While going through some old emails I ran into this - A last blast to the staff of my former employer... an employer who shall remain nameless. Entertaining to say the least... Unlike everyone else who leaves on the It was great working with all of you and Ill remember you forever! note - Id like to say a few things that may actually matter and make some sort of difference, even if it gets me into trouble. This is only my advice so take it for the two cents that its worth... (1) Design for reuse or perish. Employer-X will not survive (especially with a critically lean engineering force) unless every designer is working on VALUE-ADDED technology that is destined to provide revenue. Having our best and brightest working on sustaining work or subsystems that arent providing competitive advantage serves no purpose whatsoever except to waste engineering resources and talent on work that doesnt matter. Do whatever it takes to get these people off of sustaining and onto money-making, advantage driven technology even if it means hiring an entire force of average engineers to handle just the sustaining work. (2) Grounding and shielding: MEs and EEs - Work together to make sure things like this are caught in design reviews or its gonna eventually be death by a thousand cuts. A lot of sustaining work comes from random problems that are caused by the slow de-evolution of good grounding and shielding that occurs as a system model goes through relentless change cycles. And with employee turnover (and migration) so high, its no wonder that things like this are forgotten over and again. Try not to forget again. Otherwise youll end up on a plane to Korea or China to fix it every time someones cell phone goes off in the wrong place in the factory. The faster and more accurate systems become, the more susceptible they are likely to be to problems like this unless careful attention is paid to grounding, shielding, isolation, and communication protocols. (3) Design, implement and release systematically even if it takes more time. The consequence is a never-ending stream of sustaining work to fix all of the mistakes and mis-judgements that were made in haste while trying to release products too quickly. And although no one has ever calculated it - this costs way more than doing it right the first time. Dont forget to document everything properly regardless of how long it takes. Otherwise youll have engineers spending months reverse engineering things for no reason every time theyve got to deal with it again. I cant tell you how many times Ive had to do this... and I hated every minute of it. (4) How do I say this gracefully... If you live quarter by quarter, youll die quarter by quarter. Pandering to the quarterly desires of analysts, investors, and the board of directors is only going to get the company killed. Using layoffs as a way to cut ballast whenever needed in order to make the numbers look better lacks long-term vision. No one is going to be loyal to a company that has the layoff gun pointed at their heads all the time. And thinking that you can go out to the human commodities market to catch and release whenever you want sends a clear message that employees are not at the forefront of the companies values or mind. Start thinking and acting long-term, and forget about the quarterly crap. Forgive me for being blunt, but I figured everyone was mature enough to handle a bit of perspective. Take care and I very much hope to run into all of you in the future. And I was going to end with this, but decided against it... People in this company keep thinking that they can solve marketing problems with technology band-aids, but you can’t. You can create all kinds of amazing stuff, but if there’s no market for it, then it won’t sell. Employer-X has a marketing problem. They don’t have decent expertise in terms of finding, exploiting, and retaining market opportunities. And until this is solved, no amount of stellar engineering is going to save the company.” Im smokin a cigarette right now just thinkin about it, and how glad I am to be the hell out of there.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 06:25:06 +0000
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