WTF #20: Damn Overseas Workers
Those damn overseas workers. Can’t they do anything right? Why don’t they follow the rules? Why don’t they follow instructions? Why don’t they complete important tasks on time? Of course, from my vantage point in China, those damn overseas workers are Americans. Sorry to generalize. Rather, that damn overseas worker is an American. He’s also a fellow manager with a few brand new hires in China. As managers, we are responsible to ensure that our new hires are equipped with an email account, UNIX account, access to various internal documents, a phone, and a computer on the first day. It’s quite easy. All we need to do is to spend 10 minutes on an internal website filling out some forms in order to make a formal request to IT. This manager has four new hires in China. Three arrived two weeks ago — without computer, without email accounts, without UNIX…
WTF #9: Master of My Domain
For readers who are old enough to remember Seinfeld, one of the most brilliant episodes was The Contest where the phrase “master of my domain” entered popular culture. And the only similarity between that Seinfeld episode and this episode of What The Flux is that catchphrase. Master of my domain — that’s what it has been for the past decade and a half as a working engineer. I like to think that I know my domain pretty well — analog integrated circuit design. I also like to think that I’ve been a fairly decent engineer, that I’ve progressed and matured, and that I’ve mastered the challenges presented to me over the years. Still, in the last little while, things started to get routine, a bit boring. I felt restless, and that restlessness caused me to consider other career trajectories, perhaps even a jump over to *gasp* management. Eventually, I did…
PowerPoint Engineer
During the course of selling your soul for pieces of silver, there may come a time when the powers that be request that you sell out just a little more of yourself. Yes, they give you underlings. Soon, you will discover that all the skill and pride that you’ve carefully nurtured over the past many years will vanish in mere months. Where once you took pride in your ingenious cleverness, now you take care of babysitting disgruntled ex-peers who look upon you as an obstacle to their inventive genius. The complex computer modeling of the nano-world is replaced by Gantt charts and bar graphs. You start attending meetings, lots of them. Meetings with the boss. Meetings with your peers. Meetings with underlings. Food starts to taste funny; the flatulent co-worker seems to smell less; staring at the sun directly is no longer a problem; underling complaints seem to sound like…