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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #588 – Siloed Engineering with Leigh Brady

#588 – Siloed Engineering with Leigh Brady

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Welcome, Leigh Brady!

  • Leigh got his start working in different companies in the US as young engineer from the UK as part of the Mutual Defense Agreement
  • Throughout the episode we explored different themes
    • Specialist vs Generalist
    • US vs UK hiring
    • Big vs small companies
    • Defense vs Industrial companies
  • UK Apprenticeship
  • V curve
  • System engineering
  • Deriving requirements
  • What is the atomic unit of a system engineer?
  • F35/JSF
  • Lockheed IRAD – Internal Research and Development
  • Sandia National Labs
  • FPGAs in defense / space
  • “It’s always cosmic rays”
  • Single Event Upsets
  • “Triple modular redundancy” is so commonplace in designs there are now buttons in CAD to generate the logic to triplicate a circuit and have the 3 units “vote”
  • Bleeding edge FPGA tools vs open toolchain
  • Chris recalls Xilnx ISE with F16 on the CDs
  • Long term supply contracts
  • Jumping the line with defense companies in the US – “DPAS – defense priorities and allocation system“
  • Big vs small
  • Leigh is now back in a big company
  • When should an engineer target a big vs a small company in their career?
  • Training / Budgets / Sampling are better at big companies.
  • Mentorship
  • Phillip Salmany (Phil’s Lab) talked about the difficulties finding mentors as a young engineer out on his own.
  • UK Chartered Engineer
  • PE / EIT vs Chartered
  • Leigh worked on nuclear weapons at a past company in the UK
  • It is, unsurprisingly, a heavily regulated industry.
  • IEC61508
  • Part of the job is verifying non-proliferation among other countries
  • Nuclear deterrant
  • Chris referenced a Ukraine treaty where they gave up their nuclear weapons and ambitions, co-signed by the US, UK, and … Russia. This was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
  • Russia control room story about not firing when they detected launches from the US. It’s widely believed that Stanislov Petrov prevented a Nuclear war
  • There are never active nuclear tests anymore (good), so the majority of work revolves around testing and modeling
  • Is there a “better moustrap”?
  • What does it look like when new requirements come down from the gov’t?
  • Did Leigh wear a white lab coat?
  • We were introduced by former guest Carmen Parisi, who worked with Leigh at Wasatch Photonics
  • Optics have tight timing requirements, especially around the image sensor.
  • Leigh is now working on medical devices at Phillips.
  • Medical isn’t as slow as Chris thought, nor is FDA planning as dreadful as Chris thought.
  • “Trust but verify” on part specs
  • Mapping past experiences into new job
  • Chris mentioned the discussions with Charles Aylward about not having any control mechanisms or backup as a consultant.
  • Leigh said there are certain scenarios where a solo consultant won’t be a good fit and that “Two people working in a team are worth three”
  • You can reach Leigh on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web as Engineer Leigh

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