Build your world - mechanical engineers get the best of both worlds.
- A career in mechanical engineering allows you to build a better future for you, and for the world.
- This explains why 89% of engineers have high levels of job satisfaction, and would choose the same career path again.
Secure your future
Mechanical engineering is a secure career with a bright, long-term future:
- In the UK alone, there will be 1.86m new job openings for engineers by 2020.
- There is already a shortage of qualified engineers, meaning higher salaries and more options for those who are qualified.
Reap the rewards
Mechanical engineers earn good salaries - well above the national average:
- The average starting salary for an engineering graduate is £26,536 (the second highest of all graduates after medicine and dentistry).
- Apprentices who become Engineering Technicians earn on average £40,000.
- With experience and professional qualifications, you could earn a basic salary of around £70,000 as a Chartered Engineer.
Get to the top
Mechanical engineers have lots of options for career progression:
- 85% of engineering graduates go on to further study.
- More experience and qualifications lead to more responsibility and higher salaries.
- 33% of the world’s most successful companies have a leader with a background in engineering (e.g. Microsoft, Amazon and General Motors). Engineers are valued for their transferable skills.
Make your mark
Mechanical engineers make a real difference:
- You could help solve some of the biggest global challenges facing humanity, like climate change, cyber security, ageing populations, food, clean water and energy.
- Or you could create an invention that changes the world.
Do anything, anywhere
Mechanical engineers work all over the world, in countless industries:
- Becoming a mechanical engineer could take you to some interesting places – oil rigs, deserts, the Antarctic, the deep sea.
- Mechanical engineering qualifications and experience are like having a passport to work in many different industries and countries.
The benefits of vitamin D have long been reported, but are you getting enough of this nutrient in your everyday diet for optimal health and wellbeing? Whether you opt for a daily dose of sunshine, a supplement, or fortified foods, getting enough vitamin D is vital when it comes to keeping your bones strong and your immune system firing on all cylinders.
Vitamin D is a nutrient with abundant benefits for our physical and mental health. However, very few foods naturally contain vitamin D besides fortified foods and drinks such as milk, breakfast cereals, yogurts and orange juices. The best food sources of vitamin D are fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, and fish liver oils, while eggs, cheese and mushrooms contain small amounts.
Our bodies also make vitamin D when our skin is exposed to the sun. But as we all know, it’s important to wear sunscreen and stay in the shade to reduce our risk of skin cancer. Older people and people with dark skin struggle to make enough vitamin D in sunlight. So how can we make sure we’re getting enough of this vital nutrient?
One of the easiest ways to get enough vitamin D into our everyday diet is through the best vitamin D supplements, available in capsules, sprays and chewables. Make sure you check out what levels of vitamin D the National Institutes of Health (opens in new tab) recommends, depending on your age.
What are the benefits of vitamin D?
According to Rahaf Al Bochi, registered nutritionist and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (opens in new tab), there are several benefits to vitamin D. “Vitamin D helps absorb calcium and phosphorus, which is important for bone and teeth health,” she says. “Vitamin D also plays a role in disease prevention such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes, reducing the risk for depression.”
Rahaf Al Bochi, RDN, LDN
Al Bochi is a registered nutritionist and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She practices through an intuitive eating approach and specializes in the Mediterranean eating pattern. Al Bochi is a member of the Academy's Nutrition Entrepreneurs dietetic practice group and a graduate of Ryerson University.
We’ve taken a deeper dive into some of these key benefits, along with others, to discover what this important nutrient can do for our physical and mental wellbeing.
1. It supports the immune system
Vitamin D is already known to help our immune system resist invading bacteria and viruses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (opens in new tab) (CDC). But the accurate Covid-19 pandemic has shown how powerful vitamin D can be in supporting our immune systems against more severe diseases.
A review released in 2022 (opens in new tab) into the role vitamin D plays in fighting Covid-19 found that low vitamin D levels may increase the risk of infection and may also increase its severity. Researchers concluded that vitamin D supplementation could protect people from respiratory diseases and prevent it from progressing in severity, reducing the risk of death.
2. It builds strong bones and teeth
Vitamin D is vital to building and maintaining strong, healthy bones and teeth. It does this by promoting calcium and phosphorus absorption in the gut, which helps bones to mineralize, increasing strength and hardness.
