this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 201 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Water testing is incredibly boring, but also an extremely important job. Quality of water available affects everything in society, from top to bottom. But, I get that it is totally monotonous.

[–] toynbee 71 points 3 months ago (4 children)

That sounds like the kind of thing that could easily, and perhaps should, be automated.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In which case, the job becomes transferring the bottled samples into sample tubes in trays so that the machine can process them, and usually adding a barcode to each sample tube. The sample tubes need to be kept immaculate as well - some of the things that we test water for, like pesticides, are only present in miniscule concentrations. Might not actually save a great deal of time, and you need to buy and maintain a very expensive automated sampler.

When I used to work in the water industry, we were usually able to get PhD-qualified research chemists to do all this mind-numbing laboratory work. There's a bit of a surplus of qualified chemists compared to the number of chemist jobs available, so you got absurdly over-qualified people applying for these roles.

[–] Frostbeard 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I specifically did not specialize in analytical chemistry because of this. It's relatively easy to get a job, but it's mind numbingly boring to do the same tests over and over and over.

I did physical chemistry. No jobs but at least no one knows what the fuck you can do.

(Incidentally I managed to get a job with energetic materials where my education is occasionally relevant)

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I did automation work for a sewage treatment center that did regular water testing as part of treatment. Most of these kinds of jobs are automated for the most part. There's always a human operator present to supervise and to do some small function that is still cheaper to have done manually instead of by machine.

[–] toynbee 14 points 3 months ago

I am definitely in favor of human supervision of many automated tasks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Thing is most of water testing can be automated. There are electronic meters that can measure most important water properties like pH, electrical resistivity, total dissolved solids, turbidity, etc, which only require calibration from time to time. I am not sure why OOP was hired for manually testing water.