what kind?
1 Like
Perhaps the OP really means: “A ship I built got jammed in the Suez canal, so I’m getting out before I get arrested!”
Tee hee. Only kidding. All the best in your new career!
11 Likes
Good luck with you new job!
2 Likes
Small world. I was involved with all those ships as part of my 36 years as a civilian engineer with the US Navy.
Good luck with your next career step!
1 Like
Congrats Pat! Smooth sailing…
2 Likes
All the best @patdavid.
It’s sad that sometimes we find that we’re ‘criminally undervalued’ for a hard work 
2 Likes
It has nothing to do with war and combat, so it should be a significant improvement. I am happy for you. Hope it will be fun, although you probably also enjoyed building war ships?
2 Likes
I enjoyed building ships. Not so much war ships specifically (one of my reasons to move was that building warships doesn’t align with me personally). Don’t get me wrong, though, I am a nut for maritime stuff in general and warships is a big part of that history. I’d just rather help scientists manage data and collaborate vs. finding better ways to put weapons platforms near people someone doesn’t like.
9 Likes
When I was graduating CompSci the navy were recruiting real-time programmers. Abstract idea sounds fine. When I was told that there would also be ship board software deployment tests , that was interesting. However when I heard the words “missile guidance” I back-pedaled rapidly.
I wish you well and hope you find much greater vocational fulfillment.
1 Like
Good luck with the new job. Supporting science sounds like a lot more motivating aim than supporting the military, if you’re in general, a peace-loving person.
1 Like
:=)) I spent 12 years in academia on soft money “managing data for scientists.”
Every lab is different but we did find some common themes. Researchers (having given up the spiral bound notebook a decade or two ago) all seemed to document their experiments with spread sheets. Primarily Excel, which isn’t structured (it’s flat) and not network connected. All of which leads to interesting creative ideas about better ways. None of which have yet caught on.
2 Likes
Yeah, it helps that my wife has been working at this lab for the last 15 years or so as well, so I have a sort of front-row seat to how things are done. I’ve made multiple suggestions in the past and after a while some of the investigators started to take notice and have actually started doing things a little saner.
This will just be an opportunity to codify things and have someone to whom anyone can turn to ask questions, look for help, or blame if it goes sideways. 
2 Likes
What you may deal with is turn over. People tend to come an go a lot in the lab environment which makes it hard to implement cohesive systems…should be fun enjoy…
1 Like
Huge congrats to you, Pat. Just wish you the best. At least you evolved (I went the other direction. lol). Still hope you keep the kettle from whistling (high teapot that is). I know you know when you are about to go there and hope you find some calm time when that happens. 
1 Like
Congratulations.
It’s always interesting making these transitions. I’ve been in the marine business virtually my entire career working with and on ships. Started out as an entry level engineer at a shipyard a long time ago. My current specialization is Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV’s) and their utilization.
Scientists (aka Principal Investigators) are an interesting lot. I had a stint working at a small oceanographic company about 20 years ago and at times it could be a challenge. The PI’s had very specific ideas of how things should be done in the process of their investigations. Oftentimes these ideas were completely unworkable in reality and it was typically fairly difficult to get them to sit down and discuss how to go about getting the results that they wanted, in a way that was different than the one they envisaged.
Anyway, good luck.
1 Like
good luck 
1 Like
Good luck with the career move.
It might help out to point the researchers towards the trend of publishing scientific papers as Jupyter notebooks if they are not using Jupyter already. There is a lot written about this already but this makes a good read and even points out that 1 of the 3 founders of iPython which later became Jupyter was an oceanographer.
1 Like