Not getting enough vitamin D can lead to tooth loss and leave bones brittle and weak. It can even cause rickets in children and osteoporosis in older adults. With more than 53 million adults (opens in new tab) in the U.S. at risk of developing osteoporosis, vitamin D could be a powerful tool in increasing bone health.
3. It supports a healthy heart
Vitamin D helps to regulate heart function and reduce blood pressure, while vitamin D deficiency is associated with heart problems, stiffening arteries and high blood pressure.
Although there is not enough evidence to support the idea that vitamin D supplementation can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), many health experts argue that it reduces blood cholesterol levels (opens in new tab) and high blood pressure (opens in new tab), both of which can contribute to CVD.
4. May prevent type 2 diabetes
Vitamin D may help the body Excellerate its sensitivity to insulin, which is the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. This can reduce the risk of insulin resistance, which can lead to type 2 diabetes. Numerous studies, such as one published in the Biochemical Journal (opens in new tab), have also linked vitamin D deficiency to developing type 2 diabetes.
5. May inhibit cancer spread
According to the NIH (opens in new tab), vitamin D can inhibit or slow the progressions of certain cancer tumors. This may be because of its anti-inflammatory effect or because it may be able to stop the tumor from growing blood vessels.
A 2019 meta-analysis of trials into vitamin D supplementation and cancer incidence and mortality published in Annals of Oncology (opens in new tab) found that while vitamin D did not reduce cancer incidents, it significantly reduced cancer deaths by as much as 13% (opens in new tab).
However, one study reported an association between a higher intake of vitamin A and invasive breast cancer, with subjects experiencing a 28% rise (opens in new tab) in risk.
People with cancer should always speak to their oncologist before opting for vitamin A supplementation.
6. May reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis (MS)
Lots of studies over the years, including one published in the journal of Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders (opens in new tab), have shown that people who get more sunlight exposure and vitamin D from their diet have a reduced risk of developing MS, an autoimmune disease affecting the central nervous system. As the NIH (opens in new tab) notes, people who live in hotter, more sunny countries rarely develop this condition compared to those who live in cooler, cloudier countries.
Some experts suggest vitamin D supplements could reduce the risk of developing the disease or Excellerate symptoms associated with MS, as a 2021 article published in Annals of Agricultural and Environmental Medicine (opens in new tab) argues. However, we need more evidence to be sure of the benefits.
7. May reduce the risk of depression
More evidence is emerging that vitamin D can be an essential tool to support mental wellbeing. In 2020, a systematic review and meta-analysis published in Depression and Anxiety (opens in new tab) compared the effect of a vitamin D supplement and a placebo on thousands of participants with ‘negative emotions.’ Researchers found that vitamin D supplementation improved the mood of patients with major depressive disorder.
However, a 2021 review in the Journal of Clinical Medicine (opens in new tab) that looked into the use of vitamin D in healthy adults did not find consistent evidence to support the use of vitamin D in combating other mental health problems. Researchers also noted that some studies recommended physical activity in addition to supplementation or recommended food sources of vitamin D instead.
So while we can cautiously say vitamin D may have a mood-boosting effect, especially on those with depression, we need more research on how it does this and how it should be combined with other methods of supporting mental health.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
Collagen is found throughout the body in muscles, bones, connective tissue and skin, and is something we create ourselves from amino acids. It is the most abundant protein in the body, but you may have heard there are some potential benefits of collagen when taken as a dietary supplement.
As we age, our bodies become less effective at making collagen, and we may find ourselves with brittle nails, thinner hair and more fragile skin. This is due to the presence of collagen in the dermal layer of the skin, which is where our hair follicles live and age-related collagen production drop off. As well as the visible signs of aging, we may feel the effects of less collagen in our bodies in the form of joint pain and weaker muscles.
We’ve spoken to experts about the main benefits of collagen and whether collagen supplements may be useful as we get older. Looking for more ways to top up your protein intake? Check out our round-up of the best protein powder to support muscle growth.
1. Skin health
A review in the Gerontology (opens in new tab) journal indicates that the age-related loss and fragmentation of collagen fibrils (the protein structure) can cause delayed wound healing and even skin cancer development as the skin is weakened. As such, many topical anti-aging creams contain collagen, although this does little more than moisturize the skin.
