Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E30 Jake Whinnery | Resources for Interviewing & Landing Engineering Jobs
Jake shares his engineering journey, insights into technical interviews, and strategies for young engineers to succeed in the hardware industry. He discusses his experiences at companies like Tesla and Relativity Space and how he created Hardware is Hard to help mechanical engineers land top-tier jobs.
Main Topics:
- Importance of internships in engineering career development
- Technical interview preparation strategies
- Emerging trends in hardware engineering (AR/VR, robotics, US manufacturing)
- Balancing productivity and personal growth
- Building engineering resources for students and early-career professionals
About the guest: Jake Whinnery is a mechanical engineer and hardware leader at Apple, driving innovation and empowering fellow engineers. A UC Berkeley graduate (B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, minor in EECS, 2023), he has contributed to cutting-edge hardware at Tesla, Meta, Relativity Space, and NASA Ames. In 2022, he co-founded Hardware Is Hard with Wilder Buchanan, a platform supporting 13,000+ engineers with tools like interview guides and technical resources. At Apple since August 2023, Jake works on camera hardware, integrating optics, design, and manufacturing. His blend of technical excellence and community leadership makes him a rising force in hardware engineering.
LINKS:
Jackson Wilder Buchanan LinkedIn
Aaron Moncur, host
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
My life philosophy is kind of like, we're not here for very long, and there's just so much to do. There's so many interesting things in the world. My whole goal is really to maximize as many experiences and opportunities as I can
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we're speaking with Jake winnery, a mechanical engineer at Apple's camera hardware team and co founder of hardware is hard a thriving online community that empowers hardware engineers to land top tier roles with internships at Tesla meta relativity space and NASA Ames, Jake blends deep mechanical expertise cross functional collaboration and startup grit. Today, he joins us to unpack his journey in hardware design, technical leadership and his passion for building engineering resources for others. Jake, thank you so much for being with us today.
Jake Whinnery:Thanks for having me. Aaron, appreciate it. That's quite the intro.
Aaron Moncur:So what made you decide to become an engineer?
Jake Whinnery:Oh, geez, yeah. So I guess, like, stem has always been a pretty big emphasis for me and my family. Both my parents actually met getting their PhDs and in chemistry. But I think at least my dad probably belonged more as an engineer on some level than a scientist. He was always tinkering in the garage and was a big, big woodworker. And so I kind of grew up doing some projects there, and then in high school, I had this big web of physics. It helped that I had one of the greatest physics teachers at my high school, but, yeah, he really piqued my interest into physics. Briefly looked at maybe even going into physics, but I figured I'd like something a little bit more applied. So kind of was choosing between mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, actually, and ended up going to Berkeley in mechanical that was when I got in for and honestly never really looked back. I love mechanical engineering, such a cool field, very broad,
Aaron Moncur:awesome. How was your college experience? Was it kind of the typical college experience? Or did you have any special experiences? At what point we're gonna get into the newsletter. Hardware is hard. At what point did you decide to start that? Sure,
Jake Whinnery:yeah, so I guess that's a pretty big question, but I don't know. I got to college, and my personality has always been kind of work hard, play hard, try and do everything you can and really maximize the opportunity. So when I got to college, I joined a bunch of clubs. I took way more classes than I probably should have that first semester, didn't sleep much and joined, like the Hyperloop team. I was on the Formula SAE team. I was on enable tech, which is like a biomedical assistive device club. I was extremely involved in the Formula team. Actually, that was probably one of the best decisions I made. Best decisions I made throughout college, was joining that because it put me in contact with this group of engineers who are so much smarter than I was, and so they were able to really kind of tutor and mentor me, especially two of them like Tony no and Rohan Patel, who were two of, like, the most impactful people on my life. They really showed me what it meant to be a mechanical engineer and told me, like, Hey, you should be getting internships. This is what you need to know in order to apply for them. And also, you know, let's build a car together, which is another cool experience. Unfortunately, though, then covid happened in March of 2020, so that actually, I guess, the way to view it is closed some opportunities, unfortunately, because, like, school went remote, but opened a lot of other ones. Because then I actually my partner Wilder, convinced me to take the next year off and do internships, which kind of changed my way that I view myself as, like engineering student to engineer, I guess, is kind of where I draw the line. And so then I got to go to relativity space. Back when they were really small, they were I was number like, 200 ish. As employees, there were only four interns. So that was a crazy experience. That was probably the most fun I've ever had in an internship. I just felt like every day I was learning so much, especially because I didn't really know much about space at the time, and so everybody else at the company obviously had worked in space for like 20 years, and so they were so happy to teach me. And so that was really exciting opportunity. And then I went to Tesla the next year or the next semester, and worked there for eight months on their autopilot electronics product development team. And that was kind of just like sharpening skills through the fire. I guess I had no idea what I could accomplish until I was asked to do four times as much as I thought I could I.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, talk a little bit more about that. That seems like a really interesting experience, or set of experiences that you had. What is there? One in particular that stands out where you just thought there's no way that I can accomplish what's being asked of me, and then, lo and behold, you did it. Yeah?
