Bar Car: A Chat With Dale Rice

In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we have a relaxed chat with Dale Rice, SOLIDWORKS Electrical Applications Engineer at GoEngineer, though despite the name, we weren't having drinks at all, we just didn't have a particular journey in mind when the conversation started. 

Dale has been supporting engineering companies for decades and has seen a tremendous amount of engineering, and he also is a good friend of mine.

This is not a narrative episode, rather it is a discussion between two old friends. 

You'll hear discussion about:

1. SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS Electrical

2. How to ensure you're not getting duped by demos

3. Making sure your boss doesn't compare you to the performance of a demonstration

4. Keys to implementing a software or a change in a process successfully

5. Thoughts on AI, it's coming impact in SOLIDWORKS and what we think it would be good to focus on. 

Here are a couple links to check out:

https://www.goengineer.com/webinars#on-demand

https://www.goengineer.com/blog

You can also reach out to Dale at drice@goengineer.com if you have questions around SOLIDWORKS or SOLIDWORKS Electrical. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

On this episode of the Engineering Passion Express podcast, I talked with Dale Rice. Dale Rice is a friend of mine and a former co-worker that worked together with me for almost 10 years. And he's just an all-around good person. Dale's currently working at Go Engineer and supporting the SOLIDWORKS electrical software. But in our discussion, which is more of a chat that will devolve into sort of everything. SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS electrical, thoughts on general engineering careers, AI, and how it's changing stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 0:51

You may just get a glimpse of who Dale is, his enthusiasm, and that if you ever need anything SOLIDWORKS related, he's a guy you can reach up to. With that, let's get into the episode.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07

Welcome to the Engineering Passion Express podcast. Today I have Dale Rice on. Dale and I worked together for over 10 years at a CAD reseller called GSC. At the time, he was an amazing CAD instructor, a great human being, and he also does a good impression of a salmon swimming upstream. He currently works for Go Engineer, one of the largest, if not the largest, CAD reseller in North America. And it's great to have you on, Dale. Thanks so much, Brandon. It's awesome. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39

Tell us a little bit about your background, Dale. All right. So my background is I started out as an engineer and designer and worked my way up and ended up in the reseller chain as an application engineer. And so I had so much fun. It became my calling to do this type of work. I mean, pre-sales, post-sales, that type of environment, helping customers. And I've been doing this for, oh my gosh, probably what, 15 years now? And absolutely love it. Started out on the mechanical side for SolidWorks. And then now I am currently on the SolidWorks electrical side of the business. So I've been doing the electrical side for about four years.

SPEAKER_00: 2:24

Probably every engineer out there knows what SolidWorks is. If they're younger engineers, they may not be familiar with pre-sales and post-sales. So pre-sales is essentially helping you find a solution to your problem. Post sales is helping you find a solution to a problem after you've made a purchase. Tell us a little more about your current role and what you do with SolidWorks Electrical and how you help customers versus maybe and how it's maybe different than what most people are familiar with inside of like SOLIDWORKS and mechanical design.

SPEAKER_02: 2:56

Absolutely. So the electrical is there's some correlation between mechanical and electrical. And then there's a huge divide there. So when we get into the software aspect of SolidWorks Electrical, it's working with 2D schematics. So you have software to create your schematics. You also have software that we connect to SolidWorks Mechanical that has a 3D add-on that connects between 2D and 3D. So I get to play with both sides of the fence a lot of times and take that experience, that 20 plus years of SolidWorks mechanical side, and be able to leverage that experience on both ends of the fence. So it's kind of a fun job to be able to take those perspectives and help the customer from both sides. We have people that are just have electrical experience, and then we have people that have the experience like myself on both ends, mechanical and electrical. So it's kind of a fun position for sure to be in. And so, really from the pre-sales, I will present the software and offer, show the customer exactly how this fits for their organization within their organization. Then the customer obviously asks questions or has any concerns, and we try to answer those questions and concerns. So the software is a good fit for the customers. So from the technical side, Brandon even knows this. From the technical side, we like to just make sure our customers are happy because at the end of the day, if we sell something and we've lied to them or whatever in a bad way, like told them, hey, this software isn't going to work, we told them, hey, the software is great, and then it doesn't work out, is what I should say. Then you have a lot of problems on from the customer coming back. And so we always just like to be upfront and honest and tell them exactly how it is. And I know a lot of salespeople tend to not like that. The good ones are good with that, and then the ones that just want to sell a seat, those are the ones that don't last long, to be honest. So we have good honest salespeople and and the tech people on our side.

SPEAKER_00: 5:03

What do you think? This is a hard question, but what do you think is something that maybe no product manual or demo really shows about SOLIDWORKS electrical?

