Blogs

This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.Throughout my 40-year career as an electrical engineer and entrepreneur, I’ve often been asked how I achieve a work-life balance. Over time, I’ve come to realize that the question—and the way it’s framed—is inherently flawed. So my response to the inquiry is simple: I seek to live an integrated life where work and personal joy are not in conflict but in harmony.The key is in shifting your mindset: Stop viewing work and life as opposites and start recognizing how they complement each other.The notion of work-life balance suggests that work and life are opposing forces. Balance is seen as an elusive goal. The implication is that success in one area inevitably comes at the expense of the other. But what if the conflict is more imagined than real? Instead of trying to balance two separate entities, the goal should be to integrate them into a cohesive whole.I won’t pretend that I have everything figured out. Life—especially with work, kids, and the everyday chaos of being part of a two-income household—is messy. But I’ve learned that work and life aren’t two things to balance; they’re two sides of the same coin. Rather than compartmentalizing them, I approach them as interconnected parts of a fulfilling journey.Here are tips that have helped me embrace work and life as a unified whole.Embracing chaosLet’s be real, balancing a career with caring for children and handling daily responsibilities is chaotic, especially when both spouses are working. Between shuttling the kids to after-school activities, keeping up with household chores, and managing work deadlines, it can feel impossible to find time for everything. But here’s the thing: Balance doesn’t always come in the form of perfectly blocked time. It can come in small, intentional moments.I’ve learned to make use of the in-between times to my advantage.When I used to attend my child’s swim meets or was waiting for an event to start, for example, I would catch up on work with my iPad. I wasn’t always working, but in those moments where I’d […]

For months, the world has wondered about the stated goal of the president of the United States to acquire Greenland. Is he merely expressing a desire to make America greater again in terms of territorial area? Is it a question of security policy? Or are critical minerals—and especially Greenland’s immense rare earth riches—a key factor?The first two questions can’t really be answered without a fuller understanding of the administration’s motives and strategies than is currently available publicly. But for that third question, there exists a wealth of data and context, both historical and modern-day.Let’s start with the modern day. U.S. industries, like those of any developed economy, depend on critical materials. Lots of attention now is focused on the rare earths, a group of elements of unusual importance because of their indispensability in essential commercial, defense, and industrial applications. Roughly 90 percent of processed rare earths come from China, creating supply-chain vulnerabilities that many countries are now trying to avoid, particularly since China announced restrictions on the export of heavy rare earths in April 2025. Systematic studies have indicated that Greenland has 10 important deposits of rare earth elements.But in mining, it’s the details that matter. To understand the value of a minerals deposit it’s important to consider the history and to make a reality check of documented resources. The facts and the obvious conclusions do not always reach decision-makers, investors, and the media.Greenland Is the World’s Biggest Island, But It’s Not as Big as You ThinkGreenland is the largest island in the world, but people often get an exaggerated impression of how big it is because the commonly used Mercator projection distorts the size of landmasses close to the poles. Greenland is about 2 million square kilometers. However, the ice-free part—which could much more feasibly be mined than the other part—is roughly the size of California, and without any scenic coastal highways. Traveling between settlements is possible only by boat or airplane.Greenland has had nine different mines since World War II, but only one, for […]

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!There is a widespread misconception in the tech industry that if you work hard, you are guaranteed to be rewarded. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. During my four and a half years at Meta, I saw many people working crazy hours who still ended up with a ‘Meets Most Expectations” rating, putting them at risk for a remedial performance improvement plan. Not only were these engineers sacrificing their evenings and taking on tons of stress, but they weren’t even being acknowledged for their efforts. Whether you’re at a startup or Big Tech company, there is an endless amount of work you could take on. No matter how many weekends you dedicate to your team, you’ll always have more to do. In order to have a sustainably high impact, you must be deliberate about choosing what to work on. By understanding what your team and manager care about, you can ensure great results that are commensurate with great effort. So many engineers mess this up: They go down a rabbit-hole about some interesting problem instead of thinking about their performance review and how they’ll be judged. Tactically, here’s what that means for you:Build relationships with colleagues who understand your work and can vouch for you in a wide range of areas. Working in isolation often leads to misunderstood goals and priorities, resulting in wasted efforts. Talking about your work is also extremely valuable for identifying future problems and opportunities.Tactfully share your work with colleagues so you get full credit for it. It’s not about “claiming” credit—it’s about sharing your work to help others. The byproduct of this is marketing. Figure out who might benefit from your work and send them regular project updates.Set clear expectations with your team and manager. Negative feedback should never be a surprise. You should regularly receive (and seek out) feedback before your official performance review. I recommend having a […]

