A ruler, a metal spring and a bucket
How a high school physics project sparked Vincey’s love for technology.
Vincey Chui is an Algorithm Engineer at Continental.
How I explain my job when someone asks what I do.
I’m an engineering supervisor, for Safety Functions in our Advanced Driver Assistance Systems business unit. I have a team of four direct reports and we work on blind spot detection, trailer merge assist, automated emergency braking – all functions that assist the driver.
The degree to which the Continental culture empowers its people.
You’re given the requirements for a project, and then your boss goes off and lets you do it the way you think it should be done. If you get stuck, leaders are really willing to sit down and give you feedback. We’re big on empowering people at Continental and letting them figure out the “how.” Leaders provide encouragement and try to stretch and challenge people where they see potential.
One of our core values is Freedom to Act, which to some people can sound challenging and daunting at first. With the freedom comes a lot of uncertainty. In our area of the business, we’re developing a lot of new features, so it’s really necessary for people to step up and be able to navigate that ambiguity .
What motivates me in my career.
I’m really interested in the technology. I like solving problems. And what I really like is we can develop this safety feature and get the feedback from simulation data and vehicle testing, then change the feature and see the results. We’re building features to make driving safer.
Why I became interested enough in technology to make a career out of it.
I liked technology, but I didn’t have the foresight to take computer science courses in high school. I just didn’t know about them. My mom signed me up for a Photoshop class and HTML course one summer when I was 12 years-old, so I think that was probably one of the first steps I took into computer programming that made me interested in technology.
In high school, I had this physics project where we were given a metal spring and a ruler, and the task was to pull the spring back and launch it five meters into a bucket. So, using the ruler and our calculations, we had to know how far to pull back our spring to land it in the bucket. When we finally did it, it was so cool to see it. It was almost like we could control the matter around us or control the future – I thought that was really cool. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going into engineering at that point.
How I would describe to another female what it’s like to work at Continental.