SPEAKER_02: 5:13

Oh. So anytime you get manuals, you basically get the perfect working condition. And so everything works great. I found this when I started out in engineering was okay, I got this little manual, and it shows you things that oh, the perfect world. And then when you go to use it in your own world, all of a sudden it's like, well, what is this error? What is this error? What's that error? So that's part of the training aspect that I like to show errors and things that go wrong all the years I learned uh from just being on the engineering side to be able to show those things when things don't go well, what does that look like to try to make that a better situation?

SPEAKER_00: 5:55

I think that's an interesting aspect because it's an underrated aspect of software. There's always going to be times that things don't go well, and like you said, it's not gonna show up in a manual, it's not gonna show up in a demo. But I would like to see when it doesn't go well what the errors are throwing up. If the software just crashes without any warning, without any feedback, and it just keeps repeating that, and you can't really troubleshoot it or figure it out. That's much more irritating than a software that says close due to X, Y, and Z. And then Like maybe it's a memory limit or whatever, and then you've you can start to figure out how you can change your behavior so that that doesn't happen, but the other way leaves you no clue at all. And I think that's a good part of quality software and software design. So yeah, that that I think you threw out a good answer there.

SPEAKER_02: 6:47

Well, thanks, thanks. Yeah, definitely that's years of experience from both of us knowing that, hey, these things they're gonna see eventually. And a lot of times the manual will throw that under the rug. And uh to make it look, it's more like streamlining. Same with the demo aspect. You asked about training and the demo aspect. Well, demos are the same way. We run through, I got a great example. I had done this presentation probably 5,000 times between practice behind the scenes and going live with customers. I had done this this data set at least gone through it at least five grid, 5,000 times. And I could do it with my eyes closed pretty much. And I went into a place and the engineering manager saw the presentation, he went, Wow, how come you guys aren't as good with CAD as this guy is? And I just by mouth dropped, I looked at all of them and I just couldn't keep quiet. I just laughed. I said, Well, I've done this presentation so many times that it just looks perfect. And if the real world is that you're gonna have iterations, engineering is all about changes, and you're gonna get an error all of a sudden, and you're gonna have to sort through that problem and having to figure out those things. Uh, demo is completely different from the real world. And as long as engineering managers know that and see that expectation of, okay, Dale's just done this so many times, he knows how to do that aspect of the software. So always keep that in mind if you're an engineering manager. Your team is better than you think. If you see something that somebody blows you away, whether it's an ERP system or whatever it is, they've practiced a thousands of times before they got to you. Because we have to make the software look great, not just good or okay. It has to look great. And we know the pitfalls and we know where things are not so great in the software. So at all costs, we try to avoid those. Or if you can't fix it, feature it. That was kind of the rule at GSC with Sam Hockberg years ago. He was like, can't fix it, feature it. And that was always something that stuck in my brain was hey, if we can't fix this this software and they are absolutely needing this, this is the workaround, and this is how we can fix it.

SPEAKER_00: 9:05

And that's that's a good part of being an honest, trustworthy partner, I think. Because you need to see that workaround for things that are suboptimal so that they know they're not they're not being taken by something that looked good in a in a demo presentation and doesn't actually work in real life. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 9:22

Well, I have to say, and I'm sure you would agree with this, for any customers or people that are considering software in general, do your due diligence. Make sure that you are that is that all your issues are being addressed, or at least there's some kind of workaround if 99% are fixed that work great and there's 1% that doesn't. Well, how critical is that? And do your homework and research. Don't just buy something sight unseen. Software is never perfect. I don't care where you buy it from and who you are. Having good, reliable people to work with is number one. And then that software, making sure that it's gonna match your needs is super critical. So that's something I'm sure Brandon and I, we both run into that over the years where people just bought the software and then all they had all they had was a bunch of complaints afterwards. Well, it was great, the salesperson doesn't care as long as they they get that deal for that quarter, they're in, right? But then we get to deal with it later on. So that's why we that's why I say, hey, do your due diligence, make sure that the software is a good fit for you. And look at a few pieces of software before you jump into just one. Because people are great at demos at in all competition and all different pieces of software. So make sure you're asking the right questions.