Dr Deborah Lee, a medical doctor and representative for Dr Fox Online Pharmacy (opens in new tab), explains to Live Science that collagen production drops off as we age, which leads to skin sagging. “As we age, the production of collagen slows and the collagen produced is less efficient – which underlies many of the changes we see with aging, such as wrinkling and sagging of the skin, joint pain, loss of height, and fractures,” she says. “The structure of collagen is organized with a complicated fiber system, with chains of amino acids arranged in fibrils, like strong ropes, to provide a tight and reliable support structure.”
Having worked for many years in the U.K's National Health Service, initially as a GP, and then as Lead Clinician for an integrated Community Sexual Health Service, Dr Deborah Lee now works as a health and medical writer, with an emphasis on women’s health. She is a menopause specialist.
A 2019 review in the Journal of Drugs in Dermatology (opens in new tab) indicates that while collagen in skin creams isn’t effective, taking an oral collagen supplement in the form of collagen tripeptide saw notable improvements to skin elasticity. The review concludes that while research into collagen for skin health is still in its early stages, results are promising for collagen supplementation.
2. Joint health
A review in the Mechanisms of Aging and Development (opens in new tab) indicates that cellular degeneration as we age may be responsible for the development of osteoarthritis later in life. The review highlights several causes of this cellular degeneration, and one of the factors mentioned is the reduced levels of collagen in the body as we age.
Dr Lee tells Live Science that sometimes those with arthritis take collagen to support joint health. “Collagen can be taken as a supplement to treat joint pain in those with arthritis. The scientific name is collagen hydrolysate, but it is also called hydrolysed collagen, purified gelatine, HCP and type 2 collagen,” she says. “Collagen is purchased as capsules which contain collagen usually made from beef, pork or fish bones, which have been boiled and processed.”
A meta-analysis in International Orthopedics (opens in new tab) shows promising improvements in osteoarthritis symptoms when patients were given collagen orally. When results were compared against several different scales, many showed an improvement to stiffness, although reported pain and functional limitation patients experienced was not significantly changed.
3. Muscular support and healing
A British Journal of Nutrition (opens in new tab) study into the impacts of collagen peptide supplementation on elderly men when combined with resistance training showed an improvement in body composition and muscle strength. As resistance training puts the muscles under stress, the application of collagen, a structural protein, may help muscles effectively heal from that stress, increasing strength and tone.
In addition to this, some medical procedures use collagen membranes or grafts to promote faster wound healing. A review in the International Journal of Biomedical Sciences (opens in new tab) found that bovine collagen grafts create a favorable environment for bone regeneration. The review notes that 3% of people have an allergic response to collagen, so you should be careful when taking a supplement for the first time.
4. Healthy heart
Collagen supplementation may also promote cardiovascular health. Research in the Journal of Atherosclerosis and Thrombosis (opens in new tab) where patients were given two daily supplements of collagen tripeptide over six months indicates that collagen can Excellerate signs of atherosclerosis (the hardening of arteries due to plaque buildup). Several methods were used to measure the improvement, including testing blood lipid levels. The study concluded that collagen tripeptide can be used as an effective treatment or preventative measure.
5. Stronger hair and nails
A clinical trial in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology (opens in new tab) found that collagen supplementation can significantly Excellerate the condition of brittle nails. Patients saw an increase in nail growth and 88% of the participants saw an improvement even four weeks after the treatment.
Hair and nails are made primarily of keratin, which is another structural protein, but collagen plays a role in the health of our scalp and the layer of our skin which contains hair follicles. Having sufficient collagen within our bodies contributes to healthy hair follicles and by extension, healthy hair, as seen in research in Experimental Dermatology (opens in new tab). It also contains the amino acids needed to make keratin.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
Biomedical engineering employment is projected to grow by an impressive 10% over the next 10 years, ... [+]
gettyIn a study conducted a few months ago, we analyzed and determined the highest paying medical jobs in the United States in 2022. Cariologists topped that list, but it brought up another question, one about jobs that are adjacent to medical occupations: How much money do biomedical engineers earn in 2022?
In a past article, we examined the highest paying engineering jobs in every state. That list was heavily dominated by petroleum engineers, nuclear engineers, and aerospace engineers. However, biomedical engineering careers have been blowing up in popularity. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), the job outlook for biomedical engineers is excellent: Employment of biomedical engineers is projected to grow by 10% from 2021 to 2031, a rate which is faster than the average for all jobs.