Jake Whinnery:I guess they're probably there are a few instances that come to mind. One of them would probably be like, if somebody had told me that I would be in charge of, like, systems going into production and with so little oversight, I think I would have been surprised going in, especially ones where I was doing, like a custom development with a bunch of different vendors across like Japan, China and the US. And, you know, there's nobody else on the call. It's just me and their team of engineers at like 10 to midnight calling about new technologies and how they can develop it for our needs, getting in samples. I developed the entire test plan, do the full stack, and then, like, present it to higher level leadership to try and convince them to use this new technology in the semi truck, which they did ultimately do, which was really exciting, but I think going in that would have sounded way too daunting for me, especially on, you know, the more months timeline instead of years. So that was really cool.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, okay, so you were spending, you know, late night phone calls with overseas suppliers. And during college, you're signing up for all these different clubs, taking in your words more classes than you probably should have. It seems like you have this drive and also just the physical stamina to do a lot, to spend a lot of time working. You mentioned you didn't sleep a whole lot. What do you think that drive and that mindset comes from
Jake Whinnery:as a source? I think just like my life philosophy is kind of like, we're not here for very long, and there's just so much to do. There's so many interesting things in the world. And my whole goal is really to maximize as many experiences and opportunities as I can. And so I mean, if that means not a lot of downtime, I think I'm okay with that. I think I would way rather be doing something interesting and fun than than sitting around resting. And so, like, kind of what that means, is saying yes to a lot of opportunities and then trying to downsize them later, maybe if you decide it's not something that you want to continue with as a priority. But in general, I love opportunities knocking on my doorstep and really being able to kind of seize out by the reins. How do
Aaron Moncur:you manage your energy? I mean, you're a relatively young guy, so you probably still have a lot of energy. But even you know guys your age, I make an assumption. I'm guessing you're like, like, late 20s, something like that, and it can be hard to fuel yourself and like, you know, push through a lot of late nights not getting a lot of sleep. What do you do to manage your energy?
Jake Whinnery:Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, I think it changes, like with age. I think probably three years ago, maybe I'd have a different perspective, full of more energy back then. But I guess what I try to do is ideally work on things that energize you. So then if, if you're working, then you're also gaining energy. So like, take the example of like, basically, if you have the option to go do like, go get a PhD, for example, you know, maybe you did, like, I did four years of research in college, and I never really loved any of it. It wasn't something that gave me energy. And so even those something that, like, my parents went and did and they would love for me to go to grad school. I guess I decided it's not really something that energizes me as much as going out and getting to solve problems in industry or or side hobbies, you know, making something that's cool, like, I love desk toys, and so that's something that I'll I always find time for to, like, basically put together a Saturday, carve it out and just work on making like, right now I'm working on like a split flap machine, and so I just things that I love to do. I think they're very energizing, and so it's hard to get tired of them.
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Aaron Moncur:that's awesome. Let's go back to something you said a little bit ago. You mentioned taking a break from college for a year so that you could do an internship, which is a little unusual for the like the standard College Track. Thinking back to that time, how did that year off actually doing engineering work as an intern. How did that influence the rest of your career? And in what set of circumstances would you suggest students consider doing the same thing?
Jake Whinnery:That's a great question. It's something I actually think is extremely important. So, like, I that year off, like, really just changed my entire career. I think, like, having internships helps you get more internships at the places you want to go. And so, like, it's, it's kind of a compounding effect. And so, like, by the end of college, I could go pretty much wherever I wanted to out of graduation where, like, the job market was not in a super strong place. And so a lot of other people were really struggling to find anything, and so they were willing to take a job in, say, a position that they didn't want to do, like a design engineer, taking a position in testing or reliability or manufacturing or something that wasn't their primary interest. And once you do that, I think it's really hard to kind of break back out into what you are interested without taking some like pay cuts or going somewhere that you don't want to go. And so I was really fortunate, and that taking doing so many internships in college and taking that year off made me not only be able to go where I wanted to go, but know what I wanted to do. Because, like, across each internship, I tried to go to a different sector. Also, like I worked in kind of NASA was more like a research position. And then I worked at a small, like bio biomed, like consulting company called triple ring. And there I was doing micro fluidics development. And then after that, I went to Procter and Gamble, and I was like doing process engineering optimizations, and obviously a whole different sector of like ohm products. And then I went to relativity, and I was a propulsion engineer all of a sudden. And so then I got to learn all this cool stuff about metal printing and nine axis CNC and stuff where you're only making a few parts, but they need to be perfect, and have need to perform under crazy high and low temperatures. So that was cool. And then I went into the automotive sector, and I got to try out, you know, a little bit of optics knowledge, a lot more mass manufacturing, injection molded parts, snap fits, all that sort of stuff. And then I went into consumer electronics for my last internship, and I really enjoyed some aspects of that, and so then I decided to continue in that realm, kind of after graduation.