SPEAKER_00: 10:37

I also think if you've worked with a reseller or a partner that you've found is truly honest and does show you that stuff and doesn't hide the flaws and make sure and is ensuring that you're getting value out of the solution. I would encourage you not to go seek out a different partner to save a handful of dollars who may not have that same respect for you. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: 11:01

Absolutely. It's a it's you're building a good relationship and it's a partnership moving forward. It's not just I'm gonna save$100 on this or even a few thousand dollars. Sometimes you go, okay, why is this cheaper? What am I not getting? I I look at that. Hopefully, I never have to buy a car again, as expensive as they are. But you look at that same kind of aspect as the whole car. Well, am I gonna get a good service from these people? Does it even matter? Or do I do I want that? Do I need the services? Do I need the consulting? Do I need the support? Where is our team at? Does our team need nothing from it from this reseller, or do they need a ton of do you need a ton of help? That's the thing to consider as well, not just software. It's hey, do these people have a good depth? Like Go Engineer, our electrical team. We have 10 engineers, application engineers dedicated to electrical. And that's a huge differentiator. Every other reseller like GSC and some of the other ones, they had one electrical person. I don't know what they have now, but back in the day, there was one person for that. And we have 10 that are helping out. So that's a pretty huge differentiation when you start looking at resellers and the size. And Go Engineer is all 50 states plus Canada now. So it's pretty uh if we can't figure out the answer, we're gonna find it for you. We're gonna figure it out somewhere, give you a good answer.

SPEAKER_00: 12:26

Some of what you were just saying there actually ties into my next question. So you were talking about services, assistance, all of that stuff. What do you think the most misunderstood part of the process of adopting like an electrical eCAD solution like SOLIDWORKS electrical is?

SPEAKER_02: 12:44

I would say to write off with my experience, the thing that I ran in with when I started with electrical, my misconception was that I had to do installs and upgrades. And it was way more challenging than I thought when you go into that aspect of, hey, I've now I have a SQL database that I have to manage, and how do I work with that? I actually just did a webinar on SolidWorks electrical boot camp. So that I tried to answer some of these exact questions, Brandon, where where do you go for resources? At the end of the day, I said, hey, try to install it yourself. Have make sure you have a good sandbox, a backup, and that you're testing it on your own if you don't want us to get involved. If you don't want the reseller to get involved and you're like, hey, I'm independent, I like to do it all on my own, go for it. You're gonna fall down some holes. It's definitely gonna happen. It's different from SolidWorks installations where that's just a click of a button. It's so mature that it's been out there. PDM is pretty mature as well. But then you get electrical, it is mature, but there's things that have changed where the working with different environments, you have to watch your different servers. It still has the dedicated server that you have to install. But it's one of those things that you can do a virtual machine, you can do all kinds of different options, but there's good, better, and best, and then there's terrible options. So getting consulting with us or whoever you're working with is going to be the key that first time around. And that's what I've definitely pushed was the first time, get some, we'll teach you how to fish, but you need to get some assistance to see what you're getting into. And a lot of times we actually do upgrades every year, every other year for customers more than you can imagine. And people just don't want to deal with it for one, or they just don't have the time to do it. So that's one of those things you kind of have to see. Do I want to try this myself or do I have the resources that I can pay for someone else to do it?

SPEAKER_00: 14:42

Okay. I mean, it sounds like it's just a little bit more IT heavy than a normal installation. I mean, most engineers can handle just a straight software installation, but it sounds like you're maybe migrating databases and things like that that are a little bit more IT heavy.

SPEAKER_02: 14:58

Yeah, it was something I didn't expect when I first jumped on the team. I was like, oh, this will be a piece of cake. I work with PDM and all these other things and seek manage SQL databases and things like that. It's very similar, but yeah, the complexities, just other side things. You get you'll get errors and you won't know what the errors are. And if you haven't installed it 50 times or 100 times, I'm still, after four years, we're getting new errors now with the newer software. And due to latency and a lot of the latency between the client and the servers, or server and client, excuse me, if it's they change the hard coding of the software, that if it's past 10 milliseconds, it will just not install the software and not tell you that that's the problem. So we've got into that and we were starting to do some installs, and we're like, holy cow, what's going on here? And then we found out that that was changed. And honestly, if you think about it, because the earlier software of electrical would install, and all of a sudden you'd have performance issues, you'd have connection issues and things like projects locking out, and you're like, what's going on here? There's a lot of performance issues. And all of that was due to latency. So now they've decided, hey, let's switch this where you'll have an error up front and you need to fix your latency issue before you can install the software. So that actually makes better sense, but it was a it's a change, and customers need to be aware of that type of stuff. And that's the kind of thing that happens all the time when you're doing this installs and upgrades.

SPEAKER_00: 16:28

I'm going to ask you two questions that kind of tie into each other. So I'll read them both and then we'll go through them one at a time. So, first, what does failure of adoption look like? And then second, what do you think the biggest failure people have in adoption is without realizing it? Maybe a benefit that they're not getting because they didn't do something correctly, that kind of thing. So start with what does failure of adoption look like in maybe solid or selection?

