We ask Intel engineers Andrew O'Rourke and Brian Meehan to talk about their professional life – their mentors, details of current projects and so on.
Andrew O'Rourke
Andrew O'Rourke was born in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, and joined Intel 22 years ago. He holds some impressive credentials – a BEng in electronic product design and development, NCEA Dip TQM and Electronic Eng, MSc In TQM and 6 Sigma Black Belt certified.
Andrew O'Rourke
What inspired you to decide to become an engineer?
I’ve always been interested in the way different things work, also understanding 'how' and 'why' those items failed and how they could be fixed. My youth was spent fixing bicycles and machinery.
Can you tell us about what is involved in being a department engineer?
You need to be flexible to move between challenges, improvements, and development opportunities around multiple areas of the engineering groups..
Are there any interesting projects/technologies that you are currently working on?
Day to day sustaining and improvements around multiple semiconductor tools, along with problem solving with the focus of delivering to our customer needs, external or internally. Continuously training new engineers in the way Intel execute day-to-day manufacturing. I have previously worked in multiple different global Intel sites such as Portland, Oregon, and Israel, doing technology transfer from our development sites.
I work on projects to improve semiconductor tool efficiencies. Currently, my time is spent working across multiple projects to enable the future for the site.
Who or what was your greatest influence?
Alex Ferguson – mainly around how you can deliver and utilise all team members' skills and assets to deliver beyond expectations from a team.
What skills do you need to become a good engineer?
Technical knowledge is key. You must try and gain an understanding of what you are looking at. Tolerance of ambiguity to me is also an important skill, the ability to adapt to change is needed in a rapidly evolving environment.
What can be done to encourage more people, and in particular young girls, to explore careers in engineering?
Real life examples should be used to promote and engage young individuals to purse a life as an engineer.
What is your favourite thing about your job?
Every day is truly a different day. The industry does not stop evolving. Therefore, you must be continuously improving to keep up with the sector.
An interesting/fun fact about you, a hobby/interest or talent outside of engineering?
Plenty of young children always keep you guessing and keep you going! I have a keen interest in GAA and fundraising with the local GAA team.
Brian Meehan
Originally from Co Donegal, Brian Meehan holds a BSC (Hons) degree in applied physics and electronics, a BSC in business management and MSc in data analytics.
Brian Meehan
He joined Intel in 1996 with the idea that he would stay for a couple of years and then move to a smaller company where he could make a 'bigger impact'. He soon realised that you can make all the impact you want at Intel.
What inspired you to decide to become an engineer?
A few things really; I was a really inquisitive child. I was the kid that took his Christmas present apart five minutes after getting it to see how it worked. I was fascinated by design and how systems worked. I was drawn to problems and investigating how we could fix them. I loved frequent change with different
work every day.
My first job in Intel, where I worked as an etest or parametric test engineer, gave me the freedom to figure out how things worked and integrated together in a high volume manufacturing or production environment. The second thing was the pace at which things changed. As they said to me in NEO (New Employee Orientation) back in 1996, 'No two days will ever be the same', and that has proved to be true.
Can you tell us about what is involved in being a sort systems engineer?
I started in 1996, in the sort or test engineering department here in Ireland and my first role was as a parametric or etest test engineer. It was a brilliant role as you have full control over test equipment, software, operating system and the material quality.
Over the years, I moved from that into various management roles (parametric test manager, manufacturing manager, automation manager and systems manager) but eventually I realised I missed the day-to-day activities of an engineering role. I moved to a role as a systems staff engineer, responsible for the software and systems that support the test department and the production test floor.
What are your main responsibilities? Any interesting projects/technologies you are currently working on?
Numerous interesting projects including:
- Designing and developing the automation systems to allow us to process product made by other companies;
- Developing a supply chain to sell product into specific countries by using another company to do some of the processing;
- Figuring out production 'receive issues' were being caused by incorrect date being inserted into the database, e.g. the date was from a time zone ahead of ours. This was an example of my inner nerd!
Who or what was your greatest influence?
Wow, that’s a good question. I hadn’t thought aboutf it too much, but I would have to say I am open to learning and influence, so I take things from numerous people:
- My late father – 'Work hard and don’t ask somebody to do something you wouldn’t do!'
- My first boss of 20 years – 'undercommit and overdeliver', he always talked about exceeding expectations and delighting customers;
- My R&D boss – 'Cadence… Cadence… Cadence'. Schedule is critical;
- My last boss – 'So what?' – don’t communicate in the terms that are important to you, communicate in the terms that are important to the listener – make it relevant and important to them.
What skills do you need to become a good engineer?
Inquisitive, eager to learn and keep learning. This will be the basis for problem-solving skills. Good interpersonal skills – you need to be able to work with others. Data is king! Without data extraction and analysis skills you will not be as efficient as others.
What can be done to encourage more people, and in particular young girls, to explore careers in engineering?
This is something I feel strongly about as I now have a daughter of my own and one day would love to see her go into a technical field. For me the problem is twofold:
- Primary schools need to break the silos and typical stereotypes… Even to this day most of the schools put woodwork or metalwork opposite home economics etc, which means that kids (both female and male) must drop something if they want to experience one of the other strands. Surely in this day and age, it would make sense to have more strands where they can get entry level experience. For me, having something like a mandatory life skills course whereby they do woodwork, metal work, putting up a shelf, wiring a plug, jump starting a car, problem solving etc would break down a lot of the stereotypes and increase the number of people that realise that engineering is a career for them.
- The second thing for me is role models. I think it’s critical to have more female role models that girls can look up to. Unfortunately, we live in an age where a lot of the role models are celebs or models rather than what they achieved. You only have to see how much a young girl cheers for an all-girl team on Robot Wars to see how inspirational a good role model can be.
What is your favourite thing about your job?
Variation and the number of people I get to deal with.
An interesting/fun fact about you, a hobby/interest or talent outside of engineering?
In the last few years, I have taken up archery – both shooting and collecting/restoring old traditional wood bows. I’m much better at collecting bows than shooting them. Also, I really struggle with the fact that when you concentrate hard you may shoot poorly but if you over-ride your brain and use your subconscious, you shoot much better. I think somehow it’s trying to tell me to believe in my own abilities!