In my last installment of WTF, I briefly discussed the career aspirations of my Chinese engineering team and how they wish they are no longer viewed by multinationals as second class engineers. In the comments section, “Bill” opined that: Hopefully as time goes on they demand increasingly higher salaries as well… I can only surmise the thinking behind this comment is that Chinese wages are horribly depressed and workers are powerless to do anything about it. Perhaps this stems from the well publicized stories regarding alleged helpless workers at Foxconn being paid a pittance to produce iPhones and iPads. Or perhaps it was simply tongue-in-cheek. But whatever…I’ll go with the former because it ties in nicely into what I’m about to write. I’ve been in China for three full weeks now. On my very first day at the company, I already had to deal with my very first major issue [...]
Though I’m an engineer, I don’t necessarily consider myself a natural tinkerer. Sure, I started out that way, as most kids do. My childhood inspirations included Legos, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and lots of toys that are precursors to engineering. But as I got older, I didn’t step into many of the other stereotypical “future engineer” activities. I never learned how to change a car’s oil or do regular maintenance. I never framed a house or similar structures. I never built a computer from components at the store (though this is obviously more relevant around the time I grew up vs 20 years prior). I never got a ham license or had a 200 in 1 electronics kit, two things that almost guarantee a future as an electrical engineer. So what gives? My parents were both very supporting and continue to be to this day. And I regularly worked on [...]
As a general rule, I never thought my job responsibilities as an engineer would include HR duties. Admin duties, yes – engineers are not exempt from Excel data entry, scheduling, and organizing forms with pink sticky notes. (I do love my pink sticky notes.) And management duties, yes – many engineers work in teams and need to know how to motivate, collaborate, delegate, and generally navigate in leadership settings. But the thought of hiring folks, paying salaries, crafting policy – that just scares me. What the HR department does deals directly with issues that get to the heart of human emotion – money, titles, benefits, and scope of power. Eesh. No wonder it scares me… Fluxor has recently moved to a job that requires hiring folks, and Cherish and FrauTech have both written about being on the interviewing side of the hiring process. So far I’ve never had to hire [...]
Recently, there has been a significant amount of rhetoric by President Obama on how we need to re-establish manufacturing in the United States. This topic was front-and-center in the State of the Union speech in January. Additionally, President Obama has been touring the country, speaking at universities, businesses, campaign stops, and fundraisers about how we can boost our economy by emphasizing manufacturing. The President, thankfully, has backed this initiative with a serious amount of funding. Much of the following information is paraphrased from Manufacturing.Gov, the website detailing the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. In a nutshell, the government is looking to fund up to 15 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation in the next year backed by up to $1 Billion in funding. The pilot institute, with a focus on Additive Manufacturing, will be funded using FY2012 funds, meaning it will be awarded before the end of September. These Institutes will primarily [...]
On Tuesday, I posed a question on my own blog: what would happen if academia required PIs to fund their own salary and not get tenure? To clarify, I don’t think this would necessarily be a good thing…but I also don’t think it would be a bad thing, either. I can see the pros and cons of such a move, and it’s very hard to say if one side would win out. I also think there are several possible outcomes, and I think that it would change from school to school. However, I anticipate a few potential changes to the system that would probably constitute some general trends. 1 – I see groups becoming more bimodal in their distribution: they’ll either be really big so that PIs can keep writing grants like crazy (something that already seems to occur a lot in bio and medical fields) to try to cover their [...]
That beast being China, the one that’s devouring all the jobs from the West. For the past two weeks, I’ve witnessed my team of chip designers at work, both analog and digital. I must say, they’re really good for their experience level. Companies similar to ours continue to expand operations in China. And we’re not hiring technologist either. These are real engineers with real engineering experience with some of the big names in the industry — Intel, Broadcom, Analog Devices, etc. What most multinationals tend to do is to see their Chinese (and Indian) engineers as mere supporting casts for their team of engineers in their home base, be it North America, Europe, or other parts of Asia (Japan/Korea/Taiwan). The Chinese engineers simply don’t have the same depth of experience when compared with developed nations. Hence, they simply cannot take on as much. But over time, as Chinese engineers gain [...]
This past week was the deadline for the joyous occasion of filing your 2011 taxes. This was the first time that DrWife and I have had to file taxes in the US in several years due to being overseas. For us, filling out our tax forms was a soul crushing lesson that simple math eludes us. At least we got a happy ending. In short, we’ve learned that either more education than two PhDs in Mechanical Engineering is needed to fill out your tax forms or the IRS and Congress needs to simplify the tax process. [Before I go on, I want to put a disclaimer in here. This post and forum is not meant to be a political statement one way or the other. Constructive criticism and comments will always be accepted. This is not meant to devolve into a political discussion about which political party contains the more out-of-touch [...]
A few years ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being in a courtroom with two lawyers. As soon as the judge said that court was in session, both lawyers stood up and began talking simultaneously for several seconds. Eventually, one of them ran out of steam, and I was left with the feeling that the other had ‘won’. I’m not sure what they were going for other than some sort of weird attempt at dominance, and it was a very jarring display. I thought, at the time, that I would never want to be a lawyer. Since then, I’ve been witness to similar things over and over. However, instead of in a courtroom, these arguments involving a lot of confrontation and rude behavior, have taken place in front of white boards, on Skype sessions, on telephone calls, and even at bars. And they always seem to involve engineers…sometimes even [...]
There have been some great posts on networking and impostor syndrome in the science blogosphere lately, which has prompted me to do some thinking about one of those pieces of advice that always crops up in such discussion: finding a mentor. It’s pretty generally accepted that mentorship matters at every career stage, but as someone early in my career, it seems that the first advice I’m given when I’m struggling is “find a mentor”. One mistake I think most of us make at least once is assuming that because we report to someone, they will serve as our mentor. Maybe it’s because finding a mentor is actually not a straightforward process. I can’t write a flow chart that will consistently find someone a mentor. Personally, I’ve generally found mentors simply by talking to professors outside of class, about something other than class, or talking to professors who I no longer take [...]
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