SPEAKER_02: 16:54

Yeah. So honestly, if you take spend a little extra money and get us involved for training, consulting, and any services, one-on-one services to get you up and running, so you understand how to manage the database, how to install symbols and manufacture parts and create a template and all those things that you don't think about when you buy the software that we can help with. And the people that fail are the ones that try to do it on their own. That's just the simple, that's just the plain facts, unless they've done it and gone through a process before with a reseller of whoever they are. And if they haven't gone through a process, they tend to fail. Not all, but there's people that just give up. It's like, oh, this is too hard. And that could be any piece of software. Hey, that's too hard, and just give up and go back. I know, just being in engineering, I've seen myself and other people that go, oh man, I know how to do this in two minutes, but it takes me 30 minutes to do it with the new software. I quit. And so we have to take a step back and see the value of it. And so that failure can be if you don't see the value of it and the engineers don't understand what they're actually going to gain from the software, they give up. And I definitely have helped. We don't get too many people after they've gone through training and pretty different perspectives, Brandon, that that tend to fail. But I do actually follow up and make sure that our customers are still using the software and happy. And if they're not using it, well, why aren't you using the software? And try to get them back on track. But if you try to run with it on your own, well, you're on your own, unfortunately, and it's it's up to your own devices to succeed or fail.

SPEAKER_00: 18:37

I think something you said I just want to clarify on something that I've seen similarly with softwares, is in general, if the software maybe adds a task to a person that didn't have that task before, even though it's going to help downstream, that's when they struggle or they don't like it. So, for example, like maybe somebody was entering part numbers or metadata or whatever into an ERP system and that was an administrative person, but now, however, the workflow has changed and in your CAD tool, you now enter that when you create some new part or whatever. That wasn't on the engineer's plate before. Now it's on their plate, they're responsible for it. Even if the total sum of all the people that touch it and the time downstream is less, you now kind of get resistance to the adoption of this because that wasn't on my plate before and now it is. Exactly. Yeah, you nailed it.

SPEAKER_02: 19:31

And that's definitely what happens. The vision from an engineer is I have to get this done in the time that I have. And my boss says I have to get it done in an hour, and it's gonna take me two hours to use A versus B software. What are you gonna use? You're gonna use the software that your boss is telling you to get it done by that time. And to get extra steps, a great example is PDM. People in the beginning of that adoption for product data management was. Oh my gosh, this is going to take longer. I have to check in files. I have to add attributes or metadata to explain what I'm doing. So I have a history. But what are you getting downstream? Like you're saying, now I can search. I have a revision history. I have different, I have more data to go by than I had before by just using, say, Twigs and Mud or AutoCAD or what AutoCAD 2D. And they all have value. But how much are you getting for that? Electrical is the same way. Yes, you're going to have to put your symbols in a database or download the data bit, you know, the symbols from the database to get that into your SQL, SQL database one time. But after that, everybody can share, everybody can collaborate, everybody can use. You're getting more reporting, more efficient reporting because it's built in SQL. Plus, you're getting great searching. You're getting so many more tools than you would by just using 2D or a pen and paper to make that happen. And you have a history of that. So there's there's trade-offs, right? There's that upfront and the this total sum of time that you were talking about.

SPEAKER_00: 21:11

Agreed. I think people don't see the whole solution, and it's it's tough because no one person in the company generally has that vision. So it's kind of like the engineer is saying this takes longer, but maybe they have less salespeople coming to them saying, is this the latest revision or less shop floor managers, whoever it is, because those people know it's the latest revision because they can see all those in the system.

SPEAKER_02: 21:35

That kind of tells me, Brandon, that I also need to be having more discussions with engineers on the benefits of it, and that yes, you're going to take a little more time here, but you're going to see this in the back end a lot more information. So that's actually a really good thing to approach from a business standpoint. I like that.

SPEAKER_00: 21:55

And even those engineers' bosses, they're engineering managers, make sure they understand it. Your guys might be taking a little longer than normal, but the business is benefiting and XYZ. Yeah. I guess the next question here would be do you have like a good big win story, something you really helped the customer achieve? Well, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: 22:13

So I think when I first started, it was the customer had they were using Visio. And Visio actually is a pretty darn cool piece of software. And it actually, if you can take that pretty far, the problem was they just outgrew the software. They wanted to do more. They wanted to have more of a collaborative environment between their engineers and electrical mechanical. And they already owned SolidWorks Mechanical. And they said, well, how can we better work with our customers? And that age-old story of, well, maybe we take a look at SolidWorks Electrical. How does that work and how does that connect? Luckily, our software connects wonderfully and collaborates between Mechanical and Electrical. And so they were through the roof on productivity and being able to what they could do above and beyond Visio. So a lot of times I see customers that are like they hang on to that Visio or the 2D AutoCAD for dear life because they're used to it, like you were saying. And once I was able to bring them, our team was able to bring them over the bridge, across the bridge, to see Electrical, they never look back. And they did everything correct, too. They got us involved, and when they had questions, they bought a book hours to get us to help them, or if it's something easy, we just help them out. So that's one of those things, yeah, it's a good, good story. And I have a bunch of them like that. A lot of people, a lot of them are Visio, a lot of them come from AutoCAD electrical, or just honestly using a spreadsheet or some other thing. It's amazing what people use still today. And I'm sure we can relate, you and I, between the draft site AutoCAD, where people just were like, I don't need any more than than 2D, and then we brought them across the bridge to see 3D, and then they never look back. So it's the same type of thing here that you'll see going into the electrical world too. Once you see that vision, you won't look back.

