I too am a graduate of Rensselaer, but I think I've found a different result to the findings you mention.

In my career, I've always had trouble convincing Management of the root cause of problems. They didn't want to slow or stop production to put a permanent fix in place, but instead insisted that I put a "band-aid" fix in. And I found myself babysitting the band-aid fix. When production stopped for shut down or what not, I would go in on my time and do the permanent fix and be done with it.

So I can see why and engineers and a managers have a different view of priorities. Some would leave the problems with "not so good fixes" forever as long as production didn't slow down.

As for many different problems? I've always fixed the one that caused me the most pain first.

I myself acted just as you described yourself, but... Your own posting supports both Millmat and your management. Your boss have put a "permanet fix" on the problem by "insisting on a band-aid fix", without any extra cost or headache. Thanks to you, your boss kept the production up AND got a perment fix. If you were the manager, you might have shut down production over something less than critical, your words. To convince management, you should make your solution appear profitable and less troublesome to your boss (most likely at personal level, rather than...). I often imagine myself dealing with a Frerrengi from Startrek when dealing with board members...

Most important lesson as an engineer? You can know everything about something, or something abotu everything. But you can't possibly know everything about everything. If you don't know something, find someone who knows the answer. It is the greatest kind of fool who gives an answer with no knowledge as to its validity just for the appearance of having an answer.

Personally, I prefer to know something about everything. Doesn't make me an expert at anything, but I know just enough to be very dangerous to myself and my co-workers!

I love that answer JakeF

I prefer to call myself "Jack of All Trades, Master of None"

The best engineers don't always know the answer, but they know where to find it.

I could agree more. In my position I need to be versatile enough to work on a wide array of systems (linear accelerators, x-ray equipment, PCs and networking, facility issues, management, etc). I do not think any one could know everything. I would also state that an acute awareness of knowing what you do not know is extremely important. When delving into this "dark" area, one must approach with extreme caution, and if necessary, know when to ask the correct question in order to find your way out. Knowing where you ignorance begins is crucial.

Hi, I like your answer.

I'm very cautious of self professed 'experts'.

In fact I don't like the word expert at all!

If you must use the word ...here's my definition!

'An expert is the man who can put right his own mistakes' !

After all, as my Mum used to say 'the man who never made a mistake never made anything'.

Any alternative deffinitions out there?

Expert = the guy who is very good at taking credit for what his team/subordinates do while at the same time effectively distancing himself from anything that goes wrong by passing the blame for errors onto his team/subordinates.

I worked for an "expert" in my first job. Anytime something good happened or a customer was pleased with a project's progress, it was all because of him, even if he hadn't worked on the project! When something went wrong or a customer was displeased, it was because the software was faulty or there was a hardware problem or one of his engineers did something wrong. This included times, or which there were many, in which he an the sales team had promised a feature or add on to a project and never informed engineering to include that in the build!

Yeh, we've all met that sort .

I mean a 'real' definition which fits the guys we admire.

You know who I mean!...The old bloke who shakes his head, sucks in his breath, says 'leave it with me', then turns up the next day with a glint in his eye and a solution in his hand!

"The old bloke who shakes his head, sucks in his breath, says 'leave it with me', then turns up the next day with a glint in his eye and a solution in his hand!"

I think that is as perfect a definintion you will find for an "actual" expert! Call Webster's, quick!

Someone once told me an ex is a has been and a spurt is a small drip.

Someone once told me an ex is a has been and a spurt is a small drip.

You almost got it! A spurt is a drip under pressure...

Dick

Expert is pronounced X-SPURT where

X = a mathematical expression used to denote an unknown factor or variable

SPIRT = a drip that is expelled under pressure

Seems to fit in most of the situations I have come across especially when combined with the term management.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less, and eventually knows everything about nothing.

That is why I decided early in my career to specialize in diversity... (and have not regretted it).

Bill

The most important thing is lawers get paid more.