Aaron Moncur:Seems like there are a lot of advantages associated with doing an internship mid college. Why is speculation, of course, but just out of curiosity, why do you think that universities don't encourage this. And why do you think more students, even outside of universities? Encouragement or lack thereof? Why don't more students take that route?
Jake Whinnery:I mean, so I think one really pertinent example is University of Waterloo. I mean, they have a required internship program like I think everybody there has to do as many internships as I did. It's a five year like engineering degree as a result, but also as a result. At like Tesla meta and apple that I've seen, there's far more Waterloo graduates than any other school that I'm aware of, because when a company is hiring, they're looking for somebody that they hopefully know can already execute. I mean, it's not optimal because, like, we are technically new grads, but this is just the way the job market's changed over the last 10 years. Like now, unfortunately, just graduating doesn't mean as much as it used to. And so now you kind of need something to set yourself apart and say, like, Hey, I already know exactly what it means to work in your environment, and so you know my uptime of like, once, once you bring me on, I'm going to be productive immediately, instead of six months from now. That's invaluable to companies, and so they love it. As for why schools in the US don't push that more, I think part of it is the education system is a little bit slow to change, and I think we're seeing that really pertinently right now with like the rise of AI and the intersection of AI and education tools, like the curriculum, just hasn't really changed in the last 1520, years, even as a lot of other things and how we can deliver and absorb knowledge has. And so unfortunately, I think there's a bit of that. And then also, the school wants to push people out in four years, as quickly as possible, so they're not necessarily as interested in what you're doing afterwards. So I think that's probably the
Aaron Moncur:root of it, yeah. Unfortunately, the the business goals for the university don't necessarily line up for what's best for the student long term.
Jake Whinnery:Yeah, and I wonder if there is a way to, I'm a huge fan of aligning incentives. I think that there's a lot of companies that have kind of built their backbone on this, and I love it. So I wonder if there is a way to, like, somehow, like, I think there were some, there's a couple of universities now I forget their names that are maybe doing some level of alignment between, like, your student loan payment and how much you're making after you graduate, where, like, you know, they take 10% for three years of whatever you're making, so then their incentive is to make you find a job after you graduate. So that could, maybe that would help.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. I love that. I mean, in my opinion, obviously you need to learn the fundamentals of engineering, but a university's deliverable, to me, should be a job, you know, a good job for the engineer. All right, let's talk a little bit about hardware is hard. What is hardware is hard, and how did they get started? Yeah,
Jake Whinnery:sure, so Harvard is hard, is, I mean, we try to make it the go to research resource for mechanical engineers who are looking to get a job, especially entry level jobs, or, you know, a couple of years out of college. Basically, what happened was back in 2018, 2019, 2020, there were effectively no good resources online for people looking to go into design roles or anything about technical interviews in realistically, like the 21st Century, you would search technical mechanical engineering interview questions, and you would be confronted with stuff that nobody that I had met at college had ever been asked in a context of a engineering role for, especially within tech and so, kind of after taking so many internships, we realized that there really is a formula to it, like the cantilever beam question is extremely Common, because you can take it in so many directions, and there's really no resource for it. And so typed up like a little word doc. And when people would ask me for tips, once I started getting a little bit older on interviewing, I would just send them the word doc. And eventually, my friend Wilder and I, my co founder, we were in Portugal, actually, and we got covid. And the, I think it was right before the 2021, school year started. And so we got covid, we were trapped inside for 10 days, and we decided, what, you know, what should we do? And so we just started kind of writing down problems that we'd seen in our own circles. And one of them was that a lot of like junior students and or junior transfers, and first gen students, especially, had not really been exposed to the same level of mentorship that we had, and so they a didn't know that necessarily they should be interning every summer, that, like, you know what a co op is, and taking a semester off could pay for itself, actually, if not significantly more than that, as well as, you know, how do we get these jobs? How do we succeed in a technical interview? Because if you never had a design project in your first couple years of college, how are you going to talk about a project that you've done during an interview? And so, basically, you know, we compiled a bunch of these documents that we had written over the years and advice that we had given to people, and we're like, okay, let's just throw it up on a website for a couple $100 a year, and now we can just text people the website link when they ask us for advice, instead of, you know, typing in a long paragraph and sending them a Google Drive link, stuff like that. And so that was really how it started. It was never really intended at the time to be much more than that. And then we gave, I think, two in person seminars through like the Engineering Student Services at Berkeley. And from there, we actually got much more traffic than we expected, kind of like in the hundreds of people range, kind of relatively immediately, within a couple of weeks. And that was cool to see. I mean, you think, Oh, wow, hundreds of people want to see what I said. So then we decided to add some more content to it. You know, the four year plan is kind of a big one of like, what you should be kind of looking to do each year, if you're like, a standard mechanical engineer, big fan of the LinkedIn Trojan horse, that's Wilder's method. He pioneered it of basically dive bombing every employee, every engineer at a company with LinkedIn DMS. And then, you know, 90% of them don't respond. 