I love my job! 12

[MadMango]

Reading over this forum, we seem to get a lot of the same questions repeatedly, phrased in different manners. I find some of the things posted here amazing, and couldn't imagine myself staying in some of those conditions longer than a week. So I thought it would be interesting for us to post what we have found that we have liked or loved about our past or present employers. Maybe those are strong words as well? How about what aspect of a company kept you getting out of bed in the mornings?

I have found that most of my past employers were involved in products that were actually beneficial to society in some tangible manner. Even when I worked for a defense contractor, I knew the products I worked on were strictly defensive in nature, meaning I had a small part in potentially saving a life. Having this "peace of mind" made it very easy for me to go to work on a daily basis.

Most of my past employers had good attitudes towards their workers, salaried or not. It didn't matter if it was a large or small company, it seemed like the management actually cared about me. I know that The Board or The Investors could care less, but I always got the feeling that the CEO and those down the ladder always did. This was the warm and fuzzy feeling that made it nice to stay at an employer.

The vast majority of my coworkers have been a pleasure to work with. They all wanted to do a good job, and do the right thing, just like me. Even the grumpy guy wanted to do things right, that was why he was so grumpy. I found that some of my favorite employers had employees that were having a good time at work. It didn't necessarily involve Nerf darts and unicycles, but when a company allows a little relaxation it was noticeable (and nice).

So let's hear what's positive about your past or future employers, things than go beyond compensation. I'm sure in the end we'll see a trend that others can look forward to.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."


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[jmw]

MM "...zero personal effects".

This is a very important Sherlock Holmes like observation.
Other clues that all is not well:
Corporate screen savers.
(It probably also means that "Games" was not installed).

Coffee machines installed within sight and sound of the manager or HR offices (and not free). Ditto the copier machine.

I'm just guessing ow but I'd be wary of a company where no more than two employees ever get together at once and go to the loo and turn the taps on before whispering to each other?

SG, didn't you ever wonder what he had intended to spend the money on and what you may have missed out on?
(With one of our guys and his fondness for business trips to Thailand we are pretty sure what his budget was intended for. He is probably in jail by now.)



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[ewh]

Salad days....
Very employee oriented company which manufactures high-end servo-valves, on the crest of the "employee empowerment" wave, generous but not outrageous wage, great benefits, award winning modern building with parking underneath (in Florida), supremely enjoyable beach and holiday parties, a truly family feel, frequent and varied training, listed as one of the top 100 companies to work for...
Of course, the employees were expected to do whatever it took to get the work done and OT was standard and generously given as opposed to hiring and firing as the work load changed. I think that the only reason this company was so fine to work for was that the founder was still guiding the decisions, and he always put his employees first.
Unfortunately they had to close the division, but have successfully regrouped since.

Technically, the glass is always full.

 

[SomptingGuy]

JMW:

Hand on heart - no naughty spending was done. Although our VP of bus dev tried his hardest to get me to fork out for a night at BT's or The Landing Strip (nice places in the Detroit area).

We did do the Lake Point Yacht Club a few times though. Money well spent. Took the client there too.

- Steve

 

[btrueblood]

"so it was their fault for sending me to the colonies long enough to go native"

Switched to lager now, eh Kenat?

Seriously, on topic: I don't love my job, have never loved any job. It's work, not play, and that's why they have to pay me to keep me coming back.

Yes, I love parts of my job, and have to have some idea of contributing to a greater good to make me feel like it's worthwhile...but in the end, the paycheck lets me go home to my wife and kids and do the things I really want to do (time permitting), and let them do the things they really want to do.

As far as people go, yes, it's good to be around happy people. But I've also learned a lot from some pretty curmudgeonly folks, and earned (from most of them) grudging respect after standing up and/or shouting back. Of course, that kind of behavior makes one stand out to the namby-pamby, smiling-all-the-time, don't-spank-your-kids, let's-all-consider-each-other's-self-esteem types, and puts one on the short list for the next round of layoffs. When it's shove time, and the order needs to ship TODAY, I don't need a lot of smiles, just people who will help, snarls and all.

Have a nice day.

 

[KENAT]

Hmm, after some of the comments I made at our DFMA training today about 'I'll believe it when I see it' regarding senior management really buying into doing more up front to save later on I guess I am that curmudgeon. Dagnam it.

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[jmw]

You didn't put your head above the parapet again did you Kenat?