In terms of pay, the average biomedical engineering salary is over $100,000 per year on the national level, according to the BLS. The median annual biomedical engineering salary is naturally slightly lower at $97,410, but it rises to $123,400 for the 75th percentile of biomedical engineers and $154,750 for the 90th percentile. Thus, biomedical engineering is definitely an intriguing and remunerative field to pursue.
Read on to find out the states where biomedical engineer salaries are the highest in 2022.
10 States Where Biomedical Engineers Earn the Most Money in 2022
Looking at the country as a whole, the average biomedical engineering salary in the U.S. is $101,020. That is only a little shy of double the average annual wage for all occupations in the nation, $58,260. Of course, biomedical engineers can go through years of education, including undergraduate degrees, master’s degrees, and finally doctoral degrees, in order to practice in their field professionally. According to BrokeScholar, the college with the largest number of doctoral degrees in bioengineering and biomedical engineering is Georgia Tech, with 39 doctoral degrees awarded in the 2021-2022 academic year.
Despite Georgia Tech turning out the most biomedical engineering doctoral degrees, Georgia does not rank among the top states where biomedical engineers earn the most money. Below is a breakdown of the top 10 states where biomedical engineering salaries are the highest. Some of the states where biomedical engineers earn the most may be quite surprising.
1. New Mexico
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $64.48
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $134,120
2. Arizona
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $58.16
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $120,970
3. Minnesota
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $57.33
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $119,250
4. Connecticut
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $55.97
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $116,430
5. Massachusetts
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $55.61
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $115,670
6. Louisiana
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $53.58
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $111,440
7. New Jersey
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $53.22
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $110,700
8. Washington
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $52.60
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $109,420
9. Wisconsin
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $52.05
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $108,250
10. New York
Average biomedical engineering salary per hour: $51.29
Average biomedical engineering salary per year: $106,690
Trends in Biomedical Engineering Salaries
Geographically, the top 10 states with the highest average biomedical engineer salaries are a mixed batch and it is hard to identify a clear pattern. The two states where biomedical engineer average annual wages are highest are located in the Southwest — No. 1 New Mexico and No. 2 Arizona. Another two of the top 10 states are located in New England — No. 4 Connecticut and No. 5 Massachusetts. Two of the top-paying states are in the upper Midwest — No. 3 Minnesota and No. 9 Wisconsin. And then another two states are in the Northeast but outside New England — No. 7 New Jersey and No. 10 New York. Louisiana is the lone state representing the U.S. South to make the top 10 list.
Table of the States Where Biomedical Engineers Earn the Most Money
The BLS does not have wage data for biomedical engineers across all 50 states. Instead, it only has wage data for biomedical engineers in 35 states plus the District of Columbia. Below you’ll find a table that includes the state, the average hourly biomedical engineer salary, and the average annual biomedical engineer salary. States are ranked in order of highest biomedical engineer salary to lowest.
KYIV, Ukraine — With Ukraine scrambling to keep communication lines open during the war, an army of engineers from the country’s phone companies has mobilized to help the public and policymakers stay in touch during repeated Russian missile and drone strikes.
The engineers, who typically go unseen and unsung in peacetime, often work around the clock to maintain or restore phone service, sometimes braving minefields to do so. After Russian strikes took out the electricity that cellphone towers usually run on, they revved up generators to keep the towers on.
“I know our guys — my colleagues — are very exhausted, but they’re motivated by the fact that we are doing an important thing,” Yuriy Dugnist, an engineer with Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar, said after crunching through a half-foot of fresh snow to reach a fenced-in mobile phone tower on the western fringe of Kyiv, the capital.
Dugrist and his co-workers offered a glimpse of their new daily routines, which involve using an app on their own phones to monitor which of the scores of phone towers in the capital area were receiving electricity, either during breaks from the controlled blackouts being used to conserve energy or from the generators that kick in to provide backup power.
One entry ominously read, in English, “Low Fuel.”
Stopping off at a service station before their rounds, the team members filled up eight 20-liter (5.3 gallon) jerrycans with diesel fuel for a vast tank under a generator that relays power up a 60-foot cell tower in a suburban village that has had no electricity for days.
It’s one of many Ukrainian towns that have had intermittent power, or none at all, in the wake of multiple rounds of devastating Russian strikes in accurate weeks targeting the country’s infrastructure — power plants in particular.
Kyivstar is the largest of Ukraine’s three main mobile phone companies, with some 26 million customers — or the equivalent of about two-thirds of the country’s population before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion drove millions of people abroad, even if many have since returned.
