My initial reaction was to say “This is worth money! Why are you just giving it away?” but of course, at a certain point, money just isn’t a motivating factor. For so called “knowledge workers,” developing news skills and mastering them was the intrinsic reason for putting so much time and effort in to these projects. Here it was first hand: for the scientists and engineers in the area, making something cool was more valuable than the effort it would take to capitalize on an idea.

Which brings me to the second point I raised in the title. Why don’t these ideas don’t get stolen? The answer, as I see it, is that to steal an idea requires caring about it deeply. These people are putting hours of labor into their ideas because they are passionate. A corporation, however, has all sorts of inertia to fight: they have budgets and schedules and resources that are already tied up. Finding the combination  of someone with 1) with passion who 2) cares about that idea 3) has the technical skills and 4) and can convince other people to spend time on it, is very, very difficult.

So keep on making, makers! I can’t wait to see all the cool stuff you all are cooking up!

*picture courtesy of Mark Strozier

In the midst of talking to an acquaintance and trying to convince him to come work with me, we got talking about location. He did not currently live in the same city as me. He also divulged that he was considering a different job further away, just about as far away from where he lived as he could get (without leaving the country). We began discussing the merits of moving for a job and he stated it quite simply:

For the right job, he would move just about anywhere.

I, of course, immediately began probing him on worst case scenarios. What about completely barren areas or moving to a place that had very few resources (grocery, gasoline, etc)? What about if the weather was terrible? What if the cost of living was outrageous? But still, he maintained that the right job would get him anywhere.

It was at this point that I began thinking of my own perfect job (I enjoy my current job a lot but I still have a perfect job situation in my head). How far would I go for it? I know for me, I would need the following:

• Ability to get back to my extended family once per year (once every two years maximum).
• Decent enough weather to go outside once per day, even if not for long.
• A town with one decent restaurant.
• A modern grocery story that has available produce.
• Not so remote of a location that I cannot have an internet connection (it’s my livelihood….sort of).
• On the other end of the spectrum, if it were a big city, I would need some ability to get to green space once per day.

Much more importantly, dear reader, is knowing how far would you go? If you found a job that was truly a perfect fit for you, what would you give up? Where would you consider moving to? Have you done this in the past? Please let us know in the comments!

Thanks to amyfry for the picture of the truck

Let’s start with where I disagree with the post.  I am not sure that I buy into the whole “personal brand” idea, but I also take issue with one of the final comments: that your blog probably isn’t going to replace your resume.  The first is a matter of opinion, and in engineering, I’m going to guess that more manager-types are going to be interested in results and not your marketing je nes sais quoi.  (I could very well be wrong on this, however, which is why I’m an engineer and not an HR person.)  On the second point, however, I recently found an article in the Wall Street Journal discussing how many companies, particularly in tech, are moving away from resumes and want to see your online presence instead.  Hence, I do think blogging is definitely a step in the right direction.  On the other hand, blogging strictly as a marketing strategy doesn’t tend to go over well, as many companies have found out and thus dropped their blogs.  So keeping your blog real and not just using it to market yourself is probably a good way to keep readership.

With that out of the way, what things might be relevant for engineers?  The last three points of discussion were the most relevant: knowledge advancement, relationship building, and demonstration of skill.  Knowledge advancement is really what it sounds like: learning new things to make sure you sound sufficiently knowledgeable about your topic area.  I can vouch for the fact that, on the rare occasion I decide to put a technically meaty post on my personal blog, I spend a lot of time learning and thinking about things in a very deep way.  Relationship building is probably just a different way of saying “networking”, except you’re using an electronic signature rather than the good old-fashioned business card.  Not only can you network with people who read and comment on your blog, you can also network by leaving comments on other people’s blogs.  (In fact, that’s how I ‘met’ a good number of my fellow EngineerBlogs bloggers.)  Finally, demonstration of skill is just that: showing off your work.  However, it can also show off your communication skills, your ideas, and even your general demeanor.