I love management.
Really. T
hey are so stupid they are almost like cartoon characters.
You all know way ahead of time that Wiley C will hit the wall any minute now and if he had any brain cells or memory he'd know it too. But he goes ahead and chases the damn roadrunner. The only people who know for certain Wiley C will get blown up by his own bomb or that Tom will never ever catch and devour Jerry are Wiley C and Tom.

Management are like that too. They do all the stupid things management always do and they never seem to realise this or remember that when they did that at their last company they killed it.

Modern managers have forgotten that once upon a time success was when you took some idea and built a major company out of it.

Today success is measured by mergers and acquisitions, buy-outs and take-overs and defined by "business cycles" e.g. the 20 year diversification /core competencies cycle. (spend 10 years buying everything in sight as part of the illusion of growth and the next 10 years selling it all off again to focus on core business activities.

But take a look at any individual company and you'll see they manage to run down the workforce, cut investment, terminate products. In the end often all they have left of a company that has been traded, acquired, merged and rationalised and has had duplicated functions eliminated is a set of brand names they keep for reasons of nostalgia.

I started at a company on its 200year anniversary.
Sad to see that absolutely none of its products are around today. They managed to retain about one trademarked name.
Most of us here probably have worked for about a dozen or more companies without ever leaving our desks. But what we notice are the lost products, the skills that walked out the door or were rationalised away and the faces now but memories.

A key sign things are really going to pot is when they call in consultants or decide they want one of those "Investors in People" plaques for the lobby. Of course, what management think is that Investors in People consultants will tell them is that their workforce is inefficient deaf and stupid. They like it not when the consultants tell them their is nothing wrong with the workforce, its management that can't communicate and don't know what they are doing. They take their plaque and put it up in the lobby and then vertically file the report.

Of course, most managers are so useless, they are given a management handbook and told that if ever they have to make a decision they should look it up in the book and if it isn't there, pass the problem up the tree. It's the only way to keep the company from bleeding to death before it can be dressed up and tricked out and sold to the next company.

You have to laugh. Anything else is too painful.
If you didn't have jobs for managers you'd have an enormous welfare bill because there is nothing else they can be used for.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[ScottyUK]

Fuel?


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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[ScottyUK]

My mistake:

Biofuel.



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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[Gumpmaster]

I work 4 10's. 3 day weekends every week is a huge bonus.

I get 23 days/year of paid time off, very nice.

I live 1/2 mile from work (yes, I still drive every day). No commute!!!

I don't work much overtime (paid when I do) and don't have to travel unless I want to.

Quite a few good things at my current company. There are also quite a few thinks that make my blood boil, but this is supposed to be a positive thread.

 

[jmw]

Madmango,
I wish you hadn't started this.
What I like about my job are the achievements down the years.
But I made a mistake today in expressing this to the SB (SB= Superior Being aka wife).
Now my life is hell.

The company I worked for introduced a new sensor (let's not be too specific).
They had high hopes for it but it was proving highly unpredictable and costing more in after-sales support than it sold for.
They invited me to join them and gave me the task to make it a "fit and forget" "straight from the box" "plug and play" sensor. (always be wary of management that so unashamedly uses so many clichés in one job description).
So I did just that.
It took a lot of long cold days and nights hanging around in refineries trying to figure it all out, but figure it out I did.

Then I looked at its applications and realised that while every man and his dog could do one sort of application, though no where near as well, no one could make the other sort on line.
Then I introduced two new calculation methods, one for single sensor and the other for two sensors.

The single sensor solutions were the first ever online that delivered satisfaction and are widely used in one industry.

But forget these.
The two sensor method may seem expensive and it is.
I think the first system we ever did must have had an installed cost of around US$250-350k. Actually, probably more. But the client got their money back in a month or two.
Looking a few more of these the installed cost seems conservative and the payback about right.
Let's just say that an installed cost of around US$750,000 or more is attractive to some end users. Seems a lot to pay for a single process measurement to me but the ROI is confidently predicted as within a year. Often much less.
We did a few more of these then I did another project which developed the sensor for another industry and took the business out of the hands of the original supplier who had enjoyed a 40 year 90% market share till that moment.
And, just before bonuses were due to be paid, my company decided they needed my desk more than they needed me and happily made me redundant.

This week I saw another of these enquiries. I can't handle that sort of risk myself these days so I can just sigh and find it a decent home.
But in a moment of weakness I mentioned it to the SB.
The SB has since been busy working out how much money on a per system per annum basis my work has generated and wants to know why we are as poor as church mice.

