Trenton Systems Blog

Creative and passionate engineering

Written by Michael Bowling | Feb 13, 2018 3:49:35 PM

The Stereotypical Computer Engineer

We probably all have an image in our head of a stereotypical computer engineer. Sitting in their cube endlessly plugging away at the small details.

At first glance this may seem mundane and unfulfilling, but if you take a step back and see the bigger picture you realize that engineers should be considered some of the most creative and passionate people you know.

That smartphone in your pocket was once just a dream of an engineer. An engineer created a company called SpaceX that would launch rockets to Mars in 2018. When a group of engineers release the latest hardware or software the world sometimes can give it as much hype/press as a sporting event (Tesla releasing a new car, Apple releasing a new phone, etc). Technology is changing the world and engineers are leading the way. If we view engineers as the inventors, dreamers of our society then the stereotype that we mentioned earlier seems small and inaccurate.

The Trenton Difference

Trenton Systems has always considered itself an ‘engineering company’. What differentiates Trenton from most of our competitors out there…we dream and design our products with a focus on adding value. We don’t just want to produce the next widget focused on making it 10¢ cheaper. Our team of engineers are always looking at what we can do better and more creative than anyone else.

I know it may sound strange to say that an engineer is “passionate” about something. Let me give you a few recent real life examples here at Trenton:

  • We have a younger engineer here at Trenton Systems who is passionate about GPUs. Trenton has been partners with NVidia and we’ve worked with other GPU manufacturers over the years…but recently we had a new company come to Trenton Systems and ask if we could find a way to make over 250 GPUs work in one computer. I’ll admit that most people would have shrugged and moved on to the next potential customer since at first glance this seems extremely difficult if not impossible. This is not a product that I would have thought to design or market, but this Trenton Systems engineer dug in, worked with our BIOS engineers and system engineers to find a way to pull it off. Now Trenton Systems is moving into a whole new marketplace with a product that I don’t believe any other competitor can touch!
  • There is another engineer at Trenton Systems who has many years in storage and RAID design. He was a great engineer, but I’ll admit that we haven’t really utilized this storage experience over the years. Still he continually pushed for Trenton Systems to create a storage array that could handle high burst rates and have multiple host computers connect to this storage array through high-speed PCI Express. I loved his enthusiasm, but we struggled to push into this market. Still, persistence paid off when we found the right customer that needed a made in US storage array. The Trenton Systems engineer was so passionate about his design ideas that the customer almost immediately knew they wanted to work with us. Again, we are now opening to a whole new market with a unique product line!

I could list many other examples of where Trenton Systems engineers were creative and passionate about a product or technology. While we are known for our processor board design, and this remains our core competency, it is exciting to see creative and passionate engineers that push the envelope, invent something that doesn’t exist, and enable customers with innovative products.

Challenge Accepted

If you have a requirement that you know is complex, maybe too complex, we are up for the challenge. Our engineers are passionate about solving problems. Simply send us the specs and let us work on creating a high-performance computing solution for you. No matter the complexity!

Customer-Centric Approach

Too often companies focus on making a sale first and the customer's problems second. We've all been there - you call, you battle through the bombardment of sales related questions, and finally hours or sometimes even days later, you get a response - often times not the one you wanted to hear.

At Trenton Systems we take quite a different approach - we ask what you are trying to accomplish first then go off and engineer a solution for you. Once our engineers put their heads together, we come back with a proposal on what we think is the best approach for your requirement(s). At this point we wait for you tell us what you want to do. It's quite simple really, you are in the driver's seat from the get-go and we are your trusted partner that solves roadblocks.

Contact Us

Our Team is available via phone at (770) 287-3100, chat, or online form fill. Whichever method you prefer, do not hesitate to reach out. As we like to say here at Trenton Systems: "Our Engineers are you Engineers!"