Is there anything under that timing cover that would be damaged by exposure to oil? A rubber timing belt, for example, could possibly be damaged over the long haul. If your engine has a chain, not a belt, I don’t expect any real harm to the car unless you were to fail to check the oil level every few weeks AND this plus other oil leaks were big enough to drop the oil level more than a quart or two before the oil gets topped up AND you did a lot of hard driving during the low-oil occurrence.
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None taken. I did not see the mechanic’s 1040, so I cannot swear to the accuracy of what his father told me. Perhaps the father was exaggerating.
Fairly early in my career, I switched from hardware to software. Bragging a bit, I was pretty good. Never had a problem getting a good job. I took nearly a three-fold cut in income to go into teaching. Most of my students got jobs where they were making more money than I within a few years. The real money in academia is in administration and management. Those people suck up a huge portion of the tuition income, and their main talent is sucking up. Why did I go into teaching? Who knows? We all make choices that seemed like a good idea at the time. We deal with the consequences and continue living life.
Speaking of switching jobs, reminds me of a story, years ago I was working as techie here in Silicon Valley, had been working there 5 years or so, when I got into a little dust up with the boss. The issue about whether I should be able to take some time off on Monday in return for working unpaid time on Sunday to meet a Monday deadline for a drawing needed by manufacturing. He thought shouldn’t get any time off on Monday, I thought I should. He won, so I resigned
As I then had spare time on my hands, and it was early summer, I decided to offer design services for homeowners wanting to install water-saving automatic sprinkler systems for their lawns and gardens. It turned out the customers wanted somebody to install it as well as design it, so that’s what I did. It started off as just a lark, I did a couple of installations at friends’ homes. They referred me to their friends, etc, etc, and pretty soon I working full time on designing & installing automatic sprinkler systems. And guess what? My per-hour income was higher than working at a tech company.
While teaching computer science, people from the local community would
sometimes contact us to list jobs for students. We once got a listing for a
computer science student to program the person’s sprinkler system.
I took a similar detour in my career. Started out as a EE but given full responsibility for all aspects of new designs. Found out I liked software engineering better and my forte became embedded, multi-tasking, real time software (firmware) for safety and mission critical applications. Money is important of course but also liking what you do is very important to longevity and happiness.
George, after lurking around on lawnsite for years, I gained a greater appreciation for the engineering that goes into irrigation design and installation. Not to mention all the rules and regulations one must be familiar with to build a compliant system. Hats off to you for picking that up and successfully executing in that area…
FWIW, I have always awarded comp time to any employee reporting to me that goes above and beyond their normal duties to ensure success for the company. It’s the least I can do and I do not understand this mentality that people are expected to give freely of their time and not get anything in return. Kudos for sticking to your guns on that one…
EE majors doing software use to be very common. Not so much anymore. Back in the 70’s it was EE’s and Software engineers who designed computer chips. Then colleges started offer Computer Engineering degrees which combines Electrical Engineering and Software Design into one discipline.
Well over 95% of Software engineer jobs today - you don’t even need to know how the computer works. All you need to know is the language you’re programming in. The inner workings of the computer is not useful knowledge in most cases. Many colleges have even dropped an Assembly class or even Compiler classes to obtain a degree in CS.
Back in the 70’s when your IBM programmed crashed you got a HEX dump. Trying reading that thing without some knowledge of the assembler. Most device drivers and low level programming had to be done in Assembler. Then comes along languages like Bliss and C.
Like most disciplines, the software engineering field spans a very broad range of applications and hardware platforms; from embedded code running on microcontrollers to systems level software programming running on mainframes. In my line of work, you still have to know the workings of the actual devices as well as the intricacies of the relationships between the compiler/assembler and the actual hardware being exercised. It’s certainly not as demanding as it once was with the advent of large scale memory and very powerful computer chips. This allows for very inefficient use of resources and as I have told many people- with enough power, even a 2x4 can fly…
As a joke some years back, we did a comparison between a low level language and C++ to simply display the ubiquitous “hello world” on the equipment display. In short- anybody can do it with enough memory 