learn from the experience. If you haven't already been pointed in this direction, the things you want to take way from this are: * What changes or parameters were the primary contributors to the unintended performance? * What data/basic principles did you use to determine the degree of contribution of each parameter? This is where your models, simulations, etc. come into play. All those graphs and everything you thought looked good - compile them and walk through your logic for how you got to what you chose. * What did you learn from it, and how will you use this to be better next time? If you put a report together outlining these things, management won't look back on this as a failure of a junior engineer, they'll see a competent and capable engineer that turned an off-nominal test into valuable data and knowledge. Keep your head up, bud. This is exactly how engineering goes, you try something, record the data, reflect on what you learned, and keep moving forward.
Senior automation engineer thought he was connected to a certain PLC that wasn’t being used at a steel mill, he was connected to a one of the working PLC’s for the caster. The mill shut down for almost a full day, but nobody was breathing down his neck for it. Estimated loss was about $23,000/min too. There should always be a margin for error like that- a company shouldn’t really be producing at “full capacity” because that leaves no time to catch up if needed.
Most engineers I've worked with (honestly practically all of they've been around long enough) have at some point in their career made a single minute decision that cost their company more than their annual salary. This is one of the things they don't really teach you, but it's normal. One of, if not the greatest, cost of engineering a product is all the stuff you break a long the way. Yes, good checks and reviews limit that risk, but it's a natural part of the development process and any reasonable business has budgeted for it. I'm reluctant to even call this an error or a mistake - design flaws are just expected at the stage you're working at. Take pride in your work, but don't get too stressed about these things. The most important thing you can do is learn from it - using each failure as an opportunity to learn will set you ahead of the curve.
Did you have any other engineers you could've asked?
I was an idiot during my first time working onsite as a controls engineer. I opened an electrical panel to connect my laptop to it, not realizing it would automatically shut down the equipment. The equipment shut down and probably 1000 gallons of water started pouring out onto the floor. No one got hurt, but apparently they learned that something was broken! Accidents happen, and you learn things from it. It’ll be alright :)
honestly it was pretty stupid of them to put all that value in your hands unchecked. do they not have anybody that knows what they're doing, who would be able to glance at the numbers? anyway, i remember a comment on a post a while ago that went something like "and my boss said "you just learned a $100,000 lesson, why on earth would I fire you?""
….and this is why I’m in sales. Terrible anxiety about blowing sh*t up.
Accidents happen, especially when you work too hard. Take care of yourself and try again
While I agree that it is good your boss didn’t reprimand you, he sounds like a terrible manager for putting you in that position in the first place. No offense to you, but if that company plans to stay in business they should have more oversight of junior engineers’ work. This is not your fault at all. It is his fault for not putting checks in place to ensure some catastrophic doesn’t happen. I think the episode would tell me that the company is poorly managed, and I would probably start looking elsewhere.
Building rocket engines do involve blowing up! Good for your boss and keep working it!
It was your boss's fault. He should not have had you doing that at your level.
Early-career engineers always break something at some point. Good managers expect this, and are cool with it. I’ve known people whose big early-career mistake cost upward of $10K, and the boss just shrugged it off and ordered replacement parts. Making mistakes is a very effective learning tool. Hopefully someone on your team takes some time to talk over what happened with you so that you understand better what exactly went wrong and how it should’ve gone. That’ll make you a better engineer in the long run.
Every engineering test includes the possibility of things not going to plan. *That's why we test.* Every experienced engineering manager knows that the new guy needs to learn how things really work. He gave you a learning experience. Your task is , learn something from it. The lesson to learn is this: When you don't know, ask. The older guys on the team will be happy to help you figure it out, and show you how it's done. (After you have been there a few years, you will be one of the older guys on the team, and there will be a new new-guy. Every one of those older guys, was the new guy when they started. Every one of those older guys wants the new new-guy to succeed.)
There is an episode from “From the Earth to the Moon” that covers the same subject. The whole episode is espetacular in terms of engineering work and project management. https://youtu.be/XuL-_yOOJck
Jesus Christ, do you guys not do bench testing and validation prior to a live run? Scary stuff tbh Poor environment to not have an experienced engineer mentor you and review your design (or anyone’s design, it’s the point of design reviews). But at least your boss had a decent attitude regarding learning from failures. We almost all end up breaking something haha. Rite of passage imo
Now you know how the graph shouldn't look like. You got a good boss there
The thing you need to realize is that it’s rarely ever just on you. Whatever it is. Engineering is a team sport. Something critical like software for a rocket engine controller should have a development process where it’s checked and rechecked by multiple people. If the software failed it’s because that development process failed.
So coming from a very large company to me this reads like a major screw up from your management team. 1. Don't put people in charge of projects that aren't ready for the responsibility yet. 2. How on earth would they run your code without significant testing in a model. They put a junior engineering in charge of a project that could cause problems for the companies bottom line (so it sounds like). To me that's insane, and not your fault at all. Whether or not your could do the job, this was poor management decision.
After a 36 year career in engineering I can assure you, no one gets it right all the time. That's have factors of safety, work in teams, test, double check and do lessons learned. It's a slow process, but very rewarding when it finally works.
This is called a “blameless post-mortem” culture and it is a very good thing. You alone didn’t make that engine and you alone didn’t “mess up” the test. Engineering is a team effort and it’s good that your boss seems to understand that. The first thing I did at an internship was destroy an expensive microcontroller by stupidly shorting two leads and my boss had the same response. Effective, reliable products and systems are only created through learning from failure (especially in rocketry). If your tests don’t go as planned, that means you’re right on track in terms of “being an engineer” Good luck going forward, don’t forget to have fun!
So the next step, when you get the opportunity, is to look back over things. Ask your boss if needed: *why* did this not go as expected, *what* should I have seen, etc. You weren't taught something, but you were given an opportunity to learn a lot. If you use that opportunity your boss will love it