My observation is that all technical bloggers seem to use their blogs for relationship building (or maybe ‘networking’).  However, it seems like the academics are a bit more focused on that than many of the ‘practicing engineers’ who blog.  Many of the best engineering blogs feature technical know-how.

So would you consider starting a blog to improve your employment and networking opportunities?  Do you think the benefits outweigh the potential problems with blogging? If you have done so already, do you think it’s been beneficial?

I see a degree, at least for those fresh out of school without an established career, as a proof of competence. Trying to get hired without a degree, naturally means finding another way to convincingly demonstrate that you have the necessary skills. In other words, “show me what you can do.”

Now in some fields of study, I think this is perfectly reasonable.  For example, compsci majors can go develop a web sever or an app and graphic design students have a portfolio.

In some fields, however, the resources required to build a portfolio are just unreasonable for an individual to develop. Good luck finding a spare reactor to hone your skills in nuclear physics. It’s not going to happen outside of a university setting.

In my personal experience, I look back and feel like I got a little lucky. My company took a risk hiring me, because I didn’t have much experience in plastic part design or in the medical device industry. As consultants, with a wide variety of work, they cared more about my ability to learn than my work experience (although I should say my work experience did show an ability to learn.) It turns out that I’m rapidly acquiring those skills.

In the end, it seems to me like there should be a better way to establish what you have learned (or your ability to learn) outside of a degree. What would it look like? A testing service? An apprenticeship program? Or are portfolios enough? Or maybe just a shift in how people perceive the value of a degree is all that is required. What do you think?

These are sidewalks for the blind. Ribbed designs indicate a straight path while round bumps indicate a turn or intersection. It’s quite the sight as they’re not only put down outdoors, but also inside subway stations as well leading all the way to the subway doors.

Shanghai is a fairly new city. It’s an odd statement seeing how Shanghai used to a stronghold of foreign presence after the Opium Wars in the 19th century. Still, much of Shanghai has been torn down and put up anew in the last decade. In trying to turn Shanghai into a modern and model Chinese city, someone (or some government body) had the foresight to think about putting these things down as new roads are being built. This got me thinking about thinking ahead. I’m sure it’s not cheap to put down these blind sidewalks, but surely, it’s cheaper to do it upfront then to retrofit down the road.

This type of thinking ahead is what I’m trying to get my young team of engineers to try to do more often. Think ahead about how you plan to test your designs because how you plan to test your design will influence your design. Think ahead about how you plan to physically floorplan your circuits, because your floorplan will influence your design. Think ahead about how the larger system behaviour may affect your circuit, because how the system behaves will influence your design.

Lord knows we’ve been caught with our pants down more than once by not adding enough visibility into our designs, making probing critical signals very hard to do. And when your pants are down, probing hard to reach places is not something I look forward to.

If you have stories about how a little more up front thinking would have saved you a world of pain in your design, I’d love to hear about it.

On a side note, government spending public money to help the needy (blind people in this case), how socialist of them. I wonder who they got their inspiration from. Perhaps this t-shirt will gives us a clue.

—
What The Flux is a semi-regular weekendish feature on EngineeringBlogs.org that follows the follies and jollies of an engineer in industry, yours truly.

Hunh?

You see, I know a decent chunk of engineers who I’d love to hire. I know I’d like to hire them because I’ve seen their work, I’ve talked to them about electronics and I know that they know their stuff. I feel confident that whatever they don’t currently know, they would quickly go out and learn to the best of their ability and apply it to the situation I’ve placed them in. However, in reviewing their work and credentials, I see that there isn’t an undergraduate degree on their resume.

FULL STOP.

Is this my rule? Am I the one that immediately clams up when I see they haven’t received their degree, which I must consider to be a ticket to a job? Nope. I work at a big company, as many engineers do. And like all big companies, there is an HR department in place that is in charge of hiring and administrative duties for employees. And somewhere deep in their handbook or buried in the job description, there is a clause about the candidate needing an engineering degree from an ABET accredited university.

