Showing Appreciation
There was a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week in which the author was advising a smart but abrasive younger colleague to “try being likable“. The phrase that really struck me was “Think of what you could accomplish if people actually wanted to help you”. The piece was focusing on interacting with peers, but it reminded me of discussions I’ve had with peers about interacting with the people who make it possible for you to do your job, which I’ve touched on previously. For example, most of my work is done on a super-computing cluster. In order for me to do research, I need the server up and running. Last Friday was System Administrator Appreciation Day, and so my group brought the sys admin team various goodies. They just did some major system upgrades which are having stability issues. Because they remembered me , when I contacted…
Firing by an Engineer
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…
Looking over the fence
My husband, Mr.ME and I often compare notes on what it’s like being in industry versus graduate school as part of our “how was your day” discussions.He graduated the year before I did, so it’s interesting to see what it would be like if we’d taken the other route after graduation. Of course, not all graduate schools are the same, nor are all jobs the same, but we decided to offer some tag team insight into what our experiences have been like. Describe your job Miss MSE: I’m a graduate student in materials science at a major research university. My research is to study the structure of amorphous solids by molecular dynamics simulations. This is a major departure from what I did as an undergraduate, which was classical metallurgy. Mr. ME: I’m a mechanical engineer responsible for the design of a key subsystem for a consumer product produced by a major OEM. …
Competitive teamwork
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…
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…
ProE Etiquette
How well you get along with your coworkers can have a huge impact on how effective an engineer you can be. I’m not just talking about meetings, but how well you can collaborate on projects. People generally know you don’t pass off shoddy work or incomplete projects to the next person who has to work on it for you. But sometimes I’ve seen exactly that in the design world. Even though most CAD programs track everyone who touched that part or drawing, people seem to think they can get away with things they generally wouldn’t try in a report or presentation. A couple months ago Peter J Francis asked whether MCAD or ECAD was more trouble than it was worth. GEARS discussed his love hate relationship with it but admitted that the skills he learned with ProEngineer allowed him to really kickstart his career. Skills with a particular CAD or…
Intellectual Property (IP) and Marketing Road Blocks
As engineers, we like to talk about the latest gadget or, more importantly, about our latest designs. I personally get very passionate about my designs and the stuff I have done. For example, I enjoyed talking about my involvement with Formula Engine Control units in a recent blog. I also talked about ways in which I have used differing technologies like I2C. However, there are time when we can’t talk about things, things that cover Intellectual Property (IP). Over a year ago, I attended an RS Components sales show ( or known better as Allied Electronics in the US). This is where I and my company get to sell and introduce our new products to the RS sales force. In the evening, I got talking to a number of RS internal people about the lack of engineering communities and how this IP stuff, in my view, is a road block. IP…
Engineering is a Zoo
Most people are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality types. People are categorized into sixteen groups that are described by a combination of four letters. The letters describe the two extremes of various aspects of personality. Despite the fact that there are sixteen groups, you can make life simpler by generalizing a bit and grouping into four groups. In engineering, the NT and SJ personalities are the most prevalent. NTs, or ‘rationals’, comprise only about 5% of the total population but a significant chunk of engineers. SJs, or ‘guardians’, are nearly half the population. The more analytic of the guardians tend to enter engineering, a field which tends to utilize a lot of rules and is thus appealing to the SJ personality type. The funny thing is, SJs and NTs tend to not get along very well at all. SJs like rules and like to follow them and like when other…
Learning sprocketry from geologists
This week’s theme on Engineer Blogs is about interacting with engineers from other discplines. Given I work at a university with people from many different engineering disciplines, I have a bit to say on this topic. Specifically, talking to engineers in other fields often means I need a translation dictionary – maybe one that translates between electromagnetics and device engineering. Very often, not understanding the constraints that other engineers deal with can leave me, and them, feeling very frustrated. I’ve been fortunate, however, that I managed to get something similar that works between mechanical and electrical engineers – via a geology class, of all things. The mechanical engineers I work with often look at the thermal and mechanical properties of electronics packaging in order to figure out issues surrounding failure and reliability. At first, some of their gibberish technical…