<VV> RE: Interesting Article ...NOW Engineer (no Corvair)

Dennis & Debbie Pleau ddpleau at earthlink.net
Thu Sep 22 22:33:00 EDT 2005


As a senior engineering tech with 25 years experience, I echo every thing 
Roger says.  First I divide the engineers I work with into two camps, 
people who love engineering and people who went into engineering because 
they are good in math.  I'm much closer to the first group, and I flunked 
out of engineering school  because I wasn't good in math.  The engineers 
who are engineers because they are good in math are the whiniest, people 
you will ever meet, the engineers who love engineering only whine about all 
the meetings they have to addend which take away from the time they can be 
improving something.  An example, is we are currently running internal 
samples of the next generation WiMax chips, all engineering is on call 
(within pager range or have a documented backup)  24 hours a day 2/3 of the 
engineers don't have a problem with this, and the other 1/3 are whining up 
a storm as usual.  I volunteered to be on call even though I'm no longer in 
process engineering.  This could be a billion $ product for the company.

Engineers who love engineering are a joy to work with, the other side of 
the discipline suck.  The main reason I'm changing jobs this week is to get 
away from working for the most whiny engineer/manager and start working for 
the most technically competent engineer/managers within the company.

When I joined this company a lot of years ago every engineer I worked with 
was in the love engineering camp, it is now down to 2/3 in that camp and 
getting lower every day

Dennis

At 04:49 PM 9/22/2005, Roger Gault wrote:
>OK, I can't stand it.  I'm going to contribute to this with some free advice
>for young engineers.
>This is long and preachy, but nobody's making you read it.
>
>
>Credentials:
>   BSME, Texas A&M University, 1969
>   37 years in military products and semiconductor capital equipment
>   19 years as an individual contributor, the rest as part manager, part
>indiv. contributor.
>   Job Stability:  This is my 3rd job since I left college.  Never fired.
>Out of work a total of 5 weeks.
>   Present title, "Principal Engineer", BAE Systems, Austin, TX
>   Present responsibilities:  Systems Engineer, Software Engineer, Project
>Engineer, Proposal Writer, Smart Ass, Defender of Common Sense.  I tried to
>get them to just put "Smart Guy" on my card, but they wouldn't.
>
>Advice to the New or About-to-be Engineer:
>
>First, if you love engineering, don't let anybody scare you off.  Life is
>not short.  Life is long.  If you don't like what you're doing, it's long
>and miserable.  You're going to work many, many hours - you better like it.
>If you hate what you do, you'll take your miserable attitude home and ruin
>your happiness there, too.  Life will suck.  Being out of work sucks, too,
>but it's generally temporary - it's not life, and other people are out of
>work sometimes, too.  On the other hand, if you love what you do, if it's
>fun, if you're excited, life's a gas.
>
>Second, conciously make yourself more valuable to your management and your
>co-workers (not necessarily in that order).  Valuable people do lose their
>jobs, but not as often as some others.  There's a lot of aspects about how
>to do that.  Here are a few that I preach regularly:
>
>Be competant in your field.  You don't have to know everything, you can
>steal ideas from your fellow engineers, but you have to at least be
>functional.  Your willingness to do your best is a lot more important than
>raw knowledge and IQ, but you need a foundation to work from.
>
>Don't just be good in your chosen degree area.  Cross-train.  Make friends
>with the other kinds of engineers and understand what they do.  I'm an ME.
>I can write software.  I can read and understand schematics (but not draw
>one).  Learn enough so that you can work with those guys and give sound
>advice and recognize BS outside your field.  There are a lot of engineers
>out there that know their stuff, but there aren't very many who can see and
>understand the whole picture.
>
>Learn to appreciate the needs of your "customer".  He might be the one
>paying for your project.  He might be your boss.  He might be your team
>members.  Some days, he might be yourself.  Seek to understand what is
>needed from you, not what you want to provide.  No happy customer - no job -
>no chance to do cool things.
>
>Get it through your thick, egotistical engineering skull that technical
>expertise is not the only valuable skill in the world.  Your profs lied to
>you, your degree didn't make you God - it just opened the door to get your
>job.  Learn what other people contribute to the success of your company.
>Appreciate it and compliment them for it.  You think you're one in a
>million?  Then there's 1000 people just like you in India - and it looks
>like they're all going to be working technical jobs soon.  Remember Betamax
>(ask your elders).  The best technical solution doesn't automatically win -
>80% of everything in life is sales.
>
>In light of the above, learn to speak and write.  The average engineering
>graduate's communication skills cannot be described within the language
>limitations of this e-mail list.  If you can't communicate your universe
>saving idea, if you can't sell somebody on it, the universe won't get saved
>because your idea will never get implemented.  Once you learn to
>communicate, do so.  Speak up.  Don't let people intimidate you into
>silence.  You don't have to be an a**hole about it, but if you don't
>influence what goes on around you, what are you contributing?
>
>Never, never, never, never, never, never do anything you consider unethical.
>Offer to quit.  Offer to work a different project.  Cross your arms and say
>no.  Go to your boss and say, "The only way I see out of this situation is
>to XXX, but I'm not willing to do that.  What do you suggest?"  Do
>something.  Engineers and most engineering managers are a pretty
>conservative lot.  Once you lose their trust, you're dead meat.  Lose your
>customer's trust, or put your company in a bad legal situation, and they'll
>beat your dead body with baseball bats.
>
>Would I recommend the profession?  Not always.
>Would I enter it again if I could start over.  YES.
>
>Roger



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