I'm a graduate of Griffith University. The most important thing I learnt is that whatever knowledge and skills we gain through studies and experience should be shared with those who have need of them. That is why I am an active volunteer with an NGO developing environmentally friendly, ecologically sustainable community development projects for impoverished Third World nations.

What I learned in school (Erasmus, Brussels) was that even not so bright technical people will make it to. And suprisingly: they become the manager and make more money. (as lawyers and financial people do)

Those who have the skills to let others do the work and make it look as if they are part of the solution. They were perhaps part of the solution: by leaving the work to those who can.

As an engineer you should know your weaknesses.

And learn to find out who can help you.

My first real engineering job was product and project support: after some weeks I knew who knows the answer. Oh I was great in this job, until the moment I had tomake sure that I had the answer. That was the time to move on.

The main skill you need to have as an engineer: networking. (even more important than math as excel can do 1+1 even better than you)

I constantly find management asking me to do jobs which when done are presented to the board as a job completed by the management. The management people are incapable of doing these jobs but the view is that if they get an engineer to do them then they have successfuly completed the task.

My managers also have information about budgets and time schedules etc which I don't so to me what is an important job is not always an important job for the management. However in a crisis situation (which happens all too often) it is the engineers who come into thier own and direct the work to get the site online again. This situation is usually because like a previous post said the management have chosen a band aid fix which has not held. Then the engineers take over and sort out the problem the way it should have been done in the first place.

In a nut shell-----

Managers work the world but engineers make the world work,,,,,, dont even try to know it all just remenber where to find it out.

As I tell my higher management team "It's nice to be important but it important to be nice"

35 years ago, I was fresh out of school as a EE because I loved science, technolodgy and creativity and I went to work for the largest USA company AT&T in the Wenstern Electric manufacturing division. After 2 or 3 years, I noticed that when ever a major problem (business or political), at our location, would arise, us techy engineers would ponder over the (glass ball) multiple choice solutions for the problem and choose what we thought was best ( and almost all would agree). When management revealed their "always-correct" (choke-choke) answer, it would be just the opposite. So after a little of this, I wised up. I would use the same search method to select the correct answer and then choose the oposite. My techy peers would disagree, but 80% to 90% of the time I was correct. GO FIGURE. I guess I used "adaptive logic". I tried to use a little humor but this story is seriously true.

Now for the tech vs. manage material of engineers. I observed good tech engineers around me that were noticed for tech performance and permoted to management paths with in the company. They weren't very happy, hence their management performance was not very good either. A good engineer gone to waist. Other not so good tech engineers would be advanced to management after a longer period of time (must be seniority) and they performed much better in the management environment. Also, one of my peers observed that to get promoted you need to get attention and it didn't make a difference how you got noticed. If a project went snoothly, the engineer didn't get noticed, because everybody was happy. If a project caused big problems, it caught a lot of attention but the engineer in charge did get noticed. Guess what, because of the attention (bigger the problem, higher the management levels noticed) of the big problem, the engineer in charge was more on the minds and better recognized by management up the ladder. After a little time, the problem was forgotten but his name was remembered and usually had better chances of advancement.

Every place I have worked over the years, I excelled technically so they wanted to promote me to management but for my own good I refused and I have enjoyed my career. The best thing is to understand yourself and try to make the right decisions.

REMEMBER: If you do your job well enough not to cause problems for anybody else, nobody will even know what you did.

Ah, the Peter Principle!!

I worked for a large company General Electric, I am sure most people in indutry are familiar with their famous school in New York. They train in every aspect but engineering. In my 15 years (they moved the plant to South America) never did I go to a school of engineers with similar lines of product or problems. So much for good management.

That we have no common sense ! We have to analyze everything, then lose the purpose/goal of what we started out to try and accomplish. That's why you should all take my advice and leave those degrees behind in a closet somewhere and get a LIFE.

Man do I feel Great !!

I find this statement to be fairly accurate. I am a technical engineer and when left to my own devices, will find the problem that I see as the largest and work to solve that first. Management very rarely agrees with me on which problem is the largest. I left my last position to take a new one in the company when I felt that management was routinely taking credit for completing tasks while adding nothing but headaches to the work process. I joined a technical support group with an extremely technical boss and haven't been this happy in a long time.