At an event in Dortmund, Germany today, Amazon announced a new robotic system called Vulcan, which the company is calling “its first robotic system with a genuine sense of touch—designed to transform how robots interact with the physical world.” In the short to medium term, the physical world that Amazon is most concerned with is its warehouses, and Vulcan is designed to assist (or take over, depending on your perspective) with stowing and picking items in its mobile robotic inventory system.Related: Amazon’s Vulcan Robots Are Mastering Picking PackagesIn two upcoming papers in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Amazon researchers describe how both the stowing and picking side of the system operates. We covered stowing in detail a couple of years ago, when we spoke with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics. Parness and his team have made a lot of progress on stowing since then, improving speed and reliability over more than 500,000 stows in operational warehouses to the point where the average stowing robot is now slightly faster than the average stowing human. We spoke with Parness to get an update on stowing, as well as an in-depth look at how Vulcan handles picking, which you can find in this separate article. It’s a much different problem, and well worth a read.Optimizing Amazon’s Stowing ProcessStowing is the process by which Amazon brings products into its warehouses and adds them to its inventory so that you can order them. Not surprisingly, Amazon has gone to extreme lengths to optimize this process to maximize efficiency in both space and time. Human stowers are presented with a mobile robotic pod full of fabric cubbies (bins) with elastic bands across the front of them to keep stuff from falling out. The human’s job is to find a promising space in a bin, pull the plastic band aside, and stuff the thing into that space. The item’s new home is recorded in Amazon’s system, the pod then drives back into the warehouse, and the next pod comes along, ready for the next item. Different manipulation tools are used to interact with human-optimized bins.AmazonThe new paper on stowing includes some interesting numbers […]

As far as I can make out, Amazon’s warehouses are highly structured, extremely organized, very tidy, absolute raging messes. Everything in an Amazon warehouse is (usually) exactly where it’s supposed to be, which is typically jammed into some pseudorandom fabric bin the size of a shoebox along with a bunch of other pseudorandom crap. Somehow, this turns out to be the most space- and time-efficient way of doing things, because (as we’ve written about before) you have to consider the process of stowing items away in a warehouse as well as the process of picking them, and that involves some compromises in favor of space and speed.For humans, this isn’t so much of a problem. When someone orders something on Amazon, a human can root around in those bins, shove some things out of the way, and then pull out the item that they’re looking for. This is exactly the sort of thing that robots tend to be terrible at, because not only is this process slightly different every single time, it’s also very hard to define exactly how humans go about it. Related: Amazon’s Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than HumansAs you might expect, Amazon has been working very very hard on this picking problem. Today at an event in Germany, the company announced Vulcan, a robotic system that can both stow and pick items at human(ish) speeds.Last time we talked with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics, our conversation was focused on stowing—putting items into bins. As part of today’s announcement, Amazon revealed that its robots are now slightly faster at stowing than the average human is. But in the stow context, there’s a limited amount that a robot really has to understand about what’s actually happening in the bin. Fundamentally, the stowing robot’s job is to squoosh whatever is currently in a bin as far to one side as possible in order to make enough room to cram a new item in. As long as the robot is at least somewhat careful not to crushify anything, it’s a relatively straightforward task, at least compared to picking. The choices made when an item is stowed into a bin will affect how hard it is to get that item out of that bin […]