10 of them, 10% of them do how. Half of those, then ask for a resume. Suddenly you have five interviews, and you get three positions. And so that's awesome. Yeah, it's just kind of like a general marketing funnel, almost. So some pretty funny stats on that, but yeah. So then we just kept adding to the website, and then later that year, so in August, I guess maybe six months after we launched the website, we decided, hey, what if we started a newsletter that could be a good way to basically, right now, we're not making any any profit. We're also not collecting any customer data, so it would be cool if we had a direct line to people who are engineers. You know, that might be something of value later, and then as a hook. I mean, because there's so few technical engineering questions and answers like you can find some questions if you scrape glass door, that was the classic back in the late 2010s of just scraping Glassdoor and finding every question for Apple or whatever company that you're gonna go apply to. But they never have answers, let alone ones that are necessarily right. And so created a book. And actually, sorry, the book creation happened later, but yeah, so created the newsletter, where the goal is just, you know, every other week, send out a technical question and an answer. And we had, of course, compiled a few 100 technical questions we've been asked over the years at different companies, and so just kind of went through the best ones and said, Okay, I'll answer this one this week. And without chatgpt, I think the research was a lot more involved into making sure it was right. So that definitely helps nowadays. But yeah, so it also helped with my own interviewing skills. I feel very comfortable in most type of interviews, just because I then had the opportunity to write, you know, 3050, 60 of these questions and answers, and then from there, I actually compiled into a book that we now sell on the website, just as kind of a prep guide for for people looking to apply to jobs.
Aaron Moncur:Nice, how, how has the site and the newsletter grown and evolved over the years. The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts, providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October, 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p, d, e, x, p, O dot engineer.
Jake Whinnery:Yeah, so it's way bigger now than I ever would have imagined back then. You know, the newsletter goes out to roughly 13,000 mechanical engineers. Now, it's a extremely targeted. I don't think anybody who's not a hardware engineer would really be interested in this sort of content. So it is cool. I feel like we have a kind of direct tap to many of the young mechanical engineers in the nation. You know, we've had over, I don't even know the exact amount, but I think last year we had over 100,000 site visits, which was huge. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's gotten to the point now where occasionally I'll meet somebody who's a mechanical engineer, and I'll tell them my name will be like, Oh my God, I know you. So that's not something I really ever expected to be attached to this. You're famous celebrity, yeah, at least on LinkedIn, I guess
Aaron Moncur:so you have the the mechanical engineering technical interview guide, which we've kind of talked around a little bit already. But can you outside of the the cantilever example? Are there any other examples that you can share some of the most commonly asked interview technical questions that engineers out there who are applying for jobs should be aware of.
Jake Whinnery:Sure, yeah. So
Aaron Moncur:usually
Jake Whinnery:it's funny, actually if, if you had a very, very strong high school physics background, you can usually answer many of the interview questions, or technical interview questions, because a lot of them are actually like physics brain teasers, like one of the most common ones back in the day. I don't know if they still use this as much now, because now everybody knows about it was like, you know, throwing a rock off of a boat. Does the water level go up or down? So they love having stuff that's like, a little bit unintuitive, because, you know, somebody might expect that because you throw the rock in off the boat like the basically, the water level would go up because there's more stuff down there now, but then, because the boat rises, then it actually goes down because the rock is more dense and it was being so. Order by the boat before. Anyways, that's not really relevant, but anyways, so they love physics brain teasers. Those are big ones. Usually you'll also get other than the cantilever beam one, which they'll do a bunch of variations. They could do variations in natural frequency, like force deflection, is the most common cross beam optimization. Those are all big ones. And then they'll have one in manufacturing, usually. So a lot of times they pick whatever is most familiar to you and run with that. And so like, injection molding is a really popular one. They'll they'll ask about, like, how would you design, like, a Lego to be injection molded, for example. They'll give you, like, some unoptimized shape. And so you can really share a lot of your your knowledge through that, which is always a good opportunity. And then this is why projects are so great, is if you can make them curious about a project, you can spend the entire rest of your technical interview talking about something that you definitely know. If they're going to ask you a question at random, hopefully you know it. If it's a project that you did, you definitely know it. And so you can really explain those in a way that gives confidence in your engineering abilities, because it's something you already did. And so I am a huge fan of projects. I think every engineer should, like be forced to have more, almost not like a thesis defense of like some sort of capstone project, but like they should, for sure, have something that they're proud of and would put their name by by the time they graduate, and like college and engineering of some sort of project, that's
Aaron Moncur:a great pro tip. And as an employer myself, I can speak to the validity of that. When you know someone brings in a resume, everyone has a resume. Resumes are boring. They're hard to read. I don't feel like they provide a lot of value. But when an applicant comes in and shows me pictures or video of a project that they did, you know that, to me, is the most compelling content that you can share as an applicant for an engineering job, because now the prospective employer gets to see what you actually did. This is what you can actually bring to the table, as opposed to just words on a page, which really don't say a whole lot, in my opinion. So the the newsletter now is it, is it? Would you say it's more geared towards students or young engineers, or even engineers later than in their in their career, or all of the above?
