team

Competitive teamwork

Competitive teamwork

By Cherish The Scientist on December 22, 2011

I was having lunch with some coworkers today, and one of them started talking about another place where he worked. He was saying that people were ranked individually and as a team, and when the company would hit hard times, people at the low end of the totem pole would get tossed. I was a bit horrified hearing this, and then he said this was a pretty good situation. Apparently at another company with which he’d worked closely, people were ranked solely as individuals with no regard to the team. This meant that there was very little incentive to cooperate with teammates – if you helped your teammate, that meant you were decreasing the odds that your teammate would get canned and upping them for yourself. In other words, it seems to encourage backstabbing and secrecy. Almost all of us agreed that we would not enjoy working in that sort […]

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Do You Prefer To Work On Projects On Your Own?

By Chris Gammell on January 13, 2011

I don’t! I know I’m not the most stereotypical engineer out there. I’m social (somewhat). I’m talkative (on my radio show at least). I don’t wear a pocket protector (sometimes). I haven’t whispered sweet nothings to my calculator (lately). But this whole idea of working on your own? Without being able to bounce ideas off of friends and c0-workers? Holy hell! That’s a nightmare! I recently started consulting for electronics work. It’s always outside the scope of my day-job (and sanctioned by my company) but still involves being an analog electrical engineer. The people/companies that need work done though often need one engineer, not an entire department! So the struggle I face, and one that many before me have likely also faced, is that of solitude! “But Chris! I thought engineers loved solitude!” Well, a lot of us do. I mean, I do too. But not when going over a […]

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