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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Not Porter Cable. I bought a PC cordless set as my first set because it was inexpensive. I was wrong, it was cheap. None of the cutting tools are square and 0 isn’t 0, you have to fiddle with it to get it square. My oscillating tool died with not many hours on it. The orbital sander works great but tears through batteries, probably a quarter the life of my DeWalt brushless tool on the same mAh size battery.

    I am on DeWalt now. A prior employer gave out DeWalt tools as safety awards, and then I worked for a subsidiary of Stanley so I got steep discount on DeWalt. It is crazy how much that stuff is marked up, but it generally holds up well.

    I have some heavy industrial experience with DeWalt and Milwaukee 1/2" impact wrenches. Heavy usage, using it every hour for 12 hours a day 7 days a week. The DeWalts battery rails would wear and loosen, intermittently losing electrical contact. This was a problem with the tool, not the battery, so we’d have to replace the tool. The Milwaukees were smaller and lighter for comparable torque output, so less chance of repetitive motion injury. The Milwaukee batteries eventually shook themselves to death, breaking the plastic fastening locations inside the battery case requiring replacement of the batteries. It was cheaper to replace batteries over time with Milwaukee than replace tools over time with DeWalt.

    Milwaukee has a larger variety of tool than DeWalt from my experience. I’ve encountered a few things that Milwaukee makes but DeWalt doesn’t, like battery powered palm nailer.







  • It has been interesting. I wanted to teach at university so I went straight into a PhD program after my 4 year engineering degree. Found out that being a professor, at least at an ivy league school, was 10% teaching and 90% funding and politics, also did not mesh well with available projects and support, dropped out with “half a PhD”. Worked 12 years at steel mills, the first one sucked but I learned a lot, the second one really developed me into who I am now from an entrepreneurial and leadership POV. Went to business school at night and simultaneously got a Manager job at a shitty company, got fired, got an engineer job elsewhere and quickly promoted to manager where I rocked the house. Left for a senior engineer role elsewhere with better pay and work life balance and I am loving it so far.

    Lots of luck, lots of effort, lots of learning through failure and success. Best thing I did was probably business school. The engineering degree is what gets me in the door but the tools I learned in getting my MBA have proven more valuable because most of the problems I need to solve are not exclusively engineering problems.

    It was really weird to go from a high performer at one company to getting fired at the next. Thankfully I’ve had two great experiences since then, so I guess it was probably them not me. Getting fired messed with my concept of self worth for a bit but I have worked through that now.