engineers biggest issues and wishes 12

[IoanaP]

Hello everyone,

As an engineer, what are the two biggest issues you’re dealing with?

In terms of career, what’s your biggest wish?

 

[djs]

My biggest issue has been consulting/design engineers who only know how to write specs. Most that I encounter have absolutely no practical experience. I had one that insisted that I do pressure control by cycling a pump on and off with no hydropnuemtatic tank but also a very small discharge system. Went round and around on that for months until the owner stepped in and said it can't be done that way.

I am looking at retiring in five years.

 

[moltenmetal]

"Biggest issues"?

Most frequently encountered and frustrating issue: codes and standards being used in place of actually making, or even permitting, an engineering judgment. In a sense that's two issues, but really just one.

Biggest career wish? That we wouldn't train 3x as many engineers as we need to fill the available engineering jobs every single year:

 

[rotw]

Wishes?
I want a future job that is robust to an economy in contraction energy-wise as we'll go forward.
I wish also not to climb the corporate ladder, prefer to learn technical stuffs.
I wish life to give me a second chance to correct my past mistakes in judgment, in attitude or in things I am not even aware of.

Challenges?
English being not my first language, I did struggle at some occasions as engineer (nothing very serious though).

 

[SuperSalad]

who are they or what are they to you?

Oh they are people. Dishonest and conniving are what they are to me.

Edit: And I am fully aware that this situation is not an uncommon one in many workplaces. That fact doesn't make it any better though.

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[DM61850]

IRStuff,

I think that you hit the nail on a lot of it. Management and project management I think too often views engineering as commodity that too often will "wreck" a project by trying to do it "right". Not all companies are run this way but too often the goal is to put the barely acceptable or not litigation-able junk in a box and get it out the door as quickly as possible. The customer often can't recognize good engineering from bad engineering so all engineering is treated the same. Maybe, it is engineerings fault for not being able or willing to show the value in good engineering.

 

[CWB1]

Not at my current employer, but in the past my biggest issue has been a lack of job security due to the constant hiring/firing cycles. Even when my team or I hadn't been directly impacted, turnover always seems to cause all manner of inefficiency in other depts. which indirectly impacts and slows our work. Secondary to that, two issues come to mind at about the same level - The lack of a good, ethical, honest culture in many offices, and the lack of experience/competence common among consultants/contract "engineers."

Edit: Just noticed I missed the second question about wishes. Personally I dont have any at this particular time other than to keep enjoying this profession through to retirement and to continue learning. I believe I have been afforded more opportunities than most, working with industry leaders in modern facilities with modern tools from foundry to final assembly.

 

[RVAmeche]

DM,

Somewhat in that vein, I wish clients/PMs/whoever would remember the project scope that was sold. All too often we say "we're explicitly only doing x" and then halfway through, it becomes "you should do y as well". Then the budget is shot and fingers are pointed.

I'm not talking about scenarios where something vital was inadvertently left out the scope, but specifically "limited scope" type projects. Think "replace this control valve like for like" so construction can happen during the next outage that evolves into "perform full hydraulic analysis over several operating scenarios to size a new valve".

 

[IRstuff]

a lack of job security due to the constant hiring/firing cycles

THAT is a management issue, specifically greed and psychopathic tendencies; A decent manager will always be looking forward to ensure that they don't have to lay people off, because they aren't psychopathic and actually care about laying off people. I've been lucky in the last 20 yrs in having management that tried extremely hard to minimize future layoffs by not taking every single job that came our way. We don't fly as high, but we don't get burned as often.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[CWB1]

A decent manager will always be looking forward to ensure that they don't have to lay people off...

Unfortunately managers at companies of any decent size have little/no say in the matter. When the economy swings up the corporate directive is to hire a big percentage, when the economy swings down the directive is to fire a big percentage. Its the bean-counters' modern method of balancing budgets and ultimately, swings in the stock price which is the ultimate driver for much of this. Wall St and the general public demands this active management during downturns. Give most stock holders the choice between an extra penny in their 401k and a few thousand American jobs and they'd ship any company to China in a heartbeat, hence why so many industry giants have become branding and financial services shills. I survived several cycles at a previous employer then got caught in a 25% engineering reduction, one of several thousand let go in one day. Friends that remained tell me they're currently above previous employment highs, and are expecting another mass-layoff in the near future. Many companies today layoff from both the top and bottom of incomes for a given position regardless of tenure, so old adages about hard work and loyalty equaling job security often dont apply IME.

 

[RVAmeche]

I think it's a pretty well established fact that "loyalty" towards your employee doesn't get anything these days. The days of working for one place for 30+ years are basically gone. The general trends are the company will fire/layoff as required based on market fluctuations or keep you employeed but with minimal raises or even cost of living adjustments. Hence why the new norm is changing jobs every 3-5 years in order to get an actual raise.

Obviously these trends may not apply to all firms.

 

[IRstuff]

Unfortunately managers at companies of any decent size have little/no say in the matter.

