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

[Roger Gault]

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