Now, I can try and go around HR and I’m sure it’s possible with enough effort. As Sam Feller has written on his personal site, sometimes it’s necessary to go around HR while on the other side of the table, as a job hunter. But I don’t really take issue with the people enforcing the rule in HR, so much as the thinking behind the policy. In fact, I’m pretty sure the policy originated from the MBA playbook. “Hire the best people, as fast as possible, with as little effort as possible”. Naturally, you’d want to only hire people with university degrees, right? Isn’t this how it’s always been done?

Well, in fact…no. It hasn’t always been this way. In fact, this is a relatively new phenomenon. Previously, engineers could enter a company in two different ways. The first is the same way they enter now, with a university degree. The other was working their way up, either from the shop floor or as a technician. Almost all training was “on the job” and responsibilities were granted as the person became more and more experienced. This meant that someone without a high school diploma (though likely they did have that) could one day be a head engineer at a company, having worked their way up. And given the time frame of when this trend changed, this could very well be the case today. Perhaps your top engineer never finished school?

I’m of the belief that this is not likely to happen anymore. The combination of HR policy and social norms means that most engineers entering companies will be required to have a degree of some sort. I’ve even heard of companies making older engineers that had not earned a degree go back and earn one retroactively, as though the degree would validate the years of work they had already done. Even though “on the job” is where engineers learn most of the relevant work, there is an undeniable focus on having that degree.

One of my concerns is the logical extension of this trend. If previously a high school diploma was sufficient–but no longer is–what is the next step? Will every practicing engineer need to have a Master’s degree along with their bachelor’s degree, similar to how many teachers are now required? Will it then be a PhD? Is the profession any better for it? Or is the value of a higher degree then lessened? Mostly I’m just worried that I’ll be forced to go back to school when I have no intention to. I find that I learn more while doing my work than I ever learned while in school. While I understand that a university education is different and meant to be a broad based support for future endeavors, if I never use the base…why require it at all?

Seth Godin wrote an ebook recently called, “Stop Stealing Dreams“. In it, he discusses the origins of public schools and what they produce. While that book is a detailed and lengthy account of the maladies of modern schooling, there is one overarching point I want to pull out of the text. He states:

Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented
to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Scale was more important than quality,
just as it was for most industrialists.

This turns into many different interesting threads of thought, but none more interesting to me than the fact that schools might not actually be working. At all. And so that’s why I get so incensed when it is a requirement for hiring someone. If I can prove through questioning and references and viewing experience of the person I want to hire, why isn’t that allowed? And possibly more importantly, if I am trying to hire someone for a creative endeavor (and yes, engineering is a creative endeavor, no matter how you slice it), would I want someone who has excelled in a system that favors conformity over creativity?

As a quick aside after asking such heavy questions, I feel I should explain myself. Perhaps I’m becoming, HypoChris™, which is what my wife calls me when I’m being unfairly hypocritical. After all, a university degree is still a decent indicator of good work, right? And more importantly, I got a university degree, didn’t I? So would I hire me? Well, maybe….but in the end, probably not; at least not right when I was coming out of school. Sure, my cooperative education helped me understand engineering in a larger context and learn on the job. But I don’t feel I truly became an engineer until my second job out of school, when I took it upon myself to really get deep into the material. Not surprisingly, this was also the time when I began to enjoy engineering the most. It was the point when I was purely learning on my own and struggling and striving to make myself better that I would have considered hiring me. Did I need a degree to get to that point? There’s no way to tell, since it was a confluence of factors that got me to that point. However, I do know other people that reached that same point without earning a degree in EE.

As a final point, I’d like to bring up the haven of most engineers who don’t have degrees. In fact, it’s quite hilarious. Most engineers without the official slip of paper end up in consulting. Often times it’s because this is a way around HR departments. If you aren’t officially working for the company and instead only invoice them for your services, you don’t show up on HR’s radar. They can’t protest about what they don’t know is happening. The people without degrees who are good engineers often need to find other ways to get paid for their work, so they often have clever working agreements. They also have to work harder to find gigs, often through networking (which also happens  to be the primary way that consultants are found). The truly ridiculous part of all of it though is that when a consultant is needed, companies often paid much more than they do their full time engineers (even after adjustments for taxes and health insurance and such).