Jake Whinnery:I think I try to keep it relatively general. I think there is definitely a more, like junior, senior, first year, second year. So like, in the 20 to 25 range, like emphasis, but personally, like, as I get older, I still think it's nice to see a technical interview, Question and Answer in my inbox on a bi weekly basis, because it just keeps the skills sharp a little bit. You know, it's like, it can't really hurt if one day I'm obviously going to have to interview for something again. So it's, it's not that crazy to me that I think it does provide value to most mechanical engineers. Obviously, I think the higher level roles, they probably start asking you a different set of questions, but then they're going to be in the position where they're interviewing people. So, you know, maybe it's not the worst thing to have an interview question and answer that you can review and and take a look at and see what you like and what you don't like about it.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, is there, is there other content in the newsletter beyond just the interview questions.
Jake Whinnery:Yeah, so that was we started out with just the interview questions, and then we dabbled also with, like, some hardware news every once in a while. Now, I kind of just include the hardware news once it's if it's extremely important, if I feel like, if you're a mechanical engineer, you need to know this now. But then the other part of it is we include job links. So we'll scrape the internet for some pertinent job links for people, and we'll include, like, basically 16 job links of varying difficulty and pace, scales and locations. And so that's just because I think a lot of people are having a hard time finding jobs, and especially if you've been looking for a while and you're kind of low on motivation, I think this is a good one where it's like, you get, you get, literally, links sent into your inbox every other week, and you can just, you know, look through, say, Oh, this looks kind of interesting. I'll just apply now. And so it's like a good reminder to kind of stay on top of it. And even if you already have a job, it's a good reminder that you should if you want to maintain a competitive compensation, you should continue to explore what other options look like, so you know where you are relative to the
Aaron Moncur:market. Yeah. Okay, so the newsletter grew pretty quickly, hundreds in the first I guess it was a website back then, but hundreds in the first few weeks, and then at this point, you're up around 13,000 subscribers, which is amazing. Congratulations to you and your partner. How do you think it grew so quickly? Like, what were the what was the strategy there, if there even was one, or was it just 100% organic?
Jake Whinnery:Yeah. I mean, pretty much. I think it's, we have a very strong like, word of. Health. So basically, people find high utility in the content, I think, and they think that it's something that their friends would want, and so they send it there. And so we can, sometimes we can see sources that will just say like, oh, Facebook, or on Reddit, or even like Slack or something. And then you know that somebody is sending it internally, some sort of group. And so that's how we get a lot of our growth, actually, is just, you know, somebody finds it interesting, and then they see their friend and they say, Hey, you, you might also find this interesting. And they tell them there, which is amazing. I love community effects. I think they're so, so cool and fascinating. And like, really makes me feel happy about the world that, like, communities are still thriving. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, definitely. What do you see on the horizon for hardware is hard. Do you have any upcoming changes? Or, you know, what do you want to see it five years from now?
Jake Whinnery:That's a good question. I think I gotta ask myself that more more often. But I think at this point we've built out a lot of the like core content that I really wanted to like. The gen one technical interview guide was kind of the bare bones, like you need to know this if you're going into an interview or it's really just not going to go well. And then I think last year, I upgraded it into kind of the gen two, of, like, you know, here a lot of other things that are likely to be asked, but not necessarily. And then if, if I have time, I'll turn it into the Gen three of, like, going into different types of, like heat treatments and like, different metal characteristics. And I don't know, maybe even start expanding it past the cantilever beam only into some of the manufacturing stuff. But really, what we would like to know is like whatever content would be most useful to you guys. So right now, I'm working on a compensation piece. Basically had a couple 100 viewers of the newsletter fill out a like form, basically listing all their compensation data. And so I want to aggregate that into a really like, comprehensive piece on, like, what is the compensation market for mechanical engineers right now? And, you know, go across ages and skill levels and universities and locations, ideally. And so, like, that's a piece that I've always dreamed of having, because I think it's something that people really invest a lot of time into looking up, and don't necessarily find all the good stuff. Like, I think software gets so much resourcing relative to hardware. They have levels, you know, which is amazing resource for them. They have hacker rank and leetcode for interview questions. And so that was actually, like, the original vision is, like, vision is like, why do they have that? And we have nothing. We have glass door scraping and so no trying to add more interview questions always, is always the goal, and just help people get jobs more efficiently. But in terms of broader vision, I'm not sure I think I gotta think more on that for five years, searching Exactly, yeah, gotta go back to Portugal, I guess,
Aaron Moncur:hopefully not get covid this time. Yeah, hopefully. Where do you find the content? Like, is there a general source that you go to, or is it questions from readers, or is it just all over the place?