SPEAKER_00: 24:11

Yeah, I think there's always this tension between like a user's skill and the tools that they use. It's like a good engineer can probably get by with just about any tool. Exactly. But a bad engineer isn't going to be made a good engineer by a better tool. But that's not to say that a good engineer still isn't going to get their productivity boosted and all that by moving up to a much better tool. They will. There's no doubt about it. But again, it comes back to there's a separation between your abilities and the tool, but if you are a pretty able person, a better tool is going to help you a lot more. And there's, like you said, about 2D CAD. There's no doubt that there's engineers that were thinking through interferences and all that, even when they drafted in 2D these big complex machines. But that doesn't mean that when they went to 3D CAD, they didn't find a whole bunch of interferences that they would have found on the shop floor eventually up front, just because there's so many interactions going on, it's easy to overlook something.

SPEAKER_02: 25:11

Oh, exactly. You're only as your software's only as good as your engineer.

SPEAKER_00: 25:16

Right. That's well said. Are there any trends that are happening in this in this tool or in this space at the moment? Any sort of consistent changes year to year where you see them going in a certain direction?

SPEAKER_02: 25:29

Yeah, I I definitely see cloud-based losing moving over to the 3D experience platform. I do see that moving forward. I just saw some internal communication on Teams that Dassault has created a 3D add-in for the platform. I don't know all the details yet, but they have there look like that's going to be in July. So there's some movement there and some being able to move this over to the platform. I'm sure you'll have both options, but that'll be an option for people that, hey, you have people all over the world, and you'll be able, you'll want to check in files in the cloud and things like that up through the 3D experience platform. So yeah, that's one thing I'm actually trying to get myself up to speed with that because I see that direction of where the software's going to go. Well, as we can see, a lot of people don't want to manage these databases. Now, currently, the software is going to have to be rewritten because of SQL. And I'm not sure where they're at on how they're going to handle that with the platform. I know currently it's going to be installed on your computer or on a server, same as it is currently is. So that might not change in the short term, but maybe long term that will be a complete overhaul in the software world for Dassault. And that's what we're hoping for. That's to rewrite that. It was just a hard thing to try to replace. Now the uh going to the PDM side, they had the same issues, so they used Anovia, right? That was the we switched over and did anything cloud was using that type of PDM or PLM type software. And now Electrical's gonna have to make that jump as well and build some bridges that way.

SPEAKER_00: 27:18

I guess if you had to make a bet on a massive leap in the technology in the next three to five years, do you have any guesses on what what that change would be? Oof, that's a good question. Yeah. Huge leaps. I mean, for you, it could even be something that you just heard maybe multiple customers' requests, so you're thinking maybe it's getting on their radar or something like that.

SPEAKER_02: 27:39

Yeah. I know some small integrations, any massive leap. It's usually with software, it's integrate, you know, it's tiny iterations. As for a quantum leap and like yeah, like our processing and and working with the quantum computing, which is changing the world, is gonna change things huge. I haven't heard anything directly from Dessau that aspect of any huge jumps, but I think it'll probably be focused on the platform and that will integrate just with a lot of different tools. You're gonna see a lot of different apps that you'll be able to connect into, and you're just gonna have a lot more capabilities and options as an engineer than you would as we currently do, which is kind of cool, isn't it? I mean, you can jump in and say, hey, I like you are the you're the sim genius, and the and basically how that incorporated and was able to take on the the extra burden for people that needed more power, horsepower, and capabilities within simulation. Yeah. So yeah, I think that'll be a lot of it. You're gonna get a lot more horsepower. I I'm more curious now at what's the quantum computing gonna do. So now people we've created companies have created that that alpha of where we're at. Where's that gonna go? I think that's gonna intrigue me. And what is software gonna do from that point? So any type of processing is gonna be instantly. It's gonna be an instant change. There'll be like simulation, that's gonna benefit in a huge way.