The diesel generators were installed at the foot of the cell phone towers since long before the invasion, but they were rarely needed. Many Western countries have offered up similar generators and transformers to help Ukraine keep electricity running as well as possible after Russia’s blitz.
After emergency blackouts prompted by a round of Russian strikes on Nov. 23, Kyivstar deployed 15 teams of engineers simultaneously and called in “all our reserves” to troubleshoot the 2,500 mobile stations in their service area, Dugrist said.
He recalled rushing to the site of a destroyed cell tower when Russian forces pulled out of Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, earlier this year and getting there before Ukrainian minesweepers had arrived to provide the all-clear signal.
The strain the war is putting on Ukraine’s mobile phone networks has reportedly driven up prices for satellite phone alternatives like Elon Musk’s Starlink system, which Ukraine’s military has used during the conflict, now in its 10th month.
fter widespread infrastructure strikes last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky convened top officials to discuss the restoration work and supplies needed to safeguard the country’s energy and communication systems.
“Special attention is paid to the communication system,” he said, adding that no matter what the Russia has in mind, “we must maintain communication.”
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On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.
Twitter introduced retweets in 2009, turning an organic thing people were already doing—pasting someone else’s username and tweet, preceded by the letters RT—into a software function. In the years since, the retweet and its distant cousin the quote tweet (which launched in April 2015) have become two of the most common mechanics on Twitter.
But on Friday, a few users who pressed the retweet button saw the years roll back to 2009. Manual retweets, as they were called, were back.
The return of the manual retweet wasn’t Elon Musk’s latest attempt to appease users. Instead, it was the first public crack in the edifice of Twitter’s code base—a blip on the seismometer that warns of a bigger earthquake to come.
A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger, a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry. “These are very big, very complicated systems.” Krueger says one 2017 presentation from Twitter staff includes a statistic suggesting that more than half the back-end infrastructure was dedicated to storing data.
While many of Musk’s detractors may hope the platform goes through the equivalent of thermonuclear destruction, the collapse of something like Twitter happens gradually. For those who know, gradual breakdowns are a sign of concern that a larger crash could be imminent. And that’s what’s happening now.
It’s the small things
Whether it’s manual RTs appearing for a moment before retweets slowly morph into their standard form, ghostly follower counts that race ahead of the number of people actually following you, or replies that simply refuse to load, small bugs are appearing at Twitter’s periphery. Even Twitter’s rules, which Musk linked to on November 7, went offline temporarily under the load of millions of eyeballs. In short, it’s becoming unreliable.
“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.
The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says.
Twitter’s remaining engineers have largely been tasked with keeping the site stable over the last few days, since the new CEO decided to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff maintaining its code base. As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running.
This is particularly problematic, says Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs—a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.”
That engineer doesn’t see a route out of the issue—other than reversing the layoffs (which the company has reportedly already attempted to roll back somewhat). “If we’re going to be pushing at a breakneck pace, then things will break,” he says. “There’s no way around that. We’re accumulating technical debt much faster than before—almost as fast as we’re accumulating financial debt.”
The list grows longer
He presents a dystopian future where issues pile up as the backlog of maintenance tasks and fixes grows longer and longer. “Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”
Twitter’s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. It starts with the small things: “Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they’re using; whatever service in the back end they’re trying to use. They’ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just provide up.”
Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.”
The juddering manual retweets and faltering follower counts are indications that this is already happening. Twitter engineers have designed fail-safes that the platform can fall back on so that the functionality doesn’t go totally offline but cut-down versions are provided instead. That’s what we’re seeing, says Krueger.
Alongside the minor malfunctions, the Twitter engineer believes that there’ll be significant outages on the horizon, thanks in part to Musk’s drive to reduce Twitter’s cloud computing server load in an attempt to claw back up to $3 million a day in infrastructure costs. Reuters reports that this project, which came from Musk’s war room, is called the “Deep Cuts Plan.” One of Reuters’s sources called the idea “delusional,” while Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says that “unless they’ve massively overengineered the current system, the risk of poorer capacity and availability seems a logical conclusion.”
Brain drain
Meanwhile, when things do go kaput, there’s no longer the institutional knowledge to quickly fix issues as they arise. “A lot of the people I saw who were leaving after Friday have been there nine, 10, 11 years, which is just ridiculous for a tech company,” says the Twitter engineer. As those individuals walked out of Twitter offices, decades of knowledge about how its systems worked disappeared with them. (Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.)