Jake Whinnery:Yeah, that's a fun one. So at first, pretty much all of the content was just coming from myself. It was just like, Wilder. And I had, you know, a huge bank of interview questions, and we'd go into it and say, like, oh, that's that was a really good question. I remember when they asked me that, and I completely flubbed it. And so then I write up, I try and figure out the answer. And sometimes that it's just googling. And, you know, a lot of times these questions exist somewhere on the internet, or there's something similar enough to it. Sometimes it means texting mechanical engineering friends and saying, Hey, what do you what do you think of this, and trying to work out the answer that way. But as time's gone on, we actually get a lot more submissions from people just over LinkedIn, they'll message me and say, Hey, like, I love hardware is hard. Like, thanks so much for creating and then I'll assist them. Say, Hey, if you really love it, you know, send me some interview questions. I love interview questions. And a lot of times we'll, we'll get some great submissions that way. We've even had a few guest writers of newsletters. Come on Just through LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn DMS, at least if he texts me, I'm relatively likely to respond. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of where a lot of the new sourcing has come since then, because obviously I haven't done an internship in a few years now, but it's a good way to maintain a pulse. I guess on the community is just through, through messaging.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, so you have most of the content is free. I'm a subscriber right now to the hardware is hard newsletter. It's great, awesome. Content, interesting, insightful, useful. You also have some paid content, so talk a little bit about what do you get for free versus what. You get for the paid content, sure,
Jake Whinnery:yeah, so for the for the premium paid content, it's a book that I put together. Basically, we put together a bunch of nice graphics, really re scrubbed basically all the basically, I think, year one of the newsletter, then, like, kind of got taken off a sub stack and then scrubbed through really intensely over a few months and put together new graphics. Instead of just typing in, like a carrot for the exponent, we went and did the whole thing and in like Overleaf. So that way you had nice latex and then really compiled into, like a comprehensive workbook that I think that if you can work through, that you can basically do any technical interview for at least entry to mid level jobs. Other than that, we also have a cheat sheet. So, like, something that I always do before an interview is basically, I go through my resume and I think, what are my, like, best projects that I like to talk about, and then, you know, oh, okay, this one has to do with natural frequencies. I'm going to write down, like the natural frequency formulas. Just make sure I have everything right at the top of my head. I'm going to write down like always, pl, cubed over three di the force deflection of a cantilever beam is should always be top of your mind. Guys do a technical interview, and then basically I write down all these, like, basic formulas that I probably already know. But like, always, you get stressed in an interview, so you want to bring it to, like, the top of your head, and then you can just kind of use that so that you know, like, like, you don't have to try and dredge up something from university three years ago, so you can just kind of know it in your head at that point.
Aaron Moncur:It's a almost like being in school a resource for studying for a test, basically, right? Yeah.
Jake Whinnery:And in some ways it is oh. And then the other ones that we sell also are the interview question database. I can't answer all the questions that I have, unfortunately, it just would take too long. But I do have, like, a, I just had a database of like 300 questions, and I was like, well, if people want this, then they can get a sneak peek at future newsletters, I guess, or they can just try to answer it themselves. Or nowadays, probably chatgpt can help them. So yeah, those are kind of the main ones that we do. And then also, I think a whole nother skew, actually, that I haven't really mentioned is, you know, even if you can find a job, how do you decide where to find a job. And so Wilder's tackled this part more than me, but he was really good about using pitch book in in college, which was free, provided to Berkeley students. And so he would just troll through the startups and hardware page and figure out who was getting a ton of funding, what were the valuations. And so that was kind of how he tailored his internship search, and so he's, he's been at Andrew for a couple of years now, and that's that's done very well over that time period. But yeah, so we had a whole page on how to use PitchBook and how to go through it. But then we've also compiled just a list of, you know, hardware startups that we think are likely to be successful. And if somebody wants to use that as like an application list. They can they can pay for that as
Aaron Moncur:well. That's great. Obviously, this all takes time, right? All this, this content, doesn't just magically appear. You and wilder are putting in hours behind the scenes to generate this really valuable content, and you're working at Apple right now, which I've heard is an intense place to work. How do you manage to balance your time? You know? How do you manage your time between every and I bet, just based on the short time we've we've gotten to know each other here, you probably have a dozen other things in the background that you're also doing in addition to these, what are your time management best practices like?
Jake Whinnery:Oh, time management best practices. I would say, it's not easy, but part of it is just diligence. I would say, like, really trying to create a schedule. So, like, use that calendar app and, you know, break it into very fine, fine grained level of details. I think I actually stole this one from my mom. She showed me a schedule of when she was in college, and it was broken down to five minute intervals,
Aaron Moncur:what she was doing and the President of the United States.