SPEAKER_00: 29:15

So it already is, actually. So you mentioned my simulation background. I mean, AI in this space, people are already taking old analyses of like the same kind of components, or maybe aerodynamic analyses of like stuff they've analyzed over years and years and years, using that to train models that then they no longer have to run models that take days or weeks to run. They just get an estimated result in a matter of seconds, and then they decide based on certain factors what would they like to do their high fidelity runoff. So that's already happening. Do you think that there's any AI equivalent in the electrical world at the moment?

SPEAKER_02: 29:56

Yeah, I'm betting that's gonna be in the works. I haven't heard much, but that's gonna be something that's gonna change. There's it has to, right? That's the next evolution, basically the internet 2.0, but it's gonna be massive. And I'm sure you're already benefiting. I already use AI almost every day for personal and work, and there's some aspect of that being incorporated already, and that's exciting. And I was like, geez, just think if we had this 20 years ago, 30 years ago, how much different things would be. There's gonna be some changes, and there'll be people that had positions that won't have positions any longer, and that's starting already. And I've seen that for accounting, HR. What else is in there? There's a few other areas where people are already being eliminated. Like IBM, a great example. IBM eliminated a bunch of jobs, HR-related jobs. My wife's in HR, so human resources. So I'm very aware of those types of things for her position as well. And to see some of those changes, like, okay, yep, we're gonna retire at the right time. There's gonna be otherwise, you're gonna have to start over. I would say, as a young engineer, pay attention to that and get some skills with AI, get some skills with that next level, that next evolution, because it's gonna change. What you went through school probably isn't what you're gonna end with in your career. You need to stay on top of things and you need to really be focused on your skill set more than anything else. Always keep your skills fresh. Even to this point, at the last bit of my career, I've had to stay fresh all the way to the end. And it's kind of exciting, it was exciting. That was always a goal of my personal to say, I'm gonna stay with technology until the day I die. And that was my goal 30 years ago, to say, I'm gonna stay with this and keep up as much as I can till the day I go. And so I am. I have I'm staying with it. It's moving so fast and rapid. Now there's so many things going on that you have to keep your eyes open and be on a swivel to see what the next technology is gonna be. It's actually we're in an exciting time right now. I know people are scared, but it's exciting, isn't it? I think it's exciting.

SPEAKER_00: 32:11

When you start talking about AI and staying up with it, there's two prongs to it. So there's the software that you already use, and almost guaranteed that software company or that software vendor is trying to figure out how to integrate AI directly into their software in some manner. Right? But then there's also like what can Chat GPT or just some more general language model do for you. For example, I was doing some design work maybe like a month ago or something, and uh, I started thinking to myself, like, there's gotta be a different material that I could use or something like that. And I typed in ChatGPT saying, give me a list of materials that are in this range, and then for this property, then give me ones that have these temperature-dependent properties, and then by the way, cross-reference that with being in this price range. You've always been able to do all of that at some point, but where you had to go to get the information might have been this manual, then a separate manual for these temperature-dependent properties, and then checking this website from this manufacturer for the different costs. To be able to do that in like a fraction of the time, like like maybe in like 60 seconds, 30 seconds, compared to looking all those up, or maybe even having to order those manuals, wait for them to come in, look at the values, call up the manufacturers. You're talking like a 10 to 100 times increase in speed for that. So if you don't stay up with it, somebody that does is going to be able to do 10 times the work. And if you have, say, 10% of that industry all being able to do 10 times as much as before, then they're the ones that are gonna get to keep their jobs and everybody else is gonna be gone. So, not to say that the industry won't grow and that there won't be other room, but I mean, obviously, if somebody's adopted technologies that make them that much more efficient than the rest of their peers, they're gonna be the desirable ones. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: 34:04

And like I said earlier, it's all about your skills. Keep it, keep your skills fresh. That's gonna be the key to survival in the working for other people. If I had to do this all over again, Brandon, I probably would have started my own business because that was the way to go. And seeing that vision now, after going through my whole career, I would definitely have started my own business. And I honestly got it off topic a little bit. I would have also done investing. I would have actually taught myself and got my skills set up. I have them now, but I would have done that as a 20-year-old and really learned. When you're poor, you grow up poor and your parents are poor, you don't know any better. And now that I've looked back, I'm like, geez, I could have been not just a millionaire, a multimillionaire. And it was just what looking back is like, holy cow. So same kind of thing. If you're not good with keeping up your skills, then you're gonna fall behind and it's gonna be a problem. There's gonna be, I don't know what's gonna happen to all the the hordes that don't keep up. So it's one of those. That's our goal always is to stay up and with technology and keep up with people, and it's important.

