Thoughts on Engineering
How We See Engineering
Intratec is all about problem-solving. Engineering is all about problem-solving. Engineering is so at the core of the company that all its collaborators are engineers.
To practice engineering means figuring out new, elegant, and cost-effective solutions. This is how problems are solved, and how true innovation is done.
This means that engineering is not about repeating knowledge acquired in any given engineering course, nor replicating old solutions. New real life problems are inherently multidisciplinary, and cannot be solved as a question in an university test, in which you just apply old solutions learned from an old textbook.
Indeed, we consider engineering courses as a limited training, where the engineering students just learn how to replicate old concepts in tests and exams. Rather, we value the competencies and skills one acquired throughout his/her entire academic life more than theoretical knowledge acquired in engineering courses. After all, true elegant solutions only come with hard work from those with problem-solving mindset, able to think critically and creatively, to communicate, to collaborate, to adapt and ultimately to persist.
So, we do not consider great engineers people who just hold an engineering degree. We consider great engineers those able to solve problems - no matter age, gender, any academic title - and we want the best ones (see the table below).
(*) An Important Note about Engineering Areas
In light of the above, we are not particularly interested in any specific area of engineering.... "chemical engineering", "mechanical engineering", "computation engineering", and the like. We are interested in Engineering. If problems in life do not come with tags, great engineers should not restrict themselves to such tags.
Put another way: problems we solve are not mechanical engineering problems, are not civil engineering problems, are not chemical engineering problems...we solve real life problems of the company, which are inherently multidisciplinary and are nothing like university practices.
So, being as clear as it gets:
- Anyone joining Intratec will have daily activities totally different from academic routines he/she was used to.
- Everybody at the company is constantly dealing with something new, which is necessarily unknown. That being the case, the vast majority of academic knowledges will not be used at Intratec. For instance:
- Aeronautical engineers will not work with fluid mechanics, vibrations, or airplane design;
- Chemical engineers will not deal exclusively with "green" chemicals, fermentation processes, or renewable technologies.
- And so on...
- Intellectual skills (critical and structured thinking, learning capability, logical reasoning), growing mindset and perseverance are the key foundations of one's employability in an increasingly dynamic labor market, and is what we appreciate the most in all engineers at Intratec.