NOTE: I realize this is a second posting on engineering, but I wanted to just get these out of the way for my first posts. They’re part of who I am, and will hopefully provide some perspective on how I perceive things as I write about them in future posts.
Requirements and Design: For an engineer, depending on where you work and the past experiences you’ve had, those words can cause an entire range of reactions from, “Yup, gotta do them” to simply groans followed by mutterings of “Here we go again”. But for this post, I really want to talk about something different: What are the Requirements and Design for being an engineer?
Realistically, engineers have a broad range of attributes, so I can only talk about the general Requirements that I’ve seen that made the several great engineers I’ve gotten to work with. I’ve met lots of good engineers, unfortunately quite a few bad ones, but I’ve only found a few I and the people I work with consider great. Off we go:
REQUIREMENT #1: EDUCATION
This may seem ridiculous to some: Every engineer probably has a college education, you might say. But that’s not true, and that’s not what I mean. I’m talking either a formal college education, or education through years of experience, or both. One of the most effective engineers I’ve worked with in the past several years didn’t have a college education, but he’d been in the automation field for decades. His knowledge of the variety of automation systems, problems that could arise when implementing any system, and how to interact with other groups to get work done was incredible. Similarly, I’ve worked with college-educated individuals who were simply amazing at picking up challenges in the workplace and being able to crank through them. Wherever it may come from, education is imperative.
REQUIREMENT #2: INTENSITY
What is intensity for an engineer? It’s rising with a big old grin to meet a challenge that others haven’t been able to solve; it’s focusing on something either alone or in a team to the point that everything else falls away; it’s a drive to succeed not because of a financial or career incentive, but just to prove you can. Most engineers I’ve worked with have some intensity, but the ones who are great tend to have a higher level of it than others. But take note: VOLUME DOES NOT EQUAL INTENSITY. One of the greatest quality engineers I worked with was a very quiet person, but wow, he really knew what he was doing and was fantastic at it.
REQUIREMENT #3: SENSE OF HUMOR / SARCASM
Being an engineer (automation, quality, or whatever) requires a good sense of humor, and typically a strong sense of sarcasm. The best engineers I’ve worked with have had at least a good sense of humor, and only a couple have not had a strong sarcastic streak too. The Wife (mine, not theirs) doesn’t always appreciate the sarcasm, but in my experience it’s the best way to deal with some of the ridiculous things that can happen when you’re trying to cope with different attitudes, sometimes overinflated egos (and I’m not just talking engineers), and troubleshooting systems in an active plant. In the automation engineering world, sarcasm is often a result of, “You won’t believe what the last moron did who worked on this system”–and then, in the worst instances, you realize the last moron who worked on the system was you. So let’s include being able to laugh at yourself in this engineering Requirement. I’ve only seen one person come into engineering who tried to make things all butterflies and rainbows, and she left for a different career only a few years later. The engineers with the daily sarcastic remarks, the occasional self-deprecating jokes because they realize they’re just as capable of doing wrong as anyone else? In my experience, those are the great engineers.
REQUIREMENT #4: FINDING JOY IN FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Surprised by this one? It surprised me, too, when I was looking at the several people I was thinking of when writing this post. But when I really looked at those men and women, I realized that they had done things like:
- Made sure that they regularly took vacations where they spent time with their spouse and family
- Almost every weekend, spent time with family and friends, because that was more important than catching up on a few more emails and tasks
- Quit their engineering job because, though they were great at it, it was preventing them from taking care of their family the way they desired
- Changed jobs so that they could move to a place where they could see their family more often
- Played sports or worked out with their friends, even with many of those friends being people they regularly work with
Even though there were a lot of different ways these people spent time with their family and friends, they all made sure to do it. It was important to them, and it didn’t stop them at all from being great engineers–instead, it let them view their job as something that was a fun challenge and that they could be passionate about, but not the sole thing that defined them. Here’s my word of advice on this to others out there, and it’s always your option to take it or leave it: Don’t let your work define you, because sometimes bad days just happen regardless of what you do, and it doesn’t mean that you or your life are bad. Sometimes, @!$# happens.
CONCLUSION
These are just the most obvious Requirements that were part of the great engineers I’ve worked with. There are a few more Requirements that I’ve got in mind, but some of them are more pertinent just to those engineers responsible for programming controllers, apps, and tools in an industrial environment, so I might include them in a later post.
But I said Requirements and Design for this post, right? I didn’t forget, but I’ve got an out: No matter what the Requirements are, there are a million different Designs to get there, so the reality is there is no single Design for an engineer, great or otherwise. After all, even simple Requirements like erasing a chalkboard can be designed in fantastically strange ways.
ONE FINAL POINT: Marrying a teacher is not a Requirement for being a great engineer, although it’s worked out well for me.