SPEAKER_00: 35:10

I would say the one thing that most engineers have going for them that having spent years doing nothing but working with engineers and talking to engineers, is on the whole, they're more curious than the rest of society in general, I would say. So if you're curious about these things and you want to stay up with these things, you're already kind of ahead in that race. A lot of other people aren't even looking at AI, they're not even realizing what it can do for them, and they don't even see that it's coming. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 35:41

And this is the frontier. It's definitely we're back into the pioneer ages with AI. And I just read an article somewhere where this person dropped out of school, dropped out of college, and had a vision with with AI and created within six months, they created or he created his own business and sold the business to someone else that wanted what he created for millions of dollars. And it was within six months, he was a multimillionaire, like six or eight million he got for the his business. And so that's how kind of frontier this is, and it's exciting. It's just like crypto was what, probably six years, ten years ago, crypto when that popped out.

SPEAKER_00: 36:23

When the internet came out, everybody was becoming millionaires based on buying the right domain or having a website, which nobody had ever had before. We're in those stages again. Except I think that AI is maybe even a little bit more mysterious than that. I think nobody really knows where it's gonna go or what it's gonna morph into. It's almost like anywhere that you have a large group of data related to one thing that maybe nobody else has, there's probably value in it with AI. Absolutely. Nobody knows. Everybody's got sort of a little keyhole into the world when it comes to that, because everybody's got their own pile of data, whether that's SOLIDWORKS models, or whether it's marketing briefs that they've written over the years, or whether it's I don't even know. It's endless, really. Definitely.

SPEAKER_02: 37:13

Yeah, you're right. About not knowing where it's gonna go 100%. That's pretty that's really accurate. I thought about that a couple of times. My reflection time and and learning period is first thing in the morning, and I've created a schedule over the years of hey, I get on Udemy, or I read a book, or I or just get on YouTube and learn something from there, if I'm just feeling like not getting too deep into it first thing in the morning. And that's yeah, those are the type of things. AI comes up a lot, and there's a lot of uses. And if you really want to learn and get up to speed, definitely jump on. People have already created classes for it and basically how to start up your own business if you wanted to. So that's exciting. Like I said earlier, uh if I would have done this over again, I would have started my own business. And fail, it doesn't matter. It's okay to fail. That's part of the part of being in the US is I think we were trained to not fail. And it's okay to fail, especially when you're in your 20s and and you know, you're getting there before you have your kids and family, and you have you have commitments. Well, you know all about that, Brandon, right? Yeah, yep. You and I had many a talk over the years about we need to get you need to get your business going before you have your kids and family and all that. And it's true. I'm sure you can attest for that.

SPEAKER_00: 38:29

It's true in some ways, and in other ways it's not. I mean, I I will say that the one thing that actually helped me to do something after I had a family was the the lack of time. It's like when you're young and you you see every opportunity and you're like, I got a ton of time, I can waste some on this opportunity, I can waste some on that opportunity. You start to get a family, and you're like, okay, I really gotta pick the opportunity that I like, that makes me happy, that I'm gonna stick with all of that stuff, and you kind of gotta go all in on it, so to speak. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 39:01

And that's where podcast got in and jumped into this. I love it.

SPEAKER_00: 39:05

I will say about AI, just one thing, just to finish it off. I think something that no matter where AI goes, the one skill that most people should start thinking about is just delegation. And I know most people don't think of delegation as a skill, but it definitely is, like being able to hand things off. As AIs become more capable, you're gonna have agents and all of that, and you need to be able to hand work off that's less valuable that AI can do and focus on doing what the most valuable work is that AI cannot do. And I don't think that's easy for engineers. So I in my career I've been on the engineering side and then I moved into sales. And I'll say in sales, it's very easy. You start to think about the dollars that are going to come in based on certain tasks, and you say, Those are the key tasks. I gotta get those dollars in. That other thing over here, that thing over there, that's not gonna bring any dollars into the company. But you know. This thing will. In engineering, in my experience, it was never so clear like that. There's ten different projects. I don't necessarily know the value of all of them because they all have different contracts. I don't know what the value of this particular task is. But being able to decide what is important, what can go off to AI, that's only going to get more critical. And even if AI sort of reaches a plateau of capability, knowing how to delegate will still work well with people as you move up in your career. So I think personally elegation is something everybody needs to learn because at some point it might be that every single person in the world has a basically a huge pool of virtual workers underneath them that they're feeding stuff to, and they're just in charge of making sure all the tasks come together. So I would say that's something that's that's not going to disappear. If if that disappears, then there's no jobs left, in my personal opinion.