Jake Whinnery:Yeah, I know I'm not that diligent about it. Unfortunately, maybe I should be, but I'm somewhere in the like half hour increments. And, you know, really just trying to set aside time and being productive with your time. So I think, like, one thing I figured out in college was, like, the first couple years were a little bit more rough for me, because I wasn't being active necessarily. When I would set aside time, I'd say, Okay, I'm gonna go study for three hours, and then an hour of that is just on my phone, whereas, like, once I got back from my gap year, I think I was much more intentional with how I used my time, such that I would say, Okay, I'm going to, you know, finish these two practice tests now and then I'm going to, you know, be able to go play a basketball game, and I'm going to come back and do another two practice tests. But it's like time is. Always enough. It's more about like, engagement and so like, I try to be able to accurately Gage, like, you know, how tired am I? How much work have I done today? Am I? Am I feeling okay with this amount of productivity? And if not, that, that's okay, and then I should just go relax and do something that will recharge me so that I can be as productive as I can be later.
Aaron Moncur:To what extent do you feel like you have based your identity on productivity?
Jake Whinnery:Oh, man, getting into the moral philosophy, I guess, yeah, I guess, if you ask my friends, probably pretty, pretty highly intertwined. I guess I also would say that there's kind of a difference to me between, like, just productivity and kind of a, like, a full wife, like I don't, I don't think it's realistic to just wake up and and work every day until 3am and then wake up at eight and do it again. I think that there are like kind of different batteries within you, and so, like, I try to charge up some batteries with other activities. And so I would say even, even if I'm only spending 70% of my time being productive, like I'm using the other 30% of my time to see friends or see family, or go out to dinner, stuff like that, that is, I think, equally as valuable, if not more, so sometimes, and so it's not all work. Don't worry.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, awesome. I asked that question because this is something that I have been reflecting on lately, and I've realized that I have based a lot of my identity on being productive, and I didn't realize it consciously until, I don't know, a few months ago, maybe I've been I've been journaling more and trying to spend time reflecting on on what I write down. And this is one of the insights I had that I've based a lot of my identity on being productive, and when I'm not productive, I don't feel good about myself, and I don't think that's a healthy mindset to have, right? Because I should feel good about myself even during the times when I'm not productive, like you said, you need to recharge the batteries, right? So like not doing stuff that you would consider productive is okay and probably necessary. So anyway, that's something that's been on my mind lately, and I've been asking other people about that. I understand
Jake Whinnery:exactly what you're saying with that. I think I feel the exact same way a lot of the time, and you're right. I've also come to the conclusion that maybe that's not like a good way to live a happy life. Perhaps one thing that helped actually, I took a my last semester in college. I basically had, I was already taking a bunch of texts. I was like, Okay, let me tack on a course that I'm actually interested in before I leave university. And in a non technical sense, I guess, interested in and so I took this class called Neuropsychology of happiness, taught by Davina chan at Berkeley. And that was a really interesting class for me, not just because, like, it covered a lot of the basics of psychology as well, but she had this exercise where she had a list of like, 50 different things that you could do to try and be happier. And every week, you're required to do two of them and kind of write a little bit about it and see how its impact on your happiness was. And I felt like that was extremely helpful for me. And just even just like thinking about your own happiness can have impacts down the line. So, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that's fascinating. That sounds like a super interesting course to take. Do you remember what were a couple of the most impactful factors that ended up being relevant for you? Sure.
Jake Whinnery:Yeah. So one thing that is, I think, especially pertinent to, like, overproductive engineers, and such is that stress actually can. Stress can have very poor health consequences, I think is a well known fact, but it also depends on how you look at it. And so there are some studies with, like, I think a large number of CEOs, basically, and they would go through a lot of extremely stressful events, but then, based on how they reported how stressed they were, basically on how they look at the stress, it could change how the health actually impacted them. And so, like, a lot of stress can can be changed, I guess, the health impacts based on how you're looking at as it an opportunity for you to grow, or is it some something that's trying to beat you down? And so a lot of the times now, like, especially if you know, if I'm at work and I'm doing something, and. And something happens that, like, a crisis comes up. If I can at first, I'll be upset, and then I'll remind myself and say, hey, look like this is a really cool opportunity. Like, you know, you spend your whole life trying to get here, like this is exactly where you want to be, is trying to work through these hard problems. So like, this is an opportunity for you to do something new.
