WTF #22: Crying at Work
Barring unexpected sad and tragic events, is there a situation where it’s appropriate to cry at work? In a male dominated engineering culture, is there a place for tears? Last week, a new hire on my team came on-board. At the end of the week, I sat down with this new hire for a brief one-on-one. I asked how the week was going and was wondering if there were anything that was needed from me. I made some small talk and when the topic of past jobs came up, I casually asked why this new hire left the first job. The answer: failed workplace romance. Awkwardness ensued, but I think only on my part. The topic then swerved to how life took a turn for the worse afterwards, etc., etc. The voice started to quaver. The muscles around the eyes started to stiffen, as if trying to hold back tears.…
Bottom of the Design Curve with No Budget
This week is a Theme Week and we’re writing about our experiences at some point in the product or company’s lifecycle. My Location : Startup. I’ve always seen design engineering as having two distinct categories. Sustaining engineering and R&D engineering. Since I’d always seen Sustaining as being boring (sorry Chris!), involving designing the same product over and over, tweaking it to make it better, but basically understanding how it works already, I managed to start in R&D nearly right out of college. Seb’s recent post seems to prove me wrong, but maybe “Sprockets” have it better than us “Sparkies”! Some of the companies I’ve worked at on a project basis were similar. They had been in existence for years, eking out a living and had a common trait: No money for New Product Development (NPD). I’ve had many successful projects (I came, I designed, it worked), but the unsuccessful ones are…
WTF #10: Drinking from the Firehose
I started my move to engineering management in earnest last week by paying a visit to headquarters out in California. Before I left, I briefed myself on what to expect by reading a couple of management books. One common theme in both books is how busy and disoriented I will find myself in the beginning. Unfortunately, those books are right. I spent three days at HQ. Before the first day was over, my calendar for all three days were filled with meetings. I felt like a manager already! In the past, whenever I started a new engineering job, there was always a transition period of reading documentation and playing around with the software tools before one really starts to contribute to the design effort. This time around, there will be no such luxury. I am to take over the last phases of a project and to deliver it on time,…
Engineers: Not just for engineering
There have been several posts on EB about how recruiting students into STEM is just a Ponzi scheme. However, I finally came upon an article that provided a potential outlet for all those engineers who can’t find a job in engineering. Management! (I can see you hooting and hollering already.) According to research conducted by Identified and Harvard Business School, engineers and other STEM-type people are quickly taking up many of the top spots in most businesses. Specifically, Identified found that nearly 3/4 of CEOs in all industries have advanced engineering degrees. The Harvard Business School study determined that part of the reason that engineers are often at the higher levels of companies is that those companies are seeking people with more specializations. I can see a couple down sides to this: most engineers I know aren’t necessarily interested in getting an advanced degree, nor are they interested in…
Research Group Dynamics
Lately, I’ve been wondering about my research group and if I’m bringing the right people on board in the right order. It’s not that I have specific doubts about a person or anything to directly point at. Rather, I think everyone in the research group should operate, well, like a well-meshed gear set (pun intended, [photo credit]). Mentally, this makes perfect sense to me. I just wonder if I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur and they’re going to mix like oil and water once we get past the initial phase. I’m currently up to 5 students with sufficient overlap on projects to ensure they have a reason to work together and I have reiterated it in almost every group meeting. My students seem to want to work together and are open/friendly with one another, so that is a very good sign. But more importantly, what are the key mechanics of running a…
Professional Development Workshop
Once a year, my school provides a Professional Development Seminar for postdocs and late-stage PhD students. It’s a lottery to get in, and this year I got a spot in the class. I was really excited about this opportunity – the class is taught by professional (of course) teachers, and is only open to 12 people, to keep the setting personal and interactive. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the workshop. As I understand it, companies in industry will sometimes provide these programs to their employees, to develop them for management. The program that I participated in, however, was a program normally geared for professors. I didn’t know that there were development seminars aimed at professors – and man, what a good idea. The skills involved in being a professor are quite different that the skills needed as a student, even a PhD or postdoc student. You have…
The Hare and the Tortoise – Deadlines
The story of the Hare and the Tortoise needs little introduction, but I think fits well with this week’s theme of deadlines in the work place. We all know the moral of the story is that slow and steady wins the day. How do you become the Tortoise and not the Hare? We each work in very different ways, so I’m not saying that everything here is right for everyone. However, it’s right for me, and I hope you will be able to take a few tips and adapt them to your working day. In fact, the way I operate now would not have worked at some of my past jobs. Therefore, each of us has to develop our own special way of making deadlines. First, I want to consider what this deadline is. Without detail of the project or whatever it is it’s difficult to say. However, deadlines come…
Engineering the Age Gap
There’s nothing new about complaints about “kids these days” or young people claiming older just “do not get” them. But there is something relatively new in the workplace: possibly the widest age gap ever seen in the last 100 years of corporatism in the western world. (Notice I’m not making any claims here on pre-industrial or early industrial societies. ) Ask a Manager just had two age-related posts in a row. First from the old and crotchety side, my managers are younger than me! I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I have to take orders from people who are no older than 18. I know they don’t have as much work experience as me, simply because of age. The one girl was already complaining to me yesterday about how she has not gotten her raise yet and has more responsibility for less pay.…
Prototype vs. Simulation
In my own personal blog, I’ve complained more than once about the zero-bug prototype policy at FluxCorp and the ridiculous design processes that fall out from that. The whole premise was based on an internal study by the managers that showed we engineers spend 25% of our man-hours debugging problems on prototypes. Lots of bar charts, pie charts, tables, and scatter plots, all to convince us stupid engineers that if we could save that 25% in the lab, we’ll have time to design a whole new Flying Flux a year. They try to sell this to us by telling us we won’t be as stressed out if our designs are perfect. If engineers were to simulate more, simulate better, do more dog-and-pony show presentations, all these bugs would just melt away. I guess if I became the dictator of the world, I won’t have to work anymore. Both are fantasy…
Taking Criticism
One of the certainties in the working world is the expectation of your work getting criticized. In engineering I think this plays a crucial role. You actually want criticism to make a better product and a better design. People asking questions and suggesting alternatives or pointing in problems in your test plan is what makes the best end result. One engineer who I respect tremendously told me a story about bringing on a new employee who’d had prior experience at another shop. When the new employee was told about our products he had nothing but positive things to say. He looked forward to working there and seemed incredibly optimistic about the whole thing. And this put my engineer friend off. He was concerned that an engineer who didn’t question his surroundings or wasn’t ready to bring in his own alternate point of view was not a good engineer. So I…