That's one of those YMMV situations; clearly, one caring manager in a truck pot of psychopaths isn't going to do much. When I mentioned "management" in my own context, I was referring to the entire management chain, from the general manager on down. Now, that wasn't the case a couple of jobs ago, where we had 10 general managers in 5 years; there, the nice guys were definitely at a disadvantage, while the one, true, psychopath raped and pillaged until they got their promotion, still within the 6 months. That's a story for another thread or time.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[geotechguy1]

Moltenmetal - Figure 2 is a result of bad immigration policy and bad co-ordination between federal / provincial governments and university funding. We pay to train enough engineers to do all the engineering work that needs to be done in Canada, but we also import enough experienced engineers to do all the engineering work that needs to be done in Canada without training any.

 

[CWB1]

Hence why the new norm is changing jobs every 3-5 years in order to get an actual raise.

Don't forget that changing jobs is also advantageous to the 401k-only masses as it lets us transform (typically) slow-growing 401ks and their many restrictions into self-managed IRAs which we can risk and grow with much more freedom.

 

[argotier]

Biggest issues:
1- Consultant engineers/companies that simply dont know what they are asking for (some just copy others projects/companies specs with little or no changes). This trend is somewhat new in my country, big companies used to have their own engineering departments and when the old people went into retirement they werent replaced and outsourced all engineering to these consultants, wich also increases the knowledge gap within companies.
2- Everyone is in a hurry nowadays, there is no time to sit and think the best solution (but later on you watch all the time wasted with spec/design changes and back and forth, result of #1).

Sadly #1 and #2, most of the times, appears simultaneously.

Wish:
To keep a technical enjoyable job for the rest of my career (Im not that old, despite my "back in the days" rants).

 

[IRstuff]

As for #2, there's a trade between getting an imperfect product out the door vs. never getting the "perfect" product out the door. This is when management needs to rein in the engineers and force adherence to the project schedule. Many a project might have produced a useful, albeit imperfect project, but died off due to someone's obsession with perfection.

While Mythbusters proved that a turd can indeed be polished, there's no point in selling a polished turd.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[JohnRBaker]

...there's a trade between getting an imperfect product out the door vs. never getting the "perfect" product out the door.

Sort of like the 80/20 rule, which was especially relevant in the software industry, where you could often accomplish 80% of a customer's 'wish list' for about 20% of the budget, but getting that last 20% could cost you the remaining 80% (or more).

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[IRstuff]

Particularly for software, where there's not necessarily sunk costs, such as for machining or molds. If there's any merit to the product, one should get some useful feedback, assuming the pimples aren't gigantic boils.

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[rotw]

Moltenmetal - Figure 2 is a result of bad immigration policy and bad co-ordination between federal / provincial governments and university funding. We pay to train enough engineers to do all the engineering work that needs to be done in Canada, but we also import enough experienced engineers to do all the engineering work that needs to be done in Canada without training any.

Bad or good, its a rational move. The country is spending significant money to sustain incoming migrants. On the other hand, migrants are bringing inflow of money AND provide a readily available and sustained labor workforce to jobs that do not require special qualifications (long-haul truck drivers, front desk hotel managers, executive housekeepers, industrial butchers and meat cutters, food and beverage servers, farm-workers, livestock workers, etc.). All said and done, if the current policy was at economical disadvantage for Canada, be sure that the decision makers would have stopped it immediately.
Media/news tend to focus on few success stories. The truth is that the most majority of skilled professionals are becoming deluded.

 

[IRstuff]

The statistics aren't much different in the US:

http://shortsleeveandtieclub.com/wh...tes-actually-work-in-their-respective-fields/

And it isn't necessarily new, either. I had the occasion to work with an engineer who graduated 4.0 GPA engineering from UC Berkeley that wound up working their family's restaurant; they were good at engineering, but it wasn't really a passion thing, probably just something their parents (Chinese) badgered them into. My old ophthalmologist graduated engineering as well, but likewise, didn't have a passion for it.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[Bill West]

argotier -point #1 about knowledge. We had a project so big that the project manager had been given a letter from company president endorsing the importance of such a position. It was a primarily electrical project but that manager was not an electrical. The principal supplier was likewise more expert at manufacturing his important contribution than understanding the workings and control of utility electrical systems. After work, after we had been in a stressful meeting the project manager asked one our electricals for some home help. With a straight face he asked how to hookup his home doorbell when there was only one conductor available up to the door (pre wireless days).

IRstuff & JR Baker -timeliness vs perfection. An important difference is if the decision making boss is also a previously experienced engineer, then the cut can be made with sound judgement.

We had a number of people with 8-12 projects each per year, all sort of similar but all one man shows. If somebody had a new widget the rule was that if it didn't get the boss's approval by the day a given designer was scheduled to proceed on a project then he was to proceed with the existing design. In the 70's with evolving electronics we could never get a new design out the door before there was better way to do it on our doorstep, we had to have that line in the sand to balance speed and perfection. With our turnover of projects the better widget filtered in soon enough.

What bugs me now with "80%" in digital products is that the 3.0 round of evolution is only 0.8^3 which equals a half assed job. This particularly shows when statistics show the product suits most users but the remainder are cut off cold like chopped liver.

Bill