So do I think they should never hire anyone with a college degree in engineering companies? Of course not, that’s silly. However, I think there should be an honest discussion about why there are degree requirements for jobs, especially in this age of sky high tuitions. Perhaps, as this author from the Denver Post states, a way to fix the problem with student loans and the skyrocketing price of education is to stop requiring it for everything. That would just be a side benefit. The main benefit would be cutting off the degree inflation that is making it difficult to find workers. Instead, depend upon experiential learning and hire people that are eager to teach themselves.

I’m sure there’s a reader out there saying something like, “Well Chris, why don’t you stop complaining about it, move up the ladder and fix it?” Well, I would. But first I’d need to go get a degree and learn the playbook. And by that point, I’ll just be focused on hiring people as fast as I can.

Thanks to lordsutch for the original diploma image.

Image credit: http://www.wired.com/geekdad

I love building things. I love working with my hands, I like using power tools, I like the physical making of STUFF. (Or the tearing apart of stuff, which is a lot of fun but perhaps less productive….)

And by choosing to major in mechanical engineering, I thought I was giving myself the best shot I could to find a career where I can build stuff.

And now I am looking around at what my friends from undergraduate university are doing, and none of them are building things. And if I look at what my friends from graduate school are doing, none of them are building things either.

Part of this has to do with what you WANT to do. Of course if your interests lie more on the modeling/simulation side of mechanical engineering, or if you are more interested in leadership roles, or in management, or in design rather than implementation – then you follow your skills and find a job in those areas. There can be overlap, of course, but if you don’t WANT to build things, chances are you won’t (and probably shouldn’t) end up in a job doing that.

But let’s assume you DO want to build things. How to accomplish this?

Well it does have to do with WHERE you work. If you choose to go to Wall Street, well obviously you won’t be building things. If you go into consulting, or patent legal work, clearly you have chosen a different path.

How about working for a classical mechanical type of company? Ford to build cars, or John Deere to build tractors, or GE to build turbines, or Conoco to build oil rigs? I know folks who work for each of those places, and in all cases they are not the ones doing the actual building. Usually because they are in the management track – in which case they are leaders, directing a team of folks, going to meetings, making high level strategy decisions. As soon as I realized this meant spending 80% time in meetings, wearing a suit, and working in an office all day, I knew it wasn’t the right place for me.

It is possible to be in the engineering track in a large mechanical company, and I know a couple folks doing that – and that is closer to what I’d be interested in. At least you get to use some engineering knowledge to design things – heat exchangers, or compressors, or piping, or engine components. Yet still you hand off your design for others to make. If you are lucky, you will get to see your design implemented, and maybe you can point with pride to a car with your component in it, or get to travel to an oil field to see something you were involved in designing. But you still never got your hands dirty, and you still work in an office.

How about academia? Maybe you could get your hands dirty there – but let’s face it, how many professors actually spend time in the lab? Teaching, writing grants, and mentoring grad students seem to be the biggest job responsibilities. The grad students are the ones who actually MAKE things – and hey, guess what I’m doing at the moment!

How about working for a startup? I am slowly learning about this kind of life, and to be honest it seems really attractive. However if you are the CEO of a startup, most of your time is spent on things like meeting with potential investors, dealing with the board of directors, hiring and firing people, coordinating and organizing and scheduling, and again we are back to 80% time spent in meetings. Even as the CEO of a technically-based startup, the set of job responsibilities still doesn’t include building things. However, the CTO of a small startup probably would be building things. That seems like the most likely place, in my mind, to actually be able to combine technical knowledge and practical hands-on skills.

In the end, the answer may be that by going in to higher education, I have educated myself right out of what I wanted to do. Those who can design new mechanical stuff are no longer the ones actually working on the machine shop floor making it – and maybe that is the way it should be. If my most valuable skill is the design, I should logically be contributing there instead of taking the job that a vocational degree holder is qualified to do. Except that I LIKE doing what vocational degree holders do.