Unfortunately, teams stripped back to their bare bones (according to those remaining at Twitter) include the tech writers’ team. “We had good documentation because of [that team],” says the engineer. No longer. When things go wrong, it’ll be harder to find out what has happened.
Getting answers will be harder externally as well. The communications team has been cut down from between 80 and 100 to just two people, according to one former team member who MIT Technology Review spoke to. “There’s too much for them to do, and they don’t speak enough languages to deal with the press as they need to,” says the engineer.
When MIT Technology Review reached out to Twitter for this story, the email went unanswered.
Musk’s recent criticism of Mastodon, the open-source alternative to Twitter that has piled on users in the days since the entrepreneur took control of the platform, invites the suggestion that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The Twitter CEO tweeted, then quickly deleted, a post telling users, “If you don’t like Twitter anymore, there is awesome site [sic] called Masterbatedone [sic].” Accompanying the words was a physical picture of his laptop screen open on Paul Krugman’s Mastodon profile, showing the economics columnist trying multiple times to post. Despite Musk’s attempt to highlight Mastodon’s unreliability, its success has been remarkable: nearly half a million people have signed up since Musk took over Twitter.
It’s happening at the same time that the first cracks in Twitter’s edifice are starting to show. It’s just the beginning, expects Krueger. “I would expect to start seeing significant public-facing problems with the technology within six months,” he says. “And I feel like that’s a generous estimate.”
KYIV, Ukraine -- With Ukraine scrambling to keep communication lines open during the war, an army of engineers from the country’s phone companies has mobilized to help the public and policymakers stay in touch during repeated Russian missile and drone strikes.
The engineers, who typically go unseen and unsung in peacetime, often work around the clock to maintain or restore phone service, sometimes braving minefields to do so. After Russian strikes took out the electricity that cellphone towers usually run on, they revved up generators to keep the towers on.
“I know our guys — my colleagues — are very exhausted, but they’re motivated by the fact that we are doing an important thing,” Yuriy Dugnist, an engineer with Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar, said after crunching through a half-foot (15 centimeters) of fresh snow to reach a fenced-in mobile phone tower on the western fringe of Kyiv, the capital.
Dugrist and his co-workers offered a glimpse of their new daily routines, which involve using an app on their own phones to monitor which of the scores of phone towers in the capital area were receiving electricity, either during breaks from the controlled blackouts being used to conserve energy or from the generators that kick in to provide backup power.
One entry ominously read, in English, “Low Fuel.”
Stopping off at a service station before their rounds, the team members filled up eight 20-liter (5.3 gallon) jerrycans with diesel fuel for a vast tank under a generator that relays power up a 50-meter (160-foot) cell tower in a suburban village that has had no electricity for days.
It's one of many Ukrainian towns that have had intermittent power, or none at all, in the wake of multiple rounds of devastating Russian strikes in accurate weeks targeting the country's infrastructure — power plants in particular.
Kyivstar is the largest of Ukraine's three main mobile phone companies, with some 26 million customers — or the equivalent of about two-thirds of the country's population before Russia's Feb. 24 invasion drove millions of people abroad, even if many have since returned.
The diesel generators were installed at the foot of the cell phone towers since long before the invasion, but they were rarely needed. Many Western countries have offered up similar generators and transformers to help Ukraine keep electricity running as well as possible after Russia’s blitz.
After emergency blackouts prompted by a round of Russian strikes on Nov. 23, Kyivstar deployed 15 teams of engineers simultaneously and called in “all our reserves” to troubleshoot the 2,500 mobile stations in their service area, Dugrist said.
He recalled rushing to the site of a destroyed cell tower when Russian forces pulled out of Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, earlier this year and getting there before Ukrainian minesweepers had arrived to provide the all-clear signal.
The strain the war is putting on Ukraine's mobile phone networks has reportedly driven up prices for satellite phone alternatives like Elon Musk’s Starlink system, which Ukraine’s military has used during the conflict, now in its 10th month.
After widespread infrastructure strikes last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy convened top officials to discuss the restoration work and supplies needed to safeguard the country's energy and communication systems.
“Special attention is paid to the communication system,” he said, adding that no matter what the Russia has in mind, "we must maintain communication."
———
Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
