Should low level engineers write programs for office use? 13

[radice]

I am curious as to how much a low level engineer is expected to contribute to the company?

The issue at hand: I am a civil engineer with a P.E. and 10 years experience. I work at a small firm and am simply a staff engineer. Should I contribute programming skills to the firm in writing programs that can be used by all the engineering staff?

 

[IRstuff]

Is there a compelling reason not to?

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[miningman]

I detect an attitude problem in this office.

 

[Jboggs]

You have ten years experience and you wonder if you "should contribute"? Well let's put it like this - your employer is actually your customer. You make him happy and he'll come back for more. The more valuable you are to him the more secure your job is, and the more likely you are to be considered for promotion. The sooner you start seeing yourself as more than "just a staff engineer", as you put it, the sooner you will be more. If you have skills that would be of value to your employer, find a good way to use them! I don't understand why you would even hesitate! Is it some office politics, or turf protection thing?

 

[ctopher]

Any employee, regardless of level, is expected contribute to the company.

Chris, CSWA
SolidWorks 14
ctopher's home
SolidWorks Legion

 

[radice]

I think we are missing the point. The issue is of copyright. Should a low level engineer provide programming that in effect becomes property of the company?

 

[msquared48]

If he is being paid by the company to write the programs, then yes, it is the property of the company.

However, if he writes it on his own time, it is not.



Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[TheTick]

The reason we missed the point is because you did such a stellar job of making your point.

Most employment agreements for engineers have a clause outlining the disposition of intellectual property generated by your work assignments. This would fall under that agreement.

If no such agreement is in place, then you retain copyright. Go make millions with your programming prowess!

 

[radice]

I was asking to get a feel of how the industry views intellectual property. I'm not sure I have an answer to that as yet. Although belittling others seems to be thematic.

 

[msquared48]

radice:

I believe I did answer the question though...

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[drawoh]

radice,

Are you considering writing Free Software?

I would recommend following whatever copyright policy your company requires. Are you writing simple applications, automating simple procedures, or are you using your and your company's technical expertise to write an analysis program? The latter case presents some serious copyright issues, and possibly even some professional ones.

--
JHG

 

[SomptingGuy]

If a low level engineer wants to stay a low level engineer, he/she can contribute exactly what's on their contract. No more, no less. Personally I take pride in my work and having others want to use it makes my job worthwhile to me. Hopefully my employer sees it in a similar way. Besides, the sort of things I write at work don't have much use outside of work.

- Steve

 

[radice]

msquared48, yes I think you did touch on it. I would like to point out I happen to be very happy in my work/position for those who assume otherwise. However, it is interesting to me to identify who is responsible for creating the company's processes. Is it collective? I guess the answer to that question is the only answer I know: it depends. And also to point out many programs are not written for public use or profit, but for scientific use, optimization, etc. and may not have much "outside" monetary value.

 

[radice]

drawoh: I am referring to codes for optimization/process management.

 

[IRstuff]

?? So, what exactly is your question? If you do something on company time, the company rightfully owns it. Most employment contracts are already written that way. In some cases, even the things you work on outside of the company may fall into the crevasse, since there may be the argument that you applied IP from the company to create your own project. Monetary valuation is not a valid argument for claiming that it's not company IP. It may be a valid reason for the company to forego its rights, but that's up to the company.

If you can't identify the parties responsible for processes, then you might be the that person.

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[TheTick]

I wrote some programs for a previous employer. I got permission to keep copyright and reuse and republish code ahead of time.

 

[Jboggs]

Your original question regarded writing programs to "be used by all the engineering staff" (one assumes that means internally), not to be sold as a product on the open market. Those are two different questions when it comes to copyright. But it does not change the basic answer to the question of whether to contribute. Yes!

 

[zdas04]

There are several shades of gray here. I'm thinking:
[ul]
[li]You think the software you write is SOOOOOOOO valuable that whoever owns that copyright/patent will get mega wealthy. Dream on. The market value of any engineering program you write in your spare time is approximately zero (or maybe less than zero since you'll end up paying lawyers to protect IP that never sells).[/li]
[li]Your company sells software as part of the business model. The chance that your code will be marketable intact is very low, Engineers are not real good at writing maintainable, robust code with adequate error recovery. When I managed software projects it was really humbling to come up with an awesome piece of code, give it to the programmers to vet it for general use and see my 1000 lines of code became 20 lines of computation and 40 lines of function calls calling functions that I never heard of. The 20 lines were important, but if I'd spent the time telling the programmer the arithmetic he'd have cranked it out in a week instead of me spending months on it.[/li]
[li]Finally, you have a REALLY cool bit of code that EVERY Engineer MUST have. Keep it to yourself. No one will ever appreciate it as much as you do and the third time it crashes your peers will throw it away and say ugly things about you. I've seen hundreds of Engineers write that perfect Engineering app and it never is quite as effective as it is for the author. I've seen these "little" programs eat up 3/4 of an Engineer's time doing user support, the Engineer's supervisor rarely has much patience with the second missed deadline because you were fixing a bug in GreatEngineeringApp for Phil. [/li]
[/ul]

In any of these cases the IP for an Engineering App written by an Engineer who has a full-time job is pretty well worthless. If you write a useful application (maybe something that does unit conversion or calculates the pressure drop in a line, or capacity of a pipe), then you'll find that it isn't as flexible as Freeware, is harder to maintain, and sucks the life out of the author in a very short time.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[Ron]

Read zdas04's response twice...he's exactly right. So are most of the other answers.

Intellectual property can be tricky for an employee. You have to have an agreement with your employer if you expect anything more than an "Attaboy" for writing programs. Keep in mind they pay you to contribute to the company....in whatever fashion THEY deem appropriate. If your attitude is such that you don't want to contribute in any arena other than your assigned tasks, then don't. You'll always be "simply a staff engineer". If you show initiative and create something useful for the company, you might find that it will elevate you from being "simply a staff engineer"....but to do that, you need to check your attitude.

When I was "simply a staff engineer", your question would have never occurred to me...and yes, I've written my share of generally useless engineering code for my benefit and a few others who were inclined to use it.....on my own time usually, with no visions of it being the next panacea to engineering. I didn't break out of being "simply a staff engineer" from my programming prowess. I did it with a positive attitude that I could make a contribution and a difference in the company. I did it for them first, then I did it for me. It has worked in both.

 

[miningman]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks that "attitude" is the most relevant word on this thread