For the last few years I have been observing a bad trend in our profession. There is a trend for engineers to waste time web-browsing or personal entertainment time at the expense of doing their engineering work. While I have seen this behavior over my forty years, I feel it’s getting worse now that there are ready outlets, the internet, that enable and, to a high degree, encourage this. A short time ago I was a senior manager at one of the wealthiest and news making company’s where I had an engineering team reporting to me. I had inherited the team as often is the case. This team was made up from three experience groupings, college grads, five to ten years, and ten to fifteen years of experience. It just so happened these were dispersed in about thirds. I had no engineers with more than twenty years. Keep this in mind as you ponder my observations.
During my review of the project I had found that there was a lacking in planning and the engineering foundation work done, meaning that the actual problem understanding was lacking. For example, there was an issue with vibration affecting the camera system used throughout the room, we had several hundred cameras mapping customers while in the environment. Now normally I would have expected that a decent attempt to understand the environment would have been done but, no, this was not the case. When the shaky cameras where brought up in a review meeting with the VP our team had no answer. Two things resulted from this, first the quick RCA and second, the corrective action. The corrective action was the easy part, I had created a team to do the engineering diligence that should have been done already. The RCA was what is troubling, the excuse given was that the engineering team didn’t have the time to do this or, found later, other basic engineering work.
Observing the team, it was apparent that a fair amount of time was spent doing personal entertainment activities as opposed to the work being paid for. I don’t want to be too much a curmudgeon here, but this is troublesome. As a service, I provide processes and training covering many product design activities. Two key aspects of quality engineering work requires earnest efforts by those engineers and that thorough processes are followed. I am seeing less and less desire to go the extra distance from the young engineers. Sure, there is a percentage that embrace’s their career but there is an equal if not greater number that just doesn’t. In this area of the country, the NW, I firmly fault the companies for paying too much for too little. Paying engineers fresh out of school high five or low six figure incomes fosters an over-value of self. It becomes hard to teach these engineers when they believe they know everything. Management doesn’t care, there is a use and release mentality here that makes people a commodity. A large part of quality engineering is the adherence to robust processes and the engineering records that result.
A result of this loss of discipline is the ability for the engineer to get side tracked and spend time doing other non-job-related activities. I see a lot of “cutting edge” companies offering perks and incentives that promote this as opposed to incentivizing. I don’t think we can point to a current real skunk works organization anymore. Places like LAB126, Microsoft Research, et. al., while academically competent, don’t often meet the rigor engineering requires. There is a general tendency that engineers perform a fair amount of design work but very little engineering.
We hear from these same companies about their raising the bar blah blah blah but it’s mostly BS. Amazon for example uses an arbitrary “better than 50% of the existing work force” as a measure for raising the bar, a very BS way to do so. Adding Political correctness and other current social norms to the mix prevents companies from being reasonably demanding or critical of their employees.
So here we are, at a place where our technical staff cannot be held to a high standard because we are stripped of the tools needed to do so. I don’t have direct solutions to remedy this, most of my thoughts would be considered perhaps harsh as I don’t feel a professional should be coddled as if a child. That said, I would suggest that those entering the profession need to first be self-starters, they must have the desire to want to know more, to deep dive into the work. Management needs to stop being sold a bill of goods and demand more. The start should be that engineering over design is the norm. That diligence is both asked for and practiced by all. However, to teach this and, more, have it embraced is difficult. A lot needs to change for this to happen.
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