Aaron Moncur:It's all in the mind, isn't it? I've had opportunities throughout my life, and lately, as I've been journaling, this is something that's come up over and over, where I feel like I my energy levels, my motivation, as much as I would love for it to be pretty constant, it's just not. There are days when I feel super good and really motivated and just plow through work. And there are other days when I don't feel great, I don't feel super motivated, I feel lethargic, and I haven't been able to pinpoint why that is, but I've been I have these thought experiments where I think to myself, nothing has really changed, right? Like, if yesterday was a great day and today is maybe just a meh day, nothing really has changed. Like, my family's all good. The business is doing well. I'm healthy. No one has a gun to my head. I don't have covid, right? Food in my refrigerator, clothing on my back, shelter overhead, everything's still fine. So why do I feel different day to day? And it's all in the mind, right? The mind can, I'm not going to get too metaphysical here, but the mind can unlock a lot of things. And I just heard on a podcast recently. I can't remember which one, but there was this really famous case study. You may have heard of it before, back in the 50s, maybe, or 60s, there's a construction worker who you know, was at work doing his thing, and his foot got impaled with a steel spike went right through his boot, right through his foot, and so they rushed him to the hospital. This spike was so like embedded through the boot that they couldn't even pull it out and then take the boot off. They had to cut the boot off from around his foot, and once the boot was completely removed, to everyone's shock, they saw that this stake hadn't even gone through the guy's foot. It went right through in between the big toe and the next toe. So it didn't even, it didn't impale him, but he thought it did. And the whole time, you know, he was screaming in pain, right, agony and pain, because he thought that this, this pin, the stake, had gone through his foot. And it just goes to show how much control the mind has over our bodies and our thoughts and our emotions and our perception of pain and pleasure, all these different things. So
Jake Whinnery:totally, though. Yeah, the mind very powerful. All right. Well, let's
Aaron Moncur:wrap this up here, maybe just one or two more questions, and we'll we'll end for especially the younger engineers who are listening to this. Now, what do you think some of the emerging trends and technologies are that that these younger engineers should start learning about so that they have as many opportunities as possible as they enter the job force?
Jake Whinnery:I guess the way I see it, there are kind of like three, three big areas of opportunity right now within hardware that I think will continue to grow and be there for the next 10 ish years. So one of them, obviously, we've been seeing a lot of people in the or a lot of investment in, kind of the AR VR space. A lot of big companies have kind of been making a bet that that's going to be the next wearable that's going to be useful. I've seen a few pretty compelling demos of AR glasses, not at Apple, just on the internet, but clarify there, I wish. But yeah, no. So I've seen a few pretty compelling use cases, and the investment here is very substantial, especially because there are some players, like meta, who are currently dependent on other people's hardware, and they are not happy about that. They want to own the hardware so that they can't be, you know, controlled so much on especially on the privacy front, which has been like a whole big thing. But yeah, so I see AR technology primarily in terms of energy density of batteries. I think it needs to increase. We've seen some actually pretty big changes in the last couple of years, but I think we still basically need, like, a step change before we're going to see really compelling AR glasses there and then displays are kind of the other vertical that I've seen. Needed to be improved significantly, like right now. Wave guides have just a significant amount of loss. So I think optics would be a good place to focus within mechanical engineering, to kind of try and learn some more about that optics and like micro manufacturing techniques. But then number two, right now, we're seeing like a huge increase in global tensions, unsurprisingly, and so basically, there's a lot of opportunity for for many. Manufacturing within the US. And so that's been, like a big movement of, like, the political sector right now, but then also, like even within VC, like American dynamism, as it's called, is like moving manufacturing back to the US in kind of a more automated way, because to be honest, like we're never going to be able to automate, or we're never gonna be able to manufacture in the same way that they do overseas right now. It just doesn't, it doesn't work within the US, to be honest, within our population. And so, yeah, kind of, there's big opportunity there right now if you're looking to get into manufacturing. I think that's a good way to go. And then number three is probably the most I mean, probably the most interesting one to me on a personal basis, is kind of like robotics, and what does the future of that look like? Because obviously, we're kind of on the cusp of AI agents, as they're called, to like, go and, you know, send me any send an email for me, or, like, go onto this website and book a train for me. But the next logical step is go pick up groceries for me. You know, it's, go take my list off the fridge, go to Trader Joe's and pick up 15 oranges and three apples. And so to get there, I think it's a much more difficult route than people initially thought, like we're just kind of seeing this with autonomous driving coming 10 years after a lot of people thought it would. But yeah, so there's a lot that needs to be done in sensor development. Particularly, I think our hands are so amazing as far as actuation and tactile response and feeling. And so basically, we need to be able to develop actuators and sensors that are capable of doing what our hands can do before the humanoid like robotics revolution can continue if that's something that that is a good thing is maybe debatable, but yeah, I think there's a big opportunity there in sensors specifically. I think like that, plus IoT and more interconnectivity within the home is only going to grow.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, terrific. Those are great items. Jake, thank you so much for being on the show today. This was awesome, super fun to talk to you. Get to know more about you, your co founder, Wilder and hardware is hard, and some of your experiences and insights. We'll wrap things up now. Anything else that we didn't talk about, that that you want to share before, before we sign off, including, how can people get in touch with you. Oh,
Jake Whinnery:yeah, yeah. So if you want to reach out to me, you can reach out directly to the hardware is hard@gmail.com or you can honestly just message me on LinkedIn, and I will probably respond.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome. All right, Jake, thank you again. So much.
Jake Whinnery:Great. Thank you, Aaron, thanks for having me.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
