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Wait, there is some disconnect here, the last paragraph does not follow at all. To see it more easily, here is her post but with some specific, made up example
by theamk 5y ago
Wait, there is some disconnect here, the last paragraph does not follow at all.
To see it more easily, here is her post but with some specific, made up example instead of "X":
A chocolate factory wants to build a new dark chocolate line. They hire a very experienced industrial engineer, who just recently finished building car engine line for the Ford factory. However, once the new engineer started to work on chocolate line, they found it extremely boring and devoid of challenges. So they somehow convinced management that the chocolate factory needs to start producing car engines for their delivery trucks. This is obviously a bad idea, and many people point that, but the engineer has secured support of one of VPs, so the project goes ahead. Eventually the line is ready, new engines are produced and installed in all the new trucks. They proceed to break down frequently, the deliveries are late, customers are unhappy, and everyone is having a bad time.
Everyone is blaming engineer now and calling them "charlatan", but the engineer does not understand why: They really worked their ass off building the new engine line, working 80 hours a week to realize their dream. It was not easy -- the factory was only doing chocolate before, so switching to heavy machinery was quite a challenge! And the reason customers are unhappy is because of the management -- this project should have gotten way more resources! Then we could test more and iron out all the bugs instead of having to go to production too early.
Rachel's final paragraph puts the blame squarely on the engineer, with wishes that "hiring processes filtered out this kind of charlatan" and "whole bunch of people would have to find another industry to prey upon", but that engineer is not a charlatan -- they have a legitimate technical talent, and they used it to build real stuff. No hiring process can filter them out -- they will pass a technical interview and take-home test, they have great communication skills, they have a github page with open source code, and they can talk passionately about their past successful projects.
Instead, I'd put most of the blame on the management. In a large company, it is inevitable that someone will work on stuff that is useless or could harm the main product. Maybe because engineers lack perspective, or they overestimate themselves, or they just don't care about company's goals and want to do what they find fun. The company should have some mechanisms to prevent this -- maybe management should listen to feedback from engineers, or there should be technical committee, or at least people should not be rewarded when they ship a broken product. If the company has no such mechanisms, it will have problems as described in the blog.
- deanCommie 5y agoThat's a very reductive and limiting view of what an engineer does. Someone that accepts requirements, and outputs artifacts. A senior/staff/principal engineer should be aware of the customer needs they are working to solve, and focused on the problem. Their engineering skills are a tool to fixing it, not itself the result. In your example, * The industrial engineer should have asked "Do you need me to build car engine machinery?" And if they said no, pursued a different job. * Once on the job, if management said "let's start building car engines", he should have said "Why, how does this help our customers?" Actually, in your example: > However, once the new engineer started to work on chocolate line, they found it extremely boring and devoid of challenges. So they somehow convinced management that the chocolate factory needs to start producing car engines for their delivery trucks. That's borderline unethical. If you're bored and devoid of challenges. Change your job, don't ruin your company. You place the blame on managers and say "maybe management should listen to feedback from engineers", but that's exactly what happened in your scenario, and was the root cause of the problem! The manager listened to a poorly motivated, mis-incentivized, yet strangely persuasive engineer. The problem was that neither the managers nor the engineer actually thought about the customers, or listened to them. Incidentally, maybe they would have found out that the customers actually really like the chocolate but it always get delivered too late warm and melted, and so actually investing in building bespoke engines for their trucks would have been correct in that situation. But it has to start from the customer, not the prior skills of the engineer. Fix the process, and maybe neither the managers nor the engineer need to be fired.
- Ensorceled 5y agoI've worked with several Java evangelists in my career ... two stand out. One had written several books on Java and was tapped to head up a new initiative. They "noped" out very quickly, "this isn't a project suitable for java" and recommended a couple of different architectures and platforms and went back to their less prestigious role. The other was very active in the Java community and shoe horned Java into a very inappropriate product, costing the client $$$ and never reaching the MVP stage. You could blame management for both of those situations; but one of those companies went on to a modicum of success in an acquisition because the engineer decided NOT to turn the chocolate factory into a car factory.