Arizona doesn’t have any worse food than anywhere else in the US?
Dry heat is a good thing — your body can actually cool itself when it sweats. Way more comfy than a “wet heat”
Scorpions aren’t actually that big of a problem in AZ. Unless you like to sleep on the floor. Or there’s one hiding in your bath towel. Flying cockroaches, on the other hand…well, I have seen those on occasion in TW too.
Yup
Top engineers make the same amount of $ as top lawyers in America, but it’s much more difficult to be hired by biglaw in America. From what I’ve heard only graduates from T14 schools with good GPA who’ve done summer associateships every summer get offers, and the hours are brutal and people get fired a lot.
Median private sector new lawyer salary is $150k. It’s much lower for public sector, like $60k.
Median new engineer salary is $70k.
New lawyer salaries are bimodal.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/07/bimodality.html
If I were a lawyer I’d be an immigration lawyer–help Indians get H1B visas, help people crossing the Southern border get their citizenships.
I’d assume that’s public sector and private sector humps.
A relative worked as a public prosecutor making little money for a number of years, then he was highly sought after by the private sector and now makes big bucks.
A huge swath of the private sector also makes jack. The top firms must drag up the average for private lawyers by huge amounts.
Depends what you consider an engineer. specifically if you include software engineers. If so, maybe. If not, sort of, but not really. ;). The top maybe 5-10ish percentile are probably similarish - say in the solid $200s. But the top 1%+ (certainly top .2%+) upside for lawyers is much more (actual working lawyers and engineers, vs those who own businesses).
Wow shots fired. Some of the best food I’ve ever had was in Arizona. Especially in Tucson there’s really amazing northern Mexican food in Arizona
I know a lawyer that was doing OK for himself and then tried to sue an insurance company/bank first for 300 million USD, then 8 billion because one of his former partners had a successful lawsuit that won at 4 billion, so he couldn’t be outcompeted and upped the numbers. Then he dropped the whole thing, I assume, since he’s still living a “pitiful” life owning two teslas and a 6,000 sq foot house (bought in cash) in a major US city.
I will never understand lawyers.
Sorry for late reply.
These issues are well understood in industry (see multivariate process control etc link below)
The problem is people do not scale well (as opposed to software)
As a past/present customer of TSMC and other large companies we did not get and will never get the individualized attention that big volume contracts get (we are too small for that)
Concluding: smart people are in short supply and making your large scale manufacturing business dependent on them is gonna be a limiting factor.
Yeah, true, but AI doesn’t replace the smart engineers, it replaces the boring repetitive tasks (like process control) that engineers already don’t like doing.
The electron microscopes I worked on are getting more and more automated - I loved it cause they would replace things like manual alignments that are really tedious and boring to do. At the same time, they added a lot of complexity, so some of the older less computer savvy service engineers would struggle to fix the systems when the automation ran into issues. That and the systems get more complicated every year anyway, so the net result was we needed more service engineers, not less.
Exactly. Smart engineers are too valuable to do tasks which can be automated.
Any time I hear that PhD’s are working at some fab machine it strikes me as a temporary troubleshooting measure or a mismanagement of engineering resources. (unless we talk of PhD certificates bought on night market)
Nice! Sounds like a fun thing to do.
I was always fascinated by semiconductor micrography because none of the physical devices look like a perfect models we designers use, but this stuff still works!
Lifelong learning is a must in this industry. Problem solving abilities are another.
Sometimes you meet people passionate about their profession and they are always a pleasure to talk to.
I only worked on electron microscopes that are used for geological samples, mainly looking for radioactive minerals. But they basically use electron beams and whatever the material reacts to determine what element it’s composed of.
Yes, many of the microscopes have an EDS system attached for materials analysis. I installed a new low cost SEM with integrated color EDS. So the operator gets immediate EDS data and image as soon as they turn the beam on. Images look like this:
This is the image I get when I worked on it…
The weird texture is the double sided tape used to mount the zircon crystal onto the plastic puck. The electron beam does weird stuff to it (it wrinkles it)
And this is the dump from the microscope (I think it’s used to display the scale bar and all that…)
Blockquote $CM_FORMAT JEOL/EO
$CM_VERSION 1.0
$CM_COMMENT
$CM_DATE 2017-04-26
$CM_TIME 2:42:03 PM
$CM_OPERATOR GENERAL
$CM_INSTRUMENT JSM-6490
$CM_ACCEL_VOLT 20
$CM_MAG 550
$CM_SIGNAL BES
$CM_STAGE_POS -6.253008 5.126256 14.752 0 0
$CM_PIXEL_SIZE 1.818182E-04
$$SM_MICRON_MARKER 20um
$$SM_FILM_NUMBER 0000
$$SM_TITLE
$$SM_WD 13
$$SM_SPOT_SIZE 60
$$SM_VACUUM 28
$$SM_PHOTO ON
$$SM_MERGE OFF
$$SM_SIGNAL1
$$SM_SIGNAL2
$$SM_MULTI
Yes! As a process engineer I did a lot of SEM cross-sections of etched vias, trenches etc - never ceased to amaze me they could make working ICs out of our ugly features.
That SEM experience helped me transition to field service of SEMs, but the job was much cooler cause they use the microscopes for stuff like this:
3D imaging of SARS-COV2 virus. Customers would put a cryo-frozen cell into the microscope, then cut thin sections of the cells, then put them in a TEM for 3D imaging.
A JEOL, ewww. 
Yeah, the electron beam heats up the tape, also you get electrons charging up on it with nowhere to go. The bright white is electron buildup since your crystal is not grounded well. Thermo Fisher microscopes can also introduce water vapor to discharge the electrons, would help with that sort of image.
Well, it was at a university, so I guess they don’t use the most advanced thing out there.
Actually I think the detector is set up to look for radioactivity (zircon contains uranium) hence the white.
I always never understood why I can’t look at bacteria or whatever with it… it basically don’t look good once the magnification goes above 600x.