SPEAKER_02: 40:58

Absolutely. And honestly, no matter what happens here, people's skills will always reign king. You'll always move up the ladder. It's not how smart you are, it's how good you are with people. You know, I'm not the smartest person or engineer, and I've always known that. But I've always you leveraged my people skills and being able to communicate and listen to both sides of the story, and and or at least try to do, try to listen to both sides, and just be good to everybody. Isn't that the key to life though? You just being good to everyone, you never know who's gonna be your boss, you never know who is not gonna be your boss because you pissed them off. So it's like being a good person's a good thing. And I've always lived by that my whole career is no matter what, be good and forgive whoever was wronged you, you have to give you have to let it go and move on. And that's gonna happen in work, out of work, doesn't matter. You have to learn to let go and and forgive people around you for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 41:56

Agreed. I guess we'll end with two questions, Dale, because we've we've hit on the AI thing for a while. The last two would be maybe who are the right people to work with you? Like, is there a group of people that have been listening in to this episode that you think should reach out to you to start maybe a conversation about whether it makes sense? And then following up that, where are the best places for resources for the work you help others with? Like whether it's guides or data sources, whatever it is that you want to share there.

SPEAKER_02: 42:28

Absolutely. So the right people definitely are engineers, mechanical, electrical. I'm seeing more people that mechanicals kind of jumping on both sides of the fence, so that's why I mentioned that. But you'll see electrical engineers if you're struggling. If you feel like even if you're not and you're like, I haven't looked at technology for five years, our company hasn't touched anything new in five years. You really should reach out, at least see what we have, see what we can offer you for sure. As for resources, once we get into there's tons of resources out there. There's free resources, so YouTube, there's even a couple of Udemy classes out there if you like that type of self-paced. Go Engineer also has self-paced. I was one of the people that helped, I'm the voice of the training, the self-paced training for Go Engineer for the electrical. And so that's good. And then you can also, any other resources, there's an elite success plan with Go Engineer that you just pay and you can access all those self-paced videos yourself. Or there's live training where, say, I can do this online for you. Our team can go through a book and and show the extras and the thing, the errors that pop up to show you what happens there, if any occur. And then I would say definitely just ask questions, ask us and see if we can steer you in the right direction. Maybe it's consulting, or maybe it's just, hey, take this class and you'll you'll be in great shape. Use us as a resource. You don't think about taking all this stuff on your own and just running with it. Years ago, there weren't that many resources back in the 90s. There really weren't many resources. There weren't books and things. There were some, but not much out there. And so we had to, as a company, the companies I work for, we had to learn everything on our own and figure it out. Can it be done? Can you do it on your own? You bet. But boy, we wasted a lot of time, a lot of months, a lot of years figuring out things on our own. Know that technology has improved. People, we have dedicated skill sets to help you with resources as well, you know, help you out there. So just don't feel like you have to take on everything on your own like we had to many, many years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 44:42

Okay. If you have a link to maybe any blog or anything that that you think is critically important or other page, you can send it to me. I'll put it in the show notes. Other than that, Dale, if you don't mind, I'll put your email in the show notes as well for anybody that wants to reach out with questions. I will just say personally, Dale is one of the most helpful people I've ever worked with, so don't hesitate to reach out to him. He's a great person just in general, but also great at what he does. So I'll put his contact info in the show notes, and we'll end it here. Thanks for being on the episode, Dale. Appreciate it. Great talking to you.

SPEAKER_02: 45:19

Thank you so much, Brandon. I appreciate you very much. You're an excellent, you're an awesome guy, too. And I hope nothing but success for you in the future.

SPEAKER_00: 45:27

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01: 45:28

Alright, I'll let you go, Dale. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, you too. Take care.

unknown: 45:32

Bye.

SPEAKER_01: 45:34

So that was a conversation with my good friend Dale Rice. As you can probably tell, Dale doesn't just care about software.

SPEAKER_00: 45:42

He really does care about people. In every conversation I've ever had with Dale, generally some aspect of life pops up. And Dale has been around and has a tremendous amount of life experience, a tremendous amount of perseverance and grit. And he's just a helpful person who can help you get through hard times, whether that's engineering software or just somebody to defend to. I would encourage you to reach out to Dale. We'll put his contact information in the show notes, as well as the company he works for. If you ever do have any questions around solvers or engineering experience, he's just a good person to reach out to and like he said, don't sit there and struggle through things yourself. That's not productive for anyone. Just reach out and use others' expertise. That episode over, I would like to take a second to just say I'm grateful that you're listening to the Engineering Passion Express. It's growing and becoming more successful. And I would like to make it even better than it is today. I have a number of ideas for new episodes that I am working on creating. However, these episodes do cost money to create, to host, to edit, and this podcast needs support. There's a few ways you can support this podcast. Listening is a good start. But we'd also like you to ensure that you're following us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. If you really enjoy some of the episodes, please share them with other engineers and encourage them to also follow this podcast so that you can start some discussions. As I said, I'm truly grateful to you all that are listening to the Engineering Passion Express. I look forward to a future where we start putting out even more episodes. And I hope you do too. I'll see you on future episodes of the Engineering Passion Express.