Siloed Engineering with Leigh Brady

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