When I first started in engineering in Australia, just about everybody that had any decision making power was an engineer that had come up through the field and really understood the technical side of things. Unfortunately over the years most management positions have been taken over by people that are accountant orientated people that do not understand the technical side of the job and only look at if from a short term financial point of view.

I have lost count of how many successful engineering companies that had been around for generations and have been destroyed by these amoeba brained, short term profit driven, head up their rectum, goof balls that wouldn't know the difference between shoe lace and a microprocessor. Then when they suddenly realize that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming the other way, they up stumps leaving their mess for the engineers to clean up, only to do it to another company.

The sooner we get back to engineering managers being engineers first and managers second, the sooner things will improve.

Research engineering requires investigation of numerous new and unproven ideas and most ideas and concepts will fail, this is how we learn and without these failures you will never discover the world altering breakthroughs. However you must realize a failure and scrap it as soon as you realize you are working on a dead end. Account driven graduate management was an experiment and it has failed miserably so like any failed experiment it is time to ditch it and either to revert to a know workable system or investigate something new. To continue down a failed path is pure lunacy, destructive and a waste of time and talent.

Production or end product engineering is a different thing entirely. Taking short cuts and performing band aid fixes is nearly always a bad idea and while there are some instances where management has gotten away with band aid repairs, I have lost count of how many times it has back fired and caused big problems. You can also bet your last dollar that when the band aid fix fails and causes a disaster it will not be the manager that decided to take the short cut that takes the blame. It's nearly always the poor schmuck engineer that was ignored and ordered to do a shonkie repair that cops it.

My personal philosophy is experiment and learn by your failures, but, when it comes to building something, do it right the first time.

Masu:

The same was true in the U.S. When I started in industry many years ago, my company (as well as most major manufacturers) were headed by engineers and that remained true until sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Then, accountants and other business majors gained control and, as far as I'm concerned, industry has gone downhill ever since. Over the past 10 years, shareholders have also gained greater control; no longer content with dividends or simply selling if they are dissatisfied with the company's performance. Now, they force sale, divestiture and other actions when they are unhappy with short term gains from their investments.

In most major companies, management somehow believes that management is responsible for their company's success. In reality, what makes a company successful is a relatively small number of people in every critical function who know what it takes to get the job done and are willing to do it regardless of the obstacles that management puts in their way.

Most companies don't need managers; they need leaders. The best thing that management can do is put the right people in the right slots, give them the tools they need to do the job, the responsibility and the authority to carry out their assignments, then stay out of the way.

If I were considering outsourcing any functions in manufacturing industries today, the function I would probably outsource is management.

One thing I observed many years ago is that large companies tend to succeed in spite of themselves.

I've been working for a state department of transportation for quite a number of years. Until the early 1990s, we were headed and managed effectively by engineers. I believe that they were effective because they truly understood the nature of the basic problems. They listened to their practitioners and formulated priorities. They could not be swayed from their logic by our political bosses.

In the past 15 years, top management has been replaced by the non-engineering types all of you have spoken of and the department has been going down hill fast. Our current managers ask the politicians for priorties. Management's questions to us include the likes of "What can we give them now?" as opposed to "What is the right thing to do?" Our products are less and less effective. Our pay-as-you-go funding approach has been replaced by bonding. Our future product has been compromised by debt service. And the list of maladies goes on and on. Oh, for the days of competent management.

Most of us believe that we are the stewards of the State's transportation dollar. We want to do what is right. We can do this if we have an advocate at the highest level.

Taking short cuts and performing band aid fixes is nearly always a bad idea . . . You can also bet your last dollar that when the band aid fix fails and causes a disaster it will not be the manager . . . that takes the blame. It's nearly always the poor schmuck engineer that was ignored and ordered to do a shonkie repair that cops it.