The jobs that actually let you build things may be the vocational jobs – automotive technicians, machine shop workers, welders, electricians, construction crews. I may end up there – I’ll be the only PhD woman driving a backhoe, but I’ll be a happy one!

So where do you go if you actually want to build things?

Creative Commons Licence hmcotterill on Flickr

There can be few greater misnomers than the title of the course I attended for two days last week: Time Management. Who thought that one up? Not students of metaphysics, anyway. The management of time? We can philosophise it, theorise it, chop it up into humanly sensible bits, run our lives to it; but we certainly can’t manage it.

Still, what’s in a name? It’s a pithy title (better than “Trying to make the best of our remaining hours on earth, at work and at home”) and at least sells courses to HR departments, so let’s go with it.

Manager-like, let’s also get straight to the core question: why was I there and what did I learn? (Management questions are always double-barrelled).

I was there because during a personal development chat with my manager and director, I raised the point that I was struggling to maintain my deadlines; overall we were happy that the quality and quantity of my output were acceptable – my work, however, was (is) often last minute or late. It was generally accepted that this was the result of the sheer number of inputs and outputs I’m supposed to manage with minimal support. A sensible remedy would of course be giving me a colleague or two; but since adding resource to our group is off the table for the next couple of years, my director suggested some training. My manager and I exchanged a subtle rolling of the eyes, but agreed it couldn’t do much harm.

And so to the second barrel: what did I learn?

I don’t know how to answer that question.

So I’ll break it down. There are two ways of looking at it, the tools and the settings. Let’s start with the easier of the two:

Tools

Engineers love tools, so here are a couple that were mentioned.

A certain Mr. Eisenhower is credited as saying “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” This was used (by Steven Covey in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) as the basis of a matrix that can be used to help sift through all the tasks you have facing you in this sort of way (my version below):

The important / urgent or "Eisenhower" matrix

We should strive to be in the green zone, working on non-urgent and important projects. {Sigh}. I’m going to try implementing the matrix at work by setting aside a couple of hours and sorting my upcoming tasks as best I can.

As an aside, I would be tempted to try and add a third dimension to the matrix: Interesting / Not Interesting. There are tasks, such as validation testing, that are important (otherwise you don’t get regulatory approval to ship parts), can either be urgent or not urgent, depending on how the project is going, but which can be terminally dull – validation tests don’t tend to tell you anything in the slightest bit interesting about the product: these are the sort of tasks that grind me down to dust.

Another tool that we were shown was called “SAULUS”: It’s a German acronym which in English would end up something like SECSIV

Situation (Analyse the situation, i.e. what’s preventing you from working optimally)
Effects (Describe the Effects of this distraction)
Causes (Assess the causes of the situation)
Solutions (Brainstorm solutions with somebody else – a mentor would be best, though a colleague might do)
Implementation (Do it!)
Verify (Check)

Sound familiar? Yes, it’s basically an FMEA for a human issue. Our Quality colleagues would use an Ishikawa fishbone diagram.

The example I used was “too much surfing the web at work”, leading to ineffectiveness. One of the key causes I identified was the noise level in my offices: not just in decibels but in audible discussions that don’t concern or interest me at the time. I suffer from an inability to shut out extraneous noise (I’m the type of person who can’t help listening to another conversation even if I’m on the phone to somebody else. Sorry about that….) A solution would be to find a quiet room (an empty meeting room does the trick) and the implementation is to book it via Outlook. As for the verification – well, I’ve been doing it since the start of the year and I find it to be very effective and at least I know that I can focus on things given the right conditions. Now, if only I could get my own office to go with my new non-existent colleagues…

Adding colleagues fails the R in “SMART” test, that actions be

Specific
Measureable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

Delegation was also mentioned. It’s a tool that can be learned, especially if you’re not a manager and even if you don’t have colleagues that do directly the same job as you do. Whether it’s an email query that needs answering or a project in itself, delegation ensures that work is done without overloading you.