And what's worse, damn it, is she has a point.




JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[MadMango]

JMW, if we all wanted to be rich, we would have been lawyers, dentists, or politicians.

You hit the nail on the head though, it IS the "achievements down the years" that keep us (at least me) in our respective industries and coming back for more. It's especially true if your work makes it out into the public arena, where you can see your involvement on a daily basis. I catch myself every now and then spying something that I have done in the past, thinking to myself, "What the heck was I thinking back then?"

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."


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[patprimmer]

I still get all warm, fuzzy and smug when I see a successful product where I had a significant part in it's development.

Regards
Pat
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[jmw]

Yeah, (sigh) I know.
If only there was a way to eat as well.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[ajack1]

I wouldn’t go as far as to say I love me job, but I do enjoy it very much and feel privileged to be in the position I am.

I am very lucky I was born in the UK and both my parents had work and whilst far from being rich I never knew or never have known hunger or poverty that straight away puts me in the top 20% world wide.

I was lucky to have a good but far from outstanding education and whilst being far from the brightest person in the world I have a well over average intelligence. I also have no major health issues, either physical or mental.

Upon leaving school I was lucky to get a job doing exactly what wanted and was able to put myself through further education, university straight out of school was not a financial option.

From there I was able to get a series of jobs, all of my choosing up to the point of starting my own company, where I am now. Basically I do what I have a passion for and I earn enough money to put me way up in the top 1% world wide, you would be amazed how little to have to earn to be in the top 1%.

If despite the strong hand life has dealt me I was having to work 8 hours a day or more doing something I didn’t enjoy I would have failed myself and I would hate that.

I would guess my circumstance are not that different to the vast majority on this board and you get out of life what you put in, I wonder how many who go on about lousy bosses and bad work situations are just using that as a cover for their real frustration that they have failed to use the strong hand that life dealt them?

 

[ewh]

Good points, ajack1... it is easy to gripe when the root cause is your own.

Technically, the glass is always full.

 

[moltenmetal]

It's easy to be ungrateful and to look at gifts as entitlements. ajack1 is right to remind us all that we're very fortunate.

It's also easy to blame the victim.

Early in my career, I was ripped off and taken advantage of by unethical management. I was beaten with the whip of "professionalism", to extract uncompensated overtime from me for the sole benefit of others. It wasn't my fault, and I was right to be angry and disillusioned about it.

I had to seek the advice of others to ensure that I wasn't mistaking normal treatment for mistreatment merely because I was inexperienced. Unfortunately, there was no forum of this sort at the time to help me with that.

Once I knew what was going on, it was my responsibility to get out and find a better situation for myself. Knowing that others had it better was definitely helpful.

 

[moon161]

Me too! It's great.

 

[jmcoope3]

Working at a small firm, I love that I have to opportunity to wear a lot of hats.
In my first year as an engineer out of college I’ve been a estimator, scope writer, designer, draftsman, engineer, consultant, project manager, mechanical engineering reference, structural engineering reference, and software developer. I used to hate this, but seriously, looking at my friends that are just getting out of training I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
I love that I have the opportunity to travel for my job, but I don’t have to (Family comes first).

I love that even though the office is always busy, the engineering manager will try to find time to start a Nerf war, throw candy at someone or do something to lighten the mood.

I love that my PE finally trusts my work (only took about 150 projects) and will listen to my opinions.

I love that my bosses recognize a good idea and will give you whatever means they can afford to let you push it towards fruition.

I love that when my boss says “thank you” and "we'll take care of you" I believe him.

 

[jmw]

I love that when my boss says "thank you" and "we'll take care of you" I believe him.

I reckon it would have been better for me if I'd had a first job with the company from hell. It would have prepared for for the future.
I had the joy of my first job being in one of these companies where, however inept they were at managing the company, the managers were human beings and you could believe and trust them.
The downside was that I stayed way too long and got way behind the market on salary etc.
It was only later in life that I began to encounter the real bottom feeders who in addition to being totally inept were also nasty specimens. Plus late on is when I encountered brown nosers.
I'm pretty sure that had I encountered these problems early on I would have been better equipped for life and that even when I got double teamed by a pair of brown nosers I could have survived.
Ah well. Those were the cards dealt.
That first job was great even if viewed naively.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[Guest0527211403]

moltenmetal - your post reminds me of where I was two years ago. For reference, see

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=255928

I quit that job within 6 months of that post and haven't looked back. One of the many times that the words of E-T members have helped me to put things into perspective.