Years ago, I worked under an idiot manager who had no engineering background; he couldn't comprehend our reasoning when we told him how we intended to fix a problem. I designed a snap-fit molded plastic part, deliberately staying at the lower-force end of calculations for the cantilever, so that we could test the part, then calculate how much more steel to remove from the mold to beef it up. We could repeat if necessary. He wanted to jump in and have them take away about three times as much steel as I asked for, figuring that that would certainly make the feature strong enough [it would actually have led to part failure when forced to bend beyond limits!]. When I requested the quote for mold modification (both versions), I also asked how much it would cost if we needed to weld it back up to thin the part. Either version of the removal was about $600 US. Welding back up was about $3500. That was enough leverage to force him to OK my version, which performed exactly as calculated.

In over 40 years, I have had exactly one boss who was both a good engineer AND a good manager, several who were good at one side but not the other, and a few who were dismal both ways. This guy was one of the latter.

I am a design engineer with an engineering degree, managed by a design engineer with an agricultural degree. No matter what he will always be right, he has all the answers, he gets all the credit, he gets all the perks, and the GM is his brother-in-law. So I have learned to keep the old mouth shut and do as your told, not what is right.

All these posts are right on, question is, how do we get management to read it?

It wouldn't do any good. My father was hired by the owner of a Ford dealership and 2 other dealerships. His dealerships were having a lot of problems with customer relations and employees up front, sales, parts and in the shops. After my father did his investigation, what he was paid to do, he set an appointment with the owner. The problems as he relayed to the owner, lay within himself and his management team. When employees are un-happy, it trickles over to customer relations. The owner stated that this was not the answer he was looking for. Thanked my father, fired him and hired another outside consultant to perform the same investigation.

When I was in College, my rommate ask me "what can you do if you drop out of engineering??", and his reply was: "becomes a manager!"

MidniteFighter

When I was in college, there seemed to be one place people went when they totally dropped out of the engineering. It was the school of Management. Quite a large portion of the school of management was made up from students who had started in School of Engineering and/or School of Engineerring Technology.

I think the one thing you should remember once you have graduated is your education must continue. Your degree is just the basics to get you started.

You now must learn/develop the best people skills you can.

A recent graduate should try and work with a mentor if possible.

Remember to say thank-you to subordiates.

Managers love to have more managers under them so they will if possible create more and more management positions. Usually in these cases it is not spreading the wealth or workload it is for spreading the blame.

I was one of the first hires for Fab9 Intel. My boss was the fab manager. Seven years later I had 11 people between me and the latest fab manager. I worked much harder and got much less done. I left.

This is known as (Empire building).

Doctors bury their mistakes.

Managers don't make mistakes; circumstances change.

If one is an engineer and one makes a mistake, it is there for everyone to point at...

Most important thing I've learned.

Never ignore that little voice in your head which says 'surely that's not right?'

Also, if you make ANY change test it again, this applies to software, hardware and anything else you care to think of!

We were installing a synchronous motor once and the rep moved the rotor just a little without rechecking the air gaps. Needless to say, we were re-winding the motor a month later. Measure twice, cut once.

I agree for all the opinion that as an Engineer you dont have to know everything. But as a professional you must know something on every topic ( pertaining about engineering) or at least a logic solution and answer in every que.especially talking about a system or materials or equipment etc ,you must know what it is and the purpose of it. Our time now where technology transition are too fast , you must be always updated yourself with regards to technology innovation & transition.An Engineer is also is excellent in re-searching and finding new technology.

And I believe , as an Engineer you must not concentrated only on technology but most of all I observed and discovered that most of all successful Managers and CEO's of big componies are Engineers! because of one reason, Engineers knows how to solve & resolve problems just like solving a mathematical problems that you have to know the problems, get the data and find a solution.

In conclusion, as an Engineer I learned a lot on this field and be useful in all aspect of our life whether scientifically, technically and even spiritually.

Take Note. Be Proud to be an Engineer, coz A good Engineer is a good Manager !

The most important lesson I learned is: there is ALWAYS a better way.

As a young man I decided to keep a few calves in a shed without any water supply.