Yes, I noticed a big flaw with that delegation argument, too. It’s a double-edged sword, try not to get hit by people delegating back to you, and all that. Let’s move on.

Saying No. The ability to say no in a professional, constructive way is a tricky skill to learn, but it’s vital to stay on track with your own targets. It’s something I’m terrible at, but I’m going to practice, with Eisenhower’s Important / Urgent Matrix as a template.

Settings

Engineers are humans, too

What do I mean by settings? In this case, I’m talking about how we are as people. During the two days we filled out a couple of personal analytical questionnaires (rate things 1-5 then score according to categories). These highlighted two things: firstly that I’m driven by a desire to please, which makes it most difficult to say no (I’m also driven by speed and data, so I tend to “pulse” my work but get it right). Secondly, that I need to work on prioritisation (Eisenhower), target setting/following and coping with distractions.

A chunk of the “settings” theme was related to stress and looking after ourselves. This would be a course in itself, but the general gist is: eat well, avoid burnout, avoid alienating your family and friends, stay healthy.

Don’t look back in anger

So no, I didn’t actually learn anything that could be described as groundbreakingly new. However, having two days out of work to think about work was very valuable. For me, the biggest positive of the course were the attendees: there were five of us in total, which was in itself a nice, workable number, and we were diverse. Our crew was an architect, a production manager, a museum director, a logistics manager and a development engineer; we got on very well indeed.

We came at the time management problem from different perspectives and arrived at different answers.

How about you? What are your experiences with Time Management? If you’re feeling bogged down with tasks, I hope this post at least gives you a direction to search in. If you’ve been through all of this before, let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

Oak Ridge National Lab CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of the reasons I became a blogger was to become more involved in a community which could offer me advice and support on the problems I face in graduate school and as a woman in STEM. In many cases, others have faced the same types of problems I’m encountering and have found possible solutions. So what does this have to do with open source software? In many cases, there are communities of users that will offer beginners advice and support on starting out with a new software package or help troubleshoot problems.

One of the open source software packages I use pretty much daily is LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator), developed and maintained by a team at Sandia. While it’s a very well-documented code, the error messages can be vague. This is where the support community comes in. The lammps-user mailing list archive is usually my first stop, to see if someone else has already encountered this problem. If there’s nothing relevant in the archives, the mailing list is full of brilliant scientists who are great at helping solve problems (even if it’s a typo in your input script). The main developers are very active in the user list. It’s also a great place for inspiration.

I also use Python, and its extensions, NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib for analysis. It’s a much more diverse user group than LAMMPS, and so the community is a bit more spread out. I most often find answers at StackOverflow, but there are many blogs and forums that talk about different ways of using Python. The #python tag on twitter is also a great way to find other users.

Without open source code, I couldn’t do most of my research. Open source code allows me to tinker, to see the guts of what’s really happening, and has a support community that doesn’t charge for their help.  I’m lucky that in my field, some of the best code available is open source. What are your favorite open source tools?

The article cites several effects that come from economies of scale in the “cluster,” such as access to a good highway system, shipping ports, and a feeder system of vocational schools and engineering colleges.

One thing that’s always struck me is the way logistical problems change when companies are close together or far apart. For example, if you’re in the same building and I need to get you a shipment of raw stock, I’m telling Bob with the fork truck to take 10 minutes and drive it over. If you’re in the same town, Bob’s taking an hour to drive the flatbed with your delivery. Beyond that, I can’t spare Bob for a full day, and now it means scheduling a freight delivery and paying a shipper to get the job done. Physical proximity translated to a real, competitive economic advantage.

Likewise, as our companies (or even divisions within the same company) spread farther and farther apart, the likelihood that any two people are friends, even in just a professional context, drops off dramatically. If we’re in the same building, we might have lunch together every day. The same town, if we are friends, maybe we meet every few days or weeks. If you’re across the country, maybe a few times a year at most.

Facebook, Skype, video chat, email, cell phones… they all bring us together in a lot of ways, but physical distance still matters. The world isn’t as global as some might lead you to believe.