Purchasing a drinking bowl from the local co-op, I fixed it to the wall of the shed, and coupled it up with a piece of copper pipe to a 5 gallon drum, which I had mounted on a bracket raised about 5 ft high off the floor, and then filled it with water.

Really pleased with myself now, at my initiative, I showed off my efforts to a local visiting farmer, and asked his advise on how he would have done it.

He said, " I'd just place a bucket of water for them".

Believe me, there is ALWAYS a better way.

jt@swopzone.com

Lesson learnt but not followed:

In my career of 25 years I have never learned how to broadcast my work. I was simply working and solving problems as it came, and I thought it is part of my job. Never bothered to highlight to my boss, that there was a problem and I solved it.,

There are some people who accomplish half of what I do and get paid twice because he was good in projecting his achievements,

This world belongs to those who talks more and do less.

Nat

make mistakes.............NOt blunder ..........

You have referred to the course - Engineering Economics in one of your posts. Could you give some references, as to Universities providing such courses - {short or longterm }.

It is interesting to note that engineers are often lacking on the economic sense and mostly engineers invent or troubleshoot problems on the presumption that finance is NOT a limiting factor. Getting the problem solved is the prime motivation to them !!

sreeram64@satyam.net.in

I am glad you asked! Sadly, it was so long ago that I took the course, I doub the professor is still teaching. But, I do hope that others can provide help on the matter.

Many business schools also teach similar courses (though with a slightly different intent). You may wish to research courses in Operations Research, Managerial Economics, Cost Accounting, too.

Hi Sre Eram,

You asked MillMatt " You have referred to the course - Engineering Economics in one of your posts. Could you give some references, as to Universities providing such courses - {short or longterm }."

One place you can get more information on Engineering Economics is in the preparation materials for the NCEES Professional Engineering (PE) Exam. Methods for making cost and benefit trade-off analyses are a key part of being considered a competent engineer in both Mechanical and Industrial Engineering disciplines. ASME (originally American Society of Mechanical Engineers, but I think they changed their name to just the acronym because they are international theses days) and IIIE (International Institute of Industrial Engineers) both publish study guides for the PE exam which cover this important topic.

I personally ended up getting an MBA in addition to my engineering degree, because I figured out very early that the people who control the money determine which projects get done. Once I learned how to deal with net present value, and the importance of discount rate selection, I never got snowed or trapped by some accounting weenie again.

Namaste,

Anna

Hi AnnafromA2,

• I personally ended up getting an MBA in addition to my engineering degree, because I figured out very early that the people who control the money determine which projects get done. Once I learned how to deal with net present value, and the importance of discount rate selection, I never got snowed or trapped by some accounting weenie again.

So in reality you learned how to fudge the figures in such a way that made it look like it was something that was worthwhile.

This sort of emphasizes my point that the bean counting boffins that have the power to make or break a project are totally unaware of reality and since they can have the wool pulled over their eyes with some creative accounting don't even understand their own arguments.

It seems like there is a completely useless and redundant layer in the engineering management structure. Now, if we use their own argument that it is essential to reduce staff levels in an attempt to make the whole process more efficient, they should be the first ones to go as they are not only unproductive but don't even know what is going on or what they are doing in the first place.

Hi Masu!

I'm not a religious guy, but Amen!

Dick

Hi Masu -

You said: "This sort of emphasizes my point that the bean counting boffins that have the power to make or break a project are totally unaware of reality and since they can have the wool pulled over their eyes with some creative accounting don't even understand their own arguments."

I am in partial agreement. The bean counters in many organizations can be fooled using GIGO. If they are given bad estimates of the costs and benefits of a certain course of action, they will reach bad conclusions using their financial analysis tools. The principal behind Net Present Value financial analysis says that the projects which should be done first are those with the highest net present value;the greatest return on the investment over their life. This assumes that all the relevant and significant cash flows have been included in the analysis of each project, and that you used "appropriate" discount rates for each project. (Usually, a consistent discount rate for all the projects being considered as competitors.)

I, as an engineer, can easily predict, say, increasing amounts of unscheduled downtime if worn out equipment is not repaired, refurbished, or replaced, and should give the bean counters estimates of all the relevant cash flows. Not just the ones they ask for, because bean counters often don't "get" what really happens in many organizations. Since I know how to do NPV calculations for myself (and it isn't hard to learn), I can predict in advance which of the alternatives the accountants will support. And can tailor my estimates accordingly. Or "fudge the numbers", as you put it. Though that comes terribly close to accusing me of theoretical dishonesty.

Knowing the process that will be used by the bean counters to evaluate a proposal allows me to insist that their analysis must look not just at the direct cost and direct labor savings from some piece of automation, but it's likely effect on skilled labor, inventory levels, floor space, etc. I have found that, when I couch it in their terms, the accountants usually do understand not just their own arguments (and the flaws inherent in them) but also my arguments for a more complete analysis.

I agree with you that we could do without a whole layer of financial analysis in the engineering management structure, if all engineers learned engineering economics and a few simple (especially with spreadsheets and calculators) financial analysis formulas. Because just running those calculations adds very little value, as many of the organizations I know of have discovered (and are therefore hiring fewer and fewer bean counters). It mystifies me that this topic, along with basic probability and inferential statistics, are not included in all engineering curricula.

Anna

I remember having an argument with an accounting type bean counting manager about the best use of labor. He was complaining that we were snowed under and spread that thin that the overtime bill was killing everything. One of the most time consuming jobs was terminating thousands of CAT5 cables in Krone frames. He insisted that we could only afford to have one person terminating the cables at each frame. The problem is that you needed to document it as you went and that meant a lot of picking up and putting down of tools as you switched from terminating to documentation.

I tried a small experiment using two people, one to do the terminations and the other to the documentation and it worked out that two people could do it in about one quarter of the time that a person could on their own. In other words it was about twice as efficient and two people working together could get twice as much done in a day compared to them working alone.

I presented this to the relevant idiot manager and explained how we could get twice as much done but he just couldn't get his brain around it and insisted that we had too much work to do and could not afford to have two people working in the same job.

It was like talking to a brick wall and he just couldn't comprehend that it was cheaper and more efficient to use two people than one. Actually the brick wall might have been easier to talk to because given enough time it will at leas crumble, unlike the impenetrable barriers this amoeba brained dim wit had protecting the one operational brain cell in his head.

Hi Masu,

That idiot manager was indeed an idiot, if he couldn't see what you were getting at with the "division of labor" concept. That's been a staple method of improving productivity since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

But idiocy is not just a function of a background in management or accounting. I once had a manager, a graduate (I am ashamed to say) of the same engineering school I went to, who asked me to collect data and plot assembly "learning curves" in order to project labor cost savings due to enhanced efficiency over time for a new product we were on the verge of putting into production. VisiCalc had yet to be invented, so I had to hunt pretty far and wide to obtain 3 cycle log paper on which to make the plot and determine the actual slope of the line for each product, because some products had been in production for more than 10 years.

The manager flatly rejected my report because "Those aren't learning curves. They're straight lines." And re-iterated his statement when I pointed out, very politely, that the plot was on semi-log paper, so as to simplify comparison of the slopes of the curves for each product.

Arghhhh! Nothing can be made foolproof, because fools are so ingenious! To pick up another thread from earlier in this discussion, that particular manager was very successful for his first 10 years out of college in large measure because he was very good at making presentations and talking up his own (or those of his subordinates) accomplishments. Even when those accomplishments were mostly in his own mind.

Anna

I have worked for some really crap managers over the years but I have had a couple that were really good, it's just unfortunate that the crap ones dramatically outnumbered to good ones.

What was interesting was that both believe that it was their job to keep the upper level bean counting managers, away from the people working at the so called coal face and to ensure that the people doing the actual money earning work, had the necessary tools and materials as well as a productive and enjoyable environment that sponsored efficient work and lateral thinking.

The were also the first ones to